Trinity (13 page)

“Hello?”

“Valentine Slade, please.”

“He’s…”
gone crazy
“…asleep. He isn’t feeling well. Can I take a message?”

“Wake him up. This is Angelina Warder. Tell him his mother has taken a turn for the worse, I don’t think she’ll make it through the night. Have him come now.”

She hung up. These people were supposed to be trained to deal with this shit.

When she turned to deliver the message he stood in the door, looking gaunt and haggard.

“Is it my mother?” he asked, his voice sounding normal, like gravel.

Kate nodded.

“Is she dead?”

“No. They don’t think she’ll make it through the night.”

“I have to take a shower.”

Kate just nodded.

Excerpt #3

from
Trinity
by Judd Grenouille ©1988

When I next see poor Adrienne, she looks much worse. We meet in the activity room of the Chaves County Mental Heath Institute. The administrators were not thrilled to admit me, but Adrienne insisted upon it.

“Cal’s gone.” Her voice was scratchy and haunted, and there were dark circles under her eyes. I sat silent, encouraging her to continue. It turned into a waiting game, she stared at the floor, and I examined her. Her hair looked to be in need of a wash, her fingernails were gnawed past the quick, giving her fingers a stubby, blunt look.

She and I sat together on a couch. An orderly hovered at a desk across the room. I wondered how much he could hear.

“Where did they take him?” I asked. I’d heard nothing about a missing boy. It went very poorly for parents of abducted children. The law never seemed to understand.

“He’s in Rhode Island,” she said.

How oddly specific…

“My sister’s got him. Everyone thought it was for the best.” Oh. I understood now. This was the first she’d spoken of his travels there, and I had, for a moment, feared the worst.

“Can they get him back east? Is he safe? I thought maybe they couldn’t find him there.”

“They can be very persistent. Did something happen?”

“Something happened all right. And you don’t even have to hypnotize me.” She settled herself into the uncomfortable institutional couch. This was fairly common, the Visitors could tamper with our memories, but often didn’t think to interfere with us when it was our loved ones in danger.

“Everyone thinks I’m crazy,” she said. “Or high.” She smiled wistfully, as if longing for a drink or a fix. “I’m kinda on a different high in here, though. They’ve got me on so many pills.” I let her go on. They treated her fairly here, now that she was behaving more reasonably. When she first came in she’d been in the throes of detoxification.

“When did your son go east?” I asked. “How did that come about?”

“I called my sister Sally after…” she let her voice trail off and she looked around. “They don’t like me talking about the Visitors,” she said. “They think it was drunken crazy talk. They don’t know it’s real, not like you and me do.”

I nodded, patting her hand.

She swallowed, looked around again. “I’m going to get a glass of water.”

I waited for her, looking around the big, sunny room. The windows opened on a nice patch of desert as yards are too expensive to maintain. A few benches sat here and there, for any patients who wanted to brave the sun.

Adrienne came back with a paper cup of water. She sat, and gave me an earnest smile. Her eyes were glazed, probably from her medication.

“I was in the living room. I was a little—a lot—drunk. I couldn’t sleep otherwise. I’d have nightmares, terrible dreams about the light and them reaching up inside me. Some weren’t dreams, but by this point a lot of ‘em were. I don’t think they cared about me so much, both kinds were dutifully checking up on me. I was watching something, a late talk show rerun, maybe? Kinda staring at the TV. Then I saw a man in my hall. He was one of the Tylwyth Teg, I know it from how he walked. He was in my house, silent like a cat. I stood up and I looked down the hall, he went into Cal’s room. So I ran, I ran down there, tore the room apart, ripped everything out of his closet, under the bed, he’s six, a little guy, and he started crying. But he was afraid of me…”

I grappled with myself for a long time debating whether what Adrienne saw was a drunken fantasy or was a legitimate encounter. Based on other information concerning Cal and the Visitors, I elected to keep it in this book. I believe she saw someone in her home that night.

