Second That Emotion

Second Thoughts and Last Chances

Latikia

Edited by

The Old Fart

Chapter 2

I watched the tall, skinny, red haired kid race up the stairs inside his house, slam the door of his attic room shut behind him and look frantically around. I could feel waves of fear and confusion radiating from him. The feelings he emitted weren’t very strong, but they were intense and highly concentrated.

It was bizarre, the way the three of us were able to follow along after him, walls fading away before us so that we never lost sight of the boy, not even for an instant.

“What’s he doing now?” I asked no one in particular.

‘Looking for a place to hide.’ the pale figure on my right answered.

“Why?”

‘He’s afraid. Of what happened, of what might happen…wouldn’t you be?’

“Who were the men he was hunting with?”

‘The old man is his grandfather; the other two are his father and brother.’

“They don’t act much like the way I would expect a father and brother to.” I said, watching the boy crawl into the closet and begin throwing things out behind him.

‘No. They never did. That has a lot to do with what happens later.’

Eventually things stopped being tossed out of the closet and the sliding doors were shut from inside.

Time began flowing faster and faster. Shadows lengthened and faded into darkness and the boy remained inside the closet. Night came and went, with no sign of the boy. Morning arrived and there was still no movement. Time passed faster around us. Morning turned to afternoon and the boy finally emerged, quietly, cautiously. There was less confusion, but the fear remained, accompanied by self loathing. He crept out of his room and snuck down to the second floor bathroom. The house was empty. A few minutes later he left the bathroom and returned to the closet. The afternoon passed into evening then night and then morning. As afternoon approached he emerged once again and repeated his activities from the previous day.

“How long does this go on?” I asked.

‘Not much longer. Tonight he’ll get tired of sleeping in the closet and decide to use the bed. In the morning…well, you’ll see.’

As the afternoon became evening, just as the bright figure had said, the boy crawled out of the closet and into the bed, pulling the sheets and blankets up to cover himself completely. The night passed with the flurry of speeded up time that I was beginning to get used to and then as dawn’s light began to creep in thru the closed drapes it returned to normal.

The boy was still buried beneath his mound of bedclothes, unmoving. There came a rapping on the outside of the door. The unruly mass of dark red hair popped out from under the sheets and blankets and his pale eyes focused on the door with a fierce look of concentration.

It was an odd sensation, but strangely familiar. I could sense him reaching out towards whoever was on the other side of the door, trying to do with whomever it was the same thing he’d done days before with the deer. He was trying to make a connection of some kind. After several long seconds of trying and not succeeding, his head sagged back against a pillow and his body relaxed.

“Who is it?” he called out, seemingly uninterested.

“It’s Izzy. Can I come in?”

The boy dragged himself out of bed, unlocked the door and then turned and dove back under the blankets.

The door opened just a little ways and a very pretty teenaged girl stuck her head and shoulders part way thru. The dark figure standing on my left heated up fractionally; it felt like sunlight shining on the side of my face. Now wasn’t that interesting.

“Are you feeling okay?” she asked gently, watching the boy pulling the bedclothes up over his head.

“What do you want?” he snapped from beneath the pile of sheets and blankets.

I could feel his curiosity and wariness growing. My heart started beating just a little faster and harder in my chest.

“You’ve been hiding in here for days now, and I’m worried about you. Is that so odd?”

He poked his head out and locked eyes with the girl. He didn’t say a word, simply stared, and after fifteen seconds the young woman blinked and looked away.

She sighed quietly, then opened the door and stepped inside. I think she was waiting for him to tell her to get lost, but when he didn’t she shut the door behind her, walked over and stood beside the bed.

She was an impressive specimen, this Izzy. Tall, graceful, exotically beautiful facial features, long well muscled legs, hips that flared out just enough from her narrow waist to confirm that this was most definitely a woman. Her shoulders were a little on the broad side, making her breasts appear smaller than they probably were. She moved with athletic control and smoothness, striding rather than walking.

“Look, I know I haven’t been very nice to you in the past. I’ve been a rotten sister, and I’m probably a rotten person. But you’re my little brother and I do love you and right now I am worried about you.”

“Why? Why now?” The head of hair popped out from beneath the blankets again. He was most definitely pissed. I felt his indignant anger cresting. I also felt, deep down inside the boy, a long suppressed pool of emotion. Locked down hard and fast, and buried so far below everything else that he wasn’t even aware it existed. But her proximity and his confused emotional state combined to weaken the barriers he’d erected.

