John Saul - Black Lightning

Something that had given him great pleasure, and that even now, even when he couldn’t quite grasp what it was, still sent a shiver of excitement through him.

He glanced over at Kevin, and an image flashed through his mind, disappearing so quickly he was almost unaware that it had happened at all.

Yet the memory of it held.

A heart.

A human heart, which he was holding in his hand. Where had it come from?

Then he remembered the experience he’d had two days before, when he imagined himself staring down at the naked torso of a woman, then watching helplessly as he cut her chest open.

Her heart? Had he taken her heart out? His stomach twisted with revulsion merely at the thought, and he felt a burning sensation as bile rose in his throat.

But it hadn’t happened! None of it had happened! It had only been a horrible nightmare, or a trick of his imagination. Hadn’t the psychiatrist told him it couldn’t possibly have been real?

He shut his mind to the terrible image, and when his eyes threatened to turn toward Kevin once more, he forced them to stay on the road ahead. Now they were starting up into the mountains. To their right the river cascaded down its rocky channel, frothing white as it roared over broad rapids.

“Where are we going, Dad?” Kevin asked, gazing anxiously at the tumbling waters. What would happen if he slipped while they were fishing? He could swim, but not really very well. “We’re not going down there, are we?”

“Another couple of miles,” Glen said. “There’s a campground. We can park there.” A campground? he thought. What campground? He didn’t know of any campground. But a few minutes later, as he came around a bend in the road, he saw a sign with the familiar graphics of a tent, a picnic table, and a hiker, with the phrase 1 MILE emblazoned below them. Glen felt his hands turn clammy. How had he known it was there? Was it possible that somehow, in some way he couldn’t fathom, the dream had been real? No! It had to be some old memory from one of the drives he, Anne, and the kids had taken over the years. That must be it — although he had no conscious memory of it, the campground must have registered on his mind long ago. He slowed the car, ready to turn in when the side road became visible, but as he rounded the next turn in the road, he saw a police car blocking the entrance, and a State Patrolman waving him on by. As they passed, he was barely able to catch a glimpse of several other police cars parked in the lot at the end of the narrow lane.

“What’s happening, Dad?” Kevin asked, twisting around to stare out of the back window. “Can we stop and find out? Maybe a bear got someone!”

“We’re not stopping,” Glen told Kevin as the boy faced forward again in his seat. “And fasten your seat belt, okay?” He glanced over at Kevin, and as his eyes fixed on his son, he heard a voice in his head:

Remember the cat?

Glen tensed, his fingers tightening on the wheel.

We could do it, the voice whispered. We could do it, and no one would ever know.

Suddenly Glen’s eyelids felt heavy and the road ahead blurred. A fogginess began to settle over his mind, and he felt sleepy. If he could just close his eyes for a—

No!

He jerked his eyes open, sitting straight up in the seat. No blackouts! Not today! Not with Kevin here with him. He pictured the car careening off the road, hurtling through the guardrail to plunge into the river a hundred feet below, and just the image was enough to send a shot of adrenaline into his bloodstream. As the heat of the hormone spread through his system, his heart began to pound and the strange lassitude that had settled over him while the voice whispered inside his head evaporated.

A new sign appeared ahead. Even before Glen saw it clearly, he knew what it was — a sign indicating a side road a quarter mile farther up.

He would turn there.

A few moments later, as he came closer to the narrow track leading off to the right, he once again experienced a strong sense of déjà vu; this looked exactly like the place where he’d dreamed he was fishing.

Fishing nude, with a vague memory of having killed a woman, of having opened her chest, of having—

No! It had only been a dream, and Dr. Jacobson had found rational sources for every image in it! It wasn’t real — none of it! Braking harder than he’d intended, Glen turned the car onto a steep road that wound so closely through the trees that branches scraped against both its sides.

“What if we can’t turn around?” Kevin asked, instinctively ducking as a branch slapped against the windshield in front of his face.

“Don’t worry about it,” he heard his father reply. “I’ve been here before. Lots of times.”

Something in his father’s voice caught the boy’s attention. Kevin’s gaze shifted away from the trees.

The eyes of the man and the boy locked for a moment, and then Kevin looked away.

There was something in his father’s eyes he’d never seen before.

Something that scared him.

Anne heard the sound of the mail dropping through the slot in the front door and seized the opportunity to shift her eyes away from the monitor, relax the muscles of her neck, then stand up to stretch her whole body. Could it really be almost three hours since she’d sat down at the computer in the den to review a few of the interview files? Now that her concentration had finally been broken, she realized that it felt like even longer — her legs were stiff, and her right shoulder was sore from manipulating the mouse she’d been using to navigate through the files. So far she’d gotten nothing for her very literal pains. Only a long and tedious review of information that was already so familiar to her that she felt she could have repeated it in her sleep.

Richard Kraven, whether or not he was the serial killer she’d made him out to be, had been a man of many parts. He’d mastered both biology and electrical engineering, and had studied religion and metaphysics as well. He’d loved the arts, especially dance, contributing at least a thousand dollars each year to the ballet.

Dozens — hundreds — of people had known him.

And no one had thought of him as a friend.

Over and over the people she’d interviewed had used the same words. A lot of them had been complimentary: “Charming … Fascinating … Well-read … Genius …”

But other words kept recurring as well: “Cold … Distant … Detached … Remote …”

Sighing, her certainty fading that she would find something in the files she’d overlooked before, Anne moved through the living room into the foyer.

She saw it even before she bent over to pick up the mail strewn across the floor. A plain white envelope — the kind you could buy anywhere — with her name and address written across it in the same spiky script she’d seen only a few days ago when she followed up the police call to Rory Kraven’s apartment. Leaving the rest of the mail where it lay, Anne snatched up the envelope and tore it open. She was about to pull the single sheet of paper out when she stopped herself.

Fingerprints! Maybe, just maybe, whoever had written the note had gotten careless. Her hands trembling, she brought the letter to the kitchen, found a pair of tongs, and carefully pulled the neatly folded sheet out of the envelope. Her heart pounding, she spread it open so she could read it.

Dearest Anne,

An explanation: As I’m sure you’re aware, I had no opportunity to hone my surgical skills during my recent incarceration. Hence, the incident with your daughter’s cat; I simply needed something to practice on. Perhaps I should have left my signature on it, but it was only a cat, and not truly representative of my best endeavors. By the way, no one let the cat out. I came in and got it, just as I came in and left the note on your computer. I can come into your house any time, you know. Any time at all.