Storymania - Fair Warning by Sf

Fair Warning
Sf

“If you choose to speak with me, one of us is going to die.”

Those words, spoken matter-of-factly and without any undertone of threat, came from a young boy who appeared in front of Scott Lueck’s porch one evening in September.

Beyond the awning, from soot-stained clouds hanging low over country fields, rain fell and sluiced through the grass with the swift quality of floodwaters. Covering the sky from edge-to-edge, this tempest raged without the thunder or lightning that often accompanied such harried downpours.

Scott, nearly asleep in his rocking chair on the porch, was startled by the interruption in peripheral sound. He had been reading as he always did in the early evenings, and with his book half-closed on his lap, the driving rain served as a relaxing white noise in which to drift off.

When the boy spoke, Scott sat up and scanned the porch, not immediately recognizing the small figure standing on the steps. Only after leaning partially off the rickety chair did he finally notice his unexpected visitor: this child, blue of eye and frosted with straw-colored hair, had freckles sprinkled across his pale nose and cheeks, and he stood with the slackjawed posture of a sleepwalker unsure of where to turn next.

His stare, though distracted and seemingly half-alert, flayed Scott’s emotions into tatters; he felt haunted, seen, known in ways he never before experienced. Inexplicable, clenching hands found their way to his heart as he met the boy’s gaze and felt a connection so profound it was as though the child saw into the very fabric of being that made him who he was. Something about the eyes, those deep pools of cerulean brilliance, made the world shrink down to a place so searingly intimate it was unbearable.

It was as though he were looking not at a stranger, but into a terrifyingly dark part of himself. This child could see him, see into him as clearly as if his skin had crystallized into freshly washed windowpanes.

“Do you choose to speak with me?” the boy asked, his words clearly enunciated even though his lips moved like an aspiring ventriloquist.

Normal voice. Cute face. Nothing to corroborate his constricting chest and uncomfortable nakedness in the boy’s presence.

Then Scott noticed something that had previously eluded him: the boy occupied the bottom step, which was not covered by the porch awning, and yet his grey sweater and blue jeans remained as dry as if he stood under an umbrella. The raindrops hit the boy on his face, shoulders, arms, but were repelled just as quickly, as though to meld with any part of him would initiate a systematic death to every innumerable raindrop in the sky.

Unperturbed by the storm, the boy cocked his head slightly, climbed to the next step.

“Do you choose to speak with me?” he asked again, and took another step. One stair remained before he was on the same level as Scott, feet away with those boring, bottomless eyes.

“I...I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “Who are you?”

“You know who I am,” the boy replied, “but you don’t know why I am here.”

“I’ve never met you before,” Scott said. “How did you get here? Did you come with your parents?”

No cars had driven up his long driveway, not with the gate down as it was. Scott never liked having visitors after five o’clock, rarely tolerated them before.

His house sat within a large moat of trees bordered by farming fields and small ranch houses. The nearest home was half a mile away, and he knew most of the neighbors that lived within a reasonable radius. None of them had children this young, and all of them knew he disliked company.

“Do you choose to speak with me?”

That question again. Aside from the profound uneasiness he felt in the boy’s presence, Scott had the logic to know he should go inside and call the police to get this kid in some kind of shelter where he’d be safe. Strangely, though, he heard himself speaking with words that did not come from coherent commands of his own.

“Yes. I will speak with you.”

Taking that as an invitation, the boy crested the stairs and nodded slowly. “You’ve been given fair warning, Scott Lueck.”

He gaped. “How...how do you know my name?”

“I know many things about you. I know you better than you know yourself. I know about your childhood.”

If any amount of rope still tethered this meeting to ordinary circumstances, it had just been severed.

All his life, Scott suffered from amnesia, although his case was more unique than most: he had no memory of the first twelve years of his life. His first recollections on this planet were of waking up one morning to the smell of bacon and hash browns from a diner across the street somewhere around his thirteenth birthday. Any memory before that point was a blank slate.

He had awoken in the alley beside an orphanage. When he inquired, the officials revealed that no records existed in their database to indicate he lived there. No one knew him, where he came from, or who his family was. He seemed to have flitted in on the breeze and been forgotten just as quickly.

