Velvet Rain - A Dark Thriller (3 page)

“Do you comprehend a word? Of course you don’t. All you grasp is what you’re told. The present order. The
now.
”

The officer stirred as Brikker regarded him. If the man had shown but a whiff of the Sense, he would have been well-advised to stab that holstered gun to his head and pull the trigger. Before Brikker turned him into a lab rat—before the man begged him to do it for him.

“And what of the words, hmmm? What does a simple soldier make of
them?
”

The words behind Brikker; the words the young man had been trying to read so discreetly. The words on the plaque carved of hard desert stone.

What seest thou else

in the dark backward and abysm of time?

“What do
you
see, Lieutenant?”

Brikker grinned beyond the grasp of the light. Plainly the soldier saw nothing of substance, surely not that black abyss that had inspired Shakespeare in
The Tempest.
Only the chosen could see. Only the few.

An armillary sundial stood beside the lamp, another gift, this from his Russian friends in Moscow. He ran a finger, nail clipped sharply and neatly to a perfect point, along an edge of its intricate brass workings. It had been in Italy during the war, perhaps stroked just as it was now by Mussolini himself. How it had come into Communist hands he had been curious, but his was not to ask. It was the fifteenth of May, 1954: he had been sitting at this very desk, the Air Marshal’s desk, when the gift arrived, and he remembered the surprise fondly, despite the interruption. He had been giving the order, to an ape named Greco, an ape no older than this one, DeRose, to dispose of the Australian, to have him incinerated like the useless trash that he was. Goering would have respected his decision. Goering would have understood.

Had it been eight years? It seemed only yesterday; how the human brain could be fooled by such a distant memory had always taken him. They were so entwined, Time and Mind, lovers embraced, like those godlike strands of the double helix in DNA. They shared an unbreakable bond that could move worlds.
Make
them.

His finger slid along the cold shaft of the arrow that skewered the sphere. It stopped at the tip and hovered there, as if time had suddenly, wonderfully, come to arrest. As if it stood in wait for him to start it again, like a modern Merlin. The very thought caused his heart to quicken.

“I wonder,” Brikker said, and whether he was asking directly or thinking aloud only he could know. “Is Time like an arrow, shooting straight and true? Unbending? Unforgiving? It holds a simplicity that strains the soul. Men will kill for its secrets.”

The soldier swallowed. Again his eyes betrayed him, shifting to the painting before falling back to the phantom before him.

Brikker pricked the end of his finger on the tip of the arrow. A teardrop of blood hung there a moment, then slipped to the blotter in a silent splatter. The soldier stirred. He nearly said something about the blood, but seemed to know enough to keep his thoughts to himself … although there were whispers that was futile with Brikker. He saw souls.

Brikker repeated the strange experiment, and as a matter of course, the tiny spherule splattered in a messy overlap slightly offset from the first. He marveled at the uncertainty, the randomness of the result. You could almost see the grin on the good Doctor’s face.

He stemmed the flow from his wounds with a tender lick. He took up a marble sculpture from the desk, a figure of perhaps the oldest man on Earth, his pearly beard flowing to his feet, his furrowed hands laboring at the crank of a massive stone wheel. The lamp flame flickered, and it was impossible to know just where Brikker was looking, or if that single eye lay open. It was always so dark in this grimmest of rooms.

“Is it channeled?” he said. “Spun of Time’s Wheel, into the future by Chronos himself? Or does his aged magic cast Time aside like waste, to the past, forever to be forgotten? Perhaps one day … perhaps soon … men will grasp that wheel.”

He said nothing more. As if he knew that rap at the door had been coming. He had received word last night, an eternity past, and now here the future was, beckoning, beyond a simple steel door.

The lieutenant answered. The private, a youngster named Ayerst who had always had a strange tick in his grin, cocked his head a bit to the side, trying to spy the demon he had never seen. The demon he had heard only stories of.

“Is there a problem, Ayerst?”

“No sir.” The private—this really
was
a boy—straightened. “No sir.”

“Is this it?”

“Yes sir.” The private handed over the thick envelope he had slung under his arm. He wavered. Lingered.

“Dismissed.” The lieutenant came again. “Dis
missed.
”

DeRose closed the door firmly. He turned officiously to the desk, crossed the room and placed the package before his superior. The edge of it nudged a small stone hourglass, toppling it. It rolled into the blood.