“…where the fuck was my caring, loving older sister then!?” he snapped.

“She’s his sister?” I asked the bright figure. The dark one on my left had been unusually silent so far, so I assumed that the lighter one was going to be my tour guide thru whatever this show was supposed to accomplish.

‘Yes. Isabeau is her name. She’s four years older than he is, and a year younger than their older brother Ivan.’

“Did she really do all those things he said she did?”

‘Yes, I’m afraid she did. And more.’

“Why?”

‘She doesn’t like her little brother. Never has.’

The girl, Isabeau, seemed to collapse like a puppet whose strings had been cut and dropped heavily onto the edge of the bed. Her shoulders shuddered and her breathing got ragged and gasping.

“I’m…so…sorry.” she cried.

Something inside the boy snapped. He became enraged. I could feel the heat in him building, along with concentrated feelings of mistrust and doubt.

And then he made the connection he’d been trying for earlier. I don’t think he was trying this time, but he did it, quickly and so smoothly that it was barely noticeable.

Pain…real pain…was tearing at his sister’s heart. I felt it thru him. How the hell was I able to feel what he felt her feeling? How was I able to feel what he was feeling? How was he able to feel what she did?

There were many other emotions surging thru her at the same time. Some of her feelings were unfamiliar to him; I could sense his confusion and curiosity. Of the ones he could recognize, pain was the strongest, along with love, which I’m pretty sure came as a surprise to him, fear and remorse.

The pure power of her pain tore at us both and while I could feel it, it didn’t have remotely the kind of effect on me that it did on the boy. I simply shrugged it off, tucking the sensations away in a far corner of my being. He cried out loudly, his voice cracking twice, going from light tenor to rasping baritone, fingers clawing roughly at the skin of his chest. He curled up in a ball and croaked out, “Stop it, stop it…I’m sorry Izzy…please stop it! I forgive you!”

And with those three simple words the agonizing pain melted away. Where there had been searing and unrelenting ache there was now only love, fear, amazement and…lust.

Lust? From his sister?

‘Don’t be so quick to judge.’ the light figure admonished.

The boy’s body uncurled and relaxed slightly. He stopped digging his fingernails into the skin of his chest and let them fall limply to the mattress.

“Oh god, Ike…what’ve I done?”

Ike?

“She called him Ike.”

‘It’s his name. For some reason their parents named all three of their children with names that began with “I”.’

“Didn’t you say that my name is Ike?”

‘We did say that, yes.’

I looked more closely at the pale skinned, red haired boy who lay panting and sweating on the bed. His skin was nearly the same color as the sheets on which he lay. I focused closely on his facial features then quickly let my eyes move to the girl sitting next to him and back again. There were similarities; the sharp high cheekbones, narrow nose, firm jaw line, graceful neck and the spacing of their eyes. Hers though were deeply blue, while the boy’s were a very pale gray. Her long thick hair was dark brown, nearly black, while his was a deep, dark red, almost copper colored.

The boy stared off to one side, just beginning to get his breathing back under control.

He muttered again about forgiving her.

The young woman scooped him up in her arms and held the exhausted boy tightly.

We both felt the welling love that filled his sister. The fear was gone, the remorse and regret were still there, but were much less intense than before. And the lust that had been just barely perceptible before had wormed itself up and was piggybacking on her feelings of love for her brother.

For me, if the bright figure was to be believed.

He put his arms around his sister and hugged her in return, lightly stroking her long dark hair and murmuring “It’s alright” into her neck. When he did that, the lust grew stronger and merged, becoming one with her feelings of love.

The young boy was puzzled and mildly concerned. He didn’t know what to make of the lust.

‘Try to understand. Because of his pale skin, Ike here hasn’t had what most people would consider a normal childhood. He couldn’t go out and play with other children. And on the rare occasions when he did have contact with other people his own age…well to put it kindly, children can be very cruel. The only love he’s ever known in his brief life has come from his mother and grandfather. Even his brother and sister have been unmerciful in their treatment of him.’

I shook my head. “Then why, all of a sudden, is his sister…his older sister…having lustful thoughts for her little brother? It makes no sense. And he’s what, thirteen? I heard his voice crack, so he’s well into puberty. You can’t expect me to believe that he doesn’t know what lust is?”

‘Ike’s life to this point has been fairly solitary. He reads a lot, goes outside at night and spends the rest of his time, when he isn’t at school, hiding from his brother and sister. And while he is well into puberty, as you noticed, he is about as innocent as it’s possible to be.’

