The Meridians(70)

She put the car in reverse and pulled out of the driveway, moving so quickly that the car bounced, scraping the bottom of the chassis against the curb when she rolled over the small lip of the driveway into the street.

She then put the car into drive and - not having anywhere else to go - began to drive toward Scott's house.

Kevin was rocking in the seat, a jerky back and forth motion that sickened her. He looked manic, terrified.

"Gray man's going to kill Scott. Gray man's going to -"

And then the words cut off and again she heard that terrible, terrible screaming that she had heard in his room earlier. A finger came into view, pointing off to the right, but she didn't have the nerve to look at her son, for she feared that she would again see two of him. Two Kevins superimposed one over another, one of them rocking back and forth and saying "Gray man's going to kill Scott" in an almost sing-song, the other one looking at once more intellectually capable and more terrifying for the simplicity of the scream he was issuing forth.

Lynette, terrified out of her mind, spun the wheel to the right, and the shrieking stopped.

"Gray man's going to kill Scott. Gray man's going...."

She drove less than a half block before the scream returned, flying out of her son - or her son's doppleganger - with such force that she thought the windows and mirrors in the car must crack in a spiderweb of pressure breaks.

But the windows held, the mirrors maintained their integrity. And the scream continued.

She glanced to her side again, again looking only far enough to make out a pointing hand. The sight of that alone almost undid her: the hand went from solid to translucent before her eyes, as though her son were phasing in and out of her reality...or she was phasing in and out of his.

Who is real? she wondered briefly. Will I wake up in an institution tomorrow? Is any of this really happening?

But even as she asked the question, she knew the answer. The boy in the car was Kevin...and so was the other boy. Somehow she was seeing two versions of her son, one that had existed with her since birth and another one that was coming from...where?

To this she had no answer.

And the scream continued.

She again turned the wheel in line with the pointing hand beside her. This time however, the wail continued. And now she could hear two sets of voices speaking.

"Gray man's going to kill Scott, gray man's going to kill Scott..."

"He's here, mommy, he's here he's here he's here!"

"Gray man's going to kill Scott, gray man's going to kill Scott..."

"He's going to die, mommy, we have to stop him!"

And on and on they went, the gruesome chorus of death-wails so bright and horrific that they shook her brain in its skull and threatened to shake her sanity free with it.

"Gray man's going to kill..."

"He's here, he's going to die..."

Lynette finally clapped her hands over her ears, unable to take it anymore. "Stop it!" she shrieked. "Stop it, Kevin, stop it!"

And the silence that greeted her was more deafening than the tumult had been.

A single finger, wavering in and out of insubstantiality, pointed beside her. She did not look at the body or the face of the boy beside her. She was for the first time afraid of her son, and what he was. She was for the first time aware that he was truly different. And not in the "oh he's so precious" way that some people attributed to him, but different from her in some deep and fundamental way, a difference that perhaps sprang from his autism, but also went far beyond it.

Her son wrote about string theory - and critiqued it at the age of nine years old.

Her son threw tantrums - and saved lives in doing so.

Her son sat beside her in the car - and her son also lived in the spaces between this dimension and some other place, some place where he was not autistic, where he did not suffer from the developmental disabilities that plagued him on this plane of his existence.

She followed the pointing finger of her son/not-son, and saw Scott's car.

It was parked at the mouth of an alley. The alley itself seemed to shimmer and sway in front of her, as though it was made not of brick and concrete, but something more ephemeral, a dream of an alley, but not the substance thereof. The passage between the buildings was dark, moving, shadows flitting across its mouth like living creatures, like the souls of the damned.

"I can't go there," she said. "I'm afraid."

And beside her, the boy she refused to look at whispered, "Gray man's going to kill Scott, Mommy. Going to kill Scott forever."

That finally moved her. She moved to unlock her seat belt, to get out of the car, and found that she was shaking so badly she couldn't unlatch the safety device. She hitched in a deep breath, cursing herself for a weakling, but managed to slow the jittering of her hands enough that she was finally able to depress the red button that let the seat belt unlatch.

The doorhandle was the next hurdle. Not that she couldn't grab it, she knew she had the gross motor control necessary to pull the handle and get out of the car. But rather she simply didn't have the nerve to reach out and touch it. She was beside something that was both her son and not her son, sitting next to a being who was both crippled and able to function at a level beyond her, a being that made her tremble with fear. But still the car was a cocoon of safety in the strange wilderness that this night had turned into.