“A few mornings later he looked tired. I asked him if he was sleeping, and he told me there was a boogeyman in his room at night. At first—God, I was so stupid—I told him there was no such thing, that he was perfectly safe. How I didn’t see it was really them I surely don’t know.” She rubbed her face with her hands, her plastic patient bracelet winking in the sun. “It wasn’t until…he came to me one night. I was asleep—” I wanted to ask if she were under the influence, but something in her downturned eyes told me she was. “—and my door swings open. Real slow, creaky on its hinges. The sound wakes me up, and I look, and little Cal is standing there, in the doorway. We always kept a nightlight in the hall, for when he had to get up and go to the potty. I couldn’t see his face, it was all dark, in shadows. He stood there. I said his name. Said it again. His head was down, his little shoulders slumped over. I flicked on the light, and he fell, crumpled into a ball. The front of him was all blood. I run to him, picked him up, and he said ‘White.’ I asked him what he was talking about, got him laid out on the floor and he said ‘It’s all white, Mama.’ The doctor said he poked a hole in his nose with a pencil or something, and that’s what got him the nosebleed. But I don’t leave none-a that shit where he can get to it. The doc said then he musta done it with his finger.”

This is not the first time I’d heard this type of story. The nasal tracking implants they put inside us—usually in the sinus cavity—don’t always take, and sometimes work their way free. It seems more common in children.

“A few days later, though, he said the strangest thing to me. ‘They put a slug up my nose, Mama. It burned and then I woke up.’ What does that mean?”

“A slug up the nose?” I asked. I’d not heard that before. “That may be a dream, is he afraid of slugs?”

“Not especially.”

“A boy at daycare tormented him with one perhaps?”

“Not that I heard about.”

“I’ve never heard of an extraterrestrial slug being used on anyone,” I said. I vowed I would look into it, and through all my research, and the research of several colleagues, I could find nothing on the topic. I have dismissed it as a childhood dream.

“They took him again after that. I guess it was like with me, where the Tylwyth Teg came first and the Sangaumans came second. To check up on him. We couldn’t help them. We weren’t going to be the key to their interbreeding, so I don’t know why they won’t leave us alone.” She started to cry. The orderly gave me a nasty look, like I’d done something to her. “He’s got a really nice new friend in Rhode Island,” Adrienne said. “His name is Max.”

“That’s good. I’m glad to hear it.”

We chatted a bit more about how he was adjusting, then I left her, hoping not too much time would pass before we met again.

19

Val let the steaming hot water pour over him, almost scalding him, turning his white skin bright pink. He leaned against the shower wall, breathing in the steam, the drumming of the water harmonizing with the hum in his head. He stared at a bar of soap, a thin little bar, taken from a motel somewhere.

If he tried, he could move it with his mind.

Because he was contaminated.

He lifted it, just a little bit above the tray where it rested, then let it splash back down.

He had to pull himself together to see his mother off. Then he would evaluate the next step. Keep his shit together for the rest of the night, then he could lose it. Maybe she’d have some answers for him.

He’d spent so many years telling himself his mother was crazy, that she was a drunk. Which was why she sent him east with Dick and Sally.

It explained how he could kill those people without getting hurt.

He wondered what Kate had seen, what she was talking about. She probably didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

Maria was still in the driveway.

They’d get her into the Daytona, and then Val would have to go. Maria could wait, Caroline could not.

He toweled off, goose bumps rising on his skin after the heat of the shower. Having a list in mind of things to do made him feel better. He pulled on his jeans, aware that he would need to do laundry sometime; these jeans were ready to stand up and walk around on their own. That grown-up thought conflicted with everything going on around him. He found a T-shirt, and his hat, not looking at the sharp knife that lay on his bedroom floor. Instead of kicking it under the bed, he gave it a shove with his mind. Pressure squeezed his head, the hum intensified, and the knife scooted out of sight.

Wild. Maybe it would be okay. He had a feeling, though, that it wouldn’t, it couldn’t, there were too many bodies and too much left unexplained.

Kate stood at the screen door, looking at the pink mass in the dark driveway. The Daytona was parked closer to the body. Kate had moved the car. She had the light on over the stoop and moths crowded around it,
thunking
into the globe and the screen.

“Hi,” he said.

“You look better.”

“We’ll get her in the car, then I’ll take the truck.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Kate said.

They both looked out into the night. A few bats fluttered around in the sky, supping on the insects drawn to the light.

“We can’t keep doing this.”

Val started to speak, to tell her he’d get it figured out.

“They’ll find us. The cops are smart. Maybe Spence isn’t, but he’ll bring in the state cops, or the FBI and they’ll find us. We haven’t been that careful. No matter where we go, they’ll find us.”

Even in Santa Fe, they couldn’t stay lost forever. And once he ceased to check in with his parole officer (which he needed to do in two days—can’t forget that no matter how crazy shit gets) he’d be fucked.

