The Fall of Never(55)

“Police! Police!”

Raintree hopped a deadfall and proceeded after the man, moving faster, although he could no longer see the figure. Arms up as protection against the whipping tree limbs, the cop ran awkwardly and without certitude, his subconscious mind already beginning to doubt a positive outcome to this situation. It was an inbred knowledge, akin to Graham Rand’s proclamation that he could tell a man was a man because he could just feel it. Instinctual. It was the basic, animalistic sensation of unavoidable doom. And it was now mere seconds away.

Out of breath and vanquished, Felix Raintree paused and leaned his great weight against a tree, his head back, his teeth chattering in the frigid air despite the sweat he’d managed to work up. He brought his flashlight down. The beam trickled over his boots. His right hand slowly slid away from his holster and to his right side, where a burning stitch had suddenly materialized.

Just a few feet ahead of him, the woods seemed to come alive. It wasn’t something he saw—not immediately, anyway—but, rather, something he felt—felt it like a white-hot pulse at the center of every cell, every fiber in his body. A sense of thereness, of an empty space suddenly and completely filled.

And then he saw the figure, half hidden behind a stand of firs.

Out of breath, he managed, “Step out. Sir. Caliban County…Police…please…step out where I can…”

Felix Raintree’s words caught in his throat.

A moment later, he was screaming.

A moment after that, he was dead.





Part Two

Figures Unseen





Chapter Fourteen


Carlos Mendes thought of blood. He thought of it when he looked at food, when he looked at alcohol, when he looked at rain washing against his bedroom windows. Mostly, he thought about blood when he looked at his wife.

He’d never been a paranoid man. And, despite his family’s strong proclivity toward the belief in the supernatural, he’d never truly been a superstitious man. Such beliefs were erroneous and without foundation, and he was a doctor—someone who’d surrendered such beliefs the moment he took his professional oath. There was nothing to be afraid of in that make-believe world of fairies and goblins and trolls; it was only once you started fearing that make-believe world was there a cause for worry. It became dangerous when you started to believe in such things.

Yet, the blood…

He knew he was imagining it, that it was all in his head, but he couldn’t shake it. It was less a vision (or a series of visions) than a version of his own personal warning. Warning him of impending doom.

He’d look at Marie and think, What’s going on inside you, my sweet? What’s going on inside your body that is making me so paranoid, so frightened? What was it that old Nellie Worthridge saw that I can’t? Can you tell me?

He’d stare at Marie’s hands and would suddenly find himself acutely aware of the blood that coursed through her veins. Or he’d watch her eat, knowing that the food would turn to blood, that it would become her blood…and then it would become the baby’s blood. Because they were now one thing, one creature, living off the same blood, the same food. Or worse—that they actually were two separate entities entirely, and that the little life inside Marie was only using his wife as an incubator, prepared to burst out once it was fully formed and ready to claw and scratch and survive on the outside. He would think of his aunt’s stories of the Jersey Devil, that hoofed, horse-faced child-monster, and he would wake up in the middle of the night with a scream caught in his throat. And Marie? She didn’t even notice. Like any woman in the throes of procreation, she had her good days and her bad days. Yet even on her bad days, she never exhibited any signs that anything was wrong.

One evening, Mendes was awakened by Marie using the toilet in the small bathroom off their bedroom. His eyes flipped open and he darted toward the half-closed bathroom door in his underwear. There was already a picture in his head: Marie, projected onto a huge screen in a darkened theater, her body covered in blood, her eyes wide and frightened and staring. On the floor between her thighs was this purple, vein-riddled expulsion that moved on its own, that was sightless and limbless yet still desperate to pull itself across the cold tile floor of the bathroom and away from the womb that had birthed it. Baby, was all he could think. Baby.

But when he entered the bathroom, Marie was standing at the sink, washing her hands. The sight of her husband swinging the door open gave her a start.

“Carlito,” she breathed.

He was immediately embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”

“These bad dreams have got to stop.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“No,” she said. “Let me take care of you. It’s not your job to always be the one taking care of someone else.”

“It’s not a big deal. Can’t even remember what it was about.” But that image still lingered behind his eyelids—his wife’s blank stare beneath the warming lights of the bathroom, blood congealing in her hair, her eyelashes…and that indescribable thing slinking across the floor, leaving behind a snail-trail of pink membrane…

Other nights, when he couldn’t sleep, he found himself sitting in his study with the lights turned out, listening to Nellie Worthridge’s voice on his tape recorder over and over again.

He managed to convince Marie to go with him to Doctor Chalmers’s office for a full examination, despite her insistence that she felt fine. When Bruce Chalmers questioned the reason for Mendes’s concern, Mendes did not know exactly how to respond.