Otherworld (15 page)

The room was indeed alive with mystical dreams.

 

Mike had no knowledge of the goings-on two floors below that night, in a room most uncommon in Houston homes. In that subterranean enclosure, the darkness hung thick and grim. The temperature was twenty degrees cooler than outside, a veritable meat locker compared to the rest of the house.

Bering summoned the visitor …

… but the visitor did not come.

 

Four ambulances, three fire engines, and a long line of police cars crowded the scene in front of Tom's Hardware in Dallas. The eighteen-wheeler had impaled the store. Somewhere inside the store, in bits and pieces, lay the remnants of the Volkswagen. The flashing lights of the emergency vehicles cast an eerie kaleidoscope onto the walls.

The paramedics retrieved the limp body of the truck driver from the cab. He had broken twenty-nine bones, but it didn't matter. He had died on impact.

In the rubble of car and tools and glass and bricks and wood and gypsum drywall, they discovered the woman, broken and torn to shreds. They dug her out, placed her inert frame on a stretcher, and called for a body bag. They placed her in it, zipped it up, and carried her out.

Vickie Holland had created her last finger painting.

 

“Where are you?” the professor called.

Dr. Bering tried all night. He started in his chair, fully dressed, calmly calling for him. He beckoned in this manner for hours and gave up the approach by removing his clothes and lighting the candle. He knew his visitor dismissed the necessity of these practices, but Bering was desperate. Nothing worked. No sign of him at all. No shadows glided across his wall. No objects in the room moved with the aid of invisible hands. As the night progressed, the professor grew not more tired, but more frenzied. It was not until the early morning hours that his wildness began to fade, and he felt weak and lame.

“Where are you?” he yelled again. His voice began to taper. His throat was sore, and his tongue was dry. Finally, he collapsed to the floor in a heap, no strength left at all.

Outside, dawn began to climb up into the city. It was the tiny crevice between night and day. The time of magic.

There was a sound like a rustling of leaves, and a familiar voice.

“Samuel. Samuel, whatever are you doing, chum?”

Dr. Bering pushed himself up with his hands and looked about the room. He could not see his visitor. “Where are you?”

“I'm here. Don't worry.”

“I've been … I've been calling all night. Didn't you hear me?”

“I've had some business to attend to. I can't be two places at once, you know.”

“But I thought you would come. I've been calling all night.”

At this, the visitor appeared, his face smoldering with anger. He leaned in close to the professor, who was petrified and still lying on the floor. Bering opened his mouth to speak, and the visitor covered it with a large, rough—almost scaly—hand. The dark one exhaled a foul breath, a long, smoky sigh that reeked of bittersweet decay. His eyes narrowed into slits. His brow furrowed into a menacing crease. “You already said that, and I told you, I had someplace to be. I'm not a pet, chum. I don't come, tail wagging, every time you blow your whistle. Understand?”

“Y-yes.” He felt the visitor's fingernails piercing the flesh on his cheek.

“Good.”

The visitor disappeared as quickly as he came. Bering put a finger to his face to massage his wound and, when he removed it, found it tipped with a fresh drop of blood.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Bering cracked the door to the guest bedroom and said, “Mike? You might want to get up now. Don't forget we have class today.”

The form underneath the covers grunted an incoherent reply and slowly rose to life. Mike had been asleep only a few hours, but it had been a good, hard sleep, and he had a vague yet confident intuition that as soon as the initial daze was gone, he would feel totally refreshed. He turned over and glanced at the clock on the antique nightstand.

“Isn't it a little early?” He yawned.

“Yes,” came the reply, “but I thought we might go by the Regal Theater to pick up your car.”

“Oh, yeah.” Glimpses of the previous evening shot through Mike's head in fuzzy and eerie flashes, mental daguerreotypes imprinted on his consciousness in grotesque still-life panels. “Sounds good,” he said.

Mike sat up, rubbed his eyes, and dressed in his clothes from the previous day, still dirty and torn from the night's adventure. He would have to make a stop by his own house to change before class. Oddly, his bruises had lost most of their soreness, and his cuts did not sting half as bad as when he had retired to bed. His thoughts went to the chance meeting between himself and Bering in the street outside TransCo. But was it chance? What had Bering said?
A little bird told him.
Mike resolved to ask the professor just what he meant by that, but later he forgot, and so he never did.

