Title: Charlotte's Web (Chapter 55)

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: Ho, ho, ho. Been super busy. Merry Christmas, guys. I hope this chapter serves as an adequate Christmas present until I have more time to finish this fic without rushing (and botching) it.

Like always, reviews are much appreciated and all advice is gladly accepted. What parts do you like best, what lines made the biggest impressions?

I played a bit with the page cuts in this chapter to give a sense of fragmented memories. Sort of an experiment.

Also, if you want an idea of what direction I am heading this fic in, emotionally, the songs I have been listening to over and over as I plot out the final few chapters are "Fight" by "All Good Things" and "Believer" by "Imagine Dragons".

It's been said that all stories are essentially about seven things: 1) The Quest (think Lord of the rings) 2)Voyage and Return (Think Wizard of Oz) 3)Comedy (As you like it) 4)Tragedy (Think Romeo and Juliet) 5)Rebirth (the main character is in an imprisoned state and then is reborn and liberated- think The Secret Garden, Oliver Twist, etc) 6 Overcoming the monster (think Hansel and Gretel, Frankenstein, A Nightmare on Elm Street, etc) and 7) Rags to Riches (think Cinderella, Harry Potter or basically any under-dog story where the picked on kid ends up making it big). I have always found rebirth stories very interesting, because we are all, always improving upon ourselves and growing and in a way, being reborn in different ways. Charlotte's Web (my version) is primarily a rebirth story with a good dose of Overcoming the Monster... in fact, in order to be reborn, the monster (my version of Red John) must be overcome.

Even though there are definite tragic aspects to this story (Jane's losses, Charlotte's abuse) this is not a tragedy in the fictional sense, which should put some of your minds at ease. Have fun classifying your favourite stories into the above 7 categories (some might cross-over) and maybe leave a comment about which you prefer most of the time, and why. -Lex


"And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices."

― Joyce Carol Oates

"You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative."

— William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch)

"One of the experiments was to take an ordinary, sane person...cause insanity... and have a psychiatrist who was unknown to everybody diagnose schizophrenia, paranoia or a psychiatric illness. That was a successful outcome. And the person would spend the rest of their life in an asylum, in misery... but to the government scientists, that was a success!" -Dr. Barrie Trower, Former Royal Navy Microwave Weapons Expert and former Cold War captured spy debriefer for UK Intelligence Services


He was with Lisbon and he felt safe, and secure, and happy. She was in his bed, and it wasn't about sex, just her, her warmth and her presence and her love.

The love and desire he felt for her, so strong sometimes it pounded in his ears and made his stomach and chest ache, wasn't anything as carnal as sex; although if he was honest with himself, sometimes he did dream about that, too... but, neither of them was ready, not yet, not in the face of so much pain that still needed time to heal. He needed to go slow. She needed that too, he knew.

He'd been growing closer to Lisbon bit by bit for years.

Still, his heart ached for Angela, for what they had had together. He'd stood in the showers after work some days, right after joining the CBI, and squeezed his eyes shut against the onslaught of emotional pain which felt like a living death, like treading water in an endless ocean without relief. No starlight. No moonlight. Just cold, wet blackness which made him numb and achy in turns, and the undying need for revenge that could only be purchased with Red John's blood.

When Red John was dead, then he could rest. He could have his final peace.

When Red John was dead... but not before.

In those early years, he didn't dare become too emotionally close to Lisbon. He cared for her, because she was a good and kind human, and good and kind humans were rare.

But at the back of his mind he still thought of the peace of his rest, the turning-off of everything that would finally come when he found Red John, and caught him, and killed him.

He could never let on to Lisbon that his plan for a congratulatory "Red John is dead" party involved his own death, too.

She would have rightly worried.

She would have kicked him out of the CBI, or hovered, or made him see a shrink he'd do nothing but run circles around... or something.

So, he kept his distance, emotionally. He grinned and he played games, but his shields were up.

Except... over time, it became harder to do that with her. It began to ache to have those shields up.

Something about her, in slow and subtle ways, made him think more and more about a future in 5 years, in 10 years, in 20 years.

When he caught himself thinking of the future, she was always in there with him, living life in his fantasies and daydreams. And those thoughts unnerved him and made him feel guilty, as if he was emotionally cheating on Angela, or on Angela's memory.

Angela was dead.

He had contributed to that death.

What right did he have to ever feel happy again? What damned right?

At the same time, the idea that life might one day be worth living again excited him. He felt like he'd been holding his breath under water and had finally burst to the surface, and taken in a lungful of oxygen. His head swirled. He swooned.

He played with Lisbon more and more, in ways that strained her paradigm of how colleagues and even friends should interact in the workplace. He made her an origami frog. He bought her a pony and smuggled it into the CBI. He illegally broke and entered potential crime scene sites and he did magic tricks and mindgames in a field usually dominated by stern professionalism and clinical detachment in the face of brutal- and then sanitized- death.

He playfully engaged Rigsby and Cho, and then Van Pelt. He became part of the CBI as a valued asset, and then something like a protective father figure and therapist hybrid to the younger agents.

Lisbon pretended to find him annoying and a pain in the ass and a legal liability for the Bureau, and all of those points were valid, but she also smiled more and more often.

He analyzed her constantly, despite himself, and figured out early on that she'd grown up too fast, that her brothers had been troubled, that her father had been an abusive drunk who sometimes had emphasized his emotional teachings with his fists and that she, that Lisbon, had fears of becoming emotionally (or physically) intimate with others.

To cover up the uncertainty and the pain and the anxiety that she, herself, wasn't enough, Lisbon acted tougher than she was. She pushed herself without eating, she worked harder than what was expected of her (even for the CBI), she kept a stiff upper lip when Jane knew she really wanted to cry.

He couldn't help but love her all the more.

His heart swelled with love and protective concern for her when she was stressed or scared on a case.

She filled up more and more room inside of his mind and thoughts, and dreams.

A few times when he was sick, or wounded, her eyes clouded over with a fear not far from outright panic. Not the practiced concern professonals felt for their colleagues or clients or patients, or the socially-accepted mask of concerned solicitude that adults were supposed to show towards anyone in physical or emotional pain... but... honest-to-god fear for his well-being. For him. For the man she called Jane.

She'd spoken so softly to him when he was sick, or hurt. Unlike so many other humans, her words and tone were free of deception and hidden motives, hidden agendas. With Lisbon, what you saw was what you got, except when it came to her showing her own perceived weaknesses.

She loved him. It was impossible, Jane knew, to feel that degree of fear and pain for another if you didn't love them.

He knew, he thought, that she loved him before she, herself, knew. Something in his heart woke up, like an animal coming out of hibernation and blinking its sleep-swollen eyes up at the sun. Realizing there still, impossibly, was a sun.


Years earlier, in the psych ward, the locked ward, he'd only wanted to die. His life had collapsed.

His wife gone.

His baby girl slaughtered.

His mind broken.

He couldn't breathe, it felt like, and he'd started to have panic attacks, existential attacks involving a profound loss of meaning. He stopped showering. He stopped eating completely. He stared at shadows on the wall for days with bloodshot eyes. He drank until he passed out, then drank some more.

Whereas others might call on God or some faith-based spiritual system for comfort, Patrick Jane had no ability to do so.

