Sharing The Darkness

“But he can’t just let them take Chris from me. He, of all people, knows what will happen,” she protested.

Pablo looked back at the car, his dark eyes penetrating the even darker interior. He looked more miserable than ever. Melanie held her breath as he studied Chris.

Finally he sighed heavily, muttered something in Spanish beneath his breath, and said, “Go one mile down the highway—” he jutted his chin in the direction Melanie had originally been heading “—and then turn left onto the dirt road. You won’t be able to go all the way in that car. You will have to walk. You and…your child.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.” She swiftly strapped Chris into the back seat, and locked and shut the back door. She had turned and already started to get into the car when she remembered that she hadn’t yet paid him for the gasoline. Dragging her purse over, she started to pull out some dollar bills.

The attendant waved her offering away and stepped back beneath the canting portal. “De nada,” he said, then added in English, “For nothing. You touched him. For that, I think I would pay you.”

“Thank you—” Melanie began, but Pablo held up one mud-and grease-stained hand.

“Trust me, señora, you should not thank me.”

Melanie, too dazed by the day’s events, the furious storm overhead, and with the end of her quest in sight, only put the car in gear and steered to the narrow highway.

When she glanced into the rearview mirror, she saw Chris and his dancing toys. And beyond him, standing in the furious rain, the gas station attendant. He was back there, watching her slow progress up the mountain.

Just before she rounded a curve that would cut him from view, she saw him cross himself and look up at the flashes of lightning zigzagging across the night sky.

Was he praying that Teo Sandoval wouldn’t enact retribution on him for telling her how to find him?

Or was he praying for her?

CHAPTER THREE

The sky flared as lightning bull-whipped across the sky and the resultant thunder sounded like the drums of fate, deep and heavy, reverberating with promise…or threat.

The rental Buick slid sideways and despite Melanie’s frantic attempts to correct the spin by turning the wheel in the opposite direction, it continued its revolution. She felt low brush scraping the side of the car, scratching it but also cushioning it, preventing it from going any farther afield. Almost luckily, the car died.

For a dazed moment Melanie found herself still trying to turn the wheel, still trying to see through the sheet of oppressive rain to the narrow track that made up the road to Teo Sandoval’s hideaway. When she finally realized the car wasn’t moving, that the only sounds she could hear were the rain, wind and total silence of the Buick, she had to fight the desire to simply sink onto the seat and cry herself to sleep.

But she couldn’t allow herself that luxury. If she fell asleep now, she felt she might never wake up. Her one hope was somewhere up that road and no amount of rain, thunder or even dark, possibly animal-laden, woods was going to prevent her from attempting to enlist his aid. Surely he would turn them back out into the night, into a raging thunderstorm. Reclusive he might be, but surely not inhumane.

If she told herself that often enough, she thought, she might actually start to believe it. Especially if she ignored the utter rejection and wariness she’d read in his eyes, the tension rippling through his broad shoulders. And if she forced herself to forget the photographs of the PRI’s demolished building, the stark recommendation of the PRI psychiatrist that Teo Sandoval be left alone at all costs.

Taking a deep breath, she gathered Chris from the back seat, fastening him in his waterproof coat and hood. As luck would have it, by the time she managed to drag on her own light parka, the furious rain had abated to a fine drizzle, although the sharp, angry wind whipping the tall pines to creaking protest sent what rain there was directly into her eyes.

She held Chris against her shoulder with one hand and tried focusing the flashlight on the muddy road with the other.

“Hold on to me, Chris,” she said, hitching him higher.

“Dance, Mommy,” Chris chirruped.

Melanie knew he meant he wanted his toys to accompany them, but she wished he could make her dance right then, make them both as seemingly weightless as his ever-present entourage of floating objects. Her son had never seemed heavier than at this moment with her feet slithering in the mud, her body shaking from cold and exhaustion.

But at least one of them could mentally escape the arduous trek. “Okay, honey. Dance all you want,” she said wearily.

Another flash of lightning blinded her momentarily, but it seemed farther away now, higher up the mountain. Unfortunately, that was exactly where she was heading. She paused for a moment, catching her breath, and shifted Chris to her other arm.

Even in the dark, she could see his toys in the air right in front of them, unaffected by the wind or the drizzle. Chris’s entire focus was on them, rendering him blissfully oblivious to the discomforts of their journey up the mountain. She reflected, not for the first time, that in many ways the PRI had given him a precious gift, that while they may have been frustrated and angered by his ability to close them out, his complete concentration was more a blessing than a detriment. It spared him what his mother couldn’t escape.

She resumed her difficult hike, and soon had fallen into a shambling rhythm, thinking not of the man up ahead, not daring to hope he could be persuaded to help her son—and her. Instead she found herself remembering the early days at the PRI, the lavish meals, the hushed and awed voices of the scientists. Those days had been bright with hope, tense with anticipation. They had also been before she’d discovered the murderous intentions behind their every gift.

Then her thoughts drifted to her former husband, and she again remembered the look on Tom’s face when he’d fled from her, from Chris and his unruly powers. The oddly definite final glance he’d shot her as he’d accepted the payment for revealing Chris’s unusual nature to the driven scientists, for signing away his half of their custodial rights.

She had blamed him bitterly when he’d left them two years ago, had hated him when she saw that cowardly defiance in his greedy face. But she’d never despised him as much as she did at this particular moment, trudging up a muddy hillside in the dark. On the run from the men to whom he’d nearly succeeded in selling his son.

