The Siege Page 9

  “That is worth three favors, I think,” Bev said with confidence.

  “You want me to squander my three favors that Mia owes me for a damn party?” he shouted. “Are you trying to bankrupt me?”

  He turned his back to her and walked off smiling. He’d already asked, and Mia had agreed.

  Beverly lay back and sighed. “It’s good being me.”

  ~

  Mia shared what Gerald had told her. Ted was upset at first that she didn’t include him in on the phone call, but when Mia handed over her smart phone and showed him that she recorded the conversation, his anger abated. She pressed play.

  Ted listened intently, surprised by the information Gerald was sharing. He knew that the good result they had combating Cezar Gabor had a lot to do with Gerald’s ability. To hear him give Mia his treasured secrets was disconcerting. There had to be a price, and it would be a big one. When the deal was struck, Ted let out the breath he had been holding. He reached down and turned the recording off.

  “I thought you didn’t want to go to the party.”

  “Three favors, the guy could have asked for our firstborn,” Mia confided. “I thought I was getting off easy.”

  “I think you did. Gerald Shem is showing signs of compassion. Your aunt’s doing perhaps?”

  “No, Sabine’s. My aunt likes Gerald to wear a shark suit. He’s a dangerous man, Ted, but fortunately, he’s always been on our side.”

  “Are you still determined to take this on tonight?”

  “I’d like to clear it from our slate. Having a friend dealing with this kind of mental torment isn’t going to let me sleep well at night. And you know how I love a good night’s rest.”

  Ted smiled at Mia’s evasion of the real reason. She felt guilty.

  “Can you give me ten minutes to get organized? I think we should do this where Murphy can be part of it.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d feel better,” Ted said. “Cid’s not here and…”

  “I’ll call Murphy,” Mia said, putting on her coat. “Maggie! Might as well take the dog out while I’m at it,” she explained.

  “What about the three ghosts?” Ted asked.

  “Unless Dave was exaggerating, they were all but drawn and quartered. They’re done for a while,” Mia said confidently. “We do have to set up our safe room just in case though.”

  “I’ll give Cid a list when he gets back.”

  “What a strange day,” Mia said, sticking her feet into her UGGs.

  “You mean, we don’t normally start off conversing with Barbie dolls and ending with a stroll through Burt Hicks’s brain.”

  “Yeah that, and did you see how high Audrey was? That’s got to be embarrassing.”

  “I’ve seen worse,” Ted said, looking at her.

  “That’s not fair, Ted. I’m special. I can’t be responsible for the things I do,” Mia lied. She attached Maggie’s lead, grabbed an extra saltshaker and walked out the front door.

  Murphy heard the bell ring and was there before the tone faded.

  “Hello, handsome, fight any ghouls lately?”

  “Bad, Mia,” Murphy growled. “Be nice.”

  “K, my husband would like you to assist us in a mind walk.”

  “Who’s walking?”

  “Me.”

  “Whose mind?”

  “Burt Hicks.”

  Murphy straightened up. “Demon?”

  “Maybe. Gerald thinks it’s something called a flitch. I’m just to confirm what’s in there, get out and call in the troops. Ted would feel better if you were there.”

  “For you?”

  “No, actually for him.”

  Murphy looked at her oddly.

  “I know, I think it’s a guy thing. Mutual support. You will be doing the stuff Cid normally does.”

  “Correcting your language?”

  Mia laughed. “No. I think being a sounding board. Oh, and just in case I get stuck in there, come and get me.”

  “I’ll always have your back, Mia,” Murphy said softly.

  Mia’s eyes shone for a moment. She took a deep breath. “Come on, the night’s not getting any younger and neither am I.”

  ~

  Ted handed Mia a large disc to hang on her necklace. “It’ll give me a more complete picture. I’m hoping…” he said, turning around and pulling up the program. “Yes! There it is.” He turned the monitor for her to see. “This is you,” he tapped the top line, “and this is junior.”

