Blackwater Lights (25 page)

“Ellen. Ellen!” His voice was hoarse, and raspy.

“She can’t hear you,” Crawford said. He walked to a desk and pressed an intercom button. “Go ahead, Billy.”

The sound of a door opening came from the TV speakers. Ellen looked up. Billy stepped into the picture.

Ellen screamed.

Billy looked up at the camera. He waved. “Hi, Ray.”

Ellen looked at the camera. “Ray? Ray? Ray, can you see me? Ray, Jesus, please, what is going on—”

Billy lunged at her. “Shut up!” He reached into his pocket. Withdrew something long and thin that caught a reflection from the light above.

“Ray!” Ellen wailed. She moved her body in front of William, holding her arms up like a shield. William hugged her tighter, his face hidden.

A straight razor.

“Stop it!” Ray’s sanity was stretched and fragile as an old rubber band. Frothy spit ran from his mouth. “Please stop it, oh God, please, I’ll do anything, you can do anything. Take it. Take me. Just stop. Please.” This was all his fault. Ellen was going to die, William was going to die, and it was all his fault.

Lily’s face again, upside down, leaning over him. Moving closer. “Let us in.”

Crawford’s face, haloed in light and out of focus. “Let us in, Ray. And he’ll stop.”

Ellen screamed his name.

“Stop.” He had broken. Completely broken. “Stop it. Stop him. Stop. I’ll cooperate. Just stop.” The voice of a robot. A ventriloquist’s dummy.

Lily’s upside-down face met Crawford’s. They kissed. Slowly.

Ellen screamed again.

Crawford stepped to the intercom. “Enough, Billy.”

Billy let go of Ellen’s hair and folded up the razor, looking disappointed.

Crawford turned off the TV. “Splendid, Ray.” He beamed. “Mother, get the syringe,
please.”

The needle stung briefly. It hit immediately—a sense of the floor dropping away. Floating.

“What is it?” Ray asked.

“SP-17. Soviet recipe, an oldie but a goodie. Just relax.”

Crawford’s voice trailed off, as if it was echoing down a long hall. The drug hit like a freight train.

Lily’s fingers stroked his temples. “Shhh. Just open up, dear. Let yourself relax and let us in.”

Crawford’s face moved closer. Dark eyes drilling into his one good eye. “Let’s take a trip back, Ray. Back to when—”

He’s seven. He’s spent the day in the recreation room, in the big building. An hour earlier one of the doctors had given each of them a Dixie cup full of punch. The old man, Dr. Green, watched to make sure they’d all swallowed. He hates all the doctors, but he hates Dr. Green the most. He was in charge of the rest of them, and his breath always smelled like puke
.

His head hurts. This camp sucks. He especially hates the games. Some of them hurt, the ones when they stick the wires to his head. And no amount of ice cream can make up for that
.

Kevin tugs at his sleeve. “You okay?”

He isn’t okay. This is worse than school and Sunday school and church combined. His mom and Uncle Bill said he’d have fun, that he’d learn to build fires, and hike, and tie knots. But it’s nothing but stupid games and tests. Always tests. And other stuff, the stuff that when he thinks about it makes his head hurt and his stomach sick. No campfires, no sing-alongs, no roasting marshmallows and tracking raccoons and jackrabbits
.

Kevin tugs again. “You okay?”

Forward through time.

Stars overhead. So bright, like spotlights against the blackness. Their beams extending
down to him like strings of light. Piercing him
.

Uncle Bill leans over. Upside-down Uncle Bill
.

“It’s okay, Ray. Relax.”

He rolls his head to the side. Kevin is next to him, eyes wide, staring into the heavens. He turns his head to the other side. Another kid—Michael, with red hair—entranced by the sky. They’re in a circle, their feet together, heads out, like the petals of a human flower. And their little circle is inside a larger circle of ugly rocks stretching to the sky
.

“Remember your lessons,” Uncle Bill whispers. “Stretch out with your mind. Open up. Ask them to come to you.”

He opens. And asks. He’s done it a hundred times already
.

“Zero,” Uncle Bill says. “One. One. Two. Three. Five. Eight.”

Something hears him. And it listens. Something far away
.

