Chapter 18

18.

         Snippets.
         Sometimes that’s all we have.
         “. . . doing here, you’re supposed to be . . .”
         “. . . really is the only way, I’m sorry . . .”
         Pieces strewn about in the wake of an exploding clockshop, fitting together but not in the same way.
         “. . . and it’s not that I don’t agree anymore . . .”
         “. . . not fight for what you don’t see . . .”
         “. . . do I feel so damn selfish . . .”
         Only hearing fragments, finding more gaps than evidence.
         “. . . of course this isn’t what I expected it to . . .”
         Swirling around, taunting us with the plot, each angle a perfect fit.
         “. . . did you hear? what he said? he said we’re . . .”
         “. . . what I’m saying, how can we be sure, I never . . .”
         But even with all the pieces arranged, we can never be truly sure how they go together.
         “. . . and I’m telling you that you must do this . . .”
         And we will never really know the true story.
         “. . . the games begin . . .”
         I don’t remember all of my dreams. I think it’s a good thing.
         “Now, I thought that I had only been at the market for maybe a half hour . . . not long at all,” his mother said, bending over to sweep some crushed glass from under their broken table. “And yet somehow the house managed to get wrecked in that time.” She sniffed, using the broom to guide the small pile of glass into a larger pile of assorted debris.
         “All I know is I didn’t do it,” Jaymes replied, reaching down to pick up another discarded shard of wood and wincing as his head protested the change in altitude. Gingerly he felt the growing lump on the back of his head. It was still tender, the slightest brush sending a dull pain wrapping around his brain and sometimes spots to flash before his eyes. “I was out for all of it. So was Dad.”
         “Yes, well, when he gets back we’re going to have a little talk about letting the neighbors run amok,” his mother stated, taking a moment to adjust a small painting so that it covered more of hole in the wall. It really didn’t help any and she frowned before returning the picture to its original position. They were in the living room now, which hadn’t suffered as much as the kitchen, but had seen its share of damage, mostly as a side effect of what had happened in the other room. A chair shattered nearly beyond recognition lay nearly in the center of the room, among other things. Jaymes didn’t want to think about how several pieces of furniture had wound up in here. It had to have gone right over him. He didn’t want to think about it. “I firmly believe that we should stand up for and protect each other, but really . . .” she shook her head, picking up a chair that lay upside down in the middle of their living room and setting it rightside up. It sat at a precarious angle, one leg partially snapped off. “There is such a thing as more harm than good, you know.”
         “I’m sure they were just trying to help, Mom,” Jaymes said, kicking a fragment of wood behind the couch. If the blood rushed to his head one more time he thought it was going to explode. “I mean, they come in, see me and Dad out cold and these two guys sitting in our house . . . what else are they going to do? It’s not their fault those guys fought back.”
         “Maybe not, but I know our neighbors . . . I wonder if they really bothered to check out what was going on before just attacking whatever was in front of them. Your father goes on hunting trips with some of them sometimes and the stories he tells me . . .” she shook her head again, adjusting the string that kept her hair out of her face. “Between you and me, son, I think some of them aren’t all that right in the head. Too much sun, if you know what I mean. And the stories they were telling me, about the two men they fought . . . you’d think they were attacked by someone’s nightmare or there were monsters running around. I mean, did you notice anything odd about them, Jaymes?”
         A memory that might have been torn directly from a fever dream came to him. Dreams are not real, they don’t happen. But we remember them. That makes them memories. Memories are real. Why not dreams? A voice that sounded all wrong for the face floated to him. A face all wrong for everything tried to wrestle its way back into his consciousness. He had seen it. Before awareness fled he had seen it. He knew what had been there. There was no mistaking it.
         “Ah, one of them was . . . tall, Mom,” he said, as a wave of dizziness crept up on him, forcing him to sit down on the couch, head in his hands. “That’s all. He was really tall.”
         “See?” his mother said, coming in from the kitchen where she had just taken the battered chair. There was a clatter and a bang from that direction as something fell over. “Nothing at all to get so excited about. Sometimes people get so worked up over . . .” she stopped, standing in the center of the room and peering at Jaymes with no small measure of worry. “Jaymes? Honey, are you okay? What’s wrong?”
         “Nothing, Mom, nothing. I’m fine,” he told her, still holding his head, praying that he wasn’t shouting. It was hard to hear anything over the pounding in his head, drumbeats from a skin stretched a mile wide, the relentless droning of marching feet. The dead are walking into the sea. The lump on his head felt like a parasite, sucking away at his brains, growing larger and larger until he was nothing more than a shell guided by this faceless demon clinging to the back of his head. Except it was only a lump. He had gotten hit there. That was all. By the other man, with the thick, sharp edged voice, who he hadn’t seen. He hadn’t told his mother he had been hit, of course, because she would just worry. His mother always did that and whenever he pointed out that she worried about him too much she just laughed and said it was her job. “Just a headache. That’s all. I’m fine.”
