Simon realized that through all this she thought she was talking to the Lord. He didn’t care who she was talking to as long as he could get some information. Making his voice deeper, softer, he whispered, “Tell me, child, did you know this man?”
“No,” she cried out. “I didn’t. I shouldn’t have gone with him. I know that now. I was upset. I was depressed and,” she added, “I’d had too much to drink.”
At that, he wondered if that was a connection between the victims, if the killer sought out women at bars, after having too much to drink.
“Do you know where you are?” he asked in that same soft voice.
“No,” she whispered in tears. “I’m alone, always alone.”
“You’re not alone,” Simon argued. “I’m here.”
“I want You to take me home.” And she started to cry again.
Another voice in the back of her head started yelling at her.
“Shut the fuck up. Just shut the fuck up.”
And she tried hard, desperately so, to suck back the tears, but the door slammed open, giving Simon the briefest glimpse of that same window again. Then came a blow to the side of her head, so hard that he heard her neck snap with the force.
“I told you to shut the fuck up,” he yelled, and, for the first time, Simon heard that same voice himself.
She tried hard to hold back the sobbing sounds, but it was almost impossible when there was so much pain and when she was suffering so badly.
The second blow knocked her back into unconsciousness, but not before Simon heard the man call her a bitch. A useless bitch. There was something odd about his voice, something off, but then Simon heard the words through a woman who could no longer understand consciousness from unconsciousness—or could differentiate the voice of Simon in her head from the God that she was dearly hoping would save her.
It was all Simon could do to sit here and to hope that something else would happen, but all he sensed was just black darkness, as she sank willingly into the mindless emptiness of unconsciousness. He fell back down on his bed, his head resting in his hands, repeating, “Something had to be there, something useful.”
And he thought about it, wondering, was it a church? It looked like a big church, a big rounded window. He thought about it for a long time. However, something was odd about it, yet he didn’t know what to tell Kate. What could he tell her now, after she’d wasted all that time looking at churches? Then he had to remind himself that it was hardly a waste since they’d found another victim. And in a building in front of a church. So church was important. He just didn’t know if it was the only thing that was important.
As he sat here quietly staring out his bedroom window over the city, he knew he had to get up and get dressed. He had a life of his own, some semblance of normalcy that he had to maintain in his own world. Yet how did one do that when everything else was so destroyed?
Finally he got up, had a shower, and made coffee. When he sat down at his laptop, he checked the news to see if anything was said about the latest victim, and thankfully news of her death was still quiet. He knew it wouldn’t last, and, once they caught a whiff of it being a serial killer, the city would be up in arms. And who could blame them? Yet it seemed the city went from one crisis to another.
Was humanity so fucked up that all that they could think about was hurting one another? Causing pain to one another to the extent that they left nothing but broken and damaged people in their wake? How completely wrong was it to think the whole world was so messed up and how all that was out there. Simon knew his own experience was dark and twisted, but he had hoped that other people were having a better time of it. He never really expected his life to be the norm. And it wasn’t, and he had to keep reminding himself of that. But, with his association now with Kate—and this same craziness coming up time and time again—he saw ugliness all the time. Not right, not wrong, just the reality of what is.
How did she handle it? Or did she? He hadn’t seen her overnight for a couple nights again, and he missed that. He wanted more of that. If nothing else it was a way to ground each other and to let them know that something else was in the world instead of this craziness. That something was precious and special between them. He knew that she needed him as much as he needed her, as he continued on this nightmare pathway.
Only by having that support system—somebody who could understand and could realize how important this need was—could he keep going with this. Otherwise he had to walk away for his own sanity, and, according to his grandmother, that would never happen. There was no sanity left for people like him; it would always be one toe dipped into the dark side.
He didn’t ever remember his nan having messages of joy and love and peace. It was always the dark stuff—a child who would die, a serious illness that would take over a family. Was it his inexperience and confusion that let him only see the dark, or was it really all she ever saw as well? Could he change the wavelength somehow so he actually got good news for a change? That might help balance out some of this and make it more tolerable. He didn’t know, but it would be something that he needed to work on. He got up, and, carrying his coffee to the big picture window in his living room, he leaned against the wall and stared out.
“Where are you, Kate? What are you doing?”
Almost instantly his phone rang. He fished it from his pocket and stared down, the corner of his mouth twitching when he realized it was Kate. “I was just asking where you are and what you were doing,” he murmured into the phone.
There was a moment of silence, and then she replied briskly, “Coincidence.”
“If you say so. How are you?”
“Well, I’m at work,” she replied, “and dragging ass, but now that I’m into my second cup of coffee, I’m okay. Just checking in on you, before I go to my meeting.”
“I’m okay,” he noted. “At least I think I am.”
“Another dark night?”
“Yes, she’s almost done,” he relayed sadly. “She thought I was God and kept talking to me as if I were, and she was so ready to go home to God.”
“Ouch,” she whispered. “That’s got to be hard.”