Tag: woodstock

Sequel to Sanitarium.

~

 

Even with her quasi-foresight, Sharley hadn’t had nearly enough idea what she was getting herself into.

Three days of peace and music, the flyer said. Fair enough. The couple she’d been traveling with the last year had wanted to go to this concert at Woodstock, and she hadn’t seen any timelines where something went disastrously wrong, so she saw no reason not to.

But if I saw any potentiality with a crowd this huge, I would’ve damn well stayed in San Francisco.

The trip cross-country in their pair of wheezing VW buses had been something of a nightmare all on its own, but she couldn’t say she’d minded too much; Sharley only felt anything close to at peace when she was traveling, and she’d kept both buses in decent enough repair that Andy and Turquoise’s only broke down once. They camped under the stars at night, little Marty safe in her arms — her daughter wasn’t yet four years old, and she guarded the girl like a mother bear. Her father had been shipped off to Vietnam and walked into a bullet two days later: Marty was the only tie to Earth that Sharley had. Thought of taking her into a crowd of half a million people was almost more than she could bear.

The only future she could never see was her own, and by extension, Marty’s. That blindness made her perpetually uneasy, and she didn’t dare let it cloud her judgment, which was already so often impaired as it was. While she couldn’t see her future, her intuition still worked just fine, and right now it was poking her with a metaphorical stick.

She glanced at Marty, seated oblivious in the passenger’s seat. The girl’s blonde bangs were damp with sweat, sticking to her sunburned face, but she didn’t seem to mind at all. Her mismatched eyes were round as she stared at the press of cars, and she was practically vibrating with excitement.

“Take your cue from her,” Layla said; she hovered unseen behind Sharley, and temporarily unheard by Marty. “She’s enjoying herself.”

“It will be fine, Sharley,” Sinsemilla added. “You know you have more time than this.”

Sharley didn’t know that, but she was fairly sure she wasn’t meant to die yet. What she was less certain of was Marty’s fate — but it wouldn’t do to dwell on it now. The situation was what it was, and there was no backing out now — literally. Her bus was hemmed in by hundreds of other cars, all of them sweltering and sticky with humidity. The scent of gasoline mingled with the aroma of a staggering amount of marijuana, which she hoped would keep the crowd at least somewhat mellow.

Turquoise certainly seemed stoned enough, when she rapped on the car door. She was a tiny woman with skin the color of dry earth — her curly back hair was a wild mess, and her dark eyes were distinctly bloodshot. “Andy’s gonna dig out the barbecue,” she said. “Looks like we’ll be sittin’ here a while. Got some beer and lemonade that’s still mostly cold.”

“Lemonade!” Marty cried, and Sharley couldn’t help but smile. The kid was still young enough to be delighted by the simplest things, and Sharley wanted to keep her that way as long as she could.

They were both glad enough to get out of the van, though she had to shut her eyes for a moment. A large part of why she avoided crowds was the fact that such a huge number of potentialities could easily be overwhelming.

“Beer?” Turquoise asked. Her voice was laced with sympathy.

Sharley nodded. Neither of her companions knew the source of her oddities, but they didn’t care, which was not something she often found on Earth. They — and most of the other hippies she’d met — just accepted that she was weird, and left it at that. Even after five years, that was still rather novel.

Things were bearable when she opened her eyes, and when Turquoise pressed a can of lukewarm beer into her hand, she chugged it in three long swallows. Alcohol, like so much else, didn’t affect her as it did most people, but it took the edge off.

She looked at Marty, who was sipping a bottle of lemonade and ardently people-watching. Mercifully, she hadn’t inherited her mother’s curse; she was as close to normal as a child of this counterculture could be. That was a blessing Sharley would never cease to be thankful for.

“Andy’s fighting with the awning,” Marty said. “You maybe better go help him.”

I just bet he is. If he was anywhere near as stoned as Turquoise, it was only a wonder they hadn’t wrecked their bus. She tossed her empty can into the plastic garbage bag in her own bus, and went to help mitigate the damage.

