-- DAN
CHAPTER 22
The Plowman sat at his desk. He wore a terry cloth bathrobe and soaked his feet in a vibrating hot-water foot massager. His feet, which were either size seventeen or eighteen depending on which brand of shoe he bought, barely fit in the tray. Still, he enjoyed the sensation, and wiggled his toes in the water.
He wrote on a yellow legal pad. He liked the practice; his written English wasn’t quite as good as his spoken. A stereo played in the background, tuned to a jazz station. He hummed along, and wiggled his toes some more, and made notes in capital block letters:
SIMON GROVE - POLYMORPHIC ABILITIES HEIGHTENED, ON SCHEDULE, THOUGH SEVERELY UNDER-UTILIZED. UNPLANNED EFFECT:
SUBJECT DEMONSTRATES TENDENCY TOWARD PSEUDO-VAMPIRIC BEHAVIOR, CAUSES AS YET UNIDENTIFIED. MERITS POTENTIAL REJECTION.
MATTHEW SINCLAIR - TELEPORTATIONAL ABILITIES HEIGHTENED, ON SCHEDULE. LIMITATION: ABILITY ONLY EFFECTIVE IN ABSENCE OF DIRECT LIGHT. PROBABLE CAUSE: PSYCHOLOGICAL. “MENTAL BLOCK.” DOES NOT YET MERIT CONSIDERATION OF REJECTION.
The Plowman sat back in his chair and read over the two brief paragraphs.
That last sentence sounded a little clumsy. He frowned, added ADDITIONAL AUGMENTATIONS PENDING, AS YET UNMANIFESTED to the second paragraph, then continued in a more conversational tone.
I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE THESE OBSTACLES ARE COMING FROM.
GROVE’S SANGUINARY HABITS AND SINCLAIR’S AVERSION TO LIGHT WERE CERTAINLY NOT INTENTIONAL FEATURES OF OUR “GIFT.” I HAVEN’T YET DETERMINED IF THEY ARE THE RESULTS OF MISTAKES ON MY OR MY BROTHER’S PART, OR IF WE’VE UNDERESTIMATED THE SUBJECT MATTER’S MALLEABILITY AND ADAPTABILITY.
IN ANY CASE, THIS IS WHAT THE EXPERIMENT IS ALL ABOUT, ISN’T IT?
He stared at the paper. Still frowning, he drew an irony-laden smiley face after the last word.
He knew the experiment was about much more than that, of course. He and his brother had a schedule to keep, results to achieve. Their work was critical to resolving the Conflict. Critical to preserving their home. His people needed weapons, soldiers. An advantage.
It could be worse, he supposed. He and Ichabod could have been sent to fight. They were a God-awful distance from home, from everything they knew, yes, but they were alive. Still...he wanted to return home just as badly as Ichabod did, if not more.
The Plowman blinked a few times and read over what he’d written. He tore the sheet off the pad, crumpled it up and threw it in a garbage can by the door.
# # #
Images slammed through Matt’s mind in pain-rimmed jump cuts.
Flash.
Sixteen years old, calling for his father. An unfamiliar car sits in the driveway. He hears the sound of chains through the open kitchen door, a shadow moves, and something like a tree falls on his head.
Flash.
He sits in a chair next to his father. Chains bind them both. They’re in the chairs Matt’s mother picked out when they bought this house. Matt misses his mother, and wants to call to her when he sees his father crying. Shadows move toward them.
Flash.
The men are huge, distorted, like ogres. When one of them pulls a gun it gleams small and slick in the light from the fixture overhead. His father tries to talk, tries to beg, but the hammer cocks back and the barrel swings around, centered on Matt’s chest. His father screams, and the air goes cold.
Flash.
The ogre with the gun clamps a hand to his own face and curses, and there’s something on the floor next to the ogre’s foot, it’s small and wet, and he staggers and steps on it. The other men draw back from him, and he digs the gun into the skin between Matt’s father’s eyes and pulls the trigger. Matt’s throat aches from screaming and crying and begging, and he can’t see because there’s something hot and wet in his eyes, and then the gun turns on him and fires again, and a third time.
Flash.
Matt opened his eyes on darkness and aching pain, and started to panic when he couldn’t see. Immediately he willed the night vision on, but his breath caught in his throat with the strain. He tried to focus himself by reciting the alphabet backward, but only got to W when the first wave of real pain crashed across his chest. The memory of the kid with the Uzi came back to him just as his night vision did. His mind hitched, and for less than a second he was there again, back in the kitchen, lying on the floor next to his dead father. A flash, quickly faded. He groaned and tried to sit up, but collapsed onto his back.
He didn’t think any ribs were broken. The Vylar was badly abraded but intact, and the armor padding seemed whole. He took a deep breath, which rewarded him with stabbing pains, deeply felt but not—quite—debilitating.
Matt pushed with his elbows and managed to rise into a sitting position, and only then realized he had no idea where he was.
Oh my God. I traveled blind.
