by T. L. Bodine
“Oh, sorry,” she said, stepping back from the door and looking guiltily at her cigarette, which was flaking ash out onto the tile of the doorway. “Forgot you don’t like smoke.”
“It’s alright,” he said, following her inside, glancing around at the familiar interior; it was decorated in the spirit of white trash and tourism, and somehow it always made him smile, if only because it had so much character. The real fireplace had been replaced with an electric one, and the mantle over it bore a singing mechanical trout. As he passed, the fish jerked its head toward him and demanded, somewhat desperately and a little off-key, that someone take it to a river.
“We were waiting for you to get here, before we get started,” Angela said, stepping over a small collection of Matchbox cars that had taken over the hallway into the kitchen. “You just missed the last search party of the night. They had dogs and everything.”
“I’m sorry.”
“They’re going to find him.”
“I’m absolutely sure you’re right.” He wasn’t.
Someone Adrian assumed must be the psychic was sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee between his hands. He stared rather intently at the coffee, as though searching for answers in the bottom of the cup. Adrian felt an immediate and irrational dislike for him, this parasite preying on a mother’s tragedy.
“Isn’t it tea leaves that tell the future?” Adrian asked, pulling out a chair opposite him. “Not coffee dregs?”
The man didn’t respond, but simply continued to stare into the depths of his mug. His eyes were small and squinted, as though he had spent too much time staring at the sun, and his face had a drawn, weathered look. He looked as though he had been homeless at one time, or addicted to drugs — some hardship that had abnormally stripped him of his extra flesh and left him looking gaunt and withered.
“Zachariah, this is Adrian.”
“Adrian Montgomery, Social Services,” he clarified, offering his hand.
The psychic looked up, small eyes narrowed further in suspicion or examination, and after a moment he took his hand, giving it a weak pump before withdrawing. He handed him a business card, and Adrian took it reflexively.
Zachariah Moses, Psychic Detective
Let Me Solve Your Unsolved Mysteries
Zachariah’s head tilted and he looked down at his own hand contemplatively. “…Leaves,” he murmured, under his breath, the way someone says something they’ve just remembered but don’t fully understand.
Adrian ignored it. “So. You know where Nathaniel is, then?”
“No,” Zachariah said, simply. “Not exactly. But I’ve seen him.”
“When? Before or after the Amber Alert yesterday?”
“Before,” he replied, sounding annoyed. “I saw his photograph and recognized him from my vision.”
Angela lit another cigarette and stared out the sliding glass door into the backyard.
Adrian looked back to Zachariah. “Okay. So what did you see, if you don’t know where he is?”
“Skepticism is the first barrier to destroy on the path of enlightenment,” Zachariah returned, looking sour; Adrian guessed that the psychic probably had not been keen on Angela’s insistence for a neutral party’s involvement. “I saw him in a cave — deep underground. He is being held there against his will, and there’s a little girl with him. Younger than he is.” He hesitated here, a moment, as though he planned to say something further, but he stopped before saying anything more.
“I see. And you have no idea where this cave is, or who’s holding him there, or why?”
Zachariah shook his head, and his weather-beaten face looked crestfallen; there was something hungry and desperate about it. “You look remarkably like him,” he said.
Angela had once pointed out the same thing. “It’s the hair,” Adrian said, as he had when Angela had first mentioned it. “You don’t see a lot of kids with really dark red hair like this.”
“You’re the only one in your family,” Zachariah said. “Your brother has dark hair. Your sister’s is curly like yours, but blonde.”
“I don’t have a sister,” he said, automatically, but something tightened in his chest. “Stop changing the subject.”
Zachariah cast him a long, thoughtful look, and said nothing. He glanced toward Angela, who stood with her back toward them, shoulders held high and tense as she smoked. She dropped ash onto the floor by the sliding door. “I have to see the place where he disappeared. I have to find the path,” he said, finally. He looked back to Adrian. “It sounds insane to you, and I understand why you must think that. But if I can just find the path, I’ll know who took him.”
