Chapter 3: Going Home

It took a huge amount of control to not imagine the driver of the car that had just cut me off, almost forcing me into the median, having the same ‘accident’ as Todd had had in the classroom.

However, the memory of Harold Bleasdale forcing his will onto Andrea and Bob flashed before my eyes. I felt my rage refocus onto him - even though he was likely in a deep, dark hole - and then onto myself. Then I felt a little sick.

The usual moments of sheer terror aside, the drive home was giving me time to judge myself in the balance – the new me, anyhow. It was uncomfortable, but I told myself that it was necessary.

It was a scale, I had decided. At one end, the very worst, there was Harold. He’d barged into a party and started assaulting and molesting people. There had been not a single sliver of remorse. Even when he’d forced his victims to enjoy what he’d been doing to them, he’d only done it to enhance his own perverted satisfaction. I still didn’t know if it had been his own limitations, or another facet of his awfulness, that had led to Bob and Andrea’s horrified between-states, where they’d both enjoyed the crimes committed against them and hated them at the same time.

I wondered what Harold had been like before he’d found his power. Had he been a reasonable guy, or had he always been a predatory asshole? I found myself hoping for the latter, for obvious reasons.

That only established one extreme, but it was all I had at the moment. It was time to move on to my own case.

I examined each instance where I had used my power. I tried to evaluate my motives for using them, and also the effect they seemed to have had on my victims.

I decided I couldn’t be held accountable for Josh’s dream. I’d come to conclude that I had indeed caused it, but I’d been a horny teen indulging in some idle fantasizing. There was no way I could have known that it would affect him in any way.

I could, in good conscience, claim the same about Angela lifting her shirt. I still hadn’t known I’d had powers, or even had the slightest reason to suspect it. I did, however, wonder whether I had somehow made it easier for Harold to control her. Were people who had been influenced once easier or harder to influence again?

I doubted it would have made a difference. I had not influenced Bob in any way, and Harold had had no trouble controlling him as well.

My first real conscious attempt to control someone was the girl in the line for breakfast. I realized, guiltily, that I didn’t even know who she was. I never actually saw her face, being so focused on her ass. I made her take her phone out of her pocket. On a scale of zero to ten, how bad was what I’d done?

I concluded that since she’d suffered no harm or embarrassment, and that neither she nor anybody else seemed to have noticed anything out of the ordinary at all, I would score it a one out of ten, with Harold’s behavior being the ten. Not a zero, though. I had forced someone to do something that they were not going to do, almost purely for my own gratification. I could have picked a more innocent test. I’d gotten a better look at her ass out of it.

I was starting to feel a little unhappy with myself.

I moved on to the next incident. It didn’t make me feel worse right away. Instead, it gave me real pause.

I had known Kyle and Jennifer for all the time I had been at PSU. They were friends. I’d had long conversations with both about their feelings for each other and knew that they wanted to be together as more than just friends.

I had initially thought that I was doing them a service by allowing Jennifer to break through her fear and show her true feelings for Kyle, but was that the case?

How did I know that during our conversations, they hadn’t been telling me what they thought I wanted to hear? Maybe there were other reasons they hadn’t gotten together. Out of nowhere, my mind conjured a soap-opera scenario where they were blood relatives, born of infidelity, and had become friends – and resisted becoming more than that – as a way to look out for each other while hiding the shameful truths behind their births.

Fuck! Had I just forced an incestuous relationship on them?

I physically shook off the notion. I was getting stupid and crazy.

What my random musings did illustrate most clearly to me was that using my power to affect other lives was wrong. I didn’t have - could never have - enough information to make those decisions for others, especially not via freaky, quasi-magical powers that I deployed without their knowledge or consent.

I had taken away their free will, no matter that it was done with the best of intentions.

I paused there, again. Had they really been the best of intentions?

Had I done it just to help them, or had I been helping myself, too? I’d needed another test, and I’d decided to escalate – and oh, how I had escalated. I’d gone from a girl taking her phone out of her back pocket to a girl grabbing her friend and kissing him out of nowhere, in public. An image of Harold and Angela kissing flashed in my mind, and, once again, I felt sick.

