Nightjack (28 page)

“I don’t know. I’m not blaming anyone. It happened to me that day, I believe. In the fire. When I watched my wife burn to death.”

“My daughter was always troubled, but it wasn’t until after—”

“Why don’t you say her name?” Pace asked.

“
Cassandra
,” Kaltzas said, with so much emotion that it was like a hot wind in Pace’s face. What did it mean, for a father to say his child’s name like that?

Without turning in his seat, Kaltzas indicated the window behind him. It seemed like it might shatter at any minute and shred him to ribbons.

Kaltzas said, “This storm. It’s yours, isn’t it?”

“That sounds crazy.”

“True. Nonetheless, it is yours.”

“Yes,” Pace admitted.

“As above so on earth. Heaven rages because your soul is not at peace.” A strange, small sound fluttered from the man. It had almost nothing in common with laughter but Pace figured that’s what it was supposed to be.

Pace said, “What the hell do you want with us?”

“My sole interest is in you.” The steepled fingers returned to his beard.

“I see. Why?”

“As I said, because of my daughter, of course. Because we are blood now, you and I. Fate has seen to this.”

“How so?”

“My daughter is pregnant with your child.”

Pace stood. Maybe the knife was in his hand, maybe it wasn’t. It felt like he’d just clutched it to his chest and stabbed himself. He had to look down to make sure the stacked micarta handle wasn’t sticking out of him.

His mouth opened but he said nothing. His lips moved but framed no words.

“Yes, it’s true, Mr. Pacella. As I said, we are now blood.”

And then, for an instant, the man...
fluctuated
. His calm gone, his eyes suddenly filled with a swirling anxiety. Those eyes turned black and cold as quartz.

And Pace realized what was happening.

Faust had been right.

We’re actually channeling these other
individuals, entities, and beings. Drawing them from other dimensions, through time and space and across the cosmos. Gathering them to us. Them, and the souls of the departed. These others do not arrive organically, from within
.

He wasn’t talking to Alexander Kaltzas at all, not in the flesh.

They consume and subsume and, the worst of them, devour. We are simply the beacons. We are the vessels. We are the conduits. We are the possessed.

He stared at Kaltzas, into the man—trying to focus past the ghost to see the face of a dark-haired girl with sharp aquiline features beneath. A young woman of strength and independence, forged by heartache. With an expression that was, even now, undoubtedly reserved and remote. A girl who had buckled and broken, no worse than Pacella had, like Psyche driven down to the underworld by love.

Kaltzas remained before him, but Pace knew now, This was a girl with an affliction.

This was actually Cassandra.

A moment later, Alexander Kaltzas returned to his peaceful repose. He stood, extended his hand, shook with Pace, and said, “It has been a pleasure, my son. We shall talk again further.” Kaltzas drew him forward, patted his back twice, added, “Welcome to my family,” and walked out of the room.

twenty-eight

Pace stood there thinking, Christ, if she really is pregnant, the poor baby. With Pace as the father and Cassandra the mother, this kid was going to be born speaking ninety-seven languages, squealing, hissing, burrowing like a grub, gliding like a tree squirrel. Burning brighter than Apollo, red as Satan’s sores. Reaching for mama’s heavy breast, full of the murdered, the inhuman, and the insane.

That’s my boy
!

By the time he got out into the corridor Kaltzas was gone. Pace walked the hallway listening to the celebration still going on downstairs, Pia’s laughter loud enough to rise above the music and other noise. The
bouzouki
band was really kicking into high gear, the crowd stomping in time with Pace’s pulse.

His head swirled and he wasn’t so sure that he liked being alive anymore, being the man in charge of the body. He was picking up a history in busted bits and pieces, gluing the shards together to form the mosaic of himself.

A shadow crossed his face and he spun, wondering who was coming after him now.

It was only another statue of an incomplete man standing on a pedestal, the spotlight rising from between his cracked legs, illuminating his missing hands, his marred face.

Sometimes you found your symbols, and sometimes your symbols found you.

He walked down the hall and, as he passed an open door of a dimly-lit room, someone called to him. “Will?”

You couldn’t help thinking, Jesus Christ, now what?

He stepped inside the room, feeling the blade passing back and forth from one hand to other at incredible speed.

Dr. Maureen Brandt was seated before the window, a wretched expression writhing across her lovely face. You could take a lot, but this lady, your own doctor, she was just totally fucking disheartening.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I failed you,” she said.

“Not me. William Pacella maybe, but you and I are square.”

“All of you. Pia, Hayden, Faust, even many of my other patients on the ward. I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

The question seemed to stun her. “You’re not cured.”

She still didn’t get it. If she cured him, she’d kill him. Reintegrating Will Pacella would squeeze out the In-between man. “We were in a mental hospital. There’s not exactly a high rate of success in such places. It’s a world where recidivism is on the rise.”

“I don’t think you should be so forgiving.”

“It’s my nature,” he told her. It was the truth. “What are you doing here?”

“I had to come. To make certain you were safe.”

“Vindi paid you and brought you here.”

He stepped closer, willing her into his arms, but she remained seated. She still intoxicated him with her allure, perhaps more now than ever. Maybe he just needed someone from his past—his own past—to be here with him. He started to turn away but couldn’t quite complete the motion.

