"Leverone has penned one of the most chilling villains in modern fiction with MR. MIDNIGHT. Unforgiving, intelligent, and ingenious, this monster is what nightmares are made of…"
"…at times both touching and sickening…MR. MIDNIGHT is what a horror novel should be…Leverone crafts a tightly-knit tale that keeps the reader turning the page as quickly as possible…"
"MR. MIDNIGHT is a thrilling, suspense, dark fiction novel about good vs. evil, family, and the supernatural…downright amazing. This is definitely movie material."
"It is violent. It is at turns subtle and gory. If you love horror then you will love this. If you don't or are scared easily, leave this book alone and lock all your doors…"
To celebrate the release, and maybe even convince you to pick up the novel, here is an excerpt:
Chapter
1
Stalking.
Mr. Midnight was
stalking.
He trailed along behind
his two targets carefully, keeping to the shadows as much as possible, staying
a healthy distance while being sure to keep them in sight at all times. The
girls were college students; that much he knew. Whether they attended B.U.,
Northeastern, Tufts, or any of the dozens of other schools in the Boston area
the predator didn’t know and didn’t care.
What mattered to Mr.
Midnight was that the girls were clearly from out of town, new students still
unaware of the lines of demarcation the more experienced students observed automatically
which allowed them to stay safe. Relatively speaking.
Mr. Midnight had
been following the pair for twenty minutes, ever since observing them as they stumbled,
drunk, out of a raucous apartment party on Commonwealth Avenue. He had been
loitering in the dark recesses of a doorway across the street and gotten a vibe
about the girls almost immediately.
Now they were
lost, and confused, and just beginning to feel the first tentative twinges of
apprehension. Alcohol bravery and the fact that they were together and could
count on each other for support had suppressed the panic thus far, but Mr.
Midnight knew it was mere minutes away from bubbling to the surface.
He picked up his
pace and moved silently closer, now near enough to hear bits and pieces of
their conversation. “…think we went in the wrong direction,” the one on the
left was saying. She had a nice, shapely ass packed into low-rise jeans. Her
crop-top blouse didn’t come close to reaching her waist and the predator
thought he could see the hint of a thong peeking out over the jeans. He smiled
in approval.
“…don’t recognize
anything…” the other one said. She looked and sounded Asian, a slim, tiny girl
poured into a red mini-dress.
“Maybe we should
turn around,” the first girl said. Mr. Midnight was close enough to them now
that he could now hear their voices clearly. Both girls sounded near tears and
the predator felt himself becoming aroused.
The area was
unfamiliar.
The streetlights
were dim and spaced far apart.
Pedestrian traffic
was minimal.
It was time to
move.
Mr. Midnight
closed the remaining distance between himself and the girls, still unsure of
which one he would take, not that it mattered. They were both young and pretty,
and he knew he would be more than satisfied with either.
It was almost too
easy. The predator wore Nike cross-trainers and moved with a practiced stealth,
and the frightened girls were chattering to each other like magpies in an
effort to keep their mounting fear at bay.
They were crossing
in front of a Catholic grade school, the Victorian-era stone structure looming
in the semi-darkness behind a padlocked chain-link fence, when the predator
struck. He used the butt of his knife to club the girl on the left—he glanced
down and discovered he had been right about the thong—in the temple. She let
out a low moan and dropped straight down, unconscious before her body hit the
concrete sidewalk with a wet thud.
The second girl,
the tiny Asian in the mini-dress, gasped and froze, trying to process in her
alcohol-addled brain what had just happened. A half-second later she drew in a
breath to scream, but by then it was much too late. Mr. Midnight slapped a hand
over her mouth and lifted the knife to her throat, running its razor-sharp
point along her silky skin like a lover’s caress. Blood immediately began
welling up in the furrow.
The girl stopped
struggling, undoubtedly hoping compliance would equate to survival.
She wouldn’t find
out until much later how wrong she was.
Chapter
2
The air inside the Super-K Grocerette
felt pleasantly cool to Caitlyn Connelly as she waited in line at the register.
A low pressure system had stalled over Tampa, the moisture in the atmosphere
combining with the blazing heat to form a mushy tropical blanket over eastern
Florida.
Through the
plate-glass windows fronting the store Caitlyn watched as people trudged across
the parking lot. They seemed to move in slow motion, as if bogged down by the
weather.
The line dragged, Cait
inching forward until eventually she stood behind only an elderly woman, who
had placed her purchases—roughly a fifty-fifty split between food for herself
and food for her pets—on the conveyor belt and now reached into a purse approximately
the size of a small European car for her wallet.
Cait felt a
sensation of pressure inside her skull, a wave rolling over her brain. She blinked
twice and her head rocked back slightly. It was the sort of reaction a person
might have if confronted with a completely unexpected sight. The image of a
tiny kitchen flashed into her head. The room was shabby but spotlessly clean. On
top of faded linoleum tiles which had been out of style for half a century, Cait
saw a checkbook which had fallen to the floor and now lay against a leg of an
ancient kitchen table.
A pair of sleeping
cats sprawled on either side of the checkbook, looking like furry bookends, and
Cait knew instantly what had happened. The woman had placed her purse at the
edge of the table in preparation for her trip to the store—she shopped twice a
week, Monday and Thursday—but she had mistakenly left it unclasped. The
checkbook had fallen out of the purse when she picked it up, in a hurry because
the taxi arrived sooner than expected, and it would simply be wrong to make the
poor driver wait.
Caitlyn wasn’t
guessing about any of it. She knew what had happened because she could see it in
her mind as clearly as if it were playing on a high definition television
screen in front of her. She didn’t know how she could see it in her
mind, only that she could. She had been experiencing these visions—“Flickers,”
she called them, due to their short but intense nature—for as long as she could
remember.