It’s funny how the mind works. Through rumination and turmoil, mine settled on a single number: ‘six.’ Just like that. I almost laughed aloud.

My motives hadn’t been wholly selfless, and I’d certainly knocked both Kyle’s and Jennifer’s lives onto a very different course. I’d also caused them some public embarrassment for good measure. The only reason it wasn’t a higher number, I decided, was because I hadn’t pushed them to do anything more extreme, and I hadn’t imagined them feeling differently about each other. That seemed important, for some reason. Even though I’d violated them terribly, I hadn’t actually changed their minds.

Still, six was not a good score on the ‘sleazometer.’ I never wanted to score that high again.

Then there was the kiss. Sue.

I considered my motivations for that. I had already convinced myself that I had power, so there’d been no real need for further proof. It hadn’t been an escalation from the test with Kyle and Jennifer – and thank goodness for that. In a word, it had been gratuitous. In another, it had been selfish. Sue and I were good friends, perhaps best friends. How could I have done something like that to my best friend?

I knew that she had offered to take my V-card, and I thought that if I had wanted to take her up on the offer, she would probably have gone ahead with it, but I’d forced her to kiss me when she’d had had no intentions of doing so.

Sexual assault. Technically not, since she had kissed me, but it felt even sleazier to try to rely on a legal system that very obviously did not account for powers like mine being real.

I couldn’t even claim it had been a drunken mistake. I’d been stone-cold sober, not driven by drugs or lust or any extraneous emotion other than whimsy. I’d treated a sexual assault whimsically.

I figured I should complete the analysis, even though I was already well in the noose. I weighed what harm it had caused.

I didn’t think that anyone in the canteen had seen the kiss. It had happened quite fast. People were used to seeing us together, and Sue was not shy. I had seen her multiple times with her tongue down a guy’s throat in public.

So, she’s a slut and that makes it all right?

SHIT! I didn’t mean that. I meant that she wouldn’t have been embarrassed to be seen kissing someone in public.

Arguing with yourself is not fun. There’s nowhere to hide.

I decided on a Six for the kiss - Although the effect on Sue wasn’t as bad as that on Kyle and Jennifer, my motivation for doing it was more suspect. I tried to ignore the feeling that it should be a higher number. I had already decided that six was as bad as I ever wanted to get to. My self-reflection wasn’t going well.

Then there was Todd.

I grinned at the thought of his discomfort, but then that grin turned into a grimace.

Yes, he was an asshole, and yes, I could reasonably claim to have been defending Mary, but defending her from what?

I constructed the hypothetical and ran through it my mind: Todd calls her out. She’s embarrassed, but everyone knows that girls have periods and accidents happen. She probably has a more-than-adequate put-down ready for him, because she’s a big girl and doesn’t need anybody committing crimes just to spare her a little emotional discomfort. Todd, meanwhile, doesn’t get away with a bag of money or anything. He likely just cements his own reputation as a massive asshole – a university student who’s teasing girls as a shitty middle schooler might.

I’d done the equivalent of poisoning him – fast-acting and extreme. I’d certainly humiliated him, too, since nobody else could possibly have known that he’d just been poisoned. Todd himself hadn’t known that.

I’d done real, physical damage to the asshole – pun intended, I supposed. I’d ruined his clothes. It was impossible to know the second-order effects – just how badly he’d take it, and just how many metaphorical sharks would circle him, having seen a moment of weakness.

I just could not shake the feeling that he deserved some of that, though. Still, I’d had no right. I’d committed a crime against his person. Again, though, I hadn’t changed his mind. I hadn’t violated him in that specific way.

In the end, I scored it as a five. He’d suffered in a multitude of ways because I’d effectively poisoned him. In mitigation, I could claim that I’d been acting in defense of another, albeit misguidedly. However, what had my motives been in defending her? Had they been pure, or had I already been lusting after her?

The more I thought, the shakier all of these numbers seemed. I wasn’t sure I was making much progress after all.

