Dead Space: Catalyst (2 page)

But as Istvan grew older and bigger his mother started leaving him alone. She would curse him from the other side of the room, tell him that he was vile, but she no longer touched him. She was a little afraid of him. And that meant she no longer laid a finger on Jensi, either. She became more and more withdrawn. Or maybe she had always been that way and Jensi hadn’t realized. Had Istvan gotten whatever was wrong with him from her? Was it something genetic, something inherited? And did that mean that Jensi might have it inside himself as well? No, he didn’t want to be like his mother. He didn’t want to be like his brother, either, but he loved his brother, felt responsible for him. Istvan had always looked out for him. Maybe now, now that his brother was becoming strange, it was Jensi’s turn. It was time for him to look out for his brother.

*   *   *

Istvan was seventeen, Jensi fifteen, when things started to go seriously wrong. It started with their mother.

They had come back from another day of wandering through the Mariner Valley compound. When they arrived, their apartment door was ajar, their mother’s passkey lying on the hall floor. They pushed open the door and saw a spill of dropped assistance packages, their mother lying in the middle of them, her body shivering.

Jensi crouched down beside her. He tried to turn her over to see her face, but it was hard. Her body was stiff, resistant.

“Help me, Istvan,” he said to his brother.

But Istvan just stayed where he was. He was looking not at his mother, but at the packages. Jensi watched him mumble, gesture at them with his finger, tracing a figure through the air.

“Istvan,” he said again. “Help!”

But Istvan was in a trance, mesmerized by the pattern made by the fallen packages. He was muttering under his breath, and then his eyes traced the pattern round again and then began to stare into empty air. Their mother, Jensi saw, was foaming at the mouth. The foam was red-flecked and he could see between her teeth and lips her tongue, partly bitten through.

“This is serious,” he said. And when Istvan still didn’t respond, he screamed his brother’s name.

His brother flinched, then shook his head, then looked down. His expression was unfathomable.

“She might die,” said Jensi.

“Yes,” said Istvan, but he made no move to help. “Don’t you see him?” he asked slowly.

“See what?” asked Jensi.

“The shadow man,” said Istvan. “He’s choking her.”

The shadow man?
“Istvan,” said Jensi slowly. “Go to the vid and call emergency.”

And slowly, almost like a sleepwalker, not taking his gaze away from the boxes, Istvan did.

Jensi held his mother, talked to her, and stroked her face until the emergency crew arrived. He massaged her jaw over and over until it relaxed enough to release her tongue and then he turned her head to the side so she wouldn’t choke on the blood. Istvan, after making the call, simply stood on the opposite side of the room, watching. He refused to come close.
The shadow man?
wondered Jensi.
What did he mean by that? He was crazy.

If I hadn’t been here,
thought Jensi later as they took his mother away,
Istvan would have let her die.

*   *   *

Istvan had come through the door only to stop stock still, breathless. There it was, he could see it, the same pattern, just the same, glimmering. He had seen it so many times before, again and again, just waiting for someone to come along and see it and put it together—just waiting for
him
to come put it together, because the world called to him in a different way than to others. There was his mother, lying sprawled on the floor, but that wasn’t important, she wasn’t important. She wasn’t part of the
arrangement
. She didn’t tell him anything about what was real. She was just in the way.

No, what was important were the things she had been holding and the way they had fallen when she had dropped them, the way that each of them, tumbling out of her hands, had found its true and proper place. Things were like that. They told him something. They gave him a rough sketch of something else, something grander, something hidden. He could feel it, sense it, but it was far away, too deeply buried to make out completely. So he could only have this, this arrangement of packages that marked out something else, pointed to something else that he could almost see but couldn’t quite.

Only maybe he could have more than that.

He held himself very still. He held his breath. He stared as hard as he could, letting his eyes follow the lines between things, connecting them, spinning from object to object. He could begin now to see the blaze of the lines of connections, was beginning to peel back the cover of the world and peer inside.

His brother was saying something, calling to him, but Istvan couldn’t hear him, couldn’t pay attention, because no, this was important, something was really happening.