Pills, hypnosis, psychoanalysts, voodoo, no amount of medical or superstitious practices could get his mind to release its well-protected hostages. Now at twenty-eight, Scott had all but given up hope that he would ever know where he came from or why he ended up in a filthy alley beside an orphanage without parents, siblings, relatives--hell, not even a lousy photo in his pocket.

Now this boy, dreadfully close to him and without explanation, brought emotions reeling back to the surface that he struggled for years to keep dormant.

Rain, rain, rain, from outside. Faint cars on the highway like distant mosquitoes.

“Who are you?” he asked again, half certain that upon his request the boy would transform into some winged angel or lucent specter.

Instead, the boy just spoke: “I am here to show you what is missing. I will show you what you want to know.”

“How could you know what I want? Kid, I’ve never met you before.”

“That is not true, Scott. We have met before. I know you. I know how you live, where you come from, and I know that night after night you dream of a little girl named Krista.”

The book in Scott’s lap dropped to the floor. The girl spoke of, Krista, did indeed appear in his dreams most nights, though she was never more substantial than a plume of evaporating steam. All he ever made out was a petite girl of about ten with blonde pigtails and a flower-sprinkled shirt, but without substance enough for a face. Each dream always followed a familiar order: she hovered in front of him in silent inquisition, then whispered her name once before vanishing. As she left, she always murmured the same three words: Why, Scotty, why?

Each dream that featured her ended the same: a violent waking with sheets entangled and drenched in sweat, face scarred with tears.

He hadn’t told anyone about the presence in his subconscious. He had no friends close enough to tell.

“I will show you what happened to her. Why you don’t remember her.”

A few raindrops curved and splattered on the banister, quivering in translucent bubbles like fish eggs along the tarnished wood.

“I...I knew her?”

“Yes. You knew her well. I know her, too.”

Scott had always suspected that the girl must be a part of his unknown years, a beachhead implanted in his mind for no reason other than to taunt him with a hint of what had been. Something told him that underneath the shrouded memories, this girl had been hurt by something or someone, and he had been unable to help her. Her plea of--Why, Scotty, why?--seemed to be the sign that he failed her in some way, whoever she was or had been.

The dreams always faded fast, but the definitive connection he felt with that wisp of a girl always lingered. It was the same feeling this boy elicited from him, though his connection was a hundred times--no, more, a thousand times--magnified.

“Who is she?”

“She is your destiny, Scott Lueck. I sense that now you are ready to be shown. Come with me and I will reveal what must be seen.” Then the boy turned and began retracing his path down the porch.

Scott was on his feet in an instant. His head ached as it never had, like the boy’s words had lanced the microscopic strings that kept his brain held in place.

He followed the boy without worrying about a raincoat, a plan, even what he might be walking into. A vision of Krista floated past his mind’s eye again, replete with faded red flowers and blonde hair tucked away on each side of her featureless, drum-skin face.

The mysterious boy once again spat in the face of physics, remaining untouched by the moisture. Lost in a dream, Scott followed like a well-trained poodle.

The sun, faltering and hidden to the west, still pierced the stormclouds enough to reflect off the quiet deluge. Skeins of rain shimmered with the brilliance of rustic diamonds, making the landscape below the tumultuous heavens almost radiant.

The protection from the downpour did not extend past the boy; after a few steps in the rain Scott’s clothes were sodden and heavy. His hair, normally curly and full, affixed itself to his skin with the tenacity of leeches trying to get a taste of the blood within.

“Where are we going?” he asked, sucking in a mouthful of water. He had not expected an answer, but surprisingly his mysterious guide turned and spoke.

“We are going to a place you know quite well, Scott Lueck. We are going to Red Wing Tower.”

There again was that instant feeling of recognition behind a veil. Unshakable.

The rain battered him as though in warning to stay clear of the child, but he could not do that anymore than he could call up memories from his childhood. All his life he’d struggled with recollection, and spent uncountable hours digging and clawing at the fabric of his brain, hoping that if he only tormented himself enough the images would materialize in front of him. After years of failed attempts, it only left him jaded and alone.

