The Gift: Day 06

Jesse looked over his shoulder and recommitted to his journey into town. If anyone did see him, he doubted he would be able to outrun an entire town of Daniel's converts. That hill he had come down was too treacherous to climb back up in the dim light. It was all the way from here on out.

Jesse stepped out onto Sacramento Avenue and began walking.

***

Elena woke up, her eyes blurred and her head splitting in two.

It was dark all around her and there was a moment of real panic as she tried to establish where she was. She half expected to find Daniel standing over her, leering and ready to commit a most violent act against her. She was relieved to find that she was in her Aunt's guest room. The ocean was roaring outside steadily, crashing against the shore as a storm at sea passed over into the mainland. She felt the sheet next to her and found Jesse was gone.

And then she remembered.

She bolted upright in the bed. She was still naked from their lovemaking, and she could recall their erotic romp from the kitchen to the bedroom. And then something had happened. She closed her eyes and put a hand to her forehead as she tried to make the memories surface. The feeling of being pushed, as Daniel had tried to do in the city park a few days ago, made her shiver.

"He knocked me out," she realized dismally and shook her head, "That asshole."

Jesse had used his gift when she was vulnerable during their lovemaking to keep her from going with him. Her pulse raced in anger as she stood up and gingerly walked down the hall. She was thankful her aunt had kept nightlights in all the bathrooms for night trips. The full glare of the hot, halogen lights would have been too much for her eyes in their current condition. She felt like she was under the worst hangover ever as she sat down on the toilet and opened the top drawer of the sink basin cabinet.

"You suicidal son of a bitch," she whispered and pulled out the bottle of aspirin. After popping five of them and dry swallowing, she walked down the stairs and stepped outside. She looked at her watch and found it was now after midnight. It was Saturday morning now and if Jesse had left right after their lovemaking, he would be in Castleton Rock by now. That is if he was able to get past the nasty traps Daniel had undoubtedly set for him.

"Jesse," she bit her lip, "Damn it."

The ocean was black like liquid obsidian. The rolling crests of the moderate waves were the only highlights on the vast expanse of choppy water. She could feel phantom pelts of rain on her face and chest as she closed her robe around herself. She could admit that she was frightened to going back, just as frightened as she would have been sailing out into this storm. But she had told herself that when she did, it would be with Jesse at her side and she wouldn't be alone.

She was furious at him for putting her in this position. He didn't understand that she absolutely had to go back with him. Her commitment to his fight wasn't just some flavor of the week cause or something she was blindly going into. The stakes were just as high for her as they were for Jesse. Elena shook her head and felt like crying as she walked back inside, the wind caressing her with invisible fingers and making her hair billow to one side.

Elena looked back at the tumultuous ocean beyond the bluff on which the house sat and knew it was time. She hadn't come all this way to simply be put aside when Jesse would need her the most. She dressed quickly, throwing on jeans and t-shirt with her sneakers. She pulled her hair back and went for the keys to her aunt's car. Her blood ran cold when she found they were not in the second drawer of Rosa's bureau anymore. Elena ran down to the garage and when she opened the door, she cursed, "Shit!"

The garage was empty, the BMW long gone.

Elena hurried back inside and found the keys to her VW bug. Rain began to fall as the storm moved inland and the small car sputtered and choked, belching out plumes of blue smog. The little car had been all but destroyed during their escape from Castleton Rock two days ago. The shell of the sturdy little car was burned and dented and the interior hadn't fared much better. The rear bumper was gone and when she turned on the lights, only one of the lamps worked. The windshield wipers moved sluggishly despite the fact there was no windshield to wipe as she put the charred bug in reverse.

"Come on baby," she coaxed her car, "Just one more trip..."

She could feel the engine threatening to die as she backed out of the long driveway and pulled into the street. The gears grinded and the car groaned as she slipped into first gear and she gave it some gas. The bug lurched forward and then picked up speed as she silently prayed for a miracle. Rain sleeted in through the open windshield and soaked her scorched dashboard and her clothes. The smell of fired plastic and rubber was still thick and almost palpable as she smacked her mouth in disgust from the airborne flavor.

