The Fixer of Broken Things (Genre-Bending Horror that will end world hunger!)

“Having a child is a transformative experience,” the doctor said by way of greeting. “Until the moment it comes squealing into the world, things are in a constant state of flux. And then she’s there, in your arms, and all the variables lock. Your path becomes certain. Everything for the child. This vulnerable little God that must be clothed and fed and guarded from from the perils of the world.”

Agent Dimitry Klesch studied the doctor through the rain, a balding man with a thick neck and broad shoulders more fit for a cornfield than a hospital. His eyes were sunken with fatigue, and his hands trembled as he hefted the luggage into his trunk. 

Klesch moved to help, but the doctor waved him off.

“It’s the least I can do, Agent Klesch. I know what a pain this is. Seattle and its rain.” He paused before the open door. “But there are worse things here than weather. As you will see.”

*

Inside the Mercedes it was straight to business. “When did the disturbances begin?”

The doctor shrugged, pulling out of Seatac airport. “Who can really say when something starts? She was three years old when the fixing started.”

“Fixing?”

The doctor nodded. “That’s what we called it. Her comprehension of spatial deduction and mechanics were off the charts. It was my wife…” his lip curled and shivered. “Laney saw it first. Alayne spilled cheerios all over the carpet. Laney was trying to use the vacuum to clean them up. But it wouldn’t work. She plugged it, unplugged it, changed outlets, even checked the breakers, like I’d shown her...”

Klesch stared blankly, wondering what this had to do with anything.

The doctor shook his head. “Then Alayne pointed to the remote. Laney thought she wanted it, you know, to click through channels (she did that sometimes) … only when Laney picked it up, it was heavier. That’s when Alayne pointed at the vacuum and started to stomp. Laney didn’t know what to make of that; she tried turning the TV on, but the screen stayed black. She must have thought everything in that damn house was breaking. She threw it on the ground and stormed away to call me. But when she turned, Alayne had it in her little hands. She had it pointed at the vacuum. And she was smiling. Not a child's smile, Agent. A knowing smile.”

The doctor's voice had taken on the quality of a failing tension wire. 

“When the vacuum roared to life, Laney fainted.”

Klesch blinked. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither did we. Until we called the cable repairman and he told us our TV censors had been removed. He thought we were having one over on him; said it was a job that required small tools … or small fingers, I thought much later. Can you guess where we found those censors, Agent Klesch?”

Klesch released a shocked puff of air from his nostrils. “That’s incredible.”

“Incredible,” the doctor agreed, though his eyes were dark with mystery. “Our girl. The little genius.”

*

They drove in silence. There was an ominous pall to the countryside, the trees crowded like starving beggars, the sky a polished guillotine of sleet.

And the doctor…

His hands were trembling. In the rain he’d had excuse to shine. But here, in the car, with the heater humming, his bald head was beaded with sweat. Klesch didn’t like his eyes, the way they hid within his skull, snapping to points along the roadside. The doctor had the air of a man expecting to be ambushed.

Or else, already chased.

“You alright?”

“My nerves look worse than they are.” The doctor smiled. “Let me continue. My condition bares explanation.”

“By all means.” Klesch eyed him, leaning back against the seat, glancing at his phone. He suddenly realized he hadn’t told Leslie where he was going or how long he’d be away. The Firm had given him only a name and number. An interest to our work, the email had said, with a set of printable airline tickets. He wondered if the doctor had been vetted, if his address was on file. He told himself to stop being paranoid, but there was a smell now. In the car. An ancient chemical that elicited reactions buried deep in the Reptilian Brain. Were he a dog, the hackles along his spine would be erect.

“We took her everywhere. Neurologists. Behaviorists. Spiritualists. Psychoanalysts. If there’s a list out there somewhere, I’m sure we crossed off more than half the fields. None of them could find a defect. In the labs she was sweet, innocent. She was a baby. But both Laney and I knew our little girl was far more.”

“You say that like you're afraid.”

The doctor offered a sardonic smile. “Fear is the bedrock of emotion. Far older than love or reverence. Perhaps guardianship is its only equal. But the two are married, you see. We guard what we fear to lose; and, on occasion, fear what we’ve been charged with guarding.”

