Adam coded into the security room. A slight smell of rot hit him as the steel-reinforced door slid open. He frowned and braced inwardly. With a jerk of his head, he dismissed the guard, wondering how the man withstood the constant funk up his nose.
Signing on to the master security console, Adam caught a glimpse of Jacob in the video monitor: he lay on his side, arms wrapped around his naked belly as if to ward off cold or in an expression of acute modesty. He’d once chaired the board of Thorne Industries. Now he was cornered like a lab animal in a sterile white box. Overly thin and pale, Jacob was frightening only in the sense that no human being should ever be caged and starved like he’d been for the last six years. But then, Adam didn’t think Jacob was human anymore.
Adam dropped four inches of files on the console before him. Might as well get some work in before he crashed.
It always amazed him how so little progress could generate so much work. He picked up the first file and opened the manila folder. A detailed spreadsheet of numbers blurred before his eyes. Budget can wait. He closed the file again and exchanged it for another. Inside was a stack of papers so thick as to require a rubber band to hold them together. A Post-it was stuck to the top.
I thought this might interest you. ~C.
Celia Eubanks was a research fellow at Johns Hopkins and an old family friend. He focused on the text of the document, titled, An examination of common motifs described in near-death experiences, by Talia Kathleen O’Brien.
Near-death. That wouldn’t do him any good.
A shuffle hissed out of the speakers in the console. Jacob was moving in there.
“Ho, Adam. Good to have you back.” The voice was non-chalant and familiar at the same time, coming in crystal clear over the monitor.
Adam ignored Jacob. Early on they’d attempted to test how he knew who was beyond his cell walls, each a foot-thick plane of reinforced steel, to determine which of his senses exceeded human parameters and by how much, but Jacob had caught on and started messing with their data.
Adam scanned the 316 pages of Ms. Talia O’Brien’s dissertation. Dense text filled the pages, broken up by a chart or two. Deep reading. She could have chosen a larger point size for the font. He’d be blind before the end.
“You could answer me. Our mother taught you better manners than that,” Jacob said in his usual condescending tone.
Mom would be weeping for both of us.
Adam forced his concentration away from Jacob and into chapter one, the section where Ms. O’Brien laid out her theory and her method of analysis. He liked the way her mind worked, her odd angle of inquiry. She did not assume near-death experiences were real, but neither did she suggest they were false. She positioned herself outside the stories and looked for common threads. She noted patterns between them to analyze how the living conceived of death, and not death itself. Death as a concept, an idea entertained by a subconscious grappling with mortality.
“Adam, it’s just that I am so hungry, I can’t even think. I may be ready to try some soup. Or a sandwich. What do you think? Just a little bite to give me something to go on.”
You don’t want a sandwich, Jacob. You don’t even remember what to do with one. You just want the person who brings it to you, even if it is your own brother.
But any kind of dialogue with the thing that had his older brother’s face and memories would be pointless. Whatever came out of his mouth since his change was a manipulation of the truth, contrived to keep Adam in hell. Nothing to learn there.
Adam focused on the study. Chapter two related the author’s interactions with her sources. She’d managed to get a wide age range, which was laudable. Selected experiences had been transcribed and included in an appendix. Real work went into this.
Life after death.
Adam frowned. He hadn’t pursued this approach; perhaps it was time he did. And this—heflipped to the front—Talia O’Brien came at the subject from a neatly objective point of view. He’d have to check her out. See if she was safe to come on staff at Segue.
“God, Adam, I don’t know why you have to be such a shit about this. All I want is a sandwich. You could at least answer me. Answer me, goddamn it!”
Adam flipped through the dissertation, past her analysis, to her conclusions. Something caught his eye, made his stomach tighten. He skimmed back again. There. On the bottom of page sixty-nine. Footnote 3b. A source claimed to have met an individual named Shadowman.
A memory stirred, a long-ago rant from a gleeful Jacob, his eyes bright and wild, voice shrill. “Shadowman can’t reach me!”
Jacob’s face had been bloody, their father limp on the floor at his feet.
Adam braced against the flood of pain the recollection triggered and stuffed the vision back in the small box in his head. Shut it. Tight.
He blinked hard to restore his normal sight, shook off the heat that had suddenly slicked his skin, and forced a cleansing breath.
In the intervening years, he’d searched the name Shadowman exhaustively, attempted to question (and goad) Jacob further, but had come up with nothing. Nothing.