Invisible Threads--Chapter 32 & Epilogue

Writer's Note: Please read the previous chapters and prologue of Invisible Threads before reading this.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Jim Harriman had gotten the kid back to the nice room and then he had returned to the run-down motel off the strip in which he was staying. The kid had proven he could look after himself for a night - which was necessary because Jim wanted to drink. A cheap bottle of whiskey from one of the many late night liquor stores and the paper cups in the room were all he needed to start his binge. He passed out about 1:00am.

He awoke at eight in the morning and confirmed that the kid's flight did not leave until 1:00pm. There was plenty of time to get ready, pick up the kid, and make it to the airport by 11:00. Then with the kid safely at the gate, Harriman could return to the hotel, pick up the truck, and start the long drive home to his job as a house magician and future of mediocrity.

As he stepped out of the room, he raised a hand to shield his eyes from the bright morning sun. He dragged his suitcase down to the lobby and checked out. After ubering over to the show hotel, he put his suitcase in his truck that he had left in their parking garage. He called the kid who met him in the lobby.

The kid looked up at him, "I'm sorry you didn't win."

Harriman didn't have the energy to get irked by the reminder. "You did your part. You're going to get paid."

They had two reserved spots on the 10:00 airport shuttle and were waiting when it arrived. The kid talked as they rode - mainly about what he was seeing through the window. It was bothersome but not enough to tell the kid to shut up. So, he let him prattle.

His headache was minor and the sunglasses helped but his major concern was his stomach. The drinking had been more a clichthan anything else and accomplished nothing but to make him feel like crap. The bus turned a corner and the sun shone directly into his face for a second. And the sun hurt.

After the bus dropped them off, they made their way into the ticket desk in the airport. Checking the kid's bag was not a problem. While he was at the desk, he explained that the boy was an unaccompanied minor - which was already noted on his ticket - and he would appreciate being able to go with him to the gate. He really didn't have it in him to turn on the charm but he made the effort and it was enough. They printed out a gate pass and he walked with the kid through security.

The TSA agent took his gate pass and driver's license. "Sir..."

Harriman's heart leapt into his throat. Was this it - the arrest? Would they really have set their trap for him in the middle of a crowded airport? He held still and waited for the TSA agent to finish his sentence.

"By next year, you will need to get a REAL ID-Compliant driver's license to travel. I would recommend that you do that at your next renewal."

Harriman managed a weak smile, "I'll do that. Thanks."

The sudden tension had done nothing good for his stomach. This apparently was what the rest of his life was going to be like. It was, if nothing else, exciting. His pulse was racing and he forgot about his headache for a few seconds. The kid's travel bag slid through security and he got the kid a cola from a newsstand as they made their way to the gate which was at the far end of the terminal. He checked the kid in to make sure the airline personnel would get him boarded on the plane when the time came.

Jim looked down at the boy, "Calvin, I'm leaving now. Do you need to go to the bathroom before I go?"

The boy shook his head.

Harriman continued, "You stay right here and do not leave the gate area. Make sure that you can see the people at that desk all of the time."

A nod.

"They know that you're an unaccompanied minor and they'll get you on the plane. When you get to Chicago, airline people will walk with you from this plane to your plane for home and make sure you get on it. When you get home, follow the signs in the airport that say 'baggage claim' and they will lead you to where your mother is waiting for you. Just don't do anything stupid and you'll get home easy. Got all that?"

Another nod.

"Good. Now, you did a good job. I transferred the money into your mother's account so she should be good. Your job from this point forward is to do what the airline people say and make it back to your mother so that she doesn't hunt me down and kill me. Okay?"

A final nod. "Jim?"

"Yeah."

"I had fun. If you ever need an assistant again, I'd like to do it."

"I don't use assistants very often, but if I do, I'll call you."

"Okay."

"See you around, Calvin."

He turned to leave and started walking down the concourse.

As he passed a crowded gate, something caught his attention. He turned and saw an older couple standing by the window. The man had his arm around the woman in what was less of a caress and more his holding her up. She seemed to be leaning all of her weight against him. Harriman looked back up the concourse. The kid's gate was out of sight.

