Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [90]
“That’s insane. You’re talking insane. This is not real. This is not happening. Please, just leave. Just go. I…I’m confused. I don’t…I don’t want this. Please.” She tried to reach for the phone on the counter by the sink, but wasn’t quite there. He stepped toward her, and she jabbed the knife in the air.
“We’ve been inside each other. You know this is true. You know it.”
“Stop saying that! It’s obscene. It’s disgusting. He’s dead. You killed him. Please. Why don’t you leave? Why don’t you leave?”
“I know you won’t stab me,” he said, stepping closer. “I’ve been inside you. I know you, inside and out. I know.”
“Don’t, please,” she sobbed, slashing at the air, less than a foot from him, crumbling to the floor, wishing the world would disappear, wishing she could feel safe again.
“There’s something I need, Julie. You know where they are. But they blocked you. But I can unblock it inside you. I just need to go find that door. I need just a little time to find that door. I can stop them for good, Julie. Inside you, you have a memory. You’ve been to where they’re giving their tests.”
“66S? Is that what this is about?”
“No,” he said. “That was a young woman’s apartment. A woman I knew. Her father had been friends with my father, and he gave her the apartment after it was converted into units. A woman named Gina Lambert. Another one of us. But she was the daughter of a girl named Nell who had been in Project Daylight. Her mother was one of them. And they got her. They killed her to test her. They killed a boy named Terry West. He was still in college. He had Ability X. Do you want to know how? They had to create great fear in him before he died. But he still died. He didn’t come back. Do you want to know how monstrous they are?”
“I don’t know anything, I don’t.”
“Let me inside you one last time. Just one last time,” he said, “Please let me get inside you.”
She jabbed the knife at him, almost touching his skin. “No, please, no.”
“There’s a place inside you. I know it’s there. We were almost there. Almost. I almost found it. If you can let me in, I can stop them. I know I can. There’s always hope. It’s a blessing and a curse. But sometimes, it’s all we have. Yet, when faced with this, there is no hope. There can be no hope. Do not let hope cloud your resolve. Help me find them. Help me open that one door in your mind.”
“Please,” she wept, slashing blindly, “Go away. I don’t want this. It’s not happening!”
He reached out and touched the edge of the knife, and then the tips of her fingers. “Let me inside you, Julie.”
She felt a spark between them, and a lubricating familiarity as he slid into her and she shut her eyes for just a moment and felt him moving, and now she tried to resist but he was pushing her hard, slamming up against her on the inside, his consciousness roaming and tearing at walls and doors and things that she felt were the tunnels into her memory.
And then she saw it at the moment he did.
It was simply a house.
It was a house with glass walls on one side.
She had seen it before but she wasn’t sure where. She could not name whose it was. She vaguely remembered a video of Matt’s that was just a house on a lake. On the lake, she thought. Their lake. Somewhere right here. Somewhere in Rellingford. On the lake. She remembered the rich people’s houses across the lake, and felt as he searched her memory for who owned this house and why she was there, and she saw a woman coming to the door as she stood out in the side yard looking at the brown lake, and she turned to see the woman more clearly, but the image was out of focus and she almost had a name…
And then something exploded. She felt a sudden rush of wind inside the Stream. Diamond was no longer there with her. She opened her eyes.
At first she thought the noise was from outside the windows, a cherry bomb blast.
She looked at Michael Diamond’s face. He wore an expression of shock.
He tried to reach around to his back.
He fell hard on the floor.
Behind him, Hut.
Chapter Twenty-Two
She felt the world spinning around her.