The sidewalk below him ran with rivulets of muddied water tracing across its cracks like throbbing capillaries and veins. His steps sloshed and gurgled.

The boy disappeared into the line of trees that formed the protective moat around Scott’s house. With only a few seconds’ hesitation, he followed the kid in.

This ring of trees, spread wide around his house and lawn, served as his personal bodyguard against eavesdroppers. He rarely had visitors, didn’t have a wife or kids, and preferred the silence of his own presence instead of the blabber of people. Besides, what good was the company of others when he had nothing to offer other than a few superfluous ideas for conversation? He was a lost man, haunted by visions and strange dreams and now, apparently, magical children.

Inside the trees, he was immediately aware that the air chilled; shivers swam under his skin. Where had the child gone? Was he lost? Terror fell on him as he thought of never seeing the child before understanding the intense feelings he brought out. He had to know why his brain nearly oozed out of his skull at the very sight of the boy, and how so much of his life could be an open book to an oddly familiar stranger.

Then everything around him melted into pasty, vague silhouettes. As if a thick sheet of wax was pulled over his eyes, the landscape drifted away from clear images into murky shapes and primordial sludge.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” He felt dizzy, tried to grab something, but there was nothing to hang on to.

Scott flailed his arms as visibility in the encompassing cloak dimmed even more, until the only things that remained in his sight were thin lines and dull smears, like broken neon signs reflected in a pool of water.

Sounds failed. Darkness all around.

The boy, somewhere. Calling faintly.

Where? He tried to call out, but his voice was trapped inside him. Couldn’t move anymore.

Then, a voice, spoken from no discernable center: Are you prepared to know?

It had no body, no tone: expressionless scratches somehow manifested as sound.

You spoke with me. Now you must be shown; there is no other way.

The darkness, punctured only by those hovering afterthoughts of objects once corporeal, tightened its hold. Was he standing up? Sitting? Floating endlessly?

“Show me, then!” he shouted, though no actual sound escaped his lips.

With flashes and whirs of colors, shapes, objects, as though he were the sole occupant inside the tumbling washing machine of the universe, Scott soon found himself lying on his back, staring up at a sparkling golden nugget flanked by pale blue oceans.

Where...? Though he was grounded once more, there was something different now that was both disquieting and intriguing. It felt as though a part of him had been lost in the stupor.

The sun shone bright in a clear sky with only a few tattered puffs of clouds drifting alongside. Heat pushed around him, stifling and humidified.

Then, without telling it to, his head raised and he was staring at a great hunk of rusted metal in a small clearing. He had been here before, but the crispness of colors and clarity of vision indicated that this was not a dream or vision: this was real.

The hunk of metal was an old cab from a rusted pickup. Missing both doors, its seat, mirrors, and dashboard, the hollowed-out rustbucket only retained the steering wheel and part of its back window. A large red cloth had been draped over the empty space where the glass should have been, held together by duct tape and pieces of string. A few empty pop cans lined the front edge below the windshield where the wipers should have been.

Red Wing Tower. This was the place the boy had mentioned, the place that sparked recollections within him. Somehow, he was looking at a place he visited often as...as a child...

He tried to call out, but found no voice. He tried to move but had no limbs with which to do so. Instead, he felt the strange body underneath him rise to its feet and walk slowly towards the browned, hollow cab, scratching at the head-that-was-not-his.

He felt the head turn, and from a small, cracked windshield lying on the ground--perhaps taken from the old cab itself--caught a glimpse of his reflection. He was the boy. Blonde hair, freckled face, and round blue eyes scattered themselves across the broken glass, but it was undeniable: he was inhabiting the body of the boy on his porch.

“There you are,” a girl said. Scott felt his body turn and found himself staring at Krista, now as solid as anything else in this world--hazel eyes, round cheeks and dimples beside her thin lips, dressed in the iconic flowery shirt. She was smiling at him.

With a jolt of recognition, like the shock of a battery on the tongue, Scott realized that this was him. This blonde, freckled boy was who he had been as a child, and he was in that body once more as a witness only, a tag-along to events that already happened.

