Captain Quad (41 page)

"Stop this, Sam!" Her eyes were shiny and fierce.

"I read it in a journal he keeps on his computer. Cripes, if only I'd believed it sooner, your friend might still be ali—"

Kelly stormed to her feet.

"I want you out of here, Sam Gardner." Her face twisted itself into a parody of amusement. "What is going on here? Has the whole world gone stark raving mad?"

"He was in your dreams, Kelly. Think about this. Think carefully. Your life may depend on it. He was in your dreams, and he made you. . . do things."

For a moment Kelly's face cleared. It was as if all expression had been slapped away from it. My God, she thought, he's right. Hadn't she sensed Peter? Not once or twice but night after night after night?

Until Will came back. Then the dreams had ceased.

"No, Sam. That's crazy. That's—"

"And he was inside of Will. He took you from inside of Will. You must remember that. You—"

She did, she remembered—but it was mad, insupportable, insane, and she wanted Sam out of her house. She wanted him out and then she wanted to crawl into a corner and dream this all away, wake up to a fresh new day, a fresh new life.

Kelly pointed at the door. "Get out of here, Sam. I mean it." She stumbled to the hall closet, reached inside, and took out her Louisville Slugger. She brandished it. "Get out now."

Sam stood, hands upheld in placation. She meant to use that bat; there was no doubt in his mind about that. Still, he had to keep trying. "Kelly, please, I—"

Kelly lunged forward and swung the bat. Sam stumbled back, almost tripping over the coffee table but avoiding the brunt of the blow. The bat's business end clipped him on the shoulder, missing his ear by an inch. He had a momentary thought of rushing her, but dismissed it when she advanced on him again.

"I'm serious, Sam. Take your crazy bullshit and get out of here!"

Sam hurried down the hallway to the door. It was no use. She was in a frenzy. And why shouldn't she be? She'd just lost her lover to a grisly death and here he was trying to feed her a plateful of lunacy.

He opened the door and placed its bulk protectively in front of him.

"My number's in the book, Kelly. Think about what I said and then call me. Please. Before it's too late."

He caught one last glimpse of her there at the end of the hallway, a sleek Amazonian goddess, backlit by the moon and pumped full of battle—then she was stomping toward him, roaring like an engine of destruction.

Sam pulled the door shut and ran up the hill in the starlight. Curled up by the hood of Kelly's car, Chainsaw watched him go.

Sam ran the eight long blocks to the hospital. In the last quarter mile he developed a stitch in his side, and now it seethed like a white-hot brand. He limped up the hill to the entrance, breathless and clutching his side. The only course of action he could think of was to talk to Peter, try to reason things through with him.

But he was afraid. He'd betrayed his brother both in thought and in deed, and now he would have to face the consequences.

It was 1:35 a.m. Under normal circumstances, anyone trying to visit a patient at this hour would be turned away. But Sam knew the woman at the desk.

"Hi, Vicky."

The receptionist looked up from her Harlequin romance. The switchboard in front of her was peacefully blank. "Sam! What. . . ? Is your brother okay?"

Sam smiled. "Yeah, he's all right. I just got back from a hockey game, and I thought I'd peek in on him, see if he's up. You mind?"

"'Course not. You go ahead."

Sam thanked her, then slipped into a waiting elevator, his smile feeling like a healing scar on his face. He punched the button for the ninth floor. His fear was very big now, lying bloated in his gut like some ghastly pregnancy.

The doors slid shut, and the elevator began its ascent. One wall was mirrored, and Sam was startled by his own reflection. In that first split second, it had been like looking into the face of his mother: the same socketed eyes, haunted things cowering in shallow caves; the same crooked mouth, joyless and thin. . .

The doors hissed open, and Sam stepped out. The ward was dark, the only sound a distant radio tuned to a soothing FM murmur. As he crept past the nurses' station he heard the girls in the tiny back office, chatting quietly. They were unaware of his presence.

He turned down the last long corridor and tiptoed toward his brother's room, the blood thrumming turbulently in his veins.

Kelly shuffled into the dining room and relit the candles. She was trembling violently in spite of the housecoat she'd wrapped herself in after putting the run on Sam.

An image kept recurring in her mind. An image of Will on fire. He was burning alive and screaming her name, stumbling out at her from every dark corner, a lifelike prop in a carnival house of horrors.

