The Meridians(69)

She rushed back to Kevin's room, where the light was still on, feeling suddenly as though she was being led by some invisible force, by some benign power that was interested in helping her through this night and through the trials that she and Kevin had been facing. She felt like a prophet of old, led by God and not knowing beforehand what he was going to do.

Kevin was still sleeping peacefully, though once again when she tried to rouse him she met with no success. So she returned to a position near the light switch, and flicked it into the off position.

The scream began again. This time it was not only terrifyingly loud, but anguishingly familiar. The voice was, without a doubt, that of Kevin.

But how? Kevin was sleeping. Or was he?

Lynette flicked the power button on her flashlight, then shone the high-powered beam at her son...and gasped. She literally rubbed her eyes, so unsure of what she was seeing that even a cartoonish denial of what the vision before her seemed to be not only appropriate, but required.

There were two of Kevin. He was asleep before her, and yet not asleep. Her son had his eyes closed, and yet open. She felt like she was looking at a double exposure of a film negative. On one exposure rested the boy she knew and had seen, her Kevin, sleeping without care or concern.

But the other exposure, the other image was a vision of pure terror. He had Kevin's eyes, his hair, his facial expressions - he was even wearing the same pajamas. But where "her" Kevin was quietly sleeping, this Kevin was sitting up in his bed, shrieking and screaming so hard that she could hear his voice growing raw with the force of the banshee wails issuing forth from his young mouth.

"He's dying!" screamed the other Kevin, the ghost-Kevin, and Lynette dropped her flashlight in shock. The light fell to the floor and rolled around, casting strobe-like shadows around the room that disoriented and frightened her as her son/not son did something that he had never done before, never in all his life with Lynette: he looked right at her, right into her eyes, and completed a full sentence. "He's dying, Mom! He's dying, right now, if we don't save him he'll die for sure!"

Lynette realized that she was crying, though whether at the thought that her boy was speaking or at the terror in the phantom child's voice she could not have said. "Who's dying?" she cried back. "Who's dying, Kevin?"

And Kevin said the name, the one name that Lynette dreaded more than any other: "Scott, Mom! We have to save him."

"How?" she shrieked back, her own terror ratcheting up as she saw the agony and fear that was so palpable on this other-Kevin's face. "What's going on?"

Then the screaming stopped. Utterly, completely, it stopped. The phantom-Kevin looked at her for a long time without moving, so completely still that it was as though he had died and rigor mortis set in instantly. Then he laid down. The two images of Kevin merged, becoming one sleeping boy.

Then the most terrifying thing of all happened. Her boy - and it was her boy, undeniably her own son, his face marked by the purity of expression and innocence of visage that were one of the signal hallmarks of his autism - sat up.

He looked at her. He looked straight at her.

And he spoke. Not with the depth of expression and level of maturity that he had displayed in his other form, his screaming form. No, his words were simpler, delivered more haltingly. But no less frightening for all that. Indeed, the simplicity with which the words were delivered if anything added to the terror that had gripped Lynette's spine and squeezed it like a slithering tentacle that moved between her vertebrae, sending shivers convulsively up and down her body.

"Gray man's going to kill Scott."





***





33.

***

Lynette did not think she had ever moved so fast in her life. But then, never before - not even when Robbie died - had she been so completely in the thrall of a terror that lent fleetness to her flight.

She rushed to Kevin and grabbed him, practically swallowed him up in an embrace that lifted him right off his bed. Kevin did not protest, uncharacteristically calm about the intrusion into his personal space, but rather let her propel him into her arms, ratcheting his thin legs around her waist, and then allowing her to move him out of the room with no fuss whatever.

Not that he was silent, no, for he maintained a steady chant throughout the entire process.

"Gray man's going to kill Scott. Gray man's going to kill Scott. Gray man's going to kill Scott...." And on and on, an unstopping litany of death and terror that her son was singing into her ear.

She grabbed her car keys off the small hook above the kitchen sink where she always kept them, then maneuvered Kevin so she could hold him with one hand, and with the other she grabbed his laptop. She did not know why she grabbed the device, not consciously, at any rate. But there was definitely something within her that said having it would be not only important, but critical in the time ahead.

She ran with her son into the night - thank the Lord it was still summer, if it had been winter the entire process would have been delayed by a need to get coat and shoes for him, not to mention cool-weather garb for herself - and got them both into the car. Normally she put Kevin in the backseat, because it was safer for a child to travel there. But not tonight. Tonight she put him in the front passenger seat, for she felt that he would be her navigator.

She only hoped that she would be able to understand his directions when - if - they came.