Velvet Rain - A Dark Thriller (46 page)

“I’m sorry, son,” Gramps said. “I didn’t see him.”

The small wren twitched once more; that was all. The boy looked up at his grandfather wistfully.

Gramps shook his head.

“But why, Grampa? Why can’t I?”

The old man drew a troubled gaze along the lonely road. It seemed to come from neither somewhere, nor lead anywhere.

“It’s not our place,” he said gravely. “It’s not our world.”

~ 22

Kain looked up contemplatively at the starry sky, then looked to Lynn. Her silence betrayed her. “I know, Lynn. I know.”

“It wasn’t about a bird,” she said. “This was about hundreds of people. I don’t think he had a choice.”

“Yes he did,” Kain said. “And he broke Rule Number One as soon as it suited him.”

“I think he did the right thing. I know
you
did.”

“… Beaks.”

“Beaks.”

He tried to smile. “He always regretted it, you know. He told me so. That ship, it carried some of the most influential people of the time. If they had died—and God had meant them to—things would have been a lot different.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But no one can know for sure.”

“Maybe the Great War wouldn’t have started,” Kain said. “Maybe Hitler would have died at birth. I don’t know, maybe Japan wouldn’t have attacked Pearl Harbor.”

“Those are pretty big leaps.”

“The point is, who knows? This wasn’t about one person, Lynn. He saved
hundreds.
Don’t you see? What about their descendants? Who knows how their lives turned out? By doing what he did, he set the course for thousands. For people that weren’t even supposed to
be.
You’re right, of course. This wasn’t about a bird. But the old man knew it was wrong. Just like I did.”

“I’m thankful for what you did,” she said. “It may not have been right, but I’m thankful.” She paused. “And honestly … I don’t think he did it for
them.
He did it for
her.
”

“My grandmother?” The thought had never occurred to him, not once in all these years. But looking back now, remembering how the old man spoke of his wife, how they were together … he should have realized.

All he could do was nod.

“I never knew,” he said. “I always resented him for it because he wouldn’t let me save that bird.”

“You didn’t write much about him.”

“No.”

“Kain?”

“Yes?”

“Is it because of your birthday? Your tenth?”

He sighed heavily. “It was an awful thing, Lynn. The worst. I could never write about it. I never wanted to
think
about it.”

“All you wrote is that they passed away.”

“Just wrote them off …” He barely said it at all.

She took his hand in hers, the light of the fire dancing across the softness of her face.

Her eyes asked.

~

It had been three in the morning and bitterly cold. The official cause of the blaze had been listed as “accidental,” and that had been true; Gramps had simply left the fire screen open, just enough to kill.

The last thing Little Jon remembered was being placed in the arms of a stranger from next door. That, and the sight of Gramps running like a wild man, screaming, into the hellfire that was his home. Screaming for Gramma.

“I died,” Kain said.

“Oh my God.” Lynn cupped a hand to her mouth.

“He saved her … he saved her, and I died.”

Kain went on.

“He Turned. Got me out of there
before
the smoke took me. When he knew I was safe, he went back inside. It was too late. The Turn had taken too much out of him. He’d gone back pretty far, and what with all the Turns he’d done during the last two weeks … he just didn’t have the strength … or the time. They found him curled up in bed beside her. He knew he wasn’t coming back.”

“Yes,” he said, reading Lynn’s mind. “I tried. I couldn’t Turn. I was so messed up. The man Gramps left me with thought I was crazy. When the firemen came they had to drag me away screaming. I was
still
trying.”

“I’m so sorry, Kain.” She stroked his hand. “Can I ask you something?”

He nodded.

“Did your grandmother know about the Turn? Do
your
parents know?”

“No.” He paused. “No.”

She started to ask, but again, he knew.

“Yes,” he said. “You have the Sense.”

~

“But how?” she asked. “I mean, why me?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He dimmed. “But not a day goes by I don’t ask myself that very thing.”

“You really hate it … don’t you.”

He added some thin dead branches to the crackling fire. The soft orange light betrayed his solemn expression.

