Shimmer: A Novel (16 page)

“The other one,” Fallon said. “Thalia.”

“That might not be such a good idea.”

Fallon caught his arm as he started to rise again. “It’s okay,” she said, speaking with some strange assurance. “They seem fine together.”

Logan nodded, but said nothing.

“I tried to explain to Chelsea what happened,” Fallon said. “About the… premonition you had. But, I don’t know, I guess it’s hard to understand.”

“Tell me about it.”

“She’s just so angry right now.”

“She has a right to be angry,” Logan said. “Lost her mother and brother. The Outsider slaughtered her family but how is she supposed to… process that? She needs someone
real
to blame.”

“The nearest human target?”

“Actually, you were closer,” Logan said with a wry smile. “But I’m the weird one, right?”

“Be that as it may,” she said with an attempt at playfulness, “I told her she was wrong to blame you. That you were trying to help.”

“I can fight my own battles.”

“Is that what you were doing?” Fallon asked, one eyebrow arched. “Looked more like running away from a battle.”

“She’s been through enough,” Logan said. “She doesn’t need to deal with my issues.”

“You saved her life, Logan,” Fallon said seriously. “Shouldn’t you—shouldn’t she—be grateful for that?”

“Did I save her life?”

“What do you mean? You told me you saw…?”

“Don’t you get it?” Logan asked. “What I see or feel or sense—all of it—it’s never enough. I never know exactly what it means or how to deal with the warnings. What’s the point of having this ability if I couldn’t save her mother and brother?”

Fallon was quiet for a moment, staring into the same darkness beyond the backyard. The grass extended a hundred feet or more across the level yard to an uneven line of trees, like sentinels guarding the house, a natural border instead of a fence to mark the property line with geometric precision. Fallon sighed. “You can’t save everyone, Logan,” she said softly. “Nobody can carry that burden. Nobody should have to.”

“I don’t know,” Logan said, his voice trailing off in the night. “Sometimes…” Logan shook his head, reluctant to give voice to his fear.

She turned his face toward hers. “Tell me.”

He looked into her remarkable green eyes and for a moment he was lost and found at the same time, overwhelmed with the mingled sensations of isolation and peace and comfort. And the touch of her fingers on his cheek was warm and electric and riveting. “Sometimes,” he whispered, “I think the only reason for my ability is to slowly drive me insane.”

She smiled at him and the warmth of that genuine concern made him feel foolish for doubting himself. “You know that’s not true.”

“I do?”

“I need to believe in you,” she said, then made a sweeping gesture with her arm back toward the house. “I need to believe in all of this. Because I need to believe… that my mother was wrong.” Fallon worked her left hand between his interlaced fingers and grasped his right hand with hers. “The way she was, she thought she was alone in the world. And… it destroyed her.”

Logan watched a tear course down her cheek, glistening in the moonlight, and wanted to comfort her, but he didn’t know what to say. He’d lost his parents, but to different circumstances. One by chance; one by choice. Speechless, he squeezed her hand and managed to utter the insignificant words again. “I’m sorry.”

She sniffed, looked at him with a speculative cant to her head and braved a smile. “Have you ever considered there’s another reason you’re here in Hadenford?”

Logan chuckled. “Since the moment I arrived.”

“Why is that funny?”

“Just something Ambrose is always saying,” Logan explained. “Wheels within wheels. Cosmological machinery. He’s a great believer in destiny.”

“Way too abstract for me,” Fallon said. “I prefer the here and now”—she raised their clasped hands—“and this.”

“And nothing more?”

She shook her head and quirked a grin. “No guarantees.”

“None?”

“Each given moment.”

Their faces were close. Her gaze was intense, almost mesmerizing. Logan thought he should kiss her, if only to break the spell she’d cast over him. But before he could lean toward her, the motion-detecting spotlights winked out, casting them in abrupt darkness.

Logan turned his face back to the yard, the trees, and the greater darkness beyond. Somehow he’d lost his moment. An instant of hesitation and it was gone. When he spoke next, his voice was hushed, as if in deference to the darkness. “It’s out there.”

She shuddered and leaned against him. “Can it find us?”

“Not yet.”

“But soon?”