It wasn't so much that he didn't believe in God, as it were.

It was that he couldn't believe in God.

He had never felt a sense of God, never heard a voice or seen a vision or experienced anything even remotely supernatural and his mind was a master of logic.

He had manipulated so many people in his life, made them believe so much that simply wasn't true, that the idea of organized religion repelled him on the deepest of levels. He could see so many emotionally manipulative tactics in the words and deeds of the so-called "body of Christ", in the Muslims, in the Hindus... all clamouring for top spot on the prized social ladder as the owners and purveyors of spiritual truth and existential meaning.

And as far as old Tricky boy was concerned? They were nothing but a pack of conmen and wolves in sheeps clothing, even the ones too indoctrinated or stupid to realize that what they were offering wasn't salvation but false hope at best and active deception at worst.

He couldn't believe in God, because the versions of God he'd been taught about and told about since toddlerhood didn't make any logical sense to him- they defied the supports of everything he did believe in, could see and touch and understand.

He couldn't believe in God because the words and behaviors of God's so-called servants denoted lies and a need for power and control.

Their microfacial expressions denoted deception.

Their kind words closed over in scabs of indifference and callous hatred when someone behaved contrary to their accepted, conditioned view of "morality"; and in those moments they could be as poised as vipers and as cruel as hyenas.

He'd seen it more than once, and seen the fall out of their actions.

No, the Gods and Goddesses of the world which so many humans so readily claimed to speak for were worse than deliberate lies, in Patrick Jane's Bible of logic and sound-thinking.

They were gaslighting stumbling blocks, the crazy-making monstrosities of fantasists and sadists and schizophrenics, masochists and the mentally ill. He wanted no part in their chaos and their lies.

He'd never had a need for something more than the here-and-now.

And then his life fell apart, completely, and cold, hard materialism offered no comfort.

How could it, when at the end of it all, everyone was reduced to a body on a slab filled with poison, then burned or buried? Maggots eating out eyes and black, swollen tongues screaming in decaying heads and locked inside expensive boxes?

There was no comfort to be found there, not a whit.

There was just... nothing. Nothing to hold him up when it all was ripped away.

And he fell, quite a distance. A long, hard fall.

He got to the razor's edge of suicide. He'd been falling since their murders, since Angela and Charlotte rejoined the dust, and he almost wanted to fall, he almost wanted to hit the ground so hard that everything would stop and he would just cease; there was a self-destructive, almost manic giddiness to dying in a brutal way, an insanity about going out in pain as one last dark, bloody scream at an uncaring, cruel universe.

He'd been mad with grief.

He came within a hair's breadth of being no more.

Yet, his mind, some small part of his subconscious, still wanted to go on, even in spite of all the pain.

The suicide attempt was a bust and he ended up on a closed, locked ward raving about Red John and chaos and pain, sobbing until aides held him down and he was injected with drugs which didn't so much take the pain away as take away his ability to care about being in pain altogether, and he floated there, in the drugs and the haze and the guilt, lost on a sea of materialism which amounted in times of loss to nothing more than maggots and the certainty that we all return to dust.

The restraints on his wrists and ankles the first few days after waking up were nothing compared to the chaos in his mind. And he wildly fought against both.

Dust wasn't enough to sustain him. Dust wasn't enough to get anyone through shit.

Dust just wasn't anything.

Dust was a fucking joke.

He'd been so, so lost.

So deeply lost in his pain and sorrow and grief and guilt that even Sophie Miller's words and her tone of voice and exceptional talent as a shrink hadn't been able to reach him.

Even drugged out of his gourd he'd been five steps ahead of her, reading her body language, deeply intimate with her mentalism tricks.

He'd thought in the first weeks on the ward that he might be there forever. Or until his private insurance ran out. Then he'd end up on the street, and die in the gutters- freeze to death on a park bench or drink himself to death under a bridge, whichever came first.

He'd lived in that head-space for over a month.

He might never have gotten out.

Except, Sophie- being brighter than the average head shrinker- had given him something to hold onto.

Not much.

Just a speck of light.

The idea that if he died, too, Red John would win completely.

Red John'd go on killing and killing and killing. He'd kill countless more. Countless more Angelas. Countless more Charlottes.

"He didn't kill you because he finds you a worthy adversary, Patrick. You're exceptionally brilliant, and you know that. I know you know it. Even in the middle of all this pain, all this despair, try to think of it this way: if you die, Red John wins. This is all a game to him. He wants to dominate you because you are a challenge and because you insulted him. He views you as being more or less on his level, or else he simply would have killed you outright. He wants for you to self-destruct, but first he wants to play with you, to feed his ego, to feed an ego that needs to dominate others the way a cancer needs to spread... that is what Red John needs. Except, unlike with cancer, when he thoroughly destroys one host, he just picks up and moves on to someone new."

"Think about that, Patrick, think about the evil that sort of mindset entails, how nothing else in the animal kingdom behaves like he does, how his actions are ultimately counterproductive even to his own physical survival. Might not his very actions point toward the idea that whatever is wrong with him is more than a physical illness, more than a mental illness... but something spiritual? The level of sadism and cruelty Red John displays shouldn't exist, even in an outlier, if we're all strictly products of physical evolution."

Jane had tried to think through the drugs. He'd managed to connect a few of the basic ideas. Enough that Sophie continued.

"He wants to own you, and in order to do that, it has to be you that pulls the plug on yourself. That's how he wins. And then, like you're nothing, like Angela was nothing, like Charlotte was nothing, he will move on to another target, another host. Dominate you, destroy you, then erase you completely. That's his pattern. That is what he does to his victims. That is what makes him feel powerful, like he is more than nothing. Where he should have a soul, there is a yawning void, and the way he fills that void is to send others to the abyss, to erase their very existences to the extent that he is capable of erasing a person. That's how he compensates for his own sense of being different and lacking in vital ways- he destroys those he perceives to have, at least on a symbolic level- souls."

Jane'd been so jacked up on ativan and tranquilizers at the time that it had been hard to think and to take each word Sophie was saying and to connect them, like beads on a string, into sentences. Sentences with meanings. Meaning instead of chatter. He focused, rubbed his eyes. Nodded at her to continue.

She smiled at him, a haunted, compassionate smile. She was in his corner, that's what her smile said. She'd help him navigate through the darkest of the dark night of his soul. Even if he doubted he had a soul.

He'd stared at Sophie with crazily dilated eyes, in his white and blue lined pajamas and the socks the hospital provided with the rubberized soles, and he'd listened, and listened hard, hoping desperately that what she was saying could infuse his life with some sort of vital meaning, some reason to continue on. He needed a reason the way a drowning man needs a life preserver.

"Suicide is permanent, Patrick. If you die, fine. Yes, you end your pain. I get that. I also understand that, to you, it seems like this pain will never end. I can tell you in my professional opinion that the level of emotional pain you subjectively feel right now will diminish greatly with time, and therapy, and medication. I can't guarantee this, of course, but that is what I strongly expect will happen. If you can hold on right now. Push through this period of such intense agony. I know, to you, right this moment, that suicide seems so very easy, and living so excruciatingly hard. Part of you almost wants me to call you a hopeless case, endorse suicide, so you can end this agony, right now. So you can kill yourself and feel justified in doing so..."

