The Seeing: A Novel

All Rights Reserved © 2003 by Timothy Tweedy

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

iUniverse, Inc.

For information address:

iUniverse, Inc.

2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents in this book are figments of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

ISBN: 0-595-29506-1

ISBN: 978-1-4697-2594-9 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgements

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

EPILOGUE

This book is dedicated to my wonderful kids, Samantha and Damon. Thank you for making me a father, and thank you for helping me become a good one. I love you guys more than anything.

Acknowledgements

Writing this novel taught me a few things: One, how tough it is to sit at home on a Saturday night and plug away at my laptop while everyone else is out having a good time. Two, how funny my eyes look at four in the morning after staring at this goddamned computer screen for eight hours. Three, that I’m glad my kids are good sleepers or I might have never gotten this thing done.

But mostly, I learned that although this was an extremely long and lonely job, it was also one hell of a rewarding one. As such, I’d like to thank the following people for their support and encouragement—and, in some cases, for their much-appreciated (and badly needed) proofreading talents:

To Kim Tweedy: We made it through our childhood storm together and somehow we actually turned out okay. You’re an amazing woman. I’m proud to call you my sister, and I’m even prouder to call you my friend.

To Carole Tweedy: Whenever I feel like things are getting rough, I think about what you went through for us and I realize that things aren’t so bad after all. I am the man I am because of you. You make me proud to be your son.

To Susan Peterson: Thank you for ten amazing years together and for two lovely children who have made my world more than I ever could have dreamed. I’m glad I could count on your sharp eye for this novel, girl, because I wouldn’t have caught half of that stuff without you.

To Brad Herrera: Thank you for helping me nail down the law enforcement aspects of this little tale, my man. Hopefully your fine insight has helped me avoid looking like a total idiot.

To Michael Leshan: Thank you for your close attention to details that I would have otherwise overlooked. You saved me potential embarrassment, buddy, and I can only hope that I’ll have the chance to do the same for you sometime (which, knowing us, shouldn’t be much of a problem).

To Jessica Morgan: Thank you, my dear, for getting me out into the world again after an extremely difficult time in my life. As it turned out, you were an excellent remedy for one nasty case of writer’s block.

To Jason Luskey: Physical endurance goes hand in hand with mental toughness. Thank you for helping me to develop the tools I needed to go the distance with this thing (I really didn’t appreciate the extra push-ups and crunches at the time, dude, but I sure as hell do now).

And especially...

To Samantha and Damon: Thank you for always inspiring me to be more than I am.

(Note to Minneapolis readers: Some may notice that I took a few liberties with the locale. To that I say, It’s a fictional story—deal with it.)

PROLOGUE

The boy ran.

He could hear them gaining on him. He was small and quick, but they were bigger. Andfaster. And they were getting closer.

I’m gonna beat the shit out of you!

The boy pumped his legs even harder.

Above him, thick black pillows rolled across the afternoon sky, gazing down at him indifferently as his feet frantically pounded the earth, mimicking the heavy thudding in his chest.

Around him, the air felt wired, crackling with electricity. The boy could smell the thick, moist scent of the coming rain, and from everywhere thunder began to rumble—as if angrily reading his mind.

Ahead, the boy saw the massive thicket of trees that lay at the far edge of the school boundary, separating him from his home. He raced toward it.

And behind him, the boy heard their three voices growing louder, now too tangled together to understand the words. The boy swore he could almost feel their breath on his neck, swore they were right behind him. Soon they would reach out to grab him by the collar and drag him to the ground so they could stomp the breath out of him...

The boy pushed the thought away.

If I can just make it into the woods then maybe I can lose them...I think my house is just on the other side so all I have to do is find a way in before they catch me, because if I don’t—

I’m gonna rip your fucking face off!

And then the boy saw it, a small opening to the right. He dashed toward it, pushing himself to run faster, faster. He got closer and saw that the opening was little more

than a slight gap in a deep tangle of brush. Far too small for a larger boy like Billy Lawson to shoot through, but the boy was small for his eleven years. It was a perfectfit. He rushed toward it.

From behind him came the tromping of a stampede. The boy knew they nearly had him now but he ran on, trying not to hear their voices but hearing them anyway. And they were so close, right behind him now, almost right on top of him...

Grab him! Grab him! Don ‘t let him—

The rest was drowned out by the sound of thunder, filling the world like the bellow of an angry giant. And as the first drops of rain began to fall, the boy lowered his head and plunged into the opening.