They turned right onto a rural highway, passing a gravel truckstop with big rigs lined like abandoned trains. A fat man in a denim jacket turned to watch them pass.

“Her focus was mechanical in the beginning. When she was five, she rerouted our entire breaker to a Light-Up-Larry.”

“A Light-Up-Larry?”

“It’s a toy.”

Klesch just stared.

“I know. Any student of electrical theory will say it’s impossible. But Alayne did it. Every time she pressed the buttons on Larry’s stomach a different part of the house would engage. That wasn’t the most interesting part—”

“No?” Klesch said this automatically, trained to keep conversation going.   

 “—The most interesting part came when we got our bill.” The Doctor turned. “She knocked the kilowatt usage down to zero.”

Klesch had to stop himself from smiling. Up until this point he had believed the doctor to be disturbed, possibly dangerous. Now he had the truth of things. The man was like so many he’d been sent to investigate, hungry for celebrity to the point of delusion. They lived thankless lives, paying dues that went unsung, raising families that squandered their contributions with ingratitude, until the desire to conquer mediocrity became an infection. They told small lies, at first. Braggadocio. But finding themselves wanting, finding the glances received in answer to these fabrications lukewarm at best, consumed with the need to outdo themselves, the stories became their truth, the fictions their reality; and finding no one else to tell, having exhausted the attentions of their social circles, the need became reckless, until…

They called The Firm. 

“So your daughter did what, exactly?”

“She found a way to power a 220 volt breaker panel through four C-Cell batteries.”

Klesch took a moment to smooth the wrinkles of his outrage for being dragged out here, to Seattle, in the goddamn rain. “You understand how that sounds? In the wake of the energy crisis...”

The doctor grew morose. “Of course I know how it sounds. But I’ve got the utility bill. I’ve got my hourly sheet from the Hospital during the same month, proving I was in town. I have the pizza delivery receipts with my street address, from the nights we ordered takeout. We weren’t eating by candlelight. All of it corresponds. I’m not a fool. I’m a doctor, a capable man. Science is only superstition without data.”

Klesch decided it was no use. “Plenty would jump at the chance to study a prototype like that.”

“I called the Department of Power. Brought them in. Do you think they tested it? No. They laughed. They looked at it and laughed at me.” His large hands grinded the wheel. The sweat had spread to his underarms, the blue fabric puddled, almost black. “I don’t appreciate being laughed at.”

And there, in a flash, was the danger, shining in his eyes, in the diamond flash of teeth.

“I’m not going to laugh.” Klesch’s heart beat faste. Perhaps he'd miscalculated. He turned toward the window, alarmed to see them heading deeper into the woods. There was no traffic, no houses. The sun was going down. “My employers train me to be incredulous. Are you aware how many calls we get? Pictures? Handwritten accounts by people who hold offices and esteemed positions such as yourself? And are you aware how many of them turn out to be hyper-zealous in their assessment of the supernatural? I understand your frustration—believe me, I do. But I need you to remain calm. Give me facts. No more or less than facts, doctor. I’d sooner have you drive me back to the airport than become the straw that breaks your back. I’m here, in the rain, two thousand miles away from home, to see if what you say is true. I'm the one risking time and convenience. These are my protocols. If they’re a problem, then we’re done here.”

Klesch was surprised by the calm in his voice, the authority. Leslie, who claimed he was too sheepish when dealing with confrontation, would have been proud.

The Doctor chuckled under his breath. “You’re the one who’s afraid.”

*

Pine and fir and hemlock stabbed the gunmetal sky. Klesch was aware of his situation with every nerve ending, a dull pulse keeping tempo with the potholes in the road. He wished he’d never come, and yet the reality of his trembling body kept his mind from wandering too far . They were heading deeper into the woods.  And worse:

His phone was out of service.

He checked again, keeping the screen between his thigh and the passenger door.

The Doctor turned, grinning. “Satellites don’t like this part of Washington.”

The malice—the hidden pleasure—of those words cut Klesch to the bone. The agent’s face went cold. He turned to the rolling hills beyond the window, where Mount Rainier thrust white and powerful from between the tall black trees. The sight of it resolved him, a spike of rock unwilling to kneel to the forest surrounding it. The forest is your fear, Klesch told himself, but you're higher and stronger. Stand at the peak and look out. See above your terror.