Jane stared with too-bright eyes. His face had been very pale by this point. Even in a haze of drugs, his eyes had begun to weep without his permission, tears of sorrow that had to escape even if his mouth was too sad and numb to make noises.

Sophie continued on.

"But if you do that, Red John wins, Patrick. And he goes on killing. He'll kill other little girls like Charlotte. He'll kill other innocent mothers like Angela. He'll destroy other lives... the lives of people who don't even know he exists, as of yet. Who can't prepare for his trail of destruction, who are just as vulnerable and open as Charlotte was, Patrick. As Angela was."

Jane had listened intently. He didn't want to hear her words. But he had to hear her words.

"And he'll just keep going and going... he might even target completely random victims, because he sees you as a toy. He wants to play with you as a toy. He wants the toy to destroy itself eventually, so he can feel superior to it, but not too soon... too soon and he loses out on some of the fun that is the novelty of a new toy. You're the new toy, Patrick. For whatever reason, something in you has woken up something in Red John, and he's behaving off-script, now."

Jane's arm was itching, the flesh puckered and shiny and red around the black stitches. He was the toy. He scratched his arm through the soft fabric of his pajama shirt.

Just like a stuffed animal, a plush bear, he had stitches.

Sophie's words, making tiny dents in his resolution to die. Tiny little scrapes against marble agony.

Scratch, scratch.

He listened. His feet seemed so very far away in their socks with the rubberized soles.

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

Sophie's voice from another realm of existence, trying to anchor him to his body, trying to give a materialist an existential, non-material reason for existence, a spiritual meaning, a reason to continue.

God bless her, she had her work cut out for her.

His eyes blinked heavy, hard. Even through the sorrow and the drugs, he wanted to sleep. But he had to hear more. And he wanted to sob, again, because even with all the pain in the world, with people like Red John cutting up lives and hopes and dreams, there were people like Sophie Miller, small and vulnerable humans, trying their best to lift others up and give them hope and purpose.

He wanted to sob, but he couldn't, so he had to listen.

Because he was dying.

Because he needed help.

Without help, he was a terminal case. A dead man walking.

"You end yourself, and not only will Red John keep killing, he might start killing on a larger scale, looking for a next potential, worthy adversary. Your existence awoke something in him. That is why he changed his tactics with your family. You know this, Patrick."

"What are you saying, Sophie?" He'd been so foggy, and his tongue had felt swollen, the inside of his head was filled with cotton balls soaked in ether and turpentine. The intimate details of his emotional life were spread before them both, and what Jane had previously seen as a psychological autopsy was appearing more and more to be life-saving spiritual surgery.

He sucked in one cheek, and scratched his arm again, and rubbed at his burning eyes. Sophie watched him carefully, took time to choose the right words.

"I know you don't believe in heaven, Patrick. The concept that you'll see your loved ones again seems too much like wishful thinking for you to consider it seriously. And maybe you're right. Maybe you are. But if that's true, then that means this life is all we have, however long it continues. This is it, this life is all any of us ever haves or will ever have. And Charlotte, and Angela... theirs was taken from them. Stolen from them. But you can give life to others. You can stop Red John. You might be the only one who can really do it. At the very least, you're probably the only living human with the burning need to stop him. For that reason alone, if you stay alive, and hunt him, I think you will stop him. I think you will catch Red John where others have failed out of a need for justice, if nothing else."

Jane'd slowly nodded. Until that moment, the idea that he, by himself, could track down Red John hadn't occurred to him. The shock of his daughter's death had fried his circuitry. The murder of his wife had blasted all traces of sense from his mind.


Red John can be stopped? I can stop him?


Through the haze, it seemed possible.

I can prevent other deaths? Maybe I am the only one who can stop him... maybe that's why he let me live. I'm a challenge. An adventure.

He'd asked for a glass of water then.

His left arm was still itchy, where he'd pushed a razor down almost to the bone a month ago, along the main artery. He didn't own a gun, or he would have used that. Pills had seemed too easy. He deserved to hurt, and to bleed... for what he had done to his wife and daughter, for the harm his arrogance had put them in, for the death his ego had green-lighted on a national TV show while the audience clapped and applauded his hubris.

Red John may have been the one to kill them, but he- the amazing mentalist Patrick Jane- had been the catalyst. He had activated the monster's kill switch.

The stitches, black and ugly, would come out soon. God damn, did they itch, though.

He should have died from the blood loss alone, but a mother from Charlotte's school had come by the house just at the right exact moment, for reasons unknown, come with a casserole and photos of her living daughter palling around with the poor, murdered Charlie... She'd thought he might like to have them, the photos, she'd come with her condolonces for Charlie's famous Daddy and had found him all but bled-out on the floor in the upstairs bathroom.

A graphic and traumatizing sight in its own right, another great Patrick Jane original kinetic memory sculpture. Ha-ha.

The poor woman...


(I said a prayer for you, Mr. Jane, and something in my heart told me to go to you, to go right away, on that night... maybe I am a little psychic, myself, do you think? I am so sorry for your loss, Mr. Jane. Please, get well soon, we're all praying for you, I really do feel you will be okay, please, if you ever need to call-)


Apparently, drunk, he had left the front door open.

"I thought maybe someone had broken into the house," Charlotte's friend's mother would tell him later, over the phone, her voice still haunted by the state of his bloody body on the floor. He winced as she spoke on the phone, shut his eyes against a new onslaught of shame.

And he had ended up in the looney bin, on a locked ward, with stiches in his arm after numerous blood transfusions and his pain shackled to him care of the mental health system, and he had hurt like Hell, and then Sophie had introduced the idea of him tracking down Red John. Stopping Red John. In Angela's memory. In Charlie's memory.

He couldn't bring them back, but he could try to settle the score somewhat... couldn't he?

It had been the spark he needed to re-light his candle.

He'd asked for water, and Sophie had gotten him some from a pitcher she kept in a mini fridge in her counselling office, and he sat and sipped the water and noticed how it tasted slightly sweet and seemed to soothe his hot, scorched throat. He thought about how Angela would never again taste water, how Charlotte would never again see the sun or feel rain on her small, cherubic face, and he thought about how suicide could always wait.

In fact, how it must wait.

Because before he would die, in honour of his wife and daughter, he had to find Red John. Find Red John and kill him. Gut the bastard, preferably, and leave his entrails scattered all over the road for the crows to feast on.

If Sophie guessed he planned to kill Red John, she kept such thoughts to herself. Nothing that could ever potentially incriminate him in the future was written down in his official therapy notes in her slanted, elegant scrawl.

Jane knew this, because shortly after being discharged, he requested copies of his therapy notes and read them front to back several times. Then he burned them in a steel trash can.

Then he manipulated his way into Sophie's office when she was out of town and stole his original file, and destroyed it completely.

If he was going to hunt Red John, he couldn't leave anything in writing, anywhere, that Red John could get his hands on and use to better understand his opponent's psychology.

Sophie called after his file disappeared. She seemed mildly hurt. She knew he'd stolen the file. Couldn't prove it, but strongly suspected.

It wasn't her he didn't trust. It was Red John. It was Red John's manipulated cronies. He couldn't explain that properly, though, without seeming paranoid.