It wasn’t as bad as she’d feared, though she still had to shoo Andy away. The awning was really just a huge piece of tie-dyed canvas that sat on four rickety poles, and it had a tendency to collapse in anything more than a slight breeze. At least the air was still, if oppressively muggy. Now that she was out of the van, the raw onion stench of sweat joined the panoply of aromas, along with the far more welcome scent of cooking meat.

She could hear music in the distance, though it was difficult to make out over the din of so many people. So long as she didn’t look at them, she actually found the sound surprisingly soothing.

She pulled the lawn chairs out of her van, and sat in the shade with Marty on her lap, nursing a second beer. The atmosphere too was a pleasant surprise; her unsettled intuition took a temporary vacation. The freshly-dyed, violent blue of her hair earned only passing glances and a few smiles — she couldn’t quite remember why she’d agreed to let Turquoise loose on her hair, but she kind of liked the result, and Marty loved it. That alone would have been enough to make her keep it. Her height and her scars meant she was used to being stared at anyway.

“Mama, can we explore?” Marty asked, between sips of lemonade.

“After dinner. You stick close when we do.”

Marty rolled her eyes. “Yes, Mama.” Sharley knew she was probably overprotective, but that was only because she also knew what sort of dangers the world held. She’d seen too many of them, past and future, to risk her daughter’s safety through carelessness. Once Marty had some food in her, she’d be a little less eager to tear off into the unknown.

~

The sun was dying a bloody death on the western horizon, and Von Rached was fascinated. Slightly annoyed, but fascinated.

The counterculture had intrigued him since its inception. It was a novelty, and novelties were a rarity to him. It meant he had to rub shoulders with the (often literally) great unwashed, but it was a small price to pay for something so very interesting. The scent of smoke and sweat and God knew what else was a thing he could have done without, but he’d smelled worse.

He had to step carefully, so as not to trod on anyone — normally he wouldn’t have bothered, but he viewed this whole concert as a type of experiment, and one had to be careful with an experiment lest the results be tainted.

He flitted in and out of dozens of minds as he approached the stage, brushing them only long enough to gather surface thoughts. The music was not at all to his taste, but it faded into a background drone as he continued his mental exploration. Very rarely had he encountered such an atmosphere; in his experience, crowds this large were powder kegs, but this one was remarkably relaxed.

The vast quantities of marijuana likely have much to do with that, he thought, a trifle sourly.

The minds of stoners could be surprisingly interesting. Physically they might be unmotivated, but the dull thoughts of an ordinary person could become either comical or pseudo-philosophical under the influence of cannabis. Unlike those on mushrooms or acid, they could mostly maintain linear mental cohesion, and quite often thought they were far more intelligent and insightful than was actually the case. It made them vastly entertaining.

The crowd nearest the stage was on its feet, though few were dancing. Most swayed in place with the ponderous, thoughtful slowness of the profoundly drunk and/or stoned. Von Rached considered implanting a sudden phobia, just to see what would happen, when his mind brushed up against something at once alien and disturbingly familiar.

He halted, and scanned the crowd. Oh, he knew that mind — in his seventy-one years on Earth, he’d never felt another like it. He hadn’t aged since Sharley saw him last, though it had been sixteen years; he still looked not far past the age of thirty. Should she see him here, she wouldn’t be able to help recognizing him. And that was not a complication he felt like dealing with.

She was tall enough that he spotted her easily, standing perhaps a dozen yards away. Someone had dyed her hair an obnoxious shade of blue, but he was startled to see that she too had changed very little; he’d thought her in her twenties when she arrived in his experimental facility in 1954, but she didn’t seem to have aged much more than five.

Even more surprisingly, there was a child in her arms — a little blonde girl who couldn’t be more than five herself. Actually touching Sharley had been horrifying for all who had to do it when she was in his facility, but the child didn’t seem to mind at all. Her facial features echoed Sharley’s to an extent that made Von Rached she was the woman’s biological daughter, and the thought made him shudder. The girl’s father must have been as much of an unnatural monstrosity as her mother, if he could stand touching her intimately enough to father a child in the first place.

Curious though he was, he didn’t dare press further into Sharley’s mind. Somehow, the woman had always felt it when he did, to his eternal frustration.