The Flickers were,
as far as she could tell, completely random occurrences. Sometimes they
disappeared for days, the visions going silent for such long stretches of time Cait
began to think maybe they had disappeared for good, only to return with a
vengeance, dozens of the intense mental movies blasting into her head over the
course of a few hours.
More often than
not, though, she experienced one or two per day. They seemed normal and natural
to Caitlyn because she had been living with them her entire life, but she had
years ago given up trying to explain them to anyone else, tired of putting up
with the amused smiles or exasperated looks of people who simply did not
believe her.
Back in the
Super-K, the elderly woman began frantically digging through the gigantic
purse, looking for the checkbook she would not find, apologizing for holding up
the line. The cashier, a bored teenage girl with purple-dyed hair who demonstrated
her annoyance by snapping her bubble gum every few seconds, stood with one hand
on her hip. She rolled her eyes at a heavyset woman standing in line behind Cait.
“Oh, dear,” the
elderly woman said, “I’m so sorry. I know I had my checkbook with me and now
it’s simply disappeared.”
“Listen, lady,”
the woman behind Cait said, “we all have places to be. How about you step aside
while you try to get your act together—not that you’ll be able to—so the rest
of us,” she raised her arms like Moses parting the Red Sea, “can pay for our
stuff and get the hell out of here.”
The elderly woman
was now almost in tears, flustered and confused. Cait turned and stared down
the woman behind her, locking eyes until the woman turned away impatiently. Cait
returned her gaze to Alice—that was the elderly woman’s name, the knowledge
came to Cait without warning—and said gently, “Do you think you might have
forgotten your checkbook at home?”
“I suppose I must
have, but I can’t imagine how. I always prepare in advance for my trip to the grocery
store. I place everything on the table in the morning while drinking my tea. I
do it the same way every time to avoid this exact problem. Now, where could
that checkbook be?” She began digging through her purse again.
Cait put an arm on
her shoulder. “I’ll pay for your things.”
“Oh, no, I
couldn’t allow you to do that.”
“Of course you
can,” she answered gently. “I’ll pay for your purchases and then this nice
young woman behind the counter will give me a slip of paper. I’ll write my name
and address on it, and when you get home and find your checkbook, you can mail
me a check for the cost of your groceries. How does that sound?”
“Well, I don’t
know…”
The woman behind Cait
snorted impatiently and Alice said, “All right, yes, I think that would be
fine. Thank you so much, young lady.”
Cait paid the
cashier for both sets of groceries and then helped the woman load the bags into
the trunk of her tiny car, glad to be out of the store. The incident had left a
sour taste in her mouth and she felt badly for the old woman, who was obviously
alone in the world. She wondered about her history. Was there a husband who had
passed, leaving Alice to live out her final years alone? Were there children in
the picture who visited once a week, bringing a much-needed break from the
loneliness and isolation?
Cait considered
the Flickers a normal part of her life. She had long ago stopped thinking of
them as strange or unusual, but sometimes they were just so damned frustrating.
The mental movies the Flickers provided were almost always incomplete, lacking
any sense of context or cohesion—as in Alice’s case, where she learned just
enough about the woman’s life to become curious—leaving her unhappy and upset.
Of course, she thought as she wheeled
her bags to her car, I don’t know much
more of my own history than I
do of Alice’s. Someday that will change, she vowed.
Someday.
Cait loaded her groceries
and drove slowly out of the lot. Over Tampa the clouds swirled, becoming
thicker and blacker by the minute. A storm was coming, and by all appearances,
it was going to be a bad one.
Chapter 3
Thirty Years Ago
Everett, Massachusetts
Robert
Ayers paced relentlessly, unwilling to leave his wife’s side but unable to
stand still. Back and forth he walked, mopping Virginia’s sweaty brow, holding
her hand, then marching to the bedroom door before turning on his heel and
retracing his steps to her bed.
Shadows crept across the floor as the sun
lowered in the late-afternoon sky, the hands on Robert’s watch moving
simultaneously fast and slow. Virginia moaned and thrashed, screaming at the
onset of a contraction, relaxing when the pain eased. Sweat poured down her face.
“This is insane,” Robert muttered. “She
should be in a hospital. The days of giving birth at home ended decades ago.
This is unsafe, especially if something goes wrong.”
On the other side of the bed stood a
stranger dressed in grubby medical scrubs, a pair of latex gloves pulled over
his hands. As far as Robert could discern, the man had done little but observe
quietly as Virginia screamed and suffered. The man shot him a dark glance but
said nothing.
“She should be in the hospital,” Robert
repeated. He stopped pacing for a moment and leaned over, stroking his wife’s
cheek gently with the backs of his fingers. Her eyes were closed and she didn’t
seem to notice.
“Up to you,” the stranger said. “It’s your
choice. Call an ambulance if you wish, but understand I get paid my full fee
regardless of your decision.”
Robert Ayers glared at his guest. “You’re
concerned about your fee? Jesus Christ, you’ll get your money, don’t worry
about that.”
“Jesus Christ has nothing to do with this,”
the stranger shot back, grinning darkly, revealing dual rows of yellowing
teeth, irregular stumps thrusting at odd angles out of an unhealthy mouth. For
what felt like the hundredth time, Roger wondered where in the hell his wife
had found this man, this disgraced medical professional who had been stripped
of his license to practice and now skulked about in the night, earning a living
providing medical care deep in the shadows outside accepted society.
