Dead and Gone

by Tina Glasneck

  Milo remembered with crystal clarity the first time he had ever experienced a vision. When he was five years old, the Cain family moved to Amesbury, Massachusetts, a seaside community on Boston’s North Shore. His mother and father had both received promotions involving higher pay and additional responsibilities to work at the Seabrook nuclear plant located up Interstate 95 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

  The incident occurred at the end of the family’s first day in Massachusetts. Everyone was exhausted from the move, hunkered down in a motel for the night, in bed early because the following day was to be spent conducting a lengthy house-hunting search. Milo lay in the room with his father and mother, almost asleep in his rollaway bed despite the discomfort of the lumpy mattress, when into his head blasted a strange, frightening vision, almost, but not quite a dream.

  In the vision, his parents were lying in bed, and his father was doing something to his mother; it almost looked as though he was attacking her, hurting her somehow. And she must have been getting hurt, because she was moaning, her head thrashing back and forth on the pillow. It was horrifying, and not just because the young Milo Cain didn’t understand what it meant. What made it all the more frightening was that he had no idea where it had come from.

  The disturbing vision had all the qualities of the dream state, the vivid colors and the hyper-reality, but it could not be a dream because Milo was not yet asleep. Even five-year-olds know you have to be asleep to dream, and the moment the vision began, Milo opened his eyes wide in mute, helpless terror, mouth agape, waiting for the scene to end.

  When the vision did end—thankfully, this first one was short and to the point, even if Milo didn’t understand the point—his head lolled to the side, and he found himself simultaneously comforted and horrified by the sight of the sleeping forms of his parents in the bed across the semi-dark motel room.

  That long-ago night in Massachusetts represented the beginning of the visions for young Milo Cain. The family found a home and remained on the North Shore, and as Milo grew, the visions became more and more pronounced, growing ever darker and more disturbed even as his treatment at the hands of his parents became more and more twisted.

  For a short time he tried to describe the horror of the visions to his mother and father, eventually coming to the realization they didn’t believe him, would never believe him, and would not care even if they did believe him.

  After that, Milo simply gave up. He stopped telling his parents about the strange scenes exploding into his head, the visions that now populated more and more of his waking hours. And he began to fall behind in school. His teachers assumed he was daydreaming and uninterested when his features slackened and his eyes glazed over and he stared at the blackboard or out the window, not disturbing anyone or causing trouble but clearly not paying attention, either.

  He became withdrawn and sullen at home, spending all his time in his room, stretched out on the bed staring at the wall, unwilling to discuss his problem but unable to make it stop. Soon after, neighborhood pets began disappearing, mostly cats and a couple of small dogs, the occasional mutilated small-animal carcass thrown carelessly into the woods along the side of the road.

  One morning in midsummer 2001, when Milo Cain was not quite eighteen years old, he walked out of his parents’ Amesbury home and never returned. Over the next decade, Milo wandered throughout New England, traveling as far south as Bridgeport, Connecticut, and as far north as Jonesport, Maine, at times gaining temporary respites from the torture as the visions receded, at other times suffering mightily as they attacked with renewed fervor.

  But they never completely disappeared, and Milo found it easiest to survive inside the sprawling Boston metropolitan complex, where he could disappear, losing himself in the crowds of down-on-their-luck vagrants who, like himself, fit in nowhere.

  There was another advantage to living in Boston. Milo’s compulsion to do things, bad things, horrible, twisted things, had blossomed as the visions increased in frequency and intensity. His need to injure, to destroy, to tear apart based on the information contained in those visions was often overwhelming, and this compulsion was fed most easily in the city. The atrocities he committed were not invisible in Boston, of course, but they were much easier to get away with in the teeming metropolis than in the wide-open spaces of a small town like Amesbury, where everyone had known him and seen him as a freak.

