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  THALO BLUE

  A Novel by

  Jason McIntyre

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  Published by & Copyright © 2011 Jason McIntyre

  Fiction titles by Jason McIntyre:

  On The Gathering Storm

  Shed

  Thalo Blue

  Black Light of Day

  Learn more about the author and his work at:

  www.theFarthestReaches.com

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  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

  One: THE LANGUISHING;

  Long Drawn Out Silences

  Listening to the silence is as important

  as deciphering the noise.

  -Drawing Lines in the Sand:

  A Way of Life,

  DAVID R. G. LANGTREE

  This life just goes on and on;

  Will it end? And when?

  -THE BOOK OF THE DEAD,

  September 21

  I. Fade Away Divine

  Sebastion Redfield awoke to the squeak-crunch of footsteps in snow outside his father’s bedroom window. Alone, he lay there unmoving, as before, and his mind fluttered, caught in that dreamy world somewhere between sleep and this reality. But his eyes remained closed. In his mind, past the protection of the room’s fogged window, only the icy eaves existed. The early morning cold was unbreakable, and behind the façade of it, all the house fronts on this street sat back behind canopies of crisp dark foliage and branches which shielded them from prying eyes. Evergreens were dusted in white. Tangles of leafless trees were coated with clinging hoar frost. There was a fresh layer of new fallen snow on absolutely everything, and the world was still.

  Not convinced that the footsteps were even real, he allowed himself to fall backwards again, backwards into that warm world of embracing sleep. He craved for the darkness to cover him like a blanket. If only. Even if the imaginary shoes munching the snow outside had existed, a swaddling embrace of black would make them easier to ignore. He had left the television on, his drowsy brain told him; perhaps its drawl was bleeding into his slumber. Like a giant moon eclipsing a distant sun, the snow-treading steps were dismissed from his mind. A longed-for coverlet sheathed his sleepy thoughts...

  The bathroom, one door to the right of the bedroom, held steam from an hour ago which had since condensed into droplets on the mirror and shower doors. The faucet in the tub dripped in rhythm, and the drops fell to collide with the skin of the water beneath, which was already beginning to form a ring. There on the edge of the tub, tucked into a wet corner and standing sentry over the surface, was a glass tumbler partially filled with a dark oily liquid and two nearly melted cubes of ice.

  As the cubes continued to dissolve and become water, the bronze colored liquid swirled about thickly, around and around, filling itself into the gaps of the water and creating elaborate, yet miniscule storm systems of clear and copper colors. But both refused to dilute. The two substances encircled each other; they were performing a dance, but with no one there to watch.

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  Outside, the dim morning light almost didn’t exist at all. The sky was a stark canvas of steel gray, darkest at its edges. Tall trees with clinging snow stood out brightly against such a backdrop. They were as shining daggers pointing skyward.

  Thin strands of smoke rose from chimneys on roofs in wiry, lilting tendrils, reaching for that canvas, as if to try and paint it anew. Pulled up into the atmosphere by backwards gravity, these fuzzy grey smoke-strings were signs from early morning furnaces. Sprawling homes were warming. Day was coming. Lives were beginning again.

  A trail of prints led through the snow, from the iced over street to the front of the white bungalow where there was a pause. From that quiet, inexplicable halt, they drew around the side of the house and through a patch of shrubbery and at last to a space under a great, jagged oak tree in the back yard. At the end of the trail, sitting on haunches atop an ice-coated firewood box, under the oak and a window casement, was a man in a bright white dress shirt. Its top buttons were undone and it was un-tucked and disheveled, yet it stood out as crisp and new in the dreariness standing behind him and all around. His hair was shiny black, his eyes too, surrounded by bluish whites, and his skin was a deep brown. Drawing down his right arm was a thick line of dark red, pressed into the white shirt, blooming there, and gleaming on his skin where the sleeve was also unbuttoned. The line ran, spiraled, all the way past his elbow to his wrist, then to his finger tips—where it dripped mechanically into the snow beneath him, creating ever-brightening dimples of what looked like oil color. He remained motionless, his dark polished eyes caught in an electric gaze at the pane of glass before him. His view was mingled with the serrated lines of tree branches. They seemed to cut the glass into a thousand puzzle pieces.

  He had tried the front door, locked. Had even tried the back, but it was locked as well. As with all the times before, the light seemed brighter now, the pain more intense. It was always brighter in these ticking minutes, always more extreme. There was a steadfast and unrelenting buzz in his mind and it was getting louder. Like metal grating on metal, it seemed, and as with all the times before, it was as then: eternally growing stronger.

  With his wound ever-worsening, and the edges of his sight blurring to black like the boundaries of two binocular lenses, he did all that he could do in this, the next to last moment: he lunged forward, through the pane of still glass, towards that noise, towards that infernal buzzing inside his own head.