Through floodgates long ago closed, memories and feelings and images crept out, as if the gates of his mind were being wrenched open by godly hands. He suddenly knew things that he did not know before. Krista was his step-sister. He was adopted. This was their hideout, the car they named Red Wing Tower. This was his life at twelve years old.

The boy-that-was-Scott moved forward and gave Krista a high five. “I’ve been waiting here for you,” he heard himself say, and in that voice he found another memory uncovered, then another, like drips of a faucet onto his parched brain.

Then his body turned and walked back over to the shade of the old cab. He turned to look at Krista.

“What should Red Wing be used for today?” she asked, leaping up onto the edge of the windowless hunk. “How about a fighter plane, or a dungeon? Oh, how about a hospital for the crazies! Yeah, the crazies could come here and be operated on.”

I’m reliving my past, the part of Scott that was still an adult realized. This is what happened to me. Oh God, this must be where something happens to Krista, and I’m not able to stop it! That was what he always assumed the girl served as, a memory of his incapability to defend her in the time of desperate struggle. This must be that time.

Scott struggled against bonds that were unseen, chains that might have been tied to the stone of the earth itself.

Trapped inside a body that was his body more than fifteen years ago.

He felt himself shake his head. “I’ve got a better idea,” he said. “Let’s play doctor.”

The girl scrunched her face in disdain. “Doctor? Not again, Scotty!”

“No, it’ll be fun, you’ll see. I’ll be the doctor, and you’ll be my patient. You’ve got a very bad illness, but I’ll fix you. It’ll be fun.”

Krista obviously didn’t buy it, because she jumped down and stood with her hands on her hips. In the bright daylight, Scott noted that the creases on her forehead and nervous hands fiddling with the bottom of her shirt belied feelings hidden within, most of all fear of something or someone. The girl bit her lower lip, looked around as if to try and find some excuse to leave.

Finding none, she slumped her shoulders. “Well, okay, but just for a little bit. Then I wanna operate on the crazies.”

Scott felt his face crinkle into a smile. “Absolutely. Now come here, patient, and lie down.”

As his hand came up to lead the girl into the hollowed-out cab, it was startling to notice that he could feel the soft fabric of her shirt, the tender shoulder beneath it. This vision was more complete than any dream or memory, if he could experience such tactile interactions with drastically clear presence of mind.

“That’s it,” he heard himself say. “I must examine you, because you’re sick. Be a good patient.”

Krista lay on her back atop the small blanket draped across the dirt-caked floor. Scott came up beside her and knelt down.
“This is lame, Scotty. Do we have to do this again? I really wanna do something else.”

“Be a good patient,” he said, and heard a small bit of frustration creep into his words.

The boy-who-was-Scott reached down and patted the girl’s stomach. “It looks like this patient has an infection. I’ll have to see how far its spread, because there’s a rash on the infected area.”

Then the hand flicked up the bottom of Krista’s shirt. Soon his palm was touching the girl’s skin--soft, delicate, rising and falling with her breaths. The hand ran back and forth across the stomach before rising a bit higher to her ribcage.

“Uh-oh,” Scott heard himself say. “It looks like this is infected too. Let’s see where else the rash got to.”

No! No, what the...! No! Adult-Scott’s pleas were merely insubstantial bubbles in the sea of the new world around him. He watched helplessly as the boy’s hand--his hand--slid up and rubbed the girl’s bare chest, her sides, her legs, gentle but probing. He ran his hand down Krista’s side, back up across her chest, then down to her stomach again.

The girl opened her eyes wide in surprise but for a moment let the boy continue the pretend examination.

Worse than the inability to stop his actions, worse than witnessing the growing atrocities here in the cramped cab, was the disgustingly thrilling way it made Scott feel. The duality was wrenching: on the one hand, he felt the adult part of him fill with revulsion and anger, but he also felt the child part of him jolt with exhilaration at the soft skin under his fingers, the textures and curves and bumps filling him with tingling anticipation.

“Scotty, stop now. Let’s get the crazies!”

“No, not yet. I want to show you something. This is new, but we all know that doctors know best.”

Then the marionette that was this boy’s body took his hand from the girl and found its way to his own clothes, began stripping them off. The Scott inside flailed his arms, kicked and screamed, thrashed, but what happened next was inevitable because it had already transpired once before.

