“I don’t get you, bruh,” Alan said, sighing. “I mean, you say you’re going to join the military, so why bother?”
“It’s the ROTC,” he told Alan for the hundredth time. “My grades are still important.”
“Whatever.”
Tyler began writing. Occasionally, he would glance up at the whiteboard to make sure he was filling out everything, but for the most part he just copied what Davidson said. After a bit, he fell into a comfortable rhythm. The rest of the classroom faded out of view. Davidson’s voice softened to a murmur. All that was left was the sound of his breathing and the scritch-scratch of pen on paper.
Then a different noise. A muted popping sound, like a bottle being uncorked. Or a suppressed gunshot.
Tyler froze and looked around, bewildered. His mouth was suddenly dry. When he swallowed, a lump of mucus seemed lodged in his throat.
Son, whatever you’ve just done, let’s talk this over. There’s no need to resort to violence.
Again. Twice more.
Just put down the gun, okay? Okay?
Within seconds, he found the source of the disturbance. Two rows across from him, a girl lounged in her seat, chewing gum. Each time she blew a sizable bubble, she poked it with her pencil.
The sound was as grating as nails on a chalkboard. He tried to ignore it, but the more she snapped her gum, the louder the sounds became. Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer and turned in his seat. “Will you just shut up!”
Tyler didn’t realize he had shouted it until everyone turned to look at him. Even Mr. Davidson broke away from his lecture to give him a disapproving look.
“Is something wrong, Tyler?” Mr. Davidson asked. “Is there a reason you just told me to shut up?”
“I— It wasn’t meant for you, Mr. Davidson,” he said and was surprised to hear his voice stammer. Normally he managed to keep his cool while in the hot spot. Then again, normally he didn’t yell out in class.
“Is that so?”
“Uh…” He looked at the girl and tried to remember her name. “Felicia… She was chewing her gum, and I got distracted. I just wanted her to stop.”
“And in doing so, you disrupted the whole class,” Mr. Davidson said, clapping his hands together. “Good job. That little display of yours has just earned you lunch detention Monday.”
“But what about her?” he asked. Chewing gum was also against the school rules, right up there with pissing off the teacher.
Felicia shot him a dirty look.
“Fair point.” Mr. Davidson smiled drily. “Felicia can join you.”
With a groan, Tyler laid his head on his desk. He spent the rest of the class period thinking about how much fun he’d have sweeping the corridors and cleaning up litter during lunch hour.
On the way to the parking lot, he stopped at a drinking fountain. Someone had plugged the drain with a wad of gum and the bottom of the metal bowl was already filled with gross, dirty water. He decided he wasn’t thirsty.
As he turned around, he ran right into Alan.
“Hey, bro-ski, can I borrow your notes?” Alan asked.
“I stopped writing them.”
“Oh, I know, but I didn’t put them down at all.” Alan grinned.
Tyler scrounged around in his backpack for the notebook. When he found it, he tossed it to Alan.
Alan flipped through the pages until he found the newest entries. Frowning, he skimmed over the writing. “Hey, what’s the deal, bruh?”
“What, you can’t read my handwriting?”
“This ain’t about the Roman Empire. You gave me the wrong notebook or something.”
That couldn’t be right. He had labeled all of his spiral notebooks with black sharpie. “WORLD HISTORY” was written in neat block letters on the front and back covers.
“Here, let me see,” Tyler said, taking the notebook from him.
The first few paragraphs were about the rise of the Roman Empire, but halfway down the page, he had started writing something else. Chilled, he read the repeating sentence that covered the front of the page and then the back. In places, he had drawn the letters with such force that the pen nub had punctured the paper.
It was in his handwriting, but it was not his words.
PANDORA’S BOX IS OPENING.
PANDORA’S BOX IS OPENING.
PANDORA’S BOX IS OPENING.
PANDORA’S BOX IS OPENING.
“Earth to Tyler,” Alan said, tapping him on the shoulder.
