Lance Brody Omnibus Read online

  Malnourished, dirty, and living in a suburban façade of a home that was nothing but despair on the inside, Pamela had been rescued a month after her fourth birthday after a neighbor had peered over a backyard fence one afternoon and saw the girl walking around naked, unsupervised, and eating a stick of butter.

  “She was singing,” the neighbor had said when asked if there was anything else he’d like to add. “She was singing that song from The Wizard of Oz. The one about the rainbow. But she only kept repeating the first part.”

  After being saved from the nightmare of a home she’d started in, Pamela had bounced from foster home to foster home, before finally ending up in the Home for Girls. It wasn’t that she misbehaved or was disrespectful. All the foster parents simply shrugged their shoulders and confessed it was as if Pamela had no interest in being a child, or letting them be parents. She was withdrawn and acted as if other people weren’t there. She sat at the dinner table for meals and said her pleases and thank-yous, but conversation was brief and forced.

  Everyone agreed the only time Pamela looked truly happy was when she had a book in her hands.

  She lived at the Home for Girls and attended school and made decent grades. The Home for Girls wasn’t some run-down Oliver Twist disaster full of beatings and rationed food, but instead a dull, quiet place. State employees who cared just enough to keep the job—because it certainly wasn’t the pay keeping them from jumping ship—and enough tax money and donations throughout the year to keep the home hospitable and comfortable enough for those few young women who had nowhere else to go.

  Pamela made some friends at school but didn’t socialize as often as most teachers would have liked. She wasn’t odd and wasn’t made fun of—no more than your average high schooler, that is—but most agreed she was simply uninterested in most of the things that a regular fifteen- or sixteen-year-old woman might be. She seemed happy enough and was pleasant enough to talk with—quite funny at times, actually—but it was as if her head was always in the clouds. She dated some, but it never amounted to anything serious . Living at the Home for Girls made having boyfriends difficult, if not impossible at times.

  At age eighteen, the very next day after her high school graduation, Pamela Brody packed a small bag and walked out of the Home for Girls and never looked back.

  The first time she looked into the face of her newborn baby boy, the memories from her early childhood—memories a therapist might be surprised she could remember, given how young she’d been—resurfaced for the first time in years, and she quickly shoved them away and promised herself, promised her son, that she’d be the best mother she could possibly be. She promised she would do anything to keep him safe.

  She swore Lance smiled back at her as she had the thought.

  And for these first two years, as she watched Lance sit in his high chair and smear the chocolate frosting from his birthday cupcake across his face, occasionally sticking his fingers in his mouth and sucking at the sweetness, Pamela Brody felt she’d been upholding her promise fairly well.

  Lance always had clean clothes and a clean diaper. He never went hungry. He had toys—mostly secondhand items from thrift stores or gifts from friends—and had already developed a fascination with books, albeit big bright ones made of cardboard and full of pictures.

  Pamela managed to balance her work schedule and coordinated with friends to make sure Lance was cared for at all times. She refused to take him to a daycare—it was too much like a group home in her mind. Sometimes this meant having to drop shifts and have a few less pennies in the paycheck come payday, but they always managed to make do. Money and material possessions had never mattered much to Pamela Brody. Life mattered. Happiness mattered. Her son mattered.

  And Lance was a what you’d call a dream child. Even in his early days, he cried very little. He didn’t throw tantrums or fits, didn’t wail incessantly for hours for no reason. He usually sat quietly in his playpen or his swing or his high chair and simply looked content.

  Most people would also agree that Lance’s eyes seemed to be the eyes not of a child, but of a person much older, much wiser. If you really looked at the boy long enough, you almost felt that he was looking right back at you, and then deeper. As if he was connecting with you on a level you really couldn’t understand or believe.

  Pamela Brody had told one of her closer friends—Lizzie, who worked with her at the town’s library—that sometimes she was certain she could actually communicate with Lance by looking into his eyes. She said sometimes, when she was feeding him and he refused whatever she was offering, turning his head and pursing his lips or spitting it out once tasted, she’d stop and look at him and simply concentrate on the question “What is it you’d like to eat then?” And if she thought hard enough about it and could keep her concentration, suddenly, like a clown springing out of a jack-in-the-box, the image of carrots, or applesauce, or sweet potatoes would pop into her head as clear as day. And Lance would eat it. Every time. “See?” she’d told Lizzie one day during their lunch break. “He can tell me what he wants to eat.”

  Lizzie, though polite, had nodded and changed the subject.

  But though Lance was well behaved and intellectually advanced—as far as Pamela Brody was concerned—she also couldn’t deny that there was something else going on with her son, almost as if he had managed to learn a secret he was holding on to, unable (or unwilling) to tell her.

