Title: The Center
Author: Harper Kingsley
Genre: sci-fi, horror
Rating: Adult
Word count: 16,991
Summary: Before he used his psychic gifts to work with the police. Before he became Julian Duncan… He was Julian DeVries, a scared boy held at a secret facility known only as The Center. Abused and experimented on, his only desire was freedom and escape from a terrible future only he could see.
Orphaned violently at 12 years old, Julian has lived at the Center as favored test subject and future breeding stock. He has tried to escape several times, but has always been brought back to the scientists that torment him. There is nowhere else that he can go and no other life that he can live…
Then he receives a horrific vision of his future and he has no choice but to try once again for his dream of freedom.
The upcoming sequel is “Cannot Hold”
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EXCERPT —
“Where are you, you little bastard?”
He quivered and held his hands tight over his mouth, keeping himself from screaming. The feelings of hate and drunken rage were pounding into his brain, making it hard for him to think. Making it hard to know where he ended and that Other began.
Please don’t let him find me, he thought, tears running from his eyes as he held himself tight and close.
He was hiding in the closet inside a big cardboard box, kneeling on a pile of old clothes that had been carefully packed away. He was sure that the Bad would come for him soon. There was no hiding from the Bad.
“Come out, you little shit, before I beat your brains in!” the Bad yelled.
He was very quiet and very still. Though he knew the Bad was going to get him, he still hid and hoped that he would be safe. But there was no safety anywhere. Not for him.
The closet door crashed open and the heavy smell of whiskey filled the air, so strong that he almost choked on it. It felt as though that malodorous amalgam of odors was trying to reach down his throat and rip the breath from his lungs. It was all around him, trying to climb inside his skin and consume him to nothingness.
He was afraid.
He held very still, his hands clamped over his mouth, trying to be quiet. He must have done something though, must have made some betraying motion, because the lid of the box was ripped open and the angry red face glared down at him, the eyes rimmed with madness.
“You little shit, what are you doing in there?” the Bad yelled. “Were you trying to hide from me? You think you’re better than me, don’t you, boy, don’t you!”
Tears filled his eyes, and he wanted to run away, but he had trapped himself. Besides, there was no escape, there never was. Soon the pain would start.
The Bad yanked him out by a fist tangled in his hair and a handful of fingernails digging into his arm. He whined a little, but knew better than to scream. The louder he was, the more pain he was going to feel.
The box fell over as he was dragged out of the closet. Clothes spilled around him, shirts and pants tangling around his legs before slipping free as he was pulled through them.
“No, please!” he screamed, then yelped in pain as he was smacked on the side of the head, his teeth closing on his tongue with a painful snap. He could feel blood filling up his mouth.
Still dazed, he didn’t fight back as the Bad flung him across the room and half-over the small bed.
He screamed in pain as the Bad began whipping him across the back, buttocks, and down his legs with a black leather belt. He could feel his skin splitting all the way down to the bone and blood pouring out of him.
I’m going to die, he thought, and it was terrifying because he was just a little boy and there was nothing he could do.
The fear and the pain battled their way inside him, bubbling up from his very core to sizzle on the surface of his skin. Pain and fear and the terrible knowledge that he was going to die, they surged powerfully strong and mixed together inside him until that was all he knew, then they took him with them down into the darkness.
He woke to find himself lying sprawled across the bed, his shirt and pants soaked with his own blood. The pain was so bad it took him a long time to lever himself to his feet, his knees threatening to fold under him at any moment.
Julian bit his lip clear through to keep from crying out loud in case the Bad would come back and get him. He had to blink hard to clear the tears from his eyes, feeling them trickle down his cheeks in a silent stream.
His hand landed on something squishy and wet on the bed and he looked down at it and paled, biting his lip hard. He couldn’t quite name what that something was, but it was wet and disgusting and he knew it was something horrible.
Ignoring the torn flesh of his back and legs, he looked around the room.
A mewling sound escaped his throat.
The Bad was dead. He hoped the Bad was dead, because there were pieces everywhere, big bloody chunks that turned his stomach.
