The Forsaken (29 page)

Stanley vanished into the dim light of the stairway, avoiding the step Morgan’s frail body had broken.

The visitor spoke with his parents upstairs for several minutes while he remained against the concrete wall, the throbbing in his head and his back a constant threat.

He looked down at his fingers disdainfully, swearing at them, blaming them for their frailty, as he cracked one bone back into place. The pain overwhelmed him momentarily, making him feel suffocated. The carousel his mind was on now spun too fast for him to get off.

It felt like hours had gone by, but upon his arrival, the doctor said Morgan hadn’t been gone long. He’d merely dozed off. It seemed like the carousel had thrown him off in time to meet with the doctor, whether he wanted to be thrown off or not. Nevertheless, he was on the grass now, but it was so damp, and the smell reminded him of a basement. And then the ride operator revealed himself for real, stepping out from the corner and extending a rigid and bony hand toward him.

“Hello, Morgan. It’s time to come back to reality. Wake up, lad.” He was using a long, crippling tone, luring Morgan back from the other world. A happier world. This process happened slowly but, like all things, was eventual. In no time, his imaginary world disappeared, and the carousel gone with it.

Reality was so much crueler.

“I’m glad you came back, Morgan. It isn’t safe in that part of your mind. If you stay there too long, you grow more familiar with the other world, and if you’re not careful, you could become someone else entirely.” The doctor’s caveat was born out of calm. A voice much too calm.

Morgan’s slow reply came with tears. “Maybe I want to be someone else. Maybe I want to be someplace else. I like it there, Dr. Irons.”

38

IN SAND AND SMOKE
he passed by them.

The office waiting room occupied one elderly man and his wife. While they argued aimlessly, the secretary slid her glass window shut and rolled her eyes.

When Morgan traveled in separated particles and fractured form, he knew that it was not his own strength that gave him flight and near invisible movement. It was Azrael. The demon was swift and efficient. It was that power, that very essence that guided Morgan toward a destination, where years of waiting and sorrow might at last find fulfillment.

It was always such an odd thing to taste the air in which he glided. Was it aged? Was it full of years spent? Or was it young and corruptible?

Did it too have a soul?

Certain things stuck out. The clock stuttered over each number. The sounds of that weary couple vibrated around him. Dr. Irons waited. It didn’t matter that his door was shut; Morgan had already begun creeping through the wood grains and was taking shape within the doctor’s office on the other side.

Irons was about to begin a phone call when Morgan’s skeleton formed muscle and flesh. A face, teeth, and hands followed, and in a matter of seconds, Morgan was pieced back together, standing before the man he once put his faith in.

“And he made lame beggars walk and blind men see. Tell me, Doctor, can you see?”

“How did you get in here?”

“Shhh…I won’t tell if you don’t.”

Irons lowered the phone, startled. “If you’re here because you wish to speak with me,” Irons said, “you can make an appointment with my secretary outside. I haven’t the time to deal with you at present.”

“Haven’t the time?” In a blink, Morgan was sitting in front of the doctor. “I think you’ll make time.”

“How did you…Just
who
are you?”

No reply.

“I’m calling the authorities.” Irons’s hand shook, but he managed to punch three digits and catch a dial tone before the call went dead.

“Let’s not be rash. This is between us.” The old doctor was suddenly choking, Morgan’s grip tightening with every breath. “They’ll come for your body but not for you.”

“What the devil do you want from me?”

“You don’t remember? Can’t you see me anymore?” Morgan’s gaze went from red to its original human color.

“Impossible. What
are
you?”

Morgan’s head twitched with no response.

“I swear it, man, I do not know you. This is ridiculous. Unhand me. I…h-have done nothing wrong.”

“Still you pollute the air with your lies!”

“I am no liar,” Irons promptly countered. For a long moment, he didn’t even dare to look into Morgan’s face, his eyes. But when he did, a new revelation came. “Wait. Dear God, wait one minute. There is something…familiar. Those eyes. I
do
know those eyes.”

