Glimpse: The Broken by Nicholas Martellacci (book club recommendations txt) 📕

Maxwell woke. His mind started piecing reality together once again, as hit wits slowly trickled back to him. As happens often when first waking from unconsciousness he was confused where he was, but everything started making sense again as reality set in. He wasn’t sure how much had actually happened and how much was just a dream. The mind has a tricky way of filling the holes with false information if it can’t remember all the details of an event. But Maxwell was sure of something, well… two things at this point. One, this room was a complete mess, burnt holes in the carpet, with fire still licking at the edges where it met the walls. And two, his head hurt…a lot.

He stamped out the small patches of flame, noticing the broken glass still littering the floor. There were pieces of the mirror scattered about, and bits of pills still splayed the room. Well… that part was real. As he continued his walk on tingling feet, still trying to get blood to flow to them properly, he took note to drops of blood all over the floor with a steady streak of the red leading into the dining room. Maxwell continued to wander around remembering more and more of what had transpired, and of course wondered to himself how long he had been out. He shuttered, cautiously reaching up. The necklace, this… shard, was now placed around his neck once more. Tingles traversed up Maxwell’s spine, as he hefted the weight of the amulet in his hand. Still heavier than what looked to be normal, he put his hands to it, feeling of chilling heat resonating through his fingers once again.

He followed the trail of blood leading into the dining room, cautious of any signs or sounds of an ambush waiting for him within. The blood become thicker and more voluminous as he followed, and he soon wished he hadn’t. There laid, right next to the dining room table, a mangled corpse, save the throat that was completely torn out of it. Maxwell had never seen a body before, except his father’s and that was only the funeral when it was all dolled up. He never fancied himself the squeamish type… but this was different, this was a corpse he recognized all too well. This was Trish.

She laid there, eyes wide open, looking as if still in a state of complete shock. Blood still caked around the hole that was once home to her esophagus. As the red ooze was foamed around her throat Maxwell bent down to investigate further. Maxwell’s stomach lurched, causing him to choke down a throat full of vomit, as he courteously closed the woman’s eyes. Whatever had done this to Trish’s throat clearly wasn’t hungry, the entire body being left in tact. This was a killing blow… this was a message.

Maxwell examined the rest of the house, unsure whether he had hoped, or hoped to not find Dante. Regardless on what he felt at the time, Dante was nowhere to be found. As he had scanned the bathroom, he peaked out the window into the driveway of Trish’s trailer and noticed that Trish’s car was also missing, and something told him that she wasn’t the one driving it. “So the bastard took her car and went to hide,” Maxwell said to himself under his breath.

Maxwell went to his vehicle and started the drive home, thoughts of calling the police filling his head along the way. It didn’t take long for his mind to decide the best course of action. Realizing that in the dead of night as long as nobody saw him there, it would be much better to feign ignorance, swearing he was never there. He arrived back to his apartment, and shut the engine off, contemplating what all had happened to him yesterday. The sun starting rising as he stepped out of his car and grabbed his key to enter the apartment. He sighed as he looked to the sunrise, and opened the door. Home again… as if he would ever be able to call this empty box a home. His shuffling feet carried him into the barren-walled kitchen, tossing himself a couple waffles in the toaster, as he slowly trekked to the bathroom to look in the mirror.

The young man hardly recognized himself, with one side of his face still painted hues of blues and yellows from the punch earlier in the day. He removed the bandage from his eye, the vision blurry at first but slowly adjusting to the light and focusing once again. His hair was still matted with dried blood on the side of his head, and a large cut was spread across his tongue, the acrid metallic taste still lingering his mouth. He removed a small bit of glass from his hair, and turned on the sink, sudsing up a wash cloth with soap and hot water to clean up as best as he could.

His hand stung while he was washing his head and face. As he looked down to examine the deep cut on his hand, from his peripherals he noticed dried blood on his necklace still hanging on his neck. He took it off, staring intently at the intricate swirling clouds within. What the hell is this thing? Maxwell pondered to himself, and could his real parents have truly sent it to him? This was a lot to think about and he was already exhausted from a sleepless night. As it turns out, unconsciousness isn’t very restful. He wrapped his hand and finished cleaning up, well… as best as he could in the state he was in. He entered the living room.

