After Midnight, page 13
He looked helpless.
But still, as she ran her eyes over his prone form, she could barely breathe. She felt herself being transported back to the day she thought she was going to die. No, that wasn’t quite true. It was the day she knew she was going to die, her skin peeled away from her bones by Milo Cain.
The bile rose in her throat and she began to hyperventilate. Turned to leave, to run, she didn’t care where, just to get out. She had to get out.
She took two blind steps toward the door and then felt a calming hand on her arm.
She looked up, panicked and afraid, and saw Virginia next to her, as unruffled as ever. Her mother smiled reassuringly at Cait, who stopped moving. Stopped everything. Forced herself to breathe. Felt her pulse beginning to slow to normal.
This is just a room, she told herself, no different than any other room in the hospital portion of this castle of the damned. A monster occupied the room; that much was true. But the monster was helpless. He lay unseeing and unfeeling before her, no more of a danger to her or anyone else in his current state than was the plain wooden dresser shoved up against the wall.
She breathed deeply, her mother still stroking her arm. Willed herself to relax. And began to see Virginia Ayers in an entirely new light.
Her mother was more than just a frail woman, old before her time, who had endured so much tragedy and loss; more than anyone should have to endure in a single lifetime. Virginia was more impressive than Cait had ever imagined, possessing reserves of strength she could only marvel at.
It occurred to Cait that no matter what she accomplished in her life she would never be as strong as her mother.
Slightly more relaxed, she turned her attention to the still form of her brother. He of course hadn’t moved, and wouldn’t until someone came along and moved him.
“He doesn’t even seem like the same person,” she whispered to her mother, who was rapidly becoming her rock.
“You don’t need to whisper, honey,” she said. “He can’t hear you.”
Cait wasn’t so sure about that.
She had never been one to put stock in the concept of “evil.” Oh, she knew it existed, had experienced it firsthand to a horrifying degree last summer, but she had always believed the terrible things that human beings were capable of doing to one another were nothing more than the result of choices made by those individuals.
But now, standing just a few feet away from the man who had damaged her so badly, Cait could sense a corruption emanating from the broken body of Milo Cain, a rot that struck her as spiritual just as much as physical. It was as if a black cloud hung over the hospital bed to which her twin was chained, and that cloud was filled with maggots, squirming and wriggling, struggling to break free and wreak havoc and destruction.
She felt the fear rising again from deep within and reached for her mother’s hand. Virginia took it and squeezed, seeming to understand everything Cait was feeling. It occurred to Cait that her mother probably was going through everything she was, maybe even to a greater extent. After all, Milo Cain was her only son, the son she had given up under the most difficult of circumstances more than thirty years ago, the son who had then grown up to become one of the most reviled and feared men in American history: Mr. Midnight.
Cait glanced at Virginia. She remained totally composed. A little paler than usual, perhaps, but otherwise none the worse for wear especially compared to Cait, who felt as though she might fall apart at any moment.
“Why are we here?” she said to her mother.
“We’re here to exorcise demons,” Virginia answered. “And to prove to ourselves once and for all that this man, for all the damage he’s done and all the heartache he’s caused, can’t hurt us anymore. Can’t hurt us ever again.”
“Then why do I feel like we’re in as much danger right now as we were last summer?”
23
Milo could hear them. His “mother” and his “sister.” They were standing in his room talking about him as if he weren’t even there.
It was infuriating.
Milo considered himself lucky to even be aware of their presence. The disaster at The Crow’s Nest last night had so totally exhausted him that he had dropped off into unconsciousness, ironically placing him in the comatose state everyone already thought he had been in since getting shot in the face last summer.
But just a few minutes ago he had awoken, snapping instantly alert to the sound of Virginia Ayers and Caitlyn Connelly discussing his many faults and weaknesses in hushed tones at his bedside.
If he weren’t afflicted with paralysis, Milo’s entire body would have been trembling in fury at their utter unmitigated gall. First they manage to escape him last night, through the intervention of some random asshole, and now they come to his home, to his own territory, to rub his nose in his failure?
It was more than infuriating. But it strengthened his resolve. He had sworn to eliminate the stain of Caitlyn Connelly from the earth and that was what he would do. He had failed twice, but he wasn’t finished yet. Not even close. And he only needed to succeed once.
As he listened to the two women disparage him, unable to move a muscle or even open his eyes, Milo cursed his bad luck yet again.
They were alone. He knew they were alone not just because he could hear no other voices inside his room, but because he could sense the presence of no one else. If another person had been standing in his room besides Virginia and The Evil Bitch, he would have known; he was sure of it.
And that was a shame. Because if even one other person had been present, Milo could have jumped into either Virginia’s or Connelly’s head and pushed a suggestion into the third person’s brain. He could have taken another whack at her right this minute, and eliminated his problem at last. Finally.
