Chapter 1
"I didn't kill the children. They
were just sleeping," Lyle said, wrestling his wrist between the handcuffs. Cold
sprees of air seeped from the vents. Pale glass surrounded him. A table, lone
and left to stand every stint of his sentence, was
staged at the center of the room where he was, sitting an oddly clam
posture at the tin chair holding his legend.
"The slit of the bedroom door
exposed them to me first. Their innocence lulled my eyes to whispers cast from
winds blown from fiction. No window was open. No air—crips and clean,
wondrously wadding the stillness of night—could escape. Only the chilling cold
of curiosity remained. I continued to watch them dream, remembering times bore
before weekends became just another day; a time where laughter meant something.
Tears were drawn only at the sights of foreign knowledge—a result of good
parenting and what not. Shielding your young from foreign fears will spare them
a lifetime of acceptance. Life is nothing but acceptance. And thats's why I
slowly closed the door, shading them from misery, caging their innocence,
knowingly ignoring the note's instructions. Do not touch or tamper. Only
witness and wait."
"Hey!" The guard from behind the
transparent glass bellowed. "Stop the fidgeting. It's either the cuffs or the
other thing, Jacobs. And I'm sure we don't want the other thing, do we?"
Lyle threw away his signature
witted smirk for a more serious, more intense look this time when responding to
the guard's threat. The guard threw back a failed attempt to match Lyle's
intensity. But time was ticking. No need for unwanted attention. Not today. He
thought, releasing his scowl into a playful grin. This was a special day for
him. He'd waited for what felt like a lifetime to be heard. And no one was to
interrupt his story. No one would steal his moment, like they did all those
years ago. He knew this. He believed this. He had to.
He needed to.
"He's fine," Dr. Collins assured,
waving her delicate wave back towards the guard—shuffling her knees to situate
the bulky black binder adorned to her lap, a neatly stack of white papers slit
nicely between the solid boards—as he continued to make his rounds. The
notebook pressed atop the binder survived the potential mess of a drop. She
readied her eyes, focusing on her new patient's expression, before silently
(routinely) signaling to Lyle to continue, her hand anxious to continue the
scribble of her pen against the pad.
"Only witness," Lyle continued, not
missing a beat. "Only wait. The cryptically wrapped warning still resonates
with me to this day, leaving a trail of questions in its wake." He, against the
guard's lovely advice, fidgeted some more, reeling in his own defiance. "This
was no sight for children. No such sights for the innocent. Though, wasn't I?
I'd only just walked into the cobblestone-bricked brownstone for the first time
myself that night."
"By request," Dr. Collins finished
eagerly, her eyeglasses slipping the slope of her nose, causing a girlish
twitch—almost mirroring fascination or keen interest—to come across her
expression.
"Infallible, my dear." A clap of
Lyle's cuffed hands sounded faintly from his wrist. "Flawlessly delivered.
Someone did their homework."
Dr. Collins captured her giddiness
in a quick wash of her palm across her forehead, remembering that Lyle Jacobs
wasn't a school project anymore. He wasn't the cool topic every psych student
dreamed of getting for their midterm presentation. He wasn't the unfathomable
phenomenon she'd been reading/studying/obsessing about throughout her masters
and doctoral programs at Berkeley. She didn't move across the damn country to
fall like a weak-kneed teenager at the first whiff of a psychological
breakthrough with someone whose viewed as one of, if not the most
complex mind on the planet. Lyle Jacobs wasn't a celebrity, myth, or idol
fantasy anymore. He was a patient.
Her patient.
"Please continue, Mr. Jacobs." He
could feel the nerves of an excited toddler on their first day of school
trembling the notes of her tone. He stared in awe at her from behind the glass
prison—a neatly, almost obsessively organized cell of complete elegance,
decorated with hundreds of books lined perfectly along the walls flooring, maps
of far away continents complementing the padded white walls around him,
mirrored only by a faint reflection given from the glass. He examined the
slight curve of her build carefully, as an artist would The Mona Lisa: slim,
tall, ripe persona, clever and poised demeanor, all wrapped in a mid-twenty
something's aspirations to make a breakthrough.