He called himself “Doctor Jones”—Robert
hoped the man was better at doctoring than thinking up aliases—and when Robert
had asked Virginia a few days ago where she had found him, she had been unable
or unwilling to provide a satisfactory answer.
Locating and hiring “Doctor Jones” was just
the latest example of the strange and frightening ability manifested by his
wife on occasion. Robert had been completely unaware of her unusual gift until
after they married. At times Robert thought “bizarre” would be a better
description of Virginia’s ability to place herself inside the minds of other
people, strangers she had never before met and would never see again.
It was creepy and unsettling.
After their marriage, Virginia had described
her unusual talent to Robert to the best of her ability, begging his
forgiveness for not telling him sooner but admitting she feared the knowledge
might frighten him away. “And I can’t live without you,” she told him
tearfully.
She described the moments of incredible
insight—“brain movies,” she called them—that came upon her without warning,
flashes of thoughts or mental pictures. They represented experiences other
people were having, things they might be thinking or plans they might be
making.
Suddenly, the strange, thought-provoking
scenarios that had occurred over the course of their courtship—none momentous
when considered on its own, but all quite disturbing when added together—all
made sense. The empathetic connection Virginia seemed sometimes to share with random
strangers, her inexplicable flashes of insight into lives and situations of
which she should have no knowledge, all of it.
Initially he had been hurt and angry, even
frightened. Then, after some time and reflection, Robert had decided it was far
from the worst thing that could happen. Quite the opposite, actually, it was in
some ways reassuring. Virginia wasn’t a freak, she was simply a young woman
with an unusual, almost mystical ability; a gift she had not asked for and
could not divest herself of even if she wanted to.
Hell, if you really thought about it, the
gift was nothing more than a hyper-sensitivity to the needs of others. And that
was a good thing.
That was what Robert told himself.
And he stayed with Virginia.
He assumed Virginia had used her gift to
find “Dr. Jones.” He assumed she had experienced one of her strange “brain
movies” when somewhere near him, maybe at the gas station or while in line at
the bank, had uncovered his disgraced standing in the medical community in her
mind and then had approached him to deliver her baby.
Virginia had adamantly refused to give birth
in the hospital. Her fear of the place was something Robert did not quite
understand—he found it illogical and senseless—but his wife would not be
dissuaded from her insistence that the delivery occur at home.
Now, with the woman he loved suffering
greatly, contractions wracking her body and “Dr. Jones” flippantly unconcerned,
Robert began to feel the tug of panic in his gut. Virginia could die in
childbirth; it was a very real possibility here in this non-sterile bedroom
equipped with only the most rudimentary medical equipment.
Or her baby could die.
Or, God forbid, both things could happen.
Chapter
4
The tenement was ancient, probably
over one hundred fifty years old. Its red brick construction had been worn down
by decades of extreme Boston weather until it now sagged and buckled as if the
act of defying gravity was becoming simply too much to bear.
The building had
been condemned years ago, deemed unfit for human habitation and then ignored, never
renovated but never demolished, either. Now it sat, hulking and silent, its
interior stripped, everything of value removed, either legally by owners who
had long-since disappeared, or illegally by everyone else. Smashed-out windows
had been hastily boarded over with sheets of plywood, and the building’s
exterior doors drooped in proportion with the rest of the structure. The entrances
had been secured with locks which were broken off within days, likely within
hours, of their installation and the tenement now formed a convenient gathering
place for vagrants, drug dealers, users, and the occasional hooker performing a
fifty-dollar quickie.
And one other man.
Milo Cain was the
only resident of the top floor, having carved rudimentary living quarters out
of the empty shell of one of the apartments. In one corner of what at some time
in the past had been a living room, Milo had placed an air mattress, which represented
a massive improvement over sleeping on the buckling floor. A ratty wool blanket
lay over the mattress, one side eaten raggedly away by moths.
In the opposite
corner Milo had placed a Coleman cook stove, offering a way to heat coffee and
soup and the occasional canned spaghetti dinner. There was no oven in the
kitchen; that appliance had disappeared decades ago along with everything else
of value.
Milo sat unmoving,
butt on the floor, back against the wall. He stared across the room at nothing
in particular. The electricity had been turned off years ago, and candles placed
inside grimy old drinking glasses provided uneven lighting, splashing
flickering shadows across the wall. A gigantic spider moved slowly and clumsily
across the floor in front of Milo, its movements jerky and insectile. He barely
noticed and didn’t care.
His head lolled,
striking the wall behind him as he was assaulted by a series of vivid images,
all different but uniformly dark and disturbing. In the first, a man dressed in
a stained wife-beater undershirt screamed at a woman, consumed by a white-hot rage
which Milo could feel but which was meaningless to him because the vision
provided no context. It was simply a scene, picked up at random by his
subconscious mind.
The next involved
a drug deal going down somewhere near the tenement. Milo watched through his
mind’s eye, floating high above the illicit meeting, silent and unseen. The
participants were nervous, both sides tense and fearful of a double-cross and the
potential for deadly violence.
That image seared
itself into Milo’s brain in an instant, only to be replaced by another, in
which a young child, perhaps ten years old, was torturing an alley cat,
skinning its tail with a dull knife. The cat screamed, the sound remarkably
human, the suffering animal writhing in pain and struggling to escape but unable
to do so. The cat snapped and spit as the skin under its fur was peeled away
and still the child continued.
Finally the images
came to an end—for now—disappearing as if with the flick of a switch, and Milo
sagged against the wall, spent. How long the break would last he had no way of
knowing. It might be a precious few minutes, or maybe even a couple of hours if
he was extremely lucky, which most of the time he was not. The only thing Milo
knew for certain was that before long the images would return and when they
did, they would be uniformly dark and disturbing and exhausting.
