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It is a terribly violative thing to do. It makes me sick to do it. I’m certain there are people who would revel in the power, but for me it is a disturbing, nauseating thing and makes me despise myself.
But that doesn’t stop me, I can’t let it.
So, with a deep breath, I entered Trent’s world.
It was a hallucinatory experience of images and flashes and bits of dialog and strange physical sensations. It comes at you like a fire hose of way too much information.
I was not there to learn how Trent had come to blame “foreigners” for his father leaving home. I wasn’t there to learn that it was a bitter aunt who first set him on the path of hatred. I wasn’t there to see Trent’s father’s psychological abuse. Or his mother’s deliberate blindness to what was happening to her son.
It did not matter that Trent had been a fearful, insecure child, or that he was struggling in school because he had undiagnosed dyslexia, or that his only sense of worth came from having a weaker boy to look up to him.
None of that changed things except insofar as they made me sympathetic. Trent had not gotten to this place alone. I suppose no one ever does. The road to hatred is lined with enablers.
But I was not inside his mind to find out those things, they were simply layers I had to pass through on my way down, down into the subbasement of Trent’s fears.
There was a great deal of fear. Fear of his father never coming back, fear that it was somehow Trent’s own fault. Fear of dogs, fear of flying, fear . . . and there it was.
In this spaceless space I somehow occupied, it was like a glowing, black mass, a seething melted tar pit of a thing. Fear. The great fear.
The nightmare buried deep in Trent’s subconscious mind. The great fear that would shatter him.
Slowly I disentangled, dreading what would follow from revealing this truth to Messenger. Dreading what I would be forced to witness.
I opened my eyes and there he was: the Messenger of Fear.
“What is his fear?” Messenger asked me.
There was no point in evasion. “Trent is most frightened of being helpless. The image in his mind is from his childhood. He saw a man in a wheelchair, a quadriplegic. He—”
“No,” Trent whispered. “No. No.”
“The man was at a bus stop. It was a freezing cold day and a car came by and splashed a puddle of slush onto the man. Then, two bullies—”
“No, no, no,” Trent said, shaking his head vigorously.
“—and they used the hockey sticks they were carrying to poke the man. They kept asking if he felt it. They broke the urine bag the man was wearing under his clothing and—”
“Listen, I, I, whatever you want from me . . . ,” Trent pleaded. There was no bluster left. There was only fear.
I had seen this boy beat a helpless man. I knew that this boy’s actions had set in motion a series of events that would lead to the death of Aimal. But now he was scared, and his voice shook, and his eyes pleaded, first with Messenger and then with me.
“Hey, I’m sorry about that chink thing. I mean, I really am sorry. I got no problem with chinks. Asian people I mean. But you can’t . . . I mean . . . you guys are just messing with me.”
I didn’t answer. I tried to maintain a cold look. But it’s not so easy doing that, not so easy to look at naked fear and remain cold and detached.
“In the name of Isthil and the balance She maintains,” Messenger intoned, “I summon the Hooded Wraiths and charge them to carry out the sentence.”
Now the basement was just the basement again, tight and airless. It was the smallness and confinement, and the sense of realness I think, that pushed Trent over the edge into incoherent babbling and pleading.
The mist, the cursed mist, filled one end of the room, a gateway for new horrors.
They came then, two wraiths, tall, vague of shape, faceless, but bringing with them a feeling of cold, of the cold of death itself, so that even I shuddered.
The wraiths moved closer and I heard from them a low, insistent whispering sound that contained words, but not words I could parse. Only Messenger could understand them. His face grew gray with sadness as he listened.
He was troubled when he turned to me. “Trent will live a lifetime in that condition,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “It’s an illusion, not reality, he won’t actually be made a quadriplegic.”