The car had been a gift from her father on her sweet sixteenth birthday, and she had thought it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. Her one reservation was that the car wasn't painted yellow, like the bug the detective drove in the Kinsey Milhone books by Sue Grafton. She hoped someday to have the money to pay for a new paint job, but now that looked like less and less of a reality.

"I'm sorry, baby," she ran her hand over the ashes of her dash cover, "But you did good. Just get me home... one more time, baby..."

Lightning arced across the swirling expanse of thunderheads as the Volkswagen sputtered and smoked along the coastal highway doing it's personal best, seventy-one miles an hour.

"One more time..."

***

When Jesse had come back to Castleton Rock the first time, it looked like a nightmarish extension of hell. As the evening had fallen on that Wednesday night, red and orange lights from the carnival Daniel had highjacked revealed a scene from some S&M world of pain snuff film. People he knew, some from the time he was a little boy, had been naked or close to being naked and out in the streets, partying and living it up. He had seen old men and women in harnesses and leather bondage gear (he wasn't even sure where they had gotten that shit... the town had no sex shop, the nearest one being in Redding... but then, everyone's got to have secrets, right?), people having sex right on the main street and not caring one little bit if anyone saw them.

Again, he thought of the comic debauchery featured in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." How funny that movie had seemed to him when he watched it, but now having seen some of the realities of it taken to the furthest extreme he suddenly saw it all in a different light. These people weren't Richard O'Brien dancing his ass off and singing about doing the Time Warp again. They weren't even close to the irreverent transvestite played Tim Curry. They were shadowy reflections of something dark in and of itself. Daniel had taken Castleton Rock and perverted it into something it was never meant to be.

Looking back on the experience, he now could see that what Daniel had done wasn't simply summed up with mind control. He had unlocked all their secret and darkest fantasies. Their inhibitions had been lifted from them and the whole town transformed into a raving mob looking for the most instant gratification they could find. With their inhibitions gone, Daniel had been able to control them much more easily.

And as such, the people Jesse had known all his life turned on him and Elena, trying to kill them as they escaped from Castleton Rock that night. As loud as the town had been that night it was now just as quiet. As he walked up the long, steep hill by the police station that let out on Main Street from Sacramento Avenue he couldn't hear even a dog barking. Distant echoes from the jammed highway were audible, but Jesse had the feeling he was in some kind of bubble. The haze was strong here and Jesse could now see that it was more of a humid, wet mist. It swirled and sparkled subtly before his eyes as he walked down the main drag.

The visibility was limited to about twenty feet in front of him as the neon colored steamy mist coalesced and formed phantom shapes that tricked his eyes. Overturned cars emerged from the thick soupy cover like great hulking masses of faded out shadows. Shattered glass crunched under his boots as he passed the hardware store. He looked up and saw a fire had gutted the store out viciously. Black streaks of soot were burned on the eave of the building and the air was thick with the stink of fried rubber, plastic and paint.

"Oh man," he whispered, peering into the blackened husky of the business that once been a lynchpin to the local economy.

He passed the real estates offices and then the flower shop. All the windows had been busted out into the streets. He thought that was odd, but then considering the mass hysteria that had gripped Castleton Rock recently he figured it was all part and parcel to the madness. If people were willing to strip naked and fuck in the middle of the street then certainly everyone breaking out their windows from the inside out wasn't inconceivable.

The Pizza Factory came next. He felt a shudder, remembering the seduction he had been victim to there. Mrs. Brewster, his biology teacher and his classmate Tina Moss had lured him there not only to get in his pants but also to kill him. He wondered where they were now. Had Daniel punished them like some kind of vengeful god for failing in their task? Had he killed them as some kind of example to the others? Considering the healthy deity complex Daniel had developed as of late, Jesse supposed that was possible too.

Something fell over and crashed to the ground to his left across the street. He looked and realized the carnival was still there. In the rolling mist he could see the Ferris wheel lights slowly turning as the ride spun listlessly. There was no music and no noise. The giant wheel simply spun silently in the living fog. Jesse could the mist touching him and caressing him like spectral fingers. Something other than Daniel was here in Castleton Rock, something darker and more insidious.

