Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (17 page)

“
Everybody
responds to guns an’ threats,” he corrected.

“Not when they’ve been emotionally
annihilated like this,” she argued, keeping her voice down.  A boy, late for class, jogged past her and bolted through a classroom door.  “Pain is something he believes is a constant, anyway.  Something he’s earned for…for unknown crimes or wrongs he thinks he’s done.  They’ve done this to him, made him think he
deserved
it all, so more violence is just another day for him.”  Tears fell from her eyes, and in both worlds she reached to wipe them.  “The boy’s scars…don’t you feel them?”

“No, I don’t ‘fee
l’ them,” he said shortly.  But that wasn’t the whole truth.  He did feel them, even if it was vicariously through Kaley, and he was as uncomfortable with it as she was feeling around inside his disgusting mind.

It was all so much to take in.  Kaley was the keeper of too many secrets.  A boy trapped in a basement, victimized countless times.  A psychopath riding the razor’s edge of calmness and violence every moment of his life.  A school that demanded she focus, pay attention, keep up her attendance, avoid the venomous whispers against herself and her sister.  Emotional scars still rippling out from her sister, even though they were separated by almost a mile at this point.

And these creatures
, she thought, looking around at all of them. 
Circling like sharks
. 
What do they want?
  Kaley thought she knew, but blocked the knowledge immediately.  But there was something she couldn’t ignore.  The more she walked, the more she was chumming the waters for the sharks.

Behind her, something flopped around in the water.  When she turned to look, something long, flat, and oily had come out of the waters, smacked up against the lockers,
but then shot back below to some unknown depths.  “Something’s coming through,” she whispered.

“What?” Spencer said.
  He squinted, trying to decipher her.

Kaley looked back at him, then back at the boy.  “Nothing.  Forget it.  Listen, I need to…I have to connect with him.  Coax him out.”

“You’ve already tried that—”

“Not with words.  I have to…to…
to take some of his pain away, or else he’ll never come out of this shell.”

“How’re ya gonna do that?”

“The same way I did it for Shan after we left that basement,” she said, wiping away another tear and kneeling in front of the boy.  In the hallway, she never stopped walking towards the water fountain at the other end.  The water rippled, and all around her the sharks circled.  Hunting, hunting.

The basement had grown cold, but that might only have been Spencer’s imagination. 
No
. 
No, it’s definitely colder
.

The apparition girl sat down on her butt.  She scooted close to the boy, who still wouldn’t stop sucking his thumb, and wouldn’t let go of the blue satchel in his hands.
  Kaley closed her eyes.  Tears had come, and she had wiped them away.  But now they flowed, and Kaley did nothing to stop them.  The boy trembled, and clutched his blue satchel tighter.

In
Spencer’s right jacket pocket, Zakhar’s iPhone started ringing again.  Spencer reached inside to silence it.

Kaley stared at the boy in silence for a time. 
Growing impatient, Spencer turned away from the two of them.  He took a whiff of the room. 
Smells like Pine-Sol
.  It was a prosaic but no less illustrative reminder of just how efficient the men of the Rainbow Room were in their game. 
Keeps everything spic an’ span
. 
Or does he have the boy keep it clean?

There was another odor, too.
 
Sweat
, he thought. 
And
…
blood?
  It was barely covered up, but enough of it had been spilled down here that Pine-Sol wasn’t enough.  Things were in order.  A cheap shelf made out of balsawood was kept very tidy.  Spencer surveyed the selection:
Thomas the Tank Engine
,
Dora the Explorer
,
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
,
The Lord of the Rings
trilogy set and a copy of the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
movie.  All of them were DVDs.  A brand new Sony PlayStation 3 sat atop the shelf.  There was one controller, but no games.  Presumably, the PS3 served as the DVD player.

The room wasn’t quite…right.  Even Spencer could see the flimsy, frail illusion that Zakhar had
created.  It was a child’s room designed by someone who was neither a child nor the parent of one.  It was the way he imagined a play room being designed at a hospital where they kept children with weak immune systems in bubbles; a room more functional than fun.

For a moment, Spencer imagined being trapped down here
in this ersatz play room.  How long had the kid endured?  Not that he was feeling any sympathy, but the walls did feel strangely close together.  And, if he didn’t know any better, he’d say they were getting even closer together by the moment.  Something moved past his leg.  Spencer turned and aimed the gun at the floor, but there was nothing there.  For a few seconds after that, he felt like…like there was cold, moving water against his ankles.  When he walked back over to Kaley, he could almost feel the slight resistance of that water, and he knew it was coming from her.

The apparition girl remained silent and still.  The boy continued trembling uncontrollably.  And all around him, Spencer got the distinct feeling that other forces were at work.  Not just here in this room, and not just surrounding Kaley
Dupré.  He’d come to Zakhar Ogorodnikov’s house based on information he extracted from some of his people back in Derbent.  It wouldn’t be too long before the rest of the Russian families followed a bread crumb trail out here, or for that matter Interpol might do the same, or police forces from Moscow and Chelyabinsk.

Spencer had a
few choices to make here.  Every second he lingered was another second that other interested parties could be connecting the dots, but if the girl had been telling the truth, and the boy did know something, then leaving now could mean losing his last chance to make good on his promise to Dmitry.  If he decided to leave, did it make more sense to leave the boy alive or dead, now that he’d seen Spencer’s face?  Killing the boy would certainly upset Kaley, but he also felt certain it would go a long ways towards crippling her. 
Kill the boy, and emotionally cripple the girl
.

