John Saul - Black Lightning

“Look, let’s get out of here, okay?” she heard Mark saying.

Wordlessly, she let him lead her out of the restaurant, and when he slipped his arm protectively around her, she made no move to pull away from him. Unconsciously she moved closer, grateful for any shelter she could find in her suddenly collapsing world.

Glen picked up the phone in the front hall, instantly recognizing Gordy Farber’s voice.

“How’s it going, Glen?” the heart specialist asked, keeping his voice casual despite the worry he was feeling. Obviously, the fear he’d seen in his patient when Glen had come in the day before yesterday had not been alleviated, since now it had infected Anne Jeffers as well, though he suspected that Anne’s fears stemmed much more from the events next door than from what might be happening inside her own home. Still, he’d intended to check on Glen today anyway. “What’s happening? Any more of those blackouts?”

Glen suddenly remembered his intention of calling Gordy this morning. Why hadn’t he? He glanced at his watch. Almost an hour had passed since he’d finished cleaning up the kitchen and …

And what? He couldn’t remember! Another hour gone out of his life! Shit!

“Actually, I was going to call you this morning, Gordy,” he said. “I’m starting to feel like I have Alzheimer’s instead of a heart problem. Yesterday—” Before he could finish the sentence, the doorbell rang. “Hang on, Gord — someone’s at the door.”

Laying the receiver on the table, Glen crossed to the front door and opened it to a heavyset woman clad in a shapeless dress, who smiled uncertainly at him. In her early sixties, he thought, and wearing too much makeup. Her dyed-black hair was piled up on her head in an attempt at a French twist. Though he was certain he’d never met her, she still looked somehow familiar.

“Mr. Jeffers?” the woman asked. “I’m Edna Kraven.”

Even as he stared at her, the same dizziness that had struck him earlier washed over him again. He took a step backward, fighting the blackness that was already closing around him.

He could do nothing, though, to battle the ever-strengthening presence that rose inside him.

The furious presence …

“Don’t let them, Mama! Please don’t let them!”

“Now, you be Mama’s brave little boy. They’re not going to hurt you. They’re going to help you.”

But Richard Kraven knew they weren’t going to help him. They were going to hurt him, just like they had last time, just like his father had hurt him. Now their hands were reaching out to him, and even though he was trying to hang on to his mother, she was prying his fingers loose, working herself free from his clinging arms.

One of the white-clad figures bent down to pick him up, but Richard shrank away, struggling against the tears that threatened to overwhelm him. He knew all too well what happened if he cried. His father had taught him that long ago.

Despite his attempts to escape, the tall man in the white coat picked him up, pinning his arms to his sides. “Now you just take it easy,” he heard the man say. “You don’t want us to have to put you in the jacket again, do you?” Richard shook his head, terror filling his heart. Last time his mother had brought him here, when he’d tried to tell her what his father had been doing to him and she hadn’t believed him, he’d gotten really angry, and finally they’d put him in a coat with sleeves that tied at the back so he couldn’t move his arms at all. He’d been scared then — more scared than he’d ever been before, even when his father took him down to the basement — but the jacket hadn’t been the worst part.

Even the ice-cold baths they’d made him lie in hadn’t been the worst part.

The worst part was he knew what they were going to do today, because his mother had told him about it. “It’s for your own good,” she’d explained. “And it doesn’t really hurt at all.”

But that wasn’t true. It hurt more than anything he could ever remember, even more than the shocks his father gave him.

Once again he looked up at his mother, but instead of helping him, she only smiled blandly, as if nothing was wrong at all. “Now you be a good boy, Richard. You be Mama’s perfect little boy, just like you always are.”

She turned around and walked through the doors, leaving him with the big men in white clothes, never even looking back at him.

That day he didn’t cry at all. He didn’t cry when they took him into the room where they kept the hard bed with the thick straps they held him down with.

He didn’t cry when they attached the wires to his head.

He didn’t even cry when he felt the jolts of electricity shoot through him and thought he was going to die.

In fact, he never cried again.

And he always did his best to be his Mama’s perfect little boy.

But the anger — the dark, cold fury he always took care to hide — began to build.

Every day, every week, every month it built.

Every year the rage grew larger, more monstrous.

And his mother never knew it was there.

Always, no matter what happened, she kept believing that he was her perfect little boy, who loved her as much as she said she loved him.

But he knew better. No matter what she said, he knew she didn’t love him — knew she’d never loved him. If she’d loved him, she would have protected him from his father, and from the men in the white clothes with the terrible machine that was even worse than his father’s electric cords.

No, she didn’t love him. She hated him, as much as he hated her.

“Won’t you come in?” The words issued from Glen Jeffers’s mouth, but it was Richard Kraven who asked the question, holding the door wider to let his mother step into the foyer. “I was on the telephone, but if you’ll just give me half a second?”

Courtly, Edna Kraven thought as she nodded her agreement to Mr. Jeffers’s question. Courtly, just like Richard was. “I do hope I’m not bothering you?”

He held up a gently dismissive hand. “Of course not,” he said. Picking up the phone, he spoke briefly into the receiver. “Gordy? I’m afraid something’s come up. I’ll call you later.” Without waiting for a reply from the doctor, he placed the receiver back on the hook, then gently took his mother’s elbow and steered her into the living room. “How nice of you to come,” he said.

Edna lowered herself nervously onto the edge of the sofa, surreptitiously eyeing the furniture in the room. Some of it, she decided, was almost as nice as the things Richard had had. Probably those were things Mr. Jeffers had chosen. Surely that terrible woman he was married to couldn’t have such good taste. Now, as her eyes returned to her host, she felt her heart flutter. Though he didn’t look anything like Richard, there was so much about him that reminded her of her son. His voice, of course. The wonderful, gentle way he spoke. And his eyes, too. They weren’t really the same color as Richard’s had been, but they had the same depth — that quality of looking right inside someone — that Richard’s had.

“I just got to thinking,” she said, her fingers twisting at one of the large buttons on her dress. “You were so nice to me on the phone this morning, I just thought maybe I should talk to you instead of your wife. If I could just make you understand about Richard. You just don’t know how it hurts me when your wife writes those terrible things about him.”

He smiled. “But I do understand,” he said gently. “Believe me, I understand exactly how you feel.”

Edna Kraven brightened. “Oh, I just knew I was right about you. I just knew it! Do you know, you remind me of Richard. It happened the minute I heard your voice this morning. And I just had to come and meet you.”