The Fall of Never(86)

I would do anything for you, Marie, Carlos thought suddenly. I would do anything in the world without ever thinking twice. Maybe I am a hero after all.

“Daddy…” Marie whispered, her voice broken by silent sobs.

“You see?” Nellie said. “We can make some things right, only if it is in our own heads.”

“Yes,” Marie sighed. “Yes-yes-yes-yes-yes.”

Nellie’s left arm stirred beneath the blankets. Carlos saw a hump rise, fall, rise again. In utter amazement, he watched as the old woman slid her paralyzed hand out from the blanket and carry it shaking across the bedspread. Her eyes still closed in concentration, she managed to work her bent and crooked fingers apart, worked them closed, worked them apart again.

She’s moving that arm and that hand with her mind, he understood. It goes against everything I’ve ever come to understand and believe in, but here it is, and she’s doing it with her mind. She’s controlling her own brain. She’s unlocked some secret door and now she’s in control.

With mounting astonishment, he watched as Nellie brought her paralyzed hand up to the swell of Marie’s belly, placed it right in the center. It was the most tender action he’d ever witnessed executed by another human being. He was confident that there was actual love in that touch—love and caring and compassion and something akin to sympathy.

“Let me inside,” Nellie whispered then—and Marie’s sobs hitched in her throat. She became silent. Her body jolted the slightest bit—rigid and briefly insecure. A strong whiff of citron rushed Carlos, so powerful that he had to take a step back once he realized it was actually emanating from the old woman. Even Josh, who had remained largely nonexistent throughout, stood and backed away from the bed. Hands on his hips, Josh faced the curtained window.

My God, Carlos thought, I can actually feel it.

And he could…although he didn’t understand exactly what it was he was feeling. A sensation? An electrical charge in the air? It was like standing in the synapse of some powerful, organic machine, as it fired currents right through his body.

—brain—

He was cold, he was hot. His skin was crawling, was sweating, yet he was shaking from a coldness at the pit of his stomach. And it wasn’t just him: across the room, Josh had buckled against the wall, shivering with his head tucked down, his chin pressed against his chest. Whatever power was here—was being created by Nellie—had filled the entire room. There was no describing it, no understanding of what it meant to even feel it pass through his body, yet somehow its very own lack of definition was also its confirmation. And if he concentrated, he could almost pick up glimpses— (pocket fear this cavern this body this blood this safe pocket)

—of ideas and notions and thoughts that were not his own.

The human brain has capabilities we will never fully understand.

His mind reeled.

(safe-safe-blood)

(this baby is going to die)

Marie jerked forward in her chair, her beret falling off her head, hair spilling out. Her free hand broke into a claw, pitched upward and outward as if to strike some unseen figure. She moaned. Fell silent. Shrieked—once, twice. The clawed hand swatted at the air to her left and she jerked her body forward in the chair again. The rigidity of her posture suggested bands of tense muscles, of cramped fingers and toes.

Carlos, fearing his wife would unintentionally knock herself off the chair, rushed to her side. He froze when he saw her face.

There was pain there, etched in every line of her face, every wincing crease of her eyelids. Her lips were pulled back from her gums, her teeth pressed tightly together. She was sucking wind through her teeth—he could hear it: shhhhhhhhhh!

“Marie…” His own voice sounded dead, a blown amplifier speaker.

Trapped inside the vacuum of her mind, she did not react to his voice.

He reached out and clamped his hands down on either side of her face, trying to force her lips closed, yet only succeeding in producing a grotesque grimace. He repeated her name over and over again, although he could not be certain if he were shouting or whispering. Like a stone gathering momentum down a hillside, he felt something shift and pitch forward inside his gut—as if the floor had just given way. Beneath the palms of his hands Marie’s flesh sent electrical vibrations up his arms, his shoulders, straight to his brain.

“Damn it, help me!” he finally shouted. “She’s hurting!”

Josh was buckled over against the far wall. At the sound of Carlos’s voice, he eased his head up part way, strings of greasy hair hanging before his eyes. He was shaking, his entire body wracked with tremors.

“Goddamn you, Josh!”

“She’s—” Josh began. His words died in the air moments after they were spoken.

“Help me!”

Nellie’s withered old hand caught Carlos’s attention at that moment. The old woman’s fingers were bent into crooked hooks, pushing forcefully against the swollen flesh of Marie’s abdomen. And for one wild instant he imagined Nellie’s fingernails elongating and piercing the flesh of his wife’s belly, a spreading stain of blood appearing across the bottom half of the rose-colored blouse she wore…and those fingers going deeper and deeper inside his wife, probing, searching, tearing at her womb. And in that crazy instant, he realized the irony of such a situation—that Nellie’s touch would suddenly and undoubtedly result in the death of his son and perhaps his wife too…that perhaps the prophecy merely required the prophet’s own fulfillment and life was just a sick and twisted circle…