Title: Charlotte's Web (Chapter 53)
Rating: M for graphic violence and language
Fandom: The Mentalist
Summary: Patrick Jane has lived his life obsessed with the capture of Red John ever since finding his beloved wife and daughter slain by the maniac's hand. Now, 10 years to the day after that horrific night, a young woman appears in Patrick's life, someone who threatens to destroy everything his life has become in the interim… if not his sanity, itself.
Author's Note: Hi, faithful readers. Have been away experiencing the riches of nature, and now I am back. My immune system is also playing a rather old game of "tag" with me, where my immune system attacks my own body, which gets me very fatigued. On top of that, someone I considered a friend recently died of cancer. It's a weird time and so, I am sorry for the lag in updates. I was sitting at my computer just now and felt a sudden wave of panic, a sensation I have had most of my life which seems to strike at random moments just to make life interesting. Anyway, the sensation was disorienting and off-putting and it reminded me that Charlotte's Web is nearing completion and to get on it. So here I am. Reviews always much appreciated.
"Okay, Okay, Okay… just a little pinprick. There'll be no more. But you may feel a little sick. Can you stand up, stand up, stand up? I do believe it's working. Good. That'll keep you going for the show. C'mon, it's time to go…"
-Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd
Wednesday, June 18th, 2014
She'd seen the man in the black trench coat two times after the first appearance. Three times total in less than a week.
The first time in the park, after school, by a tree and a large green recycling receptacle with the lid strangely pad-locked shut, smoking what looked to be a pipe, the top half of his body awash in gray-blue smoke, like maybe the entirely of his physical self was little more than smoke, something which might dissolve into the ether in a handful of seconds… he didn't dissolve, though.
She knew intimately what that pipe smelled like, and even though she was too far away to really smell and taste the pipe in real time, she got the sensory impression of its essence anyway and the flesh inside her nostrils burned and flared.
The second time, a day later, standing across the street from the 7-11 she usually stopped at on her way home from the park with Dixon. It had been dusk and the sky was a golden lilac, the air smelled of fresh grass and car exhaust and city life and there he'd been standing, like a black walking nightmare, just standing eerily still by the crosswalk lights.
The traffic lights hanging over the center lane of the street had been blinking red like neon blooms of blood in the early purple night all the way down the line and she didn't think they usually did that, did they?
The hairs went up on her neck and arms at the twilit sight and she'd started the engine on the bike and hauled ass home with Dixon running happily beside her, oblivious. As she'd been on her way home, the first fluorescent street lamps of baby night began to wink on, casting spotlights in alternating spheres of gloom and orange between the parked cars and fire hydrants and street cats.
The third time had been at school.
And the third time had been the charm.
She'd been sitting at her "table" (the kids at her school worked at tables pushed into circles, with their names prominently displayed on laminated pieces of paper on each table). They had lockers in their classrooms that served as "cubbies", and lockers in the hallway. She'd been sitting at her table, listening to her teacher, a matronly overweight woman in her mid 50s named Mrs. Brannen discuss what it meant to be a "hero" (and "who might be considered modern day heroes of our time?"), ramble on about the upcoming social studies project. And she'd suddenly been flooded with a wave of panic.
A ringing had started in her ears and her vision had seemed to narrow, like she was looking down the wrong end of a pair of binoculars and her chest began to feel tight and strange, like maybe a heart attack other unfortunate cardiac event was under way (wouldn't it just be tragic if you were to drop dead this instant, Charlotte? Wouldn't it? Does your left arm hurt, is the pain squeezing your ticker?) and the thoughts had begun to pile up in her mind, fast and furious, like a bloody freeway accident where the cars keep coming and smashing and coming and smashing but none of the drivers down the road have any intentions of slowing down and avoiding similar fates.
"Charlotte, is something wrong?" Her teacher had asked from what was subjectively miles away, maybe another planet away, and Charlotte looked at her teacher through the wrong end of the binoculars, with the pain increasing and the sense of death increasing and the terror starting now, a terror of some huge and ineffable dangerous thing looming over all of them, a dark pall of grief and frenzy and insanity covering and infesting everything in the room, turning the little plants in their pots into menacing figures, warping the desks, shooting adrenaline into her veins, making her want to run run runRUNRUNRUNRUN!
"Charlotte?" Mrs. Brannen repeated when she didn't speak.
She couldn't speak, though, she wasn't being obstinate.
Her hands were shaking and she only knew she had to escape.
Her eyes swept the room in terrified arcs, and she felt she was losing control and with that feeling the panic increased in intensity, washing her in waves of adrenaline-fueled fear.
"Do you need to visit the nurse?" Mrs. Brannen said stolidly, and now the matronly-woman was coming over to the trembling girl, from her little nest of a desk with the toys and framed photos and graded papers full of bullshit themes which ultimately didn't matter at all.