“I’m sorry, sir, I’m—”

“Leave me.”

The lieutenant straightened, just as the private had straightened; monkeys, all. He saluted stiffly, clearly wanting to be on his way. He turned to leave, but not before Brikker caught his tempered glance at the painting.

Brikker waited for the door to close. He turned up the lamp a touch; he would have to fill it soon. He lit up, settled back in his chair and drew heavily, savoring the filth that filled his lungs. Perhaps he would perish at the hand of these seemingly innocuous sticks of death, but that was far in his future. Only the now, in the form of a package, concerned him, and he would proceed with the requisite caution lest his expectation turn on him again. Time could be harnessed like a prized stallion, yet well he knew how elusive it could be, how slippery it was.

He swiveled toward the window and let his gaze brush up to the painting. It had always been his favorite. Dali had produced this marvel in ’31, and for a time,
The Persistence Of Memory
had remained in Spain. For a time. Ah, to have friends in Catalonia.

The great painter had been right—as far as his genius had taken him—so right. The man had once said that his goal was to create an image as if he’d taken a camera into a dream. He had struck the mark with his brilliant strokes, had brought his vision to the canvas as if he had stepped into another dimension and had simply painted what he saw. Brikker sat in silence, in reverence; in awe. How the clocks lay dormant or dying, like molten keepers of time; how they seemed to wither and waste, slain by unyielding heat cast by magic. Time melted in a dream, quickly, slowly, never the same mindless pace as awake-time … melted as if it were there in the instant, and never to
be
again.

How wrong the artist had been. How utterly wrong.

Brikker ground his cigarette, indulged another, all the while contemplating the contents of the package. He set it beside the day’s paperwork—there was always one more report to produce, one more test to follow up—and then drew the drawer next to him. This had been Goering’s drawer, of course, and perhaps at one time it had held a cyanide capsule, or a Mauser P.38 with a single bullet. Assuredly, it had never held what it held now.

He removed the scrapbook and placed it in front of him as the clock tolled seven. He had not opened it in days, which was rare; had not added to it in weeks, which was troubling. Sometimes, he could feel the future slipping away, like water through his fingers. He glanced over his shoulder to the window. The sun, just a graying ball behind the cloud cover, was only now coming up above the Complex, its diffuse light holding the Nevada desert in gloom. Soon the phone would ring—news such as this traveled quickly in the highest ranks—the call from that ignoramus, Albrecht, down at Area 51 in Groom Lake.

Was Richards close? How long now?

How long, Brikker?

He felt something churn inside of him. Worry? Fear? Doubt? A sickly concoction of all three, enough to unsettle him … and Albrecht would be privy to none of them. He lit another cigarette. Better. Better.

He opened the book with some trepidation, but began to settle as he turned the pages, their secrets surrendering. He had been remiss in his reading; sometimes, even men like he needed reminding of the goal. There was gold in this mine of yellowed clippings and faded photographs, the purest. All you had to do was tap it.
See
it. He scanned quickly, skipping most of the pyrite, for there was fool’s gold aplenty here, promising at first, taunting and teasing as you clawed at it, infuriating when you finally had it in hand and realized its worthlessness. He lingered only on those glimmering veins circled in red, those precious pieces of the puzzle that had tasked him—
driven
him, often to the cusp of madness—since the beginning.

~

Detroit Free Press,
April 1, 1930

FIRE KILLS COUPLE, GRANDCHILD SPARED IN MIRACLE

Battle Creek Teacher Says Boy, 10, “
Rose from the dead
”

The man who had made such a wild claim insisted that the child, overcome with smoke, had been dead in his arms one moment, and in the next had been standing beside him in tears. Visibly shaken and often rambling in the aftermath, the man, a staunch Methodist, schoolteacher, and father of eight, had refused to give his name for fear of being called a crazy by the press, and to their credit not one reporter had labeled him such when but a month later, unable to cope with the recurring nightmares of the event, he drowned his wife, five boys, and triplet baby girls in a wooden washtub in the garage before hanging himself with wire above their neatly aligned bodies. Police had discovered the man’s journal in the days that followed, the pages revealing not only the sharply progressive breakdown of a human mind, but disturbingly obsessive references to “that strange mist” and “hell on Earth.” In addition, at the time of the fire, other neighbors had suffered what could only be likened to sunburn—in the middle of a cold spring night—and one woman had reported that despite the crisp but clear weather, there had been a sudden storm of electricity that was there and gone in seconds. Regarding the article itself, one angered reader of the
Free Press
had written a strongly worded letter to the editor the very next day, quite put off at what was surely an ill-conceived prank, given the date of its publication.