He’d been trained by The Firm for such situations, but it had been years since he’d needed it. He wondered suddenly if it was a trap. That he was here, in a mad man’s car, driving deeper into the woods without a means of communication, was proof enough of the possibility.

Sanderson, his immediate superior, had become more vengeful with every completed assignment. Kelsch was good, resourceful, diligent--a model field agent. The Firm’s upper echelons had forced Sanderson to pass along their praises more than once. Klesch remembered now how the words always seemed to choke the older man, his meaty face clenched, as if he wanted nothing more than to plunge his thumbs in Klesch's eyes.

But malice and murder were very different things. It had been years since the fat globe of an administrator had gone into the field. Setting Klesch up would have required him to come himself, vet the situation as volatile, then sanction the field inquiry. No, then. Perhaps fate was the culprit here. The Gods of chaos, as Leslie was fond of saying.

Leslie. He wondered what she was doing now, if he would see her tomorrow night, if—

He strangled the thoughts before they could paralyze him. He was adroit, a quick learner, unmatched in improvisation. Resignation to failure did not exist in the ordered machine that was Dimitry Klesch.

The trees grew taller and darker. The macadam thumped and bumped beneath the tires. Klesch wanted to look at his phone, but didn’t dare. He’d betrayed his unease already. He took a deep breath and composed himself.  “How old is Alayne?”

“She’ll be nine in December.”

“You said the fixing started with mechanics, electronics, things like that. I assume her talents progressed?”

“Talents…” The doctor scoffed. “What she is—no, I can’t say it like that. She’s my daughter. Even so, there are times I think she’s something else.”

“Care to explain?”

“I don’t care to, no. But I will.” The doctor breathed. “My mother-in-law was a wanton. Not by profession … but avocation. She fancied herself a Cleopatra, pulling strangers into her palace for the night. Pregnancy and marriage didn’t curb her appetites. She contracted Chlamydia and passed the infection to her daughter. By the time doctor's realized what had happened, it had already destroyed Laney’s reproductive system. That was half the reason I married her. Where Laney saw shame, I saw safety. That must seem cold, I know. But doctors witness sickness in varying degrees. The stray bullets that fly through DNA. Cancer, degeneration, neural atrophy. I watch people devolve to beasts. Who would dare bring a child into that?”

“So your wife was barren when she conceived...”

“Alayne was our miracle. But there were things about the hospital. My hospital. Things that troubled me.”

Klesch watched the man wrestle with his thoughts, sorting them, perhaps engineering another lie.

“The Doctor who delivered her was a man I’d never met. I couldn’t see his face beneath the mask. But I remember his eyes. So dark they looked solid. He didn't speak, so much as whisper. Over six feet tall, with pale, loose skin. He informed us Doctor Thompson was sick, and he’d been called in from out of town. It was my hospital. I knew everyone, the staff, the doctors in Seattle, Gig Harbor, Olympia. I was a very social man. And yet I couldn’t convince myself I’d ever seen him. There wasn’t time to argue. Laney was almost fully dilated.

“I was focused, stressed, sick with anticipation. It was the most important procedure I’d ever attended. The birth of my child! The joy of hearing her cry dissolved my dread. I cut the umbilical cord, thinking, this is the beginning of my life—the true beginning. By the time Alayne was swaddled in Laney’s arms, he was gone. But the following week, when we came for the check up…”

Klesch swallowed, feeling gooseflesh rise on his neck. “Yes?”

“Thompson shook my hand and said, ‘We did it. The smoothest birth I’ve performed in years.’ I just looked at him, blank-eyed. The world stopped. It was the first time I wondered if I might be losing my mind. I was about to say something, when Laney kissed him on the cheek to thank him. She told him he was wonderful, that Alayne was perfectly healthy.”

Klesch watched the doctor struggle. If the man was lying, he deserved an Oscar. Klesch cautioned himself. Delusions were slippery fish. Madmen were mad because they believed. “And who do you think this doctor was?”

“Not who,” came the hoarse reply. “What.”

*

Branches wove into a tunnel, turning the dusk to midnight. The Mercedes slowed to accommodate the old logging road. Roots and runoff had turned the grade into a staircase.

