Authors: Simon Janus
O’Keefe turned on the technicians at their consoles behind him.
“Keep on this.
I don’t want to lose this image.
This is landmark stuff.”
“Surely, you can’t be serious,” Cady protested.
“I can direct that statement at you,” O’Keefe remarked.
“I can’t walk away from this now.
Look at what is happening in there.
We’re close for the first time to getting a handle on the Rift.
Once we do, I’ve told you what you can expect.”
Cady couldn’t believe O’Keefe.
Did the man really think he was close to discovering the next evolution in virtual reality?
What a fool.
“What about Keeler?” Cady demanded.
“What about him?”
“He’s hurt.
We have to get him out.”
“We don’t have to do any such thing.
Keeler knew exactly what he was getting into.
Considering he knew Lefford and Allard preceded him and never reappeared, do you think he really thought he was coming back?
I listen to the cellblock whispers.
I know the ghost stories that have attached themselves to the North Wing.
Keeler stays.”
“That’s unacceptable.”
O’Keefe liked that one and smirked.
“You’re free to go in after him.”
Cady caught the glances from the technicians in his peripheral vision.
He couldn’t prevent a blush from blazing up his cheeks.
He turned towards the Rift.
Keeler was on his knees clutching his scorched eyes.
Did Cady really want to go after Keeler?
End up like Keeler?
Or worse—end up like Lefford and Allard?
There was no end to the misery waiting for him inside the Rift.
Cady faced O’Keefe.
“Thought not.”
O’Keefe failed to hide his contempt and walked away, leaving Cady to languish in his embarrassment under the stares from the technicians and guards.
One helmeted-guard shook his head in disgust.
“What about the boy?” Cady hurled at O’Keefe’s retreating back.
O’Keefe stopped and turned.
“Keeler is a convicted criminal, but that boy is innocent.
Doesn’t he deserve our help?”
O’Keefe studied the boy embedded in the tree.
“I don’t think he does.”
“What?”
“Cady, that’s no boy.
Not a real boy.”
The prison governor smirked.
“That’s Pinocchio, the Rift’s wooden boy.”
***
Keeler wept without tears.
He mourned the loss of his sight.
He tried to conjure up images of things he held dear.
If he was being cast into a world of darkness, then he wanted to see only the good times.
He tried to imagine his wife, although she’d left after he was convicted.
He willed images of their wedding day.
Instead, the faces of Timmy and the bank customer pierced the dark—both dead, but alive.
Exhibiting their mortal wounds, they crowded and consumed his vision.
He knew he wasn’t an innocent man, but Christ, he didn’t deserve this.
How had he let this happen?
The boy’s sympathetic sobs brought Keeler’s to an end.
There were others who didn’t deserve this end either.
“It’s okay, Davey,” he croaked, his voice thick from crying.
He explored his face with his fingertips.
His eyebrow ridges had been eaten away.
His face was concave from below his hairline to his cheekbones.
The searing venom had buckled his nose, but not enough to hinder his breathing—thank God.
It wasn’t all bad.
His molten face had set, sealing over what Allard’s corrosive spit had destroyed with a thin layer of scar tissue.
What a sight he must be.
It was almost a blessing he was blind.
Just as the burning had subsided and Keeler was wondering if his nerve endings had been singed away, an intense pressure built behind his eyes.
It pressed against his brain and skull, as if a tumor had been wedged in the gap.
He forced his hands against the pressure in the vain hope he could make the pain go away and felt something squirm underneath his skull.
He jerked his hands away from his face.
He hadn’t been wrong.
He felt the writhing again.
The shifting had nothing to do with a growing tumor.
This was the fidgeting of parasites.
“Allard, what the fuck have you done to me?”
As if in reply, the pressure in Keeler’s head spiked and his skull flexed as the parasites searched for an exit.
They found one.
Tearing sounds roared in his ears like cannon shells as his face gave way.
His useless eyes burst through the melted tissue covering them and trickled down his face.
Allard’s spit hadn’t finished transforming him.
The parasites wormed their way out of each eye socket.
They slithered out of his skull like snails from their shells.
Keeler screamed.
The penny dropped.
This was Allard’s dying revenge.
A sick joke to be enjoyed in hell.
Keeler knew what was happening to him.
“Oh God, no.”
He opened his brand new eyes—his snake eyes.
The mouths blinked and he could see again, though not well at first.
The trees swayed with elegant grace, like bulrushes beneath the surface of the water, when he knew there was no breeze to rustle a leaf.
The sky exhibited a soap-sudsy quality.
Forked tongues flicked out and licked the snake-eye lenses, bringing everything into sharp focus—even better than with his real eyes.
Working his snakes independently greatly increased his panoramic field of vision.
It was a fantastic gift he’d been handed, but he was an ungrateful recipient.
He stood and kicked Allard.
The boy cried.
Keeler turned and went to attend to him.
Fear blazed in the boy’s emerald eyes.
Keeler stopped and held up his hands.
“It’s okay, Davey.
