Title: Charlotte's Web (Chapter 63)
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:Dear long-time readers; thank you guys for the excellent reviews. I can't sleep right now, because with spring comes pollen and allergens and asthma "episodes" and I can't breathe (well) at present, so since I am already gasping I might as well write, right? It's also possible the gaspiness is anxiety or just over-identifying with fictional characters I have created (I like to do that, create fictional people and worlds which, over time, become more real to me than most "real" people...)
Anyway, I decided to stop lying on the sofa gasping like a goldfish dropped out of its bowl and get up and write. Channel that anxiety, right? Like always, reviews are greatly appreciated.
"Post-Script" Author's Note: I try to find new music all the time to express the different themes and emotions which come up in this story so I can listen to those songs while I am writing. They serve as inspiration and if this story was a painting (or series of paintings), the impact of the songs and their lyrics and melodies would be like an added layer of charcoal shadow or chalk pastel highlights to really bring out the dimensions of the faces, the hands, the buildings, the dark shadows hiding just out of the street-lamp's light... If you think about it, words and stories are like paintings. You can shade certain areas, build them up, wash them over with tinted washes, cross-hatch the shit out of fearful or anxious faces, tint the world of dreams with atrangely antiquated, unnatural pastel hues.
But I think readers can also build up characters in their minds, while reading long works of fiction like this one here. You can sketch the characters, listen to music, try to imagine them in scenarios and conversations not written down in the actual story, listen to music before reading each chapter to get into the right head-space, to enhance the theme of each chapter. If you would like to do that, I am happy to help by suggesting a song at the beginning of each chapter, in the author's note.
The song I recently found which fits these recent chapters very well, in a sad way, to sum up Jane's current emotional state is called "Into the Fire" by a band called Thirteen Senses. The lyrics fit, but also the mood and tone of the song, and I found a video of that song paired with images from a French film called "Sky Fighters" (if you search for "Into the Fire" with "Sky Fighters" on youtube, you'll find it)... it's so strange, those images of jets, paired with the lyrics and the pain in that song... just sums up Jane's mental state right now. It is possible I get overly involved in these characters' inner lives (laughs). -Lex
"All smiles, I know what it takes to fool this town
I'll do it 'til the sun goes down and all through the night time
Oh yeah, oh yeah, I'll tell you what you wanna hear
Leave my sunglasses on while I shed a tear
It's never the right time, yeah, yeah" - "Unstoppable" by Sia
"Come on, come on
Put your hands into the fire
Explain, explain
As I turn, I meet the power
This time, this time
Turning white and senses dying
Pull up, pull up
From one extreme to another" - "Into the Fire" by Thirteen Senses
She lay in her bed, covered in her duvet with the new Pokemon duvet cover from Target, a giant Pillow Pet frog under her head, Dixon resting on top of the covers with his head down on the fabric of Pikachu's face, looking up at his master in the gloom of her bedroom. Her room was a strange scent combination of febreze, cookie-flavoured nicotine fluid vapor, Oreo cookies and old gym socks that had been kicked under the bed and forgotten. Under these seemingly mundane scents was a combination of smells Charlotte wasn't sure were really there, but which she could smell nonetheless. The bitter smell of shame, the acrid, biting smell of night-sweats borne of panic, a sickly sweet nauseating odor that she associated with grief. If Patrick could smell these other-scents, he hadn't commented on them.
It was a relatively new scent combination- at least the normal smells were- but one the teen already associated with her bedroom, here, in this current apartment unit with Patrick, where life was starting to scab over and heal, where some of the horrors of the past were beginning to morph and fade, and new fears were creeping to the surface, long-suppressed fears and phobias that were now almost giddy to break free from her subconscious. Paramount among them was a growing fear of death, dying, dead things.
The internet called the worst of these phobias "thanatophobia", after "Thanatos", the Greek personification of death. "Thanatophobia" was the fear, no... fear was too mild... the terror, really... of one's own inevitable death. For years, Charlotte hadn't been able to consider her own death. She'd been close, to be sure, but hadn't had the space or safety to reflect on death during times of relative peace. Now, she could. And the concept terrified her beyond words. The idea that- no matter what she did, how far she ran, how hard she tried- she would eventually die. Rot. Be burned for cremation, or set up on a concrete slab and drained of dead blood, filled with a poisonous embalming fluid, dead-eyes glued shut, locked in a coffin and thrown into the deep, dark ground. Maybe she would have some of her organs harvested beforehand. The thoughts swirled and pulsated inside her head.
There were so many ways to die, so many terrible ways. The ways were beginning to pile up in her head, like a series of dominoes, ready to fall over. She felt that when those fears began to fall over, the domino chain would take her sanity with it.
There was run-of-the-mill choking. There was cancer, and heart attacks, strokes and seizures, poisoning and drowning, burning alive. Carbon monoxide poisoning. Shootings and stabbings, rapes ending with bloodloss and screams. Autoimmune disorders which could show up out of nowhere and slowly suck the life out of a person. You could be crushed to death in an automobile, or slip off a staircase and break your neck like a dry piece of kindling.
And the end would be the same. The heart would stop and the light would dim from your vision, and you would enter the eternal black, and the eternal cold. The eternal mudpit, where after awhile there was nothing even left of you for the worms to feed on and your molecules sat in the dark, dark, endlessly dark earth and buzzed about without any real thought.
It was sheer terror, a palpable sort of fear which made the girl want to run, want to hide, barter and beg. Nobody could get away from death, though. No genius could outsmart it. It came for everyone, eventually. More skillful and insidious than even Red John.
With the growing fear of death, there were new phobias sprouting up. Fears of novel viruses, of germs and bacteria, strep and MRSA, fear of Lyme disease (internet research seemed to suggest Lyme had been created on Plum Island as a bioweapons experiment and either intentionally or accidentally leaked into the population). One could try and keep the germs at bay by not touching one's face. Washing one's hand- but not with antiseptic soap, because that could cause certain germs to become resistant to antibiotics. There was ebola and marburg viruses which could mutate and develop longer incubation periods over in Africa, to worry about. Blood disorders. A nail puncture into the foot could cause tetanus.
Another relatively recent fear- recent in its expression, if nothing else- was the fear of closed spaces. Elevators and elevator shafts, being in the car with the windows shut, even school classrooms. That fear was growing.
As was the fear of being outside in wide-open spaces, where one couldn't see every angle at once, where a threat could come and take you from behind, creep up on you like a mountain lion.
There was the growing fear that heart palpitations and missed beats might be cardiac diseases. A growing fear of having a stroke. Of dying from fear (apparently, it was possible, but rare).
The fears were growing, and with them, the shortness of breath, and the chest tightness, the fast heart beat, the tunnel vision and cold hands. The fear of insanity.
She kept them from Patrick, but she had caught him a few times giving her a long, thoughtful stare. He hadn't said anything, not of as yet, but it was only a matter of time until he figured out more than she wanted to share with him, before he made his mood. He'd try and psychoanalyze her, or suggest therapy, or something unpleasant and embarassing.
Charlotte shut her eyes and snuggled under her duvet and tried to focus on the more normal smells in the room, the smells she was pretty certain most people could smell. The sock-smell, the vape smell, the smell of old oreos.
These smells of her room were soothing, already strangely familiar and old, and being in her room helped lull her into a relative state of calm.
She had her weighted blanket over her legs and belly, up to her chest, under the covers.
