The Soul Consortium by Simon West-Bulford Read Free Book Online Page A

future?”
    I dropped the gun. Felt the room spin like a cloudy carousel, felt clammy panic siphon my waking thoughts.
    “I’ll take you home.”
    I remember weeping as his gaze cut into me like a scalpel dissecting my soul. Then I sank to my knees, drowning in a cold nightmare.

SEVEN
     
    I woke the next day and chased away the harsh dreams with a comparatively stiff drink and a cigarette. I usually saved that pleasure for quiet evenings in, but I needed something more than coffee to pacify my mind. Vieta’s haunting voice and face had invaded my sleep, and I still could not rationalize what I had seen in that house. This was more than fear. It was something deeper, something far more profound than an emotional reaction.
    I remembered my youth, my fascination when taught about the blind spot of the human eye. At the point where the optic nerve sprouts from the back of the eyeball, the brain receives no visual information and fills in the gaps with a fabrication of its own. With one eye shut, a single black dot on a piece of paper could be made to disappear if held at the right distance; the eye could not see the dot, and the mind would fill the void with its best approximation—the surrounding paper. To me Keitus Vieta was the same thing: a fabrication of the brain to explain something that should not be there, a paradox, a tangible ghost, something unreal. Yet he was there. He
was
real.
    I needed to shut him out of my waking thoughts if I wanted to make it through the day with my composure intact, so I walked into town, my coat drawn about me like a vampire’s cloak, stalking from pavement to pavement, road to alley, alley to street. It didn’t matter to me that my choice of clothes and miserable scowl on such a bright morning could draw unwanted attention. I wanted to hide, though, withdraw for a time until I could better understand what happened last night, but no inner peace would be mine until I’d discovered what the local reporters had squeezed out of the police. It was the same in most of the towns and cities I moved to: they’d splash the news across the front of the local tabloid like blood from a Shakespearean tragedy.
    I could usually predict what the local papers would say. A day or two after my kill, I would buy one for the purpose of amusement and to scope out any notable stories about people who had narrowly evaded death. But today was different—today I needed to know, because last night was all wrong. Control had been lost. And it still evaded me. More than ever I felt alien eyes calculating my every move, and now I had to accept the truth: it was no longer a paranoia to be dismissed out of hand. The eyes are real. And my stalker even has a name. Had Fate disowned me? Had she sacrificed me to this new stranger’s will? I expected punishment for my carelessness, but this? Abandonment could destroy me. I need her. I need her like a child needs his—
    My shoulder glances off another’s.
    “Hey, watch it, mate!”
    “Leave it, Bill.
Please
don’t start.”
    I turn, look at the couple holding hands. The man stares at me as if ready to prove his prowess to the woman at his side. A flash of rage ignites deep in my stomach, and I chew my lower lip to suppress the rising urge to make an example of him and spread the insolent fucker’s brains over his girlfriend’s flayed corpse.
    He backs away, stepping on his girlfriend’s foot—must have read that thought on my face.
    I suck back an audible, measured, long, steady, soothing breath … as if I am about to blow the two of them into the road, spattering them into oncoming traffic where their guts will …
    Don’t!
I know what’s happening. I see it. Impulsive violence is a poor tool. Like a sledgehammer in oily hands it can destroy much, but it rarely hits the nail.
    He’s still looking at me, sizing me up with no idea in that apelike brain how close he just came to his end. Interesting. Did he just cheat Fate?
    A one-sided smile slides across