When I moved on to consider Harold, I couldn’t even be sure I was continuing this farcical self-imposed tribunal for any other reason than to make myself feel better. I had needed to prove to myself that I was better than Harold and I wasn’t being particularly successful.

So, Harold. He’d been committing horrific crimes out in public. I’d stopped him. As far as I’d known, nobody else would have been able to. After that, I’d had plenty of probable cause and moral justification to execute my invasive search of his memories. He might’ve had countless other victims stashed away. I’d needed to know if he had, because, with a burst of my own power, I’d freed everyone in his thrall, not having known exactly whom that had included.

I frowned again when I realized that I’d gotten lucky. In my haste, I easily could have broken the chains of mind-slaves whose sudden liberation might have caused injury or death – to themselves or others. I realized there was so much I didn’t know about this strange new world of powers. I could hardly take a single step in any direction without risking stepping on a land mine.

In fact, it seemed to me that the safest, sanest, and most moral thing to do would be to find a way to remove my own powers as I’d done to Harold.

As far as my self-imposed tribunal went, though, I was comfortable scoring my actions at the party as a zero. It was still complicated, but I figured that my haste and inexperience only dragged up what should have been a negative number in the first place: truly necessary, truly moral, rescuing people from immediate harm and danger, the whole nine.

If I wasn’t going to strip myself of my powers, I needed to get better at using them – which, ironically, only barely included making myself more powerful in the comic-book sense, if that were even possible. It was mostly about being wiser. That was a big word: ‘wisdom.’ It covered a lot.

My period of reflection drained me, and I decided to pull over at a truck stop for coffee. I still had another two hours before I got to my parents’.

Normally I would grab my coffee to go, but I wanted a break from driving, so I decided to sit in and drink it. Since I was sitting in, I figured I might as well have some pie too.

While I was eating the pie, my mind wandered. It had a habit of doing that. I considered my earlier thought of whether I could imagine away my own power. Would it work? Would that be the best thing to do? Then I thought of that cliché line from Spider-Man.

It’s such a cliché that I’m not even going to repeat it, but you know the one I mean.

Was there a reason I had this power, and if so, what was it?

I’m an atheist, so I would never consider that this was any kind of divine gift, but if there were other Harolds out there, didn’t I have a duty to try and stop them? I had always wanted to be in law enforcement; was there a secret Psychic Crimes Agency? Was my mom a member, or did she just have them on psychic speed dial? What about those two ‘policemen?’

I held my head in my hands and groaned. I wanted things to go back to the way they were before my birthday.

I was just finishing up my pie when I noticed. I was holding the plate with my left hand and scraping the last of the pie filling onto the fork with my right, and my eyes fell onto my wrist. For some reason, there was something wrong with what I was seeing, but I didn’t immediately know what it was. There was a nagging suspicion that I had forgotten or lost something. Then I realised. The skin of my left wrist was clean and smooth My scar had gone. Stupidly I looked at my right wrist, like maybe I had forgotten which wrist had a scar I had had all my life, but the skin there was equally smooth too.

I knew I wasn’t the brightest guy in any room, but even I could add two and two together. Somehow these strange powers and the disappearance of my scar had to be linked. Had I powered it away or was there some other explanation.

I got back on the road. Despite my crabbing, answers did await.

I was exhausted by the time I got to my parents’ house. The eight-hour drive would have been bad enough in and of itself, but the entire journey being spent in reflection and self-flagellation had absolutely knackered me. I stretched as I got out of my truck, taking a deep breath.

My parents lived out in the country. There were farms nearby, and my father worked as a mobile mechanic, servicing and maintaining their machinery. My mother kept the house.

My mom came to meet me as I walked around my truck. She hugged me.

“Hi honey. Welcome home.”

I hugged her back and then turned to start getting my things out of the truck.

“Leave those for now,” she said. “There’s someone here you need to see.”

I looked at her quizzically. “Who?”

She didn’t answer, just took my arm and led me into the house. Her expression was one of concern.