“Maybe,” Logan said, not wishing to alarm her. “Possibly…”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“Hard to keep secrets from you,” Logan said.

“Remember that,” she said dramatically. “Now tell me.”

“I explained how sometimes I can sense the rifts and the Outsiders,” Logan said, “but what I neglected to say was: it works both ways.”

“Meaning they can sense you?”

“Not me specifically,” Logan said. “But Walkers and other people who have…”

“Abilities?” she asked. “Like me.”

“Not all of them,” Logan added quickly. “Some—a few. Occasionally.”

A breeze stirred the line of trees, creating a creak of branches and a shushing of leaves, whispers of a coming storm.

Fallon squeezed his hand. “Maybe we should go back inside.”

Chapter 25

Paul Mouratidis jogged at night to escape the heat. An hour or two after dinner and he would set out on his seven-mile course through the neighboring developments of Hadenford. Rather than risk twisting his ankles on the cracked and uneven sidewalks caused by burgeoning tree roots, he preferred to jog in the street, alongside the rows of parked cars. He marked his sleeveless shirt front and back with a reflective-tape X, sharing the old joke with his wife that he hoped late-night drivers wouldn’t consider it a bull’s-eye or a challenge.

Some evenings he jogged with his MP3 player clipped to his waistband, listening to classical music on the headphones to help pass the time. But this night he’d been in a hurry, hoping to finish his jog before the predicted thunderstorms rolled in. He hadn’t even stretched beforehand, risking a bit of stiffness in the morning.

Instead of jogging to the peaceful precision of a classical piece, he made do with the percussive combo of the slap-slap of his running shoes in counterpoint to the regular chuffing of his breath.

A breeze swirled around him, spinning an aluminum soda can fitfully against the curb and driving forward a chewing gum wrapper and a crumpled single-serving potato chip bag. He strode past a Buick sedan with a ticking engine, radiating its own heat into the muggy night. But the driver had departed. Paul thought the streets seemed unnaturally deserted for the hour and wondered if he’d been a bit hardheaded for attempting to outrace a storm. Until he reached the halfway point, he always had the option of heading back early. In all his years of jogging, he’d been caught in downpours on more than one occasion.
No big deal,
he thought.
Might even cool me off.

The regularly-spaced street lights cast pale pools of light at predictable intervals, dispelling the darkness and depriving the night of absolute victory. To pass the time, he began to count the lampposts. When the soft patter of rain interrupted his mental exercise, he wondered if he should turn back, to possibly make it home before the downpours began in earnest.  If he turned back, he estimated the roundtrip would be about five miles, two miles short of his goal. Because the wind was at his back, he reasoned that the heavy storms were behind him, so he had nothing to gain by returning home ahead of schedule. If he stayed ahead of the storm, there was the slight chance it would veer away from him, sparing him the worst of it. Wishful thinking, he knew, but he picked up his pace anyway.

A peach-colored flyer advertising the Bridget Bane concert this weekend at the Renaissance Mall skittered across the road in front of him and fluttered against a storm drain before spinning away beneath a red Mitsubishi SUV.

Around him, the rain began to fall with more authority, sweeping ahead of him like wind-driven ranks of liquid infantry. The blacktop transformed from an oily glaze to a glistening, shimmering surface. The crisp slap-slap of his running shoes gradually became a wet plop-plop as gathering puddles momentarily dispersed under each regular footfall.

Despite the increasingly sodden nature of his running attire and the rain streaming down his face, arms and legs, the relentless patterns of rainfall mesmerized him, seemingly urging a faster pace, to match the rhythm of the storm’s impatient drumbeat. He found himself running harder and developing a kind of tunnel vision that excluded everything except the liquid fractal designs before him.

Because of this short-sighted fascination with nature’s mathematical whimsy, he failed to notice a dark area absent of rain patterns until it had moved into position in front of him, blocking his intended path. As his gaze swept across this section of utter blackness awaiting him, he registered its odd qualities but was running too fast to completely avoid it.
Black… emptiness,
he thought.

Rather than striking a surface, the raindrops seemed to vanish at the apparent point of contact. That oddity served to delineate the shape and outline of the emptiness, like an untouchable oblong scar in the middle of the road.