Klesch gripped his phone so tightly he heard the plastic crackle. He clawed into the leather seat with his left hand for leverage. If the doctor tried anything, he’d slam the damn thing into his temple. "What is this place?" 

“It’s been in Laney’s family for years. She used to come when she was little. No one visits anymore. After her father died, the poor cuckold, it fell to disrepair.”

Klesch didn’t understand. The doctor had spoken of ordering pizza, of receipts and utility bills. He peered through the trees, but could see no electrical wires. “This isn't your home, is it?”

“No. You wanted proof.” He stopped the car before a leaning cabin. Pine duff was piled in drifts along the porch. A hundred leaks dripped through the rusted tin awning. “Laney never liked it here. It’s where her mother held her trysts. After Alayne was born, she developed a superstition about the place. It’s as though she thought the cabin would eat the child as punishment for her womb outsmarting the infection.”

The doctor killed the engine and stepped into the rain. Halfway to the porch he turned back, staring through the windshield with a shrug.

The keys were still in the ignition. Swinging gently. Silver and brass. Would a lunatic that meant to kill him walk into the rain with such a boon to tempt his prey? Klesch told himself to lock the doors. Vault the center console. Escape.

Or, a voice whispered, you could slam it into drive.

Klesch looked up. The doctor was still close enough to the Mercedes. A strong car. A fast car. The man had taken him against his will, ignoring his visible discomfort, toying with him. And now they were at an undisclosed location. He needed to protect himself. It was only fair, only instinct. 

Klesch reached out for the keys...

And froze. 

The Firm had been edified in search of knowledge. The field of parapsychology was all but dead, laughed out of countenance, or else disguised as PSI and garbled spiritualism loosely clothed in quantum theory. But this—something actual, testable, empirical. Had he not dreamed of this day? The moment he could step into Sanderson’s office with a folder filled with proof. Such a discovery would change history. Religions would crack. The tomes of modern science would be appended with words like ghost and psychic and extrasensory.

He was still drunk on the fantasy when he heard the door slam and felt rain on his face.

The doctor smiled with approval, then turned to go inside, motioning for him to follow. Klesch gave one last look to the dripping woods before ascending the rotten steps, porch nails groaning beneath his weight.

“Alayne started with mechanics,” he said, reaching for a key above the lintel. “But she moved on to bigger things. I take it you’ve heard of the beast of Brookhaven?”

Klesch shook his head.

“Then you’re in for a not so pleasant surprise.” The doctor must have seen Klesch’s fear, because he laughed and said, “Don’t worry. It’s dead.”

*

Inside the air was thick enough to chew. Mold. Infection. The unmistakable tang of death. Klesch put a hand over his nose. “Jesus.”

The doctor didn’t seem to notice. He walked through the living room to a covered table large enough to seat ten. Two spiny coatracks protruded from the opposite side, jutting toward the brick fireplace. It was a queer place for a table, right there in the middle of the room.

“Alayne is mute. I haven’t mentioned that. She used to walk through the woods behind our house and watch the deer. She’d leave them apples and bergs of lettuce, standing at the window and waiting for them to creep out through the trees. That was a kindness, I suppose, from a girl that showed almost no affection. She loved them. In her way.

“One day our neighbor shot a doe through its throat. Alayne was standing by the fence when it happened. He didn’t know she was there. Apparently, the deer had been eating his garden and he meant to settle the score. It was terrible. The blood got in her hair, in her mouth. She tried to save it. When I close my eyes I can still see her on her knees, jerking at its neck, trying to make it breathe.

“She cried for three days. It was all Laney could do to make her eat. We explained that deer were hunted. That they were vulnerable. Sometimes trucks ran them down. Wolves hunted those too weak and lame to run. The circle of life.”  The doctor breathed. “Well, she didn’t like that. She was outraged by the cruelty of nature. Deer have no natural prey. They’re foolish and frightened. And so she helped.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either. Nor would I dare. There’s no explanation. How she could have done it, with her small hands, no tools, no education. It’s impossible. And yet.” The doctor’s eyes lingered on the table too long for Klesch’s liking. “She took something weak and ineffective … and fixed it.”

The doctor pulled the cloth.