She liked the weighted blanket, but sometimes, if it was spread over her chest, she was reminded of being in the coffin, in the ground, and buried, and choking on her spit and fear and that pressing, endless dark of burial, and the weight of death and decay and endless screams pushing down, down, down like she was being pressed to death in old witch-hunt times and so... some nights the weighted blanket stopped at her belly button. Most nights the weighted blanket stopped at the belly button.
She lay in the dark and watched the shadows beyond the window move on the stucco ceiling, playing with the soft peach light thrown by the small night light Patrick had gotten her, no questions asked, after one particularly bad night of nightmares and terrified shouts and startling at nothing that walked and breathed in the waking world.
She listened to her breathing, now, and wondered about the pounding of her heart. Was it normal? A sign of some undiagnosed-yet-potentially-fatal cardiac condition? Or just plain old anxiety, like Patrick said?
She listened to her breathing, thought about how each breath needed effort, rasped along the airways, how her lungs sometimes felt airless and choked and asthmatic, even though the asthma inhalers she'd been given didn't seem to open the airways. Panic, the doctors said.
Still, she had an inhaler now, just in case... just in case the airlessness became an emergency.
In those moments, when she felt she couldn't suck in any oxygen, when her airway felt as tiny as a pinprick, her imagination supplied her with panic fodder. Images of herself cold and blue-white, lips a cyanotic purple, eyes dilated and beginning to cloud over with death-cataracts, and the airlessness would get, somehow, even worse, until she was up and pacing with bulging eyes, praying in her head, near tears. Usually it went away, after 20 or 30 minutes of this sort of Hell.
These panic attacks were wearing her down. She was afraid not only of the fearful possibilities the panic attacks seemed to whisper in her ear, but also the concept of having a panic attack itself. She'd felt panic before, of course, but usually in response to an external threat.
Without that external threat, the fear somehow was more intense, more neon, hotter... looking anywhere and everywhere for a possible source.
Panic disorder, the internet called it. Without medication and therapy, it tended to get worse and worse and worse.
Great.
But right now was right now, and in this unit of time, right here and right now, in her bed, warm and clean in her PJs freshly laundered and scented with her favorite fabric softener, with her funny, silly dog cuddled up beside her, right now-this-very-instant, she was relatively okay.
She was okay right now, right this moment, and that was all anybody ever had, really.
The moment, the instant, the beating heart of now. Sometimes that heart beat too hard, sometimes the beat was painful. But the past was gone, it was gone... in a way, it was a ghost.
Her younger years were gone and out of existence forever. Her younger years were ghost years, and there was no need to be scared of them, anymore than there was a need to be scared of ghosts.
Patrick didn't believe in ghosts, not the literal versions. She suspected he battled with his own symbolic ghosts.
So she lay in her bed, and cuddled and snuggled with the dog, and watched the light play with the shadows, and felt the sullen throb of her heartbeat which almost always was a bit too fast these days, a bit too hard, like her heart itself wanted to break out of her ribcage and escape its tortured existence.
She wondered about her lungs, again, and the way her skin sometimes felt numb and rubbery, and the way light seemed to make the world seem dream-like and ephemeral, like she was high on marijuana or acid.
The world was fully of scary, overwhelming sensations and thoughts, and just thinking too much, just that act alone, could be a form of torture.
"Stop it, Charlotte. Go to sleep. You are safe and warm. You are safe and warm. You are safe, and wise, and loved. Go to sleep, now. Just rest," she told herself in the gloom of her room, listening to the way her own voice seemed somehow foreign and strange.
Patrick had told her she needed to get grounded.
Stop with the terrifying "what if?" thoughts, stop with the fearful thoughts that normal body sensations were dangerous, and just focus on the solid, the concrete, the ordinary. Netflix and toothpaste and school reports and doing laundry.
The fear had to be taught to sit up and behave. Her fear had gone feral years ago, like a savage, terrified dog, snarling at everything. Out of control. Now it was snarling at her, and she couldn't get away from it, because it was a part of herself.
She had to tame it, that fear, or she would never have a life worth living.
And Patrick said he could help her learn how to tame it, but so far he seemed to be more or less clueless about the scope of the fear. The usual people he'd helped didn't have years of mind control and life-threatening terrors to work through. The usual people he had helped- and sometimes scammed- had only been a bit overweight or worried about a cheating lover or a court settlement. Not exactly the same thing.
But Patrick claimed taming fear worked on the same basic principle as it did for the less extreme cases. Expose the fear. Understand what the real fear was about. Shine a light on the fears that were unreasonable, unlikely, sometimes impossible. Take off their vicious masks and expose them for the scared, feral dogs they were.
Maybe... with enough time... maybe with enough time, it would work. Maybe.
Patrick had gone to get his shower, and she had school in the morning and needed to sleep. Needed to fade away, maybe have a good dream. Time to sleep.
Time to go to sleep.
Go to sleep, Charlotte. Just sleep. Let your body rest. Let your cells rest. Let everything fade away for a little bit...
Yet... the fears kept coming, some specific phobias with garish faces popping into her mind's eye with rotting maggot eyes and clown grins of screaming-meemie nightmares, some disconnected subconscious fears swirling and undulating like an emotional, sensory disconnect... an emotional synesthesia, beyond time and place, but now images were beginning to morph and undulate like fuzzy memories, shifting and morphing and disappearing into swirling fog patterns of turquoise and yellow and gray...
...She was no longer fully awake, but not yet fully asleep. She hovered in the in-between place before the body shut down completely and sleep overtook the sleeper.
The images morphed and faded, shifted, danced, blobs and mists of colour and light... smells little more than passing thoughts but now, second by second, taking on more power and substance, images congealing and growing crisper and cleaner, the light on the grass of her mind a soft silvery starlit phenomenon, small blades of dewy grass in this dream place where night had fallen, where a soft wind was blowing and now came the images, the full scene...
The dream was starting, and some dim, almost non-existent shred of her consciousness knew it was a dream. But the rest of her was fully immersed andf buying the illusion, and it was time to go on a journey. Dreams waited for nobody. You couldn't outrun them, and eventually, everyone had to sleep.
Horrifying, just... just too much.
Why didn't it ever stop?
Colour and light and fear, the pounding of her heart, the twitching of muscles as they paralyzed themselves for R.E.M.
And now it was beginning, like a movie, the opening scenes. Body parts hanging in moonlight, almost beautiful in a strange, sad way. The sight of them made her want to burst into tears.
Images of Patrick and Lisbon and Dixon murdered and yet washed and hung out to dry, limb by horrific limb, on an old-timey clothes-line in the back yard of a farm house in some generic, bucolic country setting straight out of a 1950s childrens book, a place that smelled of lavender and fresh cut grass and hay and field tomatoes, and under all those pleasant, happy smells, there was the smell of blood and excrement and piss and lemony-fear.
Their heads- two human heads and one precious dog head- where in a pile on the ground near the washing and a wicker laundry basket, stacked in a mini pyramid with Dixon's head on the top, his dead tongue hanging over one of Patrick's bloated eyes.
Up above, clouds were growing and shifting across the robin's-egg-blue sky, and the clouds were dark and terrible and tinged with hues of a specific red that had very recently lived inside a vein... and an eerie mucous green full of terrible infection, and in the reddest parts of the clouds?