Stunned, he sat frozen for several moments. Shudders skittered through his body. Nauseated and weak, he did his best to put out of his head thoughts of what might have happened. Anyone who’d ever read any science fiction knew what was supposed to happen if someone teleported into a solid object. Matt didn’t know how accurate the stories were, and had no plans to find out.
He quickly patted himself down, took a fast inventory, and eventually decided all of him was still there. He unzipped the Vylar mask and rolled it up, exposing his mouth and nose, and took deep breaths regardless of the pain—but just as quickly pulled the mask back down. The smell of rich damp earth and the heavy, musty stench of mildew filled the air, but rolling over those two scents was the stink of human urine and feces. Matt wrinkled his nose and tried to take in his surroundings.
He sat on a packed, damp dirt floor, in a space maybe five feet high. Pipes emerged from very old brick walls to disappear both through gaps in the mortar and into the ceiling. The ceiling itself was composed of massive crossbeams and tongue-and-groove two-by-sixes, covered with mold and cobwebs. Against the far wall, maybe fifteen feet away, a squat water heater sat, housing a steady blue flame.
He winced at the pain in his chest, knowing he would be a mass of bruises soon if he wasn’t already...and then something touched his shoulder. He almost left the ground.
Matt whirled, the Glock in his hand, and saw the edge of a ragged shape scuttle behind a brick support column ten feet away, the motion punctuated by a metallic clinking. A chain.
The sound knocked him back into the memory, blood in his eyes and two bleeding holes in his chest. His stomach lurched, but he held the gun steady, and soon the sensation faded.
Once behind the column, whatever had touched him didn’t move again.
Matt crept forward slowly, eyes narrowed. The clinking sounded again, and he saw it now: a heavy iron chain connected to a bracket driven into the brick wall at the other end of the cellar. The chain dropped into the dirt, ran across the floor...and ended at the shape behind the column. Whatever it was didn’t move, and he heard its breathing, fast and shallow.
The cellar where Matt crouched was rectangular, about thirty feet long and half that much in width. Four brick columns rose out of the dirt to connect with the flooring above. A few cardboard boxes sat here and there on the floor, all of them placed near the water heater, far from the chain and the thing attached to it.
The chain clinked again, and the tattered, dark shape behind the column moved, just enough for one eye to emerge.
Matt’s spine froze over. His pain entirely forgotten, he holstered the Glock and scrambled forward, bent almost double for the low ceiling.
A little girl hid from him behind the column. Dressed in decaying gray rags, she looked to be about ten years old. The chain in the dirt was welded to a thick iron ring around her left ankle. She stared at Matt with enormous eyes as he knelt before her, and he realized she could see him. He unzipped and pulled off his mask, ignoring the stench, let his night vision relax, and saw that a few thin threads of light made their way into the cellar through a square patch on one wall.
He brought the night vision up again, and saw the patch was actually a window. A window that had been bricked over. A few cracks had developed in the cheap mortar, and allowed the weak, purplish luminescence of a mercury vapor street lamp to enter the cellar.
Returning his attention to the girl, Matt kept his voice low.
“I’m a friend,” he said, and the girl grunted and moved away from him.
She never took her huge eyes off of him, but she jerked away even more quickly when he reached out a hand to her. She clutched something to her chest like a prized possession—held it the way other children held blankets or teddy bears—and it took Matt several moments to figure out what it was.
Scratched and scarred, every line filled with dirt from the cellar floor, the girl’s prize was the black plastic bottom from an old two-liter soft drink bottle.
The full extent of what he was witnessing began to dawn on Matt, and he sat down heavily.
When he didn’t move for a bit, the girl came closer, still staring at him.
With a sense of dread, Matt tried again. “My name is Matt. What’s yours?” He smiled, his best, warmest smile, but the girl didn’t answer. She only stared, and jerked away whenever he moved his hands. “Can you say anything?”
No answer.
“Can you talk to me?”
No answer.
“Can you talk at all?”
She only stared.
Slowly, trying not to spook the girl again, Matt moved to the bracket where her chain attached to the wall. Above it he noticed a short ladder, folded and nestled between two of the crossbeams, covering a trapdoor. The trap would open, and the ladder would swing down from the ceiling. Down from the house above.
He heard the chain clink, and the girl joined him, staring up at the trapdoor. She made a sound...a low moan—a sound that shouldn’t ever have been made by someone so young, saturated with pain and hurt and longing. Matt’s eyes filled with tears, and his jaw muscles clenched tight. He turned to the girl.
“I don’t know if you can understand me or not,” he said. “But I want you to know that I’ll be back for you. You’re not going to stay here. I don’t know how you got here, or who put you here, but you’re not going to stay here. I promise you that.”
The girl’s stare didn’t change, but he thought she clutched the bottle bottom a little tighter.