Klesch couldn’t speak. Not out loud. His brain was filled with a thousand humming wasps. They buzzed with words like monster and beast and abomination.  He tried to step back, felt air, and realized too late he’d somehow backed onto the porch. He saw the steps and rotten banisters tilt, saw the crowded forest shift onto the side of the world, and heard a sound in the center of his skull, like a baseball being cracked down centerfield.

For a moment he felt cold mud beneath his back.

Then the sky went black.

*

Staccato images came in flashes: the cabin windows alive with worming rain; the doctor grimacing with the sheet in his hand; the coatracks not coatracks at all, but antlers dried with carnage gone a cold and dusty brown; a hulking head, more oxen than deer, with fangs thicker than a man’s fingers; the neck and withers slabbed with rotten muscle; the legs squat pistons made for hunting; the hooves armored with battered strips of tin; and all of it crafted; stitched with steel wire; dripping between its reassembled joints.

Klesch moaned into consciousness.

His heartbeat pumped life into the world, but only dimly. It came in pulses. They were back on the road. He could hear the heater. It was next to him, then miles away, a ghost passing between worlds. He smelled blood. Iron. Almost milky. Like shampoo. His hair. He had showered last night. Now he remembered. Lindsey had been there with him, giggling as she massaged his scalp. He’d had to leave her, still sleeping in their bed. He was always on the road. But no more. The Firm had taken too much of him. He would go back. He would hold her and smell her hair and promise to never leave. He would—

A nail of fire drove into his skull.

Klesch reached to probe his swollen head, and felt his left hand pull with his right. He grunted, looking down, unable to comprehend the silver bracelets linking his wrists.

“Duck tape.” He mumbled. “You—”

“Duct tape,” corrected the doctor.

The man’s voice was wholly different. The doubt, the uncertainty, the hidden despair, had vanished. What remained was a creature delighted by its cleverness.

Klesch froze, thinking of the keys, the ignition, of his lost escape. He thought of Sanderson, of the smile the bastard would wear for weeks when news of his disappearance spread. And Lindsey, her disheveled auburn hair, her gray blue eyes; the woman whose sweat he would never smell again.

The car shifted and rippled. His thoughts were foggy, his tongue a rolling slug. “What have you done to me?”

“A sedative for the pain.”

Klesch couldn’t understand. The motivation made no sense. The doctor had displayed linear thinking, detailed explanation—Christ, he’d seen tears in the man’s eyes. What he’d initially assumed were the ravings of a madman had been what, then? A ruse?

Klesch forced the muscles in his neck to tighten until he was looking the doctor in the eye. “What the hell are you doing?”

“You ask that as if I had a choice.” For a moment the doctor looked ashamed. “Did you see it before you hit your head? The beast?”

Klesch nodded, feeling pins and needles dance along his neck.

“It destroyed more than it protected. I told her that would happen. But she’s a child. An idealist. The world is a vise that crushes dreams into a paste to be digested. We call this humility, when it’s nothing short of mediocrity. A plateau to keep us safe from daring the mountain’s fangs. What would it be to dream without limitation? To envision without occlusion. My work sanctifies life, you see. I’m bound by oath to keep a sickly child suspended in perpetual suffering, to drag a grandfather into another year of indignity, while his children change the diapers. Why?”

“They know where I am,” Klesch grunted, swallowing to keep the numbness from his tongue. “They have your name. Your number.”

The doctor ignored him. “You saw the size of it. The power. You should have seen it move. The way it crushed through saplings. I didn’t want to kill it. But hunters out for fame had filled the woods. There’d been sightings. They thought it was a moose…” He laughed. “Does a moose maul dogs? Or track its killer after smelling only the man’s scarf? No. But a deer  … risen from a shallow grave and kissed by the small fingers of a genius? A deer is quite different.

“I think she must have given it some rudiments of vengeance. Or maybe it rose with the idea on its own. Its last image was of my neighbor, the hole in its throat gushing over the flowerbed. What would you do to the man that had killed you? That had smiled as you died? Forgiven him?”

The doctor shook his head, exiting off the highway through an underpass where someone had scrawled THE SINEATER LIVES in red spray paint. “Man’s pension for forgiveness is shallow, at best. When all is warm and the children are sleeping it’s easy to dream of forgiveness. But pain and cold are different things. When life chews you like a bone, the beast alive in all of us scratches to break free.”

