All That We Say Or Seem
Cole Delacour
All That We Say Or Seem
Published by Hidden Helm Press
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious in every regard. Any similarities to actual events and persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features are only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used.
ALL THAT WE SAY OR SEEM
Copyright © 2020
9781949604146
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter One
Brown shag rug - musty and moldy and spread out from one room into the next. Cobwebs clung, hanging from the ceiling. Rust covered every hinge. Doors hung askew. The air smelled stale and itched the back of my throat. Layer upon layer of dust caked the molding, leaving them a dingy brownish-gray which only minutely improved when I ran my finger through them. If this represented something of import, my mind stood underwhelming blank. I’d never been here before. None of the houses back home had wall-to-wall carpeting. Creaky wood floors and area rugs from one side of the town to the next.
This must’ve been a nightmare. An amalgamation of everything I loathed. A house haunted by disrepair instead of ghosts. Even the chandelier in the foyer hung dull. Missing half its crystals, the fixtured crumbled beneath the weight of the greasy air. Too still. Too heavy. Moist enough to make the fabric on the furniture sag under more than the weight of time. I hadn’t even taken a step onto the angled stairwell, but the creaks echoed in my ears, sending a shiver down my spine. Darkness and a haze of dust loomed above. Some light refracted of floating specks.
"Why am I here?" I grumbled.
Every single night, I ended up in this same stupid house. One night, sure. Maybe I failed at lucid dreaming. Wandering into a nightmare sounded my speed, but this? A dingy house I’d never seen before irked me. Room came after grimy room without anyone there. Nobody showed up, but the weight remained. Eyes followed me from somewhere like two lasers burrowing into my back. If any of the walls had paintings, I would’ve checked them, but only random nails and hooks where things used to hang covered the walls.
Some nights, if I tilted my head just right - turned around quick enough - squinted until I had a headache, on those nights, the grime faded. The floors became rich mahogany, shining as if newly polished. Above my head, the chandelier gleamed and sparkled as if the house wanted to impress me. Floorboards creaked then. Footsteps running, and an ominous knocking preceded smoke curling around my nose, and I woke up certain my roommate had set something on fire.
If this was supposed to be a doorway into my subconscious, my subconscious was embarrassingly dull.
"I know you're there," I called when the watching returned.
A weight fell across my shoulder blades. As loudly as my voice echoed, the leaky sink in the kitchen toward the back dripped louder. Upstairs, the doors rattled. Only one door on the second floor ever unlocked - a narrow room with a bed and little else save an old Ted Williams baseball card. The same dingy carpet lined that room underneath the metal-framed bed with an uncomfortably thin mattress. In those few moments when my squinting brought about some semblance of old elegance, only the Ted Williams card remained the same.
Shoving my hands into my pockets, I huffed. "I'm not going to hurt you."
Who would even personify somebody to watch them in their subconscious? Did this mean I was a narcissist?
Before I drove myself mad with self-analysis, a shuttered hiss rebounded back. "I know I'm not supposed to ask, but why are you here?" No one answered. Rolling my eyes, I grumbled, "Not like I thought this was real anyway."
"It is real." The voice whispered, but for the silence I expected beyond my own movements, I startled, spinning in a circle and almost falling to the ground like an idiot. Stumbling, I stared. My eyes scanned up and down. Why was I dreaming about some random guy?
Pale enough to scare the crypt keeper, a teen around my age - maybe a bit younger - cocked a brow. His large gray eyes flickered between the floor - entirely mahogany beneath his feet - and me. Lashes like a china doll curled, and for all his pallor, a rosiness colored his cheeks. If it wasn't for his mousy brown hair, I might've thought him a creepy doll come to life. A doll would've made more sense. Those high cheekbones weren't something I would've forgotten. Neither the white button-up shirt with lace at the cuffs nor his tailcoat and the rest of his black suit, more fit for a funeral than for the dusty mess of a room we stood in together, matched anything I remembered. Despite his strangeness, he blended right into the walls.
"Great!" I exclaimed, clapping my hands together. "What are you?"
"What am I?" he echoed. His nose wrinkled.
"Fine. Whatever. Who are you?"
Nobody said I had to be polite to myself. Everything about him left my skin itching and muscles twitching. The urge to push him back nearly overwhelmed me. His heavy-lidded eyes looked like those baby dolls as if I could tilt him back and put him to sleep. If I did, would he collapse back until I stood him up again?
"I-I am..." he stuttered and then gaped as if the answer would walk out of his mouth if he kept his lips parted long enough. But after thirty seconds or so, he closed his mouth and took a shuddering breath before saying, "I fear that I am not quite certain."
Of course. I had to name the idiot in my own head. What even was he supposed to represent? Was he my Id? My Superego? Did anybody still care about Freud?
"How can you not know your name?"
