Captain Quad (43 page)

With a tremendous heave Kelly rolled the dog off her chest. Chainsaw tumbled away, clambered to his feet, then collapsed in a twitching heap. That scarlet rage flashed in his eyes again, as Kelly backed away. Then he was looking up at her beseechingly, confused and mortally wounded.

Overcome by a great rush of sorrow for the dog, Kelly fell to her knees at its side, unmindful of her own bleeding injuries.

"Peter!" she screamed, throwing her head back, the blood like war paint on her face. "You dirty bastard, I hate you! Do you hear me? I hate you!"

Chainsaw was whining now, licking Kelly's wrist, and a cold March wind blew in on them both. Sobbing, Kelly held the animal's head—

And then scrambled back as the dog's bloodied pelt began to spit and crackle with profane electricity. Blue light streamed out of the shepherd's dying eyes in jagged, coalescing bolts that swirled and sizzled overhead.

No, Peter said, and Kelly heard the word—inside, like a secret thought. You don't hate me, Kelly.

You love me.

And now you're going to prove it.

He looked so peaceful. Peaceful and alive. His mouth was set in a ghost of a smile, and every few seconds the globes of his eyes flickered beneath their lids. It was as if he were only sleeping.

Sam had been standing at Peter's bedside for about twenty minutes. The pillow felt impossibly heavy now, an anvil instead of a sac stuffed with feathers, and Sam couldn't lift it any higher than his belt.

He felt paralyzed, like his brother.

Standing there watching him sleep (no, not asleep, he's not asleep) Sam was reminded of when they were kids and Sam would sometimes have trouble nodding off in his saggy top bunk. When these times came, he would poke his head over the edge and look clown at his sleeping brother. He'd seemed like a god to Sam then, the five-year difference in their ages somehow vast and incomprehensible, and Sam remembered feeling safe with Peter so near. No one could harm him as long as Peter Gardner was his brother. He had wondered what Peter dreamed of on these nights, hoping that he was included but doubting it, imagining instead that Peter's dreams took him to wondrous and impossible places, all the places he told Sam about when they sat together beneath the droopy old willow by the creek, just the two of them, Peter spinning dreams, Sam sitting rapt and attentive. "Gonna fly right up to the moon someday, Sammy. Maybe even to Venus, who knows? Yeah. Be the first man on Venus, what do you think about that?" To Peter all things were possible, and it made Sam wonder how he'd put up with such a wimp of a kid brother.

But Peter had always stood by him, advised him, protected him. . .

Sam thought of that demented Nicholson smirk, and that made him think of the big Indian in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Peter's favorite movie. He remembered how the Indian had pressed the pillow over Randall's vapid face after his frontal lobotomy, not to punish him but to release him.

And as he remembered it, Sam felt his arms stretch out to rigid poles as he mimicked the act involuntarily, felt the pillow molding itself gently to the contours of his brother's face. . .

Sam dropped the pillow like a hot coal and stumbled into the bathroom, where the contents of his stomach came up in the sink. He turned on the light, wiped his mouth with a paper towel, and threw up again.

Then he returned to the room.

He couldn't do it. He just couldn't do it.

* * *

Kelly opened her mouth to scream—then that horrid blue light was gone and something touched her on the nape of the neck.

It was like a kiss.

She stood, edging away from the ruined window, her sneakered feet crunching broken glass. Her fanny met the back door and she huddled there, closing her eyes.

Chainsaw whimpered once and was still.

Kelly.

(Stay calm don't let him freak you out.)

Kelly, can you feel me?

A soothing warmth oozed its way down through her body, like golden butter melting under a hot sun. It felt good, so good. . .

"Yes."

Feels good, doesn't it?

"Yes. . .”

All set for the trip?

Yes. Of course. The trip. My, how her girlfriends envied her. Spending the summer motorcycling across the country, seeing all the places they'd only read about. What freedom!

The whole summer. . .

Kelly's hand closed around the doorknob and turned it. She saw herself performing this simple act, but her arm seemed ten feet long, her hand distant and remote, not her own.

Her mind was filling up with smoke. . .

She was eighteen again. It was the last day of school and they'd just made love—and she had finally felt it, that delicious rushing release. The intervening years had been only a dream, a cruel nightmare suffered in the summer cool of her bedroom, asleep beside the one she loved.

