What Hides Within

What Hides Within
Copyright © 2013 Jason Parent

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Double Dragon eBooks, a division of Double Dragon Publishing Inc. of Markham Ontario, Canada.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from Double Dragon Publishing Inc.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Double Dragon eBooks
PO Box 54016 1-5762 Highway 7 East
Markham, Ontario L3P 7Y4 Canada
http://double-dragon-ebooks.com
http://double-dragon-publishing.com
Cover art by Deron Douglas
ISBN-10: 1-77115-002-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-77115-002-6
First Edition February 15, 2013

by

Jason Parent

He stood statuesque with fists clenched. The vein running across his temple pulsated in concerted rhythm with his rapid heartbeat. The staples holding his flesh in harmony threatened to spring from his head, the pressure beneath them mounting.

He checked the bandage with his fingers. He could swear he felt puss ooze from the wound. But his fingers were dry when he brought them down before his eyes. He dared not avert his gaze from them for fear that the mere sight of the man standing before him would ignite his rage.

Probably just my imagination
, Clive thought, calming himself. He wiped his hand on his pant leg just the same.

The smell of the sick and the disinfectant used to counter it filled the air, combining into lemon-scented ass. It made him dizzy. He looked around the room, trying to focus on anything tangible and regain his equilibrium. A gum-chomping receptionist; a row of hard plastic chairs; an elderly man with an untied shoelace; a cat clock with mischievous eyes ridiculing him as its tail click-clacked back and forth, all painted ghostly images in Clive's mind, snapshots of his surroundings viewed with uncertain clarity. At last, a plastic cup filled with unused Popsicle sticks caught his stare. He wondered if it were possible to kill a man with them. And he had one man in mind.

Only a few weeks ago, Clive Menard's life had been dull but carefree. With no aspirations or responsibilities, Clive plodded aimlessly through life, a simple man employing simple means. Tall, slender, and fairly good looking, he could have been something more than ordinary. But ordinary he was, and ordinary he liked it.

Clive was complacent in his complacency, his life without waves. Somehow, that last few weeks of his life had been caught up in a storm.

"Dr. Landenberg, you carved open my head for no goddamn reason?" Clive was hotter than mid-summer Jamaican tar at high noon. But the screaming was hotter still, a squeaky-hostile voice chanting louder and louder inside his head.

Kill the doctor! Kill the doctor!

"Not now!" Clive shouted. The outside world went quiet. His head throbbed so much that he thought he might lose consciousness. With every pulse, he wavered between reality and a surreal counterfeit. His knees weakened. His senses dulled.

Steadying himself against the receptionist's desk, he knocked over her small Dixie cup of water. The liquid ran across her desk and onto her lap.

"Hey," she whined as she scrambled for some paper towels.

Clive barely noticed. The incessant chanting of that squeaky voice and the still mounting pressure in his forehead demanded most of his attention.

Kill, kill, kill the doctor. Won't you please just kill the doctor?
the voice sung.
Take his scalpel. Raise it high. Drive it down into his eye.

"Clive?"

Clive couldn't distinguish Dr. Landenberg's voice from the inner voice's ranting. He spaced out. The blood rose in his head, threatening to re-open his wound or worse. Was this the initial stages of a stroke? Most patients were lost on the operating table. Clive thought it ironic that he could slip away in a waiting room. But nothing about his treatment had gone according to the textbooks.

In his haze, Clive wondered if Dr. Landenberg could hear the voice echoing throughout his skull. The absent look on the doctor's face showed no awareness of the sinister monologue playing out within Clive's head. How could he hear the voice when Clive couldn't even be sure it was real? The menacing melodies playing in his head seemed meant solely for an audience of one.

Clive sucked back his drool. Dr. Landenberg grabbed his arm to help him balance. Amid his convoluted thoughts, Clive wondered if Dr. Landenberg would prefer his death. Did the good doctor ponder the ways in which he could make his Hippocratic Oath utterly hypocritical?

Dr. Landenberg appeared benign, not unlike the false anomaly he had earlier diagnosed in Clive. He let the doctor prop him up in a waiting room chair.

Dr. Landenberg squatted and held Clive's head steady between his palms. He shook Clive forward and back, more likely to induce a seizure than to alleviate Clive's symptoms. Instead, it worked to wrestle Clive slowly away from his thoughts.

"Clive?" Dr. Landenberg called again. He let out a deep sigh, the sound of a man under considerable stress. Clive could only assume himself to be the cause of Dr. Landenberg's anxiety.

"What are you going to do? In all fairness, the abnormality appeared on every scan in roughly the same spot each time. The machine seemed to be working perfectly. How could I have known it was defective?"

For a moment, the unforgiving voice quieted, and the throbbing lessened, enabling Clive to catch the tail-end of Dr. Landenberg's excuses. It did little to quell his rage.

"You sawed open my skull, poked around my frontal lobe, stapled my head back together, and poorly stitched me up in a way bound to leave a scar that only Tony Montana would be proud to have, just to tell me now, in my pain-stricken, out-of-Vicodin state, that when you looked at my brain, everything appeared healthy and normal? What kind of doctor are you, anyway? I thought neurosurgeons were supposed to be the best and brightest?"

I told you to kill him
, the little voice scoffed.

"I'm not going to kill him," Clive said for all to hear.

"Excuse me?"

"Nothing, Doc. Just thinking out loud. Anyway, what do you propose we do to make this right?"

"Clive, accidents happen. I'm sure you make a mistake every now and then at your job, too. But," Dr. Landenberg said, oozing with false sentiment. "I do feel awful about all this. Would you settle for my sincerest apologies?"