As the carnival lights glowed and as the world remained as silent as a dead corpse in a tomb, Jesse walked on to the theater. He didn't know why, but he felt instinctively that Daniel was there, or at the very least there was something he needed to see there. He could feel the presence of the gift there in the back of his brain like a football sized tumor the closer he got to it. The theater was radiating the power like a nuclear bomb with a serious leak.

The lights for the billboard were on and burning brightly in the mist. Those lights hadn't been on in years. The theater had closed when he was in junior high. The man who ran it, Nat Stevens had been charging a then outrageous matinee price of nine dollars a show and the public would have none of it (he claimed the only difference between a matinee showing and an evening showing was that a matinee was scheduled before six in the evening... price was inconsequential to the change). The theater had been open from the day it was finished in 1953 to the day Stevens ran it into the ground in the fall of 2000.

"I guess it's open for business again," Jesse muttered and cautiously approached the theater. His boots clicked against the ground but did not echo as he reached the red and blue doors to the building. He could smell incense and through the diamond shaped windows in the doors he could see the lights in the lobby were on. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rolled.

"Alright," he grasped the door handle and pulled it open, "Let's do this."

He thought about Elena and hoped she was okay. His heart rested a little easier though knowing she was safe at Rosa's house on the coast and not here.

Jesse stepped inside.

***

Elena pulled off to the side of the road as the connective highway met up with the Interstate 5 junction. The cars were bumper-to-bumper and she could see no way of remotely getting past the clogged lanes on the shoulder of the road. The rain was hammering down mercilessly as her view was filled with red taillights and lightning flashes in the sky. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel as she considered her options. The bug sputtered and coughed as she slipped it into neutral and looked around.

After a few minutes of scanning her surroundings, she realized there was no way to get down to Castleton Rock with anything less than helicopter. Horns were honking and blaring as she put her head on the steering wheel and felt like crying. Water was dripping down her face and her clothes were stuck to her body as finally entertained the very real possibility that she would not be able to join Jesse. He was still at least two hours away in good driving conditions, and from the mess sprawling out before she knew that the conditions were anything but.

And then a thought seized her mind.

"That's it," she sat up straight and threw the bug in reverse. She backed up enough to flip a U-turn and head back the other way. Five minutes later she came to an overpass that stretched over the interstate highway. She sped across it and found what she was looking for. An off ramp for northbound traffic was there. She looked down and saw that the two lanes of highway were clear for the most part, but more importantly the shoulder was clear.

"Why not?" she said after a moment of cursory contemplation. She hit the gas and roared down the off ramp into the northbound traffic of Interstate 5. A green semi-truck was speeding up the ramp as she jerked to her left and tore the gravel off the shoulder. The massive truck rocked her car as it passed her, leaving her in the wind and spray of its wake. Her tires dug down deep for purchase in the ground as she kept her foot on the gas pedal, slipping from the blacktop into the dirt. The trucker blared his horn as the two-trailered monster moved on and away from her. Elena smiled and waved her middle finger out the broken window of the driver side door, "Yeah back at ya pal!"

She eased the car back onto the shoulder and kicked it into gear, mustering all the speed she could from the little bug. The Volkswagen shuddered and moaned as the engine pressed itself to the limit. Through the air vents she could smell something under the hood getting very hot as she reached seventy miles an hour. Cars blurred past her and sped by like bullets as she maneuvered the little car down the shoulder of the Interstate 5 corridor.

"Okay," she told herself as her heart raced, "We're doing good."

The bug's muffler belched out a shotgun blast as blue smoke escaped from the tail pipe. She patted the steering wheel.

"Very good, baby."

***

The lobby Jesse remembered from his childhood was gone.

It had been transformed and re-imagined as a bizarre conglomeration of ancient designs and more modern architectural philosophies. Elaborate lengths of red and purple silk hung from the ceilings with gold braids and tassels holding them in place. The elegant cloth rippled in an unfelt breeze. The snack bar was completely gone and in its place was a collection of beautiful potted plants and ferns. Jesse recognized them from the nursery down on Sacramento Avenue. The pots in which they were planted were of a special design by the woman who owned the place. Almost every business in town had one of those potted plants.