Even now, he refused to fully admit to himself that Sharley made him nervous, though given the circumstances of her escape, he knew he had every right to be.

She really had looked very little different than she did now. Her hair hadn’t been blue then; it was a deep auburn, wild and tangled, but the eyes had been the same, such a bizarre example of sectoral heterochromia — Technicolor eyes, one of his nurses had called them. She was so tall and so strong it often took three or four nurses to subdue her, and as a result they usually kept her heavily drugged.

He’d thought she was on that afternoon, that warm afternoon in mid-spring, and so hadn’t bothered restraining her. She’d leaned on her elbows on the exam table and watched him as he set about arranging his tools, mostly consisting of more drugs — she always watched, but rarely ever spoke, unless it was to whisper to those voices of hers. Hazy sunlight filled the room with gold, but it seemed to have no effect on her.

“Now, Corwin, this shouldn’t hurt if you cooperate,” he said. He faced her now with a hypodermic in his hand — he always said that, and she never did, but he had to offer the opportunity for her to make his life easier.

To that she said nothing — just watched him with those bright, half-mad eyes. Her silence so unnerved the rest of the staff that few of them would work with her, even when she was drugged, because no matter how much they gave her, her sharp eyes never lost their focus. One nurse had once confided it felt like Sharley was trying to read her mind, which had amused him to no end — he didn’t know what Corwin was, but a telepath she was not.

She tensed to spring when he approached, and with a tinge of irritation he held her fast with his telekinesis, tying a cord around her upper arm so he could insert the needle. The woman didn’t have an ounce of fat on her — she was all wiry muscle, and rawboned though she was, she was strong as a man her height. He paused, as he often did, to examine her scars — they’d been much more prominent then, deep and twisted and ugly, some pink and some white, and as they’d obviously never seen stitches he still wondered how she hadn’t bled to death when she received them. No matter what he said or did to her, he couldn’t get her to divulge how she’d got them, either — the woman could stay maddeningly silent through torture like nobody else he’d ever met, and he wondered very much how. What had happened to her, to give her that ability?

The drug made her relax quite against her will, but he didn’t let up his telekinetic hold on her, not yet. He hadn’t tried this one on her before, and he hoped it might make it easier to read her fractured mind. All these attempts had been fascinating in part because they were so frustrating, but he meant to succeed today.

“I wouldn’t, Doctor,” she said, surprising him — it was always surprising when she actually spoke, though her speech was somewhat slurred thanks to the drugs. “You’re waking it up. I can feel it, in here.” She tried to move her hand to touch her temple, but of course she couldn’t.

He set aside the needle. “Waking what up?” he asked. “What is it you have in your head, Corwin?”

She shut her eyes. “It. The thing, the — leviathan. The Stranger. It started talking to me again yesterday.”

Whatever it was, it was clearly distressing her, which intrigued him greatly — an agitated Corwin was an interesting thing indeed. From the sound of it, it must be another voice — perhaps one of the things she called Transients.

“It’s been asleep for ages — don’t make it wake up, please.”

Now that was really interesting. She’d never, ever pleaded with him before, no matter what he did to her — and he’d done some very painful things, mental and physical. What on Earth could be scaring her so badly?

Only one way to find out. He stripped off his gloves and laid a hand on either side of her face — she was the only person he’d ever met who he had to physically touch to enter their mind — and stepped right in.

As usual, it was like walking into a Hall of Mirrors with every pane cracked or broken. Each was like a window of memory, but the images they showed switched and shifted with such bewildering rapidity he could focus on none of them. Such a dark place, Sharley’s mind, filled with huge patches of blank shadow completely void of memory, and even after a year he’d brought no light to them. Whatever had been there was gone, burned away by those voices of hers, likely to protect what little sanity she had left — and wasn’t that fascinating, that they both could and would do that. She’d been committed for schizophrenia, but she was no more schizophrenic than she was telepathic.

“Get out, Vonny.” That was Layla, one of the main four, a soft sweet child-voice, and she actually sounded afraid. “Get out and let Sharley out — seriously, don’t wake it up.”