In the reddest parts of the clouds there were bursts of white, terrible, electrocuting light.
Memory-erasing light.
Sanity-erasing light.
Flash-bulb bursts of light, photography flashes as snuff films were made, God's wrath in the clouds, lightning from a place beyond time and space and love and tears, the electricity of an ECT machine firing into the temporal lobes of an unwilling victim bound to a gurney with cruel straps, mouth stuffed with a rubber mouth guard... the lightning continued to flash out its message.
She didn't know what the message was, but she was wet now, cold and shivery, in this lightning and thundering dreamscape of pain. Shivering and alone.
She'd been shivering and alone, in one way or another, for almost as long as she could remember.
Here, in the dream, was the literal interpretation.
She was standing in the field now, fully-formed and barefoot, in this world which smelled of sweet-peas and tomatoes and sweet, lazy bales of hay and all that terrible butchered death under the surface of normality, and her feet were streaked with blood and black, pungent earth.
"Hellooooo?!" Her dream-voice floated and drifted on the winds of the dream. Nobody responded, but there was another crack of lightning, the delayed bookend of thunder a moment later...
She was small again, not much older than four our five, and wearing a cream coloured sun dress with tiny blue flowers printed on it, an old-timey sun bonnet... an antiquated, impossible version of herself.
She was too young to be this old, old in the spirit, ancient from unrelenting stress. Sixteen was far too young to be this old of spirit.
She was also too old to be this young. This physical newness had worn away years ago, replaced with premature stress lines and a slight tuft of grey at her temples.
Sixteen was far too old to have Pokemon blankets and nightlights and stuffed animals to sleep with.
She was every age but the age she was supposed to be.
This place couldn't be real.
She must be dreaming, surely?
"Helloooooo?!" She called again. Again, there was no response, just the unrelenting storming sky.
Charlotte glanced back at the horrible body parts hanging on the clothes-line, the decapitated heads so neatly stacked on the ground and the dismembered, bloodless, laundered limbs hanging cold and stiff and clean-smelling on the line, but the body parts were gone now.
Now, in their place, where dazzlingly white cotton sheets which looked a soft lavender in the dying light, decorated with garish black smiley faces seeping through the sheets.. .and there was a burst of white from the sky as she realized the change, a flash-bulb burst from the heavens, and the lavender-sheets were white once more and the black smiley-faces were brilliant, freshly-oxygenated red.
Dripping blood on white sheets.
White sheets painted over and over with bloody smiley faces.
She walked over to the sheets, terrified and breathless, but compelled by an inner force stronger than terror, possibly stronger than free will.
She pushed through the fluttering, cotton sheets with the terrible bloody smiley faces, dream-eyes scanning the growing dark of her subconscious.
Red John smiley faces were hanging and flapping and fluttering on clothes-lines for as far as the eye could see.
She kept walking, head down, watching her bare, cold feet as they moved foreward, inching through a world more potent than the waking one, whatever world this was... it was far more potent than real life, more visceral. Maybe this was the real world, afterall. Maybe the waking world was the dream.
This was a world of frozen time, and space, and memory, and fear... and grief. Through the fluttering sheets and into the cold, sharp wind of night and storm and subconscious truths and lurking, nasty truths. Where everything was stark and came at you, no matter how hard you wanted to avoid facing it. Where a sudden shift in thought or feeling changed the entire landscape. This was the real one.
This was the real one.
Just keep moving. The madness and the smiles have to end. They have to.
The darkness couldn't go on forever. Could it?
The scientists claimed it could.
At the outer edges of the universe, the dark and cold would grow and grow and grow, forever, and the stars would eventually lose contact with one another, travel so far apart that not even their light could meet for company. Eternal amnesia of everything and everyone that had made your existence worth anything at all.
Terrifying.
More than terrifying; heartbreaking. Hell was that utter cold, dark loneliness.
She was on the outer edges of the known universe, had been thrown into orbit and shot past the stars- against her will- at the age of almost-six, a psychological cosmonaut, as terrifed as Laika the Russian space dog must have been, drifting farther and farther away from warmth and heat and love.
Every day drifting farther from the memory of her father's laughter and forehead-kisses, every night drifting farther away from the memories of her dead Mommy, the scent of her perfume, the soft safety of her bosom, the gentle slope of her neck adorned with pearls.
Every day, losing more and more of them, slowly, the colour and the details fading out of her young memories.
Every day, the knowledge that she was losing them, and was powerless to stop the loss, or to bring them back.
Those were the thoughts she hadn't been able to express in words. Not at almost-six, not even at almost-seven.
Those were the thoughts that had started the early, hysterical sobbing.
Her father only a vague memory after half a year, even though Red John wore a similar face.
She'd woken less than a full year later, and she couldn't even see her father anymore in her mind's eye, couldn't remember the loving embrace of his hugs, or the playful curve of his grin.
Worse, in a way, than him being dead. Like... he'd never even been.
Replaced by the thing with his face.
That loss of memory had been another kind of death. A few more stars disappearing out of sight, not even their light visible for comfort.
Red John had been the endlessly expanding dark, the endlessly expanding cold. She had drifted in him, lost, consumed by him, lost in him, dying a slow, airless death.
As scared as Laika the space-dog must have been.
He was a darkness and a coldness that could swallow a little child whole. He'd swallowed her whole, and she had tried so hard. Tried so hard to get her space capsule back to earth, through sheer will alone.
Watching the stars move away, farther and farther away, growing smaller and dimmer until they were almost out of sight, the whisper of pinpricks over the horizon. She might never find her way back to the light and the heat and the warmth, because the beast with the human face, the eater of worlds and of sanity and of innocence had gotten her scent, and he'd locked his eyes on her, and opened his endless wolf-mouth and swallowed her whole.
When he wanted to, he could even dislocate his jaw like a snake. A jungle anaconda.
The pain of seeing those stars move away to nothing but a memory of light, now, in the dreamland, the distant stars overlaid over the other images, brought out a fresh cry of grief.
"Just keep moving," she said to herself, outloud, and her voice was that of a small child's again, and upon hearing the sound of that young, gravelly voice she almost burst into tears at the sense of loss of what had been, and what had been stolen. A stabbing, sharp loss, a precious loss... a youth never to be realized, or gotten back.
"Just keep walking," her dream-child-self said again, and she was, indeed, walking forward, through this valley of death. She didn't want to walk anymore. But she was.
"Fear no evil, Charlotte."
The world was a pale purple and silver again, dark and cold and her feet ached and throbbed in the cold, black earth below as she walked. She knew she was short, yet her feet looked to be miles below her, distant objects seen through a telescopic lense, distorted and surreal.
She had to be dreaming.
No... no this was real.
Was this a dream? Strange, that she couldn't make up her mind about that one...
Maybe it didn't even matter, anymore.
What was reality anyway?
Was reality a place where parents beat their children to death and spouses murdered their partners for life insurance? Where children as young as three and four hanged themselves to escape abuse and grown men screwed little girls in foreign countries for a five dollar bill?
Who needed reality?
But what she wouldn't give for a blue sky and white, puffy clouds shaped to look like circus animals, for bright-green grass, soft and pretty as cake icing... and daisies and clover in the fields, wild rabbits and birds, babbling brooks and chipmunks, warmth and peace and a sense of safety...
No sooner had she thought about birds, did she hear the tweet. A melodious little chirp.
In a tree. There was a tree, here, now.
