The
Gifted Ones
By
David Powell
A
powerful lesson
The boy’s face stirred ghostly notes in the loneliest
corners of Alida’s memory.
He was fifteen, but his face was creased, ancient. Harry Dean Stanton
with better nutrition.
“Where did they find him?” she asked.
“Formal garden, what was left of it. He was the only one to
survive,” said Claudia DuMaurier, the estate lawyer, immaculate and stiff in
her navy suit, white blouse and silk scarf.
“And he hasn’t spoken?”
“No.”
Alida opened her memory, like pressing a piano’s damper
pedal, listening for sympathetic vibrations. There it was. She was six,
surrounded by toys, left alone by the window in her father’s office. Why
couldn’t she just sit beside him at his desk, listening to his pen scratching
and his calm voice speaking into the phone? She wouldn’t bother him.
She pushed the boy’s folder aside and stood.
“Aren’t you going to read that?” the lawyer asked.
Doctor Alida Laurent, Head Psychiatrist at Cowalin
Institute, ignored her and pushed through the door into the chilly exam room.
The boy smelled of smoke. They’d rinsed him in the shower, looking for burns,
but gray ash and charcoal grit still clung to his hair.
“Leroy, I’m Dr. Laurent. I want to give you something.”
Alida took the boy’s wrist and turned it over, placing a single pearl in his
open palm. “This beautiful thing is born of an irritation, a flaw.”
“The mollusk protects itself.” The boy’s voice rasped like
a dull blade on a grindstone. “It processes the irritation…using its own
substance.”
The exact words she’d planned to say.
“He…He knew what I was going to say.” Alida’s heart pounded
a rapid two-step.
“His alleged psychic powers are documented,” the lawyer
said, flicking at the file with a manicured nail. “If you’d read the file—”
“No! He knew exactly
what I was going to say.”
DuMaurier sighed. “Dr. Laurent, have you, perhaps, made
your speech before? To other patients?”
Alida stared at her. She didn’t want anything this arrogant
corporate goon said to be true.
“Look, forget it,” the lawyer said. “The Durants had their
ways, and they were rich enough to…pursue their odd interests. But this boy is
now sole heir of the estate, and everything hinges on whether or not he’s fit
to inherit. I need your help to establish his mental competence. Now please,”
she said, closing her briefcase and standing, “read the file and don’t be
distracted by parlor tricks. Your clinic stands to benefit greatly.”
It was a strange document, compiled from the time Leroy was
an infant by a Dr. Crenshaw, PhD from Charter Oak State College. A self-styled visionary,
probably...the kind
of guy who might prop up a cult leader, or sell miracle supplements on
late-night cable. Alida tried not to be judgmental—her dad and his
colleagues had dismissed her as a quack often enough—but Dr. Crenshaw’s
write-ups read like Edgar Cayce meets Dr. Phil.
August 3, 2009—His
parents were wise to discontinue testing at the LSU Medical Center. The mental
gymnastics those toadies perform to uphold the status quo are laughable; the
child is unquestionably gifted.
Alida took long, slow sips of the musky mushroom tea and
chuckled at the image of toads doing gymnastics. She looked out at the
landscaped expanse of the clinic grounds—her clinic, after her father’s death a
year ago. Freud was dethroned, Oedipus was out, and neurology was in. Patients
weren’t bludgeoned with antidepressants; psychedelics were judiciously applied.
She provided the most progressive mental wellness care in north
Louisiana.
Or would, if she could pay her bills.
The money stream flowing from Medicare for expensive drugs
and unnecessary procedures had shrunk to a trickle, and the herd of bureaucrats
jostling each other to drink brayed unhappily. Instead of praising Alida’s
integrity, the clinic board threatened to sue her for mismanagement. Now the
clinic was barely surviving on depressed parents, underachieving teens, and
opioid addicts.
Alida’s head throbbed gently as the psilocybin bathed her
neurons. She basked in the sunset filling her window with light. DuMaurier’s
face emerged, backlit by the setting sun. Our
Lady of the Nuthouse, bestowing the vast resources of the Durant estate on the
struggling clinic.