Emotio
ns were the root of her power.  Intuitively, he understood this.  It was why these whispers were coming to him.  Kaley Dupré’s power to empathize is what had allowed her to absorb her sister’s pain that night on Avery Street. It had also allowed her to absorb Spencer’s rage and her captors’ carnal desires, creating a powerful brew of free-floating hell, consuming anything and anyone in its path, regardless of whether or not they were deserving of retribution.

But that brought him to another thought:
If I kill the boy, might it also just kick-start another chain reaction inside o’ her?
That could be bad for Spencer.  Not that he cared.  He’d made her a promise to hurt the boy if she lied, and Spencer Pelletier always kept his promises.  Always.

“…
as long as he’s near her
…” came the whisper again, up through his bones, shivering down his spine.  “
It’s our chance
. 
We cannot miss this convergence
. 
She’s stronger when she’s near him, we cannot pass up this convergence
.”

Spencer watched the walls, the floor, and the slow-spinning ceiling fan above his head.
  He turned back to the apparition girl, ruminating.  Then, he walked over to the table, kicked it to the side, and pressed the pistol to the top of the boy’s head.  This did not have any effect on Kaley Dupré; she was in some kind of a trance, eyes shut, lips slightly parted, and a sliver of drool dangling from her lower lip.

“Ya got five minutes,” Spencer said.  “After that, if he’s not talkin’, this kid’s a permanent resident.
  Zakhar’s ghost can diddle his.”

“I’m working on it,” said Kaley. 
Her voice was monotone.  “I can’t hurry this any faster.  I’m…not even sure how this works.  I’m still learning.”

“Hope you’re a fast learner.”

“Just calm down—”

“Something’s down here with us,” he said.

Kaley nodded slowly.  “I know.”

“It’s all around us.  Swimming, pressing against…I dunno, the
air
.  Tryin’ to get through somehow.”

“I know.”

“Yeah?” he said, looking down on her.  “How long have ya known?”

“Since Avery Street,” Kaley said.

“Who are they?”

“Others.”

Spencer snorted.  “What do they want?”

“Us.”  More drool fell from the apparition’s lips.  Spencer started to ask her to elaborate again, but the girl held up a hand.  “Please, if you want this to work, I need you to be quiet.”

“What did I tell ya about—”

“It wasn’t a command, it was a request.  Spencer, will you
please
be quiet?”

“
She knows
,” said the voice.  “
And he knows, too
. 
Keep searching
…
keep searching
…
so close
.”

“Get a move on, chick-a-dee,” Spencer said, moving his foot when he felt something
lick it, something he couldn’t see.  “It’s gettin’ a little crowded in here.”

The best Kaley had ever been able to manage was using her imagination to put emotions into concrete objects—her occasional research had turned up another term for this: dynamic visualization.  Back on Avery Street, it had come to her more out of reflex, as if some survival mechanism deeply embedded inside of her had all at once flipped a switch.

T
his wasn’t actually as hard as it sounded.  Both Kaley and her sister Shannon had a form of what was called
synesthesia
, only they hadn’t known it because they had never adequately expressed it to an adult, and indeed it was rarely ever diagnosed until a person was old enough to realize that not everybody saw the world they did.

People with synesthesia, or synesthetes, had a special neurological condition that commonly made it so that they perceived letters and/or numbers as inher
ently having color: the number four might always be seen as green, the number nine as red, and so forth.  To synesthetes, even
people
could have color, or might be represented as a number—someone tall and angular might be a seven, a proud person might always be thought of as eight, and a heavyset proud person might be seen as eighty eight—and also as a color—introverts were typically seen as bluish, while extroverts may be more vibrant hues of orange.

But Kaley wasn’
t quite a synesthete, though there were definite similarities.  The emotions she felt were usually assigned a “feeling” like a crawling or tickling sensation on her skin, or a visual of some landscape she’d seen on
National Geographic
.  It was even more so since her powers had begun to take shape.  Having witnessed the twisted topography of Spencer Pelletier’s mind, and having survived it, had granted her some strange insight.

The boy’s name was nowhere
to be found in his thought-emotions (the charm didn’t quite work like that).  Though identity was typically vital to a person, names seemed to have nothing to do with that identity; they were the last thing on people’s minds.

The boy’s emotions were in retreat. 
Everything he had ever been had retreated, likely part of the same kind of reflexive survival instinct that Kaley had struck upon in the basement on Avery Street.  Paramount on his mind was his despair.  For Kaley, this despair came to her, almost unbidden, as a frozen wasteland—maybe this was the boy projecting what he knew of Siberia back to her, or maybe this was only feedback from Kaley’s own mind, her thoughts on the storm she’d seen outside this lodge…

The boy’s mind was far afield.  A
tortured landscape of splitting, shifting icebergs was all around her.  Kaley stood on one of them, and somewhere…somewhere there was a voice…a voice on the wind.  “
She’s spreading herself too thin
,” it said, with growing vehemence.  “
She’s weak now
. 
Vulnerable
. 
Keep searching, brothers
. 
She’s here
. 
She’s here!
”

Not the voice she was looking for.

A wind whipped up, and Kaley felt as cold as she had outside in the shed, watching Spencer put on his tire chains.  Thinking of Spencer made her think of the timeline he’d given her.  “Ya got five minutes,” he’d said.  Kaley believed she’d calmed him down some, but she couldn’t be sure.  She didn’t know if she’d actually spoken to him or if that had all been in her mind.