Pattern Black, page 63
Blake, Mason thought. It’s not really Preacher. He’s a puppet now, with Blake inside him.
With a heave, Mason felt his neck break. His spinal column snapped like a twig. All control left his body.
This isn’t really happening.
But the body believed what happened inside the mind.
Dying.
Like drowning.
The last thing Mason heard was Preacher, laughter in his voice.
“In-fuckin-dubitably.”
SEVENTY-ONE
How it Should Be
Mason opened his eyes. He heard small clanking sounds. Low, as if kept intentionally quiet.
As if from a long-ago dream, he remembered his neck being broken. He blinked and licked his lips. Then he tried moving his fingers. Finally, he bent his arm and laid those fingers flat on what seemed to be an all-black rug, one hand on each side of his body.
He found he could push himself to a sitting position. Looking around, he felt both lost and very much found.
Mason was beside a table with scrolled wooden feet. He could smell something cooking. Meat. A pot roast, perhaps, seasoned with rosemary.
He stood. Past the table was an old-fashioned kitchen. His grandmother’s. They hadn’t visited her as often as he supposed they should have. Mostly, the holidays drew them together. But he hadn’t been in this kitchen since he’d been a boy.
There was a woman at the oven, her brown hair — gray at the roots — tied in a bun and secured with short chopsticks. She turned, “You’re awake!”
“Mom?”
“Tell me you’re hungry. Tell me that, at least.”
Mason, dazed but clear on his role here, moved into one of the chairs around the table, already set with Grandma’s china and flatware. The sounds he’d heard had been her setting the table. He picked up a fork, sure in some way, all of this should surprise him. Not dinner, necessarily, but something else. Why had he been on the floor? And when had Grandma replaced her kitchen linoleum with black carpet? Carpet didn’t even make sense in a kitchen.
“It wasn’t his fault, you know,” she said.
“What wasn’t?”
“That we died.”
“Died?”
She nodded, meeting his gaze. “Me. And Logan.”
“You’re not dead, Ma.”
“Not here. Of course not.” She took a pitcher of water from the counter then began filling glasses. “Help me out, Mason. Get the butter.”
His instinct to obey maternal mandate squashed his confusion. Mason found himself rising, moving automatically. Grandma’s fridge was nearly as old as Grandma herself before she’d died. They’d kept the house for a while, Mom saying she’d fix it up then rent the place but really just unable to clean it out and let go. The mortgage was paid, and the taxes a pittance. Why not keep it? And though it’d been clear to them all that Carter felt otherwise, he’d agreed.
There was nothing behind the refrigerator. No wall, no outlets, no door to the living room that always smelled like warming balm. The carpet ended just beyond it into a gently curving wall, even blacker. He put his hand to it then looked up at a perfect circle of pure-white sky far above.
Despite his questions, Mason removed the butter dish from the fridge then set it on the table.
“He thought you hated him,” his mother said, her attention on the stove and her boiling potatoes.
“He wasn’t entirely wrong.”
“You shouldn’t hate your father. You should make peace.”
“It’s a little late for that, now.”
“Why? Because you’re dead?”
“I’m not dead, Ma.” And then, because Mason’s arguments with his mother always followed a script, he found himself adding, “I keep telling you.”
“By what definition, Mason?” she asked in her hectoring Mother Knows Best tone. “Are you not dead because Pattern Black isn’t really dying for you or your stubborn father? Or because you think that nice man didn’t break your neck?”
“You know about that?”
She laughed. “A mother always knows.”
It was all coming back. “You are dead.”
“Now look who’s in a glass house, throwing stones.”
“It’s not an insult, Ma. It’s a fact. There was a car crash. Some guys …” He tried to recall, but it came too slow. “After Pop broke into Blake’s office, he sent some guys in a car to―”
“I’m tired of telling you, Mason Edward Shaw. That wasn’t your father’s fault.”
Mason looked up again. The walls and floor were black. It was as if they were in the pit of a stealth silo, looking toward a featureless sky.
“Your father did his best. With all of you. He never claimed to be anything more than human.”
“He’s a piece of shit, Ma. Maybe he used to be okay, but then—”
“Language!”
Again, he looked skyward. “This Grandma’s house?”
“You know it is.”
“But it’s not, really. There’s no living room. No bathroom. The walls are flat — no tile fresco above the stove.”
“Not everything can be as you demand it, Mason.”
He squinted. “Are we inside Pattern Black?”
“Where else would we be?”
“Pop was here. He … left. With Dakota.”
“How is Dakota?”
“She’s fine, Ma.” Mason found himself getting annoyed. She was always like this. Avoiding the hard conversations, like whether or not his father was obsessed or whether he should stop drinking, or whether Logan was a colossal asshole who always conveniently landed on the winning side of every argument.
No wonder Mason became a cop. Someone had to follow in Pop’s footsteps — and erase them from the Earth as he went.
Ma stirred another pot, raised a wooden spoon to her lips, and sipped. She dipped it back, sifted salt between her fingertips, then stirred again.
“I suppose you think you’re pretty clever, dying that way.”
“I’m not dead, Ma.”