“When I was reading,” she said, “I tried to imagine what it was like for you. But I guess I can’t.”

“No.”

“And Ryan? Him too?”

“And Ben Caldwell. But not Lee.”

“And my parents?”

He shook his head.

“What do you call them?
Stiffs?
”

“I wouldn’t call them that.”

She hesitated. “And Ray?”

“A Stiff,” he said. “Probably the most closed-minded man I’ve ever come across.”

She gave him this curious glance.

“What …”

“I was just wondering,” she said. “What you feel when you’re around someone like me.”

He started to speak, but stopped. He hadn’t even realized it until now.

Nothing. He sensed
nothing.

No static … no mindless rabble of a thousand crossed stations. In the old days, when his wiring had been shiny and new, it was like Gramps had said, like that odd tingly feeling when someone was behind you, only a whole lot stronger. But now—

Ryan.
He had been with him earlier, and now that he thought about it, couldn’t recall feeling anything with him as well.

Whatever the cause—the drugs, the black work of the Turn, the beating he took from Ryan—probably all of them conspiring together—right now, he was flying blind.

“Kain?”

“Nothing,” he told her. “Not anymore.”

~

He told her how his ability to detect the Sense had been failing. How it had gone from a clear signal (the radio station analogy seemed the only way to explain it), to the grueling static of scores of overlapping stations … and finally to dead air. And then he told her how he and Ryan had, two weeks prior, nearly come to blows.

“I blacked out.”

“
What?
” And then she realized. “Just like July 4. When Ray was there. You could barely stand. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“There’s more,” he said. “Something worse.”

He told her how time had hiccupped.

“I remember,” she said, upon reflection. “At the time, I thought I was crazy.”

“I didn’t Turn.”

“But I thought—”

“It just happened,” he said. “It was like my mind just lost control.”

“It happened by it
self?
”

He nodded gravely.

“Has it happened since?”

“No. Thank God.”

“Any more blackouts?”

“Just dizzy spells.”

Lynn never had the chance to ask.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if I can still Turn.”

~

He could try, he said, but she would have none of it. For all they knew, another Turn could kill him.

They sat silently watching the fire.

“It’s getting late,” he said. “Maybe we should—”

She kissed him. She kissed him under the stars, and like the firmament, it lasted; it swept him away.

There would only be one
first
time.

~ 23

She asked how it all began; how it was such a—
miracle,
was the word she used, struggling to find one—had come to pass. Like his grandfather before him, he held no explanation. Gramps had it, as did
his
grandfather, and as far as Gramps had known, it had been passed down for generations, most usually in the second, although there may have been wider gaps, perhaps lesser ones, perhaps the direct passing from father to son. There were no women, and never were, at least to their knowledge, in possession of it, but absence of evidence was not evidence of absence. There had been tales, Gramps had told him, that men of old Europe, men of power and men of not, had burned their ancestors at the stake, had them quartered, stoned, or beheaded. Were they warlocks? Devils? Demons? No one really knew the source of the Turn. Like the Earth and the stars, like time itself, it had always existed … it just seemed to
be.

“And the others—” Her voice trailed off.

He knew of only two: the farmer from Melbourne, and the boy.

“Dead,” he said, and that was all.

~

“Maybe there are others,” she said. “I mean, if they had children, or brothers—”

She stopped. Even she knew.

“Brikker,” she said, and the way she said it sounded as if she had just tasted poison.

“He would have found them by now,” he said. “Believe it.”

Her gaze slipped. “He won’t stop looking. Will he.”

He said nothing.

~

“I was in Newark,” he said, when she asked how they found him. “January 3, 1952.”

They
—the G-men, one of them a pitiless brute named Strong—waited in the back alley, behind the diner where he was working the night shift as a short-order cook. There were six of them and only one of him, five to hold him, one to serve the injection. When he came to two months later, doped and barely able to speak, he was strapped in a wheelchair in some dark, cavernous hellhole in the Nevada desert.

“The Crypt,” she said, softly.