Charlotte walked slowly to the window, an automaton, and stood in front of it; one of the large windows that lined an entire wall and looked out over the play ground and the 4-square grids and all the other junk out there and she put her hands on the glass.
She was beginning to visibly shake all over, like high voltage electricity from some nightmare realm was being run through her limbs.
The kids might have started to whisper things, then.
A teenage boy named Lucas might have said in his obnoxious, trolling voice- a voice that seemed to crave any sort of attention as long as it was directed at him- that she was "having a freak-out", but Charlotte couldn't be bothered by such petty anecdotes.
She needed to calm down, she needed to escape, but there were teachers and aides all over this suffocating place which served as a school for the socially impaired, and the front gates could lock if a teacher phoned in to the office on her little intercom machine and reported a "runner".
She was trapped again, just as trapped as she had been with Red John, maybe, because who really knew what any human was capable of doing, when the mood struck them to do it?
She put her head against the cold glass of the window pane and shut her eyes and willed herself to breathe as slowly as she could but the pain around her lungs (god, it felt like invisible hands had reached in through her belly and were squeezing all the air out of her lungs now, it felt like death itself was playing with her lungs and maybe her heart itself like they were those squeezy stress relief balls, or silly putty, and this HAD to be dangerous, it just had to be, sensations like this couldn't possibly just be stress, could they?) and her hands were on the windows, and without meaning to, they began to ball into little fists and smack the glass, just a little, smack, smack.
"What a psycho," Lucas Dero said from somewhere in the room where he was supposed to be working on his over-paid education and somebody else snickered and some 20-something aide told Lucas to please pay attention to his own work and not make fun… mind your own work, Lucas. You can do this, buddy. Remember, we all have problems.
"Yes, just do your own work, Lucas," Charlotte said from the window, and she smacked the glass again, and licked her lips and turned slowly in her shaking, horrified way and there was Mrs. Brannen just standing there like an impotent paper doll, looking the type of concerned people who were paid to be concerned for society's basket-cases probably perfected in front of the bathroom mirror, and a little wary to boot, with her hands up like Charlotte Anne Jane might decide to just go totally bonkers on her ass and maybe this wasn't going to be the boring day she had thought it was going to be when she woke up this morning and was drinking her instant nescafe in some old chipped Ziggy mug from the 70s, a teacher like this would be the type to own at least one coffee mug with a neutered, equally impotent and bland cartoon character gracing the ceramic side, she had to have at least one...
"Hey Charlotte, it's okay. I think you're having a panic attack," the teacher said, and Charlotte looked at her with her feral, too-wide, too-dilated eyes and gulped in air like a fish that has suddenly lost its water and been knocked out onto the floor by the family's mischievous and slightly sadistic cat.
"Class, we only have 15 more minutes left today… everyone can go out for their hour break now, but remember, I want you to write 1000 words over the next week on what you think a hero is, and how you define a hero and put together an outline for a modern-day hero you would like to do a full report on," Mrs. Brannen said slowly and a bit too calmly, and some of the kids made "yesss!" noises, because they already had a break for 15 minutes every hour (so 45 minutes of work and 15 minutes of rest for the nuts, it worked out to) and now they would be getting 30 minutes break after 30 minutes of class, a pretty good deal even for the emotionally unstable…
The kids began to file out, and Charlotte stood still like an animal in a trap, shaking, gasping, lost in something that wasn't quite a flashback but was quite a lot more than an average panic attack, if there was even such a thing as an average panic attack.
"I think I'm having a heart attack," Charlotte said in a gasp when most of the kids had dispersed to the wild blue yonder, and she smacked the window again.
The teacher took her gently, one hand around the wrist and pulled her gently away from the window like maybe that darned window was the source of all this unfortunate trouble.
"Do you have any medication for this sort of thing?" The teacher asked, but Charlotte began to pace then, breaking free from the loose, easy grip.