“We mean it. Don’t.” To Von Rached’s surprise, that one was Kurt — Kurt the juvenile sociopath. He often tormented Sharley himself, but did his best to make sure nobody else did. Yet right now even he sounded frightened. “We might not be able to put it back to sleep.”

That was only impetus for Von Rached to dive deeper, or what he hoped was deeper — with Sharley’s mind one could never be sure; she’d actually managed to trick him into stumbling out a few times, though he doubted she did it consciously. Whatever powers she had — and he still didn’t know if she had a proper ability or not — she had no control over them whatsoever.

She managed to do it this time, too, to his immense irritation, but this time was different — this time something seemed to forcibly grab him and hurl him out, and when his eyes focused on her he saw sheer, naked terror in her face.

“Oh, you idiot,” she whispered, “you complete goddamn idiot— ”

Then, even as he watched, she…changed. Not physically; physically she was the same scarred Sharley, but her very presence seemed to shift, her expression smoothing into something like nothing he’d ever seen — every trace of humanity, of Sharley, had left it, and the eyes that watched him now belonged to a creature wholly alien.

“They warned you, Doctor,” she said. Even her voice was different — it was still Sharley’s, still rusty and faintly Southern, but the intonation was as void of humanity as her expression.

And then she moved.

She shouldn’t have been able to — Von Rached hadn’t released his hold on her — but she did, broke his hold like it was nothing, and that came closer to startling him than anything ever had in his life. One scarred hand shot up and seized him by the throat, long fingers digging so hard they almost ripped out his trachea, and jerked him toward her until they were practically nose-to-nose. “You should never have caught us, Doctor,” she said. There was a truly terrible sanity in those odd eyes, as bereft of emotion as a statue’s.

His reaction was instantaneous, instinctive — he hit her so hard he heard a rib snap, but not even a flicker of pain crossed her face, and she hurtled him from her with that surprising strength, so hard he crashed into the counter and sent all his instruments flying. Still there was  no pain nor humanity in her expression when she sat up, an unexpected monster in a plain white hospital gown. He tried to catch her with his telekinesis, to pin her against the wall—

—and failed. Failed utterly.

She stood, advancing on him, and her stride was as terrible as the sanity in her eyes, her every movement as completely alien as her expression. This wasn’t a simple case of split personality — this was some other entity entirely, some creature that had taken complete and total possession of her. She shouldn’t have been able to do that — nothing was immune to his telekinesis. Nothing, apparently, but whatever this thing was.

Anyone else likely would have been terrified, but Von Rached was completely and utterly fascinated. Even if his telekinesis didn’t work on this creature, he was still much stronger than Sharley — from the feel of her grip on his neck, the thing did not augment her strength, even if he did make her quite insensible to pain.

“What are you?” he asked. Tall though Sharley was, he had a good five inches on her, and she stood close enough that he had to look straight down at her.

“She calls me the Stranger,” she said — or rather, it said through her, “and you have hurt us for the last time, Doctor.” It regarded him quizzically, as though trying to read him. “But we must not kill you yet. There is something you must do, years from now. Your path will cross ours again.”

At the time he’d had no idea what that meant, and had been much too intrigued in that moment to analyze it right away. “Are you part of her?” he asked, almost hypnotized by those odd alien eyes.

“Yes. And there is something we must give you, Doctor, though neither you nor she will remember it.”

She placed her hands on his face — very cold hands; her body temperature always had been remarkably low — and for some reason even he couldn’t fathom, he actually let her. He came to regret it a moment later, when pain and darkness exploded in his head, black stars going nova within his mind. To this day he had no idea what it did, nor how long it lasted — even yet its promise held, and he remembered nothing after that darkness took him utterly.

He came to a good forty-five minutes later, sprawled on the cold tile, his head pounding like a jackhammer. Corwin lay not far away, her eyes open but completely vacant, her breathing shallow and far too quick.

“Now you’ve done it,” Kurt said, though he still sounded more afraid than angry, and Von Rached wondered that he could hear the voice though he was not in Sharley’s head. “Nice job breaking it, moron.”

