John Saul - Black Lightning

Richard, who was the apple of his mother’s eye.

And that, she well knew, hadn’t stopped even after Richard had been executed. Even after her son’s trial, failed appeals, and execution, Edna Kraven still insisted that Richard had been innocent. Innocent, and perfect.

Richard must have been eating at Rory all his life, even if he’d never shown it. Richard, who had remained newsworthy even after he’d been executed. She herself—

And suddenly it made sense.

“He wanted the attention,” she whispered, barely even aware that she was speaking out loud. “All his life, everything was focused on Richard. And even after Richard was dead, it didn’t stop.”

Her eyes went back to the note she still held in her hand.

I hate a copycat … an inept copycat … I doubt anyone will be too upset that Rory is gone. After all, he could never be me …

She read the words again and again — read them so many times she was sure she could recite them in her sleep — staring all the while at the note.

It was the handwriting.

She kept staring at it, knowing she recognized it, but not wanting to admit it. Not without an explanation.

And there could be no explanation for this.

She had seen Richard Kraven die in the electric chair. She had watched as his body stiffened, his face contorted, and his eyes rolled back into his head.

It was impossible that Richard Kraven could have written the note that was now in her hand.

And yet there was no question.

The handwriting was his.

Blood.

There was blood everywhere, but this time it wasn’t the blood of a cat.

This time it was human blood.

Glen Jeffers knew it was human blood, although he had no idea where it had come from. The blood was all over him — on his hands, on his face, smeared down the whole length of his naked body.

Naked?

Why was he naked?

Tearing his eyes away from the stains on his hands and torso, Glen scanned the walls that surrounded him. He was in a room he didn’t recognize — a shabby room, the kind he’d lived in years ago when he was a student in the architecture school at the university. But even that apartment, up in the University District just off Roosevelt, had been nicer than this one. Its walls had been cracked, and there’d been a hole in one of them where the previous tenant had let the closet door slam against the plaster every time he opened it. But at least the walls of that apartment had been white — a good, clean white that Glen had put on himself.

The walls surrounding him now were beige — the kind of drab, dirty beige that covers the walls of most cheap apartments. He could see a Murphy bed in one wall, and a sagging recliner, its upholstery so stained it was hard even to tell what color it might once have been.

A rickety-looking table with a couple of badly nicked painted metal chairs.

And more blood.

The walls were covered with it, and so was the furniture.

Blood everywhere.

He wanted to run from the room, but as he turned from one wall to another — and now they seemed to loom over him, imprisoning him — he couldn’t find a door.

Only more blood, dripping down the grimy walls, puddling on the floor.

Glen could feel it under his bare feet now, warm and sticky, and he tried to move away from it but his feet felt heavy, immobile, almost as if they were encased in concrete.

The walls seemed to be closing around him, and he reached out to push them away, but succeeded only in smearing their bloody surface. Blood, glistening scarlet, covered his fingertips, and he opened his mouth to vent his terror in a scream.

Nothing came out.

His throat constricted, and now he could barely even breathe, let alone howl out in terror.

He turned again, and finally there was a door.

An open door, leading into another room.

He worked his way toward it, his feet dragging, resisting him every step of the way. There was light flooding through the doorway, and inside he could see the shiny surface of white enamel on the other room’s ceiling, and a darkly mildewed grid of uncleaned grout surrounding the tile on the walls.

A bathroom.

There would be a shower there, and at least he could wash the blood from his body, get it off his face, out of his hair. A whimper bubbled out of his throat as he reached the door, but even that whimper died away as he gazed at the carnage in the bathtub.

It was a body — a man’s body, stripped as naked as Glen himself — its eyes gazing sightlessly up at the ceiling. The man’s throat had been slashed and his chest laid open to expose the heart and lungs.

And although Glen was certain the man was dead, he watched, transfixed with unbelieving horror, as the heart beat steadily and the lungs rose and fell with the slow, deep, even rhythm of sleep.

As another scream was born in Glen’s throat, he lurched forward, tripped, and found himself plunging headlong toward the body. Instinctively, he threw his hands out to break the fall, only to watch in helpless disgust as first his fingers, then his entire hands, disappeared deep into the corpse’s vital organs. Glen gagged, felt his stomach constrict, and knew he was going to throw up. He collapsed into the tub, sprawling on top of the body, the cold clamminess of its skin sending an icy chill through him. Now the corpse seemed to come fully alive, its arms wrapping around him, pulling him closer.

The head moved then, and the eyes blinked.

The mouth began to work, and Glen felt lips against his neck.

Lips, then teeth.

As terror and revulsion built inside him, Glen gathered his strength to jerk himself loose from the macabre embrace.

“No!” he screamed, finally finding his voice. “No!”

“No!” Glen bellowed once more, and this time he sat bolt upright. The nightmare fled as Glen came awake, but the dark image of the corpse in the bathtub was already burned indelibly into his memory.

For a few seconds he wasn’t sure where he was. He sat still, gasping to catch his breath, shaking, waiting for the horror of the blood-soaked dream to release him from its grip. He felt his heart pound, and terror seized him. Another heart attack! But then, as he came fully awake, his pounding heart slowly settled back into its normal rhythm.

As his panting, too, began to ease, he gazed around. The blood-smeared beige walls of the room in which he’d been trapped were gone. He was on the temporary platform fronting the construction elevator at the Jeffers Building. Slowly, it began to come back to him. He’d come downtown to take a look at the building, and come up here to the top.

He’d made himself go out to the edge, forced himself to look down.

He’d panicked! A wave of dizziness had come over him, and he’d felt that awful sensation of the abyss enticing him, drawing him in, almost sucking him over the edge. He’d felt himself leaning outward, ready to fall, when …

Something — someone — had stopped him.

After that, nothing.

Nothing except the nightmare.

Glen glanced at his watch. Almost four. But it had only been ten-thirty when he’d come up here! How could he have lain on the platform most of the day with nobody noticing him? Wouldn’t the construction worker who’d ridden partway up with him have wondered why he’d never come back down? Or the girl in the office? Wouldn’t she have wondered what had happened when he didn’t show up to return the hard hat? Getting to his feet, Glen pulled open the door of the elevator and hit the button to take him back to the bottom of the long shaft.

On the way down he was careful to keep his eyes focused on the door of the cage, never looking down, unwilling to risk another attack of the terrible acrophobia that had almost killed him earlier in the day. The elevator clanged to a stop and Glen sighed in relief. But in the site office, his worry came flooding back: Janie Berkey smiled at him brightly, then said, “That didn’t take long! You must have found your pen as soon as you got off the elevator!” Unable to do more than offer her a quick nod, Glen put the hard hat on the shelf with the others and made his escape from the office.