She pushed open the door to the parlor, the room we never used, and indicated I should enter. I was confused when she didn’t follow me in, but instead closed the door behind me.

“Caleb.”

The man who addressed me was slightly taller than my six feet one inch. He was stocky and had dark hair in a side parting. He wore a suit, but no tie.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“My name is Gerald Cross,” he said. “I am here to talk to you about what happened at your party yesterday.”

“Okay,” I said, taking a seat on the couch. Gerald sat on the easy chair across the coffee table.

He got out a small recording device and placed it on the table.

“Caleb,” He began, “would you please describe, in your own words, what occurred last night at the party.”

I sat for a moment marshaling my thoughts.

“I was at my birthday party...” I began.

“For your twentieth birthday?” he interrupted. I raised my eyebrow. I quashed my sarcastic response that it had actually been for my nineteenth, but that we were running a little late.

“Yes,” I responded, “I was sat talking to Mary...”

“That’s Mary Everson?” He interrupted again.

I gritted my teeth. This was going to take some time if he was going to interrupt every sentence.

“Yes.” I responded again, “We were sitting talking when I suddenly got a strange feeling. It was almost like a bad smell, something rotten and wrong. I looked around and saw a new guy standing in the doorway. Someone I didn’t know.”

“And this was Harold Bleasdale?” He asked.

“It was, although I didn’t know his name at the time.”

“And what was Mr. Bleasdale doing when you first saw him?”

“He was surveying the room,” I said, “He had the look of a fat man at a banquet, trying to decide which dish to sample first.”

“What happened next?” He prompted.

“He seemed to select a target and moved across the room, toward Angela.”

“And what did you do?” He asked.

“I followed him.” I answered, “Even now I couldn’t tell you why, he just felt so wrong to me, I wanted to know what he was up to.”

I waited for the next question. When it didn’t come, I continued my tale.”I heard, or more exactly I experienced a scream.”

“When you say experienced?” He asked.

“Initially,” I responded, “I thought I had heard it, but since nobody else reacted, I realised that it had been only in my head. It was like the ‘smell’ I mentioned earlier. The sensation was the same, but it had arrived without actually being detected by my senses. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

“Had you ever experienced anything like this before?” he asked.

I shook my head. “This was the first time.”

“So,” he prompted again, “you ‘heard’ a scream. Then what?”

Slowly and with some prompting I described the rest of the events of the party, finishing at the point when Mary and I left after speaking to Bob and Angela.

“What happened after you left Bob’s house?” He asked.

“We went back to my room,” I replied. “Josh and Louise weren’t there so Mary came in and we talked.”

“About?”

“Personal stuff,” I said.

“Did you and Mary have sex?” he asked.

I stared at him. I wasn’t even going to dignify that with an answer.

He waited a minute or so before deciding to try a different tack.

“When did you first realise you had the ability to control people?”

“I thought you wanted to talk to me about the party,” I responded tightly.

“How many times have you used your ability since you discovered it?” It was as if he hadn’t heard me.

I stood up.”I think I have said everything I am going to,” I said evenly.

“We are not finished,” he said. “I need you to tell me about what went on between you, your roommate, and his girlfriend.”

He stood up and stepped around the table.

I backed away slightly. “That is none of your business,” I said.

“I am investigating a misuse of power,” he said stepping toward me. “It IS my business.”

“You said you wanted to talk about the party. I have told you everything I can about that. Now if you will excuse me.” I turned to leave.

He grabbed me by the arm to turn me around. That was his first mistake. You don’t lay hands on a wrestler and expect to get away with it. Almost instinctively I reversed his grip and bent his hand forward in a wrist lock.

“Don’t touch me.” I snarled preparing to push him off so I could leave. That is when he made his second mistake.

I felt a weight pressing on my mind, as I had with Harold, but much stronger. I felt something fighting with me for control and I pushed back, imagining that weight being lifted and thrown off.

Gerald’s face set, and he seemed to push harder.

I was not going to stand toe-to-toe with this guy and risk that he had more power than me. Bringing my knee up sharply, I rammed it into his crotch as hard as I could.