He sat at his computer with his waffles and a tall class of chocolate almond milk. This house, his… home now, was still devoid of furniture and life in the building. Though he tried to remain optimistic, remembering he was fortunate enough to find an apartment right across the street from the building that Jaxon and Faelynn lived in. It was a simple two bedroom apartment, much like theirs. One bedroom he slept in, the other he used for storage and occasionally lifted some weights in. The main difference was Jaxon and Faelynn’s house was brimming with life, there were pictures and posters all over the walls and small items of décor littering the house. It was the type of home you could definitely tell people were living in. Maxwell felt alone in the world every time he came through this door. Boxes were still strewn all over the floor, containing his entire life except some clothes, his computer, and his bed.

With little energy to unpack, he slouched in his chair, cutting a chunk of waffle and lifted it to his mouth, syrup still dripping off the slice. He chewed ravenously, and washed it down with a swig of the chocolate drink, his stomach churning with pleasure. Maxwell was a busy guy, and could hardly remember the last time he had eaten. He powered his computer on, and turned the necklace’s pendant over and over again in his hand. He gingerly placed it on the desk. His eyes were like half moons at this point, feeling hot and heavy and sinking into his face, but he was determined to try to figure out what the hell this thing was, even at the expense of his sleep.

Maxwell scoured the internet for anything, “Red/Blue swirling necklace” searching ….searching …900 pages of responses, all search results being necklaces you can buy on the internet, on some sketchy foreign websites. None of which looked remotely close to the shard that he held in his hand. He wasn’t sure if it was filled with fluid, or how exactly it was done, but it was like nothing he had ever seen. The stone that was inlaid into the silver was about the size of his thumb but much denser than its appearance. It was oddly shaped as if it was broken off of something, a fragment of a larger piece. The shades of reds and blues that were in the necklace were constantly changing. Ranging from light azure and crimson red, the entire way to midnight and blood, at times almost black. The colors were folding on top of one another, as if in an endless struggle for dominance, but never quite managing total control.

His fingers, a blur of motion, typing frantically across the keyboard on several tabs, scouring for all that he could find. He visited chat rooms, and looked at message boards. He went on shopping sites, and image hosting sites, searching for even a hint of a clue. Almost an hour passed and his meager meal had grown completely cold. Maxwell wasn’t sure of the time, maybe half eight in the morning. The birds chirping and the sun fully in the sky, shining brightly off the of the dusting of snow they received over the night. He really needed to invest in some curtains he thought, the light was going to make it hard to nap if he decided to later. Maxwell can sleep when hes dead he thought, which might not take as long as he’d once hoped if last night was anything to go by.

He found something. At this point he had given up on conventional methods, and started running an IP scrambler and delving around the deep web. By and large he saw tons of drug trafficking, and some buying and selling of guns, but in his search he had stumbled across a strange message board. “The Chosen,” displayed boldly across the top of the page. He scrolled down and saw it was a meager group at best, five or six people had spoken in it, and the last response was well over a month ago. He looked through the messages, one of the users only spoke in binary code, which was odd. Another had made things hard to decipher as well, as it was clear he was only fluent in a form of mandarin, which Maxwell had a hard time translating properly on the computer.

As he went back and forth he noticed they were talking about glass stones of swirling energies, and the potential devastation that they could cause in the right hands. Normally, Maxwell would assume this to be some sub thread in which they were making up ideas for a novel or a video game, but given the circumstances… Maxwell knew this was just what he has been looking for. The group seemed as if they were talking in hypotheticals, being very vague as if they presumed they were being monitored. Maxwell cursed under his breath, irritated that they were so cryptic on the topic. This deep on the web surely nobody would be reading this message board. Then again... here was Maxwell, doing just that. Towards the end a user “BrokenSilence” ramped up ferocity on the topic, scoping down to more concrete details, even going so far as to explain a shard that sounded similar to his.

Maxwell read the description, then looked at his own necklace. BrokenSilence described it as being a large rock, purple clouds and veins of glimmering silver liquid swirling throughout it. Well… Maxwell thought. The color was off, but the pattern at least matched something similar to Maxwell’s stone. Though the user wasn’t speaking of a necklace at all, it was isolated and not part of any form of jewelry. It was large from the sound of it, as if it could be used as a paper weight.

Maxwell read several comments back and forth, “I’ve seen it and I can assure you it