"I am going to live, and in order to do that, that file had to go away. My past has to go away," Jane said, and his voice was calmer than he felt.

"Goodbye, Patrick. I wish you luck. Please call if you ever need to."

"I will," Jane had said, and hung up the phone.

Then he'd gotten in touch with the CBI. And met Lisbon...


And now, after all this time, and all this pain, and all the miles and cases and arrests, each playful session of banter and each day of eye contact and unspoken words, she was here with him.


Lisbon.


She was snuggled up beside him in his bed, and he had bled his heart out to her, and his emotions; the achy, fermented pains of his childhood, his fears of the future and of all the potential little wasp-stings of anxiety that crept around in his head, waiting to sting, all the possibilities for things to go wrong in sudden and unpredictable ways.

She was okay with his demons, and with him, and they'd fallen asleep together in each others arms, her head against his bare chest.

Her hair smelled like Orchid Vanilla and he could smell goats' milk soap on her skin, a faint lingering scent of her cinnamon toothpaste, and a scent that was nothing external but came from her being, her glands, her blood and her cells themselves.

It was beautiful smell.

It was Lisbon-scent, straight from the cells of her being, a warm, maternal mammalian smell which made him feel safe on a very basic physical level, made him want to put his head in her lap and let her pet his hair.

He never told her he loved her smell, because he knew she would make that displeased face she made when he said what she thought were outrageous things. Or she might be self-conscious. Lisbon was pretty damn self-conscious.

But the smell of her had soothed him from the beginning. One afternoon, after a case, he'd stolen a sweater she'd been wearing and left in the back of a rental car. He'd smuggled it home with his files and papers and cradled the sweater to his head and fallen asleep to her smell. Then he washed the sweater and it turned back up in her office, mysteriously.

He could feel her warmth and her love for him, her sense of duty and protectiveness and her trust in him, and it was soothing and lulling just to lie in bed with her wrapped around him, loving and trusting him as he trusted and loved her. So basic and so right.

She was willing to wander into the murky waters of the future together, with him, with this strange, grinning, brilliant, unpredictable, damaged man whose life was smeared with so much drama and blood and faded screams… he could be like a child with her, and she was his security blanket in some ways, an all-encompassing warmth and comfort which eased all the bad stuff and made it seem less real, less potent.

He snuggled against her chest, smelling the essence of her, head cradled against her small breasts, feeling her heart beat and smelling her wonderful Lisbon-scent.

And then, the crack of lightning, splitting the night in two, as bright as a nuclear explosion, lighting the room up in neon white so that every detail was clearly visible for the quarter second it lasted.

The outlines of the blinds threw bands of black and white stripes on the wall, on his face, on her head… prison bars of dark and light.

The sky had suffered a seizure, and in that eerily fleeting and somehow interminable crack of electricity and time, everything was different.

The room was different in impossibly subtle ways, as if every object had been removed and replaced with an exact replica.

Lisbon smelled different; now more like fear-sweat and salt than anything else, and the warmth was gone as if it had never been.

The feeling of safety and peace was gone as if it had never been.

Jane felt his heart skip a beat, hard, in his chest, like the organ was kicking him from the inside.

He turned in his bed and brushed the skin of Lisbon's arm, but now, instead of reassuring warmth there was a deep and unforgiving coldness, a coldness that sucked the heat out of him; was frosty and unnatural, as if he was cuddling next to a piece of fragrant, perfumed rack-of-lamb hauled out of a meat locker.

He turned in his bed, and he knew then that the body snuggled up beside him was not Lisbon, even before he saw the face…


It was Angela.

She was dead.

Murdered dead. Unnatural dead.

He barked out a high-pitched wail of a scream when he saw her and the eyelids on the dead doll-face slowly opened as if they were being pulled up from the inside of her head like tiny Venetian blinds.

Her eyes were cloudy with ice crystals, lips a garish gray-purple. Oh yes, most certainly dead, horribly dead, but not gone… not gone at all. There was consciousness in the dead eyes, something of a once- human soul watching him from within the too-big pupils.

Angela was watching him and even though her face was unlined and expressionless there was a burning anger and resentment in the black of those pupils. Maybe anger lived in the black; maybe it was born there.

Hello, my love. Did you miss me? I've missed you.

She was dead but not gone…

The type of not-gone that the old people said could tie a soul to a specific spot in space and time and cause hauntings and wailing in the night, cause electrical disturbances and psychic attacks which made those who were sensitive stiffen with panic and dread; the type of not-gone which caused floating, smashing plates against the walls and blood to seep through the wallpaper like thick, dark sweat and drip down the walls in stinking rivulets.

Shadow people in the halls and animals developing strange and mysterious ailments; weeping tumors and blood diseases and EMF meters screaming, screaming, screaming. Cats keening at nothing. Children fainting in heaps with bulging, faraway eyes, and the smell of rotten eggs that couldn't be explained, sulfur and loam and decay-smell all around, even after the floor was ripped up and replaced and the dry wall was torn out and replaced and HEPA filters were installed… that rot smell kept coming back, impossibly coming back. Finally you learned to live with the weirdness or you moved, because trying to fix things the usual way didn't work when hauntings were concerned.

Angela was not-gone.

(Hello, my love. Did you miss me? I've missed you.)

The type of not-gone that was so traumatic that even in the realm of death, it screamed out its trauma in loops over and over and over again, a spiritual form of OCD, a record stuck in a psychic groove, an eternal itch that always needed more scratching… needed to be heard and have someone bear witness to the exquisite level of its pain, never satisfied…

(Hello, my love. Did you miss-)

Pain that was so huge and so terrible that it split minds and souls apart and shattered spirits into compartmentalized pockets of terror.

(me? I've missed you.)

There was the moment when Angela first realized the man in the doorway was not Patrick.

(Hello, my love-)

The moment when she realized she was going to die and there was no way out.

(-did you miss-)

The moment when her child ran screaming from the room in terror and the mother was helpless to defend her…

(you miss me? I've missed-)

The moment Angela realized the physical pain (which had seemed to last a thousand years) was over, and she could see herself from the vantage point of the ceiling, that it was real, that was she gone, but still not gone, not really…

She was not-gone, but she was physically dead. And the horror of that realization had broken time and space apart, for her.

(-me? I've missed you.)

She was so, so cold in his bed, a total absence of heat and light.

He could feel the tears start again, hanging on his lashes, splashing down his cheeks silently, salty on his trembling lip.

He licked his lips and wriggled away from her, and at once was filled with guilt and shame for doing so. His body was vibrating all over with emotions he could not stifle, not in this state.

He was horrified all over again at the sight of what had once been the love of his life, and the blood all over his expensive Egyptian cotton sheets, already sticky and starting to reek that smell of black blood that has begun to rot.

The dry-heave-inducing stench of cadaverine and hydrogen sulfide.

He was horrified that when she was alone and in the most pain, and her soul needed him most desperately, his first reaction was to pull away from her like she was a moldering hunk of road-kill… something that had never mattered, and the pain, new pain in her eyes as he recoiled, new pain, yes, he was causing her even more pain, now, new pain, he was doing it-

(Hello, my love)

If Hell existed, then rotting blood had to be the smell that permeated everything. And the look in her eyes of betrayal, of pain that had suddenly found itself even lower and deeper than before, that look had to be the face of every creature in Hell-

(my love-)

Oh God.