The weight disappeared from my mind as the air rushed from his lungs. I stepped to the side as he started to bend forward and slammed a right cross to his jaw as he was headed down to the ground.

I was just drawing back for the second kick to his unprotected head when my mother came running into the room shouting “Caleb, NO!!!”

I rounded on her, furious.

“What the fuck was this?” I shouted into her face. “How could you deliver your own son to be mind raped by this fucking creep?”

She stepped back, shocked at my fury.

I pushed past her, heading back toward my truck. “I’m going back to school. If I stay here, I’ll do or say something we will all regret.”

Opening the front door, I came face to face with Mary - no, wait, two Marys - and an older woman, perhaps in her forties, whose resemblance to the two Marys meant she was probably their mother. They all had the same beautiful, tawny eyes.

My mother followed me into the hallway, crying.

She started to speak but stopped as the older woman in front of me beat her to it.

“Caleb, would you be so kind as to spare me a few moments? I promise you; nobody is here to harm you in any way.” Her voice was low and melodious.

I looked at the woman, then at Mary, then at the other Mary.

Mary Two stepped forward. Left to right, from my perspective. It was wholly arbitrary.

“Caleb, please. I know this is a shock, and perhaps a little scary, but our ship is still waiting. If you leave, I am worried it might sail forever.”

My rage abated and I stood to one side, allowing the three women to walk past me. My Mary – as far as I knew - came last and took my hand as she did, leading me back into the parlor.

I closed the door in my mother’s face, shutting her out. I was still very angry with her. The man, Gerald Cross, was still on the floor, his eyes unfocused, and his hands cupped around his genitals.

“What happened?” The older woman asked.

“He attacked me, so I responded,” I said flatly.

She shook her head.

“Please.” She indicated the sofa. “Sit. I have some questions and some information. I promise I will give as much as I get, and there will be no further breaches of protocol.” She looked at Gerald with contempt as she said that last bit.

I was still not happy, but I sat. My Mary sat to one side of me, and her twin to the other.

“Firstly, allow me to make the introductions. My name is Dianna. I am Mary’s grandmother and the Matriarch of the Everson family. Mary,” she said, nodding her head towards my Mary, “you know, and Amanda.” She tilted her head towards the twin.

I looked back at Dianna. Grandmother? She didn’t look a day over forty. I was already struggling with the concept she might be Mary’s mother, but grandmother?

Dianna smiled as if she’d read my thoughts. “You are a sweet boy.”

Gerald chose that moment to crawl to his knees. He looked a little groggy and was still in obvious pain.

“I suggest you go into the kitchen and get some ice,” Dianna said to him with a voice that brooked no argument. “Perhaps this will teach you not to be so arrogant, or so hasty.”

Climbing to his feet, he staggered from the room. He didn’t even glance in my direction.

“Would you please tell me what happened?” Dianna’s voice no longer held that note of authority. She spoke kindly, and so I decided to respond.

“My mother delivered me into the presence of that ass ... of Gerald,” I said, “he had questions about what happened at the party last night, which I answered. Then he started asking me personal questions which I declined to answer. I wished to leave. He grabbed my arm, and I brushed him off.”

Mary took my hand, which probably would have been comforting ... except for the fact that, simultaneously, Amanda did the exact same thing with my other hand. It gave me goosebumps. It was creepy.

Dianna smiled. “Please, go on.”

“I felt a pressure in my head, like someone was trying to take control. It was very much like the feeling from last night at the party when that sleaze tried to stop me from interfering in his assault on Angela.”

“Initially I tried pushing back, and I thought I was making headway, but then he redoubled his attack, and my only option was a physical response.”

She nodded. “You did well to resist long enough to be able to defend yourself. He deserved what he got.”

She sat back in her chair. “As I said outside,” she began, “I have questions for you, and I promised you information. I will begin. I told you I am the matriarch of the Everson family. We are a family who has, for generations, had a gift. We are Empaths. We have a strong mental ability to share feelings and thoughts with others.