  Sometimes, while the two of them played or read together, Lance’s attention would snap away from whatever they were involved in, his eyes darting to some unoccupied space in their living room or kitchen and locking on to something intently. Pamela would follow his gaze and see nothing—a chair or a lamp or the stove, everyday items Lance ignored ninety-nine out of a hundred times. He would stare for long moments, Pamela’s voice or her actions unable to snap him out of whatever trance he’d fallen into. Sometimes Lance would smile, giggle even, as he looked into nothing. This bothered Pamela for reasons she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  But not as much as it bothered her when her son’s eyes would suddenly go wide with fear. Those moments sent chills down her spine, causing her to scoop Lance up in her arms and rush him into a different room or leave whatever building they’d been visiting or shopping in.

  But the worst moment for Pamela Brody, the moment that solidified her ever-growing suspicion her son was legitimately seeing things that she could not, came in the middle of the night when Lance was eighteen months old.

  She was awakened by the sound of Lance crying, loud sobs that made her own throat feel raw. She jumped from bed, threw on her robe and crossed the hallway to Lance’s small bedroom. The small nightlight plugged into the wall socket was still there—she could see its faint outline by the light of the moon coming through the slats of the window blinds—but it was not glowing. Just a darkened, empty plastic shell.

  Lance’s cries tapered off as soon as Pamela entered the room, growing quieter and quickly becoming just soft moaning and whimpers. She rushed across the carpet to his crib, ready to reach down and scoop him up.

  Her arms and hands froze mid-scoop.

  Lance was standing in his crib, his tiny hands gripping the bars and peering out.

  He was facing away from her, his back turned to her and his gaze fixed on the corner of the room where the old wooden rocking chair sat. This was where Pamela would rock him to sleep at night or sometimes sit to read books as he napped, occasionally peering through the bars as he slept and letting her heart fill with joy at the sight of him.

  As Pamela’s eyes adjusted further to the dim light, she took one more step closer to the corner of the room, ready to reach out for Lance and ask him—though she knew he could not answer, as least not with words—what he was looking at.

  She stopped again. Felt ice in her veins.

  The rocking chair was just beginning to settle, slowly creaking back and forth, back and forth.

  As if somebody had just left, quietly sneaking away.
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  While the event with the rocking chair had caused an uneasy feeling that would not dissipate until the sun came up, Pamela Brody was much more curious than concerned.

  After only a few minutes of rocking Lance in the very chair in question, she laid her son back to sleep in his crib and slipped out of the bedroom. But she did not sleep. She went to the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea and sliced a small sliver of the pie she’d made yesterday. Then she sat at the kitchen table and lifted the mug to her lips and felt the steam rise across her face. She sat like that for a long time, slowly sipping, and thinking about everything that had seemed different about Lance from the day he’d been born.

  She knew that people with special cognitive abilities were abundant on earth—those with greater senses of perception or memory or awareness than others. And she would have no problem admitting that Lance might very well be one of those people. But she felt he was also more than that. The intense stares that could seemingly communicate thoughts and ideas across brainwaves were a prime example of this. That bordered more on telepathy than simple awareness and perception.

  And then, of course, there were the distant stares, when he would fixate on things that simply were not there for such lengths of time. Pamela considered the rocking chair again, the way it had impossibly rocked in the still room. Then she very quickly, right there in her small kitchen with a plate full of pie crumbs and a mug with the cold leftovers of her tea, accepted that Lance wasn’t staring at nothing. He was simply staring at things the rest of the world couldn’t see.

  Pamela felt a chill wash over her at this realization, and she quickly turned around in her chair and stared back into the living room through the kitchen entryway, as if she’d suddenly noticed that she wasn’t alone in her own home in the middle of the night.

  There was nothing in the living room. No shapes or shadows scurrying out of sight. The battered recliner was still upright and unmoving. The afghan was still draped across the rear of the couch where she’d left it.

  She carried the empty plate and mug to the sink and washed them both, then headed down the short hallway to her bedroom, carrying with her not a sense of fear, but what she could only describe as some unusual sense of pride.

  Pamela Brody did not believe in coincidences. Lance was hers for a reason.

  My boy is special, she thought as she laid her head against the pillow, hoping to squeeze out a few hours of sleep before starting her morning routine. And I need to be ready for him.

  After Pamela Brody’s early childhood and uninspired adolescence, Lance, and whatever abilities he surely possessed, felt like a peace offering from the universe.

  1999

  Lance continued to be a healthy child, and as his body grew, so did his abilities.

  Pamela often relied on him to find missing items around the house—keys, purse, sunglasses—and while most folks would admit Lance seemed to be able to locate missing household items quickly, often they would not admit it was because he was using some sort of extra sense, a mind-tic that guided him to the correct location. Not that Pamela often inquired about other peoples’ opinions of her son. She had made a decision the night of the rocking chair incident, just before she’d fallen to sleep, that whatever made Lance different—special—it was probably best to keep the information to herself. If people became scared or worried or maybe a bit too curious, it could mean bad things for Lance. For Pamela. Images from a number of science fiction movies had popped into her head, sad and frightening pictures of children with wires and electrodes and sensors strapped all over their head, locked away in cleanrooms with men in white coats all looking on stone-faced and waiting for results, pens hovering over clipboards.

  Her son was a human being. Not an experiment.