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  Entirely awake and with pounding in his temples, Sebastion jerked upright, the bed sheets twisted in his fists. That jarring crash was not pre-recorded; it was not from the television. The loudness was out of nowhere, yes, but it was real, and it could not be ignored. His eyes were wide with hysteric questions and his mind raced towards answers, all terminating in one too-real conclusion: It was six-oh-four in the morning, and there, on the edge of the night, still too early to be morning and too late to be simple darkness, there was a stranger in Sebastion Redfield’s home.

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  Window splintered into shards. As he lunged forward they pierced his face, matted in his hair, and slid across his bronze arms, tearing his skin, drawing on it countless tiny rivulets. A few pieces of cold broken branch came with him. The pain he could ignore, for a moment, but the sound was deafening. He could not ignore that.

  Landing as he did, onto a mattress covered in bluish bedspread, where glass tinkled against pieces of itself and onto the floor surrounding, he was sure that the sound would overwhelm him. And there he would stay, laying crumpled and face down in a pile of glass and branch, until noise did him in, causing his mind to cease function and implode.

  But after just one breath of hopelessness, he was driven up from his silent position—smearing blood against the bedspread with his hand and his arms. He was compelled towards the bedroom door, towards that noise that could not be identified but could now be more or less pinpointed. The front of the house was a static squall mixed with the slur of automated dullness.

  He lurched forward into the rest of the house, intent on finding the source and ending it. Down the hall, dimly lit, banging against wall and doorjamb, his focus became that noise, that unrelenting squeal. It became louder as he approached and he could stand it less. The pain was shadowed by it. Everything was worse.

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  Sebastion’s mind had seized. His door, drawn
closed but not shut tightly, quivered as something passed it on the other side. He could see it from where he sat frozen, immovable: the light from the semi-darkness of the hall broken for a moment as the something crossed it and kept moving. He realized he could not breathe. His last breath had been a hundred years before, at that second when the rear bedroom window had been shattered.

  Instinct took hold. All he could do was roll toward the edge of the bed. There was a space between it and the street-facing wall of the room—the wall beyond which, only moments earlier, he had imagined a peaceful street dusted in snow—one with no footprints leading up to his bungalow, one with no strangers lurking in foliage and breaking windows in the early morning peace.

  Continuing his roll, only three quarters of a revolution, all the way over the edge of his mattress, he braced himself with his left arm, hand-heel falling nearly soundless to the rug below. He came to a gentle but all-at-once stop beside the bed, on the padded carpet. His eyes, gaping holes, could barely readjust; there was even less light down here. It was a narrow space, between the bed and the wall, so he could not lay full on his back. Instead, he was on a slant, one shoulder on the floor, and one pressed against the cold wall. Blood was rushing to his head and he couldn’t even force an exhale. His body felt like a rusted tangle of gangly metal limbs that would squeak and give him away if he even tensed. He froze again, nearly sure the little noise he had made had been heard by the figure moving down the hall. That figure heard everything, sensed everything, knew everything, and would turn crisply, then come rushing back toward Sebastion and find him in his secret place. The cool air from under the bed, to his immediacy, pressed in on him and his mind became clouded. What do I do? his brain finally hollered. What do I do?

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  The stranger bashed the base of a small sculpture—an opulent copy of the Bust of Nefertiti—through the television screen in the living room as images of a car commercial flashed across it for the last time. His hand held Nefertiti by the throat, long and slender it was, and the follow-through gouged his skin all the way up to his wrist in dozens of places. Sparks and a brief shot of smoke blew from the tube and the glass of the screen burst outwards with a loud pop. The volume, that terrible squawk of voices and music, stopped immediately. But the static, that steady squall which brought metal grinding on metal to his brain, was not finished. He saw the blinking orange numerals of a digital display in the blackness. He reached for them and ended up yanking a stereo receiver from its spot on the shelf. Trailing cables pulled taut until they snapped from their connectors and the stereo unit was pitched to the carpeted floor. The room plunged into loud silence; the noise was at an end. It had become unbearable in his head, that static buzz, had strained inside his temples from that first moment, when he had landed across the bluish bedspread. He simply couldn’t take it any longer.

  He turned—quiet was again his ally—and then collapsed onto a plush sofa-couch under the white sheer drapes of the living room window. Smearing tacky blood across the fabric of the couch, he brought a shaky hand to his head, leaned it against his palm, tried to steady it. And then, with his other hand—his left—he removed a .45 caliber derringer from the waistband of his wrinkled pants.

