7 Souls

by Barnabas Miller; Jordan Orlando

  II

  7 SOULS

  1

  SCOTT

  IN THE BEGINNING THERE was darkness. Mary was alone, at peace, at rest—all those things they said about you right before they put you in the ground. Finally at peace. The thought didn’t seem to bring her any grief, or rage, or any feeling at all. She felt nothing, and it was good. The pain throughout her body was gone. The blinding spotlights and the deafening music before the bullet shattered her skull were all gone; everything was gone.

  Whatever had happened to her, it had come fast and hard, like the storm that had drenched the city. She had not been ready for its full force, she realized: the rain had fallen, wild and powerful, and there was no getting out of its way. The darkness had shrouded her all day; she had seen it outside the windows, in the gray sky above the city—the rain had lashed down, spattering across her as she lay planted in the cold ground at the empty house, like a girl half-buried by a grave digger, already half dead. Her friends had vanished. She had tried to run, but the storm raged and the bullets came, first for Dylan and then for her—they paid the ultimate price, as those Daily News crime stories always put it. The victim paid the ultimate price—and here she was, paying it.

  Because I’m dead.

  The strange calmness that followed the realization—the way it was no more shocking than I have a cold or I’m late for school—convinced her. I can’t feel anything, she confirmed to herself, and it didn’t make her afraid. I can’t feel anything because I’m dead.

  But she did feel something: she felt regret. Regret that she had failed to escape whoever had it in for her; regret that she was too slow, too stupid, and now it was too late to do anything about it. Regret that she would never see any of them again, never be able to explain.

  And she felt something else. Physically, she felt something—which was impossible, an illusion. But, concentrating, she was sure of it: a sensation was penetrating the void, barely there but growing, like the drone of an approaching plane. Something was pressed against her back. There was no getting around it. She wanted to move; she had to move.

  I’m sleeping, Mary thought dazedly. I’m dreaming. I’m waking up.

  That had to be it. I dreamed all that. I had a nightmare, a paranoid nightmare.

  And why not? An anxiety dream—waking up naked with a skull-pounding headache, and a scornful crowd pointing and laughing. Isn’t that the standard paranoid fantasy? A slow ride into panic, where everybody’s trying to get you, trying to kill you; you try to run but you can’t move, you can’t get away. And then you wake up.

  And it was all a dream.

  Right?

  Isn’t that it? Isn’t that what happens next? Mary realized she could hear her own breathing. She’d been ignoring it, pretending it wasn’t there. But she was breathing fast; not exactly panting in terror but not exactly calm, either. I hear my breathing, because I’m alive. It’s later and my headache’s gone and I’m waking up alone.

  I’m alive.

  That made sense, didn’t it?

  “Wake up.”

  She heard a female voice, youthful and distorted, blasted with static as if coming in on a radio station. Mary’s eyes snapped open. Her heart was pounding. The voice was right there, just inches from her head. Her eyes were watering and she reached to wipe at them with hands that felt sluggish and swollen; her fingers felt oddly thickened as they bumped against her eyelids and the bridge of her nose. Am I bruised? she wondered dazedly. Did my face swell up?

  It seemed as though her ears were ringing from the gunshot to the back of her head. But no. There was no ringing at all. No gunshots, she told herself. No rainstorm, no endless, baffling chase that turns into Death Race 2010 before you’re blown to kingdom come. Just silence, and the low hum, which sounded like it was coming from a fan—an ordinary electric fan.

  She could move, she realized. The numbness was slipping away, like the rough bedsheets that slid from her body as she flinched and sat up, squinting against the blinding, blazing white sunlight that bathed her face.

  “Wake up.”

  The same robotic voice. Alarm clock, Mary realized. Her heart was still thwacking in her ears like a snare drum as she tried to wipe her eyes clear with fingers that were too short and fat. That’s an alarm clock, a novelty alarm clock that talks.

  Taking her hands from her face, Mary could see the alarm clock with the robot voice right next to her. It was a porcelain statue of a slender, buxom young woman holding a sword. The woman wore a colorful costume and a mask that tied around her long blond hair. The base of the statue was a block of stone that had a digital clock face set into it; the bright burgundy numbers said 7:01 A.M.