A hundred branches whipped and ripped at his bare face and arms at once, scratching him, drawing blood. His shirt snagged on a broken tree limb and a ragged strip of it tore away like shed skin. Something sharp raked into his right thigh, and the boy felt something warm and wet start to moisten the inside of his pantleg. He pushed on, leaping over a large fallen tree, and veering fluidly around several others that looked as if they would ‘t be upright for long.

Behind him, he heard the labored voices of Billy and his pals as they shoved their way clumsily through the opening in the brush. They were still coming, but that modest opening had slowed them down a great deal. Their voices seemed to be tapering off already, growing distant, and the boy realized that he was pulling away from them, gaining so much ground that there was almost no way they’d catch him now. For a moment the boy wondered why they were still bothering to chase after him at all. Just the same, he gritted his teeth and kept going, eager to put as much distance between himself and the three of them as he could.

After a few more moments of hard running, the boy found that the brush was beginning to clear. The branches were thinning out, and now they weren’t nearly as dense. Soon the big branches were gone completely and the boy found himself able to hurdle the last of smaller ones. He could see one last wide pile of brush ahead of him and knew that once he was through it he’d be out of the woods and home free.

The rain began to fall in fat, heavy drops as the boy reached that final patch of downed and tangled tree branches and quickly began working his way through it. At the halfway point, the boy felt the sharp edge of some thick branch snake out and dig a deep gash into his right cheek. He barely felt it now, and he wouldn’t actually see it until much later after he was awake from the coma—although it would be mostly healed by then and wouldn’t be much more than an ugly white scar by the time he was able to stand up and walk on his own again.

Panting furiously now, the boy tore through the last clog of branches like a drowning man clawing for the surface of a lake. With one final heave, he was out of it,

stumbling into a clearing, completely free of the brush. He fell to his knees, his head lolling forward as his breath rattled in and out of his chest.

Reeling in a fresh lungful of air, the boy slowly rose to his feet. He pushed his wet hair out of his eyes, looked up...and then froze.

Aw, no, he rasped. Oh, Jesus, you’ve got to be kidding me.

The boy took a step forward, then another. With each footfall his spirit seemed to darken as if mirroring the sinister clouds above.

He should have expected it, he realized sickly. He’d only lived here for a few months, only attended school here for a few weeks. But Billy Lawson and Scotty Becker and Bryan Mumford had grown up here, and they knew this town and these woods like the backs of their grubby hands.

And now the boy knew exactly why they hadn ‘t stopped chasing after him.

He took one last step forward and stopped, reaching the edge of the small clearing. He looked down.

Before him, the earth suddenly fell away, becoming a cliff with an almost ridiculously steep drop. Nearly two full stories below, the drop ended in a thick bed of large, jagged-looking boulders. The embankment itself was almost completely smooth. Time had eroded any handholds and footholds there may once have been, and now the face of the cliff was as flat and featureless as Billy Lawson ‘s face. The boy saw zero chance of navigating his way down that cliff without slipping and falling all the way to the bottom, likely killing himself in the process.

He was trapped.

For a moment, the boy simply stood there at the edge of the drop, looking down at those gigantic rocks with a sort of dumb disbelief. Then he glanced up and over the drop to where the land became a series of lush, rolling hills. There, barely a quarter of a mile away, painted against the landscape like a tiny red keyhole, stood the old farm-house he and his father had moved into three months before.

Close, the boy thought miserably. So damned close. But it might as well be up at the North Pole for all the good it does me now.

The boy dropped his head again and saw his own weary reflection in the muddy brown water pooled at his feet. He thought about how far he was from Brookville Elementary now, how it had been his sanctuary until just a few minutes ago. But that was before he’d come walking out after the final bell and seen Billy and his friends charging toward him out of the corner of his eye. He’d taken off at once, dropping his books in a mad dash, and he remembered seeing some of his classmates watch him dart by, remembered how none of them had done a thing to help. It wasn’t as if they could have done much anyway, he knew, but he had an idea that none of them would have

done much even if they could. In three weeks, he’d made no friends at all. The teachers loved him, but that was only because of his grades. No one else had even noticed him.

No one, that is, except Billy Lawson.

Billy had sensed the boy’s shyness from the moment he’d firststepped into the classroom and had pounced on it like a cat on a cornered mouse. He and his friends had taunted the boy almost relentlessly ever since.

And it wasn’t fair.

The boy and his father had gone through so much already this year. Moving to Minnesota had been so hard on them both—being on their own for the first time without Mom, living somewhere new where nothing should have reminded them of her but where somehow everything still did. When the cancer took her away last year, they’d been devastated. And it had nearly broken his father completely. The boy knew his father didn’t need any more problems to deal with now, especially not problems like Billy Lawson. This was why he’d never told his father about Billy, because he knew how much his father would worry, knew how hard his father would try to help. Knowing this should have made the boy feel better, but somehow it just made it all that much worse.