“Thirteen. Twenty-one. Thirty-four. Fifty-five.”

It’s so close. So fast
.

“Eighty-nine. One forty-four.”

And the sky opens like the craziest summer thunderstorm ever
.

Crawford’s face emerges from the blackness. “Go back. Go back, Ray. Two thirty-three. Three seventy-seven. Six-ten. Nine.”

Kevin grasps his hand. Squeezes it until it feels like his bones will break. But Ray’s too deep now. He can’t talk
.

The lights appear overhead. Seven of them, ten of them, a hundred of them. He can’t close his eyes, can’t blink, so he watches them swarm like fireflies. Like ice. Like eyes. Each point of light moves to the center, and they merge into one. One huge, orange, throbbing sphere
.

The distance between him and the light contracts. It’s not like it moves closer to him, or that he moves closer to it. It’s as if the space between them vanishes
.

He’s inside it
.

And then it’s inside him. Looking out through his eyes. Like he’s squeezed into a tiny
corner of his head, while this thing moves around inside him. Its fingers—its hundreds of blobby fingers—poke and prod around beneath his skull. The fingers sweep through his head, rearranging and reconfiguring. His bladder empties
.

And the voice that comes through him—Its voice, or Their voices, a thousand buzzing, chattering, droning insects—cracks his consciousness neatly in half along a fabricated fault line. The half that was hidden—the secret place the men and the doctors created—awakens, pure, receptive, paying intense attention
.

The sounds fill his eyes. The symbols sing. Synesthesia, sound breaking apart and coagulating in front of his eyes, tasting light, a profusion of lines, circles, and angles. An alphabet dancing in the air. Patterns, and numbers, and tones
.

It’s a map. A map of a way to reach them. Through space and time and dream. A method of contact, of communion
.

It breaks.

Crawford’s eyes are wide. Unmoving. His mouth slack.

Ray snaps back into the present, and it’s like being dropped from an airplane and slamming into the ground. It’s dizzying.

Crawford stares. His eyes and expression are blank.

“Samael,” Lily cries. She steps behind him and holds his head. “Samael? Crawford?”

Crawford smiles. His eyes expand. His mouth stretches so far it looks like it’s going to rip. A sound comes out of him that could not be made by human vocal cords. Insectoid. Demonic.

Lily cackles.

Ray screams. And screams. And closes his eyes.

Lily sticks him with another needle. Crawford howls like a mad dog.

“Goodnight, my dear,” Lily whispers in his ear.

Lily’s head over his.

“Welcome back,” she says.

He tries to say
fuck you
but the words come out wrong. Still too drugged. Like being underwater and looking up at her face above the surface.

“You’ve given us a tremendous gift, Ray.” Her hair brushes against his face. The smell of her perfume is overwhelming.

“F-f … ffuuu …”

She puts her finger to her lips. “Shhh. Save your energy for the party.”

He can’t lift his arm to grab her neck. If he could get his hands free, he’d jam his thumbs deep into her snake-green eye sockets up to his wrists. Blind the bitch if he couldn’t take them both down.

“Hi, Ray.”

Crawford is standing, grinning.

Ray forces out the words, his tongue a useless piece of rubber. “What … do you want?”

“Nothing. You’ve given me everything.
Everything
, Ray. The sun. The moon. The stars.”

“Then … let them go. I kept my … word. Let them go.”

Crawford sighed and shook his head. “I’d like to. I really would. But there’s still one thing I need to take care of.”

Ray closed his eyes. His hands clenched into fists.

“That black fellow, his boy wonder, and their little social club. Little children playing spies and hiding in a tree house. They’ve started to annoy me. Skulking around like dogs. Sniffing around in my business.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Crawford laughed. “Whatever. Anyhoo … I have a very strong feeling—scratch that, a near
certainty
—that your friends are going to come looking for you. And I am
so
looking forward to meeting them. Because we’re going to have a party tonight. A party like we’ve never had before, thanks to
you
, my friend.”

Of course. Now he was bait for Micah and his people, as Ellen and William had been lures to draw him. But would Micah come? Or were he and Ellen and William expendable?

Crawford’s eyes danced. “It’s going to be a night for the history books.”