  It was difficult to see anything else; the light was too bright. And her body was heavy and bloated. She had to strain to lift her own weight, just to sit up. The effort made her head feel light, and when she moved her shoulders and brought her thick new hands to her face she instantly realized her hair was gone.

  Someone cut off my hair. All the familiar touches of her hair—the flicking of the smooth ends against her shoulders, the softer waves that always cascaded down over her eyebrows and cheekbones until she swept them back—were gone. Somebody had taken a razor, a big electric clipper, and cut all of it off during the night.

  Oh, Jesus, someone cut off my hair—

  She could still hear the fan—a computer fan, she realized, looking around as her eyes continued to clear. The room she was in—a cluttered, wide bedroom with a bright triangle of sunlight spearing across its walls—had a big desk, covered in stacks of books and disks and boxes, and a pair of computers, their fans humming, with glowing neon lights, orange and green.

  Where the hell am I?

  A loud noise drew Mary’s gaze to the far wall, and the door in the shadows, back beyond the dim outlines of other furniture she couldn’t quite see.

  Someone’s outside the door. Footsteps were definitely approaching; Mary could clearly hear the repeated thump and squeak of rubber-soled shoes advancing.

  “Scottie?”

  A female voice, getting closer. Middle-aged, friendly. And familiar—Mary wasn’t sure why, but she was absolutely convinced that she’d heard it before.

  “Scottie? Are you up?”

  Mary noticed a sweet, candied aroma. Industrial blueberries, she thought: the kind of mass-produced processed food Joon always scorned (while scarfing down one of her macrobiotic box lunches). Those rubber-soled footsteps kept getting louder; it sounded like a basketball player was approaching across a newly waxed court.

  Mary looked around wildly, like a cornered animal, trying to find a way out. She blinked but couldn’t quite clear her eyes; everything in the distance, beyond the bed, was hard to see clearly. There was a bathroom—with a hexagonal grid of gleaming white tiles stretching off into the blurry blackness beyond—but nothing else. Mary was trapped and the bedroom door was opening—she’d forgotten that door completely, because now she was looking full-on into the mirror on the wall that showed Scott Sanders, soft cheeks reddened by the sheets, short hair askew, brown eyes squinting in the glare of the morning light. Even out of focus, there was no question about it: Scott Sanders was staring back at her with a shocked, comical expression.

  “Scottie! Wake up, sleepyhead!” The voice was huge, deafening as the door swung open and the woman with the loud sneakers was there, framed in the doorway. That’s Mrs. Sanders, Mary realized dazedly; she recognized her voice.

  But Mary couldn’t tear her eyes from the mirror. She was still staring at Scott’s reflection, matching him blink for blink.

  “Scottie?” Mrs. Sanders repeated. “Are you feeling all right? I thought you hit the sack early.”

  “Wh-what?” Mary croaked. She tried not to jump as her voice rang out, reverberating inside her skull exactly as if it were her own, but it was Scott’s voice, a teenage-male tenor that buzzed and vibrated in her throat—Scott’s throat—as she spoke. “What—” she tried again.

 
“Feeling all right?” Scott’s mother repeated. She came forward, recognizable to Mary from years and years of school plays and home games and parent-teacher days. For Mary, the strangest part was seeing her in her sweats. “I asked if you were—Scottie, sweetie, what’s wrong? I’ve brought you breakfast.”

  The blueberry smell was overpowering, wondrous. Mary could feel her mouth watering as she fixed her eyes on the plate moving toward her, and she realized that the weakness and dizziness she felt was hunger. Scott’s mother wakes him up with Pop-Tarts, Mary realized. She wasn’t sure why, in the middle of the hallucination, the dream, the delusion, whatever it was, she found herself thinking about that, about Scott’s mother. She brings him breakfast and asks if he’s feeling all right. But she was fascinated, because it was so utterly strange.

  “Go ahead,” Mrs. Sanders urged. Mary reached out with Scott’s pale, soft arm and took a Pop-Tart. Her eyes were beginning to water along with her mouth. She was hungry; she was taking a bite before she even realized it, her teeth squeezing through the hot pastry as if she’d never eaten anything before.

