Thea Harrison: Rising Darkness

She’s not the one, stupid.

Yes, she is! She smells like blood. He’ll feed us well for this.

Mary paused and turned to look behind her. What a thing to fantasize.

She was imagining that, wasn’t she?

Other than the murmurous trees and the distant report of a car door slamming, the day was silent, while the wind tumbled sticks and leaves around like a child playing at jacks. A shadow covered the dancing debris, smearing it with darkness.

How could a tree cast that kind of shadow when the sun was not yet high in the sky? She glanced upward. Or perhaps it was a shadow thrown by a cloud.

Malice brushed the edge of her mind, and the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck rose. Or perhaps the darkness was something else, with an unfriendly agenda.

She shook her head at her own overactive imagination, turned back around and resumed walking again.

You saw! She looked at us. Does that mean she heard us?

Normal people don’t hear us. We must tell!

She jerked to a halt and broke out in a fresh sweat.

I didn’t just make that up.

I’m hearing voices.

I’m. Hearing. Voices.

An internal quake rattled her bones. She turned backward in a circle, staring around her with dry eyes. There was no one else close by. Down the street a couple of children exploded out of the front door of a house, their school bags slung over thin shoulders.

A few yards away twigs and pine needles tumbled in a dark pagan dance.

Everything else had stopped. There was no wind, no lick of breeze against her skin. Even the trees overhead had gone silent, waiting.

There was nothing around that would cause that wrong, impossible turbulence of air.

Her teeth clenched. She stamped her foot at the dancing sticks and leaves, and hissed, “Stop it!”

The small voices burst into chatter.

Yes, she heard us. She did.

We must go!

As abruptly as they had started, the voices stopped. The leaves and twigs dropped to the ground.

Nothing else disturbed the stillness, just a few cars pulling out of driveways as people headed to work under the watchfulness of the looming forest, as some of the trees only tolerated the humans who had moved into their territory—

Where had that thought come from? Why would she think such a thing?

Panic clawed her. She was used to dreaming strange dreams. She’d done it her entire life. Hearing voices though, and seeing what she saw—seeing what she thought she just saw—that was psychosis.

She clamped down on the panic. No. She was just too tired and not fully awake yet. She was still half-caught in a dream state where Dalí’s clock melted and Escher’s stairways led on an endless loop to nowhere.

Coffee would shake off this crazy fugue. She turned around and headed back in the direction of her house, working to a lope as she rounded the corner.

Her ex-husband, Justin, stood on her deck at the bottom of the concrete stairs. His dark hair shone with glints of copper in the early morning sun, his narrow, clever face bisected by dark Ray-Ban sunglasses. He was dressed for the office in a functional yet elegant suit, the jacket unbuttoned in the unseasonal warmth of the spring morning.

When she caught sight of him, she groaned under her breath and slowed to a stop. Justin caught sight of her before she could pivot and jog away.

Oh, great. Just what she needed, on top of everything else.

Well, the sooner she talked to him, the sooner he would go away again. Resigned, she walked forward to meet him.

MICHAEL HAD BEEN in a rage for as long as he could remember, long before he understood the reasons for it.

As a small boy, over thirty years ago, he had been prone to screaming fits and spells of inconsolable sobbing that had lasted hours. Once it had lasted days. In his memory of that time, his parents were vague, ineffectual shadows, pantomiming concern and alarm. That one time had involved doctors, along with a hypodermic needle.

He hadn’t liked shots. Five adults had been needed to hold him pinned down. After that he had gone through a period of medication and therapy. The medicine taught him a valuable lesson. It made him feel odd and fuzzy. He realized he would have to curb his behavior if he wanted to be free of it, so he learned how to be cunning.

He colored a lot of pictures and studied the therapist as much as she studied him. As soon as he figured her out, he told her everything she wanted to hear. Eventually the sessions stopped, and so did the medication.

Still, he remained a stormy, headstrong, brilliant child. Despite all of their early literacy efforts, his parents could not interest him in reading until he saw an evening news segment on the First Persian Gulf War. Rapt, he watched unblinking until the news program was over, and then he demanded that his father read every article in the newspaper on the subject. Within a few years, his reading comprehension approached the college level.

School was pastel. It didn’t make much of an impression on him. The other children were pastel too. He didn’t have friends. He had followers. By observation and raw gut instinct he knew what the teachers thought of him, that they were both intrigued by him and also worried about his future.

He didn’t care. They were pastel. Nothing external was ever quite as real as what shouted inside of him.

He was well on his way to developing into an adult sociopath. His dreams of release from pastel rules were as yet unformed but increasingly dangerous. He had already been in several fights with other children, and he had discovered that he liked violence.

And he was good at it.

One day when he was eight, an old woman appeared at the fence of his schoolyard playground.

Michael was as aware of her presence as he was aware of everything else around him, but he ignored her while he organized his group of followers for a strenuous bout of playground mischief.

Then the most extraordinary thing happened.

Boy , the old woman said.

That was all. But she said it INSIDE HIS HEAD .

He turned to stare at her.

The old bat looked exceedingly pastel. She looked like just a nondescript woman with a cheerful apple-dumpling face who had paused to watch children run and play during a school break.

His eyes narrowing, he walked toward her, school, stranger-danger, followers and mischief, all else forgotten. Several of the other kids called his name, and some kind of missile thumped him on the shoulder. He ignored everything else and stopped about fifteen yards away from the six-foot chain-link fence. All the while, the old woman watched him with bright, black raisin eyes.

“How did you do that?” he asked.

Shrieking children ran between them, playing a game of tag, but she still heard him in spite of the noise. Her face crinkled into a friendly smile. It’s a secret , she said. I know a lot of secrets.

His breath left him. He stared at her in wonder. She might be old and wrinkled, but she was definitely not pastel. He took another quick, impetuous step toward her. “Teach me!”

Her smile wrinkles deepened although she never stopped watching him. Those bright eyes of hers were alight with amusement and something sharper. I might , she said, her mental voice casual. Or I might not. It all depends.

Never before in his short, pampered life had he been stared at as if he had been weighed and found wanting, but that was how the old woman stared at him now. He scowled, not liking the sensation. “It depends on what?”

On whether or not you know any manners, young man , she told him. And whether or not you’re still salvageable.