He told her everything. The experiments and the drugs. The torture and the darkness.

The madness.

By the end, she was in tears.

“How long?” she asked, nearly unable to.

~

Strong had come. He had been in an unusually casual mood, cracking jokes, making small talk. Kain had smelled the whiskey on him, and when the man had, so unlike him, missed a clasp on one of the restraints on the chair, he had simply waited for his chance.

Shortly after the grunt had worked him over, Brikker had emerged from the shadows. The demon had stood over him, silent and cold, the tease of tobacco lingering in the air. And just as he was about to inject him, Kain had pulled his right hand free and had snatched the syringe. It was the one time he had heard the man scream. A needle to the eye will do that.

“He wears a patch now,” he said, matter-of-factly.

They chased him. The place was immense, far larger than he could have imagined, a numbing maze of dark corridors of stone and steel that turned and circled, circled and turned, like an unsolvable riddle. He could still hear the crisp echo of their footsteps closing on him.

“I should have killed him,” he said.

It had been New Year’s Eve, 1955.

~

“Four years,” Lynn said. “My God.”

After his escape, the desert had nearly consumed him.

“I wanted to die there,” he said. “There was nothing left of our family. Nothing left of Kain Richards.”

Lynn started to say something, but instead she hesitated. She reached into her pocket, and then, still unsure, handed him the folded newspaper clipping she had found in his diary.

“Tell me,” she said. “If you can.”

~

The Newark Star-Ledger,
March 4, 1951

LOCAL RESIDENT KILLED

Freak Storm Claims Newark Woman

The winter storm had risen quickly, sleet and snow raging in from the Atlantic, the way it often did, without warning. His mother, a casual driver at best, could only scream as she hit the top of the bridge and lost control. The car had plummeted twenty-five feet, and while the police had tried to reassure she had died instantly on striking the ice, only
God
knew: she had survived the crash. Angela Richards had suffered two broken legs and a broken back, had simply screamed and screamed as her car slipped silently through the ice. She had been alive for nearly twenty minutes.

~

“It was a Tuesday when the rains came,” he said. He said it somberly, and stopped there. He tried to push them from his mind, as fast and as far as he could, only to fail; when he closed his eyes, he could see them ever clearer in that living room window. Could hear them whisper. Only when he felt the gentle stroke of Lynn’s hand on his could he start again.

“It was one of those long, gray days, when the drizzle never stops,” he said. “Like it’ll rain forever. It was the morning after the funeral. My father was alone in the living room. No. Not the old apartment. They’d moved a few years before. Nice place on the outskirts. White picket fence. Fireplace. Big bright windows all around. You would have liked it.

“He’d been up all night. I don’t think he’d slept in a week. He looked … he looked cold. He was holding a photograph. Yes. The one in my diary. He just sat there, staring at it. I sat down across from him. It must have been an hour before he even noticed me.

“He finally looked up. His eyes were stone. It was like he didn’t know me. Not at first. He tried so hard to force a smile. He handed me the picture. It was his favorite. He was always so proud of it. Said it was the best one he’d ever taken. He wanted me to have it.

“It was in a frame on the mantel, but he’d taken it out. It felt different, holding it like that. Maybe he thought it could bring them close, at least one last time. I remember running my finger over her face. I don’t think I knew I was doing it.

“I must have seen that picture a hundred times … you know how you’ve seen something so much you don’t even see it anymore? It was like that. I just saw my mother. But when I finally realized … when I saw my father’s tear on the print … it was too late.”

~

For nearly twelve hours he had sat in the leaden light of the window, consumed by that maddening drizzle; it was as if the world had stopped. As if all that lay between this life and the next was a great gray expanse of insanity. He had made a game of it, chasing the droplets of water as they raced silently down the glass. Now and again he would stop to glance at his side, at the limp and bloodied body there. He dozed once, perhaps twice, and when he finally stirred around midnight, rose to make some tea. Standing there in a daze stirring in some sugar, it struck him: how little he knew of the man. How funny it was. He didn’t even know that his father
had
a gun.