Los Angeles Times,
August 9, 1949

“OUR GUARDIAN ANGEL”

11 Years After Saving Twins, Hero Saves Sisters Again

Brikker subscribed to the randomness of events: the unpredictability, the possibilities of incalculable paths cast by will and by die. But he also believed that the Fates, those dark mistresses of what was to be, held sway in the grander scheme. So when he discovered that a man from Australia—a seemingly simple dairy farmer from Melbourne—had saved the same twin girls from death for the second time in their lives, he believed that the Fates had smiled upon
him.
In the first instance, a wildfire had apparently claimed the four-year-olds, but no; a sudden change in the wind, just enough, had allowed them to flee the fiery hell unharmed. In the second, the girls and their father were killed instantly when a passenger train struck them at a crossing, mere moments after the family car had stalled. But no: a reckless, yet solid push from behind—from the farmer’s half-ton, in the nick of time—drove them clear. As if these miracles were not enough, in both cases at least one witness had reported a bizarre weather disturbance had appeared out of thin air, enveloping this “guardian angel” in a strange, pulsating light. Yes, the Fates had smiled, most certainly, delivering this angel to the devil himself.

The Times,
April 25, 1953

“SECRET OF LIFE” FOUND

U.K. Scientists Unravel The Structure Of DNA

How many times had he read this—and that seminal paper by Watson and Crick? A hundred? A thousand? They had unlocked the door; had drawn the map to an unexplored world. A world—a
future
—waiting to be written.

Montreal
Gazette,
June 2, 1953

TRIO OF TWISTERS KILL 182 IN TEXAS

Survivors Claim Four More Tornadoes “
Just disappeared
”

What transpired at the southern range of Tornado Alley was as terrifying as it was exhilarating: there
had
been seven of the whirling beasts, each as powerful and as deadly as the next. Yet four of them had simply vanished. As if they had never touched down in the first place. Still, the carnage from the three monsters had been mind-boggling upon their miraculous resurrection. He had been there, had played God. Had
been
God.

Roanoke Beacon and the Washington County News,
May 6, 1957

BROTHERS CHARGED IN BRIDGE TRAGEDY HOAX

Cop Calls Cries Of Bridge Collapse “
Dangerous tomfoolery
”

For nearly two months, a construction crew had been widening a bridge in Beaufort, North Carolina, when a school bus carrying twenty-three children rambled onto the overpass. At the same moment, an eighteen-wheeler, full bore with a load of concrete blocks, approached from the other direction. The new work collapsed because of the load, and the vehicles plunged forty-five feet into a rocky ravine, the bus exploding in flames. More than a dozen workers had leapt from the bridge, two of them killed, the others seriously injured. Or so it all seemed. Two brothers, Paul and Marcel Laplaunte, had been in a pickup behind the bus when the disaster occurred, claiming they had witnessed it all. According to them, a white, powdery substance had covered their vehicle, and they had experienced an eerie silence, as if they had suddenly gone deaf. Their pickup stalled. Both claimed to have smelled something in the air; Paul Laplaunte described it as “a kind of burning smell.” His brother said the hair on his skin stood on end. The policeman who had responded to their call found a working crew and a bridge intact, no bus and no bodies, yet despite the charges of mischief laid against them, the Laplaunte brothers had asked for, and received, a polygraph test. Both passed. None of the workers could corroborate their story, although two had agreed they had felt a deep static charge all around them. One of them, the foreman, had described it as “a creepy electrical storm.” Two of the crewmen had endured violent bouts of vomiting, and one had complained of a headache. But perhaps the most peculiar report had been of some long-haired crazy who had thrown himself at the foot of the southern ramp, jumping and screaming, waving his hands in the air, stopping the bus and refusing to get out of its way until the oncoming rig left the bridge; after a brief search of the area, police had been unable to locate the individual for questioning. Curiously, the bridge collapsed three days later in the early morning hours, in a mudslide during a thunderstorm.