  Mia melted. “Aw, let me see. It’s faster than mine, is he okay?”

  A cartoon dog dressed in a doctor’s white coat and lugging a stethoscope twice its size walked across the screen. He looked at both lines before nodding with his tongue hanging out.

  “Jake agrees all is fine,” Ted said. “The little one’s heart is beating at the right rate. We’ll monitor both. Mia, I will pull you if there is the slightest stress on our baby.”

  “How will I know?”

  Ted picked up a long, sharp quilting pin. “I’m going to stick you with this.”

  Mia frowned. “That’ll do it. A bit overkill, don’t you think, Dr. Frankenstein?”

  “It’s supposed to hurt.”

  “I’ll not tarry,” Mia promised.

  Burt, who had been observing the setup from the doorway, had a moment of seconds thought. “Is all this necessary? I can wait.”

  “No!” Mia said a bit too loud. “I’m just going in and will be looking around. I’m not going to do anything disruptive. The moment I know that I have either found something or have exhausted all avenues, I’m coming out. Now sit down. Where’s Dave?”

  “I asked him to walk the perimeter, just in case our ghoulies come back. Murphy, I understand, will be in here with us,” Burt guessed.

  “He’s already here,” Ted said. “Come on and sit down. I’ve got a monitor for you to wear.”

  Burt sat down, and Ted took a quarter-sized disc and taped it to Burt’s chest. Ted nodded as the new line was added to the screen. “You’re running a little fast, dude.”

  “Take a few deep breaths and hold them a sec and release them slowly,” Mia instructed. “I know how excited you get around me,” she teased.

  Ted was about to say something, but Mia managed to take Burt’s mind off of being scared, and his heart rate slowed. “We’re ready. Mia, it’s your show.”

  Mia noticed the covert cameras but said nothing. Ted, the scientist, would be recording everything. Mia took off both gloves and took Burt’s hands in her own. She scooted her chair as close as she could to make up for the distance her large belly would put between them.

  “Burt, I want you to think of the happiest time you and I had together. This is going to be my entrance and exit point. You don’t have to do anything else but think of this time. Make it one of laughter.” She wanted to add, “not in bed,” but she knew he was savvy enough not to pick the last time the two of them made love.

  Mia rolled her neck once and let her consciousness connect with Burt’s.

  Mia was inside herself as she stood talking to Burt in the overgrown lot of her childhood home. She approved of the memory. This was where she’d opened up and trusted Burt with her life’s story. It touched her that he thought it was the happiest memory. After a moment, she pulled herself out of the Mia in the memory and left the two of them conversing while she exited the scene. She took one last look at pre-hollow Burt. He was so interested in what Mia had to say. Mia remembered how intent his gaze was, how she had responded to his touch. The temptation to stay and relive that day was almost too much for her. She had to shake herself soundly to remember it was for this man that she had to focus.

  He wouldn’t be this carefree Burt for much longer. This was very close to the time that he went against her wishes and investigated the foundations of the church. She moved quickly to catch a ride on this memory as it passed her. If something had entered his mind from the dark world, this would have been the time and place.

  The m
emory was cold. Mia shivered as she crawled over the moss-laden stones to get closer to where Burt lay fighting against the invisible, restraining hands. The suppressed memory was a strong one, although the minute details wavered as the jeopardy increased. Mia moved past the clawing spirits to where the hag waited at the very edges of the foundations. Mia cursed her as the swamp witch waved her hands and cast the spell to give Burt the sight. Burt’s eyes opened wide in horror. Steele moved forward, and Mia was convinced that Burt could now see him.

  Mia backed away from the tableau in front of her and studied the ground. She stepped over a trail of some kind. She bent down and touched the thick viscous fluid. It was black and sticky with the consistency of molasses. She followed the trail out of the dungeon of suppressed memories and into Burt’s open mind. This was a large cavernous place. A place for ideas to bloom and grow. She smiled as she recognized some of Burt’s early graphic comic pictures. There, she was wearing tighter pants then she ever remembered putting on. Mia walked around the figure of herself and laughed when she saw the size of her breasts and eyes. She didn’t have time to linger but made a note to tell Burt, with boobs that big, comic Mia would topple over if she took one step.