Alida returned to Leroy’s file.
“Tell me this,” the boy said. Relaxed in his crisp scrubs,
he had lost some of the haunted look, but his face was still too old for
fifteen. “The irritation, the thing that caused the pearl to happen. Does it
stay alive inside the pearl? Or does the nacre kill it?”
She thought, but didn’t say out loud, You’re afraid
the pearl is tainted.
“Tainted,” he said. “We torture and kill the animal to
decorate ourselves, and you make it sound like bad milk.”
“You empathize with the mollusk.”
“Why not? You’re asking me to be the mollusk, to make a
pearl, create beauty from pain.” He looked at her with amusement, like a father
watching his three-year-old twist a Rubik’s cube.
“I’m asking you to consider the pearl as a symbol for—”
“You think a symbol is not a real thing, so I can make it
into whatever I want.” He stretched out his legs on her couch, hands clasped
behind his head. “That stupid book in your day room, Life Is What You Make It.
So naive.” He stopped speaking
aloud.
Life is what it
is. Things are what they are. An animal had to die to make this pearl.
Alida tried to hold her excitement in check. DuMaurier was
an idiot. This boy had powers, and “odd ways” didn’t begin to cover the
Durants’ private life.
“Actually, that’s not true,” Alida said. “Pearl farmers
extract the pearl without hurting the oyster. So the oyster can grow more
pearls.”
“So they keep it alive to torture it, over and over. That’s
worse than killing.”
All this talk of death. Well, of course. They had found the
boy, mute and shivering, covered in ash.
Thirteen charred bodies in the burning house. She needed to know what had happened
in that house, and how he had survived. She needed to keep him talking.
“That’s true…on a literal level.”
“A literal oyster was tortured to make this pearl, and you
dismiss it as a symbol. This now…” He flicked a fingernail at the cameo hanging
on a chain around her neck, a classic woman’s profile carved in shimmering
mother-of-pearl. “The nacre itself had to be carved up to make her. When you
make the animal a symbol, Doctor, you violate the meaning of its sacrifice.”
“Just give me something I can use in court, please.”
DuMaurier kept up an impatient staccato with her pen.
“He pulled out of his fugue state in one conversation. That
suggests he’s accustomed to dealing with trauma.”
“Aha. Tough, resilient!” DuMaurier scribbled on her
notepad. “What’s the buzz word? Grit? That’s useful. Anything else?”
“He went quickly to talk of sacrifice and death.”
“Is the psychological damage reparable in three years? With
your ‘enlightened’ treatment?”
“I don’t know the extent of the damage, yet.” She watched
the tapping of DuMaurier’s pen come to an abrupt halt.
“I’ll call that a yes,” the lawyer said.
“You’ve mentioned sacrifice twice,” Alida said. “Why do you
suppose that is?”
Leroy’s lip curled into a mocking smile. Oh, you can do better
than that.
Alida smiled in spite of herself. There’d be no shielding
her thoughts from this patient. “Okay then. Here’s what I’m thinking about
sacrifice. I’ve been asked to sacrifice you, to gloss over your trauma, write
you up as normal, so the estate can keep your money and I can keep my clinic.
Did you know that?”
“That’s not a bad deal,” the boy said. “One fucked-up boy
to help so many others. You could sit in your office and trip your brains out
with a clear conscience.”
Alida smiled. This combative posture was so familiar, so
thoroughly adolescent. She’d used it with her dad when she felt he was
dismissing her.
“And what would happen to you?”
“As long as I sign the papers and don’t make waves, they’ll
rebuild the mansion and give me whatever I want.”
“What would you ask for?”
The mocking smile hardened to a predator’s grin. “The souls
of my mother and father to play with, like Barbie and Ken.”
Show me how you’d
play with them.
She saw it. A pair of aristocrats struggling to keep the
rags of their fine clothes pulled around them, to cover up drooping genitals
and dried-up breasts. Leroy gigantic, leaning over to drop a cat in front of
them, face businesslike. The cat’s hiss as it spotted the couple, and the
couple’s screams.
