by Steven James
As she returned to her discussion of what makes a memorable antagonist, Daniel wasn’t really listening. Instead, his thoughts had wandered back to an Ojibwe folktale his dad had told him after the events last fall when Emily was killed.
According to the legend, an old man was teaching his grandson the tribe’s morals and values and he said that there was a fight going on inside of him between two wolves—one vicious and evil, filled with all the darkness of his soul; the other good and righteous, filled with hope and wonder. “Which one will win?” the boy asked. “The one I feed the most,” his grandpa replied.
Then Daniel’s dad had said, “That man who murdered Emily fed the wrong wolf for a long time until it was so strong that it finally killed off the other one.”
And even then, Daniel had been aware that there were two wolves inside him as well.
Which one are you feeding, Daniel?
Which wolf will win?
It made him think of Nicole’s favorite movie series—the Star Wars films—and Anakin Skywalker’s descent into the dark side of the Force.
It calls to us all, it—
The bell at the end of class drew Daniel abruptly out of his thoughts.
He looked down and noticed that his notebook was covered with scrawled words in a script that didn’t look anything like his own handwriting. Over and over, he’d written the words “Lost Cove is the key.”
He had no idea what that meant.
Quickly, he closed the notebook, collected his things, and headed for the hall. Nicole had gone ahead to her next class, but Kyle was waiting for him.
His friend had him by a few inches and came across as a bit gangly and giraffe-ish until he took off running, and then everything came into sync. He could’ve probably sprinted past half the guys on the track or cross country teams, but he didn’t go out for any sports. Daniel had always wondered why, but hadn’t pressed the issue because it was pretty easy to tell that his friend didn’t really want to talk about it.
Kyle lowered his voice. “Did you figure out who’s sending you those texts?”
“Not yet. The number’s blocked.”
“Did you tell Nicole about ’em?”
“No. That might not be the smartest idea.”
Daniel didn’t think his girlfriend would be too excited to find out he was getting mysterious texts from someone named Madeline.
“Good point,” Kyle agreed.
They started down the hallway.
Daniel didn’t know any Madelines and none attended their school—at least as far as he could tell. There was a sophomore girl named Maddie, but that was as close as it came.
He’d even paged through the yearbook but hadn’t found anyone with that name. Of course it was always possible that a freshman or a transfer student might have been named Madeline, but if that was the case, why would she be texting him? And how did she even get his number?
There were apps that could hide the number someone was texting from, so that part wasn’t as big of a mystery. On the slightly stalkerish front, however, Kyle had reminded him that there wasn’t even any proof that Madeline was a girl rather than some guy using a girl’s name—or a girl using a different name. After all, online and in texts you can’t know for sure if people really are who they say they are.
As they passed the gym, Kyle said, “Hey, at lunch I’ve got a puzzle for you. Made it up myself.” He was always trying to come up with a logic or math problem that Daniel couldn’t solve on the spot.
Hadn’t been too successful so far.
Math and logic weren’t things Daniel had ever tried to be good at; they were just second nature for him, like learning other languages is for some people. For a while he hadn’t been into solving the puzzles his friend came up with, but lately Kyle had been getting more and more creative so he’d started to get into them.
Kyle paused in the hallway. “Bet you a Dr Pepper you can’t solve it in one minute.”
“I don’t know, I’m feeling on my A-game today.”
“You better be.”
“You’re on.”
After Kyle left, Daniel responded to a few texts and by the time he was done he’d received a new one: I’m here waiting for you, Daniel—Madeline.
Madeline again.
Rather than delete her text, he archived it, hoping to eventually piece together who she was.
During his AP Calc exam he tried his best not to let the questions regarding her identity or the Lost Cove deal distract him, but that didn’t work out too well, and it was a good thing calculus came easy for him or he would’ve really struggled with the test.
As it turned out, he was the last one to hand in his final, and his teacher, Mr. Corrigan, looked at him with concern. “You feeling okay today, Daniel?”
“Yeah.” Usually Daniel finished his tests at least ten or fifteen minutes before anyone else so it didn’t surprise him that Mr. Corrigan was wondering what was going on. “I’m good.”
At lunchtime, Kyle sat across the table from Daniel in the back of the cafeteria. “My puzzle,” he told him, “it’s a liar’s dilemma.”
“I like liar’s dilemmas.” Today, rather than go for the cafeteria’s mystery meat, Daniel had brought his own lunch from home. He took a bite of leftover chicken fajita. It was a lot better than anything they would have served here. “Let’s hear it.”
“Alright.” Kyle set down the unopened can of Dr Pepper beside his food. “Picture this: There are four doors, two on each side of a hallway, each posted with a guard. Behind one of the doors is the princess; behind the others: a one-way ticket to the dungeon. Before choosing his door, our knight, Elvin—”
“Elvin the knight?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Seriously?”
“Not medievally enough for you?”
“Well . . .”
“How about Elvinore?” Kyle offered.
Sounds more like the princess’s name than the knight’s.
