Flashback by Nevada Barr

Author:Nevada Barr
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 9781472202185
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2013-06-06T07:00:00+00:00

17

The silence that is unique to the sea out where the tides are nonexistent settled around Anna with the darkness. Beneath, and at her back, the warmth that never left the brick throughout the long summer soothed her aching muscles. She waited and she breathed and she relaxed. Once before she had been in a like situation, and it had ended badly with a screaming fear that stayed in her mind for years afterward. She wouldn't think of that. She was older now. Her horrors were known. She would not invite them in.

The first change was in the light. A last ray of dying sun skipped across the Gulf of Mexico like a molten stone, piercing the tangle of arches to paint a single golden stripe no more than an inch wide across the brick of the far wall. As she watched it grew brighter, pulsed with the rhythm of the sea, the rhythm of her heart. Light broke away from the stripe in tiny showers, each spark leaving a contrail as if it were a minute jet airplane flaming out.

At length the light show shimmered into the darkness and was gone. To see if it worked, if she had any control over what was to happen next, Anna called softly: "Aunt Raffia?" and waited. Where the last spark had died, a pale shape began to pool on the floor. Luminosity poured into it from an invisible pitcher, the form of a woman being filled with light from the boots up the skirt to shirtwaist, arms, and finally the head, face averted, the hand raised as before, fingers poking nervously at escaping hairpins.

"Be a nice aunt," Anna whispered to the apparition. "No turning scaley with long lickety tongues or anything." The figure dissolved and Anna wondered if she'd taken the fun out of its spectral life by ruling out reptilian metamorphoses.

Anna was tripping. Days before it would have terrified her. Her memories of the bad old days during the early seventies were not of Lucy in the sky with diamonds but of the mind-crippling terror of losing her reason. Because she feared that same thing so recently, it was a relief to know that she was not going mad. She'd been drugged. It would turn out to be in the plastic bottles of carbonated water she'd been drinking, introduced, no doubt, by a hypodermic needle. That was why the water was flat, why there was water on the bottom shelf of her refrigerator and Lanny's. Whoever was doing the poisoning must have gotten careless, been rushed and pierced the containers below water line. Tomorrow, when she'd regained dominance over what gray cells remained to her, she'd call Wilcox with the good news. If he'd been a straight arrow during his formative years he would have no way of recognizing this drug-induced insanity. Anna might not have caught on if she hadn't guzzled nearly a quart of the doctored water on an empty stomach.

When the dark began to fill with monsters of the id, Anna moved on to a casemate open both to the sea and the parade ground.

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