That's how things were, here.
You thought something new. And the new thing... was.
The clothes-lines and their gruesome bleeding sheets had disappeared and the tree was their replacement.
The tree in question was a rather dead-looking tree, ancient, no leaves, a giant burr-hole in the center of the trunk, moist with dead wood and rot... wait? Burr hole?
Was that what the holes in trees were called, burr holes?
That didn't sound right.
Wasn't that also what doctors called the procedure they performed when they trepanned a human skull and drilled a hole through the skull to relieve pressure in the brain?
"Emergency evacuation of extra-axial intracranial hemotomata, when emergency neurological intervention is necessary to preserve brain function and reduce mortality rates associated with severe head trauma."
The voice was soft, and benign, and familiar, yet she couldn't place it.
It lingered and hung in the air like a part of nature, like wind through tree leaves leaving an echo... but this tree had no leaves. So the voice couldn't be the rustling of leaves.
There was another chirp in the direction of the tree, withered and leaf-less and blackened by the wrath of a lightning strike.
Maybe many, many lightning strikes.
"What are the holes in trees called?" Charlotte said to the night and the voice, and she was still four years old and dressed in the sun dress, in the increasingly chaotic and storming night, alone in a field of growing darkness with the dead tree, and that voice, coming from that awful hole.
She wasn't afraid of the voice though. It was as familiar as her own eyes, her own tongue, her own fingerprints.
"It's called a tree hollow." It was the same voice as before, disconnected, floating on the wind, somehow god-like and all-knowing in its confidence. God-like, but personal.
"Why did I think it was called a burr hole?"
"I don't know. I'm not a mind-reader, Charlotte." And there was that tweet, again, that chirp, like the chirp of a ham radio or walkie talkie, some strange, passerine signal code transmitted after each spurt of human words, transmitted on the winds of a dream.
A growing smell of something soft and light, impossible to define or describe, and carried along with this smell was the increasing, lingering tang of ozone riding the air molecules in waves... a growing sense of power, of presence. Of electricity growing and being stored.
As if this entire world was one giant capacitor, maybe.
"Who are you?"
"You know who I am," the voice said softly, determined and confident.
"A tree hollow... is the entire tree hollow?"
"Only part of it. But the hollow isn't really hollow. Look inside."
"I don't want to look inside," little-Charlotte said in a trembling voice.
She suddenly wanted to turn and run, sprint away in the opposite direction, even back into the waves of fluttering, bloody sheets if need be.
But she was frozen to the spot, paralyzed with fear and curiosity, and a strange sense of obligation. This was her duty, her penance.
"Put your hand in the hole." The voice was firm. This was a command.
"Don't make me," little-Charlotte whispered, and she could feel droplets on her cheeks now, salty tear tracks, the soft, dripping sensation of tears pooling on the underside of her curved, baby-fat-cheeks and dripping into the black dream earth. Drip... drip.. drip...
Blood pooled and dripped the same way. She'd seen it pool and roll off enough still bodies to forever associate tears with blood.
Maybe, in the end, they were the same thing.
Tears of the mind, and tears of the body.
"Put your hand in the hole, Charlotte. Running isn't serving you so well," the voice said, and while it's tone wasn't exactly a command, now, it was close enough.
Little-Charlotte reached towards the tree-hollow with a pale, plump hand and knuckles still dimpled with baby fat and pushed her hand into the hollow of the tree in one swift movement.
There was nothing for the first nanosecond, and then there was a shuddersome sensation and movement and something almost like life; wet and oddly warm and sticky, spongy and gummy, and through it... like pushing through a huge, heaving, weeping, living scab... a center full of wriggling, wiggling things she didn't want to see (God, please don't let me see them, please don't let me ever see them), a center filled with serous fluid and pus and the tears of a long-ago child who cried to a God who never seemed to answer or respond, yet a God she couldn't let go of, couldn't turn her back on, couldn't abandon.
A security-blanket-God in a hellish nightmare world.
This wound in the tree, large and deep as it was, should have proved fatal to the tree, no question.
This little tree (it now seemed to be a certain type of tree, distorted by fire and pain.. a weeping willow?) should have long ago died.
But it wasn't dead; it hadn't died.
The wound in the trunk, the hollow, hadn't healed, though, and was very old.
It festered and pulsed with infection and buried memories and a primordial terror.
The terror in the tree was of the same species that had served as inspiration to Edgar Allen Poe, and H.P. Lovecraft, and Edvard Munch when he had painted "The Scream".
It was as old as the sun and the waves and the clouds, a living darkness, a shadowed mirror.
Charlotte pulled her hand out of the tree in a hurry, and now it was glistening and black-wet in the dim moonlight.
There was another burst of lightning, then, another bright flash of a synapse being crossed by the energy of one of God's neurons, speaking to one to another...
All thought was a series of electrical charges, pulses of energy, the morse code language of the universe, of consciousness, of decisions, of good and ultimate evil.
And in that sudden flash of terrible daylight, her hand was wet with bright, red blood, and with the revelation, in her head, was the sound of a terrible, ancient screaming. The scream of every victim of war, of every butchered animal, of every gasping plague victim, and she began to cry in earnest for the sins of her life.
A hysterical child was wailing inside of her, wailing, keening in agony, growing stronger, hysterical screaming reverbating between her ears and in her brain and mind and soul like an old turntable speaker with the bass turned to the max.
Screaming and pounding, on and on... the wailing of a soul in Hell. The tears were coming harder now.
She screamed where she stood and fell to the ground and rubbed the hand into the black earth, trying to wipe off the hideous red of her sins, frantic now.
Telling the mud and the ground and the blood and the tree and even that bird-voice how sorry she was, how incredibly sorry for her part in what had happened, for the pain she had caused, oh God, she was sorry, and the guilt over it was stronger than anything physical the body could endure.
She rubbed her hand on the ground frantically, wailing, crying, pleading, confessing her sorrow...
But the blood wouldn't come out.
Her hand was stained red, her right hand, a worse branding than any scarlet letter in any silly Victorian novel. Her red letter was infused in her cells, in her blood... she had killed.
She had killed and had, in so doing, become more or less the same as her torturer.
This was her torment, her penance, her ultimate reality. She deserved every ounce of agony. She deserved every lick of Hellfire that surely awaited.
She had murdered.
And... that blood, that reality, could never be washed away.
It was a part of her in every cell of her body. It was said the DNA of a person remembered all events that happened to them, on some level, in the DNA code. Some of these events were powerful enough to trigger epigenetic changes, to alter DNA, the apparent, unfailing physical structure of the physical human organism... alter it, and make it something new.
A rebirth made possible through blood and stress and pain and madness.
This blood would never come out. This stain would never come out.
Each scarlet drop was fused with space and time, stitched into the fabric of the universe, forever and ever, for all time, for all ages...
Little-Charlotte knelt on the cold, black earth in the darkening night air in a field possible only in dreams and nightmares, and she wept bitterly.
The storm clouds continued to pass overhead, growling and building one upon the other, mutating and metastasizing across the navy-black expanse of sky.
From somewhere far off, a blood-red moon grinned down at the earth and the weeping, tormented child kneeling on the dirt.
The moon gazed down with heady indifference, through a veil of thin filament of cloud cover.
And the rain began.
Warmer than expected, thick and hitting the dirt and the child alike with almost-painful force.