“Sure. Whatever. Go on.”
“So, Elvinore, he gets to ask each guard one question to try and find the princess so he can marry her and they can live happily ever after. But here’s the deal: the guards in front of her door and one other door always tell the truth but the other two guards always lie.”
“Gotcha.”
“Alright, so he goes to the first door on his left and asks, ‘Is the princess behind this door?’ ‘Yes,’ the guard says. He moves to the next door on that side of the hall and asks, ‘Is the princess behind this door?’ ‘Yes,’ the guard replies.”
“Two doors, two yeses.”
“Right. Then he crosses the hall and asks the next guard, ‘Is the princess behind the door I just left directly across the hall from you?’ Again the answer is, ‘Yes.’ Finally, Elvinore goes to the last door. ‘Is the princess behind this door?’ ‘No,’ the guard tells him.”
Kyle scrolled through his phone’s home screens to bring up the timer. “Well, Elvinore thinks for a second and then walks confidently to the correct door and—” He tapped the screen. “Go.”
“Door one.”
Kyle stared at him. “What?”
“She was behind the first door.”
“How did you . . . ?”
“The princess couldn’t be behind that last door since her guard must always tell the truth and he said she wasn’t there. If she was, he would’ve had to say so.”
“Right. But . . . ?”
“She couldn’t be behind the third door because that guard said she was behind a different door, and again, if he were guarding her, he would’ve had to be telling the truth. So that means it’s down to the first or second door.”
“But why do you think it was door number one?”
“If she were behind the second door, then three guards would have been telling the truth about where she was—the second, third, and fourth guards. But we know that only two tell the truth, so she had to be behind that first door. The first and fourth guards were telling the truth,
the second and third were lying.”
Daniel took another bite of his fajita.
It really was good.
Kyle shook his head, stopped his timer and slid the Dr Pepper across the table.
“You’ll get me one of these days.” Daniel glanced at the time, then hurried through the rest of his lunch, let Kyle keep the soda, and stood. “I gotta take off.”
“Your doctor’s appointment.”
“Right.”
He didn’t need to tell his friend what kind of doctor he was going to see.
Kyle already knew.
And it wasn’t a medical doctor.
“Hey,” Kyle said, “Mia and I will be at the game tonight.” Mia Young, Kyle’s girlfriend, was into creative writing almost as much as he was and was even working on a novel: a horror story about ghosts who haunted an old monastery. The two of them had been together ever since summer and from what Daniel could tell they were perfect for each other. “Let’s get together afterward. Bring Nicole. We can chill at my house.”
“Sounds good.”
“Play well. You own those guys.”
“I hope you’re right.”
After leaving the cafeteria, Daniel stopped by his locker and grabbed the Psycho DVD that’d been taped to the outside of it. Then he swung by the school’s office and turned in the note his dad had given him excusing him from his afternoon study hall and phys ed period. As he left school he was thinking about what he’d written in his notebook in Teach’s class.
It was not a good sign that he had no memory of scribbling down that phrase, and it was even more bizarre that his handwriting looked like someone else’s. What was all that about?
It’s starting again.
The blurs are coming back.
He tried to tell himself that wasn’t true as he drove toward his psychiatrist’s office.
CHAPTER
THREE
They don’t tell you that you’re “going crazy.”
Daniel had learned that on his first visit to the psychiatrist.
The guy had been very careful to avoid using that phrase.
But when you start seeing things, hearing voices, sleepwalking and digging up dead pets from the yard, there’s obviously a cause for concern. That’s what had sent Daniel to the shrink in the first place.
The MRI and CAT scans had come back negative. From what the doctors could tell, nothing was physically wrong with him—which was both reassuring and troubling at the same time.
Because something was definitely wrong.
And if it wasn’t physical, then it had to be mental, psychological.
Which isn’t exactly something a sixteen-year-old guy wants to hear.
This was Daniel’s fifth visit to see Dr. Fromke. As he waited in the lobby, he pulled out his phone and Googled “Lost Cove is the key.” More than a million results came up.
Okay, that might be a bit much to check out at the moment.
He whipped through the first couple dozen, but didn’t see anything that seemed particularly helpful.
After putting his phone away, he paged absently through the four-month-old issue of Sports Illustrated that’d been left on the coffee table beside his chair. A conversation he’d had with Nicole a couple weeks ago came to mind. She’d asked him what the difference was between someone who’s a psychopath and someone who’s psychotic.
“Well . . .” For obvious reasons, he’d done his share of reading on the topic since October. “Psychopaths—or sociopaths, whatever term you want to use—they know the difference between right and wrong. But someone who’s psychotic doesn’t.”
“So . . . What about someone who has schizophrenia?”
“He doesn’t always know what’s real and what’s not.”
“But right and wrong?”
“From what I’ve read, he knows what’s right, but since the difference between reality and his hallucinations is so unclear, he can’t always be trusted to do it.”
Now as he flipped through that magazine, he recalled the wolf legend and wondered if a person could be feeding the wrong wolf and not even know it, and if you could come to the place where you can’t even tell the two of them apart.