“You’re not?” She turned fully, both hands on both hips. “I see. I suppose you think you know better. I’m dead, not that you ever listen. Logan, too. How is it your father somehow outlived us all?”
“If Pop’s not dead, then I’m not, either.”
“Carter didn’t get his neck broke. You did.”
Mason rubbed the back of his neck. Her points were making sense, and now he wasn’t so sure. Once more, he looked up. “Where are we, Ma? Really. Not Grandma’s kitchen. I mean … where else?”
“At the bottom, Mason. I mean, really.”
Before he could ask, At the bottom of what? Mason noticed the sloppy crayon drawing tacked to the fridge. He had done it, apparently. In the lower right, it said MASON SHAW, AGE 5.
The drawing showed two stick figures circumscribed by a circle. One was in a dress and had brown hair. The other was a little taller, wearing a policeman’s uniform. The second was himself, not Carter or Logan.
“Is this us?” Mason removed a round magnet from the drawing then held it up.
“Of course.”
“Us right now?”
“Of course.”
He looked again at the childlike drawing. The circle around them had been scribbled with black, leaving just enough room to see the figures inside. “I don’t remember drawing this.”
“For Pete’s sake, Mason,” she said when he was about to sit at the table with the drawing. “Put it back. I’m not as young as I used to be. You can at least help me with dinner.”
Again, he obeyed. But when Mason went around to the side of the fridge to return the drawing, he saw many new ones, each was the same — a black circle scribbled so heavily with crayon that the surface grew waxy. No figures in any of them, just that plain circle on white paper. They’d been arranged in a spiral pattern, at the center of which was the one he’d just held.
It was the only one with Mason and his mother inside.
Or maybe at the bottom.
He looked up again. “We’re at the bottom of one of the dots I keep seeing. The spirals inside Pattern Black.”
“Inside your Pattern Black,” she corrected. “They say we all see it differently.”
“You mean you’re inside Pattern Black?”
“Not everything is about you, Mason.”
He shook his head, returning to the table. Grandma had the smallest salt shaker in existence. Pop used to joke that you could fit ten grains inside — two for each of the boys plus three for Ma because she’d made the meal and everyone at the table. Pop said he deserved at least two, but they always fought for that final grain, as if it were a genuine argument.
“I don’t understand, Ma.”
“Of course you don’t.” Then she returned to her cooking.
“Preacher killed me for real?”
“If that’s what you believe.”
“Then that means he killed my mind. Which everyone keeps saying is the only reason this place hasn’t collapsed.”
“Please. You act like the world is on your shoulders.”
He remembered Preacher now. And all that had happened. Reformatted, with Blake at the wheel. If anyone knew how to blank a person inside Pattern Black, it’d be the man who invented the technology. And if Mason went down, everything died.
But why? Ironically, if he could find a way not to be dead after all — and barring delusions and the obvious what-the-fuck of this, it sure seemed right now like he had, or could — the fact that Preacher, or Blake, had killed him felt like an excellent omen.
Because, really, if they were actually trapped inside, why would Blake bother with hunting down and killing him? Those things were only sensible if it’d been possible, before maybe dying, for Mason to escape.
Mason’s “way out” must somehow be a threat to Blake if he was going to the trouble.
“How do I get out of here, Ma?”
“Is that all you can think of, Mason? Getting away from me?”
He stood and crossed the kitchen. Once at his mother’s side, he did something he’d never have done in real life after being guilt-tripped like that. He said, “I love you, Ma.”
“Past tense will do, Mason.”
“I know. But I love you. I know you always did your best.”
“Just like your father did his best.”
“Well. Yeah. Okay.”
“He was right about you.”
“That I’m a fuck-up?”
“That you were more like him than you ever wanted to admit.”
“In what way?” The answer felt so important. So urgent. Maybe because the walls were closing in. And the sky was getting darker fast.
“When you finally faced things, they didn’t stand a chance. But until then?” She whistled. “Stubborn. So, so stubborn.”
The dark was looming. Mason looked up again and saw the reason. An eclipse of sorts. An enormous disc was sliding across the top of their pit like putting the lid on a pill bottle.
“Ma?”
“You heard me, Mason.”
She was barely a shape in the darkness. And Mason saw only the waning crescent of daylight — or whiteness, in the absence of daylight. The fear in the pit of his gut was primal. It wasn’t about the dark. It was about the end. It was about the unknown. The light, even here, had let Mason see what faced him. But now, even that was going away.
The big thing above slid into place. Now, he couldn’t see a single lux of light. Not a pinprick.
Into the echoes, he said, “Ma?”
“What you feared most — both of you — was yourself.”
Mason found the chair then moved it aside to feel for the table’s surface. There’d been a candle there, unlit. Beside it was a fireplace lighter. The source of the flame.
He found it by feel, pressed the butane, then clicked the trigger to spark it.
His mother’s face jumped to life inches from his, her round cheeks cut sharp with dancing orange and shadows like knives. Her eyes were so black, it seemed she had none. As the firelight danced between those pits, Mason saw her eyelids sewn shut with black thread. Her skin was sallow, hanging, and desiccated.
“There is no black, and there is no white in you. There just is.”