Charlotte opened her weeping eyes and looked down at her exposed arms and hands, the scuffed, black knobs of her knees burrowed into the earth.
The rain wasn't water, not from these clouds.
It was blood.
Of course.
Her vision was turning paint-red.
She was soaking in a warm, sickening storm of raining blood and the tree stood before her, the knot-hole opening now as the blood continued to fall, the hole growing and undulating slightly, a trick of the light, surely.
Surely.
Except.. a beak was starting to peck its way through the gelatinous membrane over the knot-hole, a chick breaking out of a sylvan shell, the beak kept coming, pecking away.
Now came the head of the animal, streaked with small clumps of gore and the red pelting of bloody rain glazing the soft feathers in a red wash.
Little-Charlotte watched, horrified. Fascinated.
A giant bird was pecking it's way out of the hollow in the tree.
Finally the head was completely exposed to the night, and after that, the body, each wet, sticky wing flapping and pressing and shifting through blackened bark, the orange tufts of feathers on the belly were dark red with blood.
It was being born.
Finally the bird was free, and standing on the ground, and watching her.
Watching her with those eternal, wise, slightly-amused eyes.
Buzz.
His name came to her, then, and she remembered him. As quickly as a flash of lightning, it all came back.
She had known him longer than she had known herself, it felt like sometimes, in places such as these.
He was older than she was, by far, and he had been with her from the start of every hurting second.
"Is this a dream?" Little Charlotte asked, staring into the bird's newly-hatched face.
He opened and closed his eyes quickly, paper-thin eyelids fluttering with the fragile elegance only song birds and butterflies and creatures not long for real-life seemed capable of manifesting, head turning left, then right, feathers pasted to his body with the blood.
He was regal, and he was poised, but even so, he was shivering in the night. A newborn.
Once again, a newborn.
"Why ask that, when you don't have the first clue what a dream even is?" That was Buzz, all right, answering questions with more, impossible, questions.
How many times had he been born, now?
"I'm so tired. I just want all of this to be over," Little-Charlotte told the Western Bluebird. Or was he a Mountain Bluebird? She wasn't sure any more. She'd thought she'd known at one point, but sometimes, his form seemed to shift slightly. Undulate.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Charlotte, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," Buzz said, staring at her, and in the dark of this endless-seeming night, there was a poignant compassion in his eyes. They shone with a special inner light, impossible to duplicate, or even describe.
Light more real than light. Form more real than form, so it reserved itself for the land of dreams.
"What does that mean, what you just said?"
"I'm a western bluebird. I'm a mountain bluebird, too. I am also not a bluebird, at all. I am both a figment of your imagination, and something more real than you have words to describe. I am the empty space in your atoms. I am the dark matter in your universe. I am the permanence in your fleeting moments, the waning glint of light on the waves of the Pacific, the moments that sustain you during the crucial times, the nanoseconds of peace between despair and your concept of hope."
"So you're God, then?" Little-Charlotte asked.
Buzz looked at her with amusement. He didn't have to shake his head for her to know he didn't consider himself a God.
His eyes were shining, darkly, at her, but she felt no fear.
His aura was a velvet black and she wanted to sink into the peace of it, and just cease. Cease in that velvet black, where the real peace was.
"Are you what Jung would call my shadow self?"
Buzz turned his head to the side, into the pelting night rain, and as Charlotte watched, the blood stopped being red and became translucent. The red in his feathers and on her head and hands and arms began to fall away, streaming away in pink rivulets, bleeding out of both of them in the new downpour.
"I'm not your shadow self," the bird said finally, and tweeted again, and something in his eyes seemed somehow more amused than he had been when she'd asked if he was God.
It was hard to tell, sometimes, what Buzz felt emotionally, because bird faces weren't expressive in the same ways human faces were, or even dog faces... and yet, she knew, she knew from his eyes.
His eyes held every emotion she could think of, and some she couldn't begin to imagine.
"Do you understand, yet, little Charlie? Does the blood in the tree-hollow help you? Does the bloody rain and the lightning and the wind and the storm help you? And the new, fresh rain washing it all away?"
"I don't know. That feels too easy, that symbolism, taken at face value."
"Symbolism can never be taken at face value, silly child," Buzz chirped. He turned his head, watching her, waiting for her next words.
"It still feels too easy," Charlotte repeated.
"It's not easy at all."
"What do you mean?" Little-Charlotte thought, and she was quite certain she didn't move her lips. But Buzz responded just the same.
"He's still watching you, you know. Look past the tree, to the tall, dry grass. What do you see, there?"
Charlotte turned her head away from her oldest of friends and scanned the horizon.
Her line of sight moved past the blackened form of the bleeding, crying tree so horribly disfigured by lightning, roving over the black earth and the first sprouts of new grass, deeper and deeper over the pitch-black field, to where the grass became suddenly taller and thicker.
The grass continued to grow, larger and taller, until it looked, on the very outskirts of the field, more like bamboo stalks than anything else.
A jungle scene.
On the outskirts of the farm, dark and dry and full of heat and musk-smell and hunger. There was a low growl coming from the tall, dry grasses, and looking faster now, eyes darting with growing panic, she caught them, at the last moment before the panic dipped into loss of control.
Red and glowing, the flash of carnivorous animal eyes, red and glowing like twin blood moons hidden in the tall blades of grass, eager and hungry and intently looking at her as she looked at... Him.
The growling noise became louder, growing and growing, rising in pitch until it took on the tones and eerie desperation of a furious mountain lion.
She woke up yelling, sweating, clutching at her sheets.
Dixon was immediately nuzzling her, licking her hands and face, eager to comfort his master in her time of such obvious need.
She pushed the dog off her lap and breathed hard, shut her eyes and squeezed them tight, rocking a little in her bed.
"You're okay, Charlotte," she told herself, and began to notice, in growing increments, that the blankets beneath her were wet.
She grimaced and pushed the duvet off, then the weighted blanket, and felt the sheets, the mattress. Not piss, at least. Just sweat. Fear sweat.
She took in a deep breath and held it, looked around the soft orange gloom of her bedroom at night. Orienting herself again. She was safe. Relatively safe, anyway.
This was her room, and these objects- the dresser, the desk, the sliding doors of the closet, the rock posters on the walls, the hand-drawn charcoal drawings pinned up on the cork board, the little colourful cartoon figures and action figures lined up like toy battalions on the wall shelves... all of this was her new reality. And this was okay.
She could live with this. She was okay.
She was in her room, in her bed, and the horrible images and the reality she'd just known were only dream images. Not real.
She was safe. She continued to rock, slightly, and felt her heart begin to slow down, felt less pressure in her ears and throat and head. And heart.
Just calm down.
Just calm down.
You've been through a lot worse than this before, even as far as bad dreams go...
She considered the nightmare, and the noises she must have made coming out of it, and craned her head, listening for apartment noises.
She couldn't hear any sounds which indicated she had woken Patrick with her nightmare.
That was good.
She didn't feel like explaining that dream, not right now, not with school in the morning and not with all the strain and pain she could see in Patrick's eyes as he increasingly came to terms with the totality of her psychological damage.
He had enough to deal with.
She got up out of bed, shivering without her blankets, cold and damp from fear-sweat, golden waves of hair stuck to her forehead and cheeks with the sweat, and went to her clothes dresser.