"Oh, Will," she sobbed, slumping into the chair he would have occupied. "Please come home. Let it all be a mistake."

She gazed into the capering candle flame. It threw a surprising amount of light, a warm, romantic glow that played on the objects in its reach: the empty plates, polished and waiting; the gleaming silverware her paternal grandmother had bequeathed to her; the single red carnation she'd picked up at the florist's on the way home from the supermarket; Will's diamond engagement ring.

"Please, Will. Come home. . .”

The computer was on, its stagnant green glare the only illumination in the room. Peter lay facing it, the screen itself only inches from his chin, but from the doorway couldn't tell whether he was awake and reading the text or asleep again. He prayed for the latter.

He took a halting step into the room.

"Peter?"

No reaction.

"Peter?" Sam repeated, louder this time. He took another few steps into the room. He was at the foot of the bed now, his brother's face momentarily obscured by the bulk of the computer screen. It was a bad moment, and Sam hurried past it, nearly stumbling.

"Pete—?"

Peter's head rolled up and around, the cables in his neck splaying grotesquely, and for a bewildering moment Sam thought his vision had shifted out of true. His brother's image had doubled in that green, horror-show light, reminding Sam of poorly matched transparent overlays, and now he opened his double mouth, his four eyes narrowed into baleful slits, and released a sound that was less a shout than a lion's warning cough, fierce, blunt, primitive.

Of what happened next Sam would never be certain. Without actually moving, Peter's body convulsed. Then a shimmering sphere of what could only have been pure thought struck Sam in the solar plexus and sent him reeling backward like a well-hit tenpin. Just shy of falling, Sam stamped and pinwheeled through the open door and crashed into a parked dinner cart, the ruckus of the collision cracking through the ward like a thunderclap.

"Did you fuck her?" Peter bellowed, his eyes like overripe grapes. "Eh, Sammy? Did you give her the old line drive?" He sneered. "You sneaky bastard! You're not my brother, anymore, do you hear me, Sam? You are not my brother!"

Punched and gasping, Sam only stood there, his shock total. He felt boneless, fragile as a porcelain figurine, his brother's words striking him like pegged rocks. It took him a moment to get the sense of what Peter was saying. . . then it came.

That cold feeling on Kelly's couch, that whiff of an animal's den.

It had been Peter after all.

Sam tried to defend himself. "I was only—"

"Stuff your shitty excuses! You fucked her, didn't you!" Peter's head stood straight up, his neck muscles so prominent Sam thought they might hoist him right off the bed. "Well, I'm warning you, bro. Stay out of my way. She's mine." His face composed itself now, drew its frenzied features back in. Sam got an image of rats slinking into a hole. "Kelly is mine, Sam. Remember that. I'll hurt you if I have to. I can do it."

Peter's head fell back, striking the pillow with a thump of deadweight, and Sam saw that his body had begun to vibrate; it shook the whole bed. And that illusion of doubling had recurred, only more explicitly this time.

Now there was something rising out of Peter's body, a faint blue glow, like a shadow on sun-dappled snow. The blue shape was rising, condensing. . .

(I'll hurt you if I have to.)

Sam ran.

(I can do it.)

There was a stairwell across from Peter's room, and Sam burst into it, punching the crossbar with his hip and sending the heavy door crashing into the wall. He took the risers in precarious threes, leaping onto each cement landing like some freaked-out urban guerrilla. He'd never known such naked terror, such crippling confusion. That was his brother back there—but what had he become? At each turn Sam expected to see that cold blue fireball come swooping down on him, and was there really any point in running? Where could he hide from such a force?

Peter, oh, Peter, what have you become?

Sam ran. He ran down the stairs, ran through a restricted exit into the parking lot Peter had tried to launch himself into five years ago; he ran through the sleeping streets. And when he got home, his heart close to bursting in its secret chamber, he called Kelly's number.

There was no answer.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Kelly gazed into the dancing candle flame. It soothed her somehow, drawing a warm hypnotic curtain over this tragic turn of events. A part of her understood that the truth was still there, that it would have to be faced. But for now she allowed this counterfeit peace to suffuse her. She was deep in shock.

