COSMOS magazine

Thursday, June 26

Something's happening to me, Wayne thought. I must've hit my head when I smashed up my ankle.

He had discovered the library the night he'd gone poking around looking for more food, and somehow his mind felt far hungrier than his stomach. Reading became a compulsion; he slept during the day and spent his nights furtively crouched in the library. Half the time he'd get so wrapped up in his reading he forgot to eat. He knew he'd have to leave this place eventually, but it was too dangerous now with the cops out to catch him for whatever horrible crime he had committed. Keep a low profile, that was the thing. No way even to call Fern, they might know his identity, have his home phone bugged.

At first he'd picked up books at random, read until he felt restless. Soon, though, he found himself developing an interest in certain topics, seeking out extra background information in other books mentioned in footnotes and bibliographies. Whenever he stopped to think about it, he was amazed at how quickly he was gulping the books down, how much of the information he'd absorbed. The second night, he got interested in brains. It turned out the individual components of a human brain were almost identical to those in a mouse. The difference between him and a mouse was really no more than the number of brain cells and the number of different ways those cells could link with each other. Synapses, that was what the scientists called the connections.

As if recalled from a dream, fragmented bits of overheard conversation played themselves over in his memory. He'd been given a shot! Someone had loaded him up with some fucking drug! A treatment to make extra neurons grow, force them to build new connections. That's what this damned treatment was doing. He had no idea how he knew it, but it was so. Dizzy, he hunted for information on neurons, reading eagerly. When he noticed it was almost time for the library to open for the day, he gathered up as many books as he could carry and took them back with him when he returned to his underground refuge, where he continued to read under the dim utility lamp overhead until he fell asleep.

He hadn't felt this way since he was a kid, a small fry, when he and his friends went exploring, climbing on the roofs of houses under construction, poking around in Old Man McNutt's junkyard, watching tadpoles grow into frogs a little each day. Eventually, though, even his manic craving to learn gave way to exhaustion, and he slept for a few hours.

Even as he stands beside his father, watching the strong, sure hands push the plank into the whirring saw blade, Wayne knows he is dreaming. He sees the scene as if he is standing slightly above and behind himself, hears the malevolent shrieking of the blade as if from a vast distance.

His father turns to him as one end of the plank clatters to the floor. "Now you try it."

Wayne draws back, away from the cruel thing that lies in wait, ready to hurt him badly. Without any conscious thought on his part, his older, dreaming self steps into the scene. The little boy is gone. He directs the murderous rage he feels for his father into his hands. Grasps the wood, begins to push it into the blade, as his father has done. He feels a stinging sensation. Bright red drops spatter on the wood, the table, his own arms. He feels triumph.

Wayne sat up, suddenly and completely awake, stared at the ugly stumps of his fingers. He had never known how it happened. His father had shouted at him, calling him careless, blaming him for not paying close enough attention.

"How the hell could I've known what I was doing?" Wayne muttered aloud, angry at the past. "You didn't bother to teach me. I wasn't ready. You made me do it when I wasn't ready." The fury he felt toward his father shocked him as much as the memories that came crowding into his mind like a barrage of baseball cards raining down on him, burying him. The rock flung through the workshop window. The honey in the gas tank of his daddy's car.

"You were too much of a fucking coward," someone said in his daddy's voice. "So I had to do it for you."

Chilled, he knew that the words were coming from his own mouth. He lurched back against the cold concrete. "Who are you?"

"Just call me Payback." His father's voice.

"You're part of me." He was shaking.

"I'm no part of you. People all the time calling me by your name, but I'm no part of you."

This was the one who'd done those things he was too terrified to recall. But now he had to remember. Staring down into the pit of memory was the only way he could make himself whole. How else could he make amends for whatever vile things he had done? He willed himself to remember those things, those horrors that had come to him in dreams:

Lying unconscious, dark hair spread across the brown and yellow-stained mattress, the bitch looked more like a schoolgirl than a grown-up cancer researcher with a fancy medical science degree. Like Melody when he'd first met her, before she'd got sick. Payback waited, watching. He would not touch her until she woke up. He wanted her to know exactly what was happening to her—and why.

He glanced at the Mason jar sitting atop the dusty wooden crate that served as a bedside table. The surface of the dark layer at the bottom of the jar rose and fell in jerky waves.

The cancer doctor stirred, put a hand to her forehead, moaned.

'Well, it's about time. You'd think I gave you a whole bottle of sleeping pills or something, 'stead of a little tap on the head."

She opened her eyes a slit and made as if to sit up.

'Not so fast there." He shook his finger. "First you have to find out what it feels like to be the guinea pig."

Now she was fully awake, her eyes round with surprise and dawning fear.

"It's time for payback and you're going to make the first instalment. You owe—" He found himself panting slightly, hand trembling a little. "What you people did to my wife—no, don't bother trying to get yourself loose." He had her tied down to the bed with stout hemp rope from his daddy's workshop. "Don't you be getting any ideas about yelling either, you understand?"
Only hours ago, her lips had haughtily issued orders. Now they were parted and trembling, ready to scream. Payback liked seeing that. But there was too much risk if she made a lot of noise and attracted attention.