“What did it mean?” he asked, kneeling beside her.

“How the hell should I know? I don’t want to know. Sharley probably won’t even know. I wouldn’t try to dig in her head to find out, either, if I was you.” And Von Rached, though he would never admit it, had no intention of trying — not until he was ready to meet that thing again.

He hauled himself to his feet, filling a syringe with one of his stronger sedatives, and when he’d injected it her eyes closed, her breathing evening out. Oh, that bore testing — lots of testing, though preferably when she was restrained. He managed to pick her up and get her back on the exam table — good grief, she really was deceptively heavy for one so thin — and stared at her for a long while, calculating.

Finally he got himself some morphine for the headache, and checked on her ribs. To his surprise, none of them seemed to be actually broken despite the snap he’d heard — she healed remarkably fast, he knew, but not that fast. It made him wonder if that wasn’t part of why those scars hadn’t made her bleed out.

He took her wrist, timing her pulse, and paused to examine some of the scars. Whatever had given them to her had tried valiantly to slice her to ribbons, and when he touched one with a bare finger it filled him with a very primal revulsion. Sharley hated being touched, and it seemed she had a gift for making people hate to touch her in return. Just now it almost made his skin crawl.

He shook his head, which already hurt less, and donned his gloves again. They would have continued the next day, but the next day she was gone, simply vanished from her room like smoke, and until just now he’d had no idea what had become of her.

A normal person — a sane person — would fear her, but Von Rached couldn’t take it that far. She was fascinating and alien and unnerving, and she was the only person on the planet who was possibly capable of actually killing him, but he hated her too much to fear her. Hatred was normally something he disdained as a waste of energy, but she had earned it and then some.

He ought to kill her, before she had a chance to notice him. Whatever alien soul inhabited her body, she was more or less human — she bled and she breathed, and he could easily disrupt both without even touching her.

That would, however, leave the child, who he could not kill. Von Rached was a monster, but even he had limits — or rather, he had standards, and spilling blood without purpose offended him. Killing Sharley was a matter of practicality — the woman was, after all, very dangerous — but there would be no justifying the murder of her daughter. Von Rached certainly didn’t want the child, but surely if her father was actually around, he’d be with them now. Not that he could imagine a man voluntarily staying near Sharley anyway.

The decision was taken out of his hands when she looked right at him, and went, if possible, even more still. Her little daughter looked as well, and he saw that she had her mother’s odd eyes. Though he couldn’t hear the girl speak over the music, he knew she was asking Sharley who he was.

 Damn it. He would not avoid her out of lingering uneasiness. She was hardly likely to attempt to murder him in front of her daughter, and he was morbidly curious. While he had rarely managed to force her to speak in the sanitarium, perhaps she would be more forthcoming now that their balance of power had shifted to a more equal footing — she wasn’t a prisoner anymore. She knew why he hadn’t aged; he wanted to know why she hadn’t, either. In the sanitarium, she’d been convinced she’d die soon, but he wondered now just what her definition of ‘soon’ actually was.

He approached with a small amount of care, knowing she might well bolt. She did not, however, and when he reached her, she arched an eyebrow.

“All right,” she said, almost shouting to be heard over the music, “I might see a lotta things coming, but I sure as hell didn’t see this. What’re you doing here?” Her voice was somewhat less hoarse than he remembered, which made him suspect she used it more often now.

“Research,” he said dryly. “Walk with me.”

Her gaze turned wary. “Why?”

“Why not? I will go deaf if I stand here much longer, and I cannot imagine it could be good for your child’s ears.”

“Leave her outta it,” Sharley said, but she actually followed as he worked his way through the crowd. Perhaps she was as curious as he — though it was far more likely she’d rather keep him in front of her than wonder where he had gone. Corwin might be deeply unstable, but she was not stupid.

“Does she have a name?” he asked, when he could actually hear himself speak.

“Yes,” Sharley said, “and you don’t get to know it. Stay out of her head.”

Von Rached was genuinely offended. “She is a child,” he said. “Her mind is still far too fragile to be read. Keep her name, if you must. Why have you not aged?”

