Loe raamatut: «Sharing The Darkness»

CHAPTER ONE

A man’s scream and a loud metal-crunching crash echoed simultaneously through the narrow canyon valley. Both sounds, hard and desperate, seemed to come from everywhere, the cloud-heavy sky, the cold misting rain, the sodden ground beneath Melanie’s feet. She whirled right, then left, as did the gas station attendant and the two old men playing checkers in front of the station.

Perhaps because of the trauma she’d been through in the last few weeks, the last few years, she immediately closed her mind to the outside influences of the world. A terrifying thought struck her. Had Chris had any part in that noise she’d heard? His talent—her curse—was growing stronger every day, partially thanks to the efforts of the scientists at the Psionic Research Institute. They had wanted to train him, and had only succeeded in frightening them both and making her life—and Chris’s—a living hell.

Guilt stabbed her with sharp recrimination. How could she even think that Chris might be involved? Hadn’t her three-year-old had to face enough blame and fear in his young life without his mother succumbing to anxiety about what he might have done?

But a quick look assured her that she needn’t have worried; her three-year-old totally ignored the almost preternatural silence. A soft smile played on his lips, his baby face was lit with an inner contentment and, as was usual since his days at the Psionic Research Institute, his small, chubby fingers wiggled in waving motions.

A host of small items—a comb, a red ball, a comic book action figure, a plastic lid from a fast-food drive-in, even a tube of lipstick—danced around the interior of the car, hovering in the air, set to a tune only Chris could hear. And they were held in midair by his mind only, little puppets controlled by a small puppeteer.

Melanie swiftly looked around to see if anyone was watching her car but didn’t relax when she saw that no one was paying her son the slightest attention. When was the last time she had relaxed? She couldn’t remember. It may have been the day before young Chris was born. And she’d been in labor then.

Another scream rent the air and Melanie gasped. Chris’s eyes didn’t so much as flicker. His entire focus was upon his little collection of dancing objects, which whirled so effortlessly, so defiantly, in midair. He’d always had the ability to manipulate the world around him, even as early as six months old, when he’d turned the toys on the windowsill into a mobile over his bed.

But until his days at the PRI, he’d been easily distracted and the toys would drop to the ground. Whatever they’d done to him, he’d apparently found a place to escape. Now when Chris concentrated on making his toys dance, he was totally oblivious to the rest of the world.

Only violent shaking or abrupt body contact could snap him from this unusual withdrawal. This was what the scientists at the PRI had done for him. To him. And they would have done far more if they’d had the opportunity…an opportunity she was determined not to give them, despite their threats.

At least, Melanie thought bleakly now, Chris hadn’t been the cause of whatever crash had taken place in these lonely mountains.

But something had.

In the stillness following the tremendous racket—a silence made all the more noticeable by the lack of any jays’ raucous calls—one of the old men spat tobacco juice onto the muddy pathway that served as a sidewalk flanking the gas station. The dark spittle narrowly missed a wet paint-chipped sign that had long since faded into little more than a testimony of poverty and abandonment. The sign read Loco Suerte.

To Melanie, lost in the back roads of northern New Mexico, trying to escape the clutches of the PRI scientists, tired from two steady weeks of fruitless searching for the only man she thought might be able to help them, and now standing stock-still in a chill October mist, the scream still echoing in her ears, the village’s name was curiously apt…Crazy Luck. It was just the kind of luck she would have.

The old man who’d spit spoke in a lisping Castillian Spanish that she automatically, though with some difficulty, translated. “Demo. His vehicle slipped. Demo’s car fell off that loco jack he made.” His voice was as lacking in emotion as his face, but creaked like the door the gas station attendant had pushed through only minutes earlier.

The gas station attendant, or possibly the owner, a short squat man of about fifty with at least three days’ growth of jet black beard, a filthy once white T-shirt, and a thick, black mustache that fully covered his upper lip, barked several curses in Spanish and broke into a run toward the side of his station. Just as he was rounding the corner, he slithered to a muddy stop and yelled at Melanie in English, “She doesn’t turn off! Close the gas, will you, señora?”

As if his words broke some sort of peculiar spell woven by the scream, the crash and the seeming indifference of the old men playing checkers, Melanie turned to “close” the gas, fumbling with the antiquated apparatus that passed as a gas tank. As she did so, she heard the attendant—owner?—yell from out of sight, again in that curiously lisping Castillian Spanish, “Abuelito, call the sheriff for an ambulance! And get me some help here. Demo’s trapped under the car!”