The young Scott’s mind surged in breathless elation as he tugged his pants lower than propriety would allow, his hairs standing on end from the sensations reeling across his body.

“Scotty, what are you doing? Knock it off!” Krista protested as he shuffled towards her. The girl propped herself up and suddenly the fear was once again in her eyes. She shuffled away from him, pulling her shirt down once more.

“Now you just stop that, Scotty!”

“You obey me, patient! Come here and see what I have for you.” His words were scalding, angry. He couldn’t see his face, but judging by the contortions on Krista’s pretty features, it matched the words’ cruelty.

“No!” she shouted, then scrambled to her feet and stood facing Scott a fair distance away from Red Wing Tower.

Slowly, as the boy pulled his clothes fully on, there was a terrible changing of emotions inside. Elation and pleasure curdled into a lump of anger that settled deep within him; hate like he’d never experienced before seemed to fuel him now, calling him to action.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“I’m gonna go tell our parents what you did, what you’ve been doing to me! They’re not going to like it!”

Now the boy-that-was-Scott laughed, a scratchy outburst that had no trace of humor in it. At his sides, his fists were balled, and his mind was alight with thoughts and actions primal in nature, repugnant yet utterly terrific.

“They aren’t my parents; they’re your parents. You’re not my sister, either, which means that I can do whatever I want.”

Krista kept circling around Scott like they were two dogs about ready to attack, but her eyes leaked with tears now as she spoke. “Why are you doing this, Scotty? We have fun together! Why?”

“I’m curious, you little whelp. I wanna know what it feels like. I’ve tried it on others, but since you’re my step-sister, you’re the one I really want to try it on. I thought you’d like it.”

“No! Why, Scotty, why?”

“Just come here and let me have you, bitch!” Then he was running at the pretty girl with a feeling of immeasurable satisfaction lodged in his gut at what he was about to do. Those textures, those feelings, so magical...!

He leaped at the girl but she sidestepped; he hit and rolled on the ground, whirling back on his feet with the nimbleness of youthful muscles. Krista stood with her hands up, tears along her face and shaking as completely as if with chills.

“Why, Scotty, why?”

He let out a growl and lunged forward again. Reached for her throat, missed. Caught a piece of her shirt.

Without warning, Krista screamed and shoved him back. With his balance already compromised, he teetered back and fell.

The sun arced above him. Chants of crickets and frogs rose to a thunderous roar.

His head smacked against something hard, then he slid down against what must be the cab of Red Wing Tower. Pain shot through him. Daggers of red and white tore at his vision.

Krista appeared over him, her head eclipsing the sun. She was saying something, but his ears were useless. He was sinking to oblivion, down, down...

Then the body below him was gone, and Scott found himself back in the well of vague shapes and silhouettes like crude, enlivened pencil drawings.

He thrashed his arms, and found that he now controlled his own body once more. Slowly, slowly, sounds came back to him--the pitter-patter of rain, gurgling streams, whispered scratches of autumn leaves.

With a flash he was on his knees in the thicket of trees beside his house. Kneeling in the sludge, he covered his face in dirty hands and cried.

Rain, rain, rain, from all around.

After all the medicines, the money, the crying, praying, specialists, herbs, it was this boy-who-was-not-a-boy that brought Scott Lueck’s memories back to him in a hurricane of brutality. What he saw was not at all what he wanted to see: he remembered the day with Krista, remembered hitting his head, then waking up in a hospital several days later, alone and confused, being talked to be various specialists and cops and others who all claimed to want what was best for him. He remembered watching as he left the hospital with strangers, looking behind and seeing Krista in the arms of her parents and knowing that she told them what he did, how he acted, and he remembered feeling overwhelming fury at the girl that she should incriminate him to those miserable losers she called parents, thereby forcing him to leave to go to another orphanage, another pitiful shell of existence until a suitable family could be found.