Something in his tone made Adrian uneasy. It felt as though his small, narrow eyes were boring into him. “Fine. Let’s go look, right now.” He cast Angela a questioning look; she avoided his eyes, and stamped out the last of her cigarette in an empty Diet Pepsi can. “I don’t know what you’re planning to find that a professional search party missed, but I hope for Nathaniel’s case you’re right.”
“I’m not looking for something that the mundane eye can see,” Zachariah said. He rose from his chair and swept past Angela without a word, heading out onto the porch.
“You all won’t mind if I stay in here?” Angela asked, in a quiet, timid voice that didn’t suit her at all. “I’ve just…I don’t know if I have it in me to go out there again right now.”
“Of course,” Adrian said. He hesitated beside her, before laying a hand tentatively on her shoulder. “Hey. He’ll turn up. The police are looking everywhere.”
“Do you have a sister?”
“What?”
“A sister. Do you have one?” Her eyes caught his. “Like Zachariah said?”
“I said I didn’t,” Adrian said, and glanced at the porch, where the psychic stood. He gave Angela’s shoulder a little squeeze. “Try not to worry too much. It’ll just be a couple minutes, then we can get rid of this guy.”
She said something noncommittal, and he opened the door out onto the porch and into the backyard which separated the house from the empty wooded lot behind it.
A small corner of the fence had been pulled clear, leaving a triangular crawlspace by the post; this had been Nathaniel’s access point to the wild place beyond his own yard, his favorite, secret place — if a secret place could truly exist when all the other kids in the neighborhood kept their secret place there, too.
“This is it?” Zachariah stood beside him, following his gaze to the hole in the fence. “He was back there, when he was taken?”
“You’re the psychic. You tell me,” Adrian muttered, and shrugged. “What makes you say he was taken?”
“Someone is holding him there, I told you. In the cave. Someone you know.” He glanced over at Adrian. “It’s no coincidence that you, of all people, are here with me.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Someone you know. A real someone? Or an imaginary someone?
That doesn’t make any sense, either, Adrian, he thought. Imaginary people can’t kidnap kids. Jesus, you need a good night’s sleep.
Adrian stared into the depths of the small wood. The trees, huddled in a conspiratorial circle, refused to give up their secrets; he leaned forward, almost expectantly, and was rewarded only with silence. Slowly, without realizing what he was doing, or why, he walked to the fence line, rested his hands atop it, and peered into the stand of trees. It was darker there than it was in the sunny backyard; the aged trees wove their branches together, the sun filtered by bony, tangled limbs and the remains of dying leaves. Leaves carpeted the ground, crunchy and broken or else slimy and warm with decomposition. Adrian could smell them from where he stood, warm and nauseating; he had always hated the smell of old leaves.
“Can you feel it?” Zachariah asked, breathlessly, beside him. “The energy here? It’s thick with…memory.”
“Memory?” Adrian asked, absently, too distracted by his own half-formed thoughts to put much heart in his disdain. “What’s me
mory feel like, exactly?” But, even as he asked it, he realized that he already knew. He vaulted with small effort over the short, bedraggled fence, walking into the woods with a sense of purpose as though he were being tugged forward.
“Well?” he asked, his voice hushed despite himself; he cleared his throat and, with a concentrated effort at bravado, “See anything?”
“It wouldn’t be something I saw,” Zachariah said, pulling away almost reluctantly as he moved between trees, reaching out with his hands, his thumb rubbing his fingertips as though running fine silk between his fingers. “At least, I don’t think so. It would be…something else.” He stopped, and stared with interest at a place a few feet away, where there was nothing to look at.
Adrian scoffed, and shook his head, turning his attentions elsewhere, intent upon focusing on something other than what the psychic was doing. He turned, slowly, on the spot; nothing was out of place. He wondered what Nathaniel did here; there was no sign of a fort, no shelters pieced together from fallen branches and leaves, no discarded rough-hewn spears, or mud-pies, or half-buried toys. Indeed, if Adrian hadn’t known better, he would have thought he had chosen the wrong patch of overgrown vacant lot — there was no evidence here of any childhood fantasies being played out, or any childhood at all.