Laughter. From behind him.

The boy closed his eyes for a moment, trying not to listen as they broke through that last patch of woods and stomped into the clearing. Thunder growled loudly again as the rain pelted his small body, gluing his clothes to his thin chest. He kept his back to them a moment longer, taking in a deep breath and blowing it out. With the adrenaline rush all but gone, he felt strangely calm, his body no longer thrumming like a plucked guitar string.

As lighting cracked the dark sky above him, the boy slowly turned around.

Billy Lawson and his friends were there, huffing and puffing to catch their breath, their mouths spread open in wide grins, looking very much like a trio of big bad wolves. Each of them stood nearly a whole head taller than the boy, and they each glared at him with the same hungry look in their eyes.

There’s no place for me to go now, the boy thought bleakly. No way out of this. None at all. Not unless I can figure out how to fly like Superman pretty darned quick.

The boy watched as Billy Lawson ‘s lips began to wrinkle, his mouth silently working to come up with something clever to say. But a moment later, seeming to realize that clever words were not his strong suit, Billy gave up, his lips immediately settling back into that awful grin again.

Lighting pierced the sky again as thunder rattled the world with an incredible boom. The rain came down hard now, drenching them all. The boy barely noticed it.

Billy and his gang didn’t seem to notice it either, although they would moments from now when they were running from this clearing like rats from a sinking ship.

Billy Lawson stepped forward, his lips parting again as if his dull mind had finally managed to piece together a particularly wicked remark. But before the first word could lumber its way out of his mouth, Billy stumbled and nearly fell as his right foot caught on a fist-sized stone and dislodged it from the ground.

Billy’s head dropped down in surprise and his mouth snapped closed at once. Regaining his balance, he spotted the heavy stone that now lay just beside his right foot. He regarded it for a long moment, seeing the same thing the boy saw—a dirty rock with a sharp and serrated edge on one side. It looked like a granite baseball. With teeth.

Billy Lawson ‘s head came back up. His grin was suddenly much wider. He wordlessly bent down and picked up the stone, gripping it in his right hand. He held it there for a moment, clearly enjoying the feel of its weight. Watching this, the boy felt sudden, electric panic shoot through him.

Oh, no way. No way is he going to—

Billy Lawson cocked back his arm like a major league pitcher and threw the stone.

It cut through the air in an almost perfectly straight line and smacked the boy high on his left arm. The boy yelped in surprise as the rock glanced off him and sailed over the edge of the cliff. He looked down at his arm, and saw where a quarter-sized hunk of skin had just been rudely scraped away. As he watched, bright red blood began to seep from it in a thin trickle. The boy cradled his arm against his chest, covering the nasty scrape with his bare right hand as he stood in shocked disbelief. It seemed absurd to think that the toughest boy in school had just done something so cowardly as to throw a goddamned rock at him, but his arm didn ‘t lie. The boy stared at Billy Law-son with eyes that were suddenly filled with outright revulsion.

But next to Billy, Scotty and Bryan were following his example and had begun to dig up their own rocks, which they whipped at the boy almost from the very moment they popped out of the ground. Billy quickly joined in, and before the boy fully knew what was happening, they were coming at him in a barrage.

One heavy stone careened off the boy’s head, opening up a half-inch groove in his scalp that began to bleed heavily at once. Another rock struck his chest with a heavy, hollow thump that nearly took his wind away. Another smashed into his left cheek, staggering him. The boy raised a hand protectively to his face, and there was a sharp pain as a stone smacked against it, cracking the bone in one of his fingers.

Another rock struck him. Then another. And another.

The rain came in sheets as the rocks pounded the boy again and again, battering his face and body, assaulting the hands he raised in a useless effort to protect himself.

Billy’s gang even intentionally threw low, pummeling away at the boy’s knees and shins and even connecting several times with his balls. One particularly heavy stone struck him there with a sickening crunch, immediately doubling him over and driving a paralyzing glut of pain and nausea up into his stomach.

Again and again they came as the torrent continued. All the while, the boy continued to slap away at the stones as best he could.

Yet just as he thought it would never end, the barrage suddenly stopped.

For a moment, the boy stood where he was, teetering at the edge of the cliff, his bleeding hands covering his bleeding face. His head ached miserably and he felt a sudden rush of dizziness that made him waver on his feet. His mouth was filled with the metallic taste of blood. He felt like throwing up but would ‘t let himself do it. Not here, not in front of these three.

