Black Lightning

CHAPTER 54

A dim point of light, so faint as to be barely visible at all, slowly began to penetrate the darkness that had closed around Glen Jeffers’s mind. Feeling as if he were emerging from a deep sleep, Glen focused on the light, willing it to brighten and wash away the blackness that surrounded him.

Now he could hear a faint sound as well — a high-pitched keening.

The inky black fog in his mind slowly faded into gray, and the point of light spread.

The sound grew clearer.

A drill. A dentist’s drill?

Glen struggled to remember what had happened. He’d been at home. In the kitchen, reading the paper. The phone! That was it — the phone had rung.

Gordy Farber. It had been Gordy, calling to find out how he was doing. They’d talked for a moment, and then something had interrupted him.

The doorbell.

Someone had come to the door, and he’d gone to answer it, and …

The blackness had closed around him.

The sound grew louder, and the light spread further. It was brightening more quickly now.

You’re awake. The voice wasn’t loud, but although the keening sound was growing steadily more insistent as the blackness continued to fade, Glen could hear the words perfectly. It was almost as if they emanated from somewhere within his own head. It was I who woke you, the voice went on. Just as it was I who put you to sleep.

Why? The question formed soundlessly in Glen’s mind, but even before he could form it into an audible word, the voice answered it.

I needed our body.

Our body. The words stripped away the last of the fog that had gathered around Glen’s mind. Our body. What the hell was going on? With the question still half formed in his mind, pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place.

The hours he had lost.

The broken shaver about which he’d made up a story — a story that had then turned out to be at least partly true.

The things that had appeared in the house — objects that he assumed he’d bought, even though he had no memory of doing so: the fishing rod Kevin found, the new shaver he himself found. The fishing fly that could have been made of a feather from Hector and some fur from Kumquat.

Kumquat!

Now he remembered the dream. But it had only been a dream! It hadn’t been real — it couldn’t have been.

Once again the words the voice had spoken echoed in his head: Our body.

Not our body, Glen thought desperately. It’s my body. There wasn’t anyone else — couldn’t be anyone else. Whatever was happening had to be in his own mind. That was it — he was still waking up, and his mind was playing tricks on him! But now more memories were coming back to him. Making love to Anne the day he’d come home from the hospital. Something had happened that afternoon. He’d felt … what? Something odd, almost like another presence inside him.

Waking up in the hospital to find all of Anne’s files on Richard Kraven piled on the table beside his bed.

The blackouts …

Now he remembered something he’d watched on television — a woman who’d claimed to have eighteen different personalities living inside her. Multiple personality syndrome. The woman had first begun to worry because she was having blackouts. And then she heard about things she’d done. Things she couldn’t remember. Things she knew she never would have done—

The keening sound was louder than ever, and now that he could hear it clearly, Glen knew it wasn’t a drill at all.

It was a saw.

He could see the blade now. It was right in front of him. He could see his hand holding the blue-green plastic handle of a Makita saw. And beyond the saw was something else.

The upper part of a woman’s torso. A heavy woman, whose large, pendulous breasts drooped toward either side, pulling away from each other under no more impetus than their own weight.

Between the woman’s breasts, running from a few inches above her navel all the way up to the base of her throat, there was a cut.

A clean, fresh incision, perfectly straight.

The woman’s chest expanded as she drew a deep breath of air into her lungs.

The keening whine subsided as the saw stopped.

Glen watched in disbelief as his hand put the saw down and picked up a knife. A sharp X-Acto knife, like the one Kevin had used when he was working on the model ship.

The one he’d used when he was tying the fishing fly.

Glen watched numbly as his hands moved as if under their own volition. The knife traced a line across the woman’s torso, intersecting the existing incision at its base. As the knife slid easily through the woman’s skin, a line of red appeared in its wake, a line that thickened, then began to lose its shape as the blood welled from the cut and covered her body.

Transfixed, Glen gazed helplessly at what he was doing.

His hands moved again, and a third incision appeared, this one nearly spanning the space between her shoulders.

No! Glen thought. This can’t be happening! But even as his mind formulated the thought, dark, mocking laughter echoed in his head. Trying to stifle the taunting sound, Glen willed himself not to move his hands again, struggled to halt their inexorable motion. But now he felt something else — a terrible paralysis, robbing him of will, erasing his power over his own body. As he watched helplessly, his fingers went to work, deftly laying back the folds of skin as easily as they might have opened a pair of double doors.

Beneath the skin, clearly visible now, was the woman’s sternum.

Even as his hands reached for it, Glen’s mind grasped the purpose of the Makita. His fingers squeezed the switch and instantly his ears were filled with the keening whine of the whirling blade.

As the blade, no more than a silvery blur now, moved closer to the woman’s sternum, Glen struggled to wrest control of his body from the force that seemed to have seized it. Powerless, he saw the blade descend. Then the teeth dug into the mass of bone and cartilage that formed the ventral support of the woman’s rib cage.

Glen tried to scream out against the carnage he was witnessing, but his voice would obey him no more than his fingers and hands. No, he whimpered silently to himself. Oh, God, no. Don’t let this happen.

But even as he made his plea, the spinning blade dug deeper and his hand inexorably laid the woman’s torso open, splitting her sternum, ripping through the pleural membrane.

As his eyes focused on the mass of tissue that were the woman’s lungs, the darkness closed in on Glen once more.

This time he welcomed it.