Just as Mathis had finished throwing a makeshift clan of newbies together and was making his way out to meet this Ichiban, Dookie had shown up wanting to hitch a ride. Mathis had been reluctant, but he really needed to grind through five Octaves fast, so he’d agreed to let Dookie join them. But once they reached the 6th Octave, Dookie had turned on him, annihilating the two other players and demanding that Mathis take him along so that he could go to the secret level, too. With Dookie’s massive ray gun pointed at him, Mathis hadn’t felt like he’d had any choice.
“My hero!” Sabine exclaimed, back in reality. “That machine has been going off non-stop all night. It was driving me crazy. Seriously, thank you.”
My hero, my ass! Mathis thought.
“No problem,” Troy said. He was standing beside Sabine again. Mathis felt his gut clench. He wished his fist could, too, so he could pummel this asshole.
“So, Ms. Walker,” Troy started again, his tone still reeking with false friendliness. “I was wondering if Aislen was around here somewhere?”
“What? Oh, no! She left hours ago. She said was going to meet you at the hospital. Something about helping you move that little boy, what’s his name? Blake?”
“Yeah, that was the plan…but she didn’t show up. I thought maybe we crossed paths somewhere along the way and missed each other.”
“Must have, because it’s not like her not to do something she said she was going to do. She didn’t come back here, though.”
“Hmmm, that’s too bad. I really wanted to take her there. It’s a very special place.”
Moving Blake…meeting at the hospital…the puzzle was coming together, but at the mention of a “special place,” Mathis swooned back into a stupor, back into the jungles of Octave 6. Ichiban was about to take him to the “special place” in the game.
“This is not a game,” Ichiban said. But he wasn’t speaking in his normal voice…he spoke with the voice of a child, a boy speaking from the grown man’s body. Before Mathis could make sense of it, a tremor shocked his brain, and he became dizzy and nauseous. He must have blacked out because when the disorientation cleared, he was no longer in the jungle but was standing in the middle of a red desert.
Was this the special place? It was a shit-hole! There was nothing special about it. It wasn’t what he’d come there for.
Fed up, Mathis had ripped the game visors off his face and threw them on the ground. He should have found himself instantly out of the game, standing in the comfort of his own home, but even without the visors on his eyes, he was still standing in the desert with Ichiban, watching the visors disintegrate into the red earth.
Then Ichiban had waved his hand across the sky, and right before Mathis’s eyes the desert completely transformed into a ruined metropolis. Mathis recognized it immediately. It was the same cityscape that had been frozen on the bloody television screen in the Parrish house the night of the murder.
What was going on? This couldn’t be real! Was he really in the game or not? Mathis tried to get Ichiban to explain the meaning of all of it, but Ichiban was done with questions and wanted answers of his own.
“Where is the girl?” Ichiban had demanded.
“What does Aislen Walker have to do with the murder of Scott Parrish?” Mathis asked.
The question sent Ichiban sideways—literally. His neck snapped, nearly breaking in half, and the creepy boy-voice came back, “Ichiban, what happened to my dad?!”
And that’s when Mathis knew: somehow, Blake Parrish was inside of Ichiban, and he had no idea that his dad was dead.
Everything suddenly spun out of control. Dookie appeared and tried to interrogate Ichiban himself, but he didn’t get very far because from out of nowhere, another man appeared, some kind of human/demon hybrid dressed completely in black, with unearthly blue eyes.
Both Ichiban and Dookie knew him. Ichiban, taking the chickenshit way out, vanished from the desert. Dookie actually confronted the guy.
“Raziel, I can explain everything. But let me take care of this guy first.” Then the fucking hobgoblin turned his massive ray gun on him. “Sayonara, Sergeant.”
What happened next was like a scene from a space-age Tarantino movie. As blue bullets from Dookie’s ray gun flew toward Mathis, white-hot electricity from the palms of the other man’s hands shot at him. The man’s white lightning hit Dookie’s bullets, almost stopping them completely, but a powerful residual charge hit Mathis dead center in the chest.
He fell to the ground, his heart catawhomping hard and offbeat. As he struggled to breathe, the man in black knelt down beside him, placing one hand on his chest and one on his head.
“Go now,” the man whispered, and everything went black.
Mathis knew he was dead now. For sure. He began following the white light, taking the excruciating pain in his chest with him. But when he opened his eyes, rather than finding himself standing at the pearly gates meeting his maker, he was face-planted in his moss-green shag looking at a charred game console.
“I have no idea where Aislen might be,” Mathis heard Sabine say from outside the dream. His head began to clear, the images disintegrating like everything in the game.
I have to remember! he thought to himself as he floated toward the surface. Don’t forget!
“I thought she might have come back here to be with you,” the fuckwit next to her was saying.
The need to pulverize this guy began pulling Mathis to consciousness faster. He tried to grab as much as he could from the dream before it was gone for good. Blake’s voice. Inside Ichiban. The man in black. Those eyes. Raziel.
“I’m sure you’re right. Aislen would have definitely come back here when she didn’t find you at the hospital.” Sabine sounded very concerned now, and a need to protect her stirred Mathis out of the memory. Though the ache in his chest remained, the last of the dream vanished.