Val nodded.

“We gotta go. Let’s move her.”

Since they’d run out of dish washing gloves, Val grabbed a blanket off the couch to wrap her in. If the bodies were found they were fucked. If they weren’t, they had a shot. At this point, gloves didn’t really matter one way or another.

Getting her in the car was easy, compared to the frat boy or TJ. She wasn’t a small girl, but she seemed light by comparison. The shovel had crumpled the left side of her face, shattering the bones around her eye, flattening her nose. Val did everything in his power to not think about it.

“Should we take her to the mine? Get it over with?” Kate asked.

Yes
, thought Val, but he couldn’t stand the thought of going there, of feeling that strange pressure. “We don’t have time.” Leaving the body in the car was the most dangerous thing they’d done. It meant her scent would be heavier in the car if they brought dogs, though she was less bloody than the ones that had been ripped apart. She was still bound to leak into the car.

He noticed Kate scanning the edge of the light where the driveway melted away to blackness. Looking for something.

Val wondered about burning the car; how he could do it without attracting suspicion.

“Do you want me to drive?” Kate asked, as they walked towards the truck, after the trunk of the Daytona was slammed shut.

“No.” Bless her heart, she didn’t argue. The driving would cleanse him, ease his thoughts. Center him.

At the same place as before, he noticed the hum was gone. Without it filtering, sounds were crisper; the colors of the night were sharper. He pulled over to the side of the road.

“What are you doing?” Kate asked. Her voice was wary. Tension radiated off her, though she tried to seem calm and relaxed. She didn’t trust him, and that made him sad, though he didn’t hold it against her. He could stroke her hair while he held the wheel, though that didn’t seem like it would win him any points.

“I want to try something.”

“Are you being intentionally vague?”

“No.” He cranked the truck’s wheel, spinning its new tires in the dirt, sending it back towards his mother’s trailer. He might not have time for this, but he had to know.

“I think the hum is geographical.”

“What?”

“It always stops in the same spot. Right now I don’t feel it at all.”

He drove, and it came in like before. At first, even though he watched for it, strained for it, he wondered if maybe one of the belts in the truck was starting to let go, then realized it was his hum, back again.

“It’s back!” Discovering something, anything about it gave him a sense of elation and power. It couldn’t be in his head if it had borders.

He made a clumsy K turn in the middle of the road, and headed away from home towards where Mom was dying. Did he want her to be dead when he got there? Was he stalling in hopes of putting off conversation?

The hum melted away like an early frost as he passed the same spot, easily discernible by a bluff of stratified red rock that had been partially blasted away to make way for the road.

“It’s not in my head.”

“I saw a monster. This can’t all be in your head. It had claws, huge claws! It can’t be a coincidence.”

A monster? Claws? And telekinesis? “But I actually can move things with my mind?”

Kate looked uncomfortable that he’d posed it as a question to her. She fidgeted in the vinyl seat her eyebrows rising.

“I guess it makes sense,” he said. “Didn’t the military used to keep pet psychics? Competing with the Russians in the Cold War, who were much more excited about their pet psychics.”

“I don’t know,” said Kate.

He wasn’t sure if it was true, or if it was what pop culture wanted him to think. He seemed to remember a MacGyver episode about a Russian psychic but it may have been debunked mid-episode as a hoax.

They got to the hospice much faster than Val expected.

“I’ll stay in the car,” said Kate. “Get some sleep. Think about some stuff.”

Val didn’t like the tone of that last bit, but it made sense and he nodded. Then he kissed her cheek, and she stiffened under him. He gave her a sad smile, not meeting her eyes.

The same girl worked the desk. The lights in the lobby were low and soothing, the reception area was empty.

With no pleasantries, he signed in and went to his mother’s room. The girl watched him go. She didn’t say anything, and he interpreted that to mean his mom was in rough shape.

He didn’t want to wake her if she were asleep and tried to keep his footsteps quiet. The dark voice in the back of his mind hoped she was asleep, maybe unconscious, then he could sit dutifully by her side, maybe switch the TV over to something interesting, and maybe they’d kick him out when it got to be too late, he could regretfully sigh and politely say he’d see them tomorrow.

Caroline was awake.

Whatever the previous night had sapped from the son it added to the mother.

Caroline looked worlds better propped up on some pillows and sitting up. Her face brightened when she saw him.

I thought she was dying. I thought this was it.
He felt a little duped.