“We cannot compel or control with our gift, only share. We never do this without the consent of the person we wish to share with, although our non-invasive reading of emotions does enable us to work very effectively as counselors, and in other professions related to mental health.”

“For instance,” she went on, “I am in no way reading your actual thoughts right now, but I can feel your raw emotions even without doing so. You are angry - with some justification - more than a little confused, and a touch frightened.” Then she smiled. “And having my granddaughters in such proximity has also made you somewhat aroused.”

I blushed and retrieved my hands from the twins. They released them without complaint.

“The Everson family has, for generations, worked to protect people who have no gifts from those who do, and to mitigate damage and help victims to recover afterward. We cannot change what happened. We can only share the memory and help them come to terms with their suffering. I visited with Angela and Bob last night after you left. I must say, you did an excellent job for someone untrained. I was particularly impressed that you did not try and use your gift to change their perception of the event. That would have been a grave error.”

“Will they be okay?” I asked.

“They were both badly shaken,” she replied,” but your interference in their attacker’s plans and subsequent counseling meant that my job was so much easier. Using Bob’s desire to protect Angela to force him to forgive himself was inspired. I feel that they will recover.”

“Thank you. They are good people and didn’t deserve that.”

“Nobody deserves that,” she said with some steel. “Now back to you. I know you told your story to Mary, but I would very much like to hear about when you found your powers, and what you did with them. We could sit here all night while you tell your tale, or I could share your memory of the time since you found them. That would take only a few moments.”

“No!” I said flatly, my anger flaring once more.

She smiled at me again.

“I have made you angry again, and I know it’s a scary proposition having someone read your thoughts. However, there are reasons why it would be much better for both of us for you to allow me to help you.”

“Help me?” I asked a little more strongly than I intended. “You want to help me by mind raping me? Rummaging around inside my head and learning everything I might want to keep private?”

Mary put her hand on my arm. Her twin copied the gesture on the other side.

“Gerald is a member of your family,” Dianna said. “A second or third cousin, if memory serves.”

I goggled at her. “I never even knew I had cousins.”

“Your family, the Stotts, is another family that has, for generations, had gifts. Their gifts were more active. They could control and compel, not just share. Where the Everson family has always worked against those who abuse their gifts, the Stott’s legacy is ... more complicated. Gerald is an excellent case in point. He’s actively chosen to assist my family and to hunt down people like Harold. And yet...”

I understood what she left unsaid. He was overzealous, and that was putting it mildly. The words ‘bad cop’ sprung to mind, in fact – though he hadn’t seemed to merely be playing the role. Dianna was clearly the good cop. That raised my hackles a bit. It encouraged me to remain suspicious.

“You mean I might be related to Harold from last night?” I asked her.

“No,” she answered. “There are others who also have gifts such as yours, with varying degrees of power.

“So how do you keep track of them all?” I asked.

“In reality,” she replied, “we cannot. We can only monitor those who are born into bloodlines we know have power. Sometimes new bloodlines appear, and sometimes bloodlines with power, fade. Your family line has remained solid, however. There are others, but yours is the most prevalent.”

“So, you police these bloodlines?” I asked. “How?”

“When a new baby is born into the bloodline, their powers are sealed. An amulet is placed around their wrist which blocks them from using their gift.

The amulet is usually removed on their twenty first birthday. They then undergo assessment, training, and counseling to enable them to adapt to having their gift, without the power corrupting them. We do what we can. We’re never as successful as we hope. Some abusers still manage to say all the right things and even suppress their true emotions and intentions. Others simply can’t resist the temptation as the years go by.”

“For some reason, your amulet failed. You came into your power before we were ready. We would have removed on your twenty first birthday. Now we are left with you having discovered and used, possibly abused your powers.”

I flinched.

“We need to know, Caleb. What kind of man are we unleashing into the world? How will you use your power? Do we need to worry that you are, or will become, a danger to the people around you? What’s more, I can feel that you have similar questions – I can feel your self-doubt, your guilt, your uncertainty. That is encouraging, but I still need to hear it from you.”