  After years of restless wandering, Milo moved to the city permanently at the age of twenty-two, never staying in one place too long, moving around obsessively. When his compulsions began to attract the attention of the wrong people, he would simply pick up stakes and wander to another neighborhood, from Dorchester to Roxbury to Mattapan to Back Bay, thrilled that by traveling just a few blocks he could begin fresh.

  There was the occasional brush with the law; it was almost impossible to be a vagrant, even in a city as large as Boston, and not catch the eye of the authorities every so often. But to Milo’s continuing amazement, most of the suspicion involved his appearance, his dirty clothes and unkempt hair, those superficial things that made the good citizens of Massachusetts uncomfortable.

  The things that should have been of interest to the police—the abductions, the torture, now of humans rather than animals—never seemed to find their way back to him, despite the fact he rarely made more than a token attempt at disguising his activities, and despite the fact that the media had begun playing up the horrifying exploits of “Mr. Midnight,” the tag a clever television news reporter had hung on him a few months ago, when a trash bag filled with decaying body parts had been discovered behind a restaurant in Chinatown.

  He supposed his visions were largely responsible for his invincibility. Thanks to the images flashing into his head, he was able to select as victims only people who would pose no more than a minor threat to him. The irony of being insulated and protected by the very visions that tortured him day after day and made his life a living hell was not lost on Milo; he appreciated it in the way an entomologist might appreciate being bitten by a particularly poisonous insect: the experience was painful and rewarding at the same time.

  All of this ran through Milo Cain’s mind as he leaned against the bleak apartment wall. He savored the clarity of thought that accompanied his brief respites from the visions. The damned images spent so much time bouncing around inside his brain that when they finally subsided, his head felt large and airy, like a penthouse apartment that has been cleared of all furniture.

  He considered the long night ahead, stretching dark and empty before him. His skin was beginning to feel tight and hot, and his breathing felt ragged and constricted. His obsessions were beckoning again. It was time to play.

  Tonight he would find a streetwalker. Playing with hookers was especially enjoyable. Milo loved taking the hardened, streetwise bitches, with their garish makeup and their superior, sneering attitudes and turning them into helpless victims, begging and pleading for their worthless lives, suspecting but never knowing for certain until the very end what their fate was going to be.

  With hookers, the risk of getting caught was minimal. Dealing with pros meant dealing with people who, like himself, spent their days and nights on the fringes of accepted society. Their pimps would miss them, but that would be it. There would likely be no worried husbands or boyfriends to report them missing, no concerned coworkers to alert the authorities when they didn’t report to the office Monday morning.

  They would simply vanish.

  So that was it, then. He would take a walk tonight and let the visions lead him to the perfect victim. The visions would be there to guide him. They always were.

  10

  Thirty years ago

  Everett, Massachusetts

  The sun had by now descended below the horizon, and the room was enveloped in a gloom Robert thought most appropriate for the occasion. Virginia dozed and Robert sat next to her, holding their children, one in each arm, fighting a sadness that threatened to overwhelm him. What should
have been one of the happiest days of his life was turning into one of the most horrifying.

  “Dr. Jones” had departed, collecting his fee in cash as previously agreed upon and promising to stop by tomorrow to look in on Virginia. By then the babies would be gone, not that Dr. Jones would care one way or the other. He had been contracted to provide medical services to Virginia Ayers during the delivery, and that was all. The infants were not a part of that contract and thus not Dr. Jones’s concern.

  Virginia had refused to hold either of the babies when offered. She simply moaned softly and rolled onto her side, refusing to answer Robert’s questions, refusing even to meet his eyes. Eventually she had slipped into a restless slumber.

  The doorbell rang and Robert sat up with a start, shocked to discover he too had fallen asleep. How he had managed that feat while holding two newborn babies he did not know, but he felt fortunate not to have dropped either of them.

  “Christ,” he mumbled disgustedly, “maybe it’s a good thing we have to give them away.” Then he glanced at his children and immediately changed his mind.

  He stood and turned toward the front of the house, stopping to glance at Virginia before leaving the room. He was surprised to see her staring steadily back at him.