She actually snorted. “You’ve gotten any less blunt, have you? Time doesn’t pass at the same rate everywhere. Sometimes and somewheres it’s a lot slower. For some.”

That was a frustrating (and semi-nonsensical) non-answer, but it was also very Sharley. He likely wasn’t going to get a better one. Experience had cured him of any desire to root around in her mind for a more satisfying explanation, too. He didn’t press, and she offered no further information — she simply walked beside him in silence, cradling her equally silent daughter as she picked her barefoot way around camping blankets and the occasional prone body. He had no idea how she could retain her odd aura of stillness even when she was moving, but somehow she did, and it was unsettling because it was so very unnatural. Even with the myriad smells of smoke and food and sweat, her copper-lightning scent was vivid, and wholly at odds with her surroundings.

“Petrichor,” he said, stepping around a puddle of vomit.

“What?” she asked.

“Petrichor,” he repeated. “It is what you smell like — dry earth after rain. A desert thunderstorm.”

“You’re weird, Vonny,” Layla said.

“And goddamn creepy,” Kurt added. “Seriously, who the hell says something like that?”

“Him, obviously,” Jimmy said. “You’re not gonna try to skin Sharley and turn her into a person suit, are you? Because that would seriously put a damper on our weekend.”

Ah, the voices. Von Rached had tried to forget how maddening they were, with no success. He hadn’t intended to answer them, but Sharley spared him from further prodding by bursting out laughing.

The sound very nearly startled him. She’d laughed only once in the two years she’d spent in his sanitarium, and it had been bitter and broken — nothing at all like it sounded now. Sharley was happy, more or less, and somehow that was the truly disturbing thing. Before, she had seemed mad but mostly human; somehow, happiness made her seem more alien than ever.

“Give it up, Doctor,” she said, stroking her still-silent daughter’s hair. “I don’t rightly know what I am — you’ll never figure it out.”

Von Rached disagreed, but there was no point in saying so. Sooner or later he would divine what she was, with or without her help — preferably without it. Spending too much time in her company was draining, even now.

“Mama, is he the one Kurt calls Doctor von Assface?” the little girl asked. Her eyes were round as she stared at him, their intensity very much her mother’s — yet she seemed quite human. There was nothing at all unnatural about this child, and that made even less sense.

Now it was the voices who laughed — all four of them. Sharley at least kept a straight face. “He is,” she said. “And Kurt, I told you not to talk like that around her. She doesn’t need to be picking up your bad habits.”

 So the child hears the voices, too. Von Rached had so very many questions, and he knew she likely wouldn’t answer a single one of them.

Full night had fallen, and with it, the music. The heat was still brutal, but that too would wane. The field was dotted with lanterns, each like a glowing eye in the dark, and the scent of marijuana had actually grown worse. He would not have thought that possible. While Sharley could not actually keep him from following her back to her campsite, it wasn’t worth the scene she would cause.

“How much longer will you be here?” he asked. He did not mean the festival.

She shut her eyes for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “Not long, I think. I have a place for the ones who need it,” she added, which he took to mean she had a home for her daughter. Oddly, he was relieved by that — he might hate the mother, but he had no cause to hate the child, who had done nothing to him. Sharley clearly loved the girl, and vice versa, which was one of the few things Von Rached truly could not understand: his own mother had been as emotionally divorced from him as she was physically divorced from his father. That had suited him just fine, but it also meant there was a gap in his comprehension of the world, and one of the few other things he bothered hating was not knowing something.

Sharley, of course, was watching him, her eyes keen as ever even in the shadows. “You’ll understand better someday,” she said, stroking her daughter’s hair again. “Sort of. In your own warped way.”

“Do you see more of my future?” he asked.

“Your potentialities are narrowing,” she replied. “There aren’t half so many now.” She paused, and he was certain she was debating with herself how much to tell him. For once, it seemed the voices had no counsel to give her, because they actually stayed quiet. “You’re gonna fuck up, Doctor,” she said. “And you’re gonna do it bad. The storm’s still coming for you, but you’re the one that causes it. You’re an arrogant bastard, Von Rached, and the entire world’s gonna pay for it when you bite off more than you can chew.”