For among the lines and between them he could see something beginning to emerge. A shape. A shadow that at first he mistook for his own shadow. But was it his own shadow? It didn’t seem to belong to him exactly. It was attached to him, sure, but he didn’t feel as though he were controlling it. It was its own creature. It was bound up in the objects around it and was, he realized, looming over his mother as well. It was a shadow but it was also a man, a man but also a shadow.

He moved his hands to try to touch it. When his hands moved, the shadow moved as well and placed its hands around his mother’s neck. Then it turned its smoky mouth toward him and spoke.

Watch this
, it said.
Here’s how you do it. Here’s how you’ll kill her.

He heard his brother scream his name.

He could not move his hands. The shadow man was choking his mother, smiling, but no longer speaking. Why had he stopped speaking? “She’s going to die,” he heard a distance voice say, a voice that was not the shadow man, a voice that he realized belonged to his brother. He made an effort of will and spoke.

“Yes,” he said. “Don’t you see him?”

But when he tried to explain to his brother what it was he saw, just as when he’d tried to explain so many times before, it came out in ways that he understood but his brother did not. Jensi did not think right about the world. Istvan was helpless to make it make sense for him. And so, slowly, he was snapped again out of this world of arrangements that he so loved and that so loved him, and brought once again to see not the pattern beneath things but the surface of them. And on that surface was his mother: dying. But, unfortunately, not already dead.

*   *   *

By the time the emergency team took her to the hospital, Istvan seemed normal again, or as normal as he ever was. She was there a day, then was transferred to a mental ward, straitjacketed, put away for what potentially could be for good. A social worker, a severe elderly woman, came out to the house and told the two brothers that they would be taken into governmental care.

“But I’m almost eighteen,” claimed Istvan in a moment of lucidity. “I don’t need a guardian.”

“Almost doesn’t count,” she insisted. “You have to have one.”

But the mistake the social worker made was leaving them alone for a few minutes instead of whisking them into care immediately. As soon as she was gone, Istvan began to make plans for leaving. He got an old, stained backpack out of the closet, stuffed it full of clothes, then dumped in a random assortment of things from the pantry, including things that he would never eat. Other things that were more edible he left where they were, adjusting their positions slightly. All part of making the pattern, Jensi couldn’t help but think. Istvan was in his own world, unaware of anything but the task he was completing. Jensi just stood watching him, feeling a greater and greater sense of despair for his brother.

When he was finished, Istvan zipped the backpack closed and looked up.

“Why aren’t you packed?” he asked Jensi.

“Where are you going?” Jensi responded.

“You heard that woman,” said Istvan. “She wants to put us with someone. We’ll have to learn how they think and they’ll be like mother only they’ll be worse because we’re not related to them.”

“Maybe they won’t be worse,” said Jensi. “Maybe they’ll be better.”

Istvan shook his head. “That’s what they want you to think,” he said. “That’s how they get you every time.”

That’s how they get you every time,
thought Jensi But it was not
they
that were getting Istvan, but Istvan who was making things hard for himself. The idea of Istvan being his own guardian—or being the guardian for both of them—that would never work. Istvan could hardly care for himself, let alone someone else.

“Come on,” Istvan said. “No time to pack—they’ll be back soon. You’ll just have to go as you are. That’s what the room is saying.”

“The room?”

“Can’t you see it?” said Istvan, gesturing around him. “Can’t you feel it?”

Later, this would seem one of those decisive moments where his life could go either one direction or another, where Jensi could take a step toward his brother and whatever skewed version of the world existed inside of Istvan’s mind or where he could step closer to the real world. The terrible thing was that even as young as he was he couldn’t help but feel that either choice he made would be, in some way or another, not quite right. Either way he would lose something.

“Come on,” said Istvan again, anxious.

“I…” said Jensi. “But I—”

“What’s wrong with you?” said Istvan. “Can’t you see what’s happening here?”

But that was the problem: he
could
see. He could see that if he went with Istvan no good would come of it, even if Istvan could not.