Not terribly
original, but that’s off the top of my head. With a little time and imagination
I could go Hieronymus Bosch on their ass.
“So,” Alida said, “you can push your thoughts to others, as
well.”
Or maybe,
Leroy thought, you can read me.
Alida sipped her mushroom tea and studied the MRI scans
spread out on her desktop. All this data, and the medical gatekeepers were
finally admitting mushrooms could help with depression. Like saying radium
could make your watch glow in the dark!
Mushrooms reduced blood flow to the connectivity hubs—like
turning off the traffic signals, letting vehicles run loose. Drive at your own
risk, but choose your own speed and go anywhere you like. Lysergic acid
dissolved the dividing lines between sensory perception and the “self.” You
were literally one with the world. Like if cars, airplanes, birds, submarines,
earthworms—all felt the truth of each other at once. No wonder highly
compartmentalized minds—i.e. Dad’s—freaked out.
What if psilocybin had stumbled on a hidden thing in Alida’s
brain, and Leroy had nudged it awake? Maybe it would like a cup of coffee.
‘Shroom tea plus a light dose, say 90 mics, of LSD might widen the inner eye.
Dr. Laurent cancelled her afternoon appointments. She had
to prepare. This was more risky than her usual daytrips; she needed a tether to
her everyday self. Even if she found the Leroy corner she’d need a lifeline
back to herself.
Music.
Familiar enough to pull her back gently. She cued up Johannsson’s “Flight from
the City” and set the timer for three hours, trying, and failing, to push away
the picture of Tina setting her alarm clock before going on the hunt for
Freddie Krueger. Leroy’s mind was not one to trifle with, not when he could
read and project thoughts. Not when he took delight in feeding his parents to a
hungry cat.
She measured out the dose and squeezed it onto her tongue,
sat down at her desk, and opened Leroy’s file, the photo of his young/old face
clipped to the cover. Deepening and regulating her breathing, she forced
herself not to make a plan, to just let it happen.
Colors began to glow and surfaces to slide. Alida studied
Leroy’s woeful, abandoned face as the office began to elongate and blur. She
had redecorated her dad’s inner sanctum in mauve and white, but now it slid
back into the buff non-colors he’d favored. Artwork morphed backwards, too.
Radiant Kali with her sickle and severed head became Freud and his cigar. The
one painting she had kept, Bienville
First Meets the Natchez, was a reminder, a bridge between girlhood and
independence—the elegant French, the noble savages, the sumptuous color—the
romantic fantasies of that girl, there, sitting by the windows. Gasping, she
recognized her six-year-old self on the carpet, placing her X-Men figures in a
circle around a wild-haired troll doll.
Leroy’s voice came from behind her left shoulder.
“I like it here,” he said. “Cozy.”
Alida’s vision shifted to her six-year-old eyes, her mind
to six-year-old thoughts.
“Great Sun, stop killing your own people,” young Alida
stage-whispered. She pushed Jean Grey and Rogue forward to face the troll. “We
bring civilization!”
“Girls don’t scare Great Sun,” Leroy said. “Better send in
Wolverine.”
Alida gasped as Wolverine came to life and doubled in size.
He stepped forward with a savage roar and slashed the troll into diagonal slices.
“Don’t make so much noise,” Alida scolded. “Dad is
working!”
“Unharness yourself,” Leroy said. “It’s your imagination.
You could take away Dad’s ears, if you wanted to.”
“Don’t!” Alida whirled around to her left and saw nothing
but walnut bookshelves.
“You won’t find me in your memories. I’m just peeking over
your shoulder.”
“Where are you?”
“Come and find me. See if you can.”
Alida took a deep breath and relaxed her shoulders. He was
right; this memory of isolation had been her first try at empathy with Leroy.
Maybe he was behind this scene, or across from it. What, besides physical
space, separated two minds?
She visualized flying over an enormous ocean. No. A desert.
The ground flew away and she was sailing over the Grand Canyon, en route to the
other side.