When he stepped back, the mahogany moved with him. "I do not have an answer for that either." A slight accent curled his vowels, but I couldn't place it. "But you may call me Gray; everyone here does."
"Everyone?" Who else was crawling around in my subconscious? Shaking my head, I rubbed the bridge of my nose. I could deal with the rest of them later. "So...Gray...as in the color?" He nodded. "Wonderful. I'm stuck in who-knows-where with a loony bonker named after a color."
"If you prefer you could think of me as Gray as in the city." He hummed softly, shifting his weight to his heels and then back to his toes before adding, "Or is it cities? I can never remember how many Gray towns and cities there are."
Of course - he didn't
protest 'loony.' Nope - that wasn't the problem. The problem was his name. Seriously, what part of me was this unstable? "So...you live here."
"I do," the pale teen replied and rocked backward, almost hovering like a ghost. "And you are the boarder?"
"No." I shook my head and leaned against the doorway. "This is a dream for me."
A frown tugged at his lips. "A dream?"
"Yeah, this," I gestured to the room, "is a dream. Cause, I mean seriously, I go to Harvard College and live in Straus. Not in this weird house of mirrors."
His voice tightened, growing clipped when he spoke, "This is my home, and it is quite rude of you to insult it. A dream, it is not! It is as real as you or me."
"As you are a part of my dream, the majority of that sentence is just a little flimsy." With a huff, he deflated. "Anyway, nobody should live in this place. I feel like I’m going to get lockjaw just walking around."
"The house is perfectly liveable, thank you," came his sharp reply.
"I just mean - usually it is...uh..." Even my own psyche couldn’t give me a break. All the floors transformed into rich mahogany from one blink of the eye to the next. Every speck of dust vanished from the intricate molding. No amount of squinting made the place look as good. "Just forget it."
"Think it forgotten."
As I searched for some sign the dream would end soon, I sighed. "So...you're a Red Sox fan."
"I do enjoy a good game now and then."
"So it's yours?" I pointed upwards, but his eyes simply narrowed. "The card? The Ted Williams trading card?"
"Oh! Yes, yes it is..." He pressed the knuckle of his forefinger against his bottom lip. "I didn’t realize I left my door open. If you would kindly not enter my room again, I would be grateful."
"Sure. Just thought the card stuck out. It was the only thing in there so it kind of..."
"My father sent it to me while I was staying here..." Gray's eyes jumped toward the stairs, and his posture crumbled as his shoulders rose. "I mean, he sent it to me because I am staying here."
Seeing fear in Gray's eyes made me uneasy. Leaning so I could look up the stairwell easier, I had no idea what I expected. Some sort of nonsense monster maybe. Something more exciting than a large-eyed nobody with bow-lips. There was nothing there.
Glancing back at Gray, I raised an eyebrow, but he was not paying attention to me anymore. Gray seemed completely distracted with inching slowly away from the stairwell and toward the kitchen hall leading off the side of the front parlor. After another glance at the stairs, I crossed to Gray's side. Without really thinking, I lifted my hand and reached out to touch him. The moment before it landed, Gray looked away from the stairs and straight at me, shocking us both, and leaving my hand to fall when he practically jumped back.
"She would scold me if she heard that," Gray whispered. "I am still staying here, and she hates..." he trailed off and moved closer, almost unconsciously, to me.
"Who will? What are you talking about?"
"My governess," he meekly replied.
A tingly feeling started in the pit of my stomach. All the dreams ended that way. A sinking feeling and then a snap, and I would wake up back in Strauss in my own bed. Normally, I welcomed it. Nothing made sense here, but this time, I didn't want to go.
Gray trembled. His teeth chewed on his bottom lip. I just wanted to stay with him, to keep him safe, and to figure out who he was and why he was floating around in my head. Was he a symbol of my childhood innocence? A friend I forgot who disappeared? A story on the news? His vulnerability flipped a switch inside me. I wanted to protect him. Which made no sense. Gray wasn't real. When I woke up, he ceased to exist. He never showed up in my dreams before, so after tonight, I might never see him again. Because he wasn’t real - so I shouldn’t care.
Like a huff from a punch to the gut, I exclaimed, "I’m James."
Then I woke up, staring unseeing at my roommate's Fight Club poster. The click of heels echoed in my ears. Probably just tinnitus. Rubbing the side of my head, I groaned, rolling over to glare at my alarm clock. Three minutes until it sounded. Not enough time to sleep. Great.
Chapter Two
Exhausted, I trudged the length back to my room. My bag weighed heavily on my shoulders, and when the door swung open to reveal Tom missing, I wasted no time, throwing the weight aside to jump into the warmth of my bed. I planned only to close my eyes. A quick nap seemed a safe bet with the alarm set on my phone, but I sunk deeper quicker than intended, snapping to awareness on the stiff cushions of the coach in that decrepit manor.