It was especially galling because Milo knew there was a guard here somewhere. There had to be. Milo had been a resident of Bridgewater State for months now and he knew that no one, not even the warden of this medieval shithole, ever entered his room without at least one guard in the immediate area.
In the beginning, after being transferred here from the real hospital, it had been a team of guards, at least three and sometimes four, who accompanied visitors, as if maybe he was somehow fooling everyone with the paralysis and coma schtick, and was just waiting for the right moment to open his eyes, magically remove the handcuffs that kept his unresponsive body chained to his bed rail, and leap to the floor, attacking everyone like a madman.
The whole charade had been fucking ridiculous. And there were a lot of visitors in the beginning, too. Lawyers, and psychologists, and reporters, and medical professionals, and more lawyers, all coming supposedly for legitimate purposes, but what they really wanted, Milo knew, was to gawk at the helpless serial killer, rendered powerless by his evil bitch of a twin sister, all of them thinking he could hear nothing they said when in reality he heard everything. Every last word.
But that had been in the beginning. Over time, the flood of visitors became a trickle, eventually drying up entirely, when the novelty of Milo Cain wore off and some other shiny trinket captured the public’s attention. The contingent of guards accompanying those visitors had been trimmed from three or four back to two, and then eventually one.
And whereas in the beginning the guards had surrounded his bed like a pack of wolves stalking a wounded deer, after a while it got to the point where they didn’t even come inside the room anymore on the rare occasions Milo received a visitor.
Which was exactly the case today.
And even though the guard was outside the door, his location wouldn’t prevent Milo from pushing a suggestion to kill Caitlyn Connelly. The problem was that without knowing which guard was out there, he had no way of knowing which head to push the suggestion into. He could only push one suggestion at a time, and this prison had dozens of guards running around. They were like fucking cockroaches.
So he had no choice. Milo lay there and listened to the infuriating chirping of the two people he hated more than anyone else in the world. And that was saying something.
But this is not over, he kept reminding himself. This is not over.
24
“So, what do you think?” Caitlyn had been deep in thought, staring out the window of the cab as it carried them back to Logan Airport and their flight out of Boston and back to sanity. Her mother’s question caught her by surprise and she jumped, startled. She was embarrassed by her reaction but unable to prevent it.
She thought about the question and then shrugged. “He’s as helpless as a baby. Heck, he’s more helpless than a baby, because at least a baby can alert others to its needs by crying. Milo is nothing more than a big lump of inanimate tissue, technically alive, I suppose, because he continues to breathe and his heart is beating.”
Virginia nodded and said nothing, and Cait continued. “But he is completely helpless. There is absolutely no way he could be influencing even the things that occur inside his own hospital room, much less events happening fifteen hundred miles away in Tampa.”
“So, do you feel better?”
“No. Not at all. In fact, I feel much worse. Something is very wrong here. Something inexplicable is happening, and the circumstances of that warden’s suicide are a perfect indication of that. The method he used is so…similar…to Milo’s preferred method of torture and murder, and so…similar…to what was done to me by Kevin last week, that I just can’t accept the notion that the whole thing is just coincidence.”
Virginia seemed unsurprised by her words. “So, what do you think is going on?”
“I think you know. Or at least suspect.”
“What do you mean?”
“You said it before: back in Revere last summer, you pushed the location of your gun into my head somehow. It saved my life. But you also said you think Milo may have somehow picked up the ability to push suggestions into people’s brains. Somehow Milo has learned to bend those unsuspecting victims to his will and force them to do his bidding.”
“But Milo’s in a coma. He’s unconscious and unresponsive. He can’t hear anything. How could he be doing any of what you say?”
By now Cait realized her mother was again playing devil’s advocate, forcing her to think the issue through and confront the reality of what was happening in a way she had not been able—or even ready—to do before. Now the answer to her mother’s question came to her like a bolt of lightning out of a muggy summer sky. It was so obvious she couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it before.
“He’s in there somewhere,” she said wonderingly. “He’s not faking anything, he actually is comatose, but even though his physical state is unresponsive, somewhere inside his brain the old Milo Cain is still there. And still aware. And he’s using that awareness to push suggestions into people’s heads in order to continue wreaking havoc and destruction.”
The scenery flashed by, the Yellow Cab driving much too fast for Cait’s Florida sensibilities, but barely keeping pace with the other Massachusetts traffic. Cait was glad her mother had chosen this moment to bring up the subject of their discussion. It kept her from focusing too closely on the possibility of their suffering a violent death in some gruesome traffic accident. And wouldn’t that be ironic.
“You’ve already figured this out, haven’t you?” Cait said.
“I wouldn’t say I’ve figured anything out exactly, but I’ve had my suspicions about this, as you already know, almost from the moment I learned the specifics of Kevin’s attack on you.”
Cait felt like a blind woman whose eyes had been opened and could see clearly for the first time in her life. “Something else has been bothering me as well,” she said after a moment of silence.
Her mother raised one eyebrow and waited for her to continue.
