Stone of Fire: An ARKANE Thriller (Book 1)

Chapter 8

Tucson, Arizona, USA.
 May 19, 9.17am

      Joseph Everett walked into St Bartholomew’s private psychiatric hospital where his twin brother, Michael, had lived for the past fifteen years. He came to the hospital at least every two days when he was not away on business, and sometimes twice a day if Michael was in a bad way. The hospital was a pleasant sterile façade laid over a maelstrom of human misery. Jolly wall paintings belied the mental pain behind every door. The warden at the front desk acknowledged him but said nothing as he passed. Staff here knew of his frequent visits. Joseph left his keys and other sharp objects at the security gate and proceeded through the main corridors to the day room, pushing open the double doors. He was grimly content as he considered the plan he had put in place and how soon victory would come now that he had leverage.
     Joseph experienced the hospital as a toxic soup of fear, confusion and jangled noise hidden beneath the drugs and behavior modification necessary to maintain a superficial calm. But it was the best hospital in Arizona, so he had no choice but to keep Michael here. The staff were babysitters to disturbed individuals who dwelt on the edges of what is called sanity, though Joseph personally doubted that anyone was really sane all the time. He knew that people moved along a continuum of normality in many dimensions. Some days we could all be committed, he thought, with a glance at himself reflected in a bay window.
     Joseph found Michael in the same seat he was always placed in. Every day he woke and the nurses took him to a window seat in the day room. He would sit all day, legs hugged to his chest, staring out at the world. He never looked at his brother, never seemed to hear any words spoken to him, yet he was placid and would take his meds, lie down when told and sleep. He was just empty, a shell of a person. Joseph touched him sometimes, smoothing the hair from his brother’s forehead, but there was never any response. They were twins of a sickly opposite. Both were lean, but Joseph’s muscles were well defined, he walked tall and strong. Michael was wasted and weak with cheekbones that stuck out through his pale skin and lips tinged with blue. Joseph spoke with vigor and moved with grace but his brother was silent and gaunt, folded into his space and staring into another world.
     “How is he today?” Joseph spoke to the nurse on duty in the day room. They went through this ritual every time, and her reply never changed. But today she started at his approach.
“I need to get the doctor to speak to you, sir.”
     She went out of the room and returned with Dr Campbell. He looked serious and held a thick folder. He indicated a private room where they could talk. Joseph felt sweat prickle under his arms. The men remained standing.
     “Mr Everett, we need to discuss how to best manage the next steps for Michael.”
     “Why? What’s changed?”
     “Nothing’s changed. That’s the point. He’s been wasting away for months now, and he’s getting too thin and sick for the main facility here. We have to move him to the intensive care ward, and soon he’ll need intravenous feeding.”
Joseph shook his head emphatically.
     “No. He’s fine here. He’s going to get better, I know it.”
     Dr Campbell opened the file and pointed at the latest test results.
     “It’s all here. You have to face facts. We can make his body comfortable and keep him alive, but he is reaching a threshold. He will become catatonic soon.”
     Joseph’s eyes were wide, his nostrils flaring in anger.
     “How dare you. I’ve given the hospital millions in gifts. There must be more you can do for him.”
The Doctor shook his head.
     “I’m sorry. On my orders, he’ll be transferred next week to the special ward and then there’s a process to transfer him to the hospice when it becomes appropriate. The end is coming, Joseph. You have been the best and most devoted of brothers, but you can’t do anything else now but help him die with dignity.”
     The doctor stretched out his hand to say goodbye. It wasn’t acknowledged so the Doctor left the room. Joseph looked down at the patterns on the carpet, the inoffensive grey and pink swirls designed to mute the sounds of suffering this room witnessed every day. He pushed his fist against his temple as if to crush the negative thoughts. There was still one chance, but he couldn’t tell the doctor that. Pentecost was not far away and with the power of the stones, he could still save his brother from this wasting death. Varanasi had demonstrated that miracles could flow from the power of the stones, now he just had to understand how to harness them. Joseph stood and pulled his Armani suit jacket straighter around him. Setting his shoulders square and his face to a mask, he went back to the main ward to see his brother.
     Joseph pulled up a chair next to Michael and began to talk to him in a regular ritual he had performed for years. Sometimes he reminisced about their childhood, but generally he talked about what was on his mind, another day in the life of a rich businessman, politician and pillar of the community in Tucson, Arizona. There were the usual immigration issues, the attempts to jump-start the housing market and protestors outside his office concerned about water in the desert region. He had posed as an academic, a researcher, to get close to Morgan Sierra, but academia was far from his real life.
    Michael had become a diary of sorts, a soul into which he poured his own heart so that when he left, he felt lighter, emptier. It didn’t matter that the words seemed to wash over his brother, who never spoke or even moved. Joseph was devoted to his brother; anyone at the facility would say he was the most caring and regular visitor to the ward. Michael did not want for anything, but then he didn’t require much. He was fed the best food and had access to top of the line medications and psychiatrists, but it seemed that nothing could be done to make him better. Today Joseph leaned in close so the nurses couldn’t overhear him and spoke quietly.
“I’m going to take you on a trip soon Michael. I’ve found a way to help you, I just need a little more time. But don’t worry, it won’t be long now.”
     He gently stroked his brother’s thin hair and looked out into the garden where each twin saw worlds that no one else was aware of.