"I have to get out of here, something bad is going to happen, I have to get out of here," she said to herself, more a hiss-whisper, and her hands went to the collar of her AC/DC t-shirt and began to pull on the neckline, then her hands went into her hoodie pocket, then came back out and wiped themselves on the front of her jean shorts like she'd just touched something disgusting and had to get it off, and she paced, wide-eyed and then…
…then the fear ratcheted itself up a few more notches even though she'd thought it had maxed out for the moment, and without asking for permission, or waiting for approval or a hall pass or anything so prosaic, she broke into a run, and ran across the threshold of the classroom, knocked her skinny hip against the side of a grouping of ridiculous faux-wood laminated tables and made a choked noise of pain and kept on going, hip throbbing and pulsing now in protest (surely it would bruise a bright black rose of protest later) out through the front door, through the milling adolescents who stood and watched in mild gossipy amusement, some of them muttering to themselves, a few of them being little pukes and calling out mockery, some looking uncomfortable with the entire situation,
and she turned and sprinted down the too-shiny hallway with the white and black and white and black and white and black checkered tiles
and felt the looming dread,
the looming terror grow
and grow and GROW like an all-encompassing amoeba swallowing her calm and her sanity and her sense of reality and of all stability… just chomping away, engulfing her in sick, wet, electric terror and
she rannnnnnnnnnnnnn-
She ran and turned a corner, converse sneaker soles squeaking as she took the turn too fast and smashed into a locker, into a locker's padlock, and she winced again, fell a bit, was on her feet before the pain could fully register (that will be another bruise later, Charlotte, you daft fool: said that internal, calm, mocking voice in her head which always seemed to like to internally narrate such events) and she ran some more; ran down the hall, down the double doors that were open that led to a staircase, down the staircase, running all out, jumping down the last 3 or 4 stairs and then onto the main floor level,
even faster now, hair flying back,
all the way to the front glass doors and slamming into them, bursting out through them, leaving greasy, sweaty hand prints on the glass no doubt, down the front concrete steps and over the macadam play yard and past the tether ball line up,
running all out,
running all out,
running until her lungs burned now and her legs burned with acid and her face felt hot and dry and she imagined it was scarlet, and still she ran.
She ran until the edge of the soccer/field hockey field, where the fence started, the little fence with diamond links- chain-link was it called?- and she jumped onto the links, shoes in the holes, climbing, climbing, heart hammering, she just had to get away, get away from the panic that was following her as diligently as her own shadow.
The fence was high and she could hear adult voices behind her calling, saying "Charlotte, stop!" and "Charlotte, come back!" but she couldn't focus on them and she reached the top of the fence, maybe ten feet high, a height the school planner had thought was sufficient to deter most of the students, and jumped from the top of the fence to the ground, too crazed with fear to bother climbing down the other side, too fearful that if she slowed a teacher would be on her like a predator, maybe wrestling her to the ground for her own good or something harebrained like that.
Pain shot up both feet, deep and vascular, a circulatory scream, throbbing pain, not broken bone pain but more like broken blood vessel pain and pissed off nerve pain, more like bruised bone and bruised foot muscle pain and she gasped out loud, and swore out a long, tortured "fuck!" and began to stagger-run away.
Outside the gate were deciduous trees she didn't currently know the names of and a paved road that was what the bus came in on, and all the loonies on the bus or those driven in by their parents/guardians, with their "helper" animals, some of them, and their backpacks and their dizzying array of mental disorders, enough to choke a blue whale, and she ran even more, too scared to care about the pain in her feet or her hip or.. yes, it was her elbow that had hit the lock on the locker, and her funny bone, and through the glut of adrenaline and dizzying, free-falling terror she felt her funny burn shoot out electric sparks of agony and a sickening, burning sort of after-pain, a somatic long-winded criticism of her current life choices, and she kept running. Maybe she would never stop running. Was that possible? For this to be it, for the running to never stop, until her heart exploded out of fear?
She didn't know why she had to get away, she just knew, could feel it deeply in her cells that if she didn't run and hide, hide right NOW!, she might very well die, physically die, that the invisible fear would manifest in her malnourished, stress-strained body as the worst sort of monster she could ever imagine and rip her apart on the atomic level, and even if it sounded crazy, who cared? The fear drove her onward, and the fear was her master now…
She could hear a car coming toward her and one of the teachers or perhaps one of the aides call out to her in a strained, stressed, worried voice so she detoured off the main, paved road and into the little copse of trees around the school and continued to sprint and sprint and sprint, face bright red and hot and dry from exertion, mouth full of thick, glue-y saliva she couldn't swallow which hung from her lips in terrible strings when she tried to spit it out,
birds in the trees
and the sounds of rustling squirrels,
the smell of grass
and early summer yet again upon them, the smell of woodsy California and
dirt and
bushes and
escape, and then, she was tumbling over a log or something approximately the same size and weight, flying for a few seconds, hitting the unforgiving ground and rolling, rolling… she stopped rolling and was on her back and the wind was knocked out of her, just one more physical CLUE that maybe letting panic dictate one's actions wasn't the smartest move in her bag of tricks...
She lay on her back staring up at the perfect robin's-egg-blue sky without even a hint of clouds or carcinogenic chemtrails, just staring with dilated eyes and her heart beating an irregular staccato fugue to panic in her chest, her lungs sucking in oxygen that somehow couldn't or wouldn't connect with the precious little alveoli sprouting in their helpful lung colonies for the sole purpose of collecting air to breathe, hands moving and groping in the soft, dewy grass...