Leroy laughed out loud. “What a cinematic eye you have,
grandma. It doesn’t have to be so hard. Think! Why did you remember Dad’s
office?”
She brought up her first glimpse of Leroy, shivering as
they peeled away the mylar blanket…his haunted face. She melded into a
gelatinous wall, stopped struggling, and let his face pull her forward.
A cave. No. A cavernous room, flickering with orange light.
She peered over Leroy’s left shoulder. He was bound to a post, and he was
laughing.
“Your power?” he was saying. “You’re using a nuclear
missile for a doorstop!”
Alida’s eyes adjusted to the dim light—stone floor, massive
wooden arches. Candles sat in alcoves carved into walls made of…clay?
Low-burning fires danced in braziers shaped like wolves…or bats.
“Ungrateful bastard!” said the woman facing Leroy. Robed
and hooded. Silver five-pointed star on a chain. “You’ll sour the ritual!
Yield! Honor the sacrifice!”
Alida heard low chanting. Robed figures circled Leroy and
the hooded woman—his mother.
“If you had the slightest inkling of what this sacrifice
means, I’d be insulted,” Leroy said.
The woman threw back her hood, gave a quick sigh of
impatience. Her cheeks swept up from puffy lips toward a botox-smoothed
forehead. A claw-like hand—thirty years older than the face—clutched a curved
dagger. Its razor-edge glinted in orange firelight.
“Pentagrams, backward Latin,” Leroy said. “Bunch of
ridiculous clichés. Like a Troma devil-worship movie.”
“You don’t own these powers!” his mother snapped. “You
didn’t give birth to yourself!”
Leroy howled with laughter, and Alida felt his glee, a thin
crust over a molten sea of contempt.
“Stop indulging him!” a male voice said from the circle.
“Just do it!”
Leroy’s mother flicked her hood down and raised the knife,
but white light flared before she could move. It flared and receded, leaving a
blind spot that sprouted orange snakes of flame in a twisted corona. The
mother’s shriek rose. Alida turned her head and saw, with peripheral vision,
fire leaping onto the mother’s robe and her hair catching fire. Searing orange
and white engulfed the robed assembly until they writhed like caterpillars in a
forest fire, puny screams lost in the roar. The inferno swallowed wooden beams,
earthen walls, and stone floor in an instant.
Like a galaxy
being born, Alida thought, as the opening chords of “Flight from
the City” began their stately march, drowning out the screams, making a solemn
soundtrack to the sacrifice of thirteen misguided supplicants.
Calling Alida back to herself.
Alida stood by the wall of windows, watching late afternoon
glow soften the curves of the manicured clinic grounds. Nature tamed, she thought,
turning back to the painting of
Bienville meeting the Natchez. She heard Leroy’s appreciative chuckle just over
her shoulder.
“Could I get you back on earth for a moment, Doctor?”
DuMaurier was saying. “I need an update on your progress.”
“How much do you know about Louisiana history, Ms.
DuMaurier?”
The lawyer sighed and capped her pen.
“When I was a child I could get lost in this painting: my
ancestors bringing civilization to the savages, the explorers so elegant and
dignified, and the Natchez people so colorful, so...pure. I would imagine being
one group, then the other. Finally Dad dropped Civilization and Its Discontents
in my lap and ordered me to read
it. It was shocking, finally, to dig behind these images, to learn how empires
spread.”
“You’re wasting your time on this bureaucrat.” Leroy’s
voice came from just over her left shoulder. So the pathway between them
remained open. Alida wondered if he would always be there, if she would ever
have true privacy again. She giggled at the thought of keeping a teenage boy in
her head, peeking at her in the mirror, in the shower.
DuMaurier looked at her watch. “Growing up is hard on all
of us, Dr. Laurent. Could we please—”
“Did you know that the Natchez called their leader ‘Great
Sun’? Their myths say the first Grand Soleil and his wife came directly from
the sun, so dazzlingly bright you couldn’t look at them directly. They placed
the sun’s fire in a temple and charged the Natchez never to let it go out or
calamities would crush them.”
DuMaurier yawned and Alida decided it was time for a test.