Matt went to the window and began pulling the bricks away from it. The girl followed him, but the chain stopped her short. The mortar was old and poorly applied, and Matt soon had the window completely exposed. A square, solid beam of light made its way into the cellar now. The girl stayed out of it, squinting her eyes, but she never stopped watching Matt. He looked outside for a moment, then moved away from the window into the darkness, and flickered out. He saw her watching him even as he did it.
The world transformed outside the cellar. This far into the wee hours, the night had grown cooler, but the neighborhood Matt saw seemed to exude warmth no matter what the temperature. Tall, beautiful pin oak and pine trees lined well-lit streets. Immaculate sidewalks framed manicured lawns, and most of the mailboxes were brick, many with ivy or flowers growing on or around them. The houses themselves, while not huge, were decidedly upper-class, each of them with enough yard space for children and dogs to play in, yet not so much that a neighbor would seem far away. Matt turned slowly, taking it all in, and finally stopped when he faced the house from which he had just emerged. It was beautiful, and at a glance seemed to be the oldest in the immediate area. Lights burned inside, several on the ground floor and one on the second. A expensive mountain bike rested against the front porch railing. A mini-van sat in front of the garage.
Matt’s chest throbbed again, joined by a white-hot spear behind his eyes as his teeth ground together. The grass underneath him froze and died, and his quarterstaff nestled into his hand. He walked steadily to the side of the house, flickered into a shadow, and emerged in the dining room.
The interior of the house seemed to be just as well-appointed as the exterior. Heavy, dignified oak filled the dining room, a table seating at least eight surrounded by chairs upholstered in a stately sea green. Light glimmered from an open doorway to Matt’s left, and he approached it, moving silently.
The living room.
A teenage boy, maybe seventeen, sat slumped on the plush couch, watching a big-screen TV with the sound piped to a set of headphones. A premium channel was showing RoboCop, and the boy sat mesmerized. His mouth hung slightly open, his eyes glazed. A bag of Bugles rested next to him on the couch, and he held a two-liter bottle of soda laxly in one hand.
Matt backed away and moved to the other side of the dining room, where a stairway led to the second floor. Shadows draped the house, and a flicker took him to the top of the stairs.
Light shone from a door to his right. It stood slightly ajar, and he peered inside. Another teenager, this one a girl slightly older than the couch slug downstairs, lay in bed reading a magazine. A box of tissues lay beside her on the bed, and every few seconds she sniffled. She didn’t notice Matt at the door, and he stepped away, still totally silent. The door he was looking for stood at the end of the hall, also slightly ajar. Not that a locked door would have mattered.
The man and woman asleep in the king-sized bed looked blissfully happy.
He was big, barrel-chested and thick-armed, with a full head of silver hair. One of those arms rested under the head of his wife, a handsome dark-haired woman in a silk nightgown. Matt stood beside their bed, stared down at them as they slept, and couldn’t decide which he should feel more, fury or disbelief.
Two worlds sat one atop another: the first filled with PTA meetings and apple butter and house payments, the other narrow and crusted with dirt and mold and stench. These people lived their lives, walked among everyone else as if they were the epitome of American life, while they kept a ten-year-old girl chained in their basement.
Matt could almost laugh at it, it was so outrageous. These people did this thing and slept peacefully at night.
Without giving it much thought, Matt shifted the quarterstaff to his left hand, drew the Glock, and aimed it at the man’s head.
The barrel floated just above the man’s right ear. Matt’s trigger finger trembled.
He stood there, gun leveled, for so long that his muscles began to cramp. His chest ached unmercifully, and so did his side, he realized, where the first bullet had struck him. His breathing grew erratic.
Very, very slowly he pulled his arm back, until the gun pointed at the ceiling. He took a deep breath and eased his finger off the trigger, engaging the safety. The Glock slid smoothly into its holster.
The big silver-haired man rolled over, opened his eyes, and looked directly at Matt, and Matt didn’t think he’d ever seen a human being look more surprised in his life. The man tensed and opened his mouth, probably to scream, but before he had the chance Matt stepped backward, into the thickest of the room’s shadows, and flickered away.
# # #
The silver-haired man lay very still as the huge wraith vanished in the darkness, and didn’t move as the temperature in the bedroom abruptly dropped several degrees. Finally he got up, staring into the shadows all around him, and turned up the temperature on the room thermostat. Scared witless, he got back into bed, pulled the covers over his head, and spent the next forty-five minutes telling himself that what he had seen was just a nightmare.
Long accustomed to convincing himself of his own version of reality, he eventually drifted back to sleep.
AUTHOR’S NOTES FOLLOW IN THE COMMENT SECTION
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2 comments:
Not much to say tonight. I'm tired, my neck hurts after I did a back roll really badly in Hapkido tonight, and I'm going to bed. I'll come back and edit this post tomorrow with something worthwhile.
I think Matt showed much more constraint that I would have. That ogre needs to die, and the sooner the better.
This is a very ... affecting chapter. Once more with the indelible, vivid pictures. I can see the cords stand out on his arm, feel the seething rage, the frustrated need for justice.
Good job. I wouldn't change a thing.
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