The main body was lying against the wall, his entire body black with bruising. His eyes had been burst in his head, blood had come out of his nose and ears, and his clothes were ripped and torn as though by razor sharp blades. There was blood everywhere, more than Julian had ever seen in his entire life.
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His mind was so dull and slow that he couldn’t have said what had happened. He simply couldn’t understand anything.
Not even noticing the sharp knife blades of pain in his buttocks and legs, he slipped down to the floor, drawing his knees close against his chest. Blood trickled down his spine as he rocked back and forth, his eyes locked on the horror spread out before him.
His throat ached with the need to scream and cry, but nothing came out. The sound was locked behind his larynx, pushing painfully outward without escaping.
All he could do was rock, and rock, and rock. Back and forth, back and forth.
That’s how the men found him later. First policemen and ambulance workers, then after they’d taken him away to the Quiet Place, there were the men in the white jackets that spoke of things he didn’t understand but that he knew he didn’t want to represent him. Giant words they beat against him, labeling him from his flesh inward. But there was nothing he could do because he was just a kid. He had to do what they said because he had nowhere else to go.
They said strange things about how his father was dead. They wanted him to tell them what had happened, but all he could do was shake his head because he didn’t know. The darkness had taken him away, and something had come and torn his father to pieces. Some terrible something had killed the Bad out of his father and left him all alone in the world.
Eventually a man came and took him away. He said his name was Dr. Harold Byers and he took Julian to a place he called the Center. He promised that Julian would be taken care of and would be kept nice and safe and no one would ever hurt him again.
Julian didn’t believe him because all he had ever known in his short life was lies. There was no one in the world he trusted.
Then he met Kathleen Griffin. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was kind and gentle and all he had to do was look into her eyes and know that she would do everything in her power to take care of him. She even stood up to Dr. Byers whenever he wanted to do something that upset Julian, one of the bad experiments that made him squirm and cry.
She was the closest thing he had ever come to a mother. She was the first person that ever loved him just because she loved him and not because she wanted to use him for something.
She arranged with Dr. Byers for them to have their own house on the edge of the Center’s property. He still had to participate in the doctors’ experiments, but they didn’t hurt him as much anymore. She made them be nicer to him, made them explain what they were going to do instead of just hurting him. She made them treat him like he was almost human.
Kathleen made everything better.
Then the men in camouflage and body armor came, with their guns and their knives and their yelling voices. Dr. Byers told Julian that they were some kind of enemy commandos that had come to raid the Center for information and experiments.
Julian didn’t understand why so many of them came right to Kathleen’s little house. He didn’t know why they broke down the door and shot her so many times until her blood sprayed against the side of his face and he could feel it soaking into his skin through his pajama shirt.
Fukujinzuke: Japanese pickled vegetables.
Cut vegetables of choice (daikon, cucumber, lotus root, eggplant, carrot, white turnip, ginger, etc.). Boil the vegetables in a sauce made of sugar, soy sauce, mirin, sake, and rice vinegar, then cool in the refrigerator.
He didn’t know why those men killed Kathleen.
But he knew why he killed them back. And it was so easy…
He didn’t really remember the terrible rage that overtook him, that darkness that overflowed through him until he couldn’t breathe through the honey-thick air and there was blood and body parts flying everywhere around him and their screams were sweet victory.
He didn’t really remember what he did… but he would never forget either. A glorious insanity that overtook him, sending him spinning and dancing in a blaze of destruction and death. It would forever lurk on the periphery of his memory, but he was just a little boy and he wouldn’t let it live in his conscious mind.
And when they were all quiet and still, their bodies broken, he fell like a puppet with its strings cut. Just slumped down where he stood as consciousness fled him.
When he woke up, Dr. Byers was there to ask him questions and tell him what had happened because he didn’t remember anything.
The only thing he knew was that Kathleen was gone. She was the only person that ever loved him and now he was alone in the world forever.
He cried for awhile, then he let himself be taken from the hospital to his new room in the main Center compound. It was between many high-security hallways that needed key cards and number codes to access.
There was no one to hug him anymore and tell him that everything was going to be all right. There was no one to tell Dr. Byers “No,” and to make sure the experiments didn’t hurt him too much. There was no one to take care of him and protect him from the cruelty of the world.
He was all alone.
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William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