“Just before that man attacked me with the beer bottle inside The Crow’s Nest last night, I had another one of those episodes that have been coming and going recently.”
“The sensation of pressure inside your head. I remember.”
“That’s right. It happened as we were talking, just before all hell broke loose. It couldn’t have been more than two or three minutes later when that man came out of nowhere and tried to slice my throat.”
Virginia shrugged. Cait noticed that her mother’s eyes bored in on her with an intensity that nearly seemed to match her gaze that afternoon six months ago inside her house, when she had desperately sent the mental message that allowed Cait to stop Milo Cain from skinning her alive. That obvious intensity gave lie to the feigned indifference of the shrug.
“Coincidence,” she said, her eyes never leaving Cait’s.
“I don’t think so,” Cait answered, shaking her head slowly. “I’ve given this a lot of thought. The first time I can remember feeling that sensation was just before Pearl Hinton scalded my arm with the hot coffee in my office. The next time was later Friday night, just prior to Kevin going crazy. Last night it happened right before some random guy I’m one hundred percent certain I’ve never met tried to kill me by slicing my throat open with broken glass.”
As she spoke, her eyes left her mother’s face and wandered back to the cab’s side window, where the scenery continued to flash by. Now she returned her gaze to her mother’s face as an unreasoning terror began to fill her. It eclipsed anything she had ever felt, even greater than what she had experienced when Milo Cain was busily peeling the skin off her forearm.
Because if she was right, she had absolutely no control over anything.
“It’s Milo,” she whispered. “Milo is somehow entering my head, isn’t he?”
Virginia was silent for a moment. Then she said, “We don’t know that for sure.”
“But it’s what you think, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said simply. “I wasn’t convinced until this last incident, but when you said last night while we were sitting at the table inside The Crow’s Nest that the pressure sensation had returned, I immediately felt that you might be in danger.”
“I noticed at the time that you seemed to become very tense for no particular reason. Then all hell broke loose.”
Virginia nodded. “It was my fault,” she said. “When nothing happened right after you mentioned the pressure in your head, I let my guard down. If I hadn’t, I might have seen the man coming…”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Cait said. “There was nowhere to go, nothing you could have done.”
Virginia shook her head. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “about all of this. If I had been stronger last summer and stood up to Milo instead of calling you back to Revere as you were getting ready to fly to Florida, you’d still be safe and none of this would have—”
“No.” Cait reached across the cab’s backseat and squeezed her mother’s hand. “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Finding you was the best thing that’s ever happened in my life. I don’t have a single regret.”
But that didn’t mean there wasn’t any fear. Cait tried to keep herself under control. She felt as though the fear building up inside might just be too much for her body to contain and she would explode like an overinflated child’s balloon.
She tried to ignore the implications of her theory about Milo Cain but could not. If he somehow possessed the ability to enter her brain whenever he wished, and if he somehow possessed the ability to push suggestions into the brains of unsuspecting people, forcing them to do horrible, sickening things, then what chance did she have to survive?
How could she protect herself against that kind of omnipresent threat? And what about everyone else in the world? Was Caitlyn Connelly going to become the vehicle, unwitting and unwilling as she may be, through which the notorious serial killer Milo Cain continued his reign of terror?
How could she live with herself if that was the case?
And did she even want to?
25
Virginia Ayers had never considered herself a particularly strong woman. She hadn’t been able to prevent her husband from succumbing to deep depression and eventually committing suicide after their twins were born and then immediately given up in an illegal adoption.
Worse, she hadn’t even seen it coming.
She hadn’t been able to withstand the pain of Milo Cain’s torture last summer, eventually giving in to his demands and calling Caitlyn and Kevin back to her home after she had sent them away to safety. That fateful telephone call had set all of this madness in motion, and although Virginia cherished every moment she had been able to spend with her daughter because of it, she would never forgive herself for subjecting Caitlyn to her unhinged twin’s madness.
But for all her weakness, Virginia had always possessed the ability to do what was necessary. It was this personality trait that had allowed her to soldier on after giving up the twins for adoption the very same day they were born.
It was this personality trait that had allowed her to soldier on after Robert was found hanging in a men’s bathroom at South Station so many years ago.
She was a survivor. She was someone who could do what had to be done. It wasn’t much to brag about, not much to show for nearly six decades of life on this earth. But it was all she had.
And now she knew what had to be done. Sitting in the back of a cab as it raced across Boston toward Logan International Airport, staring into the terrified eyes of her only daughter, Virginia knew.
Caitlyn would never have a moment’s peace the way things currently stood. She would never be able to let her guard down, would never feel safe. And the worst part was that her vigilance wouldn’t even matter. At some point, whether on his next attempt or the one after that or the one after that, Milo would succeed in his quest to destroy his twin, the one who had been blessed with goodness and kindness and all of those traits so sorely lacking in himself.
He would succeed and Caitlyn would be gone, and Virginia would once again have lost both her children, three decades after the first time and this time for good.