Oh God.

(love)

His angel… his Angela… and he had pushed her away, in her cold, dead need for protection, for warmth… why else would she be in his bed now, if not for warmth and comfort? He'd pushed her away and there she still was, pulled in on herself in rigor mortis, watching him with her impossibly frozen eyes, sadness replacing all anger, sadness and pain…

The tears continued to splash. The pain in his chest and his soul continued to rise and fill him. He seemed to have an endless eternal capacity for pain and grief and shame.

Someone in the room was making wounded sobbing noises.

Maybe Hell was real. How else could the pain just continue to build and build and build over years without relief?

How else could it be endless?

And her dead eyes were still open and still looking at him, for help.

The pupils were already fully blown. They could not get any larger. But somehow she was seeing him even more clearly, even through the haze of death-cataracts.

"Patrick… I am so cold," she said from his bed. Her dead hands traced her belly as if she was in pain, or maybe pregnant with something forbidden. "I am so terribly cold. I am so alone, Patrick."

"I am so sorry, Angela…" he croaked out. "I am so sorry." What else could he possibly say?

Words were so incomplete, almost a mockery of thought, lacking all the pain and tenderness and depth of real emotion. His own words to her felt almost like patronizing indifference, but silence would be worse.

"Our baby… our baby is still alive in there," Angela said in a broken, creaking sob.

"Charlotte?"

"She is still in Hell, inside her mind. She hurts so badly. She hurts so badly, Patrick. Even you don't really get it. Even you. You don't really get it, even after all the pain you've been through. Too terrified of Hell and death to even begin to contemplate suicide, so terrified of oneself and one's potential capacity for evil that life is a waking nightmare. Even after all your pain, you don't understand that she is STILL IN HELL. How could you?"

"What can I do?" Jane croaked out, watching from his side of the bed, gooseflesh broken out on his neck and arms, the front of his chest, tear tracks down his neck glistening in the moonlight like snail trails.

"I don't know how to help…"

"Red John broke her but all the pieces are still there. They are screaming for tenderness, to help her put them back together. A puzzle. You used to do jigsaws together, you and Charlotte. This is not much different. The pieces are just invisible, and locked away, inside her mind."

"I know," Jane breathed into the darkened room. Another crash, another burst of white light. The bars of light and dark were thrown back over the walls and bed covers.

"The child she was is dead. That innocence is dead. But there is still innocence, another kind of innocence. Innocence in even wanting to be put back together again, innocence that believes a dead child can be resurrected and have its childhood back…" Angela continued and began to cough.

"I don't know what to do," Jane whispered.

"Hypnotize her- she has her guard up, yes. But she wants help. She can't tell you in a normal state of consciousness, because in a normal state of consciousness, she can't access the worst of it. Hypnotize her, and help her sort through the pieces. Help her that way. Consciously she won't want to. Do it anyway."

"I can't hypnotize her.. she's not ready."

"You're not ready," Angela said softly, and coughed again, louder this time.

Jane watched, wide-eyed. As he watched, his wife began to cough up chunks of black earth. Clots of wriggling worms moved silently in the clumps of loam. Small, white worms, as thin as sewing thread.

He took a step away from the bed, horrified.

"She is damaged, but she knows more than you realize," Angela coughed and another wad of worms and old blood came out of her lungs.

He nodded.

She was beginning to decay now.

"Go into her mind, into the deepest parts of it, and find the pieces. Help her put them together. Piece by piece." Words like wind through old tree limbs, syllables like rustling leaves.

Jane stared, horrified and fascinated in equal measure.

The smooth, white porcelain of her corpse-face was breaking apart and crumbling into his bed, now. The flesh of her cold fingers breaking into clumps, falling off her phalanges and into the rotting detritus that had been the love and meaning of his former life…

"You have to let me go, Patrick," Angela continued, and now he was mostly looking at her stained skeleton. It was still talking.

The blonde hair was still attached to a thin covering of flesh on her skull.

But the rest was almost gone into the soupy decay in the middle of his bed.

Her eyes still sat in their sockets, though, watching him, unwilling to leave him just yet. Holding on till the very end.

"It's so lonely to go on, to be dead, you needing me, me unable to be alive… you must let me go," she cried, and instead of tears, worms slipped out of the sockets of her eyes in their place, worms dropping like tears over the grotty slopes of her cheekbones.

"I don't know how to let you go," Jane said to the spectre.

"You need to let your grief die. It ties me to to this time and place. It keeps me here, so lonely. You need to go on, and live. You can't see clearly when your eyes are full of grief. And guilt."

"Angela," Jane said breathlessly, but already the bones of her skeleton were fading away, crumbling in on themselves.

He began to sob with fresh pain.

Every new act of her decomposition was a fresh, throbbing hurt in his chest and lungs and throat, a fresh welt on his naked soul.

"You can't see clearly any more, my love," Angela said, and with that, her mandible fell off and into the hollow pit of her rib cage and she could speak no more… her eyes were going now, too-


Jane awoke with a start, kicking at the tangle of blankets wrapped around his lower half, eyes darting frantically.

His heart raced and his skin felt cool and slimy-sticky. He had a scream in his throat, wanting to burst out and fill the air with its noise just to have some form of release.

He wanted to scream himself hoarse, but he was awake, and his mind was processing reality more or less like a sane person again, and he was aware of the time, and the place, and who he shared the apartment with…

Charlotte was in his open doorway in the moon-lit hallway watching him as he woke up.

The sight of her with her darkened, bruised face brought a half-asleep shriek out of him despite everything, and then Charlotte looked even more scared. Startled. And he remembered… no, she was not a ghoul or a ghost.

She'd hit her head running from a phantasm. But he could identify with that a bit, couldn't he?

With that thought came a short bark of miserable laughter.

He reached over and turned on the little Ikea lamp on the night table beside his bed and the room was instantly lit with a peach-warm glow.

"Charlie?" He said, still trying to shake the mood and smell of the dream, the sensations and prickly dread. She looked uncertain, was shifting from foot to foot, looked slightly guilty… like maybe she was responsible for the nightmares he'd been having.

He'd seen similar expressions on puppies who were mostly house-broken but then had an accident on the rug.

"Charlie, what's the matter?" He prodded.

"I… I had a nightmare," she said, looking down, scratching the side of her face with her tiny little fingers, fingers her mind had stunted to keep her small, to try and preserve what had been stolen. God, she looked awful. She looked like a child who had been beaten within an inch of her life.

God.

He blinked rapidly and nodded. Patted the side of his bed. She shuffled over and hopped onto his bed. She had done the same when she was scared, before Red John had taken her, so long ago.

"I'm sorry, Charlie. I was sleeping. I… how long were you standing there?"

He checked his bedside clock. 2:30 am. He'd been told to wake her every hour.

Damn it.

She shrugged as a way of answering. She didn't know, or she didn't want to admit she'd been standing in the dark with her fear for a very long time.

"Want to talk about it?"

"My nightmare?" Charlotte clarified.

"Yeah," Jane said.

Charlie shuddered and Jane saw her thoughts go inward. Another shudder as she replayed her dream.

"Yes… and no."

"Might make you feel better?"