         Even without looking he could sense his mother’s gaze. “If you say so,” she said, her voice skeptical. Her footsteps cracked and popped on unseen pieces of broken glass. “Do you have any idea where your father went? He shouldn’t be gone for so long.”
         “Maybe he went to get people to help clean up,” Jaymes said, clenching his teeth as fingers tried to force their way into his head. Or maybe he went to see Valreck. For some reason, he couldn’t say it. A dozen hands, prodding and poking, drumming their monotone rhythm into his brain. For a second he thought he felt his heart settling into that insidious cadence, but held his breath to stop himself. What little of the air he could see was shimmering, flickering like a sky full of razor edged birds. He tried to remember what his father had told him before he left, the three words he had said. They’re all dead. Who? Who’s dead? That didn’t make any sense. Lately he was wondering if he had passed completely into his dreams. Unreality dogged all of his steps, and everything happening to him seemed to suggest that something wasn’t quite right. Vibrant blue eyes from a body too large loomed in his head. He couldn’t have been real. The lump pulsed as if living. But I saw him. He felt congested, his lungs and nose and mouth and brain clogged with an obscene kind of mucus, coating the layers under his skin, exerting a type of pressure that threatened to crack his head in two.
         “He could have stayed to help us clean up,” his mother muttered, from somewhere that didn’t feel like here. Where was here? Here was nowhere. Nowhere at all. “It’s not that big of a mess. A good day’s work will make it all look just like new. Besides, this is just the excuse I need to repaint the walls . . .” Her voice faded as she turned away.
         Worms wiggled to force their way in, uninvited guests into a inn where vacancy was a foreign country. Our borders are sealed but never more porous than now. Than here. Jaymes nearly bit his lip to keep from moaning. A dream never felt like this. His arm twitched, fingernails threatened to tear into his face. It occurred to him that he was sweating for really no reason at all. The claw of a hammer was tearing into his face, peeling it away, exposing the hollow shell underneath. I’m the stuff that dreams are made of, he thought irrationally, randomly. But what are dreams made of?
         The pressure increased threefold. Jaymes swore he heard a bone pop in his head. That’s not-
          A scattering of rocks fell down a hillside, heralding the avalanche.
         “. . . you think I want to do this, you stuffy bastard, you think I don’t give a . . .”
         Without warning, the pressure vanished. “Ah?” Jaymes asked, blinking, confused, his head throbbing as air rushed into a suddenly vacated zone. Or that’s how it felt.
         Across the room his mother said, “Hey, now, this is much more comfortable . . .” With a clatter the broom dropped to the floor. “So how have those dreams been lately, Jamie?”
         Jaymes looked up sharply, blinking again as the room swerved in and out of focus. His mother was staring at him, hands on her hips and a lopsided grin on her face. It didn’t look like his mother at all. But she was standing right there.
         “What . . . what did you say?” he asked, finding his tongue stumbling over the words. What is happening to me? What’s going on?
         “Nothing,” his mother said quickly, reaching down to pick the broom up again. “Just making conversation, that’s all. I mean you’re getting so much older now and we barely talk anymore.”
         “What do you mean? We . . . we talk all the time. I still live here . . .” his head was spinning again, bewildered. The voice was right, but the mannerisms, the inflections, it all felt somehow wrong. But what was he going to do? Attack his own mother? He didn’t even know what was going on. “Mom, you’re not making any sense.”
         “Of course I am,” his mother sniffed dismissively. “I’m your mother. I taught you all the sense you know. If I’m not making any sense, then you certainly can’t be. And we both know that’s not true, right?” She grinned disarmingly at him, sweeping dramatically, doing a quick two-step in the process. “No, no, I raised you to be a right sensible lad, when you come down to it. No nonsense out of you ever, no sir.” The broom head skidded across the floor as his mother spun the handle in her hand, tossing it into the air and catching it with the other hand. “So answer me this, what the hell happened here, boy? Who did you let wreck our house?”
         Jaymes just stared at his mother, mouth agape.
         His mother gave him a amusingly pitying look. “Oh come on now, son, you think I don’t know what you’re hiding?” She paused, cocked her head to the side and held up a finger. “Let me rephrase. I know you’re hiding something but I’m not sure exactly what. Or else I wouldn’t ask you, because I’d know.” His mother smiled sweetly. “You see what I mean?”