But there was one
silver lining. When the images returned, maybe they would provide him with information
he could use for his own purposes; there was always that possibility.
In the meantime he
would rest while he could. Milo considered crawling to his air mattress and
napping while he had the chance, but he was too fucking tired to move. The
visions were so goddamned draining.
Instead, he bent
down, head hanging between his spread knees, and closed his eyes. God, he was
tired. Maybe he would just lie down on his side right here on the floor and
nap.
Then the visions exploded
into his brain, beginning anew. Milo Cain’s head snapped up, smashing against
the wall, and once again he stared off into space, lost and dazed.
Chapter
5
Cait sipped her wine, enjoying the
last of the pot roast dinner and reveling in the nearly continuous stream of
compliments being lobbed her way by her boyfriend. Kevin Dalton was not a hard
guy to please when it came to food, but Cait wasn’t about to let that minor
detail lessen her appreciation of the moment.
Both worked long
hours in the hopes of building their careers, Cait as a real estate attorney and
Kevin as a Tampa police officer. But their long-standing tradition was a
home-cooked meal every Thursday night, and tonight it had been Cait’s turn to cook.
She had purchased everything she needed at the Super-K and then had spent the
next couple of hours peeling potatoes and carrots, tossing a salad and cooking
the roast, before Kevin’s arrival.
“I gotta tell ya,”
Kevin said, leaning back in his chair with a satisfied sigh, “this might be the
best meal I’ve ever eaten.”
Cait smiled. “Like
I’ve never heard that before. I think it may have had more to do with the fact that
all you had to eat today was half a cheese sandwich for lunch.”
“Duly stipulated.
Whew, that was quite the vigorous cross-examination, counselor. You’re really
getting this lawyer thing down.”
Cait laughed and
shook her head. “I do real estate law, remember? We don’t cross-examine
people.”
“That’s a shame,”
Kevin answered, “because you’d be really good at it. Anyway, I’ll admit it, I
was beyond hungry. But I’m still not backing off my testimony. Everything was delicious.
I’m stuffed.” He patted his belly and grinned.
“If you unbuckle
your belt and unsnap the top button of your jeans, you’re out of here. And you
better have saved a little room for dessert and coffee.”
“Note to self,”
Kevin replied. “No belt unbuckling. At least not until later.” He waggled his
eyebrows suggestively and Cait laughed. “And as far as dessert is concerned, I’ve
never passed it up yet, and I’m not about to start now. What’s on the menu?”
“Nothing. At least,
for now.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. I’m
withholding dessert—it’s your favorite, by the way, homemade strawberry
shortcake—until I get what I want.”
“Ooh, kinky,”
Kevin said, nodding in appreciation. “If it involves a seductive striptease and
grapes being hand-fed to me by a certain sexy young woman, count me in.”
“You wish. It
involves you letting me in on this big surprise you claimed to have in store
for me. No dessert, of the food or
sexual kind, until you spill the beans.”
“Wow, that’s cold.
Lawyering’s changing you, sweetheart.” Kevin’s eyes narrowed and Cait smacked
him on the arm with a laugh.
“Come on,” she
said. “Give it up.”
“All right, all
right, I can’t take any more. You’ve worn me down.”
“Was there ever
any doubt I would?”
“Good point. Okay,
you know how you always say you’d like to learn more about your past—the
identity of your birth parents, where they live, why they gave you up for
adoption, all of that?”
“Sure. I just
don’t know where to begin. I have no idea where I was born, no idea what my
parents’ names might be, no clue what agency may have handled the adoption.
There’s nothing to go on.”
“Exactly,” Kevin
said. “There’s nothing for you to go on. But a professional could
probably handle the job.”
“Maybe,” Cait
answered. “But I don’t have the money to hire a professional, you know that.”
“You don’t have to
hire a professional.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because I already
did.”
“Uh, Kevin, aren’t
you forgetting something?”
“What?”
“You don’t have the money for that,
either.”
“That’s where
you’re wrong. It just so happens I’ve been saving up for a while, waiting to
surprise you. I have enough cash put aside to at least get started, so I went
out yesterday and hired an investigator.”
Cait paused at the
kitchen sink where she had been rinsing dishes. She stared at Kevin, saying
nothing.
“Well?” he
prompted.
“Well, what?”
“Are you
surprised?”
“Surprised would
be an understatement.”
Kevin frowned. “What’s
wrong? I thought you’d be excited.”
Cait rinsed her
hands under the warm water and dried them on a towel. “It’s not that I’m not happy,
I am. I guess I just never really thought I would have the opportunity to
discover my heritage. It’s going to take a little while to get used to the idea
that I might be able to learn something after all these years.”
“Well,” Kevin
said, “the guy has a great reputation and all of his references check out. But
he told me not to get my hopes up, that it’s a long shot at best. He may not be
able to find out anything.”
“It doesn’t
matter,” Cait said, hanging the dishtowel on a rack. She walked across the
kitchen and sat in Kevin’s lap.
“It doesn’t?”
“No. What matters
is that you cared enough to do such a thoughtful thing for me. That was really,
really sweet. It’s just one more reason why I love you.” She put her arms
around his neck and nibbled his ear. “Now, about that dessert. Still hungry?”
“I’m suddenly
ravenous.”
The strawberry
shortcake went uneaten.
Chapter 6
Thirty
years ago
Everett,
Massachusetts
Virginia
moaned and thrashed as another contraction struck and Robert’s panic bubbled
closer to the surface. He decided he could no longer stand the agony of
inaction. He had to do something. He just had to. He mopped his wife’s forehead
with the cool cloth—Christ, she was sweating so much!—and caressed her cheek.