“Ma, I’m—”
“You cannot fall if you are there to catch you.”
Her lips pursed. There was a puff of air, then the lighter extinguished.
Mason was no longer in the kitchen. Or even the hole. He was alone, and always had been. Everyone was. There wasn’t any reason to fear.
Maybe he’d lost his mind.
But maybe — just maybe — that was how it should be.
SEVENTY-TWO
Raw Construct
The scene changed. Mason heard popping sounds, like corn.
He was in an all-white room. One rug and an equal number of doors. Preacher was above him again, cracking knuckles that didn’t exist. The sound was like the exploding of wood knots in a campfire.
At first, he didn’t move. Mason waited, listening to a voice inside. It wasn’t his father’s, though that voice was somewhere. It wasn’t a remembered voice of his mother, or Logan, or Dakota. Not of his bosses, or co-workers at the station, or the person he’d shot, or the snitches he’d wrangled. Nor was it the aunts who’d kissed him on the lips and put a wrinkled one-dollar bill in a bargain card on every occasion of note.
All those voices were there. But he wasn’t listening to those.
The voice, this time, belonged to himself. The one he’d never heeded. The one he’d pushed down and tried to hide. That second, quiet, internal Mason was a doppelgänger of sorts — an odd cousin nobody invited over for the holidays. Mason’s shadow. A creature of impulse. It lived deep, deep down, in the basement of awareness. But now, the door to that basement was open, and the thing of darkness wanted to play.
Sit back, it told him, and watch it all burn.
Mason closed his eyes. Opened them.
The room — the world — was on fire.
He stood.
Preacher rose then came at him.
Feeling the heat, Mason remembered standing at railings over tall cliffs, wondering if he should jump, for no reason beyond primal curiosity. He remembered passing pedestrians on crowded city streets, his muscles twitching as if wanting to shove them into traffic.
But Mason also remembered what that deep place had told him about Dakota, about his family, about his brother. He was like his father — ambitious but impatient, frustrated, and prone to impulse. He had loved his mother, though she’d browbeaten him. He’d appreciated Logan, even while hating him, because without his brother’s abrasive example as grist for the mill, Mason would never have become the man he was.
He thought of Logan’s son, Hunter, and how he had adored the child while always keeping his distance. He’d never wanted responsibility, seeing as it was the first step toward disappointment.
And he remembered his arguments with Dakota. How close they’d come before he’d run away.
There was no such thing as crazy. Only different.
The games he played with his father. The way he’d nearly been around the other kids before stuffing it all down in an effort to be normal. He’d talked it all out with the psychiatrists, hiding the truth even in their deepest sessions. But Ma was right. There was nothing to be afraid of and never had been. If he fell, then Mason would catch himself.
He’d never liked losing control. But right now, that’s exactly what was happening.
Blake, wearing Preacher like a suit, must have sensed the change. He didn’t seem to know whether to approach or back away. He topped Mason by almost two feet and was three Masons wide. Yet it was the bigger man now with fear in his eyes.
“You can’t erase me,” Mason said, “if I’m already gone.”
This time, Preacher charged for real and without pause.
Rehashing old tricks, he returned Mason to his headlock. Only now, Mason could see the move for what it was — not tension and pressure but conditions of a game. There was still logic here, though of a demented sort. A subconscious breed, older than humankind. Logic of the id.
Spilling back through time, Mason let forth all his throttled differences — his knack for finding things that’d gone missing, his curious way of pre-guessing the people around him. Once, at six, Carter had let Mason serve non-alcoholic drinks at a party. He’d known what they wanted without asking, easy as reading their name tags. He’d handed each guest their preferred drink. At school, William Mather called Mason a freak. His father had seen it all.
Preacher squeezed. Blackness knocked, and Mason allowed it. He let himself seesaw into the dark, waiting. He and Preacher/Blake had done this before, and that only led him to his grandmother’s kitchen.
Don’t react. Just be.
Mason’s ability to see beyond the physical proved there was a curtain, and most people lived upstage. But there was a backstage, too. A place of spirit and thought, where fathers talked to sons without moving their lips. Where Mason would sometimes go outside and sit on a hilltop as a boy, imagining himself as a mote of dust, drifting into the corporeal substance of each thing on the vista, living or inert.
Mason heard his neck snap, again. Felt his muscles tense around the broken bone, again. Felt the agony, again, until he decided maybe he’d gotten it all wrong. He wasn’t really here, neither was Preacher, and that touch and feeling — here of all places — was no less an illusion than the mirage of dreaming.
So Mason thought, I’m well. I’m not even here. With that, the pain seemed to vanish, and the bones began to mend, and none of it mattered a whit regardless because he was that mote of dust, floating above, landing only when he chose to.
He hit Preacher hard enough to throw him fifty feet. Easy, because there was no force here. No distance here. No fighting, no strength. No victory and no defeat. This was an unreal place, and Mason didn’t need ones and zeroes or a wire or a signal to go where he wanted.
Mason met Preacher’s gaze. It was all so obvious now. Why was Blake, as Preacher, allowing himself to be defeated? Didn’t he see the very same truth?