“It’s here,” he heard Zachariah say, mutedly, as though whispering across a football field. “Can’t you feel it?” Again, that hungry desperation had awoken in his voice; it was joined by something that sounded like fear. “It’s not…not normal here. I don’t like this.”
Adrian was going to respond with something catty, but couldn’t find the proper jab; he felt something here as well, but he couldn’t quite describe it. It didn’t seem like a bad feeling, exactly, but one that he had certainly not felt since he was a child; it took him back, uncomfortably, to a time when he was young, and innocent, and he was teaching his baby sister to play hide and seek…
Something moved, in the corner of his eye, and he turned to look. The air in front of him seemed, almost, to shimmer, as though a heat wave was rising up from the earth, as though the air had become liquid rippled by a slight breeze. He looked away, then looked back. The shimmer remained. His brow furrowed and he moved forward, but the closer he got, the further the ripple seemed to be, always in front of him, unreachable.
He wondered if perhaps there was something wrong with his eyes, and raised his hands to rub them; when he lowered his knuckles, he blinked, rapidly, because he didn’t understand what had materialized in front of him at all. He looked back, over his shoulder, trying to find Zachariah, to prove for certain whether he was going insane — but the psychic had disappeared from view, and Adrian was forced to return his gaze to the impossible sight before him.
The trees, in the seconds his eyes had been closed, had huddled together and bowed, forming a tunnel that looked unnervingly familiar — a long, straight, thatched-roofed-tunnel of tangled tree limbs that led indefinitely into nothingness. Adrian stared at it and stepped forward, waiting for something else — waiting for a tall, skeletal figure robed in shadow to stand in the archway, and beckon.
No one materialized. Adrian was alone.
His fingertips brushed the rough bark of one of the trees — and the ground beneath his feet grew slick and tilted forward as though a chute of ice had developed beneath him. He plummeted, blindingly fast, into infinite darkness. He would have screamed, if the suddenness of his unsettled feet had not torn the breath from his lungs; instead, soundless, he hurtled through a passage of displaced earth and space.
The passageway, which had been a black void from the outside, exploded around him in brilliant, swirling colors, flashing and bursting around him like fireworks, swimming in his vision and rotating over every wall. There was no sound in the tunnel, but the void of sound was palpable, as though one need only release a mute button and the world would erupt in screaming. He tried to reach out, to grab hold of something, to steady himself, but felt nothing when he threw out his hands. It was as though the tunnel was made only of light, as though his body had been replaced by air.
When Adrian was a child, he had a kaleidoscope; he couldn’t remember where he had gotten it, or precisely when — as a gift, perhaps, from his grandmother, or picked up on a whim from the dollar store. He remembered lying back on his bed, staring through his kaleidoscope at the slowly rotating shapes and colors, and pretending that he was looking through a spyglass into another world — a world that only he could see, made of color and magic. The game had been short-lived; he had grown bored of it, progressed on to cooler, more interesting or more high-tech toys, and the kaleidoscope and all its magical properties had been discarded and forgotten. But now, falling indefinitely through space, it came again to his mind, because he felt now as though he were falling through the world’s largest kaleidoscope, a rabbit-hole dug by acid-tripping rabbits.
Somewhere — in the recesses of his mind, or from further down the tunnel, both were the same — he could hear voices. He couldn’t make out the words, but he recognized the people speaking, aural snapshots of his childhood, the times of which he couldn’t pinpoint, but the emotion was burned so deeply into him that he recognized it immediately. He heard sounds of arguing, of the bitter hurt that could only manifest itself in violence. He heard sobs, and cries, and desperation and misery, the sounds of hearts breaking.
Somewhere, he heard a laugh, a familiar, haunting laugh, one he hadn’t heard for nearly twenty-five years, and it would have brought tears to his eyes if he had eyes to cry with. He could see her, almost, the innocent gleam in her eyes, the beaming smile, and that laugh, the bright, babbling laugh of a child who would never grow to adulthood. He looked at her, without eyes, and reached out for her, without arms, and yearned desperately to be close to her.