Even though he was seeing them from behind, the couple was familiar somehow. His curiosity piqued, he walked up to the window several feet down from them as if generally looking at the sky and cast a glance in their direction. Recognition dawned, they were the Birklands - Lacy's parents. He now remembered them clearly from videos of the memorial at the beginning of the first taping.

He followed their gaze down to a large box that was being taken out to the plane for loading. The box was just a box. It was not obviously a casket although it was big enough for a casket to be contained within. If he had not recognized the Birklands and seen their focus, he would not have given it any thought. But inside that box were the remains of his victim. The martyr to his lost cause. And she was dead. Forever. And her parents were ten feet away and feeling the foreverness of the loss of their baby girl.

The box was being moved more slowly than the dollies that carried the luggage. The belt loader that took the baggage up the conveyor belt and into the plane was pulled away and the dolly stopped. The cargo loader pulled up to the door in the side of the plane and slowly lifted the box up to the door elevation. Two men stepped out of the plane and one positioned himself behind the box to push while the other stayed in front to guide. The box began to roll into the plane.

And then the top of the box exploded.

Harriman watched as the two men didn't seem to notice as the pieces of fragmented wood being shot into the air clearly revealed the casket within. No one around him seemed to be reacting. The lid of the casket flew open and Lacy was suddenly standing within it. She turned and looked directly at him. Her hair was matted with blood and she was still wearing what she had worn underneath the stage when he had stolen her life. There was nothing flamboyant. No pointing or deep, penetrating gaze. She just looked up at him as if slightly confused. Wondering how she had come to be in this odd predicament of being loaded into the cargo hold of an airplane in a box.

A tidal wave of guilt and pain flooded through every nerve in his body and he fell against the glass. The sudden noise of his fists hitting the glass startled the Birklands and they involuntarily turned their heads in his direction. When he caught their eyes, the emotions overfilled him and reached the point of excruciating pain. His mouth began to work and he was able to form two words before he looked back out at the box and saw Lacy rise slowly out of the box and drift as if on the breeze toward him. As she approached the glass, she reached out toward him. Her fingers passed through the glass and touched his face. No sound came from his mouth but it was frozen in a silent scream of pain and fear and anguish.

He dropped to his knees and then rolled sideways to the floor, now seeing Lacy's face still with that slightly bewildered expression inches from his own. The whites of his eyes turned bright red as a massive spasm rocked Harriman's body. Lacy's father was the first to get to him and kneeled and tried talking to him but Harriman's eyes were frozen as he looked into the eyes of his innocent victim. His entire face was locked into a rictus of terror with twitches as the various muscles - otherwise used for creating his smile - were contorted outside of their proper range.

Jim Harrimans's brain was non-functional within thirty seconds and his heart ceased pumping in under a minute. A passerby ran and grabbed the AED from its location on the wall and went through the process written on it as she had been trained in her CPR/AED class. She did everything right. But he was clinically dead long before the first of the emergency personnel arrived.

The undisturbed box continued to be guided into the airplane by the two cargo handlers. The only unusual thing that anyone had seen was Harriman's collapse.

The Birklands were interviewed by the airport police. They both clearly remembered the man looking directly at them and mouthing the words I'm sorry before he died. The police wrote this down but seemed to be doing little more than checking off boxes.

The airport delayed their plane departure for an hour while EMT's arrived and removed Harriman's body from the gate. Mr. Birkland took the time to call Detective Janus.

The policeman answered on the third ring, "Janus."

"Detective Janus, this is William Birkland--Lacy's father?"

"Of course, Mr. Birkland, we don't have anything new, I'm afraid."

Bill Birkland hesitated, "This seems kind of strange but something just happened at the airport. A man just collapsed and died at the gate next to us."

"What was strange about it?"

"Right after he collapsed, he looked right at us and said... or at least mouthed... 'I'm sorry'."

"You heard him say this?"

"No. It was more reading his lips."

"Just a moment." He typed a search for incident reports at the airport. He was more than a little surprised to find that the preliminary field report was already uploaded. At least somebody in the damn department was on the ball. He scanned the short report. No signs of external wounds. The body had already been sent to the morgue. The name of the deceased was James Harriman. He searched his Birkland spreadsheet and found a match.

Janus spoke back into the phone, "Mr. Birkland, it appears that the man who died was one of the contestants on the show your daughter worked on."

"Do you think it might mean something?"