“I feel like an idiot. I can't believe I actually pulled a gun on someone.”

“It's okay,” Bering said. “You can hardly blame yourself, considering your mental state at the time. Let's just be glad everything worked out like it did.” And then he added, “And that the gun wasn't loaded.”

“Even if it had been,” Mike said, “I'm not much of a marksman. I doubt I woulda even hit the car.”

“That poor lady didn't know that.”

An electricity was passing between them, joining them, binding them.

Mike believed he owed Bering something, and though he was not sure what it was, he wanted to devote himself to searching it out. Protégé. Assistant. Whatever the case called for, he would be it for Bering. And more. He made this resolution with willful surrender completely foreign to his character. But he was tired of the mental agony of pondering the excruciating minutiae of life, tired of the stress it put on him. He was tired of checking every thought against his own tender sensibilities. He was tired of worrying, tired of caring. He was tired of being timid and of being neurotic. He was tired of assuming control; his personal sovereignty only offered pain. He could do nothing but give in.

Bering's car pulled into the Regal's parking lot.

“See you in a few hours,” Mike said.

“Right you are.”

Mike got into his own automobile, and for a while, it refused to start. But after coaxing it some, he was on his way home. Once there, he showered, changed clothes, and began his new day.

The battery on his phone had long since died, so he didn't get the voice mail.

 

Jimmy Horn rested on the ash-stained carpet of his tiny bedroom and practiced opening his butterfly knife with one smart flip of the hand. Loud rock music blared from the huge speakers on the dresser. A cigarette faded out in an ashtray next to his knee, sending up a thin, disintegrating smoke signal. His eyes watched the blade of the knife fly out of its handles as he opened and closed it repeatedly.

Jimmy was seventeen years old and had been in and out of juvenile correctional facilities since he was old enough to leave the house to avoid the violence.

When Jimmy's mother had found the courage to say enough was enough, she moved the two of them to Houston, and that's where Jimmy began to get into trouble. “Hanging with the wrong crowd,” as his mother would say. She would never believe that Jimmy himself constituted “the wrong crowd.” Alcohol. Shoplifting. Vandalism. When he was thirteen, he got caught holding up a convenience store. The gun was unloaded, but it was the first in a line of serious crimes for Jimmy Horn. Sometimes he got caught. Sometimes he didn't. He had set fire to Percy Wheeler's house and never got caught. He even hid in the shadows of some trees across the street, eating sunflower seeds and watched it burn for a while. Jimmy had burned his own conscience to ashes. The rage intensified.

Trouble just seemed to fit Jimmy Horn, and that was fine by him. He liked to be feared. He saw the way people looked at him as he passed by. The way teachers and principals even seemed to be scared of him. In juvie everyone feared him. Even the bigger prisoners were afraid of Jimmy Horn. The meanest residents, many of them gang members, stepped out of his way and went to extremes to secure him cigarettes or drugs. Securing their own safety, of course. Most didn't even know his name. He knew that they spoke of him in hushed reverence, calling him Mr. Black, because when he could get ahold of the polish, he painted his fingernails that color, and because his black hair hung down into his face like a drawn cowl. Because everywhere he went, a dark cloud seemed to hang over him. He knew they called him that name, always whispering it so as not to anger him. He knew, and he liked it.

Jimmy Horn lived with his mother now. And the voices.

He didn't know what they were or
who
they were, but for two years he had listened to them and did almost everything they asked him to do. He once told his friend Kurt about the voices.

“That's crazy, man,” Kurt said.

“What?”

“
You're
crazy, man,” Kurt said. “You hear voices? Like, in your head? You're crazy.”

Jimmy promptly stabbed Kurt in the arm with a fork.

No one called Jimmy crazy and emerged unscathed. The voices were not an issue of sanity to him. The voices were real—very real—and though Jimmy didn't fear any man, he was definitely afraid of the voices. He couldn't see them, for one thing. And they asked him to
do
things. Things he didn't really mind doing, but it was the principle of the matter. Whether he enjoyed doing these things or not, he didn't enjoy being ordered around by anyone. But he always listened, and he always did the things they asked. And as they asked for more and more things to be done, Jimmy himself began to fear that he was indeed crazy.

