Vortex Page 5

  And now another child was being led into the shed.

  Gertie stopped pacing, stood at the desk and stared out the window. After about 30 seconds, she realized her hands were trembling.

  Don’t think about it, just do it, she thought. Just do it.

  She swept her nightgown up over her head and tossed it onto the bed as she hurried to her closet. She put on a flannel shirt, overalls and a pair of work boots. She took from the closet a long black wool coat so voluminous that it swallowed up even her large frame. On her way out of the bedroom, she bent down and reached for the Mag-Lite she kept standing on the floor beside the door. Then she stopped and thought, What am I doing? That’s the last thing I want. She left the flashlight where it stood.

  After quietly leaving her bedroom, Gertie went through the laundry room and crept out the back door, crossed the covered porch behind the house and went outside.

  Chapter Six

  Penelope Jarvis thought about how much she hated her name while, in the back of her mind, she went over her escape plan. That was why she went by Penny, because she hated Penelope so much—although Penny wasn’t a whole lot better. She would much rather have a name like Desiree... or Miranda... or Natasha. Just about anything was better than Penelope. Well... almost anything. Certainly not Gertrude. The name Gertrude had been floating through her head lately. She was supposed to tell her handlers about everything that popped into her head but she hadn’t mentioned that. Handlers always wanted to know what was in her head, but she never gave them everything. Some things she kept to herself. She had so little that was hers and hers alone. It seemed only fair that some of her thoughts, at the very least, remain private.

  Worse than her name was her ... thing. That’s how she’d always thought of it—her thing—because it was too awful to give it a respectable name, and if she called it what she wanted to call it, people would get upset. It had brought nothing good into her life.

  Penny had memories of her early childhood, but they were foggy and dreamlike. She remembered living on a military base. Lots of people in uniform, including her father, who she remembered being enormous. When her thing started showing itself, her parents became very concerned because at first, they thought it was some kind of illness. Once doctors eliminated that possibility, their worry was replaced with fear. Then the questions began. And the tests, right there on the base, one after another, while grave-faced uniformed men looked on behind glass partitions and men and women in white coats intensely watched monitors and made notes.

  And then Mom and Dad were killed in a car accident and her entire world changed. After that, a man in uniform—a man her dad always called “Sir”—named Lieutenant Colonel Trask, told her that he was going to make sure she was well taken care of by good people.

  After that, she was flown to a place in the mountains, an enormous castle. It looked like a castle, anyway. She learned the castle was actually a boarding school called Aquino Academy. A woman named Miss Bixby took care of her. Later, she learned that Miss Bixby was what was known as her “handler.” Miss Bixby kept her busy, showed her affection, made her feel loved. Penny was afraid she would not fit in with the other children, but she soon learned that her thing did not make her unusual at Aquino Academy. Everyone there had a thing. Some could hear thoughts and others knew about things that hadn’t happened yet; some could start fires and others move objects. She made friends and grew comfortable with her surroundings, and before long, Aquino Academy felt like home. But it wasn’t all good. She soon learned there was a dark side to Aquino. It was located in the cellar—she thought of it as the dungeon—where everyone went eventually. The dungeon was where they learned who was boss and what would happen if they did not do as they were told.

  After she turned eight, she began receiving assignments. She didn’t know they were assignments at the time. Miss Bixby called them “adventures.” She and Miss Bixby were driven off the academy grounds, through the huge wrought iron gate with the two giant horn-like “A”s over the top, sometimes flew on a plane someplace. They were always accompanied by someone important looking who didn’t talk much. When they got to their destination—sometimes a city, sometimes a small town—they went to a hotel, and then to the assignment. It was always the same. It was usually a small room in some unmarked building. Someone was seated in a chair, usually tied to it, and Penny was told, “We would like you to tell us what this person is thinking.” Sometimes she was told to look for something specific. Sometimes the person in the chair was bruised up, sometimes bloody. The assignment was never difficult. It was the easiest thing in the world for Penny to tell them what the person was thinking. The hard part was what she found when she slipped into the person’s head—usually abject terror, utter hopelessness and the certainty of death.

  Early on, Penny had come to understand that it was rude to slip into peoples heads. It was like secretly watching them go to the bathroom or undress—she found it embarrassing and it felt wrong. It was as natural as breathing, but she trained herself not to do it out of consideration for others. But when an assignment was given, she did what she was told. She wanted to please the grownups. Once she completed an assignment, Mrs. Bixby was always full of praise for her abilities and very affectionate. Penny was always rewarded—a trip to an amusement park or circus, a shopping spree, or what Miss Bixby called an “ice cream blowout,” which involved eating far too much ice cream—all of her favorite flavors—and usually feeling sick later.

  It was all exciting at first—except for the feelings she encountered when she slipped into the head of the person in the chair. That was always bad.

  She had an assignment on her 10th birthday. She was told that when the assignment was completed, she would return to Aquino and there would be a big birthday party waiting for her. The subject was not in a chair this time but stretched out on the kind of table usually found in a doctor’s examination room. It was a woman who looked like shed once been quite pretty. But now her face was bruised and swollen. A sheet was draped over her. An I.V. was in her arm. Penny was told the woman knew a 10-digit number that she refused to share with them and they wanted her to extract it. There was an urgency to this assignment that Penny had not encountered before. Everyone in the room—two unfamiliar men, one in a suit and one in uniform, and an unfamiliar woman aside from Miss. Bixby and herself—was tense.

