The Meridians (30 page)

"No," said the killer. "I've always been Mr. Gray to you, haven't I? Always the man who killed your family. Always the man who was destined to kill you." Mr. Gray looked around as well, clearly seeing the same changes being wrought in the alley - or was it alleys? - that Scott himself was observing.

The assassin's features tightened. "Not much time left," he muttered. Then he focused his flinty eyes on Scott. "So I guess I won't get to reproduce history exactly after all," he said. Then, with a smile, he said, "But it's the end of a story that people remember anyway, isn't it?"

And Scott saw the killer's finger whiten as he pulled the trigger of Scott's own gun.

***

32.

***

Lynette just sat for a while after Scott left, thinking. But not about her son's strange abilities or even about Mr. Gray or Robbie.

No. She thought - pleasantly and unabashedly - of Scott. About his kindness and charm, about his wit and his interest in helping her and Kevin.

About how he had been the one to figure out how to talk back to Kevin via the computer - something that Lynette could not believe that she had never thought of before, but the very thing that had led to the many revelations of this night.

Not least of which was the revelation that she was very, very interested in the kind man with the scarred face.

She sighed, sipping her cocoa in quiet remembrance, and just hoped that she would be able to wind down enough from the events of the evening to be able to get to sleep before too much longer. She wouldn't be surprised if, after all that had happened, she found herself unable to do more than lay in bed, thinking.

A moment later, however, the question was mooted as a scream came from the back of the house.

Kevin! she thought. Then echoed the thought with a more visceral scream aloud: "Kevin!"

The screaming continued. And now it was more than mere screaming, more than the tantrum shrieks that so often accustomed an autistic child who had been overworked or overwhelmed. No, these were shrieks of terror, of anguish.

Of pain.

Mr. Gray! thought Lynette, and stood up so fast that the backs of her knees popped against her chair, sending it flying halfway across the kitchen with the force of the blow.

She was down the hallway an instant later, rushing into her son's room, turning on the light....

And the instant she did, the screaming stopped.

Kevin was asleep in his bed. Completely, deeply asleep. No way could he have made the sounds that she had just heard issuing forth from this place. No way at all.

Yet she
had
heard the noise, she was sure of it.

She tousled Kevin's hair. He was sweating, as though he had been running a race in his dream. She wondered briefly what kind of dreams he was having, and whether he could have suffered a nightmare that had led to the screaming she had heard.

But no. The screaming would have continued past the moment when she turned on the lights if it had been something as simple as a dream.

She flattened the covers down around her boy, then moved reluctantly back to the door. She closed off the light.

And the screaming happened again. Worse this time, because she was right on top of it and it was a bone-chilling shriek and how could Kevin not be hearing this? How could he not be affected by it?

But again, the instant she turned on the light, two things happened: the screaming stopped, and she saw that her son was still asleep, not so much as even twitching under the covers.

She stood there in the light for a moment, trying to figure out a way to discern what was happening and to find out if it was something that was going to harm her son. Given the recent past experiences with Mr. Gray, she knew it would be dangerous at best and deadly at worst to ignore whatever was going on in her home.

She tried to wake Kevin, but he stayed asleep no matter how hard she shook him. It was as though he had been drugged. Her shaking grew more and more agitated, but no matter how sharply she pushed against him, Kevin remained boneless-seeming as a rag doll.

Lynette finally decided that she was going to call an ambulance, though she knew in her heart of hearts that when the ambulance arrived, they would be able to find nothing amiss. Whatever was happening now had no answers so easy that they could be discerned by something as mundane as medical science, any more than the presence of Mr. Gray could have been explained by resorting to everyday criminal psychology.

But on the way to call for the ambulance, her heart fluttering against her ribcage like a terrified bird, she got an idea. She went to her bedroom and looked around and...there!

She grabbed the high-powered flashlight from its spot near her bedside table. Born and bred in Los Angeles, she was ever-ready for the advent of "The Big One," an earthquake so severe that all power and utilities would be not only knocked out, but destroyed utterly. So even in Idaho, she was still in the habit of sleeping with the flashlight near to her bed, just in case.

She rushed back to Kevin's room, where the light was still on, feeling suddenly as though she was being led by some invisible force, by some benign power that was interested in helping her through this night and through the trials that she and Kevin had been facing. She felt like a prophet of old, led by God and not knowing beforehand what he was going to do.

Kevin was still sleeping peacefully, though once again when she tried to rouse him she met with no success. So she returned to a position near the light switch, and flicked it into the off position.

The scream began again. This time it was not only terrifyingly loud, but anguishingly familiar. The voice was, without a doubt, that of Kevin.

But how? Kevin was sleeping. Or was he?

Lynette flicked the power button on her flashlight, then shone the high-powered beam at her son...and gasped. She literally rubbed her eyes, so unsure of what she was seeing that even a cartoonish denial of what the vision before her seemed to be not only appropriate, but required.

There were two of Kevin. He was asleep before her, and yet not asleep. Her son had his eyes closed, and yet open. She felt like she was looking at a double exposure of a film negative. On one exposure rested the boy she knew and had seen, her Kevin, sleeping without care or concern.