  Aside from being a mental bloodhound and helping Pamela locate lost items, Lance’s telepathic link with his mother also seemed to be getting stronger. Pamela would occasionally test this by thinking of simple questions and concentrating on her son.

  Are you finished eating? she would think, sitting across from Lance at the kitchen table, watching him fork the last bits of food into this mouth.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he would say, acting as though nothing unusual at all had just taken place.

  Eventually, Pamela graduated the testing to things a little more strenuous. She would stand in the kitchen while Lance was in his bedroom reading and ask him, I’m about to make a pie. Do you want to help?

  And sure enough, a few moments later, she’d hear the bedroom door open, followed by Lance’s footsteps coming down the hall.

  It was exhilarating.

  It was terrifying—but in the best of ways.

  Pamela Brody was not one to fear the unknown. She embraced all walks of life and all things philosophical and all ideologies. She worshipped life and all its mysteries. How lucky was she that her son was perhaps one of the greatest mysteries of all?

  And he only kept surprising her with more gifts…

  On one Saturday afternoon three days before Thanksgiving, and roughly a month before Lance would turn five, the doorbell of their small home rang—a tired-sounding chime barely audible over the sound of a teakettle that had just begun to scream. Pamela moved the kettle to a different burner and headed toward the door, wondering who could be visiting. Lance had been in the living room, coloring on the floor, and when she entered the room, he didn’t look up to her, but simply said, “Bad man out there, Mama.”

  Pamela Brody froze on the carpeted floor, watching Lance use a red crayon to color in Spider-Man’s suit. Meticulous. Well within the lines.

  The doorbell’s chime gave it another go, and Pamela stayed put.

  Only when she heard a mumble from the other side of the door, and heavy footsteps walking down the wooden porch steps, did she venture toward the door and peek out from a window. A man in a sport coat and blue jeans was just past their mailbox and headed down the street.

  The next day, a Hillston sheriff’s deputy had stopped by and asked Pamela if she’d seen a man walking around the neighborhood yesterday. Apparently the man was going door-to-door claiming to be accepting cash donations for the local soup kitchen to help provide for the needy on Thanksgiving. He did not, in fact, work for the soup kitchen or any other charitable organization and had managed to disappear with roughly five hundred dollars in stolen cash.

  Bad man out there, Mama.

  As Lance had grown out of the infancy and then toddler stages of his life, his shifts in focus, those times when his eyes would lock on to things unseen by others, the sporadic flashes of fear and concern across his face, dwindled away. By the time Lance was five, although Pamela Brody had certainly not forgotten those moments from Lance’s life and would never forget the night of the rocking chair incident, she could now go days, sometimes weeks, without having the thought cross her mind.

  All that changed on the first official day of summer in 1999.

  School had been out for a couple weeks, but Pamela and Lance had done their lessons earlier that morning—Pamela having decided to homeschool Lance herself, at least until grade school. She wanted to develop a better understanding of her son’s abilities and intellect and personality before subjecting him to the harsh reality of the public school system. But mostly, she wanted to protect him as long as she could.

  It was a beautiful day, the sun out and the weather warm but not sweltering. An occasional breeze blew in their faces as they walked hand-in-hand down the street, headed toward the park. Lance had a junior-sized basketball under one arm, while Pamela carried a basket with a light lunch, a blanket, and a paperback novel she would try to finish while Lance played.

  Though today she wouldn’t be able to help herself from keeping an extra eye on her son. Not after what had happened a week ago.

  Last week, on the local six o’clock news, the pretty blonde behind the anchor desk had put on her serious face and alerted everyone that three-year-old Alex Kennedy had gone missing. He had last been seen playing in hi
s sandbox in the Kennedys’ backyard, which was no more than three-quarters of a mile from the Brodys’ house, as the crow flies. Mr. Kennedy had run inside to answer the telephone and returned ten minutes later to find his son nowhere in sight.

  Proclamations of child abduction ran rampant. Doors and windows were double-checked at night by parents across the entire town. Peaceful Hillston had been shocked awake.

  There had been constant reminders on the news each night. The sheriff’s office had held a press conference with Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy onstage, looking pale and exhausted and hardly aware of their surroundings. Mr. Kennedy looked particularly ill. Pamela could not imagine his guilt. If Alex Kennedy was never found, the man’s ten-minute mistake would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  So far, no leads had surfaced.

  But Pamela tried not to let the event deter her good mood. Lance had done very well with his lessons today, and the look of excitement on his face as he carried his basketball toward the park was enough to make her smile big and warm her heart. She hoped to be able to save up enough money by Christmas to be able to buy a cheap hoop for the driveway.

  Birds sang overhead.

  Today was a good day.

  They entered the park and followed the jogging trail north, which would give them a nice walk past the baseball fields, wrap them around the pond, and then deliver them to the basketball courts. There were two covered picnic pavilions near the courts, but Pamela always preferred to spread her blanket out under one of the nearby trees.

  There was a softball game being played on the first field, cheering parents absorbed in the action.

  Joggers ran by, folks with dogs tugging on leashes, snouts sniffing and tongues hanging.