But the two weeks of desperately seeking Teo Sandoval had helped to blur Tom’s features, crystallize his personality. She knew now that he’d always been a runner, fleeing at the first sign of difficulty, quitting jobs that were too demanding, leaving towns that seemed too judgmental. Though she hadn’t known it until long after they’d been married he’d abandoned his first wife and daughter, so was it all that surprising that he would turn tail and run at the first sign of Chris’s stringless mobile? And how could she not have expected a man who constantly sought get-rich-quick schemes to eventually try to sell his own flesh and blood for the proverbial handful of silver?

Nonetheless, she still felt the deep pain of the betrayal just as she’d felt it when Tom had left. Then, she’d only considered the abrupt cessation of sharing responsibilities, decisions. But now, thanks to him, she was trekking up a backwoods mountain road that had been turned to sliding mud by a freak prewinter rain and seeking aid from a man who could destroy as easily as he could help her, from a man who had already told her to leave, whose eyes had underscored the dangers he’d warned her about.

For a brief moment exhaustion overcame her and she stopped, considering turning back, running elsewhere, seeking asylum in some far away region. But then she smiled bitterly. No place was far enough from the PRI to be truly safe. If they could track her by no other means, they would use their stable of psychics to find her. Chris’s mother knew too much about them. She suspected even more. They couldn’t let her escape and possibly expose them. Her dreams, while perplexing, still revealed enough for her to understand that their conceived end justified any means. And those dreams told her clearly that the PRI would stop at nothing, because no one—with the possible exception of Teo Sandoval—was as powerful a telekinetic as her son. They wanted him, and would do whatever it took to get him.

She shivered, thinking of how they would pervert Chris’s innocent dancing abilities. She heard a crackling rustle in the nearby trees and swiftly darted the flashlight over the brush on her left. She saw no animal, no human, but the light wildly strafing the tree branches, the low scrub oak, somehow frightened her. It clearly revealed how terribly alone she was on this muddy road, how utterly defenseless.

Startled into action, she continued her journey. Half running, trying desperately not to slip and fall in the cold mud, and clinging to Chris with all her might, Melanie staggered up the rough trail, not even bothering to try to use her flashlight as a guide.

She was almost stunned when she realized she was no longer running nearly straight uphill, but had leveled out some twenty feet ago. She had reached the apex of the mountain and now stood in a huge, broad, night-darkened clearing.

No house broke the line of her vision, and tall, imposing cliffs rose high above an inky black horizon. The black could only mean one thing: the land dropped off sharply. She and her son were standing on what felt like the very edge of the world. Beyond the clearing on her left were a series of small, craggy hills that dropped sharply, leveling out to form the cliff edge. And judging by the width of the black strip, the cliff hovered above an abyss that might cut through the very heart of these mountains.

Had the gas station attendant knowingly sent a woman and baby to a wrong location? Was he, even now, behind her on that treacherous road somewhere? Or had she taken a wrong turn, gone right instead of left? Surely he’d said take the first dirt road to her left?

Tears of frustration, fear and abject despair stung her eyes. She blinked them back determindly. If she started crying now, she might never stop.

Just then lightning arrowed across the sky and illuminated the clearing, revealing the harsh face of the rock wall beyond the abyss, and the craggy hills facing her. Incredibly, the lightning also revealed a pair of massive wooden doors set into the lowest of the rocky hills that descended to the cliff edge.

Dear God, she thought. He lives in a cave?

Small flashes of lightning continued to flicker from behind heavy clouds, lighting the clearing with red, gold and blue flares. And still Melanie stood staring at the imposing set of doors, the narrow portal that stretched in front of them.

She looked back over her shoulder at the dark, muddy road she’d traversed to get to this spot. It looked even more imposing and dangerous from this vantage point than it had coming up.

Drawing a deep breath of the misting air, she told herself that she’d come this far, she wasn’t about to turn back now. She needed Teo Sandoval’s help. And nothing was going to make her leave without pleading her case before him. Nothing.

She straightened her aching shoulders, ignored her icy-cold and muddy feet, and pushed her sodden hair from her face. Crossing the twenty or thirty yards leading to the set of wooden doors, she knew how Puss ‘N Boots must have felt, or Beauty upon reaching the Beast’s castle—utterly terrified and equally determined not to show it.

All too quickly Melanie reached the narrow portal heralding the doors. She stepped up two wooden steps and crossed the rough planking after pausing to scrape some of the mud from her shoes. Chris’s toys stayed in midair at her side, as unaffected as ever by Melanie’s tension, the wind, the misting rain or the lightning. Would the sight of the toys affect Teo Sandoval’s decision to help her? Or would it make him even more determined that she leave without his aid?

She hiked Chris up and closer, tucking him securely beneath her head, cradling him, as much for her own security as his. Then she rapped on the massive doors. Her knuckles against the heavy wood made about as much noise as a whisper in a crowded room.

Using the flat edge of her fist, she pounded the door in a repeated series of three loud bangs. No one answered. Teo Sandoval didn’t appear. She waited for a few seconds, then redoubled her efforts. Still no answer.

She stood irresolutely for about a minute, not knowing what to do. She had focused so thoroughly on the trek to get here that she’d never once considered what she would do if he was either not at home or refused to answer his door. If, indeed, this even proved to be his home.

On the portal was a rough, hand-hewn bench and after a few seconds spent staring blankly at it, Melanie realized she was eyeing it as a place to spend the night. Nothing on earth was going to drive her back down that road, and no matter how cold it might get during the night, at least the portal offered some protection from the rain. And she could confront Teo Sandoval by the light of day.

A creak beside her made her turn. One of the massive doors slowly, ominously, swung outward. As dark as it was outside, she would have expected light from inside to spill across the floor of the portal, but instead, in some strange optical illusion, it appeared to her that the dark from the inside snaked out, spreading across the wooden planks, seemingly defying the laws of physics and filling the already shadowed portal.