Of course no family was ever found. He ran from the first orphanage, hoping to escape and live on his own off the streets until he was old enough to find someone to take him under wing and show him the ropes of life. He was caught, of course, brought to another forsaken shelter with other kids that were without love. He evaded even the introductions of the new place, and ran away that very night, but not before stealing a bottle of pills from one of the adults’ coats. In the alleyway, Scott tried to kill himself by popping the entire bottle of unknown pills. He swallowed them all, hoping that he could just die with the satisfying feel of Krista’s skin on his fingertips, the elation he felt when he touched every part of her, and the way she had been immeasurably better than the other girls he’d experimented on. Beside the orphanage, alone, he slept with the nameless pills swimming through his veins like piranhas, eating away his flesh with each pump and surge of his heart.

It didn’t work. The pills only made him block out that which had made the young boy what he was--the fetishes he harbored, the thoughts he entertained and the way he used families for his own twisted boy-fantasies. Thus, born from that bed of failed death and misery, Scott Lueck of the present was made, freed from the malevolent thoughts of his former self.

“No!” he cried out now, on his knees in the wet grass and twigs, the boy of his past standing stoically beside him.

“You wanted to speak with me, Scott Lueck. Now you have been shown who you are.”

“But...I don’t want to be that! I’m not that person!” In his mind, with his entire life now before him, the young boy’s perverse thoughts and dreams were once again let loose. Mixed with the new memories and values that made Scott the reclusive-but-able-bodied citizen he was, the fresh desires nearly made him wretch his stomach up on the muddy earth below him.

He didn’t want to be that boy, who felt girls and did other things that were just as sick, but he was. Krista, the vision in his dreams, had not been calling out for help, but as a plea against him. Scott burst into another round of tears as the realization of who he was blossomed in his mind.

“Now you must make a choice, Scott Lueck,” the boy said. “Who are you going to be?”

The boy stooped and touched his shoulder. The previous slicing of his emotions, that feeling of being known so well, disintegrated into something less precise but ten-fold more heart-stopping. The neurons, molecules, and cells in his body all seemed to revolt with the boy’s touch, but though he felt uncontrollable spasms building within him, it was impossible to pull away.

“Who do you choose to be? Which of us will die?”

He was unsure of what exactly the boy was asking, and he was finding his chest constricting more and more, a hundred hands pressing on his lungs and heart and throat.

Krista’s pain was his fault. He had abused her.

He had been a terrible boy, terrible beyond words.

But the truth was that he no longer thought like that boy. Amnesia had allowed him to discard those shackles and live a peaceful, if not a bit tedious, life.

He was who he was now--Scott Lueck, twenty-eight years old, nearly broke, no girlfriend, and with a healthy supply of books to pass the time spent alone. He enjoyed eating steak and green beans, despised the traditions of Easter and Christmas but loved Halloween. Every Sunday he took a five mile walk around the country road and picked dandelions for no other reason than to set them in his vase on the kitchen counter, and when he woke late at night he liked to eat peanut butter and watch infomercials until he fell asleep. He never disobeyed the law, and owned only a singular traffic ticket for a broken tail light.

Even with the newfound feelings of the boy he had been--haunting, perverse thoughts of pleasure taken from the touch of young girls’ flesh--he would never allow himself to be that boy again.

He was himself. Now and forever.

“Ah, yes, that’s it. I sense you have made a choice,” the boy said, and released his hand. As if that one little palm kept Scott upright, he fell forward and had to catch himself on his hands. “I am the one who dies, then. I am what you used to be, and you have chosen not to kill what you are now and embrace me. Goodbye, Scott Lueck.”

Then the boy turned and walked away, leaving Scott alone in the narrow circle of trees ringing his house from the outside world.

The storm, caught on a slight wind, whorled the raindrops in jigsaw paths down the sky. The boy was nowhere to be seen in that sparkling, quiet inundation.

Scott Lueck had his memory back. With it came a new world of regrets and rights to wrong, places and people to look up and speak with, but once more he was a full person. No longer a husk of himself. He knew what his life had become, knew that from a tainted grain of sand, he had built a pearl that was his to mold and do with as he see fit.

The boy he used to be was dead. Never would the nagging, devilish thoughts teasing his brain overcome him again.

Scott sat under the trees for a long while, listening to the cadences and jumbled voices in the chorus of the storm.

Rain, rain, rain, from all around.