Then she heard walking.
Heavy, impressive, calm walking and she felt a shadow fall over her and the fear came back even more intensely, something qualitatively different than panic now, an existential dread which froze her just as surely as any sadistic injection of succinylcholine ever had, a neon freezing rabbit scream of fear in her nerves… and a face fell over her.
The face was gloomy, obscured from the sunlight, and was watching her with an intensity which seemed to turn her blood to ice in her veins.
The black-man in the trench coat with the shades and the black fedora hat was standing over her, grinning at her in her panicked agony.
The man was wearing a black fedora hat, she could see it now clearly and it was a fedora, and he was leaning over her, and even though she couldn't see his eyes, she knew this thing wasn't human, couldn't possibly be human, because everybody had been telling her it was dead and that it was only trauma that made her think otherwise-
"Charlotte," the thing with her father's face said, and Charlotte felt her bowels physically loosen and felt a sudden warm spurt of stinky pee spread down the crotch of her denim shorts. The warm urine seemed to grow cold almost instantly.
"Charlotte, baby, do you have a get out of class pass?" Such a mocking tone. "Do you have a released from school pass?"
"You're dead. You're dead. Patrick says you're dead! Patrick says he killed you!"
"Patrick is easily confused by… pretty much everything, actually," the grinning thing standing over her gloated smugly.
Then it started talking again, if it had ever stopped.
"Always has been. The man sees what he wants to see, and usually that doesn't conflict with objective reality too much, because being the smartest dick in the room does have its advantages when you're dealing with common criminals maxing out around 130 on most standardized IQ tests. When you've made a career out of playing whack-a-mole with morons, then sure, that sort of basic understanding of psychology is usuallllllly sufficient. It doesn't help one eensy teensy bit when he is dealing with his superior dark half, now, does it? Did you really think I'd just die so damned easily? Like a common mortal? And after setting up the scene so perfectly, on my own territory? Just lie down and die like a good little psychopath? Are you really that fucking stupid, baby girl? After everything?"
And suddenly she could breathe again, but the thing was still standing there above her, looking down and grinning its skeleton grin with the neon lights of VICTORY behind its eyes like jeep headlights, so in all likelihood this wasn't a flashback or a fantasy or anything so psychologically appropriate.
This had to be real.
She realized she was out in the copse of deciduous trees which kept her hidden from the little non-psychopathic humans in the vicinity, in a hell of her own making… and just maybeeeeee this thing would pull out a buck knife or something in the buck-knife family (Viscera slicitis, maybe?) and decide to cut out her treacherous bowels and leave them strewn all over the early summer grass for the crows to eat.
A long, coagulating, glistening ribbon of enteric sashimi of the human kind, a little snacky snack for the corvids of the world, love from Uncle John. Does that sound yummy?
Maybe it would do just that.
Maybe it would take her heart out.
Maybe liberate her unseeing eyes?
"You seem to have wet yourself, little Charlie," It purred, looking her over, grinning wider. Delighted with its handiwork.
She was moving in a flash then, a second wind, so to speak, skinned knees hissing their pain and leaking their watery blood again, but who cared about that in such a time as this?
The thing in the black fedora (and now she could see it had a blood-red feather, large and impressive, maybe a dyed turkey feather, tucked into the hat's ribbon), the black-clothed thing that wasn't in any way a human except in the physical sense, didn't move at all as she scuttered away on her hands and feet like a crab.
Then she was up on shaking legs and backing away with marble-huge eyes. The eyes of every torture victim of impassive Nazi doctors as they thought up new pseudo-scientific experiments, every political prisoner as they were lined before a bleak stone wall and gawked their last seconds of dizzying sunlight before the infinite dark, every mouse that had ever met its end in the beak of a hawk and shrieked out a final, unheard scream...
"To live as you do, with so much fear, must be a sort of Hell," the Thing in the Black said with feigned concern.
The Thing in the Black loved to play.
It was a real helluva of a Toys R Us kid. It didn't want to grow up, it wanted to play with all the trains and bikes and video games of the world, done up so nicely in their expensive wrapping papers of flesh.
"What do you want?" She barked out, something between a wheeze and a scream and she realized faintly then that she must have bit her cheek or her lip or her tongue in her panic, because she could taste hot, salty copper in her mouth.
No pain, not really, maybe only a slight, disconnected pulse in her tongue, and the hot salt kept coming.
She spat on the ground and her eyes caught a quick flash of the spit, and it was bright red, like a physical scream. Bright red on the ground, vibrant as spaghetti sauce. And she backed away a bit more, and spat again. More vivid red staining eager blades of grass.
