Worldwielder, page 3
IT'S KYLE HELP
THEY'RE HURTING ME
USE LUUD'S LOCUTOR
FIND ME ON MELTON OR C
Melissa’s heart stopped.
THREE
For several minutes, the outside world ceased to exist. As far as Melissa was concerned, there was just her and the book. She could only read those words over and over and over, expecting them to vanish if she looked long enough. It wouldn't be the first time she'd imagined things. Walking by Kyle's house in the weeks after he disappeared, there had been times when she thought she could sense him within, only to run up to the windows and see that the house was, as always, empty. It had been nothing more than a mental mirage.
But the words didn't vanish. Instead, they became more real with each passing second, burning into her vision. She hadn't known the dread she'd been harboring for two years, dread that the worst had happened to Kyle—that he was dead—until it was blown away the moment she read the message. However, it was soon replaced with a different flavor of dread. Help. They're hurting me. What was happening to him? Absent a date, the message could have been written weeks or months ago, she realized. It could already be too late.
Her dread turned to horror when she noticed the handwriting. She would have known Kyle's writing anywhere, but this was nothing like it. This writing was frantic and unkempt, barely legible in places. The writing of desperate urgency. The writing of someone who feared for his life.
Resting a hand on the grass to stabilize herself as a sudden nausea overtook her, she tried to push the thought from her mind and focus on the rest of the message. Where was Melton? What was a locutor? Who was Luud?
The last question was the easiest to answer, she thought. The bald man had to be Luud. As for the rest, she had no idea, but took some solace in the thought that Kyle must have been confident she could figure it out, else he would have said more. Though there was the matter of the unfinished word at the end. If he'd been cut off, he might have intended the message to be much longer.
And how, she wondered, had he even known she'd see this message? If she hadn't been in the park this afternoon, hadn't seen Luud walking by, and hadn't been crazy enough to go investigate his bag, she could have lived her whole life without knowing Kyle needed help. Only a miracle had made it otherwise.
She shuddered and turned back to the bag. The locutor, whatever it was, might be inside. Maybe it was a map to Melton. Maybe Melton was a street in Willowfork or a nearby town she hadn't heard of. Maybe she could pop over, rescue Kyle, and they could both be home in time for dinner.
Hopeful, she inserted a hand into the bag.
“Zoo must not touch that!”
She quickly snatched her hand back, releasing a shriek, and the book. It was caught by the claw-like hand of the speaker, none other than the bald man himself. He towered over her, freshly frazzled from his contretemps with the dog, mind a vivid scarlet of rage.
Melissa, still crouched in the grass, began to slide backwards. “Uh, sorry, mister, you dropped your bag…”
She gulped. Up close, this Luud was ten times the oddity he'd been from afar. His voice was thickly accented. His clothes, so overlarge they threatened to slip right off his bony frame, still had store tags attached to them. His skin was weathered and caked with dirt. He smelled, too, the aroma not unlike wet dog and gas fumes. Then there was the small black circle protruding from his head just behind the right ear. It looked like a tick, but larger. Red skin surrounded it.
For all that, it was his face that scared her the most. The look on it made her feel like a block of meat he was sizing up to carve.
“Zoo vill stay avay from me,” he snarled, shouldering the bag and turning away.
Melissa didn't stay to watch any longer. Something about his last utterance argued a threat, and she could understand why. She had been going through his things. So, with shaky legs, she sprinted back to the willow, not stopping until she was safe on its far side. There she caught her breath and tried to make sense of things.
According to Kyle's message, she needed something in the bag of a man who may as well have just told her not to set foot in the same continent as him or else he'd turn her into meat pie. There would be no walking up to him and asking nicely for the locutor. More… clandestine methods would be required.
Why'd you ask me to do this, Kyle? You know how inept I am at… everything except chess. But even as she wondered this, she knew the answer. Kyle, like her, had no one else. She was his only hope, but that didn't make her a useful hope.
This is silly. Just call the police. If Kyle's been kidnapped, they should do something, not me. Yes, that was the answer. The police.
She began to turn away from the park, but a quick glance back at Luud, who was now seated on a bench in its center, stopped her dead in her tracks. Something told her she shouldn't let him out of her sight, not even for the two minutes it would take to retrieve her phone and return. Perhaps it was the fact that he was staring at his watch, frowning, his lips moving regularly, as if he were counting the seconds.
His mind, colorless only a moment ago, turned a faint orange.
Anticipation.
His lips stopped moving. He looked up from the watch. Then it happened.
Melissa fell to the ground, clutching her head from the sudden pain erupting within. It was the pain of shock, the sort you might experience from a deafening noise or a blinding light.
It was the pain of every other mind in the vicinity of the park, every mind she could sense, changing in an instant. She'd had a taste of this once before while driving with her mother. A head-on collision in the adjoining lane had caused the minds of nearby drivers to turn lime or blue in shock and sadness, but even that didn't compare to what was happening now.
There must have been fifty people in and around the park, and in the blink of an eye, without any apparent cause, their minds had all gone the same color: gray.