While one of the old men, presumably the grandfather the attendant had called to, pushed his chair back and seemingly slowly reached for the telephone—a device that looked as though it had been installed by Alexander Bell himself—Melanie heard the loud curses of the attendant from the other side of the low, dilapidated building.

Even as the older man called the sheriff, the slip-slop of many feet on the mud street told Melanie that help had arrived. Six or seven men appeared from out of the forest and the nearby adobe structures she had earlier mistaken for abandoned, or, perhaps magically, from the slick, muddy street that five minutes’ earlier had been totally devoid of people. They were followed rapidly by several women, most of them dressed in black, one carrying a small child.

Melanie didn’t feel as if she was in the United States any longer. She had stepped back in time to some mountain village in a different country.

Again Melanie glanced at Chris, willing him in vain to halt his toys’ dance. Again, her worry was in vain. No one noticed her son; all attention was focused on whatever had transpired around the side of the dilapidated garage.

“¡Uno…dos…tres!” the attendant yelled, and on the count of three the combined voices of all the men groaned in seven-part harmony. “Again! Try it again!”

Melanie told an unresponsive Chris to stay in the car, and followed the sound of the voices until she stood just around the pocked corner of the gas station. Then she averted her head in quick negation, closing her eyes sharply against the sight of a man lying too still, apparently crushed by the old Chevy that had lost its mooring on the jack and now was being held some two feet above the man by seven straining men.

“Throw it over,” the attendant yelled.

“But Demo’s Chevy—”

“Throw it over! Who cares about the car? On three…. ¡Uno…dos…tres!”

The heavy, battered classic flipped over with a groaning shudder and slithered down a muddy embankment.

“¡Madre de Dios! He’s alive!” a woman screamed.

Melanie opened her eyes again and tracked the line of the woman’s pointing finger. The mechanic, though bloodied and covered with oil and grime, was indeed feebly moving. Melanie couldn’t have said how, but he was.

“Jaime, andale! Fetch El Rayo!” the attendant yelled. Then, without looking to see if the young man he had clapped on the shoulder did his bidding, he bent over the hapless mechanic.

“But, Pablo…” the young man protested.

“Now, damn it! Fetch him!” the attendant snapped, again without looking at Jaime. The youth stood uncertainly for a moment, then bolted into the thick trees flanking the gas station to the north.

Pablo bent lightly, resting a hand on the injured man’s brow. “Demo…Demo, boy, can you hear me? You’ll be all right. Abuelito called for an ambulance.” The attendant looked upward, as though praying, then back down as he said urgently, “And he comes soon.”

Melanie held her breath. El Rayo—Rah-e-yoh—might be translated to mean The Man of Thunderbolts. Was her quest to be ended this easily? Or was the peculiar term, “El Rayo,” some odd colloquialism for doctor or even ambulance? But the attendant had said, “He comes…”

He…El Rayo.

She’d spent the last nerve-racking two weeks dodging around the country, slinking in and out of seedy hotel rooms at night, spending entire days in a paid-with-cash rental Buick, accompanied only by her unusual and telekinetic son, seeking a man who was said to destroy brick buildings by a mere wave of his hands. A man who, according to the files at the PRI, was a recluse, a barbarian and a would-be killer. A man who could literally move the earth or eradicate it with a look.

Was he the man with thunderbolts in his fingertips?

Melanie realized that until this moment, hearing the odd designation, she had nearly given up hope of finding the man she sought. She had never felt foolish in her quest, that wasn’t it. Anything she could possibly do now, any bizarre hope of saving Chris from the scientific experiments at The Psionic Research Institute was worth any investigation. But just an hour earlier, lost and tired, her back aching from the many miles behind the wheel of her car, and tired of dodging free-floating bits of tissue, food wrappers, or even the road map, she had been prepared to admit defeat.

If there was a powerful telekinetic hiding in these rugged, terrifying mountains, it was obvious he didn’t want to be found. Up to now she’d been relying on every facet of her own telepathic abilities, her own clairvoyance, and they might have led her here, but she wasn’t even sure where here was.

From the files, she’d illegally studied, she’d known he was reclusive. She’d known he’d be hiding. And dangerous? her mind offered. Yes, she’d also known that, both from the files and from her own chaotic and vague dreams in which a man named Teo Sandoval called her name as electricity flew from his very fingertips. Dreams that always left her shaking, a scream choked in her throat.

But at the same time, the very dangerousness that was inherent to the man she sought, dreamed about, was what made him her last hope of saving Chris from being taken from her. Her former husband, Tom, had already signed over his custody rights to the PRI…it hadn’t taken them long to try to secure hers. And when she’d refused, still furious with her ex-husband for even thinking he could get away with such a thing, they had made it perfectly clear how little an obstacle they considered her. If she weren’t around, they’d said, Chris would become a ward of the court. And since Chris’s own father wished them to protect his only son, no court in the world would deny their petition for full custodial rights.