"Are you fucking nuts?"

"Well, let's see. What can I do?" Dr. Landenberg rubbed his chin. It appeared as though he were pondering Clive's best interests. "I know. I got two tickets to the Red Sox-Yankees game this Sunday. I saw you wearing that Sox cap when you came in. It's sure to be a great game." Dr. Landenberg smiled like a car salesman. "You can have them if you like, and we can put this unfortunate event behind us."

"You really are retarded, aren't you? Did you see any brain damage when you were poking around in my head? Or perhaps the better question is whether you saw any brain damage not caused by you? I wear that hat to cover the large gash that you lovingly displayed on my noggin, you jackass. You just performed life-threatening surgery on me without justification or, apparently, remorse, and you want to quiet me with baseball tickets?" Clive was truly insulted. Now season passes, those may have been different story.

"I don't think I approve of your tone."

"What? You don't like my tone? Are you seriously that oblivious to your own incompetence?"

Can we kill him now? Huh? Please?

"Maybe."

Clive again failed to grasp the concept of inner monologue. He reminded himself of those people who can't think quietly, like those weird guys in grocery stores who stand in the middle of the aisle asking themselves, "What am I going to do today?" or "What movie should I rent later?"
No one gives a fuck, so shut the hell up
, Clive always thought. He prayed he wasn't becoming one of those guys. Then again, was it actually himself to whom he was talking?

"Maybe," he repeated as though he meant to say it the first time. "Maybe I should see about getting your license revoked."

"Well, a simple 'no' would probably have sufficed. I don't appreciate the threat. I think you should leave."

Dr. Landenberg sounded insulted. Clive was far beyond the point of caring.

"Fine. You'll be hearing from my lawyer."

Clive turned to leave, thinking he had said everything that he was supposed to say. In truth, he didn't even know any lawyers.

"I'll look forward to it. But before you go, Mr. Menard, there's the little matter of your co-pay."

"You can't be serious."

"Don't worry. Since there was no tumor to remove, the initial calculation we provided you has been greatly discounted."

"Go fuck yourself."

Yeah, go fuck yourself
, the miniature voice echoed. Clive exited the office, slamming the door behind him.

Nine weeks ago.

Timothy sprinted through the thick underbrush. Prickers clawed at his clothes and skin, tearing both. Wet mud from a passing shower kicked up from his soiled sneakers onto his calves and white socks. The sun's rays, blocked by tall pines and shady willows, had not yet baked the earth into solid clay.

Timothy darted from tree to tree. He frantically searched for a place to hide. She'd be coming for him soon, and he knew it. She was probably already gaining on him, not far behind at all. He needed cover fast.

He spotted a felled tree, a remnant of a hurricane whose passing had been forgotten. He ran to it. The dense, fat base of the dead oak would hide him until she got closer. For now, he could rest, but he'd need to move again soon.

Her voice grew nearer. Its soft, seeking tone and her impetuous laughter traveled as if on fallen angel wings to his uninhibited ears. She hunted him, seeming to prey upon her own excitement.

Timothy crouched into the orange, red and yellow leaves of fall's beginnings. The leaf pile was high, an unusual accumulation for so early in the season. He thought to bury himself in them. Surely the pile was big enough for it. But the smears of blood painting his legs and the droplets still running down them would act as an adhesive, accumulating plant life. His flight would be harrowed by the crinkling of dead leaves rubbing together and crumbling as they fell from his body.

There was so much blood that it startled him. He paused to check his wounds. Blood stained the leaves around him. But he felt no pain and could only find superficial cuts, no cause for alarm. At the moment, he had more pressing concerns.

His breath came out more slowly as he regained his stamina. It formed into a layer of condensation, melting in the air like steam from the mouth of a dragon. He closed his eyes and waited for the right moment to move.

The still, black water was blotted with patches of bug-covered lily pads and colonies of green algae. Closer to shore, reeds as thick as bamboo stood tall and proud, feigning resistance to a vampiric death inescapable beneath the scorching sun. No more than twenty feet away, a lone swan paddled softly across the water's surface, as if her silence made her invisible to her unwelcome houseguests.

Amid the lily pads, a dark-headed snapper poked his beady-black eyes out of the darkness, only to retreat a moment later. It left a few air bubbles popping on the surface to remind the world where it had once been. All was quiet, still, peaceful.

"I got one!" Morgan shouted, pulling back on her rod. She spun the reel with the ferocity of a wolverine attacking its prey. But the reel gave in too easily. Whatever she faced at the other end of her line had either taken off with her bait or wasn't much bigger than the bait itself. She would find out soon enough, her prize jettisoning a small wake as she willed it across the water.

"Whoa," Clive taunted. "That thing's a monster. You may have just set the Milford Pond record with that one."

"Shut up."

Morgan frowned as she pulled her inappropriately named large-mouth bass out of the water. It was, at best, the length of her hand. Clive watched as the joy on her face disappeared.

"Clive, can you come help me?" Morgan sounded genuinely depressed. From her tone, Clive could anticipate the problem he was called upon to remedy.

"I got my hook stuck in deep again."

Clive reeled up his line and rested his fishing pole against the front of his kayak's cockpit. Grabbing his paddle, he rowed deliberately and smoothly, his movements resonating experience. He quickly made his way over to where Morgan sat drifting, her catch flapping impatiently in the water beside her.

"Let me see it," he demanded, removing a pair of long, thin pliers from the tackle box between his legs. They were included as part of his fishing supplies for precisely such an occasion.