"Will it ever go away?" She said into the air, not looking at Jane.

"What, honey?" He watched her carefully. If he could take all her pain and sadness and grief and fear, he would, in a heartbeat. But he could not. He couldn't even process his own stuff.

"Bad thoughts. Scary thoughts. Panic attacks. Nightmares. The... the sadness. All of it…?"

"I don't know, honestly," Jane said softly. He didn't have the strength to lie to her, not convincingly. And she was smart enough and trained enough to see through his BS, anyway. "It will probably get better with time. Most things do get better with time. There was a time when I didn't believe that, myself. But it's true, you know. It's true."

"I dreamed Red John came here, and he had Lisbon, and he made you kill me to save Lisbon…" Charlie started, and her voice hitched and she fell silent again. Jane knew she was terrified to ask if, in that scenario, he would harm her… to save Lisbon. Knew she was thinking it. And Charlie knew that he, her father, knew what her fears were.

He let out a shuddering breath. Jesus…

"That sounds terrifying," Jane said slowly, collecting his own thoughts. His own subconscious had just told him in no uncertain terms that his kid was more damaged and hurting than even he'd initially assessed.

Which made a sick sort of sense. She'd been trained by life to hide as much weakness as possible, to survive.

"You know I would never harm you, right?" He moved slowly to take her into his arms in a hug. She let him, but she felt like a cord of wood.

She was 16 only chronologically, that was becoming more and more clear. Physically, due to malnutrition and chronic stress, she was stunted at a young 11. Emotionally... she was even younger than that.

A small child, really, in every way that truly mattered.

"You wouldn't hurt me... not even to save Lisbon?" Her voice was almost a whisper against his chest, hesistant and fearful.

"I would never hurt you, Charlotte," he said again, resolute.

"Maybe Lisbon would hurt me to save you, though," Charlotte theorized, wheels spinning, testing weaknesses in the fence...

"Lisbon would never hurt you, either." Jane knew this. He knew it intimately. It wasn't even a possibility.

"I would never hurt you, either," Charlotte reassured him, still small and cuddling into his hug. "Or Lisbon. I wouldn't."

As if he'd even considered it.

"I know," Jane said softly and smiled a little. He kissed the top of her head. Her wavy hair was dishevelled and unbrushed, as usual. Her hair smelled like L'oreal kids blueberry smoothie shampoo, a candy-sort-of smell. It suited her.

"Why are people alive, Patrick? Is it just to hurt?"

"I don't think so," Jane said, sotto voce. "I understand why it must feel like that for you."

"Why do you think we're alive, then?" His child's voice was full of grief and need and fear and above all else a pressing need to know. To know the big answers, to know there was some greater purpose to existence, to suffering and pain and loss. "Is there a point to it all, or is it all just random?"

"I…I used to think it was random. Now… I don't know anymore. But I don't think it's just so we can hurt. If it is random, that would mean that the universe is ultimately indifferent, but we're not here just to hurt. And if there is some greater meaning, some divine spiritual purpose... I don't think we're here just to hurt, because if that was the purpose of life, I don't think good and kind people would exist."

"Like Lisbon?" Charlotte asked softly.

"Like Lisbon, and like you," Jane said, smiling against Charlotte's sweaty head.

"Maybe… maybe we are here for lessons. Like… life on Earth is a school for our souls? Maybe I did something bad in a past life, so this life was about teaching me how much pain hurts, so I don't repeat my mistakes?"

"Maybe we're here for lessons, but I don't think you did anything to deserve or justify what you've endured," Jane said softly, and kissed the top of his daughter's head.

"You were having a bad dream, too, I think," Charlotte said, hesitating to voice her observations. Jane nodded. He was sitting up against the padded headboard, now, still cuddling her, like he had when she was so much younger.

"Yeah, I was." No point in denying it.

"You were whimpering in your sleep. I didn't know whether or not to wake you up."

"You can always wake me up if you need to. Or if you think I need to be woken up," Jane said.

"What was your nightmare about?" Charlotte pressed, and her arms around her father tightened a little more. She was trying to give him strength, a sense of caring and solidarity, if Jane was reading her right. Jane sighed.

Thought of his dream and felt familiar chills. He would not be discussing this with his daughter anytime soon.

He didn't even want to think of it, himself.

"I don't really remember. Red John related stuff…" A total dismissal would only come off as obfuscation to Charlotte, and rightly so. She was smart, and she knew how to read body language, how to interpret spacing and pauses in spoken words, inflections and nuances.

"Do you think Red John is in pain?" Her voice sounded so young and small and vulnerable in the late night air, and something about it made his skin prickle with cold goose-flesh again. A little soul trying to make the most of its lot in life, and emotionally unequipped to do so… her openness chilled him. In some ways, she was emotionally little more than a toddler.

She was more of a target than he'd predicted and had really let himself believe, and he knew that for as much as she'd disclosed to him, there were so many more painful fathoms to explore, waiting to be processed and worked through.

And yet, here she was asking about Red John, and his pain, his fate, his state of mind. Like it even mattered, really. Like anything related to that monster's pain mattered.

Jane shifted slightly against the headboard and tightened his hold on his daughter as he let her words sink in, and the potential reasons for the words, what the question itself represented about her emotional state and the damage done to her.

At what point was compassion self-destructive to the compassionate? Feeling compassion for Red John almost felt like self-abuse, to Jane. An emotional sort of self-flagellation, maybe, for the death of her mother or her own perceived crimes?

Maybe.

Because Red John didn't deserve any compassion. Jane was quite sure of that.

But, his daughter did. He forced his voice to sound neutral and steady when he finally spoke, as if they were discussing a philosophical topic that didn't pack any emotional punches and didn't hurt like hell to talk about, and, ultimately, didn't matter.

"I think Red John is dead," Jane said, still a little more forcefully than intended. Easy. Easy. Gentle.

"But… he's not…" Charlotte trailed, knowing what her father thought and too stubborn to stop herself.

Jane shifted in his bed. Didn't know what to say to that, never knew really what to say to those sorts of comments.

There was no good response for this ongoing delusion. He'd considered that maybe Charlotte was correct. Red John was highly manipulative, and even though he didn't like to admit it to himself, Charlotte had spent much more time in close proximity to Red John than he, himself, ever had. She was in a greater position to know how Red John operated. Most of his own experience with Red John was tangential. Her's had been direct.

The psycho had mentored her, for crying out loud. It would be flat-out stupid to completely dismiss her fears.

So… could he still be alive?

The thought made Jane feel unhinged, half-mad with fear and paranoia. And until he had proof, or a sighting himself, or something more than spooky feelings and heart-burn and nightmares… what could he really say to her which wasn't potentially more destructive than therapeutic?

If her fear that Red John was really still alive wasn't grounded in reality, he could help mutate that fear into a life-long obsession if he capitulated now.

And if she was right, and he was being short-sighted and naive?

God help them all, then…

"You didn't know Red John was your brother," Charlotte said softly, as if she had been reading his mind as he reflected.

Jane nodded.

"No," he said pensively, chin resting on the top of her head. "Not consciously."

"How do you forget a brother?" It wasn't anything but a simple question, but Jane felt a new surge of guilt.

It was a perfectly valid question.

How did anyone forget a sibling?