Klesch worked the duct tape back and forth in slow, circular motions. Clockwise. Counterclockwise. Gentle. Quiet. He kept the doctor talking, holding the man’s sunken eyes when they turned to emphasize some point. “You’re telling me the deer killed your neighbor?”

“She was an apex predator. She killed a great many things.”

Klesch would have slammed the dash, had his hands been free. “Your talking gibberish! Why am I here? Why did you call us? To show me a butchered horse? I saw the stitches. The snout. You think you’re the first person to sew dead animals together and claim you’ve killed a beast? Is your daughter even real?”

The doctor looked wounded. “You have me mistaken with someone else, Mr. Klesch. Everything I’ve told you is the truth.”

Klesch noted the demotion from Agent to Mister, and felt a cold finger slide up his back. The anger came then, like a thunderclap. “Then why the hell are my hands tied?”  

The doctor hooded his eyes and watched the road for a time before answering. “Science is a beautiful poison. It lulls as well as decimates. The transplantation of a human heart; the atomic weapon. The stem cell and the plague. But for all its power, there are things that elude it. Consciousness, for one. And intuition. Such phenomena cannot be measured.”

“Answer the goddamn question!” Klesch saw spit fleck the windshield.

“I am answering your question.” The doctor flashed annoyance. “When you fell, you hit an ugly piece of quartz. It nearly crushed your occipital plate. You were shaking too badly for me to lift you. I put a stick between your teeth while I waited for the seizure to pass. As I was saving your life, it came to me, light as air… Intuition.” The doctor smiled. “A plan.”

Klesch stopped pulling at his wrists. “You're mad.”

“My daughter is one of those beautiful poisons, Mr. Klesch.” He killed the Mercedes’ lights and pulled onto a residential street, the houses hidden behind the trees. “She must be stopped.”

“Stopped?”

The doctor turned, lips trembling. “I mean to kill her.”

*

The woods were alive with dripping as they climbed the narrow drive. It was hard to move with the sedative, and twice Klesch stumbled. His mind was rife with fog, the thoughts slipping through his fingers.

The doctor whispered as they walked. “Laney never wanted children. She tried to mother as best she could, but she wasn’t built for it. A former model, dedicated to fitness. She was built to be paraded, not imprisoned at home, dragged from specialist to specialist, wasting without sleep while the monster she’d birthed sat mute by the bedroom window. I was her strength and she was mine. Together we endured Alayne.

“But the child always hated her. I sensed it from the start. Laney would lose her temper. She’d try to be sweet, but her frustration overpowered her. Sometimes she struck Alayne. I’d hear it in the silence. Like a whip.” He shook his head. “I’d warned her, but she didn’t see Alayne through my eyes. The menace. The awful brilliance. She was convinced it was a rare form of autism, that Alayne was a savant.”

The doctor froze at the porch, taking out his keys. Klesch watched them tremble in his fingers. “But you see, Alayne was a fixer of broken things. She saw her mother struggling to play house, and so she automated the vacuum. She saw the inefficient distribution of energy and so she rewired the entire system. The deer was weak; she made it stronger. But us… Human beings. Ruled by opinions and whims and fears of moral punishment. What would we be with only logic to govern us? Would we kill the populace to ensure the sustainment of earth’s resources? Would we snap the necks of infirm children to spare them a life of suffering? What would our society be without emotion?”

Klesch felt his legs trembling.

The doctor disengaged the lock, hesitating with his hand on the knob. “Not all the poets of the world could dream such a nightmare.”

*

The house was dark, but for a flickering tube of light that spanned the entire length of the vaulted beams. It was unlike anything Klesch had ever seen, fluid and alive. It was not precisely plasma, but some other element entirely. It was cold against his skin, drawing him closer, until he was standing in the center of the room with his face pitched toward the ceiling.

“Don’t,” the doctor whispered. “Stop!”

But he couldn’t. His neck was fixed, his compacted scalp burning from the wound. “What is it?” he whispered. “It’s so beautiful. It’s…”

“—the thing that stole my wife,” The doctor jerked him back. “Here. Wear these.”

Klesch looked down at his hands and saw the glasses. A clear orange composite—the kind of thing a construction worker might use to shield dust. When he looked up, he saw the doctor was already wearing them.

“Put them on, dammit. And be quick about it.”

