I know beyond a doubt, my heart will lead me there soon.
“This is about you,” Caleb whispered.
Boris said nothing, and Caleb realized the man’s focus had always been on the turnstile, on the song, up until this point. Now, he shifted and stared at the door in the center of the wall, the door Caleb understood led to an elevator, then to the subterranean levels.
“You’re not with them anymore. You’re rogue,” Caleb said, and Boris’s eyebrows lifted for a moment.
A deep sigh from Boris, one that had been ages in coming. “About time.” Another sigh. “Everything…everything is personal.” He took a step toward Caleb. “I realized that to have your help you need the truth, and need to see where I’ve come from. Why I can do what I do.”
He moved forward fast and laid a hand on Caleb’s skull, gripping it tight.
“You asked how I got the power, now I will show you.”
The record — a single 45, spinning, spinning… Sound crackling, the song over.
The arm finally moves the needle across the bare area and lifts, then resets and drops. The blessed silence breaks, and the song begins again.
“Somewhere, beyond the sea…”
The young boy moans.
He’s strapped to a flat metal table, head resting on a thin, ragged pillow soaked with sweat and possibly tears. Wearing just ragged white underwear, the boy — not more than ten — whimpers and weakly struggles against the straps. Electrodes are glued all over his chest, his arms, and up his neck, onto his temples below the shaved head.
A flashand the same boy, in a baseball uniform, knees all dirty and a smile on his face as he rounds third, heads for home. A glance to the stands, and a man and woman stand up and cheer — but someone behind them gives the boy pause. A man in a dark suit with a hat like those worn by the people in the forties or fifties, those old movies he loved to watch with his dad. Humphrey Bogart as a tough-talking PI, that sort. Except this guy had those hooded eyes locked just on him. An unlit cigarette protrudes from his lips.
Another flash, and back in a cozy house, settling into bed after his parents close his door, blowing him kisses. The closet light falls on the new trophy in its prominent place on his desk, beside the stack of Marvel comics, his latest finds from neighborhood garage sales. Tales he can’t wait to get to, in the morning…
Closes his eyes, then opens them. In the kitchen, coming down the stairs, finding his parents at the table, slumped over. Heads at awkward angles, impossible positions…bent backwards and so crooked. Their wide-open eyes registering confusion and shock.
A shuffling as a man emerges from the shadows. The man from the game. Hat and coat. Darkness concealing his face.
“Come, boy.” He reaches out a gloved hand. “You have an exciting life ahead of you.”
“No…”
“There’s no choice, son.”
Then in an instant he’s standing at the boy’s side, setting a hand on his head. “Let me show you what awaits, what power you’ll soon have.”
Visions within visions. Caleb groaned and tried to pull back from the grip, feeling the same as the boy in his vision.
The boy.
“See what you will be,” came the voice. “Look, and think now and forever, of nothing else.”
And the revelations of the future drown him with their intensity.
Shaving his head, attaching electrodes. Going under a knife, an implant at the base of his skull, injection after injection. Screams and nights upon nights of agonized loneliness in some kind of pitch-black cell, nothing to see, hear or otherwise sense but the workings of his sleepless mind. Subjection to magnetic-electro fields, a room of dancing plasma and focused energy coursing through and around his body. Day after day after day after day.
A familiar bell-shaped device, spinning as he approaches. The fabric of the ether charges, expands and opens, swallows and consumes, separates, reforms and excretes elsewhere and else-when. All the while technicians, generals and others watch and record and follow the boy’s progress.
Growing now, a teen. Sitting in a room, focusing on subjects in the next room, who react in horror and claw at the air, striking at nothing — or each other, escalating in violence until blood spatters against the one-way glass.
Then, he’s an adult. Sent out into the plasma-charged chamber, through the door-that-isn’t-a-door, sometimes with the man in a hat, sometimes solo, onto missions of strange and deadly scope.
Following a man on a busy street, focusing on the normal-looking individual, concentrating. A flash and that same man now walks into a crowded church with an AR-15 and several handguns, shouting and shaking his head as if trying to dislodge sights that shouldn’t be seen, before he commences firing upon the helpless congregation.
Another scene: a crowded bus terminal, and now from his point-of-view sitting beside a disheveled man, half-asleep on a bench. Focusing, then backing away as the man rises, eyes wide. A flash of light and the same man, now bearded and clad in a white robe, at last takes a sip of a wine glass, joining the sixty-seven others who had done the same, and lay at his feet, scattered about the room, all waiting for the joyous rapture he’s been promised, seeing such angelic visions offering salvation.
Another flash and six campers stare at the night sky in open-mouthed awe and terror, eyes following something that isn’t there. Zooming closer, their eyes reflect an impossible scene: a bright disc-shaped craft and a beam of light, from which large-headed, almond-eyed figures emerge and move toward them with sinister purpose.
Further back, a man retreats to the shadows, smiling and confident of the vision he’s just presented to them. He returns to the street, and the nondescript car there, and the driver inside, wearing a familiar hat; the driver with an unlit cigarette at his lips, the driver who doesn’t turn, but only flashes his eyes to the mirror to see his passenger, his subject, take a seat.
“Your training is almost done.”
“I don’t understand what all this is for.”
“You don’t need to,” the other says after starting the car. “All for a larger purpose. Everything you do, every vision you present, every—”
“Murderer or assassin I create?”
“Every radical, every mass hallucination? Diversion or test, it doesn’t matter, because something greater is coming.”
“Another purpose?”
“A final mission.” The car eases forward. Headlights off, driving into the dark.“Your success. Our salvation.”
“When?”
“Soon. You’re almost ready, but these new targets… They’re going to be a challenge.”
“I can do it.”
The old lips part in a smile. “I’m sure you can.”
Another flash and the black sweatshirt hangs on the back of a chair in the Stargate recruitment room as a series of cards are flipped over and over.