She fished out a new pair of pajama bottoms and a generic Hanes sweater, stripped out of the sweaty pajamas, and got dressed in the new clothes.
They smelled like Fleecy Fresh Air dryer sheets, a smell that had nothing at all to do with fresh air, and yet the smell was soothing. It was an every-day sort of smell, a smell for common Americans who ate Jif peanut butter and watched football and ate Nachos and shopped at Petsmart.
Already, she was feeling warmer.
She walked slowly to her door, tugged it open as quietly as possible, and wandered down the hall to the bathroom.
She peed, washed her hands, stared at her pale face and her flushed cheeks and her lip, which was swollen and leaking light red fluid. She'd bitten her tongue or cheek or something in her sleep, and with the realization of the injury, the pain came, a deep, throbbing red pulse of agony in her mouth.
Fuck.
She wandered back to her room and crawled back into bed.
Reached over and hugged her dog, patted his thick, square head, his muscular back, kissed him in the slight hollow indented area between his gentle brown eyes.
"You're such a good soul, Dixon. I don't think most people realize how conscious non-human animals are, and how basically good they are. They take you guys for granted," Charlotte told the dog, and kissed him again, between the watchful, warm eyes.
She could smell him; his warm, familiar doggy smell- and while most people wouldn't have found that smell particularly enticing- to Charlotte it was suddenly as pleasing and intoxicating as the finest Parisian perfume.
She picked up one of her dog's large front paws, rubbed the black, calloused paw-pad and held the little doggy foot up to her lips , her nose. Smelling his foot, his paw-pad, rubbing her lip on his overgrown toenails.
He was real. A real being.
He was here, watching her, guarding her.
He would never hurt her.
He was a friend she trusted more than herself.
His foot smelled like corn chips. So funny.
Charlotte kissed the paw-pad, gently put the paw back on the blankets, pulled the duvet up over her legs and stomach, up to mid-chest.
Dixon sat up and offered his master the paw again.
"No, Dixie, not shake a paw. You're a good boy, though." Her voice was full of laughter.
The dog's mouth opened and his tongue rolled out, his version of a smile. She sat up and hugged him again.
"Never change, okay, Dixie? I am sorry if I scared you, boy."
He licked her cheek at that, her lip, the swollen area with the traces of new blood.
"Thank you, Dixie. I have to go back to sleep now, buddy. School in the morning. Wish me good dreams. I hope you have good dreams, too."
Dixon was still smiling, but at the word "sleep" he lay down on the bed, and rested his head on his front paws.
"Goodnight, Dixie," she told the dog and he looked at her with that strong, pure canine love dogs were so well-known for expressing, opened his mouth and yawned, then nuzzled closer to her and began to lick the hand creeping up from under the covers.
"I love you too," she told the dog, not quite ready to go back to sleep just yet, but his eyes were already closed. She watched him sleep, a deep, gentle love sweeping over her, almost drug-like. God, she loved this dog so much. Good old Dixie.
I wonder if he will look like this when he is dead? So still, with the eyes closed like that? And how badly will that loss hurt, do you think?
The thought came to her unbidden, startled her out of the slow, easy, dreamy sense of love and she startled. Dixon immediately opened his eyes and looked up at her, concerned all over again.
"It's okay, Dixie-boy. Go back to sleep. Your Mommy is just being a freak tonight, is all."
He lay watching her, his head down on her blankets once again, eyes moving from left to right and back again, scanning her face with canine intensity, looking for whatever was bothering his beloved Charlotte, so he could chase it away, or kill it.
If only all problems were so easy.
"Shh, sweet boy. Go to sleep. I am sorry I scared you," Charlotte told the dog, and turned on her side. Squeezed her eyes shut. No more crazy, scary thoughts.
No more panic attacks, and troubled Patricks mumbling about monsters in their sleep, and fear over shadows moving beyond the soft orange hues thrown by street lamps.
No more blinding panic, heart-beating-in-the-throat, no-breath-in-the-lungs terror, where the legs felt rubbery and weak and bloodless and yet... you couldn't stop running, had to keep running and running and running until the muscles gave out and you fell into a heap and skinned your knees. No more. Just... no more.
Please God.
She couldn't take any more.
She got up at half past five, unable to sleep deeply, muscles burning and aching from lactic acid build-up. She took Dixon out for a pee, and the light was soft and peach as the sun came up to greet the day. She scanned the scenery intently, looking for threats, but there was nobody out, just cars moving on the highway in the distance, birds in the trees, singing about their birdie business with crisp, clean joy.
She came back up to the apartment with Dixon, punched in the alarm code (apparently Patrick had forgotten to set the night code, which only spoke to his level of fatigue), got a box of Cookie Crisp out of the cabinet Patrick had designated for her cereal needs, and ate a bowl of cereal while Dixon wolfed down his Purina puppy chow and then loudly slurped water out of his bowl.
She gave the dog a dentastix when she was done with her cereal, rinsed the bowl and spoon in the sink, then put both in the dishwasher. She slapped together a quick school lunch- peanut butter and jelly, a soda and a banana- looked through her school books and zipped up her backpack.
Double-checked and then triple-checked that she hadn't forgotten anything.
She was showered, dressed and watching TV on her tablet at the kitchen table by the time Patrick got up at quarter to 7.
She alternated between using her vape for nicotine and sucking on her asthma inhaler to help open up her consticted lungs.
Patrick came into the kitchen, still in his PJs, put the kettle on the stove for his morning tea, grabbed a bagel out of the cupboard and slathered on a decent amount of cream cheese. He sat down at the table and studied his daughter, eyebrows raised just a little.
"You might want to rethink your strategy, there, kiddo," he said pleasantly, still sleepy. His hair was full on bed-head and his eyes were still sleep-buggy.
Charlotte grinned at the sight of him. Red John had never looked half as human.
"Huh?"
"The asthma inhaler alternating with the nicotine vape. If you really do have asthma, the vape isn't going to help. If you don't, the steroids in the asthma medication are going to make your anxiety worse. Actually, same for the nicotine."
"It's low dose nicotine. Only 6 milligrams," Charlotte dismissed, popping the vape back in her mouth, sucking on it. It was soothing. Oral fixation.
Patrick had given her the full run-down on oral fixation and the emotional maturity level associated with that level of functioning. Trauma stunted emotional development, made people seek comfort and safety. Subconsciously, that was represented as the mother's tit.
There was a good reason, Patrick had told her sagely, why so many folks abused in childhood who never got the love or support they needed grew up to be chain-smokers, alcoholics constantly sucking on bottles or crack addicts sucking on their little, glass crack-pipes. It all went back to that need for comfort, for the nipple. Charlotte had made a face when he'd said that, had felt her cheeks heat up. He'd grinned at her, ever the mischeivous one.
Most folks with Irish blood in them had playful personalities to some extent. Patrick Jane, by contrast, had inherited full-on Leprechaun genes.
"What about intravenous drug users?"
"Most of them start with oral substances and learn along the way that intravenous injections deliver their drug of choice to their endrocrine systems even faster than inhalation. Don't get me wrong. The drug itself- the release of feel-good endorphins and dopamine- also have their parts to play. But there is also the subconscious desire to nurse again, to be held and cuddled and made safe and taken care of. More people than you'd ever guess have deeply rooted subconscious urges to return to the subconsciously percieved safety of infancy. And you can find ways of getting that comfort without inhaling nicotine vapor... which will only compound your anxiety issues."