But she faded away from him, as he knew she would, and he urged himself forward, wanting, more than he had ever wanted anything, to see her for just a moment longer — but, as though the tunnel had read his mind and responded in sadistic kind, she disappeared entirely from his view.
Samantha? He called, his non-voice deafening in his thoughts but dying in his throat. Samantha, come back, please.
The words echoed in his thoughts, surrounded him, reverberated, soaked into whatever was left of his self, and consumed him. He was aware only in a peripheral way of the rapidly approaching ground, and the realization that if this was a falling dream, he should be waking up by now.
DREAMLAND
Adrian had been hung over once, and only once, in his life. On his twenty-first birthday, his friends had kidnapped him from his dorm room, threatening to burn the essay he was writing if he didn’t come out drinking with them that night. He had agreed, and, with each successive round, as the room became dimmer and noises more muted, he had grown fonder of everyone around him until his memories faded entirely. He had awoken the next morning facedown on the tile of a bathroom that wasn’t his, naked except for his socks and his watch, with complete certainty that his eyeballs would explode from their sockets at any moment.
He felt exactly like that now.
He realized, as his body began to regain some sense of feeling aside from pain, that he must be outside — at least, he could feel dewy grass, the moisture soaking through his shirt and up into his skin, permeating his pores. He could feel the earth, moist and soft but not quite muddy, beneath him, and felt as if he could sink down into it and disappear entirely. Grass tickled his nose, and he smelled and tasted earth with each inhalation. He wanted to roll over or stand up, but his body wouldn’t cooperate, as if he were a puppet and someone had cut all of the strings.
He could hear quiet animal noises, though he wasn’t sure what kind — a gentle sniffling, the sounds of heavy breath and heavier footfalls, and he felt the nearness of something, the warmth of it invading his space. A stray dog, he thought, vaguely. A raccoon. A bear. Something.
The animal let out a low, snuffling grunt. A large furry muzzle jabbed into Adrian’s rib
s, hitting him with enough force to rock him onto his side before he rolled again to his stomach, feeling nauseous.
He groaned, feeling the creature nose into his side again, bruising his ribs with its enthusiastic prodding.
Early in their marriage, Jessica had convinced him to get a dog, the only dog he had ever owned. It had been a big, hulking, shaggy thing, with a cold nose and sad brown eyes hidden under a tangle of untidy white and grey hair. It had loved Adrian with a sadistic intensity that rivaled only the intensity of Adrian’s immense dislike of the creature.
It had the habit, every morning, of worming its way into the bed that he and Jessica had shared, settling itself between them and then pushing, slowly and insistently, until they were separated by the full length of the vast animal between them. Or, when Adrian had been in his office, reading over his papers for work the next morning, the dog would pad into the room and, with a determined expression on its otherwise dopey face, would jab its nose into Adrian’s hand, forcing him to scratch behind the long bedraggled ears until the dog had had its fill.
The dog died two years after they got him; he had gotten loose from the yard and, dodging and weaving through traffic, misjudged the distance and met a grisly end beneath the tires of a Dodge Ram. Adrian had been uncharacteristically moved by the loss and Jessica, who had never been able to succeed in probing the deeper complexities of Adrian’s well-guarded psyche, never quite understood why he had been so shaken by the death of the dog he had hated. Adrian had never been able to explain. They never got another dog.
“Get off,” he muttered. His voice was hoarse and muffled by the ground. He wasn’t sure the creature had heard him, as it responded with another heavy jab. A long, warm, wet tongue went up his neck and cheek. Adrian heaved himself onto his back, although every muscle screamed in pain from the exertion. He rested for a few seconds, panting, and waited for the pain to subside. Slowly, he opened his eyes, then let out a cry and closed them again. It felt like his brain would explode from the sudden burst of dazzling light that invaded his senses.
