Night Terror (20 page)

32

THE MASSIVE MULLIONED WINDOW
diced the moonlight spilling into the room. The vaulted ceiling was two stories overhead, shrouded in gloom. An iron catwalk surrounded the open space on three sides, girding high bookshelves and a spiral staircase. The massive building dwarfed the woman and dog silhouetted by the frigid light.

Tara stared out at the distant hills. She was tired and wanted to go to bed, but her work wouldn’t let her. She was close. So damned close. Unconsciously she massaged the two small scars on her left bicep, inflicted years before by one of her patients. Her eyes gleamed in the yellow light, while her small form below the neck was obscured beneath a light blanket. Beside her leather armchair, Adler rested his jowls on crossed paws and stared out into the night with her.

Tara had been sitting in silent meditation for over three hours. She was perfectly capable of maintaining her present state until dawn, but she had no intention of doing so. The light trance was simply a way of recharging her batteries, relieving stress and focusing her mind. The dog noticed immediately when Tara began to return to her body. The merest blinking of her eyelids alerted Adler and he
woofed
gently. Tara stretched her neck, then her shoulders and arms, stopping to lean and pat the dog before rising and completing her postmeditation exercises.

She flipped on the lamp over her desk and fingered the two thick manila folders. Closing her eyes she could recite line for line, page after page, from the hundreds of miscellaneous reports, affidavits, and records. She could pull either patient’s face into the front of her mind from a mental database that was as accurate and probably faster than any police computer on the planet. Her hard files were stored mostly for management and organizational purposes, but now there was little to manage.

Not that losing either her license or her government funding had ever really affected her. If anything, the newfound freedom had given a boost to her experimentation. Before, she’d had to operate within the constraints of the system. After she lost her legal facade, she became autonomous. True, there were no research grants, and no large institutions with their endless supplies of research material would hire her. But she had no monetary worries. By the time her license was revoked, she had already made a fortune on her book sales, and few people thought to connect her name with a little-known government program.

Thinking of her books reminded her of her meditation. Usually Tara would fall into a deep state of oblivion when she meditated. But occasionally something transpired in her subconscious, ideas jelled, memories synthesized into new insights, and she had discovered some incredible revelations upon returning to the present.

Like tonight.

Enough bits and pieces had wormed their way out of her subconscious mind for her to develop a picture. She could hardly believe the fatal line of coincidences that had occurred in order to turn her carefully constructed fortress into a house of cards, but believe it or not, she had to take action now.

She shuffled aside a chart marked 79B and picked up another, unlabeled. Laminated and taped to the folder was a color photo of a young girl, about ten, with straight blond hair and piercing eyes. The look on the girl’s face was what the Marines called the thousand-yard stare. It was clear that the adolescent had witnessed more than her mind could assimilate. Anyone glancing at the photo might wonder if there was any hope at all for the child.

Failures.

79B and Audrey both.

The thought of Audrey as a failure bothered Tara deeply. Richard hadn’t called back since informing her that Audrey had gone to see Cates. Why? He was supposed to call immediately anytime Audrey showed signs of dredging up her past. If she was starting to pry at the doors in her mind, something needed to be done. And she certainly shouldn’t be talking to another psychiatrist.

And not only psychiatrists!

She stared at the phone on her desk, listening to the last call again in her head, word for word.

“She went to see Babs St. Clair.”

Tara hadn’t been able to believe what she was hearing. What insanity was that? Audrey had no connection to the St. Clair woman. Tara had never cared for the coincidence that had led Babs St. Clair to choose to live so close to Audrey. But the likelihood of the two of them ever meeting seemed remote and even if they did, what harm could it cause? But that had been before Babs started blurting out information on the Timothy Merrill case.
That
revelation had been a stunner. There was no way for Babs to know anything about the case. No way.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did she do after?”

“Her husband drove her home.”

“Keep doing as I told you.” She held a ballpoint pen close to the receiver and clicked it once. “Portal,” she said.

The phone had gone dead.

Tara strode across the hallway to the elevator. The bright lights inside forced her to squint, but she found the button without looking, just as Adler leapt in beside her. The lift dropped precipitously and came to a sudden stop, but rather than exiting through the open doors, she turned and reached beneath the rectangular metal bar that ran around the perimeter of the elevator at waist height. With a barely audible
click
, the rear wall swung outward, revealing a dank, brick-lined corridor with missing floor tiles.

The air was thick with mildew and disinfectant and something else, something almost nauseating. The soft
whoosh
of
the door closing behind her harmonized with the circulation system struggling valiantly overhead. The dog’s panting breath sounded like a metronome as he loped along beside Tara.

She turned down a dark side corridor and stopped in front of a white metal door. Slipping a key from a thin gold chain around her neck, she opened the door and stood for a moment, preparing herself. The smell that the corridor had only hinted at, hit her full in the face. She stepped into the laboratory and the door hissed closed behind her.

No matter how high the ventilators were turned on, no matter how often she cleaned her laboratory, the odor of death would not leave it. The noxious smell of feces, urine, blood, vomit, disinfectants, and formaldehyde saturated the floor, walls, and ceiling.

