Sinister: A Paranormal Fantasy (Sinisters Book 1) (2 page)

Peter Caracalla’s back ached. He sat back on his heels, feeling the muscles creak as he released them from the positions they'd held for the past hour. Massaging his lumbar region with his fists, he surveyed his work.

Bright fluorescent bulbs illuminated a large chalk diagram sketched on the tile floor before him. The room itself was small, only large enough for the ceramic toilet, a white sink basin, and a few feet of standing room. The size suited him; it was much easier to ward a room this size. The tiles were also much easier to clean than the wood that covered his office, and with the sink nearby, he had all the water necessary to perform his experiments. He could go to the warehouse as well, but it was so much more convenient to work at his office. He only needed to use the warehouse when he didn’t want anyone to know that he was involved in what was going on. With his latest experiments, that was especially important. He couldn’t very well have people know that there was a tie between his failed attempts and him.

His knees creaked as he rose, and he felt old beyond his years. The work took its toll on him, but if he stopped...well, there was no telling what would become of them all. He cocked his head as he surveyed the diagram. Two lines connected in the lower left of the sketch, forming a perfect right angle. Inside the lines he'd sketched a curve that started parallel to the bottom line before angling up to the edge of the box. Some people preferred the much smaller sideways-eight symbol, but he found the graphical representation of infinity so much more pleasing. Below the diagram, he'd written the equation that Schrödinger had slaved over less than a hundred years before. The equation that had irrevocably altered his life path.

Peter smiled at the sketch, so simple and yet so life-altering. If only he had found the way before Giacomo had—he shoved that thought away. It was too late for Giacomo, but there were others he could save. He had work to do.

“Now, did everyone read the Assad article last night?” Mr. Rodney asked from the front of Matt’s sophomore political science class the following day.

A few heads nodded and papers rustled as students pulled out their assignments. Though political science was his favorite class, Matt had forgotten about the assigned article on the Syrian conflict. Normally, he would have rushed through his other homework and spent the last hour of his evening researching the situation in Syria. He liked to imagine that he was preparing to go overseas and start peace negotiations between the two parties, but he'd forgotten about homework in lieu of his birthday celebrations. Not to mention the beginning of his mental breakdown. All he knew was that the article had something to do with the bombing in Damascus and Assad’s government blaming terrorists for the attacks, and the rest he could wing. In the three months they’d been studying volatile countries, he’d realized that pretty much every article was about someone bombing someone else and then blaming a third group.

He dug through his backpack and found the article crumpled at the bottom of his bag. He shook out the miscellaneous debris that had gathered in the creases and smoothed the page out on his desk. As he looked up again, he saw a strange glint in Mr. Rodney's eye.
Just a trick of the light
, he told himself, but he didn't really believe it. The subdued red light seemed to be coming from within him. Matt blinked once, twice, and the light faded.
It was just light
, he repeated.
Nothing else.

He rubbed his eyes tiredly. He wasn't fooling himself. Although he hadn't seen anything like the creature from the night before, Matt had caught glimpses of flashing lights from the corner of his eyes on and off all day. This was the first time he'd seen the light in someone and not just passing by the edges of his sight, and he wondered if that meant something significant. It probably all meant something significant, but he didn’t have a clue as to what. He just hoped it wasn’t the first sign of insanity.

Matt turned his head to gaze out the window at the unfriendly clouds whipping across the sky. The motion matched his turbulent thoughts as he recalled his conversation with his dad the night before. Despite seeming to acquiesce to his wife's request to leave his son alone, Matt’s dad had caught him in the hallway just before bed and tried to extract more details about the “hallucination,” as he insisted on calling it. He had, at least, assured his son that a tumor was unlikely to be the cause.

“There are believed to be three possible causes of visual hallucinations, provided, of course, the subject is not simply suffering from psychosis. There can be disturbances to the actual brain, such as seizure activity in the cortical centers responsible for visual processing; disturbances of neurotransmitters, so that the body is sending fewer or more signals to the visual center; or disturbances of the conscious by the unconscious. Any or all of these could trigger a visual hallucination such as the one you just experienced.”

“I don’t think I was hallucinating, Dad.”

“Interesting.” Greg stroked his beardless chin, peering down at his son in fascination. “You likely experienced a strong hallucination then. At your age, the brain is undergoing an amazing amount of changes as it grows into an adult mind. It’s a very common time for mental illnesses to emerge.”

