The Fall of Never(126)

“How in the world—”

“With her mind.”

“My God…”

“Is it bad, the rest of the building?” Josh’s voice shook. “I didn’t know if maybe it went beyond her apartment, maybe somewhere…I don’t know…maybe some other places…”

“Lights in the hallway are blinking,” Carlos said, his eyes running the length of the room. The jazz record ended and the needle began bumping. “That’s about it, as far as I can tell. Where is she? Is she all right?”

“Bedroom,” Josh said, and turned to lead Carlos down the hallway. “She doesn’t look well and she won’t say anything to me. I don’t know if she can or just won’t. I think she’s scared. Do you think she could have, you know, had another stroke?”

Carlos stepped over a fallen picture frame. I’ve never seen a stroke victim blow out windows just by thinking about it, he thought. “Just let me see her,” he said.

Nellie’s bedroom was in the same state of affairs. The single window here was gone as well, the curtains billowing out like ghosts. The chair Marie had once sat in was now overturned and strewn in a corner, one of its legs busted. As he approached the bed, Carlos sidestepped the larger slivers of glass scattered about the floor.

“Nellie.” He couldn’t bring his voice above a whisper; it simply would not comply. “Nellie…it’s Carlos. Doctor Mendes from the hospital.”

“I’ve seen it,” she breathed. Her words caused him to pause in midstride. Behind him, he could hear Josh sigh with either relief of surprise at the sound of the old woman’s voice.

“Seen it?” he questioned.

“She’s in trouble,” Nellie said. “Kelly.”

“What happened here, Nellie? The windows—the whole apartment. What happened to you? Do you understand what you—”

“Not important!” she half-cried, half-croaked. She sounded as if something had lodged itself inside her throat. Her tongue lolled around inside her mouth: an obstruction. “No time…”

“What is it?” Josh said from the doorway.

“We need to help her now,” said the old woman. “We don’t have time. I need to go in after her.”

Carlos shook his head. To Josh, he muttered, “She’s talking delirious.”

“No, I don’t think so. She’s talking about Kelly.”

“She can’t go anywhere.”

“She can,” Josh said. “In her mind.”

Carlos moved to Nellie’s bedside and pressed a hand to her forehead. “She’s burning up with fever.” He placed his satchel on the bed, unzipped it. “See if she has some plastic trash bags,” he said. “Big ones. And lots of tape, Josh. Get these windows taped up, at least the one in here, okay?”

Josh nodded and slipped back into the hallway.

Carlos shook some instruments onto Nellie’s bed. He had no idea what needed to be done. “Are you with me, Nellie? Stay with me, dear.”

“Not for long,” she said. There was an odd serenity to her voice now. Carlos expected her to start grinning at any minute.

“Don’t say that.”

“Can’t stay here. Kelly…” She repeated Kelly’s name over and over again, as if committing it to memory.

“Nel—”

The old woman’s eyes began to flutter, her mouth silently working over her tongue. A clear strip of spittle ran down the corners of her mouth to her earlobes. For a brief instant, Carlos thought the woman was suffering a seizure, and he was preparing to respond accordingly…but then the wave hit him, stronger than it had been with Marie. It was a warm, electrically-charged current that emanated from her body, passed right up through his own, and diffused throughout the room. In that moment, Carlos was keenly aware of every organ in his body—every cell, every molecule, every sensation. He could feel the rush of blood washing against the walls of his arteries, could see the granulated flints of light at the base of his eyeballs, even now with his lids closed. And he could see his lids, see the insides of them and see right through them…

In a state of near-catatonia, Carlos thought, She’s opening up her mind completely now, searching for this girl Kelly, and opening all her senses. It’s like a wave, a current…but an emotion too, in a way. I can feel it—some of it is actually washing over me, washing through me—and I can almost see what she sees too, I think, and feel what she feels. Almost. It is like being in a wind tunnel, or perhaps being the copper in a network of electrical wires. There is an intensity here, a power here, that goes beyond anything I am capable of describing. Of comprehending, too.

He felt the sensation of rocketing along a skyline toward the horizon, like a bird spread out over a great sea, and he thought his heart might just swell and burst in his chest, that he was suddenly so free.

Josh returned with a roll of trash bags and a spool of masking tape and paused in the doorway.

He, too, felt it.





Chapter Twenty-Five


She wove the Caddy through the streets of Spires in the darkness. The town appeared poised and anxious all around her, as if possessing knowledge of things to come. The streets were dead, empty. And up ahead, now a studded black smear blotting out the stars, stood the wooded precipice on which the Kellow Compound sat. She steered the car off the town road and mounted the lip of the driveway that wound up the massive hillside. She did this with unconscious dexterity, her mind in complete focus, her shirt damp with the tears she’d cried.