Now, Melissa had seen minds turn every color of the rainbow, from blue to burgundy, magenta to malachite, but never in all sixteen years of her life had she seen a mind turn gray. It simply wasn't a color minds turned. It wasn't much of a color at all, for that matter.
Yet it had happened, and the question now was why. And how. There were several questions, really. Righting herself, she looked around the park, and was greeted with sights ranging from amusing to petrifying.
At the basketball court, a game was underway, and Brock, as usual, was sprinting across the court in possession of the ball. Halfway there, it slipped from his fingers and tumbled into the nearby bushes. Brock dropping it was unusual, but even more unusual was the fact that no one appeared to notice what had just happened. Brock didn't stop running. The other players didn't stop chasing him. The game went on as Brock mimed throwing the ball to another player, who mimed catching it and dribbling it towards the hoop. Then, within a few seconds, all the players collided with each other and were sent sprawling on the concrete.
In the grassy expanse beside the basketball court, the golden retriever and its owner were playing catch with a disc. Until the disc veered left and the dog ran right, jumping into the air and snapping its jaws as though catching something. It ran back to its owner, who took nothing from its mouth and pretended to throw it. And the charade continued.
In front of Melissa, an elderly couple was stepping off the sidewalk to cross the street, until an approaching biker smashed into them. The trio collapsed in a heap on the ground. None of them cried out in pain, nor did they move to get up after the crash.
At the playground, a woman was pushing her young son on a swing, until she stopped pushing the swing and started pushing air where the swing had been a moment ago. When the swing arced back towards her, its velocity increased, it whacked her in the face and knocked her horizontal. Even as she lay there on her back, she continued to move her arms as though she were still pushing the swing.
Across the street, on the other side of the park, a white sedan was driving along, until a pickup truck backed out of a driveway just in front of it, colliding with the sedan's face. The truck continued to back out, then straightened itself and drove off. The sedan, its busted front fender dragging along the ground, resumed its forward movement as though nothing had happened.
All told, it looked like everyone nearby had gone blind… but thought they could still see.
Melissa's eyes traveled back to Luud, who sat in his bench like a statue, gazing out at the various bizarre scenes in the park with macabre fascination. And looking at him now, she realized his mind hadn't turned gray. It was orange, just as it had been when he was staring at his watch and counting…
As if he knew this was going to happen.
A more frightening thought quickly supplanted that one. What if he were causing this? What if it were some kind of mind control? She would have thought the idea ridiculous a few minutes ago, but given the freakish spectacle now occurring, a more reasonable explanation eluded her. At least this explained why his mind wasn't gray.
But then she froze, realizing something else. She couldn't see her own mind as she could others', but unlike everyone else in the park, she was aware of what was happening right now, which could only mean one thing: her mind hadn't turned gray either. Whatever the bald man was doing, she was immune to it.
Then, as abruptly as it had started, the graying ended, having lasted no more than a minute or two. The gray disappeared, replaced with the usual lack of color, or, in an alarming number of instances, red.
Now there were screams.
From the basketball court, the fallen guys made a bunch of the most unmanly noises Melissa had ever heard. But they didn’t seem to be hurt, all returning to their feet within a few seconds.
From the playground, the woman who’d been knocked over by the swing let out a cry and leapt to her feet, massaging her forehead. She, too, appeared unharmed.
From the street across the park, there was a screech as the white sedan came to a rapid halt and its driver jumped out, hurling curses into the ether.
From the field in the park’s center, the golden retriever, halfway through running back to its owner with nothing held in its mouth, let out a whine and turned, looking around for the disc.
From the street near Melissa, a succession of moans emanated from the crumpled pile that contained the couple and the biker. The biker and the old man began to get up, but the old woman remained on her side, a hand clutching her hip. She'd probably broken it.
Out of the corner of her eye, Melissa caught sight of Luud at the far side of the park, striding away with the bag over his shoulder. She knew he might never be back, knew she had to follow him, but the thought of being caught doing so paralyzed her.
She couldn't call the police, she saw now. They'd never believe her without some evidence, not to mention that by the time they showed up, Luud would be long gone. Though by the time she decided to do something, he also might be long gone.
He's getting away, you idiot. Your only way to find Kyle is getting away, and you're doing nothing. The reminder of what this was all about—Kyle—was enough to unglue her from the tree. She hurried forward, and it was a testament to just how strange of a day it was that she'd forgotten all about her chess set in the grass behind her. It was, ordinarily, her most valued possession.
Halfway across the park, a sudden inspiration hit her. There was no way around following Luud, but she didn't have to do it alone and defenseless. She could bring something along to help her, something that was presently sitting at the edge of the basketball court massaging a bruised elbow. Brock.
When she reached him, she did something she wouldn't have dreamed of any other day. She grabbed his hand and pulled him along with her. He wasn't put off by the assertive gesture, as she momentarily feared. On the contrary, he was nothing if not pleased.
“Whoa, Melissa! What's up? Your schedule free up?” He may have been a shade too pleased to be holding her hand, but that suited her purposes just fine at the moment.
“Brock, I need your help.” She towed him towards the sidewalk, keeping her eyes on the distant form of Luud.
“That's what I'm here for!” He jogged to come up beside her. “So, uh, what are we doing?”