"You're such a pathetic little disappointment," the Thing in Black cooed.
"You aren't fucking real, you're not fucking real, so fuck you!"
"I'm perfectly real, you miserable little disappointment," the thing said, and now, like a presto change-o magic trick, a sleight of hand, it held a good sized pocket knife, a switch blade in one of its gloved hands. She'd been right about the knife friend.
Matte, black gloves on its hands, leather, the type that could manipulate objects well but would leave no finger prints. Patent leather gloves, were they called?
And now, the thing was peeling one of the gloves off its exquisite hand, showing her the human flesh of its body, the naked skin, tanned and smooth with manicured fingernails and she knew it wasn't a hallucination at all, whatever lingering doubts had been hanging around like adolescent mockers vanished like they'd never been.
Those hands were real, and they had life in them, and they were nothing if not physical. Because Red John was soulless. Or if he had a soul… she recoiled from that insight.
"Not real," she said again like a prayer, even though she knew ALL OF THIS was real, that this fantasy was real in the most really real of ways, and the thing grinned its too-white Totenkopf smile at her, and popped the blade on the switchblade with a subdued click that was almost an audible afterthought.
Before she knew what was happening- could connect the immediate past with the immediate present- it had cut deeply into the exposed hand.
Blood was guttering out of the smooth, tanned palm and dripping onto the grass like an SOS morse code. Drip… drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. A fairly steady rate of blood seepage, that hand had going there.
"Totally real, my little broken toy. Totally real." The blood continued to dripdripdrip and the thing began to walk over to her.
She urged her legs to move, but they seemed suddenly frozen (again?!) and she urged them again and again as the creature drew closer; and it was like a waking nightmare, the type where you try to run as the monster approaches but you're running through quick sand or on a conveyor belt, or through stinking, wet tar, and can't get anywhere.
Maybe it was a spell of some sort. Maybe he'd put a freeze spell on her. Or a curse.
Finally some switch between her brain and her legs connected. Some ancient, inherent will to live was successful at hot-wiring her nervous system and the starter wire made contact with the battery wire in her brain, and she was going again…
It felt like that switch took hours to connect but it was probably just a few seconds in the warped all-consuming time of NOW and she was moving again, thanks be to whatever God loved her, sprinting even-more now, and the thing just stood there in a little pool of golden-green brilliance filtering through the leaves in the copse of trees like a sylvan stage light in a magic show, bleeding its thick, red blood (blood that was somehow redder and brighter than hers, impossibly bright red body-gasoline ran through the veins of the Thing in Black) bleeding all over the ground, grinning, grinning, grinning… grinning like her getting away was all a part of its Ultimate Master Plan. She couldn't stop looking back at that hellacious grin.
Charlotte looked back around at the last moment before she was out of the woods, and there, in front of her, was a single, lonely tree popping up in ill-timed congratulatory greeting (HELLO, friend!) and her head made contact with a brain-rolling WHACK and suddenly it was lights out in a hurry.
She woke up to the sound of adult voices and a ringing in her ears and pain in her knees and tongue and hip and elbow and someone saying "she's here! We found her!" and there was her aide and coming up to lick her face, there was ever-loyal Dixon, her sweet little pit bull puppy, licking, licking, confused and warm brown eyes full of love and questions (are you okay, mom? Me do good? Me protect you, now? Why you scared? What causes scared? Me lick your face? Okay? You happy now? Okay? More licks making you better? Happier now?), licking her face and jumping on her a bit too hard just to make sure she was a-okay, pushing his solid, boxy head into her belly as if checking for internal injuries with his snout and licking her shirt in relief, overjoyed at her relative okay-ness.
"Charlotte, honey, are you okay?" That was her science teacher, a pale, gawky blond man with a receding hairline who was in his mid 30s and named Mr. Sydes.
Mr. Sydes wore glasses which he hadn't upgraded since he'd been 10 (by the looks of them) and which were probably outdated even back then. She was good at science and generally liked his carefully presented classes, a fact Mr. Sydes seemed to really appreciate in a class full of nitwits who showed almost zero interest in anything he had to show and tell… except maybe cutting worms apart and laughing about anything pertaining to reproduction of any kind (including plant reproduction, unfortunately).
Only one of his classes had proved troubling to her and she'd had to hurriedly leave the room during a class on anatomy featuring a video showing a man undergoing a heart surgery of some kind... She'd gone white as a sheet and felt pinpricks all over her body, had complained of sudden, fierce nausea and hinted at "girl" problems to seal the deal, and been released to the nurse's office before anything like today could happen and mar her reputation with the paternal science enthusiast.
The word "honey" coming out of his mouth was both awkward and comforting and his blue eyes were full of worry for her mental health.