  “You have to do this quickly,” the man in the suit said. “We don’t have much time.” He did not say why they didn’t have much time.

  She found the 10-digit number easily, but before she pulled out, the woman died.

  Penny felt as if she were inside a great cathedral that suddenly collapsed on top of her in a heap of rubble, but instead of stone, the rubble was made of emotions: Fear, regrets, loss, horror, hopelessness. Then she spiraled down into a darkness blacker than anything shed ever imagined. When the darkness finally dissipated, she found herself lying on her back on the floor with Miss Bixby hovering over her.

  After that, nothing felt quite the same and Penny found herself looking at everyone and everything with... suspicion. Her next assignment involved a man with mocha-colored skin, thick black hair and stubble on his jaw tied to a chair. The person in charge was a blond white man in a black suit who told her to find out who the dark man worked for. She did. Then she did something shed never done before, something that had never occurred to her before—she slipped past the smile and pleasant voice and into the head of the man in the black suit.

  There was nothing good in there. Nothing good.

  That was when Penny began to see her life differently and ask herself questions that had difficult answers. That was when she began to realize that somehow, at some point, her life had to change, because she did not want to work for these people any longer than she absolutely had to.

  Now she was on her newest assignment, sitting in this building that had been hastily constructed behind a ranch house in Mt. Shasta. The walls were covered with a thick layer of dark gray, egg carto
n-shaped soundproofing. The rectangular room was filled with familiar machinery. They had been using it to test Pyk like an animal in a laboratory—that was all he was to them. The same machinery had been used on Penny at one time, but in a much friendlier setting and over a period of months.

  In the room were Penny and Pyk, Mr. Ryker, Dr. Wu, who administered all the tests, the three people who worked under him—a blonde woman named Carla, a young black man named Aaron and a painfully thin man with bad skin named Ronald—and Mrs. Rubens, Penny’s guardian. Miss Bixby had died the previous year. Shed been diagnosed with lung cancer in February and had died in November. She was replaced by Mrs. Rubens, a stern-looking middle-aged woman who looked like a prison guard. She seldom smiled, talked little and seemed to have no interest in getting to know Penny. She merely stayed available if Penny needed anything and always accompanied her off the Aquino campus.

  Penny knew Mr. Ryker from previous assignments. He had called on her a number of times in the past. Shed slipped into his head the first time they met and he was no different than any of the other men and women who instructed her on these assignments.

  But this assignment was unlike any that had come before it. This time, she was told to slip into the head of the small boy lying on the examination table in the building. But he was not a boy. He wasn’t even human.

  “He doesn’t speak,” Mr. Ryker had said when she’d first arrived. “We need to communicate with him. You’re here to help us do that.”

  For a few weeks now, she had been the mediator between Mr. Ryker and his people and Pyk. That was the creature’s name, Pyk. They communicated with feelings and concepts rather than a language. And they had been communicating a lot more than Ryker and his friends knew. Penny and Pyk had been communicating with each other more than with Ryker and his people. And they had been making plans together.

  Now, as she went through the motions of her assignment, she and Pyk searched for just... the right... moment... to escape.

  The door opened and a woman brought in another child. That made Penny feel sick, and it made her want to get out of there as fast as possible.

  Chapter Seven

  Despite her enormous coat, Gertie was cold. An icy drizzle fell with a whisper that she predicted would turn to snow before the night was done—she could smell it in the air and feel it in her bones. She walked away from the house toward the bright glow of the floodlights on the building some distance away. Without any moon or stars, the back yard was black. Gertie pulled the coat together in front and buttoned it as she reached the edge of all that light.

  She watched the building and the motorhomes for a while. Keeping her eyes on the shed, Gertie made her way around the perimeter cast by the floodlights. She stayed in the darkness, following the edge of the light to the rear of the building.

  There were lights on inside the motorhomes, but she could see no one near the vehicles or the shed. There seemed to be no one around, no activity at all.

  She told herself once again to stop thinking of it as a shed. It looked like a large rectangular white block that had been dropped on their property from the sky. It had no markings, no windows and only one door.

  Gertie stood in the dark with a stand of mountain hemlocks at her back, and behind that a patch of woods that stretched to one end of the Mahler property. She listened carefully.

  The light rain pattered on the ground and dripped from nearby trees, and an owl hooted from somewhere within them. Other than that, she didn’t hear a thing. No sound came from the building.

  She was getting wet and was terribly cold. I’m wasting my time, she thought. She didn’t like the presence of a child in that ugly white building, but there was nothing she could do about it. With hands stuffed in the pockets of her coat, she turned and started to walk back along the perimeter of light.

  A rush of sound behind her made her spin around.

  The door of the building had been knocked open so hard that it slammed against the wall and a figure shot through the doorway. The moment it was open, she could hear sound inside.