Her eyes remained closed.
“That’s it,” he announced. “I’ve had it.
This insanity has to end.”
“Dr. Jones” gave no response. It was as if
he hadn’t even heard Robert speak. He seemed preoccupied and Robert wondered if
perhaps he was high on some medication. “She’s going to the hospital,” Robert
continued. “I’m calling an ambulance.”
He strode across the room.
Made it to the open door.
And Virginia screamed, her voice jagged and
high-pitched, intense now with anger, not pain. “NO! You will not call an
ambulance! I’m having this baby right here. You agreed to this and you will NOT
BACK OUT NOW!”
Robert stopped in his tracks, confused, the
certainty of a moment ago gone. At the foot of the bed, he thought he saw a
smile flit across “Dr. Jones’s” face and disappear.
Then Virginia screamed again as another
contraction struck. She sounded like she was being beaten with a baseball bat.
The contractions were coming more rapidly now and increasing in intensity.
Robert rushed back to her bedside. He
realized it was probably too late for an ambulance now, anyway. Something was
going to happen soon, he could feel it. The baby was going to be born in the
next few minutes or…well…Robert refused to consider the alternative.
Again Virginia screamed, her voice like a
buzz saw ripping through a stubborn plank. She was panting and sweating, screaming
constantly now, thrashing on her blood-and-sweat-soaked bed. The unlicensed
doctor bent down over Virginia, somehow deciding now was the time to act. “You
need to push,” he announced softly.
“I can’t,” she screamed.
“PUSH,” Dr. Jones said again, more
forcefully this time, grabbing her by the shoulders, and she pushed. She
screamed and cried and sweated and swore, but she pushed, and then pushed
again, continued pushing when she swore she could not, and then it was over and
Virginia Ayers had given birth to a baby girl.
And then to a baby boy.
Chapter
7
Milo Cain wandered down Washington
Street toward Roxbury, moving slowly, randomly. The night was still young, so he
was forced to share the sidewalk with plenty of other people. Few took direct
notice of him, but, as always, the majority of pedestrians gave him a wide
berth, somehow unconsciously sensing menace. Mothers tightened their grips on
their children, adults averted their eyes at his approach.
His face was
nearly invisible, sunken deep inside the shadows of a hooded grey New England
Patriots sweatshirt. Baggy jeans, desperately in need of a washing they would
not receive, threatened to slip down his narrow hips, somehow defying the laws
of gravity and staying up. Tattered Chuck Taylors flopped on his feet.
A group of three
young black males approached, flat-brimmed baseball caps askew, sauntering
shoulder-to-shoulder, forcing Milo off the sidewalk and into the gutter. One of
them shot him a glance, silent and resentful. They passed and Milo waited for a
sign and received nothing, so he continued on.
A small
hole-in-the-wall tavern appeared on the right, flickering neon Coors sign
illuminating a plate-glass window that probably hadn’t been cleaned since the
Bush administration. The first one. Inside the bar, a tired-looking middle-aged
waitress schlepped glasses of beer clustered atop a small round tray. As Milo
watched, a heavy-set drunk lost his footing and stumbled into the waitress, sloshing
beer over the sides of the glasses and off the edge of the tray in a golden
mini-tsunami. No one paid any attention and the waitress soldiered on.
Two girls, white
and young, blonde, clearly college students, too ignorant to realize they had
no business being in this area—Milo’s favorite kind of girl—rounded the corner and
turned in his direction. They chatted quietly, unaware of their surroundings, oblivious
to the potential for danger.
The girls passed
on his left, quickening their strides, and his head snapped back like he had
been struck in the face as an image seared itself into his mind. The girls were
students at Northeastern University. Juniors. The one passing closest to Milo was
named Angela and she was cheating on her boyfriend, sleeping with her married Philosophy
professor for no reason other than it seemed exciting and daring. She had told
no one, not even her best friend.
As quickly as it
had slammed into his brain, the vision vanished. The two clueless college girls
continued on, moving away from Milo and he paused, stopping in the middle of the
sidewalk, analyzing what he had just learned, trying to decide if the information
was in any way useful. He glanced at his feet and saw sickly-looking weeds struggling
through the cracks in the sidewalk.
Then he raised his
head and the Northeastern students were instantly forgotten as he locked in on
what he now knew he had been waiting for. Across Washington Street, a young
Hispanic boy ambled along the sidewalk. The kid was perhaps ten years old, wearing
gang colors, MP3 listening buds sprouting from his ears like cancerous growths.
Milo didn’t even
need a vision to tell him what he needed to know. The kid was a runner, a
middleman employed by local gang members to deliver product to customers and
cash back to the dealers. It was the oldest scam going. As a minor, if
apprehended with illegal drugs, the kid would face nothing more than a slap on
the wrist, whereas the older gangbangers could be put away for years, even for
life, depending on their arrest records.
What Milo didn’t
know was whether the kid was carrying drugs or cash; whether he had already
made a delivery or was on his way to do so. Milo had no need or desire for
drugs, his reality was warped enough from the nearly unending stream of visions
he experienced. Cash, however, was another matter entirely. For a man living on
the farthest outskirts of society, cash was indispensable.
Milo crossed
Washington Street at a jog, moving quickly enough to gain ground on the kid but
not so fast he might draw unwanted attention. In this neighborhood, a sprinting
young man most often suggested a felony in progress. Behind Milo a cab slammed
on its brakes, nearly clipping him as it slewed to the side of the street. The
furious cabdriver unleashed a string of broken-English epithets into the muggy
night, his anger unacknowledged by Milo or anyone else.