  “It’s time,” Robert said simply, and she nodded. “Would you like to…”

  “No,” she interrupted. “I don’t want to say good-bye to them. I can’t bear to do it. I’m sorry to put this on you, my love, but could you please handle this?”

  Robert looked at the floor and scuffed the carpet with the toe of his shoe. “Of course.”

  He left the bedroom and trudged through the small house. He thought he now knew how an inmate might feel making the walk to the gas chamber. He stopped and took a deep, shaking breath. Opened the door. On the landing stood a stranger dressed head to toe in black. Black watch cap, black trench coat, black trousers and shoes. The man even wore a solid black necktie over a black Oxford shirt.

  The stranger eyed Robert for a long moment, not speaking. Then he inclined his head at the babies. “Are they ready?”

  Robert nodded. “Come in,” he said.

  The stranger—Robert didn’t know his name and didn’t want to know—entered without another word. Next to the door sat a small duffel bag, packed earlier in the evening. Inside it were two outfits for each infant, a small supply of diapers and baby formula, and a pair of blankets, all items that had been agreed upon weeks ago.

  Robert picked up the bag and handed it to the stranger, who hesitated a moment. It seemed as though the man wanted to say something, but decided against it. The stranger shrugged and carried the bag to a car idling at the end of the driveway. He dumped the bag into the trunk.

  A darkness unlike anything he had ever felt filled Robert’s heart. He had never seen the man in black before and knew he would never see him again. He knew nothing about the stranger, only that he was to hand over his two children, his own flesh and blood, to the man and allow the man to disappear with them forever.

  He couldn’t do it.

  He wouldn’t do it.

  11

  Cait leaned back in her seat and tried to relax as the half-empty airplane carved the sky northbound over the Atlantic coast. Kevin dozed next to her, as did most of the other passengers on the late-night flight, but Cait was far too keyed up to sleep. She was on her way—hopefully—to meet her biological mother, and it was all she could think about.

  After a lifetime of wondering where she came from and who she was, and having resigned herself years ago to never learning her personal history, the speed with which the investigator, Arlen Hirschberg, had uncovered the clues to her past was astonishing. It took less than a week for Hirschberg to determine that she had been born June 15, 1983, in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, to a young couple named Robert and Virginia Ayers.

  There was no record of the birth in any of the local hospitals—not surprising, Hirschberg said, given the Ayers’s subsequent release of the infant into the illegal baby market—so it was reasonable to assume she had been born inside the Ayers home. Tiny Caitlyn had spent just a few hours in her birthplace before being spirited away in the middle of the night by a nameless representative of a faceless black market adoption ring.

  She had been raised by a young married couple living outside Tampa and had grown up on the west coast of Florida, wondering Why? every time she thought about her biological parents. It was not that she didn’t love and appreciate her adoptive family. Margery and Walt Connelly had showered her with love and attention, raising a strong and caring young woman. To Caitlyn, they would always be her real parents, and both had gone to their graves knowing how much they were loved by their only child.

  But none of that changed the fact that Caitlyn Connelly needed to plug the hole she felt in her heart every time one of her friends would say something like, “Oh, my grandfather came over from Verona, Italy, in 1935, and started his own plumbing business.” Caitlyn wanted—needed—to be able to relate her own family history. She wanted—needed—to understand where her own grandfather had come from and what he had done for work. Was he a plumber, carpenter, doctor, lawyer?

  For all of the excitement she felt as the airplane hummed its way north, though, Cait knew there was every possibility this trip would end in disappointment. Arlen Hirschberg had contacted Cait’s birth mother, Virginia Ayers, now widowed and in ill health, living in her longtime home outside Boston, and the woman had flatly refused to see her daughter. According to the investigator, she was shocked at being tracked down after all this time and had seemed somehow frightened at the prospect of meeting her now thirty-year-old child.