“Poor kid.”

“I’m so tired…” he yawned widely and slumped back into bed, closing his eyes. His sister tucked him in and smoothing the covers around him. She lightly kissed him and whispered, “Sleep tight…I love you.”

He dozed off and the link was broken and I couldn’t sense either of them anymore.

“What happened to him, that day he shot the deer?”

‘You were there. What do you think happened?’

I shook my head. “What I think happened isn’t possible. It just isn’t.”

‘Arthur Conan Doyle liked to say that when you’ve excluded the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’

“That’s me lying there, isn’t it?” I asked, gesturing towards the sleeping boy.

‘That’s us, yes.’

“He’s, we’re…I’m an empath. I can sense other people’s feelings.”

‘Yes.’

“He,” I said, jerking my head towards the sleeping boy, “doesn’t know what’s happened to him yet, does he?”

‘Not exactly, but he’s figuring it out. Tomorrow, well…the day after this day…he’ll take a giant step in understanding and controlling his talent. He’ll learn to link with other people, and his sister will help him figure out how to break the link. She also teaches him a couple of important lessons about women and sex. Tomorrow morning they start down the road that will eventually lead us to where you are now.’

“What you’re showing me isn’t real, is it?”

‘Oh, it’s real enough.’ the dark figure spoke up for the first time in a long while. ‘What it’s not is now.’

“How is it I can feel what he’s feeling, if it isn’t now?”

‘You aren’t really feeling what he feels. You’re remembering what you felt then. It seems like you’re feeling it thru him, but what’s really happening is that you’re processing the sensations thru the filter of experience. You’re more than twenty years older and much more knowledgeable than he is, so what’s confusing to him is obvious to you.’ the bright figure told me.

“But I don’t remember any of this.” I objected.

‘Sure you do. One of your many odd talents is the ability to remember everything you’ve ever experienced, in excruciating detail. At the moment your subconscious is blocking, or suppressing, your entire life. But the memories are there. We,’ he said, indicating himself and the dark figure on my left, ‘just bypass the blocks and access those memories.’

‘Think of it as hacking an encrypted computer system.’ the dark figure chuckled.

I nodded my head and shrugged.

“You told me that I look like you, but the boy…he has red hair.”

The bright figure gave me a sad smile.

‘We’ll get to that. But there are some other things you need to know first, or none of what happens later will make much sense.’

The pace of time increased, the day flew by in a blur of motion and suddenly it was the next morning.

The boy woke up slowly. He poked his face out of the blankets and looked around the room. Probably trying to figure out what time it was.

He stretched and flexed then stopped moving abruptly and turned his head to examine the figure he’d just realized was laying next to him, hidden beneath the covers.

He cautiously lifted the blankets, as if expecting a snake to strike out at him.

Isabeau, his sister, lay there on her side wearing a plaid flannel nightgown, socks on her feet and facing away from him. She murmured softly and then rolled over and threw an arm across his torso and pulled the two of them together. She snuggled in tight, laying her head on his chest and rubbed her breasts firmly against his ribs.

The boy’s eyes widened and a surprising look of comprehension flashed across his face, as if he’d just had an epiphany. And the look of understanding was very slowly replaced by one of distinct discomfort.

I stood between the light and dark figures, feeling amused, impressed and queasy as I watched the boy’s sister seduce him. Oh, he was a willing enough participant, in a completely naïve fashion, but there was no doubt in my mind that he was also utterly clueless. I watched with amazement while he figured out how to use his ability to heighten her pleasure…I even felt an irritating smidgen of pride when he overcame his fear and absorbed her orgasms, even though he was convinced they would kill him.

But even so, his sister?

I watched, thru sped up time, as the boy and his sister worked out elements of basic control; watched him confront his parents and older brother; watched him grow in confidence and self assurance.

Watched him grow physically, mentally—but for some reason his emotional state remained far more child-like than I would have expected.

In a matter of seconds his brother was out of the picture, and then his sister. He felt nothing but relief when his brother went away to college, but losing his sister was hard. He’d come to rely, too much I thought, on her presence as well as her love and acceptance. The boy had gained some rudimentary social skills under her tutelage, but seemed unable to work around the physical differences that marked him as a social outsider.

“He’s too needy. Too obviously needy.” I muttered to myself. “Easy prey.”

‘Observant as ever, I see.’ the light figure said, with only a faint trace of sarcasm.