Images began to unreel in her mind, but they were pleasant ones now. She saw Will climbing out of his Buick on that mellow autumn afternoon before their drive to the island, looking like one of those impossibly handsome actors in a light-beer commercial in his denim jacket and jeans. She saw the rigid set of his jaw as he made love to her, and heard her own voice urging him to let it go, let that private hurt out. She saw his delighted smile in the candlelight, the diamond ring he'd given her reflected in the pools of his eyes. "Do you mean it, Kelly?" she heard him say. "Really?"

"Oh, yes, Will, I do, I really do." It was a desperate whisper. "I do—"

Kelly gasped.

The candle flame. She could see Will's shape in the candle flame. He was burning, reaching out to her, begging her for help. Responding to his pleas, Kelly plunged her fingers into the flame. Will had died by fire, had been consumed by fire, as Peter's mother had. How horrible that must have been, flames licking and charring, the pain shrieking to a chorused pitch until it glutted the mind and destroyed it, the porklike stench of one's own burning flesh. . .

What was he saying? Was he begging for help?

Or was he beckoning?

Kelly's fingers began to blacken and blister. The smell of cooked meat brought the cat padding around a corner. It stopped at Kelly's feet and looked up at her, head quizzically cocked.

Come with me, Kelly, Will beseeched her from the heart of the flame I love you. Be with me forever. . .

"Yes," Kelly murmured. "Oh, yes. . .”

She withdrew her fingers from the flame and let her injured hand dangle at her side. There was no pain. Fang sniffed her burned fingers, then darted for the basement stairwell.

With her good hand Kelly removed the candle from its base. It was only a stub now, the wick close to drowning in a pool of hot wax. Grasping the candle by its butt, she dipped the sleeve of her housecoat into the flame. The quilted material caught with a tiny flump!
of combustion. Black smoke wisped up, thin and pungent.

You and I, Will promised. Forever.

The flame curled up Kelly's arm, reaching for her elbow, spreading like an autumn grass fire. It sent a tongue into her hair, and the ends ignited. There was another, stronger whumpff as the side of her housecoat caught.

And still his face was in the fire, beckoning—

The pain finally opened her eyes. No! That's not Will!

Kelly turned and caught her own reflection in the window.

I'm on fire!

She screamed, blundered sideways in panic—and then there was a tug, a brisk shearing sensation that prickled her skin. It was as if every last body hair had been plucked free in a single simultaneous pull. An eldritch glow enveloped her, a shimmering halo of blue that seemed to emanate from her very pores—

Peter?

Then she was scrambling for the bathroom, pain streaking up her arm to her brain. The flames had spread to her back; she could feel them baking through her housecoat.

She was on fire.

Kelly tore off her housecoat and flung it into the tub she'd run a few hours earlier. There was a baleful hiss of flame, then an acrid belch of black smoke. Chunks of smoldering material clung to her arm, and now a thatch of her hair was blazing.

Kelly dove rump first into the tub and dunked her head. Water scummed with old bubble bath sloshed onto the tiles. She was aware of the smell now, as she sat there shivering: the charred and soggy mass of her housecoat, the sweet, crisped smell of her skin, the nauseating stink of her hair.

The phone had started ringing, but she couldn't hear it.

Sam stood at the kitchenette window, staring out at the night. From this vantage he could just make out the hospital's east flank. Flat and featureless, it rose against the night sky like a doorway studded with lights; most of them were off now, but a few still twinkled with life. It made Sam wonder what sort of late-night dramas were being played out behind those curtained windows, how many lives were quietly giving up the ghost.

And it made him realize, with sudden, inarguable clarity, what he must do.

He turned and strode out to the foyer, grabbed his coat from the rack. . . and then slumped tearfully against the doorjamb.

It was no use. Peter was his brother. Sam would sooner kill himself.

He let his coat fall in a heap on the hallway runner. In defeated shuffles he made his way into his room. He had a dim urge to try Kelly's number again, but he'd already let it ring off the wall. There had been no answer. Maybe he was already too late.

The feel of her limp and sobbing body tried to insinuate itself on Sam's surrender, but he blocked it from his mind. He opened his closet, reached behind a tote bag stuffed with hockey gear, and brought out a latched balsawood box. Originally it had contained assorted Italian wines. Now it housed Sam's most cherished mementos—the hockey crests he'd accumulated over the years, press clippings from out-of-town games, team photos, a folding pocket knife his father had given him—but mostly, it contained souvenirs of his life with Peter. He fingered through these items now, unmindful of the late hour, the sweetness of nostalgia somehow nullifying the awful truth of the present.