A rational explanation popped into Paul’s mind—
sinkhole
—and he tried to leap across it.

He was confident his long stride would carry him safely to the other side, but he made one small miscalculation.

The “sinkhole” moved.

As he leapt over it, the emptiness tracked him, sliding beneath his projected landing point.

Alarmed at the wrongness of the movement, the apparent shift in reality beneath his feet, he flung his long arms outward and was jarred as they slammed against the slick blacktop. The entire length of his legs and torso dangled into the pitch dark of the emptiness. A panicked glance over his shoulder revealed nothing but a black void. For all he could make out in the impenetrable darkness, the sinkhole might as well have been bottomless.

Ridiculous,
he thought, again rationally.

Of course, he’d seen pictures on television and in newspapers showing sinkholes deep enough to have swallowed cars, but those holes had bottoms. Every one of them.

Even if he slid down the side he would be able to scrabble out or call for help… so why did he have the nerve-rattling sensation that he needed to climb out immediately. Some primal, vestigial warning system deep in his brain had awakened and seemed to be screaming at him to flee. And he was trying. But his legs flailed below him without finding purchase, as if the sinkhole had no sides. He supported his weight on nothing more than his bare, scraped forearms.

At first he tried to hoist himself up with his arms alone, but the rain had made the road surface slick. He needed something to grab to pull himself up, but other than a few smooth pebbles and a rusty metal washer, there was nothing within arm’s reach. Next he tried to swing sideways and throw his right leg over the lip of the sinkhole. But too much of his body hung beneath the surface and each broad motion caused him to slip a little. His forearms were barely over the lip of the hole and trembling with fatigue. Abandoning his dignity, he shouted into the rainy night. “Help! Someone—anyone—help me!”

The rain pelting his face seemed unnaturally cold. His face felt numb, his voice hoarse and unsure. “Help!”

Something sinuous and muscular curled around his dangling legs and squeezed them together with crushing force.

Paul gasped. “Oh, God—
help!”

The sudden jarring attack had almost dislodged him from the lip of the sinkhole. His hands pressed into the slick blacktop so hard he split several fingernails and his raw fingers began to bleed, with the unfortunate side effect of making his grip more treacherous.

“Please…” he whispered hopelessly.

Jaw clenched, arms trembling with effort, he made one last attempt to pull himself out of the hole, away from the living nightmare that was crushing his legs. He felt something pop in his leg—a ligament maybe—a moment before the muffled crunch of bones. His pelvis collapsed like a rusty hinge. The pain was white-hot and consuming, so unbearable it left him too breathless to scream. And the next instant something sharp and hard struck him beneath the ribs, ripping through his midsection and shattering his spine.

Even if his numb hands hadn’t lost all strength, the force of the blow was overwhelming. For the fleeting moment he retained his senses, he formed the grisly mental image of himself as a living shish kebab morsel shoved down the length of a giant’s skewer. Then he fell back into the ravenous dark as bottomless as his despair…

…and never saw the hole seal itself above him.

Chapter 26

Laramie, Wyoming

Gideon resisted the urge to pick up the telephone.

Since nightfall, he’d had the sense that something had happened back east, in New Jersey, where Ambrose and the others were making their latest stand against the shadows. As he made himself a dinner of steak, mixed vegetables and a baked potato, he hoped the sensation would pass. Unfortunately, by the time his meal was ready, he’d lost his appetite.

Whenever he wandered close to the phone and his hand drifted near the receiver, he snatched it back with a curse. “Not your fight,” he repeated to himself like a mantra, certain that repetition would engender belief.

With his abandoned meal cooling on his plate at the counter, he grabbed a second long-necked bottle of beer from the refrigerator, removed the twist-off cap, and sat at the kitchen table to study the child-killer newspaper articles he’d clipped and taped to lined pages in a plain black binder.

Articles in the Casper Star Tribune and the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle touched upon Chief Reilly’s comment about “inhuman atrocities.”  Laramie’s top police officer also referred to the killer as a “monster.” Quotes from the FBI agents were sparse and restrained, less dramatic and less likely to alarm the general public. They had profilers working on the case and assured the local media that the serial killer’s capture was “just a matter of time.”