And I love you, Kelly.

With these words the warmth inside her intensified, becoming a compelling, euphoric heat—

But now there was a cold blast of air, nasty shavings of ice in her eyes, and Kelly paused, shaking her head in an effort to clear it. She was on the back steps, oblivious of having come out, the door behind her left open to the elements.

She could feel him inside her now, in this single lucid moment, not as a lulling warmth anymore but as a sly invading presence, a slow poison, a killing drug.

The hard fist of dread struck her then. He'd taken her so easily, unmasking that part of her which still cherished him, that part which had been frozen in time and then methodically buried, disinterring it with a single whispered phrase: I love you, Kelly. . . Upon hearing these words, she had felt the fight run out of her like sap from a felled tree, and suddenly she had wanted him inside her. It had felt like. . . like some mystic liquor decanted into the dusty vessel of her soul. It had made her feel whole again. More than whole.

It had made her feel divine.

(No! Smarten up! It's a mind game, and he's going to kill you!)

Heeding that voice, Kelly grasped her burned fingers and squeezed. The pain made her cry out—but it brought with it a savage clarity and she flung herself into the snow, where she kicked and flailed in an effort to dislodge him. For an instant that unpleasant tugging sensation began in her scalp—

And then she heard a single soft word. . . felt it, in her heart.

Kaitlin.

Kelly sat stock-still in the snowbank, eyes wide, heart racing—and felt the sleet turn to cool summer rain against her face. There was a wobbly sense of time falling away, like plates of ice from a towering iceberg. . .

Then she blinked and saw the land slope away into darkness, the road's muddy shoulder a blur in the jittering coach light. Lightning fractured the sky, and Kelly saw the coach driver crack his whip at the galloping horses. From behind them came an answering pistol crack, then a hot crease of pain as a slug grazed her arm. "Oh, Liam, I'm hit!" she cried, and the man beside her roared, returning fire through a rent in the canvas canopy. "Filthy bastards!" he screamed—and Kelly thought: Peter? "You've hit my wife!" Now the road took a hard right, nothing but a rutted track in the flank of a hill, and lightning flashed again. In its glare Kelly saw her own soaked attire—my wedding dress—and now the man beside her was turning, his brown eyes filled with concern in the wild pyrotechnics of the storm. "Ay, Kaitlin, are ya hurt?" But before she could answer the front wheels plunged into a washout and the coach lurched toward the gully. Now the rear wheels hit—and Kaitlin saw the right one go spinning off over the edge. Liam's side of the coach dropped like a stone, sending a roostertail of muck into the air. Another slug punched through the canopy, and now Liam was clutching his throat, blood gurgling out between his fingers to stain his silk ruff. There was a snap!
as the horses broke free—then the coach was going over the edge. In that endless moment Liam regarded her with fondness and a terrible regret. Then he flung her out and was gone, over the brink and down, and Kaitlin was plastered with mud in the roadway, the rain sheeting down, the wind snapping at her robe, the horsemen drawing up around her, high, faceless horsemen. . .

Ireland, Peter said in that even, soothing tone. Eighteen—

"Seventy-three," Kelly said without hesitation. She was on her feet again, starting down the slope to the lake.

You remember.

"Yes," Kelly said, tears freezing to her cheeks. "I remember."

They had been lovers then, she and Liam—Liam DeBlacam, merchant seaman, landowner, son of a Newgrange shepherd.

And now a fresh flood of memory came, vivid and wondrous. Her girlhood on a farm in the Celtic highlands, her love of horses and her talent for weaving, her mother's hale face and her father's fearsome but loving strictness. . .

(Stop this. It's a mind trick and he's going to kill you.)

But no. This was no trick. She had been there. She had lived it. The memory came from a secret vault where, even now, other memories stirred from their hibernal slumber. She had loved him before, in another place and another time, but with the same all-consuming passion.

Yes, Peter said. Many times. So many times. . .

Sasha. . .

It was the whispered voice of the ages, secret, serene, compelling. And now a new memory came.

"Sasha."

The word was a knowing sigh, and Sam felt his hackles rise at the sound of it. He leaned forward, searching his brother's face in the mellow glow of the night-light. Warm shadows played over Peter's face as his mouth widened in a canny smirk. . .

