CHAPTER THREE
Dex
I’ve woken up in some fucked up places before. Once, on a bench in some park in Bellevue, a ritzy Seattle suburb, with happy squirrels bouncing all around me like over-caffeinated rats. Still not sure how I ended up there. Another time I was on the roof of a Vancouver hotel, rain pelting me on the face and an empty bottle of Jack Daniels beside me. I remember how I ended up there – damn stripper led me astray and stole all my money. At least I had Jack for company.
But I have never woken up in my old bedroom of my childhood home, a home I tried to erase from my memory until I was certain it no longer existed.
And yet it did exist. More than that, I was lying on my puny old bed, legs hanging off the weak frame, and the room was exactly the same as I had remembered as a child.
Which was, you know, pretty much fucking impossible. But there you had it.
I lay back on the bed for a few drawn-out moments, blinking first at the ceiling at the stick-on stars that I had affixed on it back when I was a little shit. My eyes slowly trailed down the walls, pausing on the Alice in Chains and Nirvana posters and cut-outs from Spin and Rolling Stone magazine I had placed haphazardly on the greying wallpaper. I bet if I peeled back the corners, I would see the Blu-tack I used to put them up. God forbid I put a pin or thumbtack into the wall without my father slaughtering me.
Suddenly memories flooded my mind and I could barely contain them, feeling like a thirsty alcoholic with an undersized bladder. Holy shit. This wasn’t some crazy fucking dream. I really was here, in my old room. Everything was the same, everything except me. I was Dex Foray, not Declan O’Shea, yet the essence of who I was clung to the carpet like mildew, just as the fear used to.
But there was nothing to fear now, was there?
I slowly sat up and stared at my feet, at the toes of my boots, tapping them together loudly. The sound was hollow, peculiar. It didn’t quite feel real. But this was real. Right? Every breath I took in made me second guess it, every breath I exhaled told me the truth.
I reached up and pinched the tip of my ear. It hurt like hell. It had healed since it had been sliced off in New Orleans, but it was currently the most sensitive part of my body (other than my dick, but that seemed unnecessarily cruel). Anyway, point is, I was alive and well and this was no nightmare manifested of unresolved issues from my childhood. This was real.
I was motherfucking Dr. Who.
Outside the window, the light was starting to fade. I eased myself out of bed and looked out of it. The view was the same as I had remembered. The neighbor was so close, you could touch their brick wall– well, I couldn’t because I was never tall enough, but my friend Joey once did. He nearly fell out the window and crashed into the garbage cans below, which would have really ruined his drumming skills. After that, I made a rope ladder for emergencies.
Craning my neck, I could see the street out front. 78th or 88th or 98th, I couldn’t remember. It was framed by leafy trees and busy with passerbys going about their business. The Upper West Side. A place completely and totally removed from my life and everything that I was.
So why was I there?
I racked my brain, surprised at how sluggish it was, how slow the other memories came to me. My life before I was here.
Perry.
My chest clenched at the thought of her and then the novelty of where I was vanished in an instant.
I had been at Perry’s parents’ house in Portland, editing the video we shot at the sanatorium. Perry had decided to go for a walk. Her parents were out somewhere. Her sister, Ada, was downstairs doing some annoying workout video by that angry chick who yells at everyone.
I wasn’t sure how much time had passed before I heard a knock at the door. I remember I was staring at an image of Perry on the computer screen, her face beautiful even in the grainy green light of the night vision. For some reason the sight of her, combined with the knock at the door, brought this whisk to my gut, turned me inside out.
Without thinking, I had got up and looked out the window. There was no car outside except for my Highlander, something that inexplicably made the feeling worsen. I opened the door and poked my head out into the hall and heard a voice that made my spine stiffen.
A voice that should never brought such fear into me.
Yet it did. And before I knew what I was doing, I was walking down the stairs, feeling almost pulled toward my brother.
I had told Ada to run, to get Perry, to get out of there. But that was all I could do.
I don’t remember the rest. I have no fucking clue how I ended up in New York, in my old house, if it was even in this plane of existence.
And – shit your pants scarier than all of that – I had no idea where Perry was and if she was okay. Because, god help me, if Michael had done something to her, I had no problem getting blood on my hands.
At that thought, I went for the door and cautiously opened it. Now that my brain was in high gear, all my senses were following suit. I refused to submit to fear.
The hallway looked different, was different. Though my bedroom had remained trapped in the past, a clean, pleasant version of all my years in the house combined, the hallway that led to the other bedrooms and bathrooms was blackened, as if there were a fire recently that scorched the walls and tinged the dingy carpet.
But on closer inspection, the walls weren’t charred. They were coated with a black substance that oozed and wriggled on the wall. I had a feeling if I looked even closer than that I’d see creatures in it moving, as if it were a wall of pulsing insects.
Luckily the light in the hallway, coming in only from the foyer’s wide windows at the end, didn’t allow for much detail. I stepped out and was met with a wash of frigid air that cut deep, momentarily stealing my breath.
The hall resounded with a creak and I slowly turned my head to see the door to Michael’s room swinging open. Purplish smoke followed, wafting out, then disappearing.