“Valentine!”

“Hey,” he said, wondering if it were appropriate to tell her she looked better. Would that draw attention to how crappy she’d looked the day before? He settled for “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” she said, not sounding addled like she had the day before. She took him in with her eyes. “You’re so tall,” she said, and he nodded, even though he hadn’t grown in about ten years.

He sat on the chair next to her bed. He wondered if it were appropriate to ask
why
she was feeling better. Angelina hadn’t made it sound very likely when she’d called.

After “How are you feeling?” the questions dried up in him.

“What did you do last night?” She asked. “Is it nice to be home?”

Two days
, he thought.
You don’t want to know what I’ve done.

He could ask her about the aliens, he guessed. But she looked so normal. Like a mom, not drunk, and not ranting.

“It’s weird. Stuff’s changed, but a lot hasn’t.”

“Did you see
that girl
last night?”

Maybe it was better when she was delirious.

“Her name is Kate. I did see her. She’s doing well.”

“You were such good friends with her brother.”

He dove into the topic on his mind. “Tell me about the aliens, Mom.” Anything to get her off the topic of the Fultons. If she’d wanted him to have a nice life, with nice friends, she should have left him with Dick and Sally.

“The what?” she asked, her face growing dark, and he panicked for a moment before he realized she was stalling.

“Aliens.”

“You’re ready to listen, finally?” she asked, her tone laced with strychnine, her brow furrowing.

He opened his mouth for a gentle rebuttal, but she bowled him over. “You would never listen before. You never believed me. Now you’re just humoring me.”

“I’m not humoring you. Tell me your story.”

“Have you read the book?” She was proud of being in that thing.

“I always thought it was crap before.”

“What did you see?” she asked, looking curious and afraid beneath the blonde wig. He shouldn’t have brought it up. He didn’t want to upset her.

“I asked you first.”

He didn’t like the proud smile she gave, stinking of “
that’s my boy.
” “Judd wrote a book all about it. I was on the Jerry Springer show.”

Val shook his head. She was an embarrassment.

“They’ve been to see me.” He swallowed past a knot in his throat. Should he show her his trick?

“Tell me.”

Against his better judgment, he said “look.” He just did a tissue on the night stand. Her eyes went wide and she started to cough. A frog in her throat.
Frog…or something worse?
Val thought of chest-bursters, and then of the thick feeling he’d had in his sinuses when he woke up that morning. Fear pressed against his sternum.

He let his hand hover over the call button.

“Do I need to call someone?”

“No.”

His hand dropped.

“Fine.”

She composed herself, regarding him like a cat watches a mouse. She seemed fine again. What had Angelina meant when she called, saying this looked like the end? Maybe he could even take her home, if she continued to feel this good…though the thought of sharing the trailer with her wasn’t one he liked.

So he let fly with the million dollar question, not expecting an answer. Any one of the answers she’d given over the years could be the right one, though he suspected none of them were. Who had contaminated him?

“Who’s my father?” he asked.

When she laughed it came out as a hollow, croaking sound.

“I knew you’d ask,” she said, her tone condescending, as though he asked a frivolous question.

“Funny, I’m still curious after all this time. You’d think prison would have made me forget about that.” He glared down at his hands.

“You were in prison?”

When Val looked up she looked cloudy and far away, like she had yesterday. No, she couldn’t lose it, not right now, not when she might give him a real answer.

“When were you in prison?” she asked, her voice sounding like it came through a tunnel.

“For a drunk and disorderly,” he said, the words coming in a torrent.
Like you.

“Poor boy,” she said; the role of mother seeping back in.

He should have humored her, shouldn’t have talked about aliens. Not here. Shit. He rubbed at his eyes.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He smiled a panicked shark’s grin at her.
See, look how nice my teeth are. Everything is great.

“Knock knock,” Angelina called, like the other day, so much like the other day Val wondered if this were some kind of hellish time loop. She wore her own jack-o-lantern smile, he noticed. It must come with proximity to the dying. “Hi, Caroline, how are we today?” The word
we
made Val grit his teeth.

“Good, Sally,” Caroline said. “Did you know Val spent a night in jail?”

The nurse made a
tsk
-ing sound and he wanted her to choke on it.

“Mister Slade, may I speak with you outside?”

“Yes,” he said, wondering how she could backslide so fast, if she’d been as lucid as she seemed, or if maybe he’d seen what he wanted to see. “Call me Val.”