Breakthrough. Lyle thought, forcing an
emphasis—kneading the malevolent urge with a lusted caress—on the word break.
"Ah yes. By request," He continued,
resting his chin in one palm, the other carelessly clawing at the edge of his
wrist, (tending to the incessant itch of the handcuffs). "The note read of only
an address, time, and brief instruction. Do not touch or tamper. Only
witness and wait.
The wait part is what caged
my curiosity. Wait for what? I'd asked myself as I crept down the vast
hallway, dodging the swinging heals of the woman dangling from the banister
adjacent to the staircase. Why the children slept downstairs still baffles me.
But any who, the woman—who presumably sparked my thinking her to be their
mother—lacked nothing short of the wickedness of death draped from her
expression. The drool and dread of her stare dropped far further than the
second story she hung from.
Of course," Lyle paused, scratching
his head, an unconscious aid to rattle the broken thought from memory. "Of
course, she was the first to greet me on my little excursion: quest, if you
will. I do prefer the term quest. For it never ends, like life. It never seems
to dwell or linger or lounge the essence that is time, never fearing its
hanging," another pause and scratch, "its taunting tale of ticks and tricks and
tethers to death's rolodex. He calls, and time delivers, like UPS on Tuesdays.
Or, in your case and generation, Dr. Sarah Collins, Amazon. Have we ironed out
any and all formalities wrinkling are time together? What's it been? Two..three
weeks time since we first met? Since you first walked ever so gracefully into
this lovely establish—"
"Mr. Jacobs, as much as I enjoy
your magnificent tangents, and the immeasurable distances of which they can
travel, I do," Sarah paused, remembering her training from interning that
summer. We. Always use We when speaking to the patient. Involve. Never
alienate the patient. "We do only have the hour, remember? So, I'd like to
keep the conversation moving forward. On topic. Is that alright with you, Mr.
Jacobs?"
Lyle thought to remind her to call
him by his first name. But what was the bother? He knew Sarah would be too
politely mannered and professional to accept his pleasantry. Besides…
What is a name but what we wear to
hide who we truly are?
"Will do, Doctor." he assured once
more. "Will do. So, striking the need to sound redundant, the woman scared the
living crap out of me upon my arrival. I almost left, deserting the mission.
But what fun would that be. I'd come this far. I'd seen things. I'd done
things. I'd did things. I'd read the wrongs of the wicked, pounced the
projected promises of privilege, lead the lavishly longed lull of the loved and
loveless. And so, for the time, I relived the anguish of my own tyranny,
longing to loath the fiddled, fated, two-faced coin that spun its wretched
future into my past. I rested the reams, rolling the dice, resting the cold
steel of the coin in my hand. A toss and twist of probability is," catching
himself giving away too much, "was just a flip away. A sudden, subtle choice
of—"
"Chance," Sarah finished again,
checking her wrist to see how much time was left in
the session, before rushing along to the true purpose of their meeting.
"Aw," Lyle fake wept. "Poor child.
Am I boring you?
"Not exactly. It's just," she
paused, a quick check into her psychiatric memorized list of interview do's
and don't's with pathological, hyperactive, egotistical, narcissistic,
eccentric psychopaths. "It's just that…everyone's heard, read, and damn near
lived the literary genius of your bestseller, Chance. But, what people,
i. e. Me, don't know, and want to, is why you chose twenty-six years after your
publishing debut to reenact the tragedy you composed in that book?"
Lyle smiled. A big smile. A huge,
gut-wrenching, wickedly crafted grin carved a smile into his pale, colorless
cheeks. An intense surge of eagerness stung the air, like a silent bolt of
lighting, the violent nakedness lingering right before the crush of thunder.
His fingers played with each other. They danced and twiddled the gaps of space.