She had fled the institute that night, knowing full well that the PRI scientists, privately funded and not regulated by any governmental watch committees, believed themselves above any and all laws. They had no intention of letting anything get in their way, especially not a mother who didn’t exhibit any sign of their coveted telekinesis. So, by fair or foul means, they planned to snatch Chris and harbor him at the Psionic Research Institute permanently, a captive subject to their bizarre experiments and brutal testings.

A woman holding a small child moaned and sagged, but was caught and shushed by the older woman nearest her. “Be quiet, Doro. Pray. El Rayo comes. One touch and your husband will live. You know. Believe it.”

At this Melanie had to stifle the flood of questions that sprang to her lips. If she voiced any of them, she might be asked to leave, and she couldn’t do that until she was certain this El Rayo wasn’t the man she sought so desperately. To forestall the surge of hope welling inside, she reminded herself that she wasn’t in the rolling countryside of Pennsylvania any more, she was in the backwoods of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, a place where the superstitious populace still believed in curses, witches and miracles. A place where she was the only Anglo in a world of ancient Spanish; the outsider who neither fluently spoke their unusual dialect nor understood their customs.

Pablo pulled back from the mechanic and Melanie had to cover her mouth with both hands to restrain an instinctive cry of dismay. It would take nothing less than a bolt of lightning to help this man. In fact, Melanie doubted there was much a trained physician could do, even if he carried patented miracles in his little black bag, for the mechanic was all too obviously dying. Automatically she lowered her precious mental guard to seek the mechanic’s thoughts and caught them too easily.

Madre de Dios…why can’t I breathe?

She slammed the gates of her mind tightly closed. She couldn’t bear hearing a dying man’s thoughts.

Seeing the crumbling face of the woman holding the child tightly to her shuddering breast, hearing the murmurs of the men around the dying mechanic, Melanie felt disassociated. She seemed in two places at once. Here, in the chill October afternoon rain in a lonely mountain village in northern New Mexico, carnage at her feet, and there, in a too bright laboratory, watching a team of white-coated men attach electrodes to her son’s chubby chest while he cried at the chill of their fingers and shrank from the fear and longing in their eyes.

“The ghost clouds come,” the mechanic’s wife moaned, snapping Melanie back to the present. “Demo will die. See how they come for him!”

Melanie tilted her head to follow the woman’s gaze, not needing to squint her eyes against the soft rain. Thin, fog-like wisps of white snaked through the tall pines, slinking over the high, treeless peaks and silently creeping downward toward the village. Melanie restrained a shudder. She could see why a superstition about the clouds might be generated. They did indeed look like stalking ghosts.

A bird swooped down from a nearby tall pine and, as one, the crowd around the mechanic gasped. The mechanic’s child began to cry, restively, perhaps from being held too tightly against his mother’s breast.

An older woman called out, “An owl! It’s an omen! Call Tierra Amarillo’s church for a priest!”

Pablo growled something about “talking goats” at the woman, then fell silent, his gaze fixing in Melanie’s direction. One by one, the rest of the group turned, grew quiet. For a moment Melanie thought all eyes were trained fearfully on her, then she realized their cumulative gazes were just beyond her shoulder. She felt an almost atavistic fear of turning around to discover what could hold that many voluble people so absolutely silent. Could Chris have left the car, dancing objects in his wake?

She fought the sudden attack of nerves and turned.

The youth, Jaime, stood to one side of the muddy station stalls, as though keeping a fair distance from the man who strode across the water-burdened street toward him and the garage. Melanie had the urge to do the same as the young man and couldn’t resist drawing closer to the damp and chipped adobe wall.

Behind her, the crowd now gathered around the dying mechanic sighed and whispered, “El Rayo…El Rayo.” The muted voices underscored the strangeness of the man approaching them.

He walked as though in no particular hurry, though his stride was steady and broad. Like a bullfighter’s, Melanie thought, snared by the sighing, chanting voices behind her, or like a king’s all-powerful steps.

“The car fell on Demo,” Pablo called out to the silent figure, cutting through the whispers. “He lives. But only just.”

“El Rayo,” the mechanic’s wife begged, “help my Demo, please.”

Melanie turned to look at the group of townspeople and noticed they had all pulled back—like Jaime, like herself—as though contact with this stranger would be injurious to their health. She couldn’t blame them. There was something so dark, so forceful, about the man that it seemed to exude from his very pores. And yet, almost as if whatever it was about him was electrical—and if he was the man she sought, it might very well be electrical in nature—she felt her skin respond to his presence.