“Yes, yes.”

“But you were just a boy. Has it been that long? Has it really been that long, lad?”

Morgan’s power increased, and he gripped even tighter. “Now you can see.”

“Morgan Baker? You’ve come back. But not as a man, as a ghost.”

Crippling Irons onto his desk, he said, “My name is Cross, you old fool. Morgan Cross. Don’t you like the way it sounds? I stole the name from a real nice family. You’d like them. They had a daughter. And I loved her.”

The doctor’s lip quivered.

“You see, I escaped the hell you left me in. But where could I go? Hitchhiked outta here first chance I got. Can’t remember how long I was drifting, because time just kept passing, until one day it stopped and I met Naomi, by accident, at some convenience store. She probably liked my smile first.” Morgan grinned devilishly. “She…let me in. I think she’d been waiting for someone like me, to take her, to get inside.”

“Enough, please.”

“I’m about to get to the best part,” Morgan whispered, stroking a wrinkle in Irons’s cheek. “A week goes by and I’m having dinner, playing nice with her folks. Mommy thinks I’m so quiet, but she likes me still, says I’m polite, says she can see her sweet daughter winding up with someone like me. Me? What a world this is.

“So Daddy lets his guard down one night after a few beers, starts to trust me. Tells me his Naomi’s had it rough. I tell him I’ll look out for her, love her when he was out. After all, Daddy’s a cop. All those hours on the clock makes it hard to keep guard over your family, you know. Plus, I felt for Naomi, really, I did. And she did too at first. But then she didn’t fully…understand me. She didn’t love me some nights, the nights when I’d go to that carnival, the one in my head, with the carousel and the bright lights. You warned me, Doctor, yes you did. But I stayed in that place too long.”

“You’re still very sick,” Irons said. “Let me try—”

“Shut up when I’m talking to you. Morgan Baker is never coming back! He’s dead. Like Naomi. She was an accident, I swear to God. But we fought, and I got lost a little. We were by the train tracks near her house when it happened. I was calm then, but the mind doesn’t forget the hurt and the anger it endures. Doctor, I swore she slipped, got her foot stuck when the train finally came rushing by to take her from me, and I couldn’t get it out. Or I guess that’s just what my mind made up. To make me feel like I wasn’t all that sadistic. It was at the funeral that her Daddy took me in. He didn’t have a clue what I had really done.

“I took their last name when he took me in, all teary-eyed, no questions asked. Of course I’d burned any evidence that could screw up my new life. Told him I was orphaned and that I ran away from the last hellhole. Half-truths, right? Naomi’s daddy didn’t think I failed him. He wore the guilt, knew he failed at being a father. But he had a plan to pay his penance, to raise
me
good and proper, the way Stanley never could. I was his second chance. But Time passed, old man, and I slipped deeper. You know what I mean? The deeper I sank in my craving, the closer I got to the Cross family. A few years go by and I’m training like he’d done at the academy, but the craving never stopped. And I liked it.”

“So this is who you’ve…become? A psychotic? A murderer?”

“You made me and yet you dare to mock your creation? I have become so much more than you can imagine. Beneath this flesh is power.” Then, with wide eyes, “Something neither you nor anybody else can take away from me.”

Panic wore the doctor like a straitjacket.

“You can feel it now, can’t you? The world you created, spinning. You can’t breathe, can’t think. You know the truth, that no one can save you. That no one is coming for you here.”

The walls seemed to be coming closer, paintings now creeping toward them.

“I wish I could take it back, lad. I wish I could.”

“But you can’t. All this time and you never went public, never gave up this manipulating profession. I gave you time, Doctor. So many long years, I waited.”

“We can arrange…a deal. Just think about it, won’t you? Come to your senses.”

“Are you even alive?” Morgan breathed hotly over the doctor’s face. “My parents paid you a meager sum to write my fictional, happy childhood for the authorities to keep them out of prison, where they belonged. And you, weak-minded little puppet, fed them that lie!”