He was honestly surprised she’d told him even that much — surprised, and suspicious. She would not have done so without reason, but he sensed no lie in her tone.

Sharley set her daughter down before he could speak. “I can’t let you remember this, Doctor,” she said. “It wasn’t supposed to happen. You won’t meet up with me again for a long while yet.”

Von Rached arched an eyebrow. “You are not a telepath, Sharley,” he said. “You cannot take my memories.” Daughter or no daughter, he was perfectly willing to hurt her if she tried something stupid.

Sharley shut her eyes. “I can.”

The intonation of those two simple words made him freeze, if only for an instant. “Stranger,” he said. The smart thing to do would be to back away, to run, but Von Rached was not a man who ran from anything, no matter how alien or dangerous. Whatever the Stranger was, it had only beaten him the last time because it had caught him unaware — he had never encountered anything like it before. Though he still didn’t know what it was, he knew now what it could do.

“Do not fight me, Doctor,” it said. “You are not the only one who will suffer if you do. Sharley would not forgive me for it, but there is much I have done already that she will never forgive.”

“You told me once you could not kill me,” he said, ruthlessly tamping down his instinctive horror. When Sharley’s eyes opened, they might as well have been made of glass, for all the life behind them. He cursed his visceral revulsion — the primitive, ungovernable part of his brain that told him in no uncertain terms to flee. Sharley herself seemed inhuman, but this thing, this creature, was an intolerable abomination. He didn’t seize her with his telekinesis, but he held it between them like a shield — it would slow the Stranger down, if nothing else.

“And I cannot,” it said. “I cannot kill you. Run from me, and I will remove anyone you put between us.”

It was the wrong thing to say. It was a thing Von Rached would have paid to witness, and the Stranger was offering it for free. He would not run, but perhaps, just this once, he would retreat — and very happily see what came of it.

“Don’t do it,” the little girl said, glaring at him with her mother’s gimlet stare. “And Stranger, don’t make Mama sad. How come all grown-ups are dumbasses?”

One of the voices choked on a laugh, while another sighed. The Stranger didn’t react at all, but that wasn’t tremendously surprising. It extended Sharley’s right hand, fingers brushing the telekinetic barrier, and sighed.

“Oh, Doctor,” it said. “I do not need to touch you to do what I must.”

It was the only warning Von Rached was to receive. Pain hit him, but only briefly; it shifted into a burning sensation in his mind that was more irritating than anything else. He tried to give her a telekinetic shove, but found he was incapable of doing a thing — blackness crept over his vision, and he knew no more.

~

The Stranger didn’t bother trying to catch Von Rached when he fell. Sharley wouldn’t have. Though it also didn’t kick him, and that she might have done. He was a threat that the Stranger wished it could remove, but it understood the future far better than Sharley. He was to be the cause of much misery, but if he did not do it, someone else would, and things would be much worse for it. At least he was capable of cleaning up his own mess, and would actually have the motivation to want to.

For now, the Stranger would return to sleep, and allow Sharley to enjoy what time she had left.

~

Sharley blinked, and fought a groan. Von Rached, she saw, had collapsed, and was surrounded by well-meaning hippies — something he’d be thrilled about when he woke up, she was sure.

“He’ll be fine,” she said, picking up Marty. “He just needs to sleep it off.” I hope so, anyway. She didn’t actually know for certain what the Stranger had done to him, but it would not have truly harmed him. Unfortunately.

She and Marty made their way back to their bus before anyone could think to stop them. The voices were strangely quiet — but then, they often had little to say after the Stranger made an appearance. Sharley was able to enjoy the cooling night air in peace, Marty half-asleep in her arms. Now that she knew Von Rached was here, the voices could keep an eye on him, so she need not run into him again. They wouldn’t have to bow out early.

In spite of it all, Sharley smiled. Von Rached aside, she was happier here than she had been on Earth since she was a very small child. If this life was to end soon, at least she would go out with a smile.

~

Followed by The Storm-Dark Sea