He stuffed deep into her mouth a dirty rag doll with yellow yarn hair. Something he'd found on the floor of the trailer when he first moved in. The sight of the doll's droopy legs straddling the woman's chin was so comical he wanted to laugh, but this was a solemn occasion. A time of retribution and instruction. She began to gag, and he pulled the doll's head out, pushed it in again but not quite so far. He picked up the Roselli hunting knife from the top of the crate, tested its sharpness with his thumb, lifted her blouse.

"It was right about here," he muttered to himself, and touched her spasming abdomen. "I'd stop that squirming if I was you. It's gonna hurt more if you don't lie still."

Her eyes were huge now, terrified. He ran the knife lightly along her skin, just below the navel, plotting the course. He moved his hand back to the starting position and retraced the line, bearing down hard enough to part the skin. At first the cut was clean; then it filled with blood. Payback glanced up at her head. She was twisting from side to side, spilling tears from her eyes.

Payback pulled at both sides of the skin, exposing the shiny peritoneum, carefully positioned the knife. The woman arched her back and jerked her midsection up; the knife sliced into the guts, spilling foul-smelling semi-liquid into the darkness of the abdominal cavity.

"Shit! You stupid klutz! I told you to lie still." When Payback had imagined his revenge, he'd thought it would be easy, like gutting a deer. But a dead deer didn't move around and cause you to screw up and cut into the intestines. "This is just gonna make it take longer and hurt worse." He looked up to see if she was paying attention to what he was saying. Her head had fallen back on the pillow, eyes closed. Damn! He briefly considered trying to revive her but decided it would be better to finish what he was doing while he could count on her lying still. He picked up the Mason jar, upended it into the wound. A seething mass of June beetles fell into the abdominal cavity, tiny claws grappling for purchase in soft, bleeding tissue.

It was too much to ask of himself. Everything blurred, lurched sideways.

Thursday, June 26

As Drew Chang swam effortlessly, warm water massaging his body, he could see bright red and green coral formations only a few feet below, as clearly as if he were viewing them through crisp mountain air. A school of small, arrow shaped fish surrounded him, flashing neon yellow and purple in the sunlight. He marvelled at the clarity with which he could make out the flow patterns over and around each individual fish as it moved swiftly through the water.

He couldn't stay here. People were counting on him. Roberta Treadwell, Paul Gibson. And Maureen. She was expecting him for dinner. He had to call her, let her know he would be late. The water was cold, murky, as he swam upward toward the surface. So cold it hurt his head, made his throat burn. He broke through the surface and found himself staring up at dimly lit wooden rafters. He remembered disjointed fragments of talk that made no sense, the mutterings of a psychotic. Quickly he closed his eyes. The crazy man might see he was awake, strike him again. But the air did not smell as it had when the lunatic was close by. The man had an unpleasantly sour body odour, now absent.

Drew opened his eyes a little wider, turned his head, fighting dizziness. He was in a room with bare studs and rafters and an odour of damp earth and motor oil. His right hand was loosely wrapped around a water bottle with a little straw. He was horribly thirsty. The first small sip set off a wave of nausea, but he fought it down.

Dim light fell from a small, dusty window directly above him. All he could hear were bird chirps and a discordant scraping, maybe branches dragged by the wind back and forth across the roof. Drew began sinking into his warm, beautiful ocean, jerked himself back into alertness. I'm dying, he thought. I've got to stay awake, however painful that is. He wondered if the lunatic had brought the binder where he kept his cell phone. Oh God, I'll have to get up and look for it.

Slowly.... slowly... With the greatest effort of his life, Drew sat up, fell against the wall at his back, breathing in shallow gasps. He was sitting on a plank table about four and a half feet above the floor. Was that his leather binder, on a chair half-visible in the gloom? I have to reach it, he thought. He didn't need to know where he was, thank the good Lord, because 911 dispatchers could pinpoint the location of callers using cell phones.

He planned his journey from the table to the chair with the sort of precision he used in writing a proposal for a scientific research project. He would slide to the edge of the table. Rest until he felt strong enough to move. Make a half turn so that he could hold onto the table with his hands as he slid off. Rest. Ease himself to the floor, supporting his weight against the table. Rest. Once he was on the floor, he could crawl on his hands and knees, taking as long as he needed to reach the chair.

The plan worked as he anticipated. Excellent scientific analysis, he thought approvingly, head swimming. By resting each time he exerted himself, Drew managed to conserve his strength. He reached the edge of the table, paused to catch his breath. He felt dizzy, but by fixing his eyes on his goal and taking slow, deep breaths, he kept his balance. Slowly and deliberately, he put his weight on his left hip and pushed against the table top with his hands, rotating his body until he lay on his stomach, legs extending over the side of the table. He was relieved to note that he was less dizzy in this position than he had been sitting up. Once a friend had talked him into trying sky diving; now, calling on the same reserve of courage that had allowed him to jump from an airplane thousands of feet above the ground, he began to push himself backward into space.

Something happened that Drew had not built into his plan. The table had been made by nailing planks across a frame. For years the roof had leaked, rotting the plank on the front edge of the table, rusting away the nails. His weight snapped the rusty nails. The plank tilted. Drew lost his grip, crashed heavily to the floor.

Pain speared his left arm. A thought began to form: "Oh shit, I've broken my fucking arm." Confusion, then, and the slide through darkness.