Janus shrugged, "Well, it's more than we had an hour ago. We'll pull some DNA and see what we can match."

"Thank you. And thank you for your help in getting our daughter released to us so quickly. We are glad to be getting her home."

"It's no problem at all, sir. Have a safe flight."

Janus ended the call and started the paperwork to get approval to gather DNA from the new corpse.

The Birkland's didn't really care about the investigation. Its resolution would not bring back their daughter. But they both knew that they had seen the man who killed Lacy die an agonizing death right in front of them. That, at least, brought a sense of closure. They went about the business of burying their child.

There was one thing that the Birkland's could not tell the airport police because it was invisible to their eyes. They could not see the threads that permeated every part of the universe and filled the world around them. Therefore, they could not see the gap in those threads directly behind Harriman in the shape of a large man with his hands buried deep in Harriman's head.

After the autopsy, the coroner was dumbfounded. One death due to a post-traumatic intracranial aneurysm in a decade was unusual. But two in a week?

EPILOGUE

Gary ate his cold waffles and psychoanalyzed himself. It was something that he had not felt the need to do in almost ten years since his previous battles with depression. The performance yesterday had been a small manic phase when his brain had shifted into high gear and he felt able to process the information being presented to him at an amazing rate. But it drained him. All of that energy and focus were gone as soon as he had returned to the hotel room the previous evening and confirmed Cherie gone. And then having to relive the same realization when he awoke this morning to find himself alone.

When his father had died, his weapon against the depression was the passage of time and it was a long and drawn-out process which ultimately took years. But he was in the middle of so many things and he didn't have that kind of time. There had to be some way to get his mind and emotions on track.

But he had a puzzle and if anything could keep him moving, that would be it.

On the previous day, the anomaly had seemed to feed information directly into his mind from Mercurio's mind. This was important information. New information. Better than the screaming terror which he had already known. The new information provided critical data points which again pointed to a causal relationship between human perception and reality. He had thought of the threads - or continuity strings or whatever he was going to call them - as simple geometrical lines through space that connected all of the mass they touched. But yesterday's information indicated that they were less like random lines and more like connections which were created or at least impacted by the thoughts or perceptions of people - like Mercurio and his wife and the physical location of their home. It was not just a locational thread which happened to connect those two people and that location. But it was a connection between them. And it interacted with all of the mass between them and beyond. But it was their thread... their connection.

He focused into the extraverse and watched the room fill with threads. There were no spaces or voids to indicate the presence of the anomaly - which was good. He didn't want the distraction. He looked more closely at the individual threads. Many of the them simply ran through the room in all directions but some were attached to people sitting around him in the restaurant. How had he missed that before? He left those alone. It somehow seemed voyeuristic and inappropriate to find where they led.

But there were three that led from him. In reality, there were hundreds that passed through him as there were hundreds that passed through everyone. But three clearly terminated at his head. He tried to see or feel a difference between these three and the others but there was nothing visible that he could discern.

He mentally felt for the first one and sensed the earth and stone between him and where it surfaced. He sensed his mother. Not as a person but as mass of blood and tissue and electrical impulses - which should be ghastly but felt natural. It was the basis of her physical nature. There was no detail and he had no idea how he knew it was his mother. But it was.

The second was cold and empty and it bothered him to focus on it. So, he stopped.

The third was Cherie. Again, just represented as an organic and electrical mishmash with no level of detail that would identify her as a human being - much less as a specific individual. But he knew.

He tried to figure out exactly how far away she was but could only get a general sense that she was over one hundred miles away. He could sense distances very accurately along the threads when they were close but Cherie was too far. She didn't seem to be moving. Probably sleeping.

Or maybe it was all his imagination. A fabrication of his mind as it tried to stave off the looming depression and mental illness: Trying to find hope or something positive amid the sense of loss weighing on his soul. That was the most likely hypothesis. The stress and the loss were spiraling him back into the mental and emotional upheaval that he had traversed following his father's death. He hoped this was not true but, Occam's Razor dictated that the most obvious solution must be reviewed first.

Maybe none of what he was seeing and sensing was real. Maybe he was just going crazy... again.

He got up and left the restaurant to head up to his hotel room. His first meeting with the Superstar people was in less than an hour and they had told him he would be busy through the day. This was going to suck.

THE END