Let alone someone with a genius-level IQ and memory abilities that were formidable enough to exist in only a few thousand people, globally? How did he, Patrick Jane, forget a brother?

He blinked.


So much of his childhood was peppered with black holes of amnesia. He'd known in the back of his mind that such gaps weren't by any means normal. Not for months or years at a time, anyway. But he'd always been too frightened and uneasy to plumb the depths of what those amnesia gaps might mean in practical terms.

He could function.

And function well, at that, without scoping out the depths of his mind and memories. He'd never put much faith in the psychologists and head-shrinkers of the world who believed every traumatic event in a person's life had to be dissected and resurrected and "processed".

If a person could function well and maintain meaningful relationships, what real need was there to dredge up the past? Better to let sleeping dogs lie, sometimes.

He'd sworn by that view of psychology for all of his adult life, and it had allowed him to tap dance his way into the hunting grounds of a sadistic serial killer with impunity.

"I think sometimes when sad or scary things happen," Jane began, choosing his words extra carefully, "some people cope by forgetting. They just… put those memories away and sort of file them way back in their brains, so they don't have to think about them, so it is easier to live in the present, day to day."

"I wish I could do that," Charlotte said glumly, as if Jane was speaking about some fantastic superhero power.

"I think you have done it, to a large extent," Jane said sadly. Charlotte was still, and finally nodded, more an admission that she'd heard him than actually agreed with him.

"Yeah. I mean for all of it, Patrick."

"Yeah," Jane said. "I think you- and most people- remember what you can emotionally handle and what your mind feels you absolutely must remember to protect yourself in the future, and the rest, the nasty details that don't seem to have any practical sort of survival benefit, those get buried so you can function as well as possible in the present."

Charlotte was quiet, processing his words.

"So… if you forgot about Red John, that means your memories of him… from when you were kids, I mean… they were pretty traumatic, then?"

Jane began to nod, then stiffened.

He had a sudden, intense image of a boy standing in front of him, screaming hysterically, reeking of gasoline and blood and sweat.

There was the smell of grass fire and something under it, something rubbery, like car tires. The screaming boy's face was streaked with drying blood and in his hands was an animal's head… a dog's head… a border collie dog's head with the tongue lolling out and the eyes miserably reduced to unseeing marbles.

The head belonged to what had been… Lucky.

Lucky.

His dog, Jane's dog, his little friend. Loyal Lucky.

With the image came an overwhelming sense of grief and horror and acid betrayal, grief so strong it closed up his wind pipe and brought on an asthma attack, and in his memory, now, like a strobe light, he could feel and hear the sound of his own child's voice, screaming wildly and somehow broken, a hysterical wail, painful to even half-remember.


LUCKY!


LUCKY!


LUUUCCKKKKKKKKKY!


His panicked, broken, hysterical child's voice continued to sound in his skull, like a ghost in his head.

He had screamed his dog's name over and over and over and over and over and over.

He hadn't been able to stop.

He hadn't been able to stop screaming that name, his dog's name, hadn't been able to stop and hadn't wanted to stop.

He had screamed even as his airway tightened and his breath began to whistle and his vision seemed to dim and gray out and he went into shock.

He'd screamed himself hoarse, until he could taste blood in his mouth and his temples pounded and his throat felt skinned and raw.

Jane shifted again, pulled one arm away from his daughter and ran an unsteady hand over his face, his day old stubble. A wave of nausea swept over him and for a moment he thought he might vomit, right there in the bed.

He counted to four, waited, gently drew in fresh breath. The nausea was still threatening to overwhelm him, but was a little less intense, just a touch, a little more manageable.

"He killed a dog I had, when I was little… a little black and white dog."

"Lucky," Charlotte said sadly. She had picked the name up somewhere. Jane blinked, eyes full of pain, tried to remember where she could have learned the name from, but the past few weeks rolled over his consciousness in a fog of stress and fight-or-flight hormones, broken by periods of insane panic and surreal sadism. It didn't really matter, anyway.

"Yeah. Lucky."

"Yeah. I would want to forget that too, Patrick," Charlotte said, and there was not an ounce of sarcasm or belittlement in her voice. A dog was a good friend, a loyal and trusting friend. To kill a dog was right up there in Charlotte's mind with killing a child, or a spouse.

Dogs were beautiful, compassionate, loyal and heart-breakingly trusting creatures; the antithesis of Red John.

Jane was no longer tired.

He didn't think he could sleep again tonight.

He had always loved dogs, but after Lucky, had never gotten another dog. Not until he'd allowed Charlotte a dog, not until Dixon… there was something too trusting and loyal and destined-for-tragedy in the patient, honeyed eyes of a dog.

Charlotte was waiting for more to the story.

"You know when I was a kid, I think I told you before… I lived in a Circus lot?"

"Yeah," Charlotte murmured.

"When I was about 10, Red John... his name was Peter… he came to stay with us. I hadn't seen him in years. Had sort of put him out of my mind, made myself believe he was a figment of my imagination, or something like that. But he came and stayed with us. I wasn't told why, he just showed up one day. Anyway… that summer and into the fall… he stayed with us."

Charlotte waited, was still and silent. Her breathing was raspy though, waiting for some new and terrible horror to rear its ugly head in her father's words. There always were new horrors- especially in stories involving Red John.

Red John was more predictable than Stephen King when it came to rolling out the gruesome horror scenes. He seemed to generate nightmares the way most people generated credit card debt.

"I did a lot of tricks in the Circus when I was a kid. And anyway, long story short… we had a neighbor. Not a nice guy, kiddo… what… today would be known as a pedophile…" Jane's words were slow and hard and careful. Sharp as a diamonds. His eyes were glittering as he went through his memories.

"Back then, people just referred to them as perverts or, if they were trying to sound educated, they might call them molesters. But they were the same things then as they are now, and they did the same damage, and they used the same threats to keep their victims silent."

"Oh," Charlotte murmured sadly, stiffening again, and Jane could feel her tremble, just a little. An old, familiar fear and a brutal pain, for both of them.

"Yeah. Anyway… he was… the man…he was… hurting me. And Red John… Peter… he was so angry when he found out, so angry… one night he came to my defense. But he went… too far. Waaaaay too far, and he ended up killing the man. He was only ten, too. He started a fire, after."

"Oh," Charlotte breathed.

"Something in him snapped. Maybe it had snapped a long time before that. But that's what it felt like to me. He killed the man who had been hurting me and started a fire after. Maybe to cover it up, but I always felt the fire was more impulsive than that, not a cover up at all, nothing so sophisticated as an attempt to hide DNA evidence or anything. It was like he had to show the world what snapping felt like, maybe, what he felt like on the inside, and starting a fire was the best way he knew how to do that, but I don't think he thought about it in terms of symbolism. I think it was purely instinctive for him. And then… the memories are very blurry, but he killed my dog after that, after he started the fire."

"Why?" Charlotte breathed, confused. "What did Lucky do?"

"I don't know why, exactly. Anger. Rage. Pain. His pain… or his anger, something in him, it just kept coming out of him. The floodgates were opened. Just like the fire he lit burned out of control, his own emotions burned out of control. He couldn't control them, not then, I don't think. Maybe the dog was the best target he had at the time. The only living thing within striking range that could take his aggression and absorb some of that rage and pain and not be me."