Face pressed into the rough fabric, I groaned. Sad brown carpet covered the floors. Even before I flipped onto my back, cobwebs and fluffy clouds of dust gathered in corners. Knots of hair - who knows whose - gathered under the feet of the couch and the rest of the furniture. Wet and rotten, the scent stuffed itself up my nose. Eau de wet dog and moldy toast.
The floorboards groaned, creaking when I sat up to count my fingers. All ten stood in a row. Two hands, five fingers on each - just the way I remembered every single time. Crossing the room, I tugged a dusty book from the shelf. Each page detailed the same murder mystery as the last time I’d picked it up.
Not much remained to read in the place. A book with half its page missing lurked on the lowest shelf in the far corner of the room. In the kitchen, I had found an index card with nearly indecipherable cursive. I almost cheered when I found it, but the more I stared at the curling loops, the more I recognized I could still read the notes on how Heather Proust couldn’t have dairy of any sort and refused anything with the slightly bit of green. The third and last bit of text required me to climb the stairs and invade Gray’s room. While the note card and book left my hands itching with grime and threatened to crumble at my touch, the Ted Williams baseball card never aged.
THEODORE FRANCIS WILLIAMS
Outfielder - Boston Red Sox
I could name all the stats. Born in San Diego, California. October 20th, 1918. Bats Left. Throws Right. Ridiculous - because I learned his actual middle name was Samuel.
Gray hadn’t popped up, and he’d asked me not to invade his room, but this was my dream, so why should I listen to a figment of my own imagination? If I did, Cheyenne and Chad would have a field day.
"Hey?" I called out. "Gray?"
No response. Maybe my brain deleted him.
As I stepped off the stairs, crossing to the second floor landing, sweat poured down my face. My eyes stung. Everything itched. Rubbing my palms against my jeans, I glared at the card. Same words. Wiping my face across my upper arm, I looked back. Same words. Ten fingers and I could read. Recognizing a dream without a trigger? Priceless. Every speck of data from my side of the project undermined our group project. This early in the semester, my grades could recover, but I’d never hear the end of it from Cheyenne.
"You're in my room." Gray hovered by the door. His large eyes avoided mine, bouncing from one end of his tiny room to the other.
Frowning, I sat down on his bed - because taking my frustration out on a figure of my subconscious felt like some self-flagellation, and honestly, I hated when my body betrayed me. Lucid dreaming shouldn't have been this hard.
When his fingers curled into fists, I pointed at the card. "That's a 1940s card."
"It is."
"You're dressed like it's the 1800s."
His eyes narrowed. "I am dressed how I like to dress."
"Lie." Before he could argue, I grinned and continued, "You're overly controlled. I assumed you were a representation of my subconscious, but I'm giving you too much credit, right? I'm not a control freak, but I have some obsessive tendencies. I don't like being wrong. That's you."
Tilting his head, Gray scoffed, "Disassociation. And here I thought your psychosis would be more interesting."
"What?"
"You think reality is a dream. Your perception is flawed. This house, me, everything around you - you're just seeing what you want," Gray said.
I rolled my eyes,
clucking my tongue. "Dream-reality confusion? Seriously?"
"If that's what you'd like to call it." He glided into the room to stand over me. His thin lips twisted into a smirk. "You often fall asleep at random and in strange places. Narcoleptics are more likely to confuse reality and dreams..."
"Paraphrasing my psych textbook? Yeah, sure, you're your own person," I sneered. Grabbing his wrist, I tugged him down onto the bed beside me. "If this is a boarding house, where is everyone else?"
A wrinkle formed between his brows as they tugged together, furrowing as he studied me. "I never said it was a boarding house."
He stared up at me. Like an owl, Gray blinked ridiculously slowly like a tilting doll. My hand, which still encircled his wrist, slid up his arm to press against his shoulder. The urge to push - to send him tumbling backwards onto the sheets itched, causing my arm fingers to twitch against the coarse fabric of his jacket. Would he close his eyes if I did? Fall asleep and be unable to wake until I brought him back up again?
Biting my lip, I tugged my hand away. "Then what is it?"
A flash of white teeth - his eyes softened and laughter echoed through the room. A chill ran up my spine. The sweat - sticky and warm, causing my shirt to stick to my back - itched against my skin as nails dragged down my spine and the explosive rush of heat like fire when leaning too close to a gas grill when it caught, but when I blinked, he frowned up at me the same as he had moments ago. The world blurred. Back to the Fight Club poster. No answers.
Rubbing my hands over my face, I groaned, "Great."
Chapter Three
"Hands up if you've successfully recognized you were dreaming," Cheyenne called out before most of our group had even settled in their seats.
On the plus side, I didn't have to be the group parent - rushing everyone else to actually do their parts, but on the down side, nobody wanted Cheyenne to be the one in charge. Her dream journal inspired the project, so it made sense; however, her end goal was astral projection and reaching enlightenment. The rest of us just wanted a passing grade - preferably an A.
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