The boy slowly lowered his throbbing hands.

His face, littered with bruises, had gone the purple shade of a rotting apple. His cheeks and forehead were swollen obscenely and now bulged with thick, dark knots. Blood, oozing from too many wounds to count, mixed with the rain and ran down his face like war paint. His eyes lookedal most hollow, as if they’d somehow sunken into their sockets.

Looking at them, the boy saw that Scotty and Bryan seemed to have suddenly lost their nerve. Their eyes were wide, their faces full of stunned disbelief. They were both cringing at the sight of him, and as the boy watched they each took a single step backward, as if acknowledging that things had somehow gone just a little too far.

But Billy Lawson, whose bullying days would end on his twenty-eighth birthday in a knife-fight outside of a dive bar less than two miles from here, had not moved at all. He only stood there, staring back at the boy, his right arm tucked slightly behind his back.

And even though the boy knew it was coming, knew it with absolute certainty, it still somehow came as a surprise.

As that awful grin flashed on his face one last time, Billy Lawson reared back and launched one final, heavy stone with all his strength. It sailed toward the boy in a deadly, definitive arc.

And it struck him between the eyes.

FLASH

There was a sudden, spectacular explosion of red fireworks in the boy’s mind. He felt no pain, but only a dumb sense of wonder at the incredible red rainbow blooming through his head. So many shades of red. His head was filled with it, alive with it... FLASH

Another detonation in his mind, and then there was an unbelievable sensation of heat filling him, consuming him. Those red lights were even stronger now and the boy felt himself blinking to try and see though them but it was no use... FLASH

Even brighter this time, and now those lights were blinding him. They began to pulse, fluttering in his mind, on and off, open and closed, like the shutter of a camera.... FLASH

So strong this time, and then the boy felt himself staggering backward, unable to stop. He tottered one step, then another, and another. And then it was one too many and the boy no longer felt the earth beneath his feet at all... FLASH

That kaleidoscope of red, bursting through his mind, as the boy fell off the edge of the cliff. FLASH

Deep red, and the boy’s mind reeled as his body smacked against the embankment and began to bowl its way down the steep decline like a human avalanche. He now realized that the face of the cliff wasn ‘t smooth at all but was cracked by jagged chunks of stone that jutted out like errant knuckles. The boy crashed into a solid edge of one protruding boulder and felt an incredible jolt of pain as his collarbone snapped in two places... FLASH

Another blast of red as the boy tumbled over and over, twisting and bouncing like a child’s doll. Blinded, he didn’t see the large hunk of stone that fractured his left kneecap and senta bolt of exquisite agony screaming through him. Didn’t see the other thick rock just below it until his face smashed into it, shattering his nose... FLASH

Red lightening in his mind as the boy plummeted down the face of the cliff, spinning wildly out of control. He wanted to cry out but there was no air to cry out with, and his mouth was full of dirt and blood... FLASH

Reds so blinding that he never saw the large gray boulder waiting for him at the bottom of the cliff, the one he now approached with such savage speed, the one that would put him at death ‘s door for the better part of the next month... FLASH

In the end, the boy had only the briefest of moments to conceive a single thought...

I’m sorry, Dad...I’m so sorry—FLASH

CHAPTER 1

The man woke.

He sat bolt upright in the darkness, sweat glistening on his face and bare chest. He blinked his eyes, forcing the hazy bare walls of his bedroom slowly into focus. The only sound in the room was his breath, hitching rapidly in and out of his lungs as if he’d just run a hard race. Which, in a sense, he supposed he had.

The man swallowed hard. He glanced at the small digital clock on the wobbly nightstand beside his bed. 2:28 AM. He sighed, the air rattling out of his chest in a weak staccato.

Always so damned early. He wanted to lie down and go right back to sleep, but he knew better. Sleep wouldn’t come just yet. The dream was still far too vivid in his mind. He shook his head slowly, trying to clear it. When he woke after the dream, it always made him feel as if

(fireworks)

a smoke bomb had detonated in his head, leaving his mind filled with a thick, murky fog. It also left him with a dull ache in his bones, as if he’d gone for another tumble down that damned cliff. He sighed again. Twenty years had done almost nothing to diminish the memory. And as he sat here alone in the dark, he supposed twenty more would do no better.

His breathing was slowing now, becoming more even, but his heart still pounded almost audibly in his chest. No, sleep was definitely out of reach. For a little while, anyway.

The man pushed back the blankets and climbed out of bed. He stood, his left knee bitching briefly as always, though a few limbering steps would close the valve on that old pain soon enough.