Charlotte had rolled her eyes.
"Sometimes a cigar, Patrick, is just a cigar. Besides, low-dose nicotine is a documented nootropic."
Patrick had grinned like the cheshire cat at that one, delighted that she knew enough about Freud to be able to paraphrase the man. Delighted that she knew- at a battered and bruised 16 years of age- what a nootropic was.
Now, jitterbugging in her chair, he watched her with his intelligent, penetrating eyes.
"You didn't sleep last night, did you?"
"I slept," Charlotte said, and sucked another lungful of nicotine vapor.
"Really? Because the black bags under your eyes tell a different story."
"I didn't sleep well," Charlotte clarified.
"Want to talk about it?" Some of the glee faded out of his voice and was replaced with objective neutrality, the careful cadence of a good therapist. Patrick was in counsellor mode, now.
Charlotte stiffened in her chair, made a face. She wasn't awake enough to consent to being psychoanalyzed.
"Not really," she said.
"Might help to talk about it," Patrick pressed.
"Not before school. School makes me anxious enough."
"About school... any of that anxiety decreasing at all? Are the meds helping at all?"
Charlotte shrugged.
"I don't like being confined anywhere. Feels like a trap."
Patrick nodded. "Makes perfect sense."
"I was researching medicinal marijuana," Charlotte said suddenly, as if the idea had just come to her. "Apparently some strains of pot can help with PTSD and anxiety disorders and-"
"No. That's a horrible idea," Patrick said, cutting her off, holding up a hand for emphasis.
"But if it helps?"
"With your brain chemistry you're more likely to have a series of massive panic attacks. And the panic you're already dealing with will be... worse. Trust me on that one."
"But can't we at least look into it?" Charlotte pushed. Patrick sighed.
"Let's give the medication a few weeks to work before we decide it's useless allopathic garbage, okay?"
Charlotte shrugged. Exhaled a heavy breath. God, her lungs felt tight again. Fuck.
Fuckity fuck fuck.
"I think we need to air the apartment out," she told her father, sucking in another deep breath. "I don't think we have enough oxygen in here."
"We'll open the windows later, after school. Okay?"
"Yeah," she exhaled. Her chest felt like there were a series of elastic bands around them, now, squeezing. Around her lungs. Around her heart. Anxiety, Patrick and the doctors had said. Nothing to worry about. Limit caffeine and nicotine usage, do deep breathing exercises, get enough exercise, eat healthily, try to have a schedule. Focus on how safe you are. Objectively.
Bullshit.
Patrick wandered off then to get ready for work. He was back 15 minutes later, dressed in one of his ubiquitous three-piece suits, carrying a briefcase, spiffy as a new penny.
"What's that?" Charlotte asked, gesturng the briefcase. She already had a good idea that at least some of the contents were the info on Red John and his past her father had collected the day before.
"Stuff for a case I am working on," Patrick said unhelpfully.
"Gee. And here I thought it was full of unmarked bills you ripped off from your last bank heist job with Lisbon. Seriously. What's in the briefcase, Dad?"
"Stuff for the CBI. Paperwork. Boring stuff," Patrick said with something that was almost glee, and Charlotte knew he was lying.
"Thanks for the clarification," the teenager said. Patrick grinned at her. And then it was time for another day, pretending to be a "normal" teenage nutcase. Pretending to be calm when she felt like the walls were closing in, when the panic pressed so hard she wanted to scream.
Charlotte stared out the window of Patrick's car as he drove her to school. Lost in dream images, lost in pensive thoughts. Patrick hugged her when he dropped her off in the school yard, pulled her into his arms when she went tense like a cord of wood at the thought of school and the anxiety that would accompany sitting at her desk and trying to focus, kissed the top of her golden head softly.
"Have a good day at school, kiddo. Learn a lot! And remember... panic is just panic. Not dangeorus. Just scary feelings. And you can call me anytime you need to. No questions asked. You feel bad? Then call me."
"Yeah, yeah," Charlotte groused back, but she was smiling, too. It felt nice, his love. His concern. He cared, and that was good. But she couldn't show how much she liked it, because... because? She didn't know why exactly, just knew that acting tough was a good way to be in this life.
Besides, her father already knew she delighted in his soft, paternal side. He patted her on the shoulder, then, as if reading her mind, studied her tense face, smiled what he hoped was an encouraging Jane-smile.
Jane waved, got back in the driver's side of the car, and was off. This was the new pattern of her life. Breakfast, school drop-off, school, lunch, more school, home, homework, chores, TV (or internet, or drawing, or reading), bed. Extra stuff on the weekends. It was strangely boring, after so many years of adrenaline and terror.
Boring, that was, when the panic attacks weren't in the driver's seat.
Charlotte walked into the school building, went to her homeroom, put her backpack in her locker and sat down at her desk. So far, so good. The other kids were beginning to wander into the class, now.
Just do one thing at a time. Baby steps, her Dad had said, quoting the movie "What about Bob?" with Bill Murray.
"Baby steps to four oh clock..." Charlotte said, now, under her breath. A boy sitting across from her shot her a mocking grin, twirled one finger around his ear to indicate he thought she was bonkers.
She ignored the little brat.
The bell went at 8:30 am, and the room was full almost immediately; buzzing voices, the overhead flourescents on and humming, the squeaks of shoe soles on the linoleum and books opening, backpacks zipping and unzipping, pencil sharpeners, coughs.
They were going to be learning about earthquakes today in science class, writing essays on their favorite material possessions, working on their book reports, doing a variety of math from fractions to algebra.
Baby steps to four oh clock.
Charlotte opened her Science Year 8 textbook, flipped through the pages until she got to chapter 6 and was greeted with drawings of tectonic plates having temper tantrums and causing mayhem in the form of earthquakes. She waited until the kids settled down before trying to read.
Images from her dream kept coming to her, though, scattered pieces, fragments. The little girl in the sun bonnet, the bleeding sky, the bluebird breaking its way out of the tree, body parts on the clothes-line.
The smell of blood and grass and hay and that eerie pair of blood moon eyes staring at her from behind the tall grasses.
By lunch she was shaking with adrenaline, having sucked on the asthma inhaler a good three times as often as prescribed, eyes darting over the pages of her book, brain throbbing with a building headache. She'd asked to have a break, and her aide had taken her for a slow walk around the school grounds, told her to breathe. That hadn't helped much, but had kept the panic from spiking into something uncontrollable.
Now: Mrs. Brannen said something about them doing science projects in the upcoming 2 months. For a special-needs science fair. She asked for ideas and went through a long list of bullshit answers, some bullshit because they were flat-out impossible (build a spaceship), some bullshit because the student involved was a slacker and lacked the ability to do the work (build a tesla coil), some bullshit because they had been done ad nauseum (the ever popular Papier-mâché vinegar-and-baking soda volcano).
"Charlotte?"
Mrs. Brannen had been calling her and she'd been zoned out again. She straightened up in her chair, looked up, made something approaching eye contact.
"Yes?"
"Do you have any idea what you'd like to do for the science fair project?"
She thought of her dreams. Dreams weren't science, though. She didn't want to do some rinky-dink stupid project, and she couldn't think of anything new and exciting within her price range.
"I can't think of anything," she finally said. Mrs. Brannen motioned to Dixon, sitting below her desk.
"You like to spend time with Dixon. Why don't you do a project on canine intelligence?"