Charlotte was silent, waiting for more. Jane continued, glassy-eyed.

"He hit Lucky in the head with a ball-peen hammer, like the type we used to hammer down the tent pegs. It happened so fast, too fast. By the time I saw the hammer in his hands and saw him approaching the dog and was able to move, my dog was already falling down. I can't even remember if he made any noise, if Lucky did, it happened that fast. Then he hit him again and again, his arm was just flying up and down as he beat him with the hammer, moving like a machine. Blood from Lucky… it splashed on his face, it actually splattered on his face like a mist, that's how hard he beat him. It all happened so incredibly quickly. It was like watching a horror movie on fast forward function, except my own body was stuck in slow motion."

Jane ran a hand over his stubble, pulled on his lip for a moment, lost in memories. Began talking again. Now that he had opened this memory up, it seemed almost impossible to stop the remembering.

"And I think I was probably in shock by then, too, watching everything like I was watching a movie in a drive-in lot, except I could hear my own body screaming and crying and feel my own face crying tears. He…He then cut my dog's head off with a folding hand saw we used to cut wood for the wood furnace. He was screaming hysterically the entire time. Probably louder than I was, even."

Jane looked at Charlotte. She was silent, sombre, waiting for more. He continued.

"He was yelling at the sky, which was almost full dark by then and full of black, roiling smoke and his face was illuminated by fire light and he was still screaming hysterically back behind the freak trailers and the trailer of the man he'd just killed. That entire trailer was up in flames by then and it smelled like gasoline, which must be how it went up as quickly as it did… in my memories the light on his face looks peach and yellow and danced across his face, and his eyes looked almost completely black. But that must have just been a trick of the light, because of course there is no way his eyes could have physically gone completely black. And he kept on screaming…"


(LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO! LOOK WHAT YOU FUCKERS MADE ME DO… LOOK WHAT YOU MOTHERFUCKERS MADE ME DO, A DOG, A DOG, ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?! ARE YOU HAPPY WITH THIS FUCKING SHIT-EATING DOG, ARE YOU, YOU FUCKING BASTARDS?!)


"...and I kept on screaming Lucky's name, and crying, and having an asthma attack. People came… and I think he was taken away again, right then. The fire… sort of was swept under the rug as an accident, as far as I know. Nobody really talked to me about it, either way. Nobody wanted to dig too far into any of that stuff. Not back then. Boys were boys, back then, until they went too far and committed a felony, and then they were usually locked up and the key was thrown away and people went on with their lives as if the kid had never existed in the first place."

Jane sighed deeply. He felt like he had aged ten years in the last ten minutes. His joints seemed to ache. But he wasn't done.

"I saw him when they put him in the back of the police car-" Jane's voice trailed, and he blinked again. Made a wincing sort of face, as if in pain, now.

"I walked up to him, and he was sitting in the back of the police car completely out of his head. I said something like 'Peter, do you know what you've done?' and he looked at me all covered in black soot and his hair sticking up wildly at all angles and blood spray still dripping down his face, my dog's blood still dripping down his face and he smiled at me, this insane smile and said: 'Don't call me Peter, my name's not Peter…' and I asked him what his name was. And he said-"

"My name is Red John," Charlotte said, cutting her father off. Jane blinked. Felt a chill drive through his bones, felt the hairs on his arms and neck bristle and stand.

"Yeah. That's right."

"That's when he became Red John," Charlotte breathed, mesmerized. "That's when they turned him, maybe. Maybe Lucky was a sacrifice."

"What are you talking about?" Jane said carefully, trying to sound as neutral as possible. The voice of a therapist, not a father.

"It doesn't matter," Charlotte said softly. Jane could feel her go inward. She had a piece of the puzzle, only she wasn't sharing it with him.

"If it's important to you, then it matters. Who turned him, Charlotte?"

"You wouldn't believe," Charlotte said in a strangely tired voice.

"I'll believe you believe it," Jane said softly, and winced as he heard his own words.

"That's not the same thing, Patrick. And besides... that's what psychiatrists say to total nutjobs," Charlotte's voice was full of so much obvious teenage indignation that Jane couldn't help but smile.

"Okay," Jane said when it was clear his kid was done with emotional show and tell. He didn't want to argue. He could always cycle back to this at a later time, anyway.

Jane blinked hard, shook his head, tried to clear the charge of the memories away. Looked at Charlotte and offered her what he hoped was a reassuring, paternal smile. It felt garish and shark-like on his own face, but Charlotte seemed to accept it as legitimate.

"Shit," Charlotte exhaled finally, studying his face as if it were the Rosetta stone, each line and pinch of the skin a new clue to the untranslated heiroglyphs of her personal history. "And you didn't remember that growing up?"

"I repressed it for a long time," Jane said numbly. "I think I might have remembered it in nightmares for a long time, but they were the sort of dreams that you forget almost immediately upon awakening, but while you're having them? While you're having them, you know you have dreamed the same thing many times before. Ever had any dreams like that?"

Charlotte nodded.

"I can see why you wouldn't want to remember that. Do you think he killed Lucky instead of you?"

Jane considered this. Nodded. "Yes, I think it's a likely possibility he might have killed me if the dog hadn't been there."

Jane had never let that thought out of his subconscious fully-formed before. His mind had toyed with the idea, but only in half-awake states, before sleep, in his early twenties.

It made a sick sort of sense, a Red John sort of sense to kill a buggered brother.

In Red John's eyes, it would have been like throwing out something soiled, or broken, something that couldn't be fixed and made one disgusted to look at.

Even Lucky's name felt different in that light, destined for tragedy by a sarcastic and sadistic fate. Except he, Patrick, had been the lucky one. Lucky the dog had been the Patrick-effigy, the sacrificial lamb.

"Maybe he was still human, then," Charlotte continued, her voice narrating his visual memories. Jane's stomach was beginning to twist into knots again. It was time to change this subject. Right now.

"I… that's what I remember about him when we were kids. Not much, really, but what I do remember is exceptionally vivid. Of course, memory is largely state-dependent which might explain why people tend to remember past traumatic events when something equally traumatic happens in the present. But… what do you say we talk about something else, now? Or try to get more shut eye tonight?"

"I don't want to go back to sleep tonight, Patrick," Charlotte muttered.

"Okay. That's okay. I'm not going to make you. With your concussion, it might be a good idea to stay up, anyway."

"Yeah," Charlotte mused.

"Do you want to watch Netflix or something?"

"Okay."

"Something funny though, okay? No horror."

"Okay."

"I think I'll pick," Jane added with a sly smile.

"That's probably a good idea," Charlotte said cheekily, not missing a beat, and grinned.

She got out of bed then and walked towards the open doorway carrying one of Jane's pillows in her arms. She stopped at the door, looked back at her father. Studied his face carefully, expression intent, almost worried.

"It's going to be okay, Patrick," she said softly, eyes still scanning his face. Jane felt a knot form in his stomach, a frog in his throat. Finally, he nodded.

"Yeah," he said earnestly, eyes bright. "I know that, Charlie. But do you really believe that?"

She was still for a moment, expression unreadable, then finally nodded.

"I'm going to make it alright." She said, soft as wind through tree leaves.

Then she moved out of the frame of the open doorway, and was gone from view.