  Caitlyn knew how she felt. The idea of seeing the woman who had given her up so long ago caused a snake made of nerves and fear to twist through her belly, and she knew that snake would never slither away as long as the questions she had been carrying around for so long remained unasked.

  So, despite the fact that Virginia Ayers had turned down Hirschberg’s request for a face-to-face meeting, Cait and Kevin bought the cheapest red-eye tickets they could find to Boston, determined to see the woman in person and convince her to share just a few minutes of her time.

  Cait didn’t intend to bully the woman. She just had to know.

  She gazed out the tiny window, watching the lights blink on the tips of the wings as they swayed hypnotically, buffeted by the wind resistance created by an aluminum tube shooting through the air at hundreds of miles per hour. Cait tried to imagine the circumstances that might have forced her mother to abandon her. Her fantasy had always been of a young teen, pregnant and terrified, the father unwilling or unable to support her, hiding her pregnancy in shame and then ridding herself of her baby immediately following its birth.

  But she knew now that fantasy was far from accurate. Hirschberg said she had been born to a married couple. Maybe there was mental illness involved—that certainly seemed possible, given the existence of the Flickers Cait had experienced her entire life—or maybe her parents had been on the run, fleeing some unknown threat, unwilling to subject their newborn baby to the danger in their lives.

  Cait sighed. She was being ridiculous and she knew it. Her birth mother hadn’t been fleeing from some shadowy Hollywood B-movie assassin. Virginia Ayers had lived in the same area, under the same name, for decades, maybe for her whole life. The reality of the situation was clearly different than anything Cait had spent a lifetime imagining, so it was pointless to speculate. Better to simply wait for the meeting, pray she could convince the woman to talk to her, and then try to get as much of the full story as possible.

  But relaxing was out of the question. Kevin snored softly next to her and then without warning the Flickers began, crashing into her brain like an out-of-control freight train. Her head jerked once, almost imperceptibly, as it always did when the Flickers began, and then the images invaded her mind, random scenes of random people, all of whom were sitting quietly on this airplane.

 
A little girl hugged her stuffed bear close to her chest as she tried to sleep. She had to go to the bathroom but was trying to ignore it because she didn’t want to wake her sleeping mother.

  A man experiencing money problems could not stop worrying how in the hell he was going to make his next mortgage payment, and how long he might be able to stall foreclosure when that payment was missed, as he knew it inevitably would be.

  A young woman, newly engaged, was traveling to meet her fiance’s parents for the first time, nervous about the meeting and fearing she was making a mistake. She worried that she didn’t truly love her husband-to-be, and that he wasn’t the one for her. Should she back out of the wedding, and if so, how would she tell her fiancé?

  Cait reached over and took Kevin’s hand gently in hers. It was large and it enveloped her smaller one like a big, warm glove. His eyes blinked open and he looked up at her sleepily. He squeezed her hand once and then dozed off again. She had told him she could make the trip herself, that it wasn’t necessary for him to babysit her, that she was a big girl and could handle meeting her mother alone, but he had just smiled and nodded and gotten the time off from work anyway.

  “You don’t get to have all the fun,” he had said. “I could use a little mini-vacation, too.”

  But Cait knew why he had really tagged along. He was afraid that she would arrive at Virginia Ayers’s home and the woman would simply send her away, or, worse, she would agree to talk but would be caustic and nasty, and Cait would be devastated. He was coming along because he wanted to be there in case it became necessary to pick up the pieces.

  Cait wondered what she had done to deserve Kevin. How had she gotten so lucky? She knew there was nothing so horrible in the world that you couldn’t face it head-on if you had the right partner. And she had the right partner.

  Outside, the lights on the wing continued to wink, the plane moving steadily north over the dark ocean far below, vast and silent and ghostly. The Flickers continued for a while longer, flashing into Cait Connelly’s brain at random intervals, imprinting themselves on her consciousness and then disappearing like scenes picked up by a flashbulb popping in a dark room.