She pointed to Luud. “Following that guy.”
Brock slowed at that, frowning. “Oh, right on. Following people is cool. I mean, if that's your thing. But why this dude?”
She briefly considered telling him the truth, before coming to her senses and realizing that such a course of action would only end with him laughing at her and leaving, at best, or physically restraining her and taking her home, whereupon he would tell Minnie that her daughter had lost her mind, at worst. So she said the only other thing that popped into her mind. “He looked interesting.”
“Huh.” Brock chewed on that one. “Is this what you do in your free time? I mean, no judgment or anything! It's cool and all. It's just a little…”
“Weird?” she finished for him. “Chasing a ball around is pretty weird, too.” She clamped her mouth shut as soon as she'd said it, wondering what had possessed her to make such a rude and out-of-character remark.
To her surprise, Brock just laughed. “You're pretty funny, Melissa.”
She let out a silent sigh of relief. “I need to ask you something.”
“Shoot. I'm an open book.”
“What happened during your basketball game a few minutes ago?”
He'd clearly been expecting a more personal question, and judging by the pink shade his face went, he was embarrassed about this one. “Oh, uh, I just bumped into Troy is all. His fault for sure. Kid's super clumsy, but it's all good. He'll get better.”
So he did remember falling during the graying. But what else did he remember? “How long were you on the ground?”
“Just a couple seconds.” Though his nonchalance was painfully forced, Melissa saw no amber flickers in his mind, which meant he was telling the truth. The problem was, what he'd just said wasn't true. He hadn't been on the ground for a couple seconds. He'd been there for a full minute, at least.
“Do you remember dropping the ball and pretending to play without it?”
Brock gave her an incredulous stare. “Uh, what?”
It was as though everything he'd been seeing and hearing and feeling during the graying had been cut out and replaced with a different set of experiences, like in spy movies when the security camera feed was replaced with a looped recording. In this case, Brock remembered playing basketball as usual until the moment the graying ended and he found himself on the ground.
The thought, frightening in its implications, robbed Melissa of the ability to speak, so she just nodded, staring at the distant figure who had brought about this horror. Suddenly, bringing Brock along didn't seem like such a helpful idea. If Luud had that kind of power over minds, no amount of muscle would stop him.
FOUR
About a hundred yards before Colchester Drive made a U and turned into Whiff Lane, Luud took a turn off the sidewalk. He entered a shaded aisle flanked by a pair of wooden posts, which led to another path running parallel to the nearby river. The greenbelt. Beyond the posts, he made a left and disappeared from view.
Melissa halted at the entrance, releasing Brock's hand, a development he was obviously displeased about. “I thought we were following that guy?” he asked.
She didn't answer yet, focusing all her energy on sensing Luud's mental presence to see where he was going. A short distance down the greenbelt, he abandoned the path altogether and ventured into the band of trees that bordered the river, then stopped moving. What was he doing there? Fishing?
She glanced up at Brock, who was stretching his bountiful biceps and didn't look the least bit concerned. Melissa wished she were as ignorant as him. With each passing minute, as the temporary emotional high aroused by Kyle's message faded, her panic had risen.
Taking Brock's hand again, she sidled up the entrance to the greenbelt. “We've gotta be quiet,” she whispered.
After what seemed like ages of creeping, they came near enough to Luud for Melissa to catch a tentative glimpse of him through the trees. He was bent over a pile of sticks, a low stream of mean-sounding words issuing from him. His fire-starting efforts weren't going well.
On the opposite side of the path, Melissa crouched behind a bush. Brock was all too happy to join her, nestling himself markedly closer than necessary.
He winked. “This is cozy. You sure we're here to follow this guy?”
She had to roll her eyes. “Don't talk.”
Another wink. “That's not what I had in mind either.”
Before she could think of a suitably gentle way to tell Brock just how misplaced his efforts at wooing her were, Luud distracted her. Letting out a storm of curses including “otter's balls!”, “schizzlewig!”, and “by the unforgiveable question!”, he hopped up and down, hurling sticks in all directions.
“Whoa,” Brock muttered, his gaze diverted from Melissa. “Dude's got issues.”
You ain't seen nothing, buddy. She thought of what the combination of a two-year-old's temper and whatever Luud had done in the park would result in. Nothing good, she concluded. The only upside to Luud's outburst was that it served to drop the subject of Brock's sexual fantasies.
It remained dropped for the next hour, during which Luud's erratic efforts to enkindle the sticks were at last rewarded. Brock asked several times how long she intended to watch this weird dude, but holding his hand again sufficed to silence these queries.
The fire in a healthy condition, Luud removed a head-sized brown sack from his duffel bag, opened it, and took out a cage, inside of which were a half-dozen bulbous, multi-legged things crawling around.
“Eww, nasty,” Brock muttered, making a face.
Melissa stopped breathing. She wanted to run. She didn't care that they were thirty feet from her or that they were inside a cage. She experienced a harrowing flashback to the day four years ago when a whole family of the beasts had charged upon her in the shower. If Luud has spiders, Kyle might just have to fend for himself! she caught herself thinking for a split-second.