Time blurred again then screeched to a halt, with the boy, looking a little older, on his knees in a room that was obviously not his own, between the thighs of a half naked little blond cheerleader type who was lying back on a frilly bedspread. The girl was alternately disgusted and delighted with what he was doing.

“Who’s the girl?” I asked.

‘Vickie Carter. Our first girlfriend. We’d been going together for about three weeks by this time.’

I looked around the room, taking note of the posters on the walls, the stuffed animals, the piles of cassettes beside the tape deck, the books on the shelf, the book bags lying on the floor in front of the closet.

“She doesn’t seem able to make up her mind.” I mused absently.

‘No…her mind is fairly well made up. It’s her body that’s confused.’

The boy lifted his face from between her legs and rasped a question. The girl, Vickie, didn’t respond. And then I felt him connect with her, just as he had with the deer and his sister.

I felt his emotions go from excitement and lustful hunger to cold detached anger in less time than it took either of their hearts to beat just once.

“They aren’t alone.” I said woodenly.

‘How do you know?’

“The book bags by the closet. Two of them, both belong to teenaged girls. His is next to the door.”

‘Very good. We noticed that too, eventually.’

And then the boy did something that I found very interesting. He took her feelings into himself, somehow amplified their intensity and blasted them back at her, giving the girl an orgasm unsurpassed in the history of oral sex.

“He wasted most of whatever it was he just did…like spraying mist instead of pouring liquid. Why didn’t he just use the link between them as a conduit?” I wondered.

‘This was the first time we ever took another’s feelings from them. The first time we ever amplified feelings beyond their original level. The first time we ever projected. The first time we ever used our talent against another person. We didn’t even know we could do what we did. We just did it.’

“What else can he do?” I asked, curious despite the nagging sensation that told me I didn’t really want to know.

I felt a mental shrug from the ghostly figure next to me.

‘I imagine that there’s a limit to what we can do. There always is, because the universe seems to frown on anything being limitless. But the fact is we’re still finding new ways to use our ability.’

“Can he fly? Run at the speed of sound? Pick up buildings? Anything like that?”

‘Don’t be stupid!’ the dark figure hissed disparagingly. ‘We aren’t a fuckin’ comic book character.’

I’d almost forgotten the darker one was even there, he’d been silent for so long. He was watching intently as the boy got up off the floor, wiped his mouth and chin with one large hand, and then stepped over to the closet. I could sense waves of approval mixed with an unexpected sadness emanating from the flaming figure.

Seemed to me like he was wasted not being a comic book character.

The boy opened the closet and looked down at the dark haired girl crouched inside, grinned harshly and told her to “top that” if she could. Then he picked up his book bag and left.

Time blurred again.

‘Izzy stopped writing to us, stopped calling, pretty much dropped out of our life. We suppressed the hurt and moved on with our life. Nothing of any real interest happened for the rest of High School, except that Granddad died. We graduated early, and decided to go to college in Arizona.’

I felt a real sense of loss at hearing that the old man I’d seen earlier had died, which was strange, considering that I only half believed that he’d been a real person. I shoved the emotion aside and focused on the rest of what had been said.

“Why Arizona? Why not go to Harvard or Yale or someplace like that?”

‘We probably could have, but we wanted someplace warm.’

“You’re pulling my leg.”

‘Nope.’

“Stupid way to pick a college. So what happens next?”

‘We got married.’

His simple pronouncement caught me completely off guard. A pit opened in my chest and it was as if every single good feeling I’d ever known was ripped out of me and dropped into that gaping, bottomless hole, never to be seen or heard from again.

Time stopped blurring and the scene unfolded before my unwilling eyes.

He noticed the woman who was standing next to him. He had to look down quite a bit to see her. She was only five feet five inches tall. Her hair was reddish, but not like the young man’s; hers was a darker, more burgundy color. Her skin was pale, but darker than his, and her eyes were an alluring hazel mix of brown and green. Her body reminded me somewhat of Vickie Carter’s. Like a cheerleader or a gymnast.

She smiled up at him, inviting him to…

“Hi, I’m Ike.” he said a little awkwardly.

“Hello. I’m Carlie.”

I could sense her interest and fascination. Her self confidence masked a surprising unease on her part…she was attracted to the tall redhead, but wasn’t sure why.

“I married her?” I asked the light figure.

‘Yes. A romantic soul might say it was love at first sight, but they’d be wrong. It took a little longer than that, but not much.’