“Huh?” Tyler blinked, looking up at Alan. For a moment, he had forgotten that Alan was even there.
“Zoning out much, bruh?”
“Uh, sorry, I was just…”
“Come on,” Alan said, slapping his back. “Bell rang. School’s over.”
He watched as Alan rushed off, then glanced down again. He stared at the page for a moment longer.
I’ve heard this somewhere before, he thought. The exact words. But where? Why does it look so familiar?
Tyler shook his head. As he returned the notebook to his bag, a cell phone rang. He retrieved the flip phone from his pocket and lifted it to his ear.
Then everything faded out for a while.
Case Notes 13:
Hades
The sensory deprivation tank was ten feet long by five feet wide, with a height of five feet. The exterior was made of medical-grade stainless steel, without windows. At one end, there was a hinged door; on the other side, filtration pipes disappeared into the wall. Even in the bright blue-white fluorescence cast by the lamp panels, the tank seemed ominous. Like a torture device. Like a coffin.
If used as a coffin, the tank would have accommodated an entire family of corpses. Yet, minutes after he lay down in the shallow water, he felt the confines shrink. The walls caved in like a collapsing artery. The roof fell down. The darkness tightened around him, constricting him until it was as if he were in the belly of a great python.
He thought there could be nothing worse than staying in the serpent. Then as his veins flooded coldly with whatever had been introduced into his infusion pump, he learned there was something a whole lot worse than claustrophobia.
When Hades awakened, for a moment he believed he was once again inside that confining darkness. Uncontrollable shivers racked his body, silent tremors under his skin. He gripped his sweat-drenched arms, searching for tubes and wires. His fingers contacted the scarred track marks lining the crooks of his elbows but nothing else. No wires or tubes. No piercing needles.
It had only been a dream.
Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the gloom of his windowless room. The only light came from the smoke detector above him, which shone perpetually in night and day. Its glow wasn’t bright enough to fully illuminate his surroundings, but he had spent so much time in the room that he could navigate it in absolute darkness. Even now, with the furniture little more than silhouettes against a greater blackness, he knew what he was looking at when he sat up and glanced around. The shape along the farthermost wall was his dresser, and to the right of it, the punching bag hung from the ceiling like a lynched sentry. Then there was the desk where he sat for meals or to draw. And nothing else. No television. No video game consoles or stereos. Just red walls and a marble floor.
Reaching out, he found the light switch near his bed and flipped it on. Cold light flooded the room, pervading into every corner. It should have comforted him to know he was in his own room, in his own bed. Yet as he looked around, the bad feeling in the pit of his stomach only worsened. He clutched at his arms, feeling tension crawling like spiders beneath his skin.
From under the covers, he retrieved the stuffed cat that Elizabeth had given him at their date almost a week ago. He restlessly ran his hands over the soft fur.
Not for the first time, Hades wondered if he had been drugged in his sleep. It wouldn’t surprise him. Every so often, he woke up with the disturbing notion that someone had been messing with him while he slept.
But this was different. This time, th
e wrongness was outside of him, in his surroundings.
I don’t belong here, he thought, breathing deeply. He was flooded with discontent and the first boiling signs of rage, a searing, all-encompassing fury more blinding than the lamp above.
I don’t belong anywhere.
He walked to his desk, thinking that drawing might calm his nerves. He liked to draw, always had. With only a pen and a scrap of paper, he was able to create anything, and creation was almost as powerful as its antithesis, destruction. In a way, artwork was a kind of evolution—useless components coming together to form something truly superior.
Setting the stuffed animal on the desktop, he took a sketchbook and box of charcoal pencils from the middlemost drawer. He leafed through the thick book, searching for a blank page. Most of his completed drawings were of buildings and landscapes. Others depicted mundane objects rendered in exquisite detail.
Hades turned the page—and froze.