  The trail of ooze slowed and was now one of intermittent drops. Mia had to be careful not to miss them as she moved out of Burt’s open mind and into his investigative one. There too were pictures of Mia, but they had been colored with suspicion. The dark, smudged rendition of her was sticky as if she was corrupted by something. By this point, Mia knew that Burt’s change in perception and personality wasn’t caused by trauma. It was more organic. She could have backtracked at this point; no one would blame her if she didn’t continue. But Mia needed to see this thing for herself. She followed the drops, careful to not touch the contaminated memories lest they take hold in her pure mind.

  “How is she?” Murphy asked, uncomfortable with the time that had passed.

  “Steady. Both mother and child are fine. Burt’s heart is showing a little sign of stress but nothing to worry about,” Ted reported.

  “How do you know all this? Are you a doctor?” Murphy asked.

  “I read a book, a few books, several dozen books,” he admitted.

  Murphy laid a gentle hand on the worried man’s back. “Mia’s tough. Stubborn but solid. She won’t jeopardize the child.”

  “I know, but it’s not Mia I worry about; it’s the things I can’t control. Here she is sitting here, but actually she’s a million miles away, wandering in the mind of a man who lost his regard for her. The sadness alone has to be affecting.”

  Burt laughed.

  “Someone’s having fun,” Ted said. He pointed to the easy smile that had formed on Burt’s face.

  “Mia put that there,” Murphy said.

  “That’s why I’m worried.”

  Mia felt like she was moving in circles. Corridor after corridor was beginning to look the same. Arguments between Burt and Mike, between him and Bev, and between him and Mia were all sounding the same. Mia put her hands on her ears. All this negativity was getting to her. It was camouflaging the real Burt. He didn’t argue in the beginning of their relationship. He listened. Determined to continue, Mia stopped to regain her focus. It was fortunate that she did stop. If not, she wouldn’t have caught part of a shadow just too long to make sense, and she would have never seen the pit she almost stepped into. She reeled backwards, using her arms to propel her to safety.

  In Mia’s mind walk, she chose to keep her pregnant body. This was to remind her of not only who she was but also that she held more than herself in jeopardy when she took too many risks. She squatted down and then, with much difficulty, crawled forward, inching her head over the pit, and looked down.

  There, residing amongst the collection of barely-remembered comics was Steele. Mia moved back quickly. “It can’t be. He’s long gone,” she assured herself. She took another peek, and she again saw the man whose skeletal remains Whitney had pulverized. There was no way this was him. As if she had called his name, Steele looked up at Mia and smiled.

  “Hello, you look familiar. Have we met before?”

  Mia quickly got to her feet and managed to fake a blasé stance by the time the man climbed out of the pit.

  “What kind of memory are you?” he asked. His voice was the voice of Steele, the one that taunted her in the hollow.

  Mia didn’t trust herself to speak.

  He asked again, “What kind of memory are you?”

  “I’m not a memory. I’m a thought.”

  “What kind of thought are you?”

  “One that travels. What kind of memory are you?”

  “One that rules,” Steele bragged. “I’ve been here for some time. I don’t remember meeting you before,” he said, angling his head. “Although you do look familiar.”

  Mia looked him up and down, and there stuck to his shoe was part of a Batman comic. “Allow me,” she said and squatted down and tugged the piece of remembered paper off of the sticky shoe of what Mia knew now wasn’t Steele.

  “You travel, and I’m actually stuck. Like that paper,” the Steele impersonator explained.

  Mia wrinkled her brow. “That is a dilemma. Why don’t you see if you can follow me out of here?

  “I’m not sure that’s wise. I’m just getting established. Why don’t you stay with me?”