         “I . . . I don’t think . . .” Jaymes had never thought of himself as stupid, but right now he felt as if he had lost all capacity to understand language. His mother’s speech had never been so rapid before, words falling over each other in an effort to reach his ear, sentences tangled and warped, rife with an implied meaning most unlike his normally plain speaking mother. “Mom, are you okay?”
         “How about we spell it out for those folks just joining us at home,” his mother said, still smiling passively. The end of the broom handle flicked out and hovered an inch from his chest. “Everyone has been talking about the two men who came here and who all the neighbors decided to pile on. They are talking because those two men managed to wreck a large part of the house and elude a large party of people who’s sole purpose was to find them.” The handle made a tight circle, snapping up to tap him on the chin. “We do not live in a very dangerous village, nor do we exist in overly exciting times, Jaymes.” It sounded less like his mother with every passing phrase. “Any excitement is a terribly interesting thing, and being how we’re always so bored out of our heads, I imagine that when something exciting does happen, we’re all more than willing to imprint that on our memories in exquisite detail.” The handle tapped him right between the eyes, forcing him to flinch and turn away. Suddenly he very much wanted to be somewhere else. “Why were they here, Jaymes? What did they look like?”
         “Mom, I don’t understand what you’re saying . . .” he stammered, edging deeper into the couch. This wasn’t right. What was going on? Unbidden, the scene in the kitchen with the giant man was playing in his head, strange words spilling from alien lips like a lament, the voice from behind, the blow at the back of his head. He could remember it all distinctly, freeze the moments, step between the seconds and force to scene to proceed as fast or as slow as he wanted it to. “I told you already. Why are you bugging me about this? What’s wrong with you?”
         “What’s wrong?” his mother asked, shrugging. “What’s wrong? Two men come into my house, beat up my husband and only son, wreck my home and yet I get the feeling that my son is trying to protect these people, for whatever bizarre reason that might be.” Her eye narrowed and the lump on the back of his head began to throb in time with his pulse again. The nearby hairs on his neck stood up slowly, as if in defense. “What happened here, Jaymes? Why won’t you tell me? Don’t tell me you forget, because I know you remember, I know you do. There was something not right about . . . about one of them . . .” hands raked with ungentle ease through the coils of his brain, “yes, one was very strange, right? But you knew him, you did, you said it . . . that means you must have talked to them before, you must have some idea of why they were here.”
         “I don’t, I told you already I don’t . . .” his voice dancing precariously close to whining. He wanted to leap off the couch and shake this woman who wasn’t acting like his mother. But he couldn’t do that. Because his legs weren’t working. This isn’t right. “Why do you keep asking me when I told you already? How many times do you want to hear the same damn answer?” Vaguely he was aware that he was shouting, but from his mother’s lack of a reaction, he might as well have been singing. “Okay? I don’t know. I said it. For the last time. I’m not saying it again. Okay? So just drop it. I didn’t see anything.” Standing up, he felt the broom handle poke him sharply in the chest. He tried to level a firm, unwavering gaze on his mother, but what he saw in her eyes sent an arc of pain lancing through his head, with his injury the nexus and the destination. This is not . . . this isn’t . . .
         His mother abruptly yanked the broom away from him, twirling it so that the handle tapped loudly on the floor. “I’m sorry, son,” his mother said, eyes downcast. “You’re right, you’re absolutely right. I shouldn’t push you with too many questions . . .” her smile was a stranger’s attempt at motherly. “I mean, after all you’ve been through, of course you don’t want to be interrogated by your mother. Of course you don’t. I’m so sorry, Jaymes, really.” If emotions could be a mask, she would be wearing a contrite shell over her entire frame. “That wasn’t right of me.”
         “It’s okay, Mom,” he said slowly, gradually beginning to edge his way toward the kitchen. What he needed was to get the hell out of here until his mother got whatever the hell was bugging her out of her system and decided to start acting normal again. Go to Valreck, tell him all about it. Maybe he would have some ideas about what was going on here. “It’s, ah, it was a stressful day, you know, with everything that happened, I can understand how you, ah . . .” he trailed off, his creativity for crafting platitudes deserting him suddenly. “It’s okay,” he finished, lamely.
         “I know it is,” she replied, not looking directly at him, although his skin exhibited a crawling sensation that wasn’t exactly pleasant. “I know. I’ll just . . .” brightening suddenly, tilting the broom and clutching it in both hands with a broad grin, “. . . I’ll just ask your father when he gets home. From wherever he went.” She glanced down, then back up at him, a furtive gesture. “Any idea where he went?”
         Here we go again, he thought. “No, Mom, I said already-“
         With a creak, the kitchen door opened, then slammed. Footsteps could be heard in the next room. A shadow protruded into the living room, a cone pointed straight at his mother.