A beautiful teenage girl smiled at him from the paper. She had light hair, light eyes, and the memorable face of Elizabeth Hawthorne. Her hair was shorter than the long curls of the Elizabeth he remembered, but there was no mistaking her.
A sprig of flowers was tucked into her hair, and though he had added no color to the drawing, the blossoms were easily identifiable by the shape of their petals. Forget-me-nots. Vergissmeinnicht.
Impossible.
In the corner of the page, he had recorded the date of the drawing’s completion. Last January. Over a year and a half ago.
Below the date, he had written a title: A-09.
With a low moan, he tore the drawing from the sketchbook, ripped it up, and threw the pieces on the floor.
Elizabeth.
“Not her name,” a voice said, and only after Hades heard it did he realize it was his own. “Not her. Not her. Not her.”
Hades took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He held the air inside of himself for three seconds, then exhaled slowly. After repeating the breathing exercise two times, he opened his eyes, turned to a fresh page in the sketchbook, and began drawing.
He couldn’t focus. His hands kept shaking. The pencil quivered in his fingers and he ended up with a thick serpentine curve instead of a straight line. He turned the paper to the other side and tried again. Instead of just deviating outside of the vision in his head, the lead tip pressed down so hard that he was left with a thick smear of charcoal and a broken point. A dusty scatter spread across the paper, as fine and black as gunpowder.
Who was A-09? Who was Elizabeth? Who was he?
His thoughts grew muddled. The rage and confusion returned. Frustration building, anger mounting, Hades threw the pencil across the room and pushed to his feet.
He shouldn’t be here. He didn’t belong here. This wasn’t his room. This wasn’t the Academy. It wasn’t fair.
Other teenagers had homes or semblances of homes. They had families. They had parents. They went to school and made friends and talked and laughed, and all he had was this fifteen-by-fifteen-foot square.
The rush of thoughts was like adding oil to a fire. Anger raged up in him. The edges of his vision were swallowed by a pulsing blackness.
He wanted Elizabeth. He would never have her. She lived in a world apart from him, and the moment she realized that he was evolving, she would turn in terror from him. It was only a matter of time.
Forget me not? No, one of these days, she would forget him. Everyone always did.
Before he even knew what he was doing, he picked up the chair and hurled it against the wall.
Even though the chair was made of flimsy wood and he had tossed it with such force that one of the legs had punched a hole in the plaster, the chair didn’t break. There was a large crack in the seat, but that was all.
Which only enraged him further, so much that he wanted to scream.
Hades snatched up the chair again and hammered it against the floor until it was reduced to splintered timber. Then he hurled the stuffed animal across the room, tore the desk lamp from its socket, and threw it as well. The metal shade gonged hollowly against the wall, and the lightbulb exploded.
The cacophony of his systematic destruction reverberated against the walls, but nobody came. The room was soundproofed. Even if he screamed and shouted, the sounds would be completely deafened by the foam padding behind the plaster.
He knew from experience. He screamed often.
Rage unsated, Hades seized his ankle sheath from the desk and pulled out the knife. He drove the blade into the desktop, once, twice, several times, punctuating each thrust with a feral snarl. On the fourth time, the blade became trapped in the wood.
Left with nothing within reach to destroy but himself, he rushed across the room. He pounded his fists against the punching bag, hard enough to send pain surging through his knuckles and up his arms. He felt each punch all the way into his shoulder. By the time he collapsed from exhaustion, gasping for breath, his hands felt like they had been dipped in acid. The skin over his knuckles was abraded, oozing blood.
The pain was strangely comforting. It helped distract from the confusion his nightmare had brought. It drowned out the thoughts that weren’t his own.
He rolled over onto his back and stared at the ceiling.
This is happening to someone else. Hades lifted his hands and regarded the way the blood spread across his knuckles. This is not my body.
The ache slowly receded, and every emotion faded into weary indifference. That was right. This was not his body. It didn’t matter what happened to this useless carcass, because the real him was elsewhere. Untouchable.
