Black Lightning

CHAPTER 58

“Dad? Hey, Dad, is something wrong?”

The words hovered on the fringes of Glen Jeffers’s mind, not quite penetrating. From his place in the Saab’s passenger seat, Kevin looked worriedly at his father. Then, just as Kevin was about to speak again, the words sank in, and Glen glanced over at his son.

“No, everything’s fine. We’re almost there.” He sounded confident enough, he knew, but Glen wondered how much truth there was to what he’d said. The fact was, he wasn’t really fine; hadn’t been since he’d gotten up this morning. Almost as soon as he awakened he had a feeling that something was wrong, that maybe he shouldn’t take Kevin fishing after all. But when he’d suggested postponing the trip until the following weekend, the look of devastation on his son’s face had quickly changed his mind. Besides, when Anne had asked him what was bothering him, he hadn’t been able to tell her — indeed, he hadn’t even been quite able to figure it out himself. All day yesterday he’d been feeling fine. There were no repeats of the blackout he’d experienced on Thursday, and finally he’d decided the vague sense of unease he was feeling wasn’t worth disappointing Kevin over. By the time the two of them had actually gotten into the car and headed east across the Evergreen Point bridge, he’d felt much better. But as they’d moved farther east, passing through Redmond, then continuing on out toward Carnation and Fall City, he’d started to experience a strange sense of déjà vu — strange because it wasn’t exactly that eerie feeling that what was happening right at the moment was a perfect repeat of something that had occurred before. Rather, the experience Glen was having this morning was something else, not a flash of familiarity, as though something was being repeated, but a stroke of anticipation, a feeling that he was about to repeat something.

Something that had given him great pleasure, and that even now, even when he couldn’t quite grasp what it was, still sent a shiver of excitement through him.

He glanced over at Kevin, and an image flashed through his mind, disappearing so quickly he was almost unaware that it had happened at all.

Yet the memory of it held.

A heart.

A human heart, which he was holding in his hand. Where had it come from?

Then he remembered the experience he’d had two days before, when he imagined himself staring down at the naked torso of a woman, then watching helplessly as he cut her chest open.

Her heart? Had he taken her heart out? His stomach twisted with revulsion merely at the thought, and he felt a burning sensation as bile rose in his throat.

But it hadn’t happened! None of it had happened! It had only been a horrible nightmare, or a trick of his imagination. Hadn’t the psychiatrist told him it couldn’t possibly have been real?

He shut his mind to the terrible image, and when his eyes threatened to turn toward Kevin once more, he forced them to stay on the road ahead. Now they were starting up into the mountains. To their right the river cascaded down its rocky channel, frothing white as it roared over broad rapids.

“Where are we going, Dad?” Kevin asked, gazing anxiously at the tumbling waters. What would happen if he slipped while they were fishing? He could swim, but not really very well. “We’re not going down there, are we?”

“Another couple of miles,” Glen said. “There’s a campground. We can park there.” A campground? he thought. What campground? He didn’t know of any campground. But a few minutes later, as he came around a bend in the road, he saw a sign with the familiar graphics of a tent, a picnic table, and a hiker, with the phrase 1 MILE emblazoned below them. Glen felt his hands turn clammy. How had he known it was there? Was it possible that somehow, in some way he couldn’t fathom, the dream had been real? No! It had to be some old memory from one of the drives he, Anne, and the kids had taken over the years. That must be it — although he had no conscious memory of it, the campground must have registered on his mind long ago. He slowed the car, ready to turn in when the side road became visible, but as he rounded the next turn in the road, he saw a police car blocking the entrance, and a State Patrolman waving him on by. As they passed, he was barely able to catch a glimpse of several other police cars parked in the lot at the end of the narrow lane.

“What’s happening, Dad?” Kevin asked, twisting around to stare out of the back window. “Can we stop and find out? Maybe a bear got someone!”

“We’re not stopping,” Glen told Kevin as the boy faced forward again in his seat. “And fasten your seat belt, okay?” He glanced over at Kevin, and as his eyes fixed on his son, he heard a voice in his head:

Remember the cat?

Glen tensed, his fingers tightening on the wheel.

We could do it, the voice whispered. We could do it, and no one would ever know.

Suddenly Glen’s eyelids felt heavy and the road ahead blurred. A fogginess began to settle over his mind, and he felt sleepy. If he could just close his eyes for a—

No!

He jerked his eyes open, sitting straight up in the seat. No blackouts! Not today! Not with Kevin here with him. He pictured the car careening off the road, hurtling through the guardrail to plunge into the river a hundred feet below, and just the image was enough to send a shot of adrenaline into his bloodstream. As the heat of the hormone spread through his system, his heart began to pound and the strange lassitude that had settled over him while the voice whispered inside his head evaporated.

A new sign appeared ahead. Even before Glen saw it clearly, he knew what it was — a sign indicating a side road a quarter mile farther up.

He would turn there.

A few moments later, as he came closer to the narrow track leading off to the right, he once again experienced a strong sense of déjà vu; this looked exactly like the place where he’d dreamed he was fishing.

Fishing nude, with a vague memory of having killed a woman, of having opened her chest, of having—

No! It had only been a dream, and Dr. Jacobson had found rational sources for every image in it! It wasn’t real — none of it! Braking harder than he’d intended, Glen turned the car onto a steep road that wound so closely through the trees that branches scraped against both its sides.

“What if we can’t turn around?” Kevin asked, instinctively ducking as a branch slapped against the windshield in front of his face.

“Don’t worry about it,” he heard his father reply. “I’ve been here before. Lots of times.”

Something in his father’s voice caught the boy’s attention. Kevin’s gaze shifted away from the trees.

The eyes of the man and the boy locked for a moment, and then Kevin looked away.

There was something in his father’s eyes he’d never seen before.

Something that scared him.