“I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about, Ms. Walker,” Dookie said. “But would you do me a favor?”
“Sure, Troy. Anything.”
The lightbulb finally lit. Troy Kellen! Aislen’s co-worker! And the therapist who had treated Blake Parrish for his video game addiction! Of course! He knew all the secrets of the game. He knew all the ins and outs of the Parrish murder. He also knew who Ichiban was and that Ichiban was after Aislen.
From the sound of it, Troy was after Aislen himself. And it definitely wasn’t because he was a friend.
But if Aislen wasn’t with Troy…and she wasn’t here with her mom…where was she?
“If Aislen comes back here tonight, could you have her call me right away?” Troy said. “We need to get together as soon as possible.”
“Will do,” Sabine agreed. “As soon as I see her, I’ll have her call you.”
“Thanks a lot. You have a good night. And I hope he gets better real soon,” Troy said, patting Mathis on the chest.
Mathis wanted to roar to life, play a little game of payback with this fucker and interrogate him with his fist. But a heavy lethargy was pulling him down. All his body wanted him to do was sleep. Mathis tried the resist its alluring pull, listening to the click of Troy’s shoes dissipating down the hall.
Sabine squeezed Mathis’s hand. “Something doesn’t seem right about that, Robert. If he hasn’t seen Aislen, how did he know we were here?”
“Call Jackson,” Mathis wanted to say, but all he heard was static emitting from his mouth.
Call Jackson now! He tried screaming it to her instead. He could feel his sticky lips peel apart and open and shut, but only static filled his ears.
“Shhhhhhhhhh,” Sabine whispered, sounding like static. “Just rest, Robert. Everything will be all right.” She smoothed a cool hand across his forehead, sending him into a glissade down the mountain of consciousness.
Six
Aislen curled up in the strange chair, looking into the dark space where her captor had stood. A million questions peppered her mind, and her emotions roiled.
Who was this man, Raziel?<
br />
For sure, the most evil man alive.
What kind of name is that?
Of course, that couldn’t be his real name. He wouldn’t give her that.
But why not? If he was planning to kill her?
Unless he wasn’t planning to kill her.
But why kidnap her if he wasn’t going to kill her?
Aislen noticed that the chair she was in, although it looked sterile and institutional, was extremely comfortable. So comfortable, she felt like she was floating, suspended in the air. The darkness was dense. She seemed to be floating in a black hole, its heavy energy magnetizing all her questions, confusion and fear, drawing them away, calming her mind and body.
A memory of her father and their last visit together drifted into her mind. She was surrounded by an infinite blanket of stars, hovering in a bubble in space. He was standing before her, weaving a three-dimensional hologram in the air between them, talking about the nature of reality.
“Reality only appears three-dimensional while you are three-dimensional,” he said. The abstract words had spun incomprehensibly around her head. How could she be anything but three-dimensional?
She could see her father now, drawing sweeping spirals of sterling light, layering and intertwining them. He had flattened the hologram in the palms of his hands and formed it into the labyrinth pendant, and then he placed it around her neck on a chain.
Listen to it carefully, for it will guide your way. And someday—I pray—it will guide you back to me.
She heard his words again and understood. The pendant was some kind of map—a guidance system that could help her find her way back to her father, wherever he was hiding.
Then he said goodbye, and she floated away in space, away from him, waking up on the floor of her bedroom with the necklace still around her. Somehow she had brought it with her from the dream into reality. She had forgotten about it until it fell from her pocket.
And now her captor, this Raziel, had it.
Despair washed over her, pulling her out of calm lucidity and back up into anxiety. Aislen was no match for this man. She didn’t know where she was or how to get out of this place. Overwhelmed, she buried herself deeper into the chair. It responded as if it were alive and embraced her in return.
Aislen reached into her pocket again, finding the fine silver chain that the pendant had been on and fastening it around her neck. She would find a way to get the pendant back, then find a way to escape, and then find her way back to her father and home.
The chain and the chair were a small comfort in the thick darkness, and she found herself relaxing despite her fears.
The sound that filled the room seemed to respond to her calm and pulsed a bit louder. At first, it was just static and hum, but the longer she lay there, the deeper she fell into it, and the noise became something more.
It became the wind, a lullaby that calmed her anxiety. Then it became the ocean, languid waves rolling in and slipping away, massaging her senses, hypnotizing her overthinking mind. She felt all the tension drain from her body.
The sound in her ears created the sensation of being a baby in the womb again. Aislen felt cradled, protected, warm. The pulse of the room encircled her with its steady, soothing rhythm, and she drifted off to sleep.
Seven
Raze sat heavily on the edge of his bed. Exasperation escaped from his body, half sigh, half groan.
What was it the hicks in his hometown used to say? Up Shit Creek without a paddle?
Yeah, that about summed it up.
Although his idea of having Aislen match his base signature to get past the Qi readers had worked brilliantly, locking her in The Womb was not a good idea at all. It was an unsustainable solution for all the obvious reasons—lack of food, water, and toilet facilities. But there was a bigger issue: Raze had given her a key—the key to the whole house—and the key to him.