In front of the doors to the main theater stood four women. Jesse recognized them all from his school. Tina Moss, Lindsay Gorsuch, Alicia Stone and Sarah Brower were only vaguely reminiscent of the flighty high school seniors he had known a mere week ago. They looked more like a quartet of Amazon warriors, and had it not been for the bizarre circumstances Jesse might have been inclined to laugh. They looked like relics from the past, all them wearing heavy make-up that made them resemble bizarre variations on ancient Egyptian women.

Dark eyeliner framed their unwavering eyes and swept out to fine points as the corners of their lids. Jesse noticed that not one of them wore any clothes save for a loose fitting wrap that hung from the hips and barely covered their pubic areas. The cloth was silky, like the material hanging from the ceiling but a faded white color that revealed more than it hid. All of them had elaborate body paintings that swirled and rolled in sweeping lines over their curves. Someone had taken great care to make each design different from the other, both in color and in expression.

Jesse stood silently in front of them, watching and waiting as they stared off into an unknown expanse of thought, eyes open, focused and waiting. Blue paint had decorated Tina's voluptuous body from head to toe while Lindsay wore a dark red design over her athletic frame. Both women stood by the left entry, grasping long wooden poles they kept secure at their sides. Alicia wore green, the swirls of her design culminating in a beautiful accentuation of her full breasts. Sarah Brower bore the color of a golden yellow that stood out on her dark chocolate skin like the stripes on a wasp. All four women wore their hair in thick braids and stood at perfect attention.

"Hi," Jesse said, breaking the silence.

Tina turned her head slowly and looked at Jesse. She seemed to be indifferent to him as a human being in every sense as her bright blue eyes scanned his face. She lowered her staff into a defensive position as she left the doorway and blocked his path. Joining her from the right entrance was Sarah Brower. He noticed that both Lindsay and Alicia remained still and unmoved. They knew how to cover all their weak points. Jesse began to feel like he was in some fucked up, over-sexed Cecil B. DeMille movie.

Or, at the very least, one of Ed Wood's finer masterpieces.

"You will come with me," Tina said flatly.

"Will I?" Jesse felt a little nervous as he looked at them both. They were serious, and he no doubt those staffs could crack his head wide open if he wasn't careful. Sarah moved to the side a little, just in case he decided to make a run for it.

"My master wishes to speak with you," Sarah said, "You will do as you are commanded."

"You tell Daniel I'll talk to him out here."

"Daniel," Tina said with no small measure of impatience, "Is not my master. He is the dog of the Queen."

"The dog of the Queen?" Jesse smirked, "When did he get demoted?"

"Silence," Sarah hissed.

"Who the fuck do you think you're fooling?" Jesse laughed, "Sarah, you can't even get your cat to quit spraying your couch. You're ordering me around?"

"You will do as you're told," Tina eyed him coldly, "Or we will close your mouth for you."

"Still bitter over the other night?" Jesse winked, knowing he wasn't helping his situation.

"My Queen will have your overly-inflated head," she said.

"Your Queen can lick the tip of my overly-inflated head and shove it right up her ass," Jesse said dryly.

"Silence," Sarah warned him, "Your ego swells, pig."

"And proudly, you pompous bitch."

Sarah jabbed her staff into his ribs, "Silence you dog!"

Jesse flinched and rubbed the sore spot, "Okay, who talks like that?"

"You can speak to our master or die on the end of our staffs," Tina said flatly.

"Well, when you spin a cliché like that..." Jesse shrugged and nodded, "Show me the way."

"A wise choice," Sarah eyed Jesse and then went to position herself behind him. Jesse suddenly lunged out and grabbed the staff from her, jerking back as hard as he could. He swept the staff down and took out Sarah's legs from under her. She screamed and fell to the red carpet directly on her ass. Jesse jumped back, and being fully aware he knew absolutely nothing about martial arts or anything so elegant as fighting with a staff, he wielded it like a baseball bat and brought the weapon down hard on her chest. Sarah cried out and rolled to her side, wheezing.