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  By the time Sebastion heard more things being smashed at the front of the house, he had nearly summoned the courage to reach up and grab the telephone’s receiver from the nightstand. He would pull it down to his chest with the chord dangling up behind it. Yes, and then he would—No, dammit. That’s no good. He realized quickly, stupidly, that he wouldn’t be able to see the numbers to dial. He would have to get up onto his knees and turn about to look at the keypad. That would put him at risk. He pictured the bedroom door in his mind, standing just slightly ajar. It had moved a little when that stranger passed it. It had actually moved. He squeezed down and craned his neck towards the floor. Beneath the bed he could just barely see the door’s bottom edge and the dark crack of the hallway between it and the threshold. Whoever was in the house could actually be standing there at this moment. It sounded as if the living room had taken a beating but that was seconds ago by now. The stranger could easily be back down the hall and standing at the bedroom door. And even if he wasn’t standing there breathing on the door with his tasteless breath, the stranger was prolific; he could be all places at once. He was God.

  Why had he even drawn the door shut earlier? He never closed that door, not since dad. But if he hadn’t, the stranger, when he had burst from the back bedroom into the hall, would have surely seen the light from Sebastion’s bedside lamp as he passed, would have even seen Sebastion himself sitting in bed, clutching the sheets. It moved—that door. It actually moved. He was that close to me. Just on the other side of that damn door. But why tonight? Why had it been drawn shut tonight? And why, goddammit, hadn’t he closed it tightly, all the way? Reaching up for the telephone, in view of the doorway, in view of the all-knowing, all-seeing stranger, that would have been easy right now if the door had been shut all the way. The numbers would already be dialed, quick as that, there’s only three to remember. And the police would be on their way. But now, now it felt too exposed to reach up there, like whoever was breaking things in the living room could actually be standing at the doorway, peering in. The intruder would see that hand reaching up for the receiver. There was no logic in that—how could the stranger see him—but the realness of it, the actuality, seemed undeniable. Why don’t I just go and close the door?

  No. Too much time. It would take too much time to get up, cross the room, close the door, and return to the phone. It was the phone, he just needed to focus on that and nothing else. He needed to get up on his knees, whirl around quietly and dial those three numbers. He simply had to.

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  He steadied his head. It was still buzzing a little, even since the TV had been silenced, even since the room had been darkened by its abrupt absence. But his hand was shaking—little droplets of blood from his wound were dripping onto the couch and growing like an ugly flower. The shaking would get worse. Just like the sounds would get worse, the light would get brighter and the pain would seer and burn. These wounds were going to be his undoing. And so would the sounds in his head.

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  Sebastion realized that, not only had his breathing been sporadic at best, but his hands had become cold, dead cold. And they were both beginning to shake. He tried to steady them, rubbing them together. They sounded rough and dry, not prepared to do even the simple task he was about to ask of them.

  But he summoned the strength of will, maybe the audacity, to finally spring upwards. He scraped a little against the wall, steadied his weight, then turned around to face the nightstand. He snatched up the telephone receiver, hit those three numbers in quick succession, and came back around, settling down on his lower spine on the carpet. Again he was nestled on a peculiar angle between the bed and the cool drywall.

  There. That wasn’t so bad. That was okay. The tremors were running through his cold hands and he had to use both of them to hold the tan reciever to his ear. It rang once, on the other side. Sebastion heard it faintly, from a distance so unbelievably far away. At that moment, how could anyone so far away hear him? He held his breath. And the receiver gave an audible click.

  “Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

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  Moments passed. There was more light in the living room. It was still dim, but when he opened his dark, glassy eyes he could see outlines of furniture and picture frames on the walls. He sat back against the plush sofa cushions and held the derringer against his face. Its grip was wet with sweat and blood. Since the television had exploded he had been rubbing his hands together, had been pushing the heels of them into his eyes and across his moistened forehead, as if doing so would silence or even lessen the volume inside his skull. They were intensifying again, those sounds. Despite the new quiet, that buzzing inside this mind was growing. It was getting louder still.

 
And with that, he turned an ear toward the sheer curtain behind him. Out there, in the street, he heard the sirens again. More of them this time. The rising of their shrillness came again, like waves bringing the oil-slicked tide to a dry shoreline. His eyes narrowed. And his grip on the derringer tightened.

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  “—No. Y—You don’t understand—” Sebastion’s whispers into the handset didn’t sound like his own. They were those of a stranger he had never met. Perhaps those of the same stranger in his house at this moment. The stranger was here—somewhere—and he didn’t know where exactly. He could be there at the threshold of this room, could be looking in at the crumpled sheets of the bed with Sebastion crowded into the narrow strip behind it. Sebastion didn’t know, hadn’t heard any more movement, hadn’t heard a sound at all in several minutes.

  “—he’s in the house. Somewhere. I don’t know where. Jesus Christ. He broke the window in the back...and now he’s inside—” The operator was calm, almost too calm, Sebastion thought. It was as if she couldn’t understand how Sebastion knew the intruder was there if he couldn’t see him. It was like the whole world was against him, simplicity made into the marching enemy, idiots waving the flag with their brains removed, their eyes sewn shut, and their tongues pickled in a jar somewhere. All of them, every last man, woman and child, unable to understand bare bones explanations, even if Sebastion screamed it into their ears or enlightened them with color diagrams and scale models.