Her homeroom teacher Mrs. Brannen was there looking even more harried than usual, and an aide in her naive early 20 twenties that helped troubled little Charlie in math class when the teen felt frustrated and stopped paying attention, name Julie, and two other male staff she'd seen around the building but didn't regularly interact with who looked sober and a little morose.
"Charlotte, you're bleeding," Mrs. Brannen said helpfully, and someone helped her up on her feet.
Mr. Sydes.
His hand was cool and just a little sweaty, but he had a firm grip and was stronger than he looked. He smiled at her just a little in encouragement as she stood on her screaming feet and swayed, dizzy and suddenly full of memories of the Thing in Black with his sadistic, grinning death face. Her eyes must have lit up like scared neon because he said "whoa, easy" like she was a horse still being broken in and might decide to bolt again.
"We phoned your father, he is coming to pick you up," Mrs. Brannen said with manufactured calm as they began to walk back to the school and suddenly the entire adventure came back to her even more strongly- like a kick to the stomach- and she cried out without any conscious desire to do so: "Red John is in the trees!"
The adults exchanged worried, desperate glances and helped her continue to walk. They knew her history in an abridged, sanitized way Patrick thought was sufficient, and they knew who Red John was from the newspapers and presumably TV clips on youtube and whatever Patrick had additionally told them, but they also knew he was dead. That much had been widely publicized.
The monster known as Red John was dead and buried and Charlotte was a disturbed, traumatized adolescent with a severe case of PTSD and occasional disconnects from reality.
"Honey, I think you're having a flashback. Red John is dead, okay? Nobody's in the trees."
"He's in the trees! We need to get out of here!" Charlotte cried, and someone somewhere asked something like "call an ambulance?" and somebody else flatly negated the idea, which Charlie was distantly grateful for.
"Your Dad is coming, honey. Everything is okay, now. Okay? Let's just get you back to the school. We can sort all of this out later." Mr. Sydes.
"You have quite a bump on your head. Maybe a mild concussion. How do you feel?" Stupid thing to ask, but poor Mr. Sydes was the socially awkward kind himself, more comfortable with books and facts than drama and meltdowns.
Concussions and panic attacks he could understand, but only in the most straightforward of ways.
The emotional fall out of them was outside of his comfort zone.
Still, she appreciated his mild protective glances back at the veil of trees behind them, like maybe Charlotte's trauma-induced boogeyman in the trees might have a scientifically rational basis, after all… Good old Mr. Sydes!
"I saw him out there, Mr. Sydes! Wearing a black hat and a black coat and black gloves, in the trees, and sunglasses, and he was smiling at me…" she was rambling, and distantly she knew she sounded insane but fuck it, she had seen Red John and they were all in danger!
She sucked in oxygen and tried to make them understand. The unlikely sounded insane when the survivors had more information about the inner machinations of waking-world demons than the general public did… maybe because the general public wanted, maybe even needed to believe that such real-world monstrosities didn't really exist. Or if they did?
They stayed dead when the authorities of their lives came to a consensus that they were dead.
Denial was powerful with the sheep.
"I know it sounds insane, but Red John is a master manipulator of human behavior. That is freely available information. You can look it up yourselves, and I encourage you to do so. His crimes are mentioned in a number of books you can buy about serial killers, because he was active for so damned long. Some of these books you can buy on amazon. One is called "Clinical Nightmares: Serial Killers and the uncaught psychopathic personalities who rule our world and keep us awake at night" by Warren H. Stamford. There are others."
"One newspaper referred to him as the "21st century American Jack the Ripper". He loved that headline, you know? He cut it out and framed it in a very expensive cherry-wood frame with cream matting… and put it in his office. Also a sadistic psychopathic personality, the type the FBI writes about in the VICAP unit and holds conferences on understanding better, the type that likes to exert dominance by making his victims fully understand their relative stupidity to his unmatched genius… that type of human is not above or beyond faking their own death. Did they tell you his so-called body, which was burned beyond all recognition, went missing shortly after it was processed? That an independent lab was unable to run dental matches of his teeth or submit any tissue for DNA samples, that the fingerprints were burned beyond any use for identification purposes? Did they tell you people that?! That the only reason they think the body was Red John's because was because of the approximate height and weight of the corpse and a matching ABO blood type? Mr. Sydes, you know about ABO blood groups… they're not the same as matching DNA, many people can have the same ABO type… tell them…. tell them it's why unrelated people can have blood transfusions from other unrelated people and…"
"Honey, you hit your head really, really hard. I know you're smart enough to realize that the concussed mind can invent all sorts of things," Mr. Sydes said slowly, as if he was testing out his own hypothesis as it left his mouth.
