Rob Thurman - All Seeing Eye

“He might not be here now.” Going by the brackets of pain beside his mouth, Hector’s own headache wasn’t much better than mine. “But he will be trying again, and soon. When he comes through, you should know. We can pinpoint the time extrapolated from his past visits to predict future ones to nearly the hour. You could take something of his then, read it, and get a lock on his location.” He must have seen my automatic shudder of revulsion at the statement. “Something old,” he hastily revised. “Not the transplanar-interlink cuff. Something older wouldn’t have Charlie’s death imprinted on it, would it?”

As much as I wanted to lie, I didn’t. Why? Because Charlie would’ve thought less of me. And while up to yesterday that wouldn’t have affected me in the slightest, it did now. It was as if he stood at my shoulder, his pale eyes bright and expectant, thinking only the best of me, thinking I was still a scared kid who’d do anything to prove that I wasn’t. He would fade; the Charlie presence/feeling would slowly melt away. I’d come across this in the past. Not often, thank God. But it had happened, and the odd sensation of knowing someone, of sharing their memories along with your own, didn’t last. A silent Charlie wouldn’t judge me forever. He wouldn’t try to make me a better person for too much longer. And I wouldn’t have to see his brother or his lover Meleah through his eyes anymore, either.

That was one reason not to lie. The other reason was Glory. I was still her ticket to ride. Lastly, the one that really tipped the scales? It wouldn’t have done me any good. Hector wouldn’t have believed it. An easy out like that for me-he wouldn’t have bought it for a second. I gave a silent noncommittal shrug.

Hector took it for what it was. The tight stretch of his mouth relaxed slightly. “You can also help us map which places could be genuine targets for Charlie to try to come through. Most locations we can verify ourselves through old police reports and newspapers, but there are older houses where the information is sketchy. We were hoping you could perform readings on those to see if they had violent histories that might have imprinted on the ether.”

He was right. Georgia was full of them. Supposedly haunted plantations restored to their former glory, others that were no more than tumbled stones and bones. “What about battlefields?” I asked. Georgia was full of them, too. I knew the location of every major one and avoided them like the plague if possible. You would think Atlanta itself would be unbearable, what with the burning and sacking and all, but so many people had lived there since then, it was like thousands upon thousands of woolen blankets muffling the long-ago terror. If you kept your gloves on, cities were fine. A stretch of field soaked by blood-that was a different story. If I tripped and fell out there, if I touched bare skin to the ground, I’d never get back up again.

“No. A battlefield is too large. For Charlie to come through, he needs a smaller, hence very concentrated area of violence. One as massive as the Battle of Chickamauga or Kennesaw Mountain would likely splinter him into multiple threads of energy. Virtually destroy him. On an instinctual level, he must know that. He hasn’t tried a single one of them.”

I folded my hands across my stomach. I was stuck. Well and truly stuck. But the sooner this whole Charlie fuckup was resolved, the sooner I could get on with my life. And I really wanted it back, my life. As for Charlie’s murder, Christ, I had to think about that. Getting involved in that could get me killed just as quickly as Charlie had died. And justice, that was only a word… wasn’t it?

“So.” I exhaled. “How do we get started?”

I can’t say the tired face of Hector brightened; there wasn’t much in his own life that was too goddamn bright at the moment. But he did look relieved.

“We take a field trip,” he answered, standing. “I’ll grab you some clothes.”

Field trips. They hadn’t been all that much fun in school.

I was betting the same held true now.

“If we do find Charlie, or wherever Charlie’s trying to get through…” Could this be more bizarre? And if I, the resident psychic, thought it was bizarre, then bizarre wasn’t even the word. “What do you plan on doing? I mean, seriously, Hector, that movie wasn’t real, you know. No such thing as proton packs. So who you gonna call?”

Behind the wheel of the generic Ford, Hector snorted, and it was despite himself, I knew. Dead brother aside, the guy was one serious and somber son of a bitch. I’d have labeled him responsible and deadly dull if it weren’t for the occasional flicker of wry humor I saw behind the stoicism. And if not for pieces of Charlie whispering in the back of my thoughts, telling me what Hector had gotten up to in his younger days. Taking out the entire back of their parents’ house with a microwave jury-rigged for a moon flight? Hell, that was truly inspired, if unintentional, destruction right there.

“I don’t think it’ll come to that,” he said dryly. “The team has been working on a way to pull Charlie entirely back to this plane. It’s what he’s attempting now but can’t accomplish. He needs more power. If we can feed it to him on his precise personal energy signature, if we can do that for him, he’ll come through and…” His mouth flattened, and the glint of amusement was gone. “Dissipate,” he finished abruptly. “This level of physical existence can’t support him.”

I propped an elbow on the window frame and watched as a blur of black, white, and green passed by. Cows and fields. Wouldn’t life be easier if that’s all there was to it? Cows and fields. “And then he’ll go on to a better place.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in anything like that.” He turned the wheel, and we jounced down a rutted dirt road. “That you thought we simply stopped existing.”

“Who’s to say not being isn’t better than all this?” I could see a house through the trees, flashes of faded rose brick. “One long nap. Maybe you haven’t taken a really great nap, Allgood, but I have. I’ll take that over fluffy clouds and annoying harp music anytime, thanks.”

He didn’t call me on a philosophy that wasn’t precisely dripping with sunshine and roses. After all, he had a file on my past-on Tess, my mother, that nightmare bastard Boyd. What I’d done. He knew I came by my beliefs honestly. He knew what had made me.

Or unmade me, depending on your point of view.

“This it?” I went on. I rolled down the window, and the cloying smell of honeysuckle drenched the hot air that flooded the car.

“The first,” Hector confirmed. “File’s on top.”

I fished the folder up off the floorboards and paged through it. I was sure I looked ludicrous, thumbing the pages with black gloves that didn’t exactly go with the jeans and green long-sleeved T-shirt I’d packed. That was the thing about the gloves; they went with the whole All Seeing Eye gig but not so much with the casual look of a good old Southern boy. Forgetting about my ego for a moment, I scanned the pages. The house was dated back to the late seventeen hundreds. A man, Jeremiah Farrell, had built it for his wife, Felicity. They’d lived there and multiplied. Damn, and had they multiplied. Thirteen kids in thirteen years. Apparently, they’d also been a robust family, and infant mortality just passed them by. By year fourteen, Mrs. Farrell had either had enough or had flat-out lost her mind. There wasn’t any postpartum depression back in those days; there was only crazy. And sometimes there was pure homicidal mania.

Felicity killed them all. Every last one. But unlike Lizzie, she didn’t stick to an axe. Her husband was a hunting man, as all men were back in the day. She hacked and shot and bludgeoned until the wooden floors coursed with blood, a blood that never came clean. To this day, the floors shone ruby in the light.