“What?”
Mental illness?
The thought made nausea roil in his stomach.
I’m definitely not going crazy
, he told himself. He would know if he were.
Right?

A flash of guilt showed in his dad’s eyes as he realized what he said. “No, no, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you. There would be other symptoms. You’re fine. I just meant that, as the brain rewires itself, it’s a likely time for mental…occurrences that have never happened before.”

Matt had eventually conceded to his dad’s explanation, since he couldn’t come up with anything more logical, but he also didn't want to believe it. He hadn’t completely understood what his dad said, but it didn’t seem like someone would be perfectly normal one day and then suddenly start seeing flashing lights and the odd hallucination a few hours later. Something had to have caused it, and the only reasons he could come up with were "brain tumor" and "insanity." He didn't like either of his options. Flashing lights...he remembered reading somewhere that light had something to do with migraines, though he couldn’t quite remember what. Maybe he was just getting a migraine. He poked his head with one finger. It did hurt a little.
There
, he thought,
I'm just getting a migraine.

A skittering noise caught Matt's attention, and he turned his head to the front of the classroom to see a duck-shaped creature with eight spider legs scurry in front of his teacher's shoes. He jumped, then leaned forward in his seat to get a better look. The creature looked incredibly strange, but Matt felt more pity than anything else for it. He could feel sadness, rather than evil, coming from this one. He frowned at the thought. Why would he be able to feel anything from these creatures? His imagination was getting the best of him. He glanced to his left in time to see Dean peering at him.

"What?" he mouthed.

"Whatcha doin'?" Dean mouthed back, gesturing at Matt's perch on the front of his desk.

"Looking at the..." When he realized he had no idea what to call the thing, he simply pointed at the creature, now nearly to the classroom door.

Dean followed where he pointed, then looked back at his friend. "At what?"

Matt looked at the students around him, but he heard none of the whispering he would have expected from the sight. Was he hallucinating again? He looked at Mr. Rodney, just in time to see the man's eyes flick up from the floor. Had he...? No, Matt decided as the lecture continued, it didn't look like he'd noticed the creature either, or he would have done more than talk about Assad. What was going on? The duck-spider had reached the door by now and pushed through the slight opening, hinges creaking as it did so. The heads of four students nearest the door turned in that direction, then just as quickly turned back to the front of the classroom—or to the doodles in their notebooks.

They did see it! Matt felt a surge of triumph, vindicated in his hallucinations. Or at least, they could hear it. It didn't make sense to him. He'd learned in science class that objects were visible because they bent light rays, which were then detected by the human eye. The bird-thing and duck-spider should be bending the same light rays, so everyone should be able to see them. Yet somehow, only Matt was.

The bell rang, interrupting his thoughts and Mr. Rodney’s ponderous lecture. Matt gathered his books and walked to Dean’s desk.

Matt and Dean had met in kindergarten, at Franklin Elementary just off Monona Bay in Madison, Wisconsin. The first day of kindergarten was the first time Matt could remember crossing the road that stretched from the capitol building downtown, across the Monona Bay, and on to the end of the world. He was awed and slightly afraid to venture so far, even after his mom assured him that the world didn’t end with the road. To help allay his fears, Irene had talked to the other mothers in the neighborhood to see which kids would be in Mrs. Phillips’s class with him.

“Dean Hendricks is in your class,” his mom had told him. “He’s a sweet boy. He has curly brown hair and glasses. He lives right down the street so he should be on the same bus as you.”

Matt had watched for a curly-haired boy with glasses on the bus the next morning and identified a likely candidate. Matt had approached him during recess, but the boy had his back to him. To get his attention, Matt punched him.

The boy whipped around, eyes wide.

“Are you Dean Hendricks?”

He nodded, glasses sliding down his nose.

“I’m Matt Reynolds. I live up the street. Mom said you were in class with me.”

That was all it had taken for the friendship to form. They’d been best friends ever since, though Dean never let him forget his “attack” that first day.

“Hey, man. Lunch?” Dean asked this every day, and every day Matt agreed.

"What were you lookin' at in class?" Dean continued as the pair ambled to the second floor west wing to drop off their books before heading to the cafeteria.