  Screaming. From a woman and a man—and the shrill, piercing screams of a child. Something crashed inside. A man shouted, “Stop him! Grab him! Stop him!” More screaming.

  But her attention was focused on the figure that was running straight toward her—a small, slender figure. As the runner got closer, Gertie began to walk backward, hoping to get out of the way. But it was clear the person didn’t see her.

  Gertie uttered a muffled cry as the person ran into her hard. They both nearly fell over, but the runner staggered backward, then reached out and clutched the lapels of Gertie’s coat with both hands.

  “Gertie!” she shouted. It was the girl Gertie had seen being led to and from the building several times. “Help us, Gertie, help us!”

  Gertie looked past the girl at the open door. Chaotic sounds were still coming from inside the building. Screaming, shouting, crashing.

  “Get it off of him!” someone shouted.

  A woman screamed again and there was another crash.

  “Somebody go after Penny!” a man shouted in a ragged voice.

  Gertie saw no one else accompanying the girl, so she didn’t understand why she kept saying “us.”

  The girl leaned close until their faces were almost touching and shouted, “You’ve got to help us!”

  But she wasn’t shouting. Her lips were not moving. Her mouth was closed. The girl’s voice had not sounded in Gertie’s ears—it had shouted inside her head.

  Gertie felt electrified. Adrenaline suddenly roared through her and she was seized by a sense of urgency. She looked around frantically but saw no one else. Not yet. But others would be coming out of that open door soon.

  Gertie grabbed the girl’s arm and pulled her along as she whispered, “Be quiet and come with me!”

  Ryker flopped onto the couch in the motorhome, stretched out, put his right forearm over his eyes and released a long, weary sigh.

  “Anything I can do?” Ross Stedman was Ryker’s right-hand man. He was a diminutive blond man in his mid-thirties who was typically so quiet and still that no one knew he was in the room. He was uncannily observant and usually anticipated Ryker’s needs without being told or asked anything.

  “Get Babitch on the phone immediately,” Ryker said. Anthony Babitch was his contact at Aquino Academy.

  They had sedated Pyk, who had injured Dr. Wu. The doctor was being treated in the other motorhome. He would require stitches. Dr. Wu’s assistant Merry had been knocked around a little, but she’d fared much better. Mrs. Rubens, unfortunately, had been killed. Her body was still in the lab. Someone was on the way to pick it up and dispose of it. The child brought for Pyk’s feeding had been rushed away, uneaten.

  And Penny was gone. That was the worst part.

  Irina knew nothing about it. She was in her hotel room in town and he hoped she stayed there until he had this mess cleaned up. It didn’t look good and if word got around about it, his reputation could be damaged.

  Ryker had worked with Penny before and there had never been a problem. Her record was spotless, not only with him but her record at Aquino, as well. Ryker had even gotten the idea that she liked him and enjoyed working for him. He’d made an effort to treat her well, make her comfortable, show his gratitude for her work. Had he become too lax, too unguarded? Had he missed warning signs? Mrs. Rubens should have been the first to see any sign of trouble with the girl, but she had mentioned nothing.

  Babitch would send in a replacement, one well-suited to finding Penny. Once recovered—and she would be—she’d be taken back to Aquino to be put through an extensive program of discipline and rehabilitation. All of the Aquino students were broken early, but Penny would be broken again. She would not be the same person when they were done with her.

  Ryker thought that was a shame. He’d liked the girl.

  “Babitch,” Ross said.

  Ryker sat up, took the phone and tried not to sound so tired when he sp
oke.

  Chapter Eight

  It was an old phone and it did not chirp or play music—it rang loudly, piercingly. It so startled Gavin that he lunged out of his sleep, rolled out of bed and hit the floor with a heavy thud. As he got to his feet, he saw Karen sitting up in bed, looking around with squinting eyes. The phones obnoxious ring kept sounding.

  Karen muttered, “Is it the 1970s again, or am I dreaming that sound?”

  Gavin answered the phone.

  “It’s Crystal. I’m sorry to wake you, but you need to come over to my house right away.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Remember the client I told you about? The one who has researchers on her property? Well, she just showed up at my house.”

  Gavin looked at the clock. “At 2:30 in the morning?”

  “She’s not alone.”

  “Who’s with her?”

  “A young girl who ran away from the researchers. Her name is Penny. You need to get over here because she’s afraid for her life and I think she wants to, like, talk about it. In detail.”

  “We’ll be right there,” Gavin said. He started to hang up the phone, but put the receiver back to his ear. “Wait—where are you?”

  “Not far. It’s easy. Are you awake enough for directions?”

  “Go ahead.”

  As Crystal gave him directions to her house, Karen got out of bed and paced the floor, scrubbing her face with both hands, trying to wake up.

  Gavin repeated Crystal’s directions back to her. “Give us a few minutes,” he said, then he hung up. He told Karen what she’d said.

  They quickly dressed and put on their coats. Outside, snow fluttered down to the whitening ground in fluffy flakes. They drove to Crystal’s house, which was only a few miles away.

  She lived on a street of middle-class ranch-style homes with neat yards and one or two cars in each garage. Gavin parked the Escalade at the curb in front of the house. Crystal opened the front door as they were making their way up the walk.