He shuffled into the bathroom and flipped on the light. The three bare bulbs above the grimy mirror burst to life at once.

Christ, he mumbled, squeezing his eyes shut in protest. As they began to adjust, he forced them open again and glanced in the mirror. His reflection glanced tiredly back at him.

The old scars were still easy to make out. Time had faded them, but not completely. The few on his face, especially that deep one on his cheek, had paled to small white lines. Noticeable, he supposed, but not glaringly so. The deepest one was right there on his forehead, that jagged groove right between his eyes.

That’s the one that did it, he whispered. I just didn’t know it then. The image in the mirror met the man’s tired smile with one of its own.

He turned on the faucet, reached beneath it, and cupped a handful of cold water. He leaned over and splashed it on his face, bringing himself fully awake and wiping away the last of his dream. He straightened, dried his face on the frayed white hand towel laying on the counter, and then left the bathroom, turning off the light as he went.

He padded through darkness, heading for the kitchen. The floors of his apartment were covered with heavily worn shag carpeting, cheap stuff that should have been replaced long before he’d moved in, which was pushing five years ago now. He could feel loose tufts of threading poking out of it beneath his feet. It felt like a bunch of tiny little rodeo cowboys trying to lasso his toes.

In the kitchen, the man flipped the light switch beside the stove and three small, fluorescent tubes mounted below the cupboards flickered to life, bathing the countertops in a soft purple glow. A castle of empty Mountain Dew cans stood beside a stack of empty Green Mill pizza boxes. Unwashed dishes lay in a staggered pile in the sink. The man reached above this mess and opened a cupboard. From inside, he lifted out a tall can of Swiss Miss Cocoa and large, empty, zebra-striped mug. He filled the mug from the tap, then popped opened the door of the bruised microwave mounted above the stove. Setting the cup inside, where it straddled a long crack in the plastic circular seat, he closed the door, pressed a button marked ADD MINUTE, and leaned back against the counter, silently praying that the old nuke still had a few ticks left in it.

The microwave hummed sluggishly to life. The man watched through the cloudy glass door as the mug slowly began its rotation. The cyclical motion was almost hypnotic, and the man felt his tired mind begin to melt away almost at once. His eyes grew heavy and had almost closed completely when the machine’s timer compliantly went off. BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.

He opened the microwave, grabbed the mug, and slapped the door closed again. He set the mug on the counter, peeled the lid off the cocoa, and shook a small mountain of it into the mug, watching as it turned the clear liquid into a murky shade of brown. Like muddy rain water, he reflected.

He pulled open a drawer beneath the counter and grabbed a spoon. Slipping it into the mug, he stirred the mix until the chunks were gone, dunking them the way his father had done for him when he was a boy. Thinking of this, the man smiled.

’How about a cup of cocoa, son?’ he whispered, mimicking his father’s gentle tone. The words broadened the smile on his tired face. He closed his eyes and raised the mug to his lips, sipping gingerly, savoring it. The night outside was cold and windy, but the hot cocoa was liquid comfort as it slid down his throat and lit a small fire in his belly.

The cocoa still soothed him. Just as it had when he was a young boy who badly missed his mother. Just as it did each time the old ghosts came back to play.

Yeah, you’re right, Dad. ‘Things always make more sense after cocoa.’

The words still soothed him too.

The boy was twelve.

A few cars passed languidly before him as he stood alone at the corner of 12th and Meadow this Friday afternoon. The boy watched the red hand in the DON’T WALK sign flash sluggishly in the heavy, humid air as he waited for the light at the intersection to turn green. The day was unusually hot and muggy for early June, but it was welcome just the same. Welcome, at least, to the boy.

The sun was thick and intense—too intense for most people, the boy supposed. He thought of the empty sidewalks he’d walked along this early afternoon, the empty streets. The vacant yards where countless toys lay unused and forgotten, exposed to this driving heat. Here and there, abandoned swing sets sighed in the warm, subtle breeze, their empty seats hanging forlorn from chains long since rusted. The boy had never been in a sauna before, but he imagined that it must be something close to this. Sweat was running from his brow in rivers. His shirt, sticky and wet, had become a second skin. His breath drew thickly in and out of his lungs as he walked with his head hung down, the heat beating into him like a fist.

Within the last few blocks, the boy’s muscles had begun to fatigue. His left knee, tingling almost from the moment he’d left his house, was now aching terribly. He wasn’t limping yet, but he was close.

The boy was hot and he was tired and he was sore.

Yet all in all, he felt wonderful.

Just to be outside, he thought. Just to be alive.

After the incident in the woods