     Joseph never stayed long at the hospital and was soon on the road again in his SUV, heading back to his home office. Working from his house in The Foothills outside Tucson allowed him the privacy he needed for his businesses and other projects. He had people who managed his offices in town and he had cleared his schedule for the next few weeks in order to focus on Pentecost. He felt some anxiety as there were too many variables right now and the situation was not entirely under his control. He was worried about the Thanatos group who were also pursuing the stones. Their evident determination, superior resources and firepower meant he had to bring ARKANE and the academic Morgan Sierra into the mix. He had been loath to do it but the frankly unexpected miracles of Varanasi meant he could no longer keep the quest secret from those who watched such events. He didn’t know much about Thanatos except that they would go after the stones whatever the cost. He expected them to follow Morgan’s trail first, but they would be after him eventually. He grinned then, his perfect orthodontic teeth flashing in the sun. He would release the power of the stones at Pentecost when the comet was closest to earth and he didn’t care if they took them after that, as long as Michael was healed first.
     As he drove, Joseph thought about what had brought him to this moment, how the past had shaped this quest and transformed his brother into a living ghost. The twins had been late additions to a miserable marriage and the target of their mother’s fury with the world. Their father had been mostly absent, consumed with his research and the acquisition of knowledge and he cared nothing for raising children. They didn’t know what he did with his time, only that when he was at the house, he shut himself away in his study. He often travelled, bringing back strange objects he kept locked away from their prying eyes and sticky hands. The twins were hardly seen and definitely not heard; their mother made sure of that for she was the one who roamed their nightmares. When they were young, she had made them wash all the time, calling them dirty and filthy. She made them scrub with pumice stones until their young skin was raw, chapped and bleeding, even on their private parts. They were stains she wanted to erase from her crumbling world.
     Michael was the older twin by minutes and played the protective role, deflecting their mother’s attention from Joseph. For this, she would beat him with sharp metal tools from the kitchen then shut them both under the stairs in the dark. Michael would hold Joseph until his terrified sobbing stopped. He often slept in his brother’s arms there for there was safety was in being together. Apart they would die, but together they were strong. Perhaps I still believe that, thought Joseph.
    They had growth spurts in their early teens and Joseph started to become more resilient and able to fend for himself. At 13, Michael had stopped speaking, communicating only with his hands or writing on scraps of paper. Joseph found he could understand his brother just as well, they had a kind of sign language but it was the control over his own body that their mother couldn’t bear. In a rage, she had held Michael’s hand onto the hob of the cooker to make him scream. He hadn’t made a sound and she only stopped when the stench of burning flesh brought Joseph running to help.
    At 15, Michael tried to cut off his penis with a knife in the kitchen in front of their mother. She had laughed and urged him on. Joseph had wrested the knife away from his brother but the cut was deep. As he bled, she had just stood there watching as if she would finish the job herself. Joseph called 911 then and told them everything. Social services had taken them away. Michael entered his first psych ward, and never emerged, his condition worsening every year. As Joseph had grown into a wealthy businessman, he had moved Michael into better facilities and always stayed close to the ward so he could visit all the time. Despite his riches, he sometimes felt he was still trapped in that closet with his brother. He needed Michael.
     Shaking his head to clear the memories, Joseph turned into the drive of his property, the gates swinging open silently at the touch of the remote. He drove into the underground car park and pulled in next to the other two cars, his own Bugatti Veyron and his wife’s BMW Z4. This meant that she was home, but she would keep to her wing of the house. Joseph had charmed and married the Arizona socialite early in his business career, tempting her with his extravagant lifestyle in order to fulfill the public role demanded of him. He gave her everything she thought she wanted in return for her discretion, her presence at official functions and his privacy. She had learned early on not to ask any more of him, having spent a week in hospital for her audacity. The scars from the beating had marked her, but he had been careful to ensure she could still wear low-cut dresses and short skirts. It was important to maintain a good image at the many community functions they attended. He gave a great deal to the charities and projects of the state, his public life one of power, money and charitable giving. Yet Joseph’s smile was ultimately a mask over the demons of his private life.
     Getting out of the car, he walked through the house to the large open plan study that was his real home within the grand property. It adjoined a sparse private bedroom and tiny kitchenette separated from the rest of the house. Joseph even cleaned it himself, keeping it off limits from everyone. It was landscaped into the hillside of the property, camouflaged by the mesquite and juniper trees. When the couple held business receptions at the house, no one even knew it was there. Unlocking the door with the digital keypad, Joseph stepped inside and checked the security camera for intrusions. Nothing. He hung up his jacket and grabbed a diet soda. Pulling another of his father’s diaries from the shelf, he began to read.

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