When he reached
the opposite sidewalk, Milo slowed. Now roughly twenty feet behind the kid, he maintained
his distance. And waited expectantly.
He didn’t have to
wait long. In seconds a vision sizzled into his fevered brain like a lightning
bolt. It’s money, he thought. The kid is carrying the proceeds from a drug
deal. It wasn’t much, only a couple of hundred bucks, but beggars couldn’t
be choosers, especially when you took the expression literally. Two hundred dollars
would go a long way when you had nothing but a little spare change rattling
around in your pocket.
Milo picked up his
pace slightly, staying attuned to his surroundings as much as possible while
still absorbing the vision. The money was in the right thigh pocket of the
kid’s cargo shorts, nine twenty dollar bills and two crumpled tens stuffed next
to a throwaway cell phone. Milo could see it in his mind as clear as day. In
the left pocket the kid carried a knife, a weapon which would wind up being completely
useless to him.
It was perfect.
What was not perfect
was the fact that the kid was almost back to the burned-out shell of an
abandoned tenement—a building not much different than Milo’s—which served as
his gang’s headquarters, only another block-and-a-half away on the left. Once
within sight of that warehouse, the kid would be untouchable, as the gang would
have a team of sentries posted, young men who were heavily armed and not likely
to approve of their runner being taken down before their very eyes.
Milo knew he had
to act now—stealth and surprise would work in his favor. He resumed jogging and
wrapped his fingers around the stolen Glock 19 inside the hand-warmer pouch of
his sweatshirt.
In seconds he was
couple of feet behind the kid, who was still bopping along to the music in his
ears, feeling secure in a way he never would again. Milo pulled the Glock from
his pocket and in one smooth motion lifted his arm to smash its butt against
the side of the kid’s head.
The boy had begun
to turn at the last moment, some instinct alerting him to the impending attack.
His reaction was much too late. He spun around and the gun caught him just
above his right eye. He dropped like a felled tree, blood gushing from a jagged
gash in his forehead.
This was the critical
moment. Time was precious. The kid moaned and clutched at his skull, almost but
not quite unconscious. Milo knelt and reached into the left pocket of his
victim’s cargo shorts, withdrawing the hunting knife still secured in its
scabbard and jamming it into his pocket. He didn’t really need it, owned plenty
of knives already, but he had no desire to find he had misjudged the extent of
the kid’s injuries by getting shanked as soon as he turned his back.
Milo pulled the
wad of cash and the cell phone out of his victim’s pants, then stood and began
walking briskly away from the tenement building. He made it half a block before
the first rough shouts of surprise went up. He didn’t turn around, didn’t
glance behind, didn’t do anything. He just kept walking.
In a matter of
minutes, Milo had left the scene of the attack behind and was well on his way
to safety of his “apartment.” He assumed as a matter of course that he had been
seen attacking the kid, but the likelihood of being identified was almost nil
between his outfit—the uniform of urban anonymity—and the fact that he rarely
spent time in this neighborhood.
To be safe, Milo
knew he would have to avoid Washington Street for a good long while, but the
prospect didn’t concern him. Boston was a big city and there were plenty of areas
suitable for hunting. All one needed was the time to seek out victims.
And Milo Cain had plenty
of time.
Chapter
8
The Private Investigator’s name was
Arlen Hirschberg and he was hungry. Specifically, he was hungry for a turkey
melt with crispy fries and a chocolate shake. Cait knew this because she could
see it in her head; the vision exploded into her brain the moment she stepped
into Hirschberg’s office. It was not exactly the sort of he-man meal Cait would
have expected out of a macho private detective, but she had been on the
receiving end of Flickers for her entire life and had never known them to be
wrong.
Hirschberg had
called yesterday and scheduled the appointment, saying only that he had some news
to share. When Kevin expressed surprise that the PI had obtained results
already, he laughed and said he would be happy to sit on the information for a
couple of weeks if it made Kevin happy.
Now, sitting in
the P.I.’s office, it occurred to Cait that her expectations of what a private
investigator would look like had been inaccurate all around. She had expected
to meet a gruff, burly man wearing an ill-fitting suitcoat over a leather
shoulder holster into which would be crammed a big handgun. He would have a
booming voice and arms like stevedores and his office would be small and
Spartan, with a ceiling fan moving the air around and a metal filing cabinet in
the corner behind his beat-up desk. He would be the Hollywood noir cliché of a
private detective.
The reality was
almost the complete opposite. The Hirschberg Investigations office was big and
airy, with framed, signed prints of American sports heroes adorning the walls.
To Cait’s right, Bobby Orr flew through the air, hockey stick held high in
triumph, forever celebrating his Stanley Cup-winning overtime goal for the
Boston Bruins in 1970. To her left, a young Michael Jordan slammed down a dunk,
tongue wagging out of his mouth. Behind her, some NFL kicker she didn’t
recognize was booting a football into a raging blizzard.
Instead of a
clichéd cheap suit, the private detective was dressed casually but crisply in
tan Dockers and midnight blue golf shirt. His weapon, if he was sporting one,
was nowhere to be seen. There was no ceiling fan, and the filing cabinets weren’t
even in this office, they were located behind Hirschberg’s receptionist in the
waiting area. Behind his desk, the glass wall offered a breathtaking view of
the Tampa cityscape, with the greenish-blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico
beyond.
In short, Caitlyn
realized this was no down-on-his-luck Hollywood PI. Everything about Arlen
Hirschberg screamed competence and success, and Cait supposed that was exactly
the point. She wondered how much money Kevin had had to shell out to secure this
man’s services. She had asked him that very question on the way over but he
refused even to discuss the issue.