For Aislen to conceal her energy field from the readers, Raze had had to let her in, and not just superficially. He’d buried her in. Deep.
He had felt her in there, riffling through buried memories and stirring up the sediment of his psyche. He could feel a shadow of her in there still, like an echo bouncing faintly through a canyon. It put him in a very vulnerable position, being that connected to her.
Before tonight, he’d had the option to disappear if need be. Even Infinium hadn’t touched upon or captured those darkest frequencies. If he’d ever needed to hide, like Preston had, those unmapped energies could have cloaked him.
But now Aislen had been there. If she was adept enough, and Raze was certain she had that potential, she could tap back in. They were intrinsically connected now.
Even worse, Aislen had seen the truth of him—she knew him for what he was. And she had called him “monster.” The assessment angered him. That he cared what she thought angered him even more. Nobody’s opinion of him had ever mattered before. In fact, he relished the disgust and fear his presence invoked in others. But the fact that her opinion of him was so low, and the look of fear and disgust that had passed over her face, disturbed him. He had never had remorse for any of his actions. Remorse was a product of morality, morality a paradigm for sheep, and Raze had severed the connections between action and conscience long ago.
But it mattered tonight. Because she thought it. A new feeling had seeded itself in his gut. Shame.
“Who are you?” she’d asked.
That was a good question.
Who am I? It had always been an easy answer: your worst nightmare.
But that wasn’t his answer. He’d given her his name. He could have used his gaming moniker, Craze, but why? She already had access to everything about him. Knowing his name wouldn’t make it any worse. And at least if she called him Raziel, she wouldn’t be calling him Monster.
Raze wished he could go back in time and rearrange the sequence of events that had led him to this place, to having ever crossed paths with Aislen Walker. Being in her presence had rewired him in a way he did not understand—in a way he did not like. He was uncomfortable. His skein didn’t fit over the new truth of him. He wanted to go back to being who he was and doing what he did and not giving a damn about any of it.
But that was impossible. The third dimension was on a fixed timeline. This was where he was now.
Raze thought of her lying in The Womb below and pulled her trinket out of his pocket.
He traced his finger around the glimmering spiral maze, from the tip of the thin molten metal path where it began, then back and forth around the loops. The pendant was definitely a gift from her father. He could feel a trace of Preston Reed’s energy emanating from it. He could also feel it broadcasting several distinct signal lines. When his finger brushed across one of the embedded stones, the vibration of the amulet changed. Raze could feel a distinct tone, a unique signal line, in each jewel.
Over and over he traced the path, ruby to tourmaline, citrine to emerald, topaz to amethyst to sapphire to diamond until it stopped in the center on a stone that was unlike anything he had seen before. It wasn’t a color; it was beyond all colors, like every color all in one.
The tones that it played brought up a memory from deep within him, of a time when his mother showed him how to play music using wet fingertips along the edges of crystal glasses. He could hear the music now, not just clear and pure in his head but resonating through his fingers and into the core of his body. A lullaby in the palm of his hand.
Raze put the amulet back in his pocket and pushed the nostalgia back down into a dusty crevasse.
The amulet wasn’t for him. It was for Aislen. But maybe if he decoded it, he could help Aislen faster. And the faster she could learn how to take care of herself in the new reality she found herself in, the faster she could be out of his life, and Raze could get back to his.
He checked the clock. 3:33. He had just enough time for a power nap before his next task in this fiasco: taking on The 8. It was imperative that he slow down the wheel that was turning toward his
inevitable destruction. If he did this right, maybe he could turn it back in his favor. Maybe he could become his old self again.
Eight
Sigmund stood before the full-length mirror trying to admire himself. He’d never gotten used to the casualness of white-collar work clothes, preferring the thick, scratchy wool of a uniform instead. He felt coarse and uncouth. He didn’t recognize himself looking so unimportant.
Muted shuffling noises rose up through the floorboards beneath his feet as Astrid continued her work in the kitchen, desperate to complete his meal and clean up before he made his appearance.
Sigmund smiled at himself in the mirror. Her distress brought him such pleasure. He shifted his weight, left foot to right, agitating the floorboards just to torment her. It had the desired effect. The energy from the kitchen became frantic, like a kicked anthill.
Smiling, he returned attention to his reflection and was immediately deflated. The first signs of imperfection mocked him. He reached up to rearrange his hair, smoothing the pale locks from the back of his scalp toward his forehead and then to the left, carefully working to conceal the beginnings of a receding hairline.
He stepped back to reassess. Not much better. What did it matter anyway? He worked with whores and drug addicts. He was a god amongst them. He was more than presentable for the night’s festivities.
Remembering the evening’s agenda galvanized him, and he turned from his disappointing reflection and headed for the bedroom door.
He could hear that Astrid wasn’t done. She should have been tucked away in her basement hideaway by now. That was the rule.
By God, he should march down there, grab her by the grubby head and drag her into the basement for punishment. The thought whet his appetite, but he didn’t have the time. He was on the brink of something huge at work, and giving Astrid the chastening she deserved would only divert his energies. She’d have to wait.
Time Walker: Episode 2 of The Walker Saga Page 5