She knew that she was overly sensitized to it, when she should have been completely indifferent after all these years. It was because she was such a sensitive person that she had taken to her chosen field to begin with. Since childhood, Tara had been drawn to people with problems. She was a fixer by nature. And the one thing that she could not stand was other people telling her how to do things. She knew how things had been done in the past. Freud and Jung and all the others. She had named her dog Adler because she thought the Doberman exhibited more sense than the man.

Against one wall of the white, tiled room, a small boy, clad in a set of Barney boxer shorts, sat strapped tightly into a wheelchair. His head was encased in a metal helmet with red and gold electrical wires attached in a polka-dot pattern upon it. Bright adjustable lights circled him. The walls were hidden behind glass cabinets filled with bottles and jars, and strange electronic equipment in green and blue and gray stood around like a silent computerized audience.

Tara stood beside the chair and stared down into what would have been the child’s face, willing him to focus on her. When she felt nothing, she reached out and twisted one of the myriad dials attached to the face of the machine. Voltage raced through bright electrical wires taped to the boy’s shaved head, and the smell of ozone and singed flesh
was added to the ghastly stench. Tara calmly watched readouts on monitors placed strategically over the boy.

She had never wanted to hurt anyone. But she could when she had to. This was about her life’s work. About the development of mankind. And she wasn’t going to make any more mistakes.

From now on, the doors she closed would stay closed.

All the things one has forgotten scream
for help in dreams.

—Elias Canetti,
The Human Province

33

COODER SCRUBBED THE DENTED SOUP POT
, ignoring the nickel-sized pieces of Teflon that floated away into the big old slate sink, listening to a Grateful Dead song in his head, and enjoying the vibration of the steel wool in his hands. Cooder lived a frugal life, but to him it seemed full enough.

Gas was delivered monthly so his stove worked, and state checks and food stamps covered his basic needs. Since he wasn’t particular about his clothes, he wore them for years. The phone and power had long since been turned off, but he kept a five-gallon can of kerosene beside his chair, to refill his three oil lamps, and they gave him all the light he needed. His water was gravity-fed from a spring in the hill out back, but it only came in cold. That was all right with Cooder. A sponge bath or a good splash now and then in the summer was all he needed, and besides, he got rained on enough on his endless walks.

The noonday sun bounced off the windshield of the Chevy half-buried in the backyard, splintering rainbow patterns across the kitchen window. Normally he would have been caught in the colors like a deer in a headlight, but ever since Virgil’s visit, Cooder had been tickling at something hard and crusty in the dusty back side of his brain.

The pot clanged into the bottom of the wide stone trough and Cooder dropped into his sitter, a recliner so ancient it looked as though it had been reclaimed not once but
twice from a Dumpster. He propped his feet on an apple crate and crossed both hands on his stomach. Then he closed his eyes and tried to remember what it was that had been gnawing at him.

I seen bad things, Virg.

Now why had he said that? What was he talking about? It was as though he had opened his mouth and a stranger’s voice had spit out. Only it wasn’t a stranger, it was his voice and his words and he knew right off, without being told, that they were true and he had wanted to say them. But as soon as Virgil had asked him what he was talking about, the thought had raced out of his sieve of a head.

He
had
seen bad things. He dreamed about them sometimes, and sometimes the pills didn’t get rid of all of them the next day. They drifted through his mind like phantoms, turning his wake-up time into a nightmare. It was then that he went walking. Only outside, with the wind in his face and the open sky overhead and his feet
nick-nick-nicking
along on hard asphalt, could he get any relief.

He had awakened in the night with a flash so bright in his head that he was unable to breathe. Pain struck from all directions. Pain he’d felt before. He’d struggled to his feet, leaning against the wall with his fingernails digging into the decaying plaster, the sound of it falling to the floor like sand in an hourglass, dribbling away the minutes of his life. He hadn’t been able to get back to sleep in bed, finally curling up in his sitter and drifting off again just before dawn.

He’d been thinking about the flash all through his oatmeal. All through his coffee. All through the ritual of washing dishes. He thought about it now in the semi-comfort of his recliner. He couldn’t figure out what it meant. Where it had come from. But he knew he
should
know what it was. He
should
remember what had caused it. Whenever he was just about sure he had something, a distorted image would shimmer across his mind and then melt into something completely different. Something that made no sense at all.

He recalled Virgil’s visit and he wondered if somehow the pain and the weird flashes and Virgil had anything to do with one another. Virgil was looking for a little boy. Did Virgil think
he
might have seen the kid on one of his walks?
He
had
seen children. In fact, he thought he might have seen a lot of children. But which one was Virgil looking for?

He slammed his hands together and the slap echoed through the tiny house. With unusual vigor, he fumbled to his feet and stomped out the back door, not pausing on the stoop. When he reached the road out front, he was so intent on his walk that he was very nearly run down by a speeding semi. The roar of the air horn blasted away through the trees, but that was only a momentary distraction to Cooder.

Somewhere along his route, on one of his countless walks, something had gotten into his head. Something he had had to tell Virgil. But the thought had raced out of his mouth with the sound, and if he ever wanted to recapture it, then the only way that he could think of was to go and find it. The sun warmed his back and the wind was in his face.

Somewhere ahead, there were bad things to see.