Jimmy would lay on his bedroom floor, playing with his knife, and keep telling himself, “I'm not crazy. I'm not crazy. I'm not crazy …”

And then the voices came. Echoing in his ears. Pounding in his brain. “Do us this favor,” they said and kept saying.

“Do us this favor.”

“I'm not crazy.”

“Do us this favor.”

And then, the conversation slipped into his mind. The conflict began.

Jimmy! A favor!

I'm not crazy!

Do us this favor!

I'm not!

Please!

Do you hear me? I'm not!

Jimmy … please do us this favor.

His mother was peeling potatoes over the kitchen sink. The blare of music from Jimmy's room drowned out his approaching steps, but somehow she'd sensed his presence.

She turned. She looked at the unfolded butterfly knife in his hand strangely, as if it were something she'd never seen before.

She dropped a potato.

“Jimmy?”

Jimmy, please just do us this one crazy favor.

 

One thing Steve Woodbridge knew without a doubt was that the early-morning call from Graham sounded important. With no hesitation, he raced past rows of new family restaurants and strip malls, the ever-creeping tendrils of Houston's northern urban sprawl, to the little diner near the Houston-Trumbull border. He arrived first, so he took a seat in an out-of-the-way booth and ordered two scrambled eggs, toast with butter, and black coffee.

He had finished his first cup by the time Graham found him.

The two men ate and shot the breeze about sports, weather, the biography of Truman that ran on A&E, and how they thought things were going in the church Steve pastored and Graham attended. They finished their breakfasts before moving on to more serious matters.

“So what's been going on, Graham? You sounded a little off in your call this morning.”

“Well, I'll tell ya—this place is going crazy.”

“How do you mean?”

“Hard to explain. Last couple of days—well, starting last week, I guess. With all this UFO business. I got reporters out the wazoo. It died down for a while, but then this crazy farmer has his other cow killed, and all of a sudden they're all back. He's got TV crews out there at his place. Got some parapsychologists scanning his barn for energy fields and whatnot. I went over there to check it out. You know, right after he found it. It was a mess, let me tell ya. Guts all over the place. We found some death card or something—”

“Death card?”

“Yeah, some kinda card. Got a Grim Reaper on it. One of my boys said it was a
tarrow
card or some sheesh like that.” Graham rolled his eyes. “And I'm thinking
, This is all I need
, you know? Whole town's caught up in it. We get reports of lights in the sky every night, and you can't even suggest to them it was an airplane. No, an airplane's too unbelievable. But they're gonna believe some alien's trying to get their attention. The whole thing's just getting weird.”

“It'll blow over. How many cows the guy got?”

“None now.”

“See? It's over already.”

The men laughed.

“Yeah,” Graham said, “but he's got a whole pen full of chickens. And if it ain't that, we'll be getting people comin' in sayin'
they
were attacked or abducted or whatnot.” The captain paused and cast his gaze down to his empty plate. He fiddled with the handle on his coffee mug.

“Something wrong, Graham?”

“Yeah. I don't know, Steve, but it's more than all that. It makes me mad to have my whole town stupid like this, but there's something else. I don't know. I just get this feeling. I've been having these headaches for over a week now. And this cold weather's unlike anything I've seen here. Not that it's so cold, but that it's so cold for so long and so early in the season. And it all kinda came together somehow in that old man's barn. I was looking at that card, and somehow it all came together. Not real clear, you know? I mean, I couldn't put my finger on it, but I just felt something. Some kind of …
pressure
, I guess. No, I know what: oppression. It felt oppressive. It's just really strange. I guess you could pray for me, Pastor, that I do my job well. If we can catch our cow killer, maybe we could put a stop to all this. And also, that my headaches go away. How are you?”

“Well …” Steve shifted in his seat nervously. “I've been having kind of a hard time lately. I don't know, I guess doubting myself. You haven't noticed anything different about me?”

“A little,” Graham answered. “You seemed a bit upset in our meeting last week. And I could tell something was bothering you during the service. During your message. You weren't quite yourself, I guess.”

“Well, you're the first person to be honest about it. I heard, ‘Good sermon, Pastor' so many times, I thought I was gonna throw up. Truth is, I have been a little upset. I guess my mind's been someplace else.”