Then he said it again. Breathed it.

"Sasha. . .”

Stripped naked and cold in the salty sea air, leering men with coarse hands looping crude lengths of hemp around her chest, cinching them cruelly behind her. (Oh, dear Jesus, I'm tied to a stake!) Cold, so cold, and all of them staring, a terrible bloodlust in their eyes. "Burn!"
they chanted. "Burn!" And her only sin had been to fall in love with the deacon's son, so young and uncertain of his faith and yet pledged by his father to spread the word of God, not the legs of a peasant's daughter. So they'd come in the night and dragged her away, raped her in that stinking jail, and then brought her to trial on some trumped-up charge of witchcraft. "Oh, David, where are you? Can you not stop them?" But he didn't even know. The ropes were chafing her skin, and now a grinning troll of a man tossed an armload of tinder at her feet, then another. And the deacon glowered, his eyes like bloodless bayonet holes in the dusk. "And the Bible saith, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Behold the mistress of witchcrafts that selleth nations through her whoredoms, and families through her witchcrafts.' Now a boy waving a lit torch scrambled out of the mist. At a nod from the deacon he lobbed the torch at her feet, a boy of no more than ten, and as the torch struck the tinder and the tinder caught fire, the boy darted forward and pinched her breasts, spat on her legs, then turned and scampered back into the crowd, There were whoops and cheers of approval. And the chant beat on: "Burn, witch!
Burn!" Flames licked up in a yellow hoop, crackling tongues that merged with deadly swiftness into solid pillars. The heat was terrible, stealing her air, the smoke making her head spin. The crowd drew back from the pyre, their eager faces thrown into hideous corrugations by the heat. A burning branch tumbled into the narrow circle at her feet, and its tip branded her ankle. Crying out, she kicked it aside, but others fell in to replace it. She screamed—and then a man galloped up on horseback, plowing through the crowd, trampling those in his way. "David!" Sasha cried. "Oh, David, thank God—" But now they were dragging him down from his mount, obeying the deacon's bellowed commands. David battled them fiercely, slaying three with his sword and another with his musket before they pinned him screaming to the ground. And the deacon's black raiment fluttered in the firewind.

No, Sasha! Nooooooo. . .

"Oh, God," Kelly sobbed. "Oh, God."

She was standing on the lakeshore now, that shattered voice from the past echoing through the ravaged galleries of her mind. The moon had found a worn spot in the cloud cover, and as if in a dream Kelly saw the hazy white disc reflected in the patch of open water at her feet. She studied it. It seemed to call her.

She stepped into the water. It closed over her shoes, cold as liquid ice.

It was always like this, Kelly. And it always will be, if we let it. Lovers through time. Tragic lovers. . . but we can change that now.

Change it forever. . .

That strange hair-pulling tug came again, a sense of something vital being snatched away. . .

And then she saw him.

He rafted above her, a shimmering phantasm in the shape of a man, lacking any discernible features and yet unmistakably Peter. Kelly experienced a brief razor stroke of awareness—I'm up to my knees in freezing lake water!—but it passed when the wraith above her extended a shimmering hand.

Without hesitation Kelly reached out to accept it.

come

Before their fingers met, that same discomfiting tug began in her fingertips and rippled back through her body. Simultaneously Peter's shape began to shed its eerie glow and solidify, taking on the hues of life and the features that were distinctly his own. He was naked and perfect, unchanged since Kelly had last seen him whole. Only his smile glowed now.

Their fingers met, and Kelly felt suddenly light, lighter than air, free as a distant star. She glanced down and saw her body advancing into the lake, approaching the thick lip of ice that tinged the circle of open water. She was already in past her waist. She had one urgent thought—Sam! Please hurry!—but it was torn apart like ground fog in a high wind.

Am I going to die, Peter?

He drew her to him, embraced her.

No. You are going to live forever, as one with me.

The notion brought with it a flood of tranquillity, reducing the freight of her mortal concerns to ash. Kelly looked down again and saw the water lap over her breasts, cold and black, that livid lip of ice only inches away. . . and she saw something else—a fine, glowing blue thread, stretching back to her body like an enchanted leash.