He was of Latin descent, with a dark complexion and jet black hair that hung far below the collar of his shirt, farther still, perhaps beneath his shoulder blades. Either one of his recent ancestors had been Anglo or he was a throwback to the true Spanish that had originally settled these mountains, for the man’s eyes were a glittering pale blue-gray, the color of the sky on a stormy winter’s afternoon.

This imposing stranger wasn’t tall, perhaps only six feet or so, but his shoulders were broad enough to strain at his rough flannel shirt. His hips were narrow, and his thighs, tightly encased in his jeans, were muscled and thick. Moisture clung to his dark hair and seemed to shimmer, creating the impression of a dark liquid halo.

This had to be him, Melanie thought wildly; everything about him exuded dark mystery and raw sensuality. He was more spirit than man, a wild black stallion, a lone timber wolf, a clap of thunder on a cloudless night. He gave the impression of absolute power.

She had to know if he was, indeed, Teo Sandoval, the man she’d needed so desperately. She unveiled her mind a notch and reached out to him when he paused, stopping at the side of the building. His eyes seemingly took in the entire scene at a glance.

His mind was questing so—reading all—she couldn’t get through, and dropped her guard another notch.

He said nothing as most of the people tried explaining what had happened at the same time. He turned his gaze finally, and with cool appraisal, to Melanie.

She felt a moment’s pure shock as her gaze linked with his, as his mind tried to probe hers. It was a rare enough occurrence, to actually lock eyes with someone, but it wasn’t the rarity of it that triggered an inner quaking in Melanie. An elemental sexuality seemed to transmit from the stranger like the coldest of mountain winds and, at the same time, like the heat of a cliff’s edge baked too long by a summer sun. She knew instinctively this man was like no one she had ever known before, and she couldn’t seem to think clearly enough to decide whether that boded well or ill.

Lines from the files on him she’d read chased through her mind, incoherent, fleeting. After the fiasco, after his demolishing an entire wing of the PRI when they had pushed him too hard, after he had escaped their clutches, one psychiatrist had written of him: He’s a man of extreme conscience. I don’t know whether Teo Sandoval should be condemned or praised. But at all costs, he should be left alone.

If not for Chris, at that moment Melanie would gladly have turned and left the man alone, abandoned her quest for his help, because, linked with his gaze, for a single, shattering moment she had felt as though they were the only two people on earth. She shivered, feeling totally and wholly exposed. Then she felt him strengthen the probe to her mind, as though ready to rifle through her thoughts, glean every drop of knowledge about her. She swiftly clamped her mind closed, slamming the door on her thoughts, her soul. That slam seemed to echo inside her and it somehow hurt.

Though he didn’t so much as flinch, some instinctive knowledge told her that she wasn’t the only one affected by their exchange. Something about it had shocked him, as well. She had the oddest notion that for a single flicker of time she had been looking into the man’s very soul. She had caught a glimpse of a well of anger and loneliness trapped inside him. An aloneness so extreme that it seemed far removed from any mere lack of human companionship, to the point of being another emotion altogether, one that would make others cringe in terror.

She didn’t have the sensation of reading the man’s thoughts, there was no tingling awareness of any sort of telepathy or mind transference; she knew that feeling all too well. This was more simply and starkly a case of knowing some facet of his innermost feelings. Nothing anyone said could have persuaded her that she was wrong at that moment. What she’d seen, what she’d felt, was an intimacy as strong and bonding as the marriage of night and day, as sharp and poignant as a final farewell.

Something flashed in the man’s eyes and as abruptly as he’d pulled her into the depths of his gaze, she felt released, or more accurately, thrown aside. She had shut her mind to him, but now, brusquely, he was wholly closed to her, as well. He was once again a stranger, and all she could see in his unusual eyes was her own reflection. She shuddered in relief.

He turned from her then and, without having to ask anyone to clear the way, walked through the group that parted for him as they might have for a god…or a monster in their midst. He drew a deep breath, shook his hands out to the side of his body like a fighter preparing for the ring, then slowly knelt over the wheezing mechanic.

It wasn’t until she saw him kneel that Melanie realized he wasn’t carrying that extension of every country doctor’s arm—the medical kit. He had come to aid this mechanic with no more than his bare hands. Or, Melanie thought a little wildly, with his pale, hypnotic eyes.

He was the one. He had to be. Teo Sandoval, a telekinetic whose powers had been strong enough to frighten the PRI, perhaps the only man on earth who could help her save her son from their designs.