“Come now, Morgan, don’t…be melodramatic. We both knew how you’d end up. And yes, I made an error. I accepted their price. But look at you…You’re dement-d-emented.” The doctor struggled to speak, and he was nervous. “You’re violent at the root. If you are so great a man, fix…y-your own life, boy!”

“How quickly you turn when the fear comes to play.”

“I have lived my…life with few regrets. Perhaps I should’ve done right by you and revealed your past to the authorities, but for…w-what profit? I thought you were dead.”

“A part of me was.” Morgan let his grip loosen a bit.

“Take anything you want, but leave me. I’ll write you a check. Name your price. Or have my watch. It’s worth…several thousand dollars. Go, start a new life.”

“You’re an ugly beggar.”

“Even something like you can understand a logical transaction. Let me go. Hurting me…will…accomplish noth—”

“You just let it happen. Like my whore of a mother. You knew, and you didn’t protect me. I cannot let you live.” Morgan felt his face peeling back, the skin stretching like rubber, his eyes a haunting scarlet and jaw cracking from one side to the other. Heavy grief clouded his mind as the memories flooded back.

Irons shuddered.

“It is mine to avenge; I will repay, you miserable waste.”

Irons fidgeted with the items on both sides of his desk. He scurried to locate a pen and, with all his strength, thrust the instrument into his intruder’s throat.

Morgan tried to swallow, the movement complicated. He lunged closer and slid the pen out, licking the ooze at the tip and crushing the instrument into dust. “Not that easy. Before I slit my father’s throat, he squirmed, like this. Lied and said he loved me. People get so creative and so desperate before they die.”

Red tears slowly fell down his cheeks.

“And my mother, may she rest in peace, had a smoking problem. Smokers wind up in hell, she liked to say. It was a threat to a scared child. I might have started the party a little early. My mother never looked as pretty as she did all lit up.” Morgan smelled the old man’s neck then tickled it. “I burned her, Dr. Irons. But she didn’t suffer…I made sure she was sleeping first. Her happy pills. You gave them to her, didn’t you? To make her numb.”

“Good heavens.”

“But there was no pill to sedate me. Nothing that could make me forget.” Morgan used a letter opener to slice into the doctor’s thumb, scribbling his blood onto a sheet of paper to make his note for Jude to find. “And now, before you stands a pale horse, and hell follows with me.”

“Tiffany!” Irons finally screamed. “Hel…!”

Morgan unleashed Azrael in that moment. The demon rose to the surface like a black cloud erupting out of Morgan’s human flesh. It lunged out with one word floating over what would become the doctor’s corpse. The word was
coward
. Sweeping through the doctor’s entire body, the demon absorbed the energy and the soul inhabiting Irons’s brittle bones. Like wind, Azrael then fled and returned once more to Morgan’s cage to feast.

“I stayed on that carousel much too long, I’m afraid.”

The door creaked open suddenly. “Dr. Irons, I heard screaming in here. Is everything all…Who are
you
? H-h-how-how did you get in here?”

With a grin, the flesh in Morgan’s face began to disintegrate. Then his clothing tore and revealed a naked corpse, which slowly gave way to bone and finally dust. The frightened secretary collapsed and fainted, and Morgan vanished.

39

THE RED LETTER WAS
still damp when the secretary who had fainted, still startled out of her wits, handed it to Jude with eyes that begged for safety. He had taken too long to get to Irons’s office. Being late for an appointment had never resulted in the loss of human life—at least, not before today.

“Finally bought the farm, old man,” Jude murmured. “Maybe,
in time
, people will find a reason to miss you.” In that snapshot of a moment, he felt a different essence flow through him, the sensation no longer truly foreign to him, his bones, his heart, an essence that bled hatred purely. With new blinks taken, Jude hoped curious ears didn’t pick up the wretched static. He didn’t mean it, did he? He wasn’t that far gone.