"I bit my tongue back there, and I spat bloody spit on the grass, but Red John cut his hand open! He bled a lot more than me! My blood type is B+. My father's is O+ but Red John's is Oh negative. He left blood back there all over the grass! Lots of it! It's back there… all over the ground. You have ways to test ABO blood groups, remember we tested mine? Remember, in class? So you know mine is B+… you know… and you can test the samples, and you can see, it will prove it…"
She was rambling. She looked up at the sad, controlled, morose adult faces who thought she was a few cards short of a full deck and burst into bitter, frustrated, exhausted tears.
"Charlotte…" Mr. Sydes said sadly, not sure what else he wanted to say. She kept walking, trying not to sway.
They helped her out of the little copse of trees and onto the pavement and the bright, sane early-summer sunlight without any black figures standing there, grinning, and into the back of one of the teachers' rinky-dink cars as Dixon flipped out excitedly and tried to get inside first, and Dixon slobbered and kissed her and she had to say "down Dixon," several times when they were inside and seated in the back seats, but the dog kept licking. Someone carefully closed her door with a subdued thud which felt a lot like a coffin lid being moved into place.
Then they drove back to the school and remained in the car, with the engine running, in the parking lot, with the lock up on the back doors so she couldn't run again.
It seemed to take forever but finally she saw Patrick's Citroën pull up and come to a hard stop. He got out, rubbed a hand over his tanned face and moved to shake Mrs. Brannen's hand, then stood on the asphalt and made small talk with some of the adults who'd helped corral his daughter, nodding thoughtfully. He glanced over in Charlotte's direction, saw her sitting in the back of a car holding a chemical ice pack to the goose-egg on her head and watching the world warily, and offered a propitiatory smile of understanding.
Mr. Sydes was sitting in the front passenger seat, watching the scene unfold.
"If he left O negative blood on the grass near where we found you, that would be easy enough to test for," Mr. Sydes said quietly from the front seat.
"I know it would be easy to test for," Charlotte said sullenly.
"If I test for it and find no blood, or only blood matching your type, will that help you understand that Red John is really dead?"
"You can't go out there alone! He could still be there!"
"Charlotte…" Mr. Sydes sounded exhausted. "If I was to go out there with a few people, just to be safe and collect blood-"
Before he could finish his comment Patrick was at his kid's window, tapping gently on the glass. Mr. Sydes reached over and pushed the button which unlocked the back doors.
Patrick clicked the door open.
"Red John was in the trees and I saw him, Patrick," Charlotte said flatly as her father crouched down and analyzed her face with paternal protectiveness, his intense blue gaze tracing the strained lines of her young face, analyzing her stress and fear and microfacial expressions with the practiced care of an incredibly intelligent and sympathetic therapist.
"Kiddo…" he started and came up short. "Come on, let's go home. We'll talk later, okay?"
"You don't believe me," Charlotte said defiantly, and folded her arms over her chest.
"Red John cut his hand open and bled all over the grass," Charlotte began.
"And his blood type is O negative. You don't know that but I do, because Red John told me, and he told me that O negative types are mutations, possibly seeded here by aliens who view the earth as a giant laboratory, and are naturally intellectually and morally superior to the other types. The next stage in human evolution, so to speak. Nobody knows for sure where O negative or Rhesus negative blood originally came from and…"
"No more Ancient Aliens for you, for a while," Patrick said, cutting off her monologue, and then sighed despite his joke. He probably thought he was being cute, but the cuteness wasn't making its desired impact, wasn't landing. He sighed again.
"Charlotte, come on, let's just go home," Patrick said tiredly, and she was almost surprised he didn't tag on a "let's not make this difficult."
She felt suddenly very old and very alone.
More alone, in a strange, sad way, then she had ever felt with Red John.
Red John knew what he was capable of.
Red John played games, but he never underestimated his own depravity and cunning, he delighted in it. Red John had seen her terror, he'd seen it fully, delighted in it, acknowledged it fully, and then pushed the needle ever higher.
Sadist as he was, he acknowledged her fears. He didn't downplay them because her fears were his psychic trophies. In that respect, he had never invalidated her feelings. Not even a teensy weensy bit.
In that respect, Red John always had and always would understand her better than any other person on the planet.
In that respect, Red John was the God most Christians prayed to for mercy, the only one capable of bestowing true peace on his chosen people… and to be fair to him, he had granted her occasional respite from his tortures, framing them as gifts of mercy when she thought she couldn't go on, much like another parent might give their Harvard-bound child a break from the study books.
In those times of relative peace, they'd read books together in Red John's study, and eaten expensive finger foods and consumed tea and listened to Classical music and she'd thought she could possibly love him someday, as the father he insisted he really was… if he would just stop the bloodshed.
If he had stopped she would have found the strength to forgive him for everything.