Klesch slipped them on and felt the intoxicating sensation slip away. The pain came back. Then the fear. He looked around the house, saw the walls draped with wires, pieces of piping fastened with electrical tape, gutted hard drives and panels stretching as far as the eye could see. “What is all this?”

“Shhhh.” The doctor walked ahead, motioning for him to follow. “Honey? Alayne?”

The house was silent.

“Honeeey? Alaaaayne? I brought you something.”

The doctor slipped a hand into his waistband and brought out a pistol. “I have something for you. A new toy. His name is Dimitry. Isn’t that a funny name? Hey honey? Are you—?”

A shape jumped from the closet, too fast, too strong. She grabbed the doctor’s wrist and twisted it behind his back, yanking up. There was a pop, another pop, and the joint sagged at the shoulder, falling three inches too low.

Klesch stood frozen, watching the woman work, her arms and legs moving with the twitching speed of an insect. Before the doctor could scream, she straightened her free arm into a gibbet and slammed the knife of her hand into his throat. The doctor’s legs went limp. He coughed a sheet of blood onto his chin as he slammed onto the ground. 

His eyes rolled up along his forehead until they fixed on Klesch. His lips were moving. Saying something. Klesch squinted, trying to understand, backing away in slow lurches. The words came with a whisper. And then he saw. The word.

Run.

He turned for the door with his hands still bound. The tiles moved like liquid, the walls bending out of shape. His eyes felt numb, his brain a sponge of static. There was only instinct. He tripped through the hall, slammed into the wall, and felt a ring of fire cinch his rotator cuff. The arm went instantly numb. He stumbled past another closet door, hearing the footsteps behind him, imagining the woman, tall and blonde and naked, her chiseled muscles sheathed in sweat. He had not seen her face, and now he feared to, the doctor’s words filling his mind, the wasps buzzing and buzzing.

What would our society be without emotion? Not all the poets of the world could dream such a nightmare.

He saw the open door, the rain coming in sheets beyond the floodlights. It was propped all the way against the wall. He could feel the wind, the sweet, sweet wind. And far below the driveway, the silver of the Mercedes peeking through the trees.

Footsteps behind him, closer, quicker.

“NO!” Klesch forced the ground to firm beneath him. He would see his home again. He would hold Lindsey. He would smell her hair. And there was nothing that—

The door slammed shut.

And there, against the wall, a thing impossibly pale and thin. A child with her head down. The dark brown hair hanging in clumps. Her arm was still outstretched, palm flat on the door. As he watched, it slid down with a sandpaper whisper and engaged the deadbolt.

The footsteps right behind him now.

He refused the impulse to turn. He could still hear the doctor choking to death, his weak attempts to suck air. Klesch sunk to his knees, closing his eyes, wishing it all away, praying that the Firm would send someone. Wishing…

And then the hands, small hands, on his head, probing with the deliberation of a surgeon. They were feverishly warm, almost hot. They would have to be to fuel such a brain. They drifted to his eyes, the thumbs gently sliding into the sockets, massaging the tears. That was funny, he hadn’t known he was crying. And now another set of hands on his shoulders, stronger, larger, no compassion, no comfort, only there to secure him, like a cow the moment before its throat is sawed open.

The thumbs pressed, slid upward … and then the anteroom came into focus. A face. Thin and brittle. The skin gone flaky around the lips. The child raised its head, letting the hair roll away from her cheeks. Her eyes snapped open. And there in the depths Klesch saw everything and more, the world, the underworld, myths and secrets and the fodder of dreams. He saw himself shrinking into nothing, becoming a vapor to be sucked and emptied from the shell that was his mind. But before it could take him, before the life and world he’d known could be pulled up through his pupils.

Klesch blessed the night with one last scream. 

[Note from the Author: The idea for this story came to me while I was sitting at the Friday bonfire that's impermissibly held in my yard. There was conversation, like there always is, but I was somewhere deeper, tunneling through my mind. The brain is limitless, in constant states of expansion. The capacity for longterm memory is nearly infinite. It is its own universe, untouched by instrumentation, undiscovered, unmapped, but most emphatically: misunderstood. There might well be things better left hidden in that cognitive roadmap shaped by Nature's hands. For every great creator has His secrets.]