He flashed again on the first time he’d seen her: waking up in the hyper-white cell room, strapped in the funky straitjacket tied to the stainless steel railings surrounding the bed. Dr. Brandt introducing herself by name while she flicked a fingernail against a syringe, sticking the needle into his neck. How could it not make an impression?

“I really wish you’d stop looking at me like that,” she said.

“How?”

“You know how.”

“Yeah, but I want to hear you say it.”

“Like you want to fuck me.”

There it was. He’d always know that, on some level, Dr. Brandt really hated her patients. They were, to an extent, infecting her with their troubles, putting different kinds of thoughts into her head.

“Maybe I love you,” he said. “Maybe you’re in love with me.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Some people might call it crazy, but I’m glad you don’t throw that word around so easily.”

“No, I don’t.”

He remembered the final smile she’d given to him before he’d left the States, that condescension somehow mixed with bereavement. As if she’d almost managed to rescue the part of him worth redeeming, before he’d proven himself past all atonement

“I need your help,” she said, and moved in such a way that her breasts jutted, consciously or unconsciously luring Pace in to do her will.

“You need
my
help? To do what?”

“To save Cassandra Kaltzas.”

It was acceptable to go mad with lust, but he didn’t need the extra burden right now. “Kaltzas said the same thing. But what can I do?”

“I’m not certain, but you’re a main part of her illness, and so you might be an aid in her treatment. Cassandra didn’t have a breakdown in the accepted understanding of the word. She was...obsessive. Whereas you, Pia, Hayden, and Faust make each other more ill, I believe that you might actually be an aid to Cassandra, and help me draw out her primary personality again.”

“Her father says she’s afflicted. And that I’m the cause. She’s pregnant with my child, he says.”

Dr. Brandt’s entire body tightened in the chair. Her brow furrowed and she shut her eyes, and he saw the muscles in her beautiful face working to no benefit. When she looked at him again she was nearly pouting. “At first I thought you were the impetus, the catalyst for shared mass hallucination. But you weren’t merely seeing and interacting with the other patients’ alternates. You were ingraining the ill with their fractured psyches. You were giving life to their additional personalities.”

“That’s not possible,” he said. “You can’t spread split personality disorder.”

“Apparently you can. Perhaps with implanted suggestions. And with additional suggestions you can help seal the fractures and reverse the process.”

“You know, lady, you’re as nutty as any of us. And everybody knows it.”

She gave him a sad smile there that made the center of his chest hurt. “We’re breaking new ground here, Will. We’re far and away from the usual psychoneurotic disorders.”

How often did you hear that?
We’re far and away from the usual psychoneurotic disorders
. She didn’t even realize how ludicrous it sounded.

Dr. Brandt said, “That’s why I know I’m responsible, in part, for your continuing illness. I should have turned your case over to psychiatrists whose skills exceeded my own. Or at least invited others to study your case and weigh-in with their professional opinions. But I was selfish. I was greedy. I wanted to keep you to myself. I guarded you jealously.”

He didn’t know how to take that. “But if you wanted to study me so badly, then why did you keep trying to shake me free from it? With such intense therapy? The medications? That fucking straitjacket?”

“I was...conflicted.”

He let out a bark of laughter. “Yeah, I guess so, lady!”

“I’ve got to talk to him,” she said.

Knowing exactly who she meant, but unable to say the name. “Who?”

“Jack.”

“Why?”

“He’s a part of this.”

It made no sense. “He doesn’t talk.”

“Yes, he does. He spoke on the ward. Pia mentioned it in the car when we were leaving Manhattan.”

“He doesn’t talk to me or you. He just giggles.”

She grinned with such sorrow that he took another half-step toward her. “There are ways to communicate with your alternates even without directly assuming their personas.”

“He isn’t an alternate.”

“What is he then?”

“Something else.”

“You might find you can speak to him directly, if you make the effort.”

“I don’t want to talk to him.”

“No, but perhaps he wishes to speak to you.”

Look at this. Two years at Garden Falls, maybe a thousand hours of group therapy and one-on-one psychoanalysis sessions, days and days in the straitjacket rig, all the pills, the months surrounded by Brutuses and Ernies, making ashtrays and pajamas, and she just brings up this new course of action now?

Two oceans away, in the heart of a hurricane, in the house of the enemy, who didn’t even exist.

“Forget about that now,” he said. “How did you get here? Did you come on Kaltzas’s jet?”

“Yes.”

“Were you on the helicopter?”

“Yes.”

“But—”

She rose and slid into his arms, and kissed him with such passion that he actually moaned against her tongue. She tightened her embrace on him, urging him to crush her. Pace drew away and held her at arm’s length as she struggled to reach him again. He stared into her eyes, thinking the last time he’d been this close to her, on the verge of touching her, the same storm had been breaking wide over them both. Maureen Brandt kissed him and he searched her face, hoping she wasn’t going to stick a needle in his neck. The soft pressure of her body against his made his head swim, even a lunatic can enjoy a woman’s love, and as she whimpered a name that wasn’t his he felt—beneath the strata of concealing flesh
—oh Christ
—he felt the child within her womb.

He realized, Goddamn, this is Cassandra too.

twenty-nine

The hot breath of the Minotaur brushed against the back of Pace’s neck, burning him once again.

He turned away from Dr. Brandt to see Vindi standing in the doorway, his expression as dark and dense as an outcropping of reef. When Pace looked back, Maureen Brandt was gone and Alexander Kaltzas was standing there with his red lips like crushed roses.