But the other exposure, the other image was a vision of pure terror. He had Kevin's eyes, his hair, his facial expressions - he was even wearing the same pajamas. But where "her" Kevin was quietly sleeping, this Kevin was sitting up in his bed, shrieking and screaming so hard that she could hear his voice growing raw with the force of the banshee wails issuing forth from his young mouth.

"He's dying!" screamed the other Kevin, the ghost-Kevin, and Lynette dropped her flashlight in shock. The light fell to the floor and rolled around, casting strobe-like shadows around the room that disoriented and frightened her as her son/not son did something that he had never done before, never in all his life with Lynette: he looked right at her, right into her eyes, and completed a full sentence. "He's dying, Mom! He's dying, right now, if we don't save him he'll die for sure!"

Lynette realized that she was crying, though whether at the thought that her boy was speaking or at the terror in the phantom child's voice she could not have said. "Who's dying?" she cried back. "Who's dying, Kevin?"

And Kevin said the name, the one name that Lynette dreaded more than any other: "Scott, Mom! We have to save him."

"How?" she shrieked back, her own terror ratcheting up as she saw the agony and fear that was so palpable on this other-Kevin's face. "What's going on?"

Then the screaming stopped. Utterly, completely, it stopped. The phantom-Kevin looked at her for a long time without moving, so completely still that it was as though he had died and rigor mortis set in instantly. Then he laid down. The two images of Kevin merged, becoming one sleeping boy.

Then the most terrifying thing of all happened. Her boy - and it
was
her boy, undeniably her own son, his face marked by the purity of expression and innocence of visage that were one of the signal hallmarks of his autism - sat up.

He looked at her. He looked
straight at her
.

And he spoke. Not with the depth of expression and level of maturity that he had displayed in his other form, his screaming form. No, his words were simpler, delivered more haltingly. But no less frightening for all that. Indeed, the simplicity with which the words were delivered if anything added to the terror that had gripped Lynette's spine and squeezed it like a slithering tentacle that moved between her vertebrae, sending shivers convulsively up and down her body.

"Gray man's going to kill Scott."

***

33.

***

Lynette did not think she had ever moved so fast in her life. But then, never before - not even when Robbie died - had she been so completely in the thrall of a terror that lent fleetness to her flight.

She rushed to Kevin and grabbed him, practically swallowed him up in an embrace that lifted him right off his bed. Kevin did not protest, uncharacteristically calm about the intrusion into his personal space, but rather let her propel him into her arms, ratcheting his thin legs around her waist, and then allowing her to move him out of the room with no fuss whatever.

Not that he was silent, no, for he maintained a steady chant throughout the entire process.

"Gray man's going to kill Scott. Gray man's going to kill Scott. Gray man's going to kill Scott...." And on and on, an unstopping litany of death and terror that her son was singing into her ear.

She grabbed her car keys off the small hook above the kitchen sink where she always kept them, then maneuvered Kevin so she could hold him with one hand, and with the other she grabbed his laptop. She did not know why she grabbed the device, not consciously, at any rate. But there was definitely something within her that said having it would be not only important, but critical in the time ahead.

She ran with her son into the night - thank the Lord it was still summer, if it had been winter the entire process would have been delayed by a need to get coat and shoes for him, not to mention cool-weather garb for herself - and got them both into the car. Normally she put Kevin in the backseat, because it was safer for a child to travel there. But not tonight. Tonight she put him in the front passenger seat, for she felt that he would be her navigator.

She only hoped that she would be able to understand his directions when - if - they came.

She put the car in reverse and pulled out of the driveway, moving so quickly that the car bounced, scraping the bottom of the chassis against the curb when she rolled over the small lip of the driveway into the street.

She then put the car into drive and - not having anywhere else to go - began to drive toward Scott's house.

Kevin was rocking in the seat, a jerky back and forth motion that sickened her. He looked manic, terrified.

"Gray man's going to kill Scott. Gray man's going to -"

And then the words cut off and again she heard that terrible, terrible screaming that she had heard in his room earlier. A finger came into view, pointing off to the right, but she didn't have the nerve to look at her son, for she feared that she would again see
two
of him. Two Kevins superimposed one over another, one of them rocking back and forth and saying "Gray man's going to kill Scott" in an almost sing-song, the other one looking at once more intellectually capable and more terrifying for the simplicity of the scream he was issuing forth.

Lynette, terrified out of her mind, spun the wheel to the right, and the shrieking stopped.

"Gray man's going to kill Scott. Gray man's going...."

She drove less than a half block before the scream returned, flying out of her son - or her son's doppleganger - with such force that she thought the windows and mirrors in the car must crack in a spiderweb of pressure breaks.

But the windows held, the mirrors maintained their integrity. And the scream continued.

She glanced to her side again, again looking only far enough to make out a pointing hand. The sight of that alone almost undid her: the hand went from solid to translucent before her eyes, as though her son were phasing in and out of her reality...or she was phasing in and out of his.

Who is real? she wondered briefly. Will I wake up in an institution tomorrow? Is any of this really happening?

But even as she asked the question, she knew the answer. The boy in the car was Kevin...and so was the other boy. Somehow she was seeing two versions of her son, one that had existed with her since birth and another one that was coming from...where?

To this she had no answer.

And the scream continued.

She again turned the wheel in line with the pointing hand beside her. This time however, the wail continued. And now she could hear
two
sets of voices speaking.