“Daniel Byers?” the receptionist called, then informed him that the doctor was ready to see him.
He entered the psychiatrist’s office: a cluttered desk with the pocketknife he used as a letter opener beside his inbox, a chair facing the couch, diplomas on the wall, a certificate for volunteering as a counselor at the Derthick State Penitentiary, a bookshelf with twenty-eight books on it with a total of four hundred and seventy-one letters on the spines. Daniel noticed the number, couldn’t help but notice. It was just that way with anything dealing with math, with numbers.
Dr. Fromke looked like he was about the same age as Daniel’s father, but was mostly bald and had a somewhat scraggly beard. He rose from his chair to shake Daniel’s hand, then gestured toward the couch. “Please. Have a seat.”
After Daniel sat down, the doctor settled back into his chair and said, “How are you feeling today?”
“I’m good.”
“Any headaches recently?”
“No.”
Dr. Fromke wrote something on his notepad, then dove right in: “And what about blurs? Have you been having any more?”
Actually, Kyle was the one who’d come up with the term “blur” for the times when fantasy and reality—or maybe it was sanity and insanity—merged for Daniel. The word had stuck, and back when Daniel first told Dr. Fromke what was going on, he’d found himself naturally using it. Since then, the doctor had opted for it as well, rather than “hallucinations.”
“No,” Daniel told him now. “No blurs.”
But what about what happened in English class? Writing that phrase over and over? Does that count?
No. That was just you being distracted.
But what about—
“I’m glad to hear that,” Dr. Fromke said, drawing Daniel out of his thoughts.
He was hoping the doctor wouldn’t ask him if he was taking his meds. He didn’t want to admit that he’d been getting rid of them, flushing the two pills down the toilet each day, but he also didn’t want to lie. It’d probably be better all around if the subject didn’t come up.
Thankfully, Dr. Fromke didn’t go there. “How have you been sleeping?”
“Good.”
“No sleepwalking?”
“Nope.”
“And things with your parents? Tell me how that’s been going.”
“Everything’s going okay. With my dad, at least.”
Daniel wasn’t exactly sure how to explain how things were with his mom. That was a little more complicated.
She’d moved out last spring, hadn’t told anyone why, and hadn’t spoken with Daniel much at all since leaving. Then, in October, she’d come back for the first time from the Twin Cities, where she was staying, to see one of his football games.
That was awkward.
Very awkward.
Now, this weekend she’d flown to Anchorage, Alaska, to visit her brother, but she was planning to come back to the Midwest in time to see Daniel on Christmas this coming Tuesday.
He couldn’t even begin to guess how that was going to go.
“And your mother?” Dr. Fromke asked.
“Pretty much the same.”
She still hadn’t told Daniel why she’d moved out. She wasn’t seeing another guy and Daniel’s dad hadn’t had an affair or anything to make her mad—which basically meant that she preferred being alone to being with her husband and her son.
So there was that.
Everything was pointing toward them getting a divorce and Daniel was just surprised it hadn’t been finalized yet.
He was torn.
On the one hand he wanted them to get back together, but on the other hand if his mom didn’t want to be there with them, fine. He could deal with that.
He wanted her around.
He didn’t want her arou
nd.
He wanted to forgive her for taking off.
He wanted to just forget about her and let her get on with her own life.
You get pulled in those two directions and sometimes you feel like you’re going to snap because of it—but that wasn’t exactly something he felt like he wanted to share with his psychiatrist right now.
Did he love her?
He wasn’t even sure anymore.
“Have you been talking with her at all?” Dr. Fromke asked.
“A little. Yeah. Things aren’t really any better, but they’re not any worse either. Like I said—pretty much the same.”
Dr. Fromke scribbled something down, then asked Daniel about his grades and how school and basketball were going, if he was feeling depressed or anxious, if he was finding it hard to concentrate.
Daniel assured him that things were fine. His grades were okay. Basketball was going well. No depression or anything. Figuring that the incident in English class was probably nothing to worry about, he didn’t bring it up.
“So,” the doctor concluded, “the medication must be helping.”
It didn’t really sound like a question.
Daniel said nothing.
They talked for another twenty minutes or so, Daniel reiterating that he was doing alright, Dr. Fromke looking pleased. “The last time you were in here we talked about your grandmother’s death.”
“Yeah.” It was true, the topic had come up, even though she’d died when he was nine.
“How has that been for you?”
“It’s good. I’m fine.”
He explored Daniel’s feelings about that for a couple minutes and then wrote out a new prescription and handed it to him. “Just give that to your dad. He can fill it at the pharmacy.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t forget: Two pills in the morning. Take them with food.”
“I won’t forget.”
He wasn’t exactly sure why he’d bailed on taking the meds. Maybe it was because the blurs had stopped on their own. Maybe because he didn’t want to chance coming up positive for anything if he was tested for drugs for sports, or that the meds would muddy up his thinking or slow down his response time.