Washed out, he staggered to his feet and returned to his bed. He picked up his jacket, which he had draped over the iron bedpost. He searched the pockets for his cell phone and turned it on.
As he dialed Elizabeth’s number, he sat down on the mattress. His dream had cast a dark, smothering presence over everything. He still felt the walls closing in on him.
On the fifth ring, she picked up.
“Hello, Elizabeth,” he said, listening to the soft hiss of the open line. In the background, he could hear voices and laughter.
“I’m sorry, Hades, I’m getting ready for practice, and I can’t really talk right—”
“Wait, please don’t go.”
“Hey, what’s wrong?” she asked, her voice soft with worry. “Are you okay? You don’t sound…”
“I…I had a bad day,” he said, to avoid telling her that he had been sleeping during school hours.
“Oh no, what happened?”
Just her murmur soothed him. He closed his eyes, imagining she was here with him now, lying down beside him. He could almost feel her body heat.
“It doesn’t really matter now,” he said, curling his fingers into a fist. His bloodied knuckles stung.
A door slammed in the background, and the voices were replaced by the quiet squeaks of sneakers on linoleum. “Are you sure? If you want to talk about it, I’m still here.”
“Let’s go somewhere.”
“What?”
“Skip practice. We can go for a motorcycle ride.”
“Hades, I can’t just skip it.” She sighed. “There’s a big game coming up next week. Anyway, I’ll see you at the dance tonight, right?”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” he said. “Wait for me out front.”
Case Notes 14:
Persephone
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Elizabeth muttered as Hades took her backpack and purse. He had spent the last five minutes giving her a rundown of what to do while pillion riding, but she still felt like a lemming one step away from the cliff’s edge.
Securing her belongings in the bike’s tail case, he glanced over his shoulder and favored her with a sinful grin. “Having second thoughts?”
“If my parents find out, they’ll kill me.”
“You mean the same ones who make you take etiquette classes?” From deeper within the compartment, he removed a pair of tinted go
ggles. “You can’t keep listening to them or you’re going to end up like me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Living your life for someone else.” After he shut the case, he hung the goggles on the handlebar. “Owned.”
She frowned. This was the second time he had used that word, or a variation of it, during a conversation. Owned. Names were proof of ownership.
“So I was wondering, do you live alone?” she asked.
Instead of answering, he picked up his helmet. “It’s better if you wear this. Just try not to head-butt me.”
She sighed, allowing him to ease the helmet over her head. Through the mirrored visor, the world appeared faded and monochromatic, like an antique photo. After the helmet was secured, he tightened the chin strap for her, stroking her jaw in the process. His leather gloves were soft against her skin. Every touch of his gave her a thrilling rush. The air between their bodies crackled with secret tension.
“How does it fit?” he asked, setting his hands on her shoulders.
She shook her head to test the helmet’s looseness, then lifted her hands and tried to pull it off.
“Perfect,” she said and then repeated herself a little louder, worried that the helmet smothered her voice.
“Don’t worry, I can hear you,” he said, giving her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. He took off his jacket and handed it to her, too.
“I’m not cold,” she said, although she wished she had brought something heavier than her cashmere sweater. There was a wintry nip to the air. Glancing at the cloud-burdened sky, she wondered if it might rain.
“It’s for protection, not warmth,” Hades said. “In case you fall off.”
She was touched by his concern for her and more than a little intimidated by the thought of getting into another accident. He had already assured her that he had spent hundreds of hours in the last year alone riding motorcycles, but even the most skillful motorists were at the mercy of other drivers.
He put on his goggles and got onto the bike. After a brief hesitation, she climbed up behind him, resting her feet on the pegs. Even though the motorcycle remained steady beneath her, she felt unbalanced, as if at any moment she might tip to the left or the right. She wrapped her arms around his hard waist, finding security in the warmth and sturdiness of his body.
Project Pandora Page 14