She pictured a hand the size of her desk pushing at the lawyer, and smirked to see
the drowsy bureaucrat flattened against the back of her chair, shoulders
pinned.
“Now that’s fun,” Leroy said. “Mom and Dad were so prosaic.
They couldn’t get past the goats and pentagrams.”
Alida drew the hand back and raised it, as if preparing to
swat a fly, just above DuMaurier’s head.
“Easy now,” Leroy said. “We need her for the paperwork. Her
blood doesn’t matter.”
Alida relaxed the hand and gently circled the lawyer with
her thumb and forefinger. She considered making the hand visible, but decided
that was overkill. Just a slight squeeze.
“Perricaul wrote about it in his journal. While the French
were visiting, a great storm came up. Lightning struck the temple where the
flame was kept and burned it to ashes. The people were terrified and started
throwing their children into the fire to appease the sun. Perricaul estimated
sixty people died before the do-gooder French, those ambassadors of
civilization, put a stop to it. The Natchez were doubly horrified that they
weren’t able to finish. There were two hundred people lined up, waiting to join
the sacrifice. They never trusted the French again, which was wise, as it
turned out.”
“I love that story,” Leroy said. “I understand it went
viral in the colonies.”
DuMaurier tried to rise, and the fingers tightened. She
stared at Alida, wide-eyed. Alida released the lawyer and she fell forward,
gulping air.
“Write whatever you want,” Alida said. “The estate will be
fine.”
Leroy had lost the haunted look. Leaning at ease in his
Comme des Garçons shirt, his expression gave Alida the idea that Cole Sprouse
had just murdered his twin brother.
“Who is Cole Sprouse?” he asked.
“Never mind. Head of an empire doesn’t have time to watch
TV. Ms. DuMaurier is…oriented to her post?”
“Happy as she can be at $1200 per hour. I understand you’re
planning a new wing for the clinic.”
Alida launched into a description of all the services the
new ward would offer, but Leroy interrupted, “Yes, fine. Your clinic will be a
magnet for the gifted ones, the genuinely gifted. Keep a few ready. Now and
then some blood will be required.” He stood.
“What do you mean, genuinely?”
Dismiss DuMaurier, fine. But she, Alida, was a partner. Her research had opened
her mind to his—its—mind. She’d found her own gift, a desiccated thing lying
dormant, and used it to cross the barrier into Leroy’s—it’s—world. Merged with
an entity as ancient as the earth—perhaps more ancient—she was an evolutionary
cell in the body politic of the cosmos, and she meant to evolve. She reached
for his mind to tell him so, pictured the gelatinous wall, but nothing
happened. The wall was solid—smooth and featureless as a steel bulkhead.
Leroy turned to face her with a wolfish smile. “Your gift?
That was all me.”
Alida tried to breathe, but couldn’t. She felt pressure
around her chest, as if squeezed by a giant hand.
“All custodians need something—a way in. The Natchez
worshipped the sun, so the sun paid them a visit. Your ancestors, the
plantation owners—” He shook his head. “Their god was conquest. They spilled
more blood than I could possibly use. You, though...probing the mind. You’ve
been closer to the source than any of them. Don’t let it go to your head.” He
laughed. “See what I did there?”
He released her and Alida took a gasping breath.
“Oh.” He dug into the pocket of his jeans and tossed her
the pearl she’d given him on the first day. “Save this for your patients. This
one, though—” He lifted the mother-of-pearl cameo from her neck and snapped it
free from the golden chain. “—reminds me of Mom.”
He left the good doctor alone, again, in her office.
The
End
David Powell,
powellxrds@gmail.com,
of Rome, GA, HWA Supporting Member, who wrote BP #85’s “The Gifted Ones,” writes full-time in
Georgia, though his
day jobs have run the gamut from studio musician to farmhand. Count on him to
seek out the neglected corners where things whimsical, dreadful, or pitch-black
hide. A member of Horror Writer’s Assn., his weird fiction has been published
in Grue, Argonaut, Near to the Knuckle,
and Yellow Mama.