         Jaymes looked toward the kitchen, said to his mother, “I think he’s back.” Louder, he called out, “Dad, we’re in here!” Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a weird expression fall over his mother, like she was sick and baffled, hit in the stomach with a punch and a sickness simultaneously.
         More shufflings from the kitchens. A muttered babble, his father must be talking to himself. These days he did that a lot. There was a scraping sound as what was left of the table was moved around. Fine time to be rearranging the room, Jaymes thought. He wanted his father in here now, to see his mother and maybe get her to act like she was supposed to again. “Dad!” he said again. “We need you to come in . . .”
         His father stepped through the entryway, a hard look on his face.
         Next to him and slightly behind was a man that Jaymes didn’t recognize but knew anyway. The lump on his head knew him. It did, pulsing in a spasm of fear. Don’t hurt me again, whimpered a thought that didn’t originate in his brain.
         “. . . here,” and all further words died in his throat as a large shadow descended upon them all.
         The giant man with the insect head and the brilliant blue eyes regarded him silently, as if exchanging a flurry of communication with him that he could never hope to hear. He had to duck down as he came into the room, although the ceiling was high enough to accommodate him.
         “Now,” the man said, holding out both his hands in a conciliatory fashion, “everybody just take a deep breath and calm down, there’s no need for anyone-“
         With a strangled yelp, his mother dropped the broom and bolted for the front door.
         “-to panic,” the man finished, sighing. “Oh damn, not again.” Turning slightly he said with a frown, “Tritan, stop her.”
         “Very well,” the giant man said in a surprisingly soft voice. He took two steps into the living room with a speed that belied his size, scooping up a block of wood the size of Jaymes’ head and hefting it with a casual grace right at his mother.
         Spinning wildly through the air, it intersected with his mother’s head just as she reached the door. Stumbling back a step, she raised a hand as if about to say something, then twirled in a small circle and collapsed in a heap on the floor.
         The man whistled. “Nice work, Tritan. If we can’t make a warrior out of you, you might still have a decent career in crowd control.”
         Jaymes finally found his voice. “Who . . . who the hell are you people? What are you doing back in my house?” This was crazy. What was happening? These people were crazy.
         The man turned to Jaymes as if seeing him for the first time. “Oh, right. You again. I guess we were introduced poorly last time.” Holding out a calloused hand, he said, “The name’s Prescotte, and my large yet efficient friend here is Tritan.”
         Without speaking, his father stalked past all of them to go over and check on his mother. Jaymes caught a glimpse of his face as he passed and was startled by how much older his father seemed, the lines on his face deepening, putting out tributaries, the shadows under his eyes growing darker. That couldn’t have happened overnight. It had to be all in his head. Still. A dream. Why can’t this be a dream? I don’t understand those either. But at least I could wake up.
         “Why are you here?” he asked Prescotte, injecting more venom into his voice that he cared to, realizing that more than he wanted to admit was sincere. How dare you bastards come here and try to screw up my life and mess up my family. “What are you trying to do here?” Events, which had never really been under his control anyway, were now spiraling swiftly out of his grasp.
         “Ah, well, you see, as it turns out, we’re the good guys,” Prescotte said, grinning so broadly that Jaymes wondered briefly if he were mad. If so, then he had plenty of company. “And right now we’re looking for the bad guys.” Pointing at Jaymes, he said, “This is the part where you come in. It occurred to us that, while we work well on our own, it wasn’t right to not let everyone else in on the fun.” Clapping Jaymes on the shoulder hard enough to make the world vibrate, he added, “So, welcome to the team! You won’t be disappointed, between me and Tritan, we have months of experience saving lives. Experience we will now impart to you and your family,” he finished solemnly. Turning toward the kitchen, he called out to the giant man, “So what do you think, Tritan, this a good base of operations?”
         “I believe so, friend Prescotte,” the giant man said, sticking his head back from the kitchen. “Like you said, they will not think to look for us in the home we have just finished destroying.”
         “Exactly,” Prescotte said emphatically, grabbing Jaymes by both shoulders firmly. “You just wait, kid. There’s nothing quite like crushing evil to warm your heart. You’ll see. Right, Tritan?”
         “Yes, just the thought of squeezing the evil from the Universe has kept me alive on many a cold night, I must admit.” The voice was dead serious. It had to be kidding.
         “That’s the spirit,” Prescotte laughed, rubbing his hands together. “That’s what we need to hear.” Glancing sideways at Jaymes with a wicked grin, he said, “So, shall we let the games begin, then?”
         All Jaymes could do was stare. Deep in his brain, something spasmed, sending a shiver down his spine. He stopped himself from laughing because he didn’t want to hear the sound.
         “. . . the games begin . . .”
         Why don’t I remember my dreams?
         Snippets.
         That’s all we have.