But he'd never stopped.
Much like she couldn't stop being who she was; the little, rambling weirdo who was damaged first and foremost and Patrick Jane's daughter secondarily.
The thought made her almost wish she had died in that coffin, underground. The sinking realization that she felt something like affection for Red John and his carnage. She shut her eyes tight at the thought.
They both knew what it was to be true outsiders, misunderstood by the general public…
Tears bubbled on her lower lids. Red John had raised her and he understood her. As sick as it was, she almost missed him, and that sensation of missing him made even more tears come up.
Finally the tears broke over the edges of her lower lids and gently ran down both of her dirty, swollen cheeks. She wiped them away immediately, angry with her body and its betrayal of her private thoughts.
"Yeah, whatever. You'll find out eventually…"
"Come on, Dixon," Patrick said with manufactured brightness, moving his attention to the dog. Dixon's head moved to the side, on an angle, and his tongue lolled out in full canine splendor. We all happy, now? We all love each other? Yes? Patrick love Dixon? Yes?
"Dixon listens to me," Charlotte griped, miserable, stroked her dog's head around the ears and Patrick nodded.
"Of course. He's your dog. But we need to go home, now. Your teachers need to go back to their other classes. We'll talk at home."
"I'm sure the other nutcases will appreciate the extra free time. Might even earn me some brownie points with my peer group. You think about that at all, Patrick? What this is doing for my reputation among the crazy adolescent peer group I have here?" She remained sitting, irritated.
"We can talk about this at Dairy Queen, then," Patrick said happily, smiling his most winning smile.
For the last month and a half his kid had been on a drastically reduced sugar diet and though she submitted to the dietary tyranny that Patrick claimed would eventually save her from developing full-blown type 2 diabetes, she was really missing sweets. The occasional slurpee from 7-11 just wasn't cutting it in the face of Patrick's carefully prepared oatmeal and chia seed breakfasts and nutrionally sound, veggie-rich dinners. And somehow, she'd managed to blow her life-savings in the past few months buying gas for the jeep, toys for Elian, video games, clothes for Dixon, graphic novels from amazon, Pokemon cards just for the sheer thrill of opening the packages and ordering them in plastic sheets in a blue three-ringed binder covered in holographic stickers… she was now making money doing weekly chores of Patrick's, and there was no Dairy Queen near the apartment.
"Will you believe me any more at the Dairy Queen or is this just plain old bribery?" She said sullenly.
"It's not that I don't believe you," Patrick started, and stopped. He made eye contact with Mr. Sydes and smiled another winner of a smile. "Thanks for helping us out today, Brian. I really appreciate everything you've done for us."
"Of course," Mr. Sydes said awkwardly.
Charlotte got out of the car then, followed by Dixon, and slowly marched over to the Patrick's little silver bullet of a Citroën. Scowling.
She kept the chemical cold pack firmly pressed against her right, purple-bruised temple and held Dixon's leash with her left hand, got to the car, and got in shotgun after Dixon wormed his way into the backseat and lay down on the large fleece "Walking Dead" blanket Patrick had purchased online to protect the upholstery. You could throw that blanket in the washing machine with Gain detergent and scent beads, but it was a real bitch to clean car upholstery…
Dixon made slobbering noises as he sniffed his blanket, found a tiny crumb of some dog treat he'd forgotten to eat the first time around, and inhaled the beefy goodness with so much excitement that if he had been a human archaeologist he'd have just have found the freaking Ark of the Covenant.
How cool must it be to be a dog? To eat and sleep and hump and shit and play with toys from Pet Smart smeared with spray cheese flavored to taste like bacon cheeseburgers and peanut butter and filet mignon steaks and get belly rubs and head massages and daily excursions to sniff other dogs' asses when that was your number 1 favorite activity in the whole wide world? No bills or school work, no taxes, no existentially dreadful thoughts of death or what it meant to be evil to ruin the mood, just yummy tastes and happy sleeps and slobbery grins over games that nobody ever won, and nobody ever lost.
The car started and she moaned as a shard of bright summer light punctured her pupils and shot a new bloom of spreading, stabbing pain behind her eyes.
"Fuck," she groaned sadly, and her father shot her a concerned look, the type that denoted that a serious medical problem might have been previously overlooked and time might be of the essence...
"Dairy Queen after a trip to a walk in clinic," he insisted then in a voice he probably thought was soothing. "Both your eyes are bloodshot and you're waaaay too pale not to be seen by a doctor."
"Whatever, Patrick," his kid groused, no longer caring. Defeated. She felt like she was watching an old, not particularly good movie on VHS and she already knew the ending, but other people couldn't see that their reality was a B thriller and could only play out a certain way from now on...
What-the-fuck-ever.