“So,” Hirschberg
said after introducing himself and seating them, “can I get you something to
drink? Coffee? Tea? Sparkling water?”
“I’m fine,
thanks,” Cait replied, smiling. If she had held on to any remaining stereotypes
about Arlen Hirschberg, the offer of sparkling water pretty much destroyed
them. Her adopted father had been a devoted fan of the 1970’s TV series, The
Rockford Files, in which James Garner played a down-on-his-luck private
detective. As a child, Cait had watched just about every episode with him on TV
Land and she was almost certain he had never once offered sparkling water to
anyone.
“Okay, then, let’s
get right to it. You have quite the unusual history, young lady,” Hirschberg
said with a smile. “In most cases, when an adopted child wishes to unearth her
history, the official records may have been sealed to protect the privacy of
the birth mother and thus are not accessible, but there are records.”
Cait nodded. “I
understand. But that’s not the case with me, is it?”
“No, Ms Connelly,
it’s not. In your case, there were no official records, accessible or
otherwise. You weren’t born in the Tampa area, I’m sure you are aware of that
much. Do you have any idea where you were born?”
“The only
information I ever got from my adoptive parents regarding my birth history was
that I was born somewhere in the northeastern United States. That’s as specific
as they would ever get. I got the impression that even they didn’t know exactly
where I came from.”
“And your adoptive
parents are now deceased, is that correct?”
“Yes, that’s
right.”
Hirschberg crossed
his arms and cupped his chin in one hand. “What do you know about the black
market baby trade, Ms Connelly?”
The question
caught her by surprise. She paused and then shook her head. “Um, nothing,
really.”
“You’re not alone.
It’s not a subject that gets a lot of media attention. But it should. There is
a flourishing market in this country for people who want babies but are not
able to have their own and, for whatever reason, cannot or will not go through
the normal and accepted—and legal—channels of adoption. This market has existed
for decades, centuries probably, and continues to this day. It will likely
continue long into the future.”
“Are you saying I
was a black market baby?”
“It would seem
logical, wouldn’t it, given the lack of official documentation regarding the
circumstances of your birth?”
Cait nodded and
Hirschberg continued. “This would explain why there seems to be no way to trace
your adoption through legal channels. There are no legal channels to
speak of.”
“But you said you
had news for me. If there’s no way to trace my history, why am I here?”
Hirschberg held up
a finger. “I didn’t say there was no way to trace your history. I said there
was no way to do it through legal channels. I’ve worked in law enforcement my
entire adult life and over the course of my career have served as a patrol
officer, a homicide detective and federal agent, among other things.
“Over time I
developed a fairly extensive network of contacts, as you might imagine. In your
case, mining those contacts was problematic due to the fact that three decades
has passed since the adoption occurred. Many people who might have been
familiar with the circumstances of your case are now dead or moved on years ago
and cannot be found. However, ‘problematic’ does not mean ‘impossible,’ and I
was able eventually to secure the information you wanted.”
Cait shook her
head, confused. “How in the world could you do that if there are no records?”
“Oh there are
records, Ms Connelly. There are always records, at least in these sorts of
cases. They may not be official government records, all neat and clean and
notarized and legally binding, but they do exist. And those records are
accurate, certainly accurate enough for your purposes.”
“So…” After years
of dealing with the pain that came from assuming she would never learn the
specifics of her familial background, Cait discovered that being on the verge
of getting that information was more than a little daunting.
She took a deep
breath and started again. “So, where am I from, Mr. Hirschberg?
Chapter
9
The visions pounded through Milo Cain’s
head, one after the other, like movie trailers playing non-stop on some cursed
screen in his brain. These trailers, though, often made no sense. They were mostly
short snippets of lives being lived by anonymous people Milo would never meet.
Pointless visions of ordinary actions, like a woman washing the dinner dishes
or a man making plans to play basketball the next day. Their very pointlessness
made Milo Cain’s torture even more difficult to bear.
He sat in the tiny
shell of an apartment, back propped against the wall—his usual method for
riding out the storm of visions—waiting for them to take a break. They always
did, eventually, just as they always came roaring back eventually as well. When
they finally, mercifully, came to an end, an exhausted Milo Cain considered how
to spend his evening.
It wasn’t supposed
to be like this. Milo had survived a traumatic early childhood involving
physical and mental abuse, had survived and moved on and deserved better. Up
until the age of five, he had lived in suburban Austin, Texas with his adoptive
parents, both executives in the nuclear power industry.
Normal.
Respected.
Abusive to Milo.
He didn’t remember
much of anything about Texas, but one thing he did know was that while
living there he could not recall so much as a single episode involving visions
blasting into his head.
Milo remembered
with crystal clarity the first time it had ever experienced a vision. When he
was five years old, the Cain family moved to Amesbury, Massachusetts, a seaside
community on Boston’s North Shore. His mother and father had both received
promotions involving higher pay and additional responsibilities to work at the Seabrook
nuclear plant located up Interstate 95 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
The incident
occurred at the end of the family’s first day in Massachusetts. Everyone was exhausted
from the move, hunkered down in a motel for the night, in bed early because the
following day was to be spent conducting a lengthy house-hunting search. Milo
lay in the room with his father and mother, almost asleep in his rollaway bed despite
the discomfort of the lumpy mattress, when into his head blasted a strange,
frightening vision, almost but not quite a dream.
In the vision, his
parents were lying in bed, and his father was doing something to his mother; it
almost looked as though he was attacking her, hurting her somehow. And she must
be getting hurt, because she was moaning, her head thrashing back and forth on
the pillow. It was horrifying, and not just because the young Milo Cain didn’t
understand what it meant. What made it all the more frightening was that he had
no idea where it had come from.