"I only have the one dog," Charlotte said with a smirk. "So... no control group. Or if Dixon is the control, no experiments. Either way, not much foray into the scientific method with that idea."
Mrs. Brannen sighed. She liked the intelligent kids, but sometimes they were above her pay-grade, especially when they unleashed the sarcasm. "Well, I'd like you to come up with something by the end of the day, okay? Don't overthink this."
"Don't overthink science?" Charlotte clarified, trying to sound earnest.
"Come up with something you can do for the science fair. You're not angling for a nobel prize, here, just an eighth grade science fair project."
Charlotte nodded. Felt like saying something sarcastic again. Hell, Patrick was sarcastic night and day, when it suited him, and he got by fine. Instead, she looked back down at her notebook, began to doodle pictures of Dixon's goofy face, eyes buggy, tongue sticking out, drool pooling around his oversized cartoon paws.
By the end of the day, she still had no ideas for the stupid science fair.
Jane lay on his sofa at the CBI. He'd interviewed three people involved in a current case, played his usual head-games, had engaged in a fair amount of lighthearted verbal banter with Lisbon, made several pots of herbal tea and finished most of it. He felt groggy and a bit moody. His kid wasn't sleeping well, and the information he'd collected about Red John's past niggled at him like a poison ivy rash.
Around noon he phoned the military base where some of the alleged Red John experiment videos were supposed to be housed. He pretended to be a military officer, but was off his game. Charlotte wasn't the only one sleeping poorly. Lisbon had Van Pelt disconnect the call before Jane could thoroughly screw himself over and burn that bridge.
"You sleeping?" She said to him when he went to the break room to pace.
"Meh," he said, and shrugged his shoulders. "Are you?"
"A little, yes. Modern day pharmaceuticals do have their uses, Jane."
"Spare me," Jane said, and dropped coins into one of the vending machines, selected an apple that didn't look too gnarly, rubbed it on the front of his suit vest and took a loud bite.
"I can have Van Pelt try to get around their security, but if the facility is as high-level as we were led to believe, we might never get a look at those tapes. And... it might not matter, anyway, Jane. Just knowing what he went though explains a lot."
"I need to see those tapes. I need to know exactly who did what, and when. And I need to make it right, if I can. Expose that program, or shut it down. Something."
"Some things you can't make right, Jane," Lisbon said. She reached over, rubbed the material of his suit sleeve, offered him a small smile as a peace offering. Jane nodded, but remained brooding.
"I think Charlotte's paranoia is rubbing off on me," Jane said as Lisbon was about to leave the break-room.
"Oh?"
"She has me jumping at shadows. Questioning everything I used to believe. Well, not everything. A lot of somethings, though, big somethings. I feel like warmed-over doggy-doo-doo, Lisbon."
"Thanks for the visual," Lisbon said ruefully.
"She's so wound up. Gasping, jumping at everything. It can't go on forever."
"The anxiety?"
"Yeah. I think she's heading for a breakdown."
Lisbon considered this. "She has you. She's not alone."
Jane sighed deeply. "Yeah."
"She's a tough kid, too."
"Tough only gets you so far. Whacked-out brain chemistry doesn't care how tough you are. Everyone has their limit."
Lisbon nodded, expression sad.
"How's the medication going?" Lisbon asked. Jane shrugged.
"Not much change yet. We'll see. Or... we won't."
"it usually takes a few weeks to see any change," Lisbon said helpfully. Jane nodded. He already knew that.
"I feel like I want to jump out of my skin," he said softly.
Lisbon nodded. She was starting to develop a personal understanding of that sensation, too.
Some days she wanted to go home, just get into the shower, remove her brain and wash it so she could feel clean again. Doubly-so when it came to what they'd learned about Red John, about the experiments, the state-sanctioned torture.
It shook up the foundations of her belief system, her sense of basic safety. Not a nice feeling. To call such a sensation destabilizing was a profound understatement.
"One day at a time, right? I mean, that's what you're always telling Charlotte."
Jane sighed loudly. Looked at his hands, at what was left of his GMO-apple.
"Yeah. It occurs to me, now, that my advice is not nearly as helpful as I've always assumed it would be, not when you're stuck in this mire of anxiety and general uneasiness that pervade every waking thought and-"
"Jane, you're catastrophizing. Take a breath."
Jane cracked a smile at that. "Yeah. Sorry." He ducked his head a little.
"Charlotte will be okay. You will be okay. We'll learn more about the program Red John was in. Or we won't. It won't change who or what he was. It won't undo the past. Ultimately it won't change anything in your personal life, or in Charlotte's. You both have to go on from here, no matter what you find out."
Another sigh from Jane.
"Yeah. But if he was made, Lisbon... if he was crafted. Some sort of... weapon. That would change things. That would also mean we have an ongoing threat to deal with."
"We've always had those threats to deal with, Jane. We've always had psychopaths messing around with innocent people, unleashing their terrible visions of 'progress' on an unsuspecting populace."
"But this is personal," Jane breathed out.
"You wonder what it would have done to you, don't you?" Lisbon said softly. Jane went very still. Studied the apple core. He finally nodded.
"If you'd been in Red John's place, in that... 'program'. If you would have... become what he became?"
Jane didn't speak, but nodded again, just the barest shift of his head. Lisbon sighed.
"I can see why that would make sleep difficult."
Jane nodded a third time. His tongue felt huge and suffocating in his mouth.
"Almost every serial killer we uncover and put away has some horrible past, Jane, something that split their mind in two, or chewed it up and spit it out. Some trauma or series of traumas which shape and distort who they might otherwise have become. They're still, ultimately, responsible for their actions," Lisbon said in that same, soft tone of voice, and fingered the gold cross necklace around her neck.
"That's just it, Lisbon. At what point does trauma- especially intentionally, government-induced traumatic mind-control- minimize or even erase personal responsibility? Surely, there must be a point where a victim is no longer morally accountable? If not legally?"
"Jane, these are philosophical questions. I'm a cop. You're a mentalist. We find the bad guys- bad for whatever reason- and we stop them. That's what we do. You'll make yourself sick chasing impossible questions."
Jane hunched his shoulders.
"For what it's worth, I don't think your brother was born evil. Why he became what he became, the ultimate evil behind that program, all of it? I don't have those answers. But if you're wondering if there is something inherently flawed in your blood or your genetics, Jane... I don't think so."
"Even more reason to find the bastards responsible for this program, then, and stop them, or expose them." Jane picked up the remainder of the apple, pitched it into the nearest trash bin.
"And if that's impossible? If this abuse is taking place too high up the ladder for us to make a dent in it, what then?" Lisbon studied her friend, the determined set of his jaw, the way his eyes blazed with anger and need.
"It sounds like you just want to accept that it's beyond us, Lisbon."
"It's not that at all. It's... you have to face the possibility that we can't touch this one. Because I know what you get like, if this becomes your next driving mission? You'll spend your life chasing this, to the point of obsession, trying to right a wrong that's not your responsibility to fix, and you have a daughter who needs you, who is here, now, in your life. And before you say it... yes, Red John is dead. You know he is."
Jane nodded. "It's for her that I want to uncover this, expose these people."
Lisbon sighed. "Jane, I know. But you can't do everything. Just... remember that."
And with that, Lisbon left the break room, leaving Jane to his thoughts, his obsessions, his fears.