“I can’t go,” he finally said, not looking his brother in the eye.

“Sure you can,” said Istvan, his eyes darting all around the room. “It’s the easiest thing in the world. All you have to do is walk out the door.”

“No,” said Jensi. “I’m sorry. I’m not going.”

For a moment Istvan just stared at him, his face blank, and then Jensi watched something flit across his brother’s expression as he took in what Jensi was saying. Then all at once his face was creased with genuine pain.

“You’re abandoning me?” he asked in a voice that was almost a wail. It was nearly unbearable for Jensi to hear.

“No,” Jensi tried to say. “Stay here. Stay with me. It’ll be okay.” But he knew that to Istvan that was as unimaginable as leaving was to him. For a moment Istvan looked stunned. And then, heaving the backpack onto his shoulder, Istvan went out and Jensi found himself alone.

2

Nothing was really wrong about the guardian the court appointed to Jensi, but nothing was all that right about her, either. She was what his mother might have called
the lukewarm,
neither one thing nor the other, but for Jensi that was all right. He could survive with someone like that. He could get by. For once in his life he didn’t have to worry about where his meals were going to come from.

He threw himself into his schoolwork and was surprised to find that he enjoyed it, that he even excelled at it. The sort of kids who before had given him a wide berth now began to circle closer, sometimes even speaking to him.

One of them, a kid named Henry Wandrei, started hanging out around him, silently standing a few feet away from him during breaks between classes, sitting across from him at lunch but at first without speaking or meeting his eye. Sometimes he shadowed Jensi for a few blocks when he walked home. At first Jensi tolerated it, then he got used to it, then he started to like it. He started to notice when Henry wasn’t there, like his shadow or ghost.

“What?” Jensi finally said one day at lunch.

“Nothing,” said Henry. And then they sat silently for a while until Henry asked “What music do you like?”

Music?
wondered Jensi. What did he know about music? Helplessly, he just shrugged. “What about you?”

Henry rattled off a few names of bands, then when Jensi didn’t say anything in reply, began to try to explain what each one sounded like. He was, as it turned out, good at it, capable of talking in a lively and surprising way that didn’t really describe the music so much as say something slantwise that still gave a sense of what it sounded like. Jensi was surprised to find he enjoyed listening to him talk. Henry, silent for so long, now seemed unable to be quiet. And later, when he gave Jensi the music to listen to, Jensi found that the descriptions felt right.

Henry was his first real friend, apart from his brother. But you couldn’t really think of a brother as a friend, could you? How had he gotten to be fifteen before having a real friend? Thinking that made him resent Istvan, which made him feel guilty. Here he was, living an okay life, with a decent guardian and one real friend, while his brother was wandering alone somewhere out in the domes.

He had glimpsed his brother once or twice, usually from far away though once up close. That time, his brother had seemed not to know him. Istvan had not acknowledged him as he went past, and though Jensi wanted to reach out and speak to him, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do so. He couldn’t, not if Istvan wasn’t going to meet him halfway. But later he wondered if his brother hadn’t simply been lost in his private world of patterns and numbers. Maybe his brother was so deep within his own head that he couldn’t see Jensi.

His life was like that in those days. It was like he was on a teeter-totter, slipping from feeling all right to feeling guilty and then back again, but never stabilizing.

After a few months he trusted Henry enough to tell him about Istvan.

“That’s your brother?” said Henry. He’d seen Istvan here and there, always from a distance, and didn’t quite know what to think of him.

“I feel like I should help him,” said Istvan.

Henry nodded. “Sure,” he said, “he’s you’re brother. You have to feel that way.” And then he shrugged. “But what can you do?” he asked.

*   *   *

For six months he did nothing, really, and then one day, walking home, he was talking with Henry about the apartment building he used to live in, trying to describe it as vividly as Henry had managed to describe not only music but other things since, and finding himself failing to make it come alive. Henry was watching him politely, eagerly even, but he kept tripping and stumbling over his words, unable to make them into images that Henry could understand. Slowly he ground to a stop.