  Mia turned and started to walk away. “Traveling thoughts don’t have homes,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Wait, where are you going? Hello, I’m talking to you. Come back here!” he demanded.

  Mia kept walking. She moved at a steady pace, retracing her steps back the way she had come. The circled route was actually more of an ascending corkscrew. She looked down and caught Steele moving up behind her. If she stopped, he would catch her. What would happen to her if he did?

  “You there, slow down. My feet are slow as…”

  Molasses in February, Mia thought. I just have to get ahead of him, far enough so I can plan. She thanked god when she saw the open mind before her. With all the counterfeit images of her there, the Steele lookalike would be confused.

  Burt’s eyes opened.

  “Whoa, you’re not supposed to do that,” Ted said. He saw that Mia still held on to Burt’s hands.

  “Something is triggering lost memories,” Burt whispered before shutting his eyes again.

  Ted looked at Murphy. “Get in there.”

  “Where will I be?”

  “I suspect Mia’s old house. The one she burned down.”

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “Where did you first encounter Burt?” Ted asked.

  “At the farm.”

  “He went back to Kansas after that. Don’t seek him there.” Ted’s face lit up. “The night Mike fell into the well! The night you fried the electronics in the old truck.”

  Murphy nodded. He first moved into Mia and then used her as a conduit to move into the mind of Burt Hick’s.

  Chapter Nine

  “Where did you go?” the flitch asked, his voice echoing in the chamber.

  Mia flattened herself against a two dimensional prototype of a pink dragon. Mia, upon first seeing it, remembered the fight between her and the hag. She had tried to distract the biddy by becoming a fierce dragon, but all she managed was this pink squishy form more suited to a toddler’s bath than fighting a swamp witch. She got better at dragons, but Burt hadn’t been around when she did. Forever he would remember her as this cute little thing with big green eyes.

  “It occurs to me that thoughts travel from person to person. But they can become imbedded. Look at me, I’m all but a bad habit, digging in and changing my environment. You could do that too. Hate to say it, but I’m lonely. I’ve consumed my old friends, and I’m hungry… Hungry for company that is,” the flitch corrected quickly.

  ~

  Murphy waded through the tide of time. Where had he taken a wrong turn? Burt’s mind was full of questions, dreams and Mia. At least the part he la
nded in. He stopped to listen in on a memory when Mia admitted to Burt about being attracted to Murphy. He stopped and pushed his hat back on his head. The argument that followed wasn’t pleasant to watch so Murphy quickly moved on and found himself knee deep in water, or was it tears?

  There was a current pulling at him. He decided to ride it out and found that the water rapidly moved through turbulent canyons of indecision and over small falls of regret.

  The water started to move round and round. An eddy was pulling him downward as he circled. He was caught in a depressive state, and it was taking him to heaven knows where. Murphy looked for anything that could pull him out. He spotted it on his second time around. It was a thread. He lunged for it, hoping it wasn’t the loose thread of a conversation. But the thread held, and Murphy pulled himself out of the water and found himself at the entrance of an immense cavern. He had found Burt’s open mind.

  “The thing about being me is that I’m my own worst enemy,” the flitch confided. “I can’t simply be happy with imbedding and ride out eternity in some mind. I have to devour it, play with it, and frequently this brings on the demise of the mind holder. Once again, I have to wander the dark world. Why do all my victims end up in the dark world?”

  Mia wished this solipsistic flitch would just stop talking. Even though the constant chatter helped Mia to locate it, she found the nonstop exploration of self to be nauseating. Surely she could use this against him? She needed information. As far as Gerald knew, a flitch could be lured out of a mind, but how do you contain it? With a demon, a pig was useful, but unkind. Mia pushed the thoughts of pigs and demons out of her mind. She needed space in which to work.

  She decided on a course of action. She moved towards the flitch, ignoring him as she moved past.

  “There you are!” it said excitedly.

  “I’m sorry, were you addressing me?” Mia asked as if she’d just noticed him.