"Did you hear the door creak?" Matt responded.

Dean raised an eyebrow at the non sequitur but answered. "Uh...when?"

"Right after you asked me what I was doing."

His friend scratched his head in thought, then brightened. "Oh yeah! Why?"

"I saw what made the door creak."

"Oh...k." Dean drawled, sounding more confused than curious.

Matt’s attention was pulled from their conversation by a man leaning against his locker. He looked too old to be in high school, but he was dressed too casually in black jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt that matched the raven-black of his hair to be a teacher. Matt had a sudden flash of panic that he, too, was a hallucination, or invisible

“Would you mind?” Dean gestured behind the man. “Those are our lockers you’re leaning on.”

Matt let out the breath he hadn't realized he was holding. Dean could see the man.

“Matt,” the man said, ignoring Dean. He smiled, and it resembled the look a lion would give its prey just before it chomped down. “You are much larger than the last time I saw you. How is your life these days?”

“Fine” came out automatically. Matt flicked his eye s to his friend, looking for backup. Dean’s expression was just as confused as Matt felt, and he shrugged helplessly.

“You are sixteen now, yes?” Matt gave a cautious nod, and the stranger’s smile widened. “Do you have a few moments to speak with me? We have some things to discuss.”

Matt frowned at the man. “What sort of things?”

The stranger’s eyes slid to Dean. “Just a few matters regarding your past. Or future. Or both. Somewhere slightly more private.”

Matt could feel the acid in his stomach bubbling up as he gazed at the man. His heart began to pound faster until he could practically hear it thumping against his ribs. He didn’t know why, but his primal fight-or-flight instinct was screaming at him to flee.

A memory nudged the back of his mind, a brief glimpse of that same curly black hair and those bottomless blue eyes—Matt was two or three, just on the cusp of consciousness, playing cars in a pool of sunlight on the living room floor. A man crouched next to him, though he couldn’t remember where he came from. Matt had looked up, smiled, and offered the man a car, which he accepted.

“Wrong hand,” the man had said, gently, and transferred the car to Matt’s left hand.

He ran a finger down the boy’s cherubic cheek, then sighed. He’d said something else, but Matt could no longer recall it. The memory was fraying into threads of black hair, sunlight, those strange eyes, and the feeling he’d forgotten something important.

“I am quite safe, I promise you,” the man said, showing his teeth with that lion’s smile that did nothing to reassure Matt.

Matt sucked air in through his nose and turned to look at Dean. “I’ll meet you at lunch.”

As much as his instincts wanted him to flee, logic said that he should at least hear what the stranger had to say. Besides, the man’s timing was strange. It was too close to the appearance of Matt’s visions, and though he knew the two were unlikely to be related, some small part of him hoped the man knew where they came from. This way, at least, he might get some answers. Hallucinations didn't make sounds everyone could hear. Unless his mind used a sound that already existed to give authenticity to his visions?

Even as he thought that, he laughed at himself. He was creating conspiracy theories about his own mind, for Pete's sake. He should just listen to this man before he ran off with wild ideas. Firmly quashing his nerves, he waved good-bye to Dean and turned his attention back to the pale-skinned stranger.

“I believe I never introduced myself. People call me Luke,” the stranger said. “Shall we walk?”

He gestured to the nearly-empty hall, and Matt fell into step beside Luke. They walked for what seemed an eternity without speaking, the only sounds the distant echo of a locker slamming shut and the soft pad of Matt’s footsteps. Only Matt’s footsteps. He whipped his head to look at the stranger, turning so fast that the muscles in his neck screamed in protest. How could the stranger not make a sound when he moved?

The silence continued. Finally unable to take it, Matt asked, “What do you want to talk to me about?”

Luke hesitated a moment before saying, “You may, by now, have started noticing some odd things about yourself. You might be seeing things no one else can, or feeling things you cannot explain.”

Matt started. Though he'd told himself there were no coincidences, he hadn't really expected this stranger to address them in such a straightforward way. He answered the man with an eloquent, "Um."

"Be not alarmed." Luke's voice held a tinge of amusement now. "I know it is strange, at first, to suddenly start seeing things others cannot. Perhaps you think you are going crazy. I wish there were an easier way, but..." He shook his head. "When you are young enough not to think it odd, you are too young to hold such a burden.”