I’m hurt, but it’s still me.
I’m here to get you out.
Trust me?”
“Yes.”
Keeler smiled.
“Good.”
He approached the boy.
“If you don’t like looking at me, you can close your eyes.
I won’t be offended.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Good boy.”
“Does it hurt?”
With the snakes free of their lair to roam unhindered, his migraine from hell had subsided, although his eye sockets smarted where the snakes had burst through his face.
A queasy, seasick sensation swept over him when he shifted his snakes to see, but he guessed that would subside with time.
“It hurts a little bit, but don’t worry about me.
Let’s worry about getting you out of here.”
The boy smiled and Keeler smiled back.
His smile was plastic, something to calm the kid.
He still didn’t know how to extract the child from the tree.
Keeler wondered if he possessed the powers Allard had possessed.
If he spat, would his spit burn through flesh and bone—and wood?
The changes inside him told him yes.
His new eyes were only part of the metamorphosis.
An energy coursed through his bloodstream, not adrenaline, something much more powerful.
Added strength and sharper senses would be a welcome advantage in the Rift, but what if Allard’s legacy brought the cruelty he’d seen in his fellow inmate?
What use would he be to the boy then?
If he were destined to follow in Allard’s footsteps, he’d end up hurting the boy for no reason other than for sport.
He tried to blot out the images forming in his head, but they kept on coming.
He had to get the boy out of the tree before he lost control.
“I just need to try something,” Keeler said and went over to Lefford’s corpse.
Standing over the hog-man’s body, he considered spiting on its bulk to see if his spit possessed corrosive powers, but rejected the idea.
He feared if his spit worked, it might reanimate Lefford.
He wouldn’t put anything past Jeter in this world.
He couldn’t take that chance.
He decided to pick something more befitting his problem.
It wasn’t flesh he was trying to cut through.
He crossed to a tree out of the boy’s line of sight.
He didn’t want to scare him with his experiment.
“Please don’t leave me,” the boy pleaded.
“Don’t fret, Davey.
I’m not going anywhere.”
Keeler stopped in front of a substantial redwood with a number of sinuous roots cutting into the earth.
He worked saliva into his mouth and let it drop onto a protruding root.
The root sizzled where his spittle touched it.
The spittle bored a hole through the root and into the dirt, cauterizing the wood, snuffing out the flame as quickly as it had come.
A curl of smoke wafted from the tree’s wound.
He waited for a minute to see if his spit presented some side effect that killed the tree.
None presented itself.
Releasing a breath he didn’t know he was holding, he patted the redwood’s trunk.
Keeler jogged over to the boy.
“Davey, I might have a solution.
I can’t say it won’t hurt, okay?”
Panic knotted the boy’s wooden features.
“I know this is scary, but this might be our big break.
Trust me?”
The boy’s voice trembled when he replied, “Yes.”
“Good.
I’m going to cut the tree away from you.”
The boy protested with whimpers.
Keeler spoke quickly to allay the boy’s fears.
“Not with a knife like last time, but with my spit.”
The boy offered confused eyes as an answer.
“I have the same powers as the snake-eyed man I killed.
I can remove you safely from the tree.
Will you let me try?”
“Yes.”
The boy replied so quietly that Keeler barely heard him.
Keeler worked saliva into his mouth again and directed a controlled trickle at a section of the tree’s trunk about six inches from the boy’s embedded arm.
The bark flared with the contact of the spittle, but didn’t bleed this time.
The spittle seeped along contours of the tree burning a deep scar clear through the bark and into the trunk.
For the briefest of moments, Keeler thought this was going to work.
His salvia would separate the boy from the tree with the skill of a laser.
He even allowed himself a smile as his spit scorched its way through the tree, but his smile evaporated when something screeched behind him.
He whirled on the sound.
The redwood he’d spat on was fading, losing its pigment.
The tree had craned over until it slouched against a neighbor.
“Oh, shit.”
He’d been wrong.
He hadn’t waited long enough.
He charged over to the tree to examine the damage, but the inevitable stopped him in his tracks when the boy exploded into heart-stopping screams.
“Jesus Christ, I’m sorry.”
Keeler raced back to the boy.
He tried to shush him, but nothing would silence the pain he saw in the boy’s contorted features.
He examined the tree wound again.
His corrosive spit had stopped its downward journey, but it was still soaking into the tree, burrowing its way to the tree’s core.
He wished he had water or something to dilute the salvia’s progress.
He jumped down from the tree, gathered up leaves and jammed them into the wound with the hopes the spit would burn up its energy by incinerating the leaves.
It wasn’t working.
The boy’s screams rose to a fever pitch and Keeler feared the boy would destroy his vocal chords when the screaming stopped in mid-yell.
The boy had fainted.
Keeler tried to rouse him, but nothing worked.
He thought it was a good thing that the boy was unconscious anyway.
At least he wouldn’t feel the pain.
Suddenly, the bark encasing the boy lost its deep brown shade.
It aged to a steel grey and continued to lose color.