“We were in love? I mean it wasn’t just hormones or infatuation; we were really in love?”

‘We can tell what other people feel. You knew what and how she felt about you. We wouldn’t have agreed to marry her if there’d been any doubt.’

“She loved me.” There was a long, terrible pause as we watched the newly minted couple leave the party together. “We didn’t live happily ever after…did we?”

‘You ain’t Prince Charming and this ain’t a fuckin’ fairy tale.’ the dark figure growled, but with much less venom than I would have expected.

Events blurred again, but for a shorter period than I hoped, and came to an abrupt halt.

He threw the car into park and got out, running like a madman across freeway traffic to get to her.

A traffic cop grabbed the very tall young man and tried to hold him back.

“That’s my wife and baby in there!” he bellowed, desperation, fear, terror, despair and helplessness flowing from him like water from a fountain.

Looking over his shoulder I saw the paramedics trying to cut open the crushed remains of Carlie’s car to get her out. I saw her eyes widen as she realized that he was there. She felt him fighting to get to her. His eyes found hers.

He linked.

Even with the numbing distance of time, multiple layers of obstinate apathy, intentional ignorance and iron willed suppression acting as barriers, the molten power of her pain and suffering came bursting down the link exactly the way they had that day…just as harsh, as crisp and biting, as dull and gut ripping, as rusty, bloody and horrible as they’d been that morning.

He screamed long and loud; the anguished sound tore at my heart and ripped apart the wall that hid my memories.

I screamed with him, a stereophonic wail of the lost and damned.

The pain grew and grew, and the fear became an enormous beast that threatened to swallow us. We tried to ignore the fear and the horrible burning pain, battling with our bare hands to save her.

We died. Only this time, this viewing, four heartbeats stuttered, fluttered…and stopped. Lungs quit pumping, blood stopped flowing, no more emotions, no more feelings…no more Carlie. No more us.

There was nothing. Nothing at all. Eons and eons of nothing, and we were caught smack-dab in the center of it with nowhere to go.

I realized what had happened. He hadn’t cut the link in time. He had gone too deep down the link and didn’t get out in time. He had suffered and died. He was still dying.

‘You felt her death. Just like with the deer, but this time with an emotional attachment.’

“I lived her death.” I gasped, my imaginary chest heaving as if I’d run a marathon. “Why didn’t I die?”

‘I don’t know. You don’t know, even though you’ve asked the question, and relived that moment a hundred thousand times. We may never know, but her death, and your experience of it, was the second truly pivotal event in your life. It knocked you off, as Granddad would have called it, your path.’

I watched myself stretched out next to the wreckage of my wife’s car, beside the wreckage of my life, and shuddered with fresh horror as we died over and over and over again.

The man sitting before the rows of monitors slammed back in his chair, staring intently at the large screen in the center while scribbling furiously on the yellow pad.

“What the hell just happened?” the man standing behind him demanded softly.

“At a guess, I’d say he’s having a nightmare. Problem is, he hasn’t been asleep long enough to be that deep into REM. I suppose it might be that his subconscious is reconnecting with his conscious mind, in which case he might be reliving memories.”

“So what you’re telling me is that you don’t know.”

The man in the chair shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

“He’s the psychologist.” he said, gesturing towards the center screen with his left hand, still taking notes with his right. “I’m more of a physiologist. And, as you pointed out, mind games aren’t really my line of work.”

“Fine, fine…is he in any danger physically? No sign of heart attack or stroke?”

“No, healthy as a horse…although, there was something odd, but it might just have been an electrical glitch…”

“What sort of glitch?”

The man in the chair turned, and for the first time in hours took his eyes of the monitors.

“For just an instant the sensors registered a nearly simultaneous increase and decrease of seventeen degrees in the room’s ambient temperature.”

Even though his face was in shadow, there was a definite impression of puzzlement, anxious puzzlement, from the man in the doorway.

“Probably just a glitch.” the man in the chair suggested again.

“Yeah…probably.” The man in the doorway started to turn away then stopped. “Give him an hour. Then roust the sonofabitch and haul his pasty ass back into the interview room. Tell the handlers I want high voltage and the drugs standing by.” He completed his turn into the light behind him and pulled the door shut with finality.

The man in the chair returned to watching his monitors.

“Lay off the nightmares and try reliving some happy memories, my friend.” he said to the image of the man on his center screen. “Because reality tends to be a blood drunk bitch, and you’ve only got an hour before the bitch is back.”