Wanting to leave but knowing I couldn’t without answers, I turned and went toward it. The carpet was wet under my feet, sticking to the bottoms of my boots, smelling like an old drunk: mold and alcohol.
At his door, I stopped and peered inside. Michael’s room didn’t look anything like mine, or like his back in the day. I mean, he was an annoying, straight-laced kid but there wasn’t anything about him as a child that made me think he was Damian from The Omen. But now, now was a different story.
Here, his room was a black cave, the doorway framed by hanging stalactites that looked as heavy and dense as iron. Inside, the cave looked like it went on forever, a tunnel of cold, dripping walls that led to a dancing flame, as if there were a fire at the end, raging far away.
“Declan,” my brother said, his voice impossibly low, almost guttural. He was sitting on the floor, staring at nothing.
“Where’s Perry?” I asked. I’d hoped I’d come across as commanding but it felt like I wasn’t speaking over a whisper.
He looked up and I was struck by how much he looked like my mother. Our mother. But it was hard to think that way, to think we both came from her, because he lacked something that I had, or at least I hoped I had. His eyes were dark pools that had no depth, no sign that the man had any empathy at all – or that he was even a man.
I thought back to my mother, the last time I had a vision of her, before she stopped haunting me. What had she said about him? What was it that I didn’t understand?
Michael laughed, empty and cold. “You ask where Perry is? Not where you are, how you got here, what is going to happen to you. But you ask where she is.”
I feigned strength. “Where is Perry?” I repeated.
He cocked his head, like a bird. Like a raptor. “She’s fine.”
“Where is she?”
“Here, of course,” he said. “Manhattan. She’s come looking for you.”
My heart sank. How the hell did Perry know to come here?
“I told her,” he said smugly, reading my face, or my thoughts.
My fists clenched and unclenched. “Why?”
“You don’t seem to be surprised to be here. I thought you’d appreciate it.”
I frowned at him, feeling rage and frustration begin to bubble up inside. He was changing the subject and I was walking right into it. “Appreciate it? Being here? How the fuck can I appreciate that? This place is hell.”
He grinned at me like a snake. “I know. It always was, wasn’t it? That’s the whole beauty of it, don’t you see, Declan? This has always been hell.”
I narrowed my eyes. “I’m pretty fucking sure your hell was never as bad as mine.”
He slowly got to his feet and dusted off the suit he was wearing. “You’re right. It wasn’t. But you had one thing that I didn’t.”
“And what was that?” Somewhere in the distance, down the low tunnel of the cave, I heard faint screams that faded as quickly as they started.
“You had love,” he said simply.
I nearly laughed. Love was the one thing I didn’t have growing up. My mother was an abusive, alcoholic trainwreck, my father was a man devoid of feeling, except the pride he vested only in Michael.
“We were both different,” he continued, taking a step toward me. His footfalls echoed off the dank walls. “Did you know that? That they were afraid of both of us?”
“Why? Why were they afraid?” I’d always known that my parents recoiled from me, as if I were covered in a layer of dirt that would never wash off, though I never knew why. I always figured it was just because I wasn’t good enough as Michael, their golden boy. I was scrawny, weird, artistic – second best.
But to hear that they were afraid of both of us, that made absolutely no sense.
“You really don’t know,” he mused. Then he grinned to himself and shook his head. “No, I suppose you don’t. Otherwise you wouldn’t have lived your life the way you did. You would have embraced the change. Just like I did.”
“Look,” I told him, “if you’re going to start spouting Changeling shit with me, you’re talking to the wrong guy.”
“And I used to think you were so open-minded. Oh, that’s right,” he said with a snap of his fingers. “I forgot you used to medicate yourself. Talk about closing one’s mind off.” I stared at him with hard eyes and he continued, “No, there is no Changeling shit, as you so eloquently say. You know our mother was sick, didn’t you?”
I sighed noisily and my breath froze in the air. “In more ways than one.”
“She was mentally weak…mentally curious. She strived for answers to her sorry life, she wanted ways to cope with what she saw – the horrors, the ghosts. I truly believe that she wanted what was best for her and marrying our father should have provided that. It at least provided money. But then again, I’m done with trying to figure out the shallow depths that lie inside each human.”
I cocked my brow warily. Human?
He noted my look and came even closer to me. The air filled with the smell of sour milk, rotted meat and I did what I could to breathe through my mouth. He stopped a foot away and again I was struck with a fuckton of fear, like it was just being dumped from above. Maybe I didn’t want to know what he was going to tell me.
“Regine, your mother, was…not herself when she had you. Not that she had any real idea of who she was, but she was better, you know, before we were born. I obviously did a number on her, so she tried to fix that. She asked for help. As before, she got help, in what she perceived as the wrong form. She was possessed when she got pregnant, possessed while she carried you.”
He let that sink in for a moment. It took more than a moment. My mother was possessed when she had me? Sadly, it didn’t shock me. She acted like a wild creature throughout my childhood, until her death, until I accidently killed her. It almost made sense – almost.