Behind him, around him, the odd collection of assistants and relatives made the index finger-over-thumb sign against evil despite their avid gazes. Melanie saw with some sense of irony that now that he wasn’t looking directly at them, all strained to see everything this unusual man might do.

To Melanie’s wonder, then consternation, he appeared to do nothing at all. Then he gently pulled away the mechanic’s bloodied shirt, exposing the ravaged, lacerated chest. Melanie bit her lip to keep from groaning in horror.

El Rayo then raised both hands over the man’s chest and flexed his shoulders as if steeling himself against a great ordeal. A multivoiced sigh rippled through the anxious crowd. As if that were a signal of sorts, El Rayo lowered his rock-steady hands to lay them directly on the man’s bloody chest. Again Melanie had to hold in a cry of instinctive protest.

Though his back was to her, she could see a shudder seize him and shake him as violently as though he were caught in a tornado. A moan escaped the mechanic’s wife and her baby whimpered once, then all were silent again. Even the winged denizens of the forest seemed to be holding their breaths.

Unconsciously, Melanie had drawn closer, and now took another step forward, as much to see better as to offer whatever assistance she might have to give. Pablo’s arm shot out to restrain her. A work-roughened hand encircled her wrist.

“No, señora,” he whispered. “Wait.”

“What is he doing?” she asked, and though she had only breathed the question, she was shushed by the older woman flanking the mechanic’s wife.

“Wait,” the attendant said again, and turned his gaze back to the tableau at their feet.

As if rigidly locked in a battle as ancient as the mountains themselves, the stranger beneath her seemed frozen over the dying mechanic. Ignoring both rain and the people crowded near him, his concentration was solely and absolutely on the man under his hands.

Melanie had the disorienting feeling that she had experienced the merest hint of that concentration just seconds earlier when they had locked gazes. And a dim part of her wondered what his hands would feel like against her skin, and if that deliberation of mind and soul would accompany his touch. She shook her head as though the movement would rid her mind of such unusual imagery.

From the reaction of the crowd, and from the rumors she’d heard, read about, back in Pennsylvania, Melanie half expected thunderbolts to shoot from the rain-heavy sky or for the ghost clouds to come snatch the mechanic and his odd healer from their midst. But in actuality the rain only continued to fall softly and silently, the ground grew muddier, and the people standing around got wetter and colder.

Somehow, to Melanie, this seemingly prosaic attitude of Mother Nature’s only strengthened the illusion of magic that was transpiring before her very eyes. A contrast, nature’s indifferent energy versus that of the man at her feet. She felt as though she were watching a play that had been written in the Dark Ages, but was seeing it unfold in another country, another time.

And in watching this bizarre spectacle wholly at odds with all she had known to be true before, Melanie trembled. Could it be true? Could this man really heal with his touch? She suspected—no, she knew—he would, if by no other means than sheer force of will.

The thought sobered her. And made her hopeful for the first time in six months. Could Chris ever learn to harness his talents for good, for tremendous good, instead of making his toys dance, and instead of the sorts of goals the PRI had in store for him?

She dimly pondered what she was witnessing: an old-fashioned, often disputed healing. Even as she realized the implications of this “healing,” she wondered, almost in anger, what, if it was true, this man was doing in the backwoods of nowhere. Why hide such a gift? If he was indeed such a healer, he should be out in the world helping millions, hundreds of millions.

She remembered the notes on his telekinetic abilities, remarks recorded when Teo Sandoval had been only some nineteen years old and as wild and furious as a trapped mountain creature. And then she remembered the detailed description of his destruction of one entire wing of the PRI. That he hadn’t killed anyone had been a miracle in and of itself. The PRI scientists had termed him “untrainable,” “irredeemable,” a barbarian with untold powers. When he’d fled the institute, no one had tried to stop him. Nor had they done anything to stop the annuity the PRI had established for his father and his heirs when he essentially sold Teo to the PRI almost fifteen years ago. As Tom had tried doing with Chris.

But with such powers, such a tremendous gift for healing, how could Teo Sandoval remain at the edge of nowhere, allowing pain and misery to exist in the world, when by a touch he could alleviate so much?

More than that, he should be out in the world helping children like Chris learn to live with their unusual gifts. Keeping them safe from being exploited as he had been. Would she be able to persuade him to help her? To protect her son and teach him how to live with his double-edged gifts?

She felt that sense of helpless anger coalesce into determination. How dare he linger at the edge of oblivion when the PRI was threatening to take her son away, tear him from her against her will, shunt him away into some frightening institution simply because he was different…and then try to use his unusual talents for their own desires? This man, if he was indeed Teo Sandoval, had endured a similar childhood. How dare he ignore other children like him?