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I see how it’s a gift to them. It’s pain and a curse to me.
They tell me, without it, I would never have survived some of those situations. Well, guess what, if I didn’t have the thing that they like to call my ‘gift’, they would never have put me out there into the path of all those risks in the first place.
I don’t know how I’m going to survive like this. I really wonder how long I can keep going.
Journal
Talent
The thing they call my ‘gift,’ or ‘talent,’ I always had it. I thought everyone did. I always felt those vibrations in the center of someone when they lie to me or when their intention turns bad.
First, there’s the buzz, a tense lightness around the cap of my head. Then an awareness of what the other person is feeling, or what’s going on in their head. I couldn’t tell exactly what they were thinking. Not at first, anyway. It was more like I sensed a mood. Something between a sound and a color.
They think that’s a talent. They should try it. See how it feels to be locked in a room, sat on the far side of a metal table, with people just like them snarling, lying to you, and threatening you.
And you can feel the rage and viciousness, deep inside them.
I wonder if you get those sensations, Eve? Those unwanted glimpses, howls from the pain in other people’s souls.
Chapter Twelve
In Portland, I really want to get a taxi, just so I have a driver. Somebody I can rely on. So I’m not completely alone.
But I did that in Seattle once. I had to meet a client in a sketchy area by the docks. So I took a cab, gave the driver a twenty, and asked him to wait. I promised I would come back in less than ten minutes.
He said, “Sure.”
Then he drove away before I crossed the street. He even waved. Fucker.
The location is a disused pool hall in a dead area. I drive the rental car around the block slowly.
I can’t see any other vehicles around, other than ones that look like they’ve been embedded in the pavement for months or longer.
The door’s not fully shut. It looks like it’s hanging off one hinge.
I drive slowly past. A side door looks shut, but not very secure. The same goes for another door from the littered parking lot in the back. I park half a block away.
Slowly, as casually as I can manage, I walk the long way around the block. There’s not a living soul in sight, but I don’t think that means there’s nobody here.
I walk past the front door and try to observe as much as I can without looking. The door is part way open. Inside, all I can see is dirt. Marks on the floor don’t look too old, though. When I pass the side door, I can see that the frame is so rotten, it would open with a shove.
I keep on to the door at the rear. Before I get there, I spot an open trapdoor with a slope to a cellar. The dirt on the slope has built up over months or more.
The rear door is in good shape. And it’s clean. The handle turns easily.
As quietly as I can, I crouch and back away.
I go in through the cellar. Getting in is easy. The cellar is full of dust, dirt, a lot of cobwebs, many old kegs, some on their sides, and a big iron fire safe.
A wood stairway leads up to the pool hall. I’m careful to move slowly, trying not to make the stairs creak.
I rise up through the floor and emerge behind the wreck of the bar. The space behind the bar, around the stairway, is surrounded by kegs and filthy, splintered packing cases. They’re obviously packed with something heavy that isn’t worth stealing.
It’s almost all one room. The building didn’t look so big, but the room seems huge. I guess that’s my nerves.
The collapsed bar is in one corner. The wrecks of half a dozen pool tables sag in haphazardly in the center of the room.
A door in the far corner opens and a black figure steps in.