But his brows sent chills down Sarah's spine, attacking her senses with a low,
threatening growl that only an expression given from behind a padded, glass
cube prison could give.
"My dear," Lyle finally replied,
breaking the eerie silence with a confident whisper. "The real question is, why
do you continue to come here, sit with me, make nice with me, all done only to
leave this place for the sole purpose of spreading more lies?"
"Mr. Jacobs," Sarah stammered
between syllables. "I…I beg your pardon?"
That's when the alarms
sounded.
Guards dressed in white jumpsuits
rushed the jaggedly aligned corridors. Prisoners yelled, screamed, then
silenced one by one by a single gunshot echoing from behind their pleas.
"Your lies," Lyle continued, as if
utter chaos wasn't erupting before him. "Your lies are why I'm here. All to
protect him; the true villain.
Sarah's stomach was in knots. A
jolted, primitive boost of fight or flight energy sparked her to her
feet. The mess of papers and files and notes all fluttered to the ground
amongst the shouting and screaming serenading the brokenness around her. Not a
single guard came to her rescue. It was as if she was invisible through it all.
Her only audience was Lyle. He sat so calmly through it all, just staring,
waiting.
Do not touch or tamper. Only
witness and wait.
The words rang a disturbing, but
familiar rattle of fear into her core. Her heart was racing. Her mouth grew
dry, feeling suffocated as if left to die in the Sahara, the sun blazing a
scorch of carelessness and uncanny deniability to its actions. The base of her
palms were sweating profusely. She fell. How? When? She couldn't tell, nor
counter any reasons while fighting the searing pain emanating from her knees.
But as she looked up from the fierce white sheen of the tiled floor, Lyle's
eyes met hers, scaring a nightmare into any hopes of surviving this moment she
felt must be a dream.
"Stop protecting him!" Lyle belted,
the glass looking to have been shaken by his claim. But it was the sliding of
the single door opening, freeing his containment to the scathed airs of
liberty. "My dear," he corrected, reeling his aggressiveness back to the poised
charm he displayed before. "I want to apologize for that. I've waited a long
time for this day. We all have."
A gang of a half dozen masked
persons surrounded Sarah, still crouched down to the floor. The tallest one
reached to grab her, lifting her up, only to place a gag in her mouth, and a
black cloth bag over her head. "Mmhm…Mhmm." Sarah attempted, flailing her legs
and arms through the restraints another goon easily—with a practiced, sharp
action—wrapped around her.
"Remove the bag and gag. I'm not
done with my story. And no one will interrupt that today. Understood?"
They all nodded agreeably, removing
said indignities from Sarah.
"The ending's the best part," Lyle
finished, stepping within inches of Sarah's face. "Now, precious girl, where
can I find him? And, before you say who in that cliche like tone that
screenwriters use in the movies to create suspense, realize where you are. This
is no set, study hall, or classroom, sweetheart—" stepping and inch closer,
nose to nose, "—You're in my world now."
Sarah's eyes started to well with
tears. But, what good would it do. He'd only gifted her nothing but empty
promises at this point. Why protect him? Why continue protecting someone who
obviously would never come through for her and Abigail. She needed food,
diapers, formula and what not back then. Now, Abigail was almost fifteen.
Raising her sister wasn't easy. She needed him. And he was there. But now, he'd
created nothing but this: a psych-ward jail break with her as the hostage. So,
what were her options? What outs did she really have.
Do not touch or tamper. Only
witness and wait.
Each syllable cut more than the
last. Each time she rehearsed the rhythm with him, read, reread, and memorized
each word, she knew she was in for a undesirable end. But what was she to do?
She loved him. She thought she did, anyway. Did she? Now, with her present
circumstance staring at her like a ticking clock, she was unsure. But the one
thing she did know was his name.
The key to her freedom.
"What's his name, sweetheart?"
Lyle, continued, a certain sweetness dripping from his pale, eager, villainess
stare. "Just tell me his name."