The disturbing
vision had all the qualities of the dream state, the vivid colors and the hyper-reality,
but it could not be a dream because Milo was not yet asleep. Even five year
olds know you have to be asleep to dream, and the moment the vision began, Milo
opened his eyes wide in mute, helpless terror, mouth agape, waiting for the
scene to end.
When the vision
did end—thankfully, this first one was short and to the point, even if Milo
didn’t understand the point—his head lolled to the side, and he found himself simultaneously
comforted and horrified by the sight of the sleeping forms of his parents in
the bed across the semi-dark motel room.
That long-ago
night in Massachusetts represented the beginning of the visions for young Milo Cain.
The family found a home and remained on the North Shore, and as Milo grew, the
visions became more and more pronounced, growing ever darker and more disturbed
even as his treatment at the hands of his parents became more and more twisted.
For a short time
he tried to describe the horror of the visions to his mother and father, eventually
coming to the realization they didn’t believe him, would never believe him, and
would not care even if they did believe
him.
After that Milo
simply gave up. He stopped telling his parents about the strange scenes exploding
into his head, the visions that now populated more and more of his waking hours.
And he began to fall behind in school. His teachers assumed he was daydreaming
and uninterested when his features slackened and his eyes glazed over and he
stared at the blackboard or out the window, not disturbing anyone or causing
trouble but clearly not paying attention, either.
He became
withdrawn and sullen at home, spending all his time in his room, stretched out
on the bed staring at the wall, unwilling to discuss his problem but unable to
make it stop. Soon after, neighborhood pets began disappearing, mostly cats and
a couple of small dogs, the occasional mutilated small-animal carcass thrown
carelessly into the woods along the side of the road.
One morning in
midsummer 2001, when Milo Cain was not quite eighteen years old, he walked out
of his parents’ Amesbury home and never returned. Over the next decade, Milo
wandered throughout New England, traveling as far south as Bridgeport,
Connecticut and as far north as Jonesport, Maine, at times gaining temporary
respites from the torture as the visions receded, at other times suffering
mightily as they attacked with renewed fervor.
But they never
completely disappeared, and Milo found it easiest to survive inside the
sprawling Boston metropolitan complex, where he could disappear, losing himself
in the crowds of down-on-their luck vagrants who, like himself, fit in nowhere.
There was another
advantage to living in Boston. Milo’s compulsion to do things, bad
things, horrible, twisted things, had blossomed as the visions increased in
frequency and intensity. His need to injure, to destroy, to tear apart based on
the information contained in those visions was often overwhelming, and this
compulsion was fed most easily in the city. The atrocities he committed were
not invisible in Boston, of course, but they were much easier to get away with
in the teeming metropolis than in the wide-open spaces of a small town like Amesbury,
where everyone had known him and seen him as a freak.
After years of
restless wandering, Milo moved to the city permanently at the age of
twenty-two, never staying in one place too long, moving around obsessively.
When his compulsions began to attract the attention of the wrong people, he
would simply pick up stakes and wander to another neighborhood, from Dorchester
to Roxbury to Mattapan to Back Bay, thrilled that by traveling just a few
blocks he could begin fresh.
There was the
occasional brush with the law; it was almost impossible to be a vagrant even in
a city as large as Boston and not catch the eye of the authorities every so
often. But to Milo’s continuing amazement, most of the suspicion involved his
appearance, his dirty clothes and unkempt hair, those superficial things that
made the good citizens of Massachusetts uncomfortable.
The things that should
have been of interest to the police—the abductions, the torture, now of
humans rather than animals—never seemed to find their way back to him, despite
the fact he rarely made more than a token attempt at disguising his activities,
and despite the fact that the media had begun playing up the horrifying
exploits of “Mr. Midnight,” the tag a clever television news reporter had hung
on him a few months ago, when a trash bag filled with decaying body parts had
been discovered behind a restaurant in Chinatown.
He supposed his
visions were largely responsible for his invincibility. Thanks to the images
flashing into his head, he was able to select as victims only people who would
pose no more than a minor threat to him. The irony of being insulated and
protected by the very visions that tortured him day after day and made his life
a living hell was not lost on Milo; he appreciated it in the way an entomologist
might appreciate being bitten by a particularly poisonous insect: the
experience was painful and rewarding at the same time.
All of this ran
through Milo Cain’s mind as he leaned against the bleak apartment wall. He
savored the clarity of thought that accompanied his brief respites from the
visions. The damned images spent so much time bouncing around inside his brain
that when they finally subsided, his head felt large and airy, like a penthouse
apartment that has been cleared of all furniture.
He considered the
long night ahead, stretching dark and empty before him. His skin was beginning
to feel tight and hot, and his breathing felt ragged and constricted. His
obsessions were beckoning again. It was time to play.
Tonight he would
find a streetwalker. Playing with hookers was especially enjoyable. Milo loved
taking the hardened, streetwise bitches, with their garish makeup and their
superior, sneering attitudes and turning them into helpless victims, begging
and pleading for their worthless lives, suspecting but never knowing for
certain until the very end what their fate was going to be.
The risk of
getting caught was minimal, too, with hookers. Dealing with pros meant dealing
with people who, like himself, spent their days and nights on the fringes of
accepted society. Their pimps would miss them, but that would be it. There
would likely be no worried husbands or boyfriends to report them missing, no
concerned coworkers to alert the authorities when they didn’t report to the
office Monday morning.
They would simply
vanish.
So that was it,
then. He would take a walk tonight and let the visions lead him to the perfect
victim. The visions would be there to guide him. They always were.
