John Saul - Black Lightning

His skin felt itchy now, and he couldn’t sit still any longer. Abandoning the chair, he went back to the window and gazed out.

There was a man across the street! A man who was looking up at him! Staring right at him, as if he knew him!

As the stranger started across the street toward his building, he backed away from the window.

The band he’d felt around his chest when his mother had called seized him again, tighter than ever. He could feel cold rivulets of sweat running down his back and trickling from his armpits down his sides.

The nausea was back in his belly, and now his guts were aching as he felt the first pangs of diarrhea grip his intestines.

Hunched against the pain, he had started for the bathroom when he heard the knock at the door. He froze.

Images flashed through his mind, remembered images from things he’d seen on television.

Would they break his door down?

Would they shoot him through it?

A strangled whimper escaped his lips as he imagined a.45 slug ripping through the door, then slashing through his flesh, tearing his guts open. He staggered as the pain of the imagined bullet ripped at his mind, and he lurched toward the door. Better to open it willingly than to have them break in on him.

Pulling the door open, he found himself looking at the man he’d seen gazing up at him from across the street only moments before. A pleasant enough face, with even features.

Not the face of a cop.

His lips worked; he tried to speak and failed.

The stranger was looking at him, his eyes boring into him, and suddenly he had the feeling that he did know this man after all, that he had, indeed, seen him somewhere before.…

Moments passed in deadly silence as the Butcher stared at the stranger who had come to his door. Then he knew. It was Anne Jeffers’s husband! He had seen him the day before yesterday, when he’d been casing Joyce Cottrell’s house. But Jeffers hadn’t seen him — he was sure of it!

Then something in Jeffers’s face changed, and the man gasped, for he suddenly recognized the eyes he was looking into.

They were his brother’s eyes!

But that was crazy — Jeffers didn’t look anything like his brother! And besides, his brother was dead!

Then Glen Jeffers spoke, and the man’s terror peaked. “Hello, Little Man,” he heard his brother’s voice say, using the name he’d hated all his life. “You’ve been bad, Little Man, and I’ve come to punish you.”

His mind reeled, then cracked. It was impossible! This man couldn’t possibly be his brother — he was the wrong age, and he had the wrong face, and he wasn’t even the same size.

But it was his brother!

The voice was his brother’s, and the coldness of the eyes was his brother’s.

And the words were definitely his brother’s.

Rory Kraven, cowering with terror, backed away from the impossible presence of his older brother.

Richard Kraven — the Experimenter — stepped into his younger brother’s shabby apartment and silently closed the door behind him.

Edna Kraven let the telephone ring twenty times before she hung up. When he was in one of his moods, Rory sometimes wouldn’t answer until he realized she simply wasn’t going to give up. But this was the fifth time she’d called him, and she was starting to worry. After all, he had said he was sick when she’d talked to him earlier, and although he hadn’t sounded that bad (and had always been the kind of boy who malingered — not like Richard at all!) she supposed it was just possible he’d taken a turn for the worse.

Either that or he really wasn’t at home, in which case he’d have to answer not only to the nice people at Boeing’s who were decent enough to give him steady work, but to her as well. If she trekked all the way up to Capitol Hill only to find that he was out gallivanting somewhere, she would have a lot to say to him. Still, she had always been a good mother, Edna Kraven told herself, no matter what people might have said behind her back, so what choice did she really have? Rory wasn’t much, but he was all she had left.

She left her house at one o’clock, climbed off the bus in front of Group Health at a little after two, and trudged the block to Rory’s apartment building, her annoyance with her younger son growing with every step she took. Why couldn’t he have been more like Richard, who had never caused her a day of grief in his entire life?

A martyr, that’s what Richard was. Just a Christian martyr!

Edna had prayed about Richard many times, and over and over the same message came to her: Richard had been an innocent lamb, unjustly led to slaughter. Only his own mother had believed in him. Well, someday they’d find out. After all, weren’t those terrible murders happening again right now? Just a week or so ago there had been that woman over on Boylston. Not that Edna felt very sorry for her; after all, she was a whore. But then just the night before last there had been that poor woman who lived up the street from Rory. And both of them killed just the way those others had been, the ones they blamed poor Richard for. If only they hadn’t killed Richard, they’d know the truth now, and he’d be able to come home to his mother where he belonged. But it was too late. Sighing heavily under the burden of her sorrows, Edna Kraven pulled the front door of Rory’s building open, went in, and climbed the steep flight of stairs to the second floor.

Pausing on the landing to catch her breath, she peered with distaste around the dimly lit corridor. The paint on the walls was peeling and the strip of threadbare carpet that ran down the cramped hallway was curling back at the edges. What had she done to deserve a son who would live in a place like this? She’d told him before that it wasn’t a fit place for her to visit; today she would put her foot down. If he didn’t move, he needn’t expect her to visit him again.

She plodded down the hall to Rory’s door, lifted her hand to knock, then realized that the door wasn’t quite closed. Just like Rory to go out somewhere and not even bother to lock his door — anyone could rob him blind! Pushing the door wider, Edna stepped inside.

“Rory?”

There was no answer, but Edna suddenly felt uneasy. The place just didn’t feel empty. Scowling, she moved toward the open bathroom door, but before she’d gone more than a step or two, she stopped short.

The walls — the grubby beige walls she’d never been able to get Rory to paint — were streaked with red.

Bright red.

Bloodred.

“Rory?” Edna Kraven said again, but this time the name of her younger son was uttered softly, almost inaudibly, as if she already understood what had happened here. “Rory?” she repeated. “It’s Mommy, Rory, come to take care of you.”

As if guided by an unseen force, Edna edged toward the bathroom door, terrified of what she might find there, but unable to keep herself from looking. When she was finally able to see exactly what lay in the bathtub, Edna Kraven’s stomach heaved. She lurched into the bathroom, bent over, and threw up into the sink. Only when her stomach had completely emptied itself was she finally able to creep back out to the single room in which her younger son had died and call the police.

“Holy Jesus,” Mark Blakemoor swore as he gazed at the ruined body of Rory Kraven. “What the hell is going on?”

He and Lois Ackerly had been reviewing the files on Shawnelle Davis and Joyce Cottrell, searching without success for anything that might link the two women together — a friend in common, a distant relative, even a casual acquaintance — when the call came in.

Now, lying naked in his bathtub in a crappy apartment, was Rory Kraven, the kid brother of the man whose crimes had been copycatted by whoever had killed Davis and Cottrell.