  “Take the plate,” Mrs. Sanders scolded, mock sternly. “I’m not standing here waiting on you.”

  Mary was chewing and swallowing. She bit the side of her mouth and winced; even her teeth felt strange, irregular and misaligned, and she had to chew carefully not to bite her own—Scott’s—tongue. Pop-Tart crumbs flew from her mouth and hit Mrs. Sanders, bouncing off her sweatpants. Mary reached to take the plate, the Pop-Tarts on it rattling and sliding. The sensation of tasting the food was incredible; she was barely done swallowing each bite before she wanted more.

  “Look at my hungry little man,” Mrs. Sanders murmured as Mary finished the Pop-Tart—it had taken her three bites. She was so close that Mary could smell her scent and identify it—Clinique’s Happy—before she turned away. “Come on, champ—better get moving. It’s five past. And don’t you have a test today?” She was walking away, legs hissing beneath blue terry cloth, shoes squeaking on the polished floor. “That means no gaming—and be sure to leave time for a shower.”

  I want to wake up, Mary thought as the door slammed, feeling a sugar rush kicking in. I want to wake up now; I’ve had enough of this dream. She was breathing heavily again, out of fear; she could see Scott’s chest rising and falling beneath his yellow Grand Theft Auto T-shirt—she could barely read the blurred logo, backward, in the mirror.

  A phone rang, suddenly. It was so loud that Mary flinched and nearly dropped the plate. The jangling, piercing chime—a cell-phone ringtone—was coming from Scott’s cluttered desk. Rising off the bed, Mary came to her feet, holding on to a bedpost as she weaved, unable to support herself and almost losing her balance. The ringtone was still blaring and Mary actually recognized the song it was playing: “Femme Fatale.” She stumbled to the desk, the plate clanking loudly as she dropped it there, the Pop-Tarts sliding onto a graph-paper notebook. Mary felt a cold wave pass over her when she saw Scott’s blue LG phone—the one that always looked so grimy—with its amber light blinking and its bright screen displaying the incoming caller ID:

  SHAYNE, MARY

  It was all so real—that was the thing about it—not like a dream at all. The phone’s display (four bars; full battery), the seven digital numerals of the world’s most familiar phone number … every detail was perfectly realistic, even through the maddening blur that she suddenly understood, staring down at the desk.

  Glasses—Scott’s glasses!

  There they were, on the desk beside the phone: Scott’s familiar, gold-framed antique glasses. As Mary fumbled them onto her face, the surrounding room snapped into exquisitely sharp focus. Looking in the mirror was unsettling; now she could see the red veins in Scott’s eyes and the millions of tiny white hairs on his smooth skin. A few yellowed, sticky grains of sleep were gummed to his eyelashes, and his lips were slightly chapped.

  She reached down and touched the cool plastic of the phone, feeling its vibration along her arm as she picked it up, flipped it open and brought it up to her ear. Her thumb brushed against her—Scott’s—hair as she pressed the green Talk button.

  “Hel—hello?” She jumped again at the sensation of hearing Scott’s voice coming from her own throat.

  “Scott!”

  A young female voice, garbled and distorted by the cell phone’s tiny speaker. “Can you hear me?”

  “Wh-what—?” she heard herself responding—again, in Scott’s familiar tenor.

  “It’s Mary. You there, Scott? I need your help.”

  “Mary—wait, what?”

  That’s me, she thought. That’s me. Oh my God.

  “You’re Mary,” she managed to rasp out. “What the—What day is it?”

  “It’s Friday,” her own voice blared in her ear through the erratic connection. “Friday, Scott, the day of the physics test—the big killer test. We were supposed to meet last night to power-cram, remember?”

  “Physics test.” There was something familiar about those words—something she couldn’t put her finger on.

  I said that, Mary suddenly remembered. That’s me, this morning. I called Scott at seven, from the taxicab—on the way home from Crate and Barrel.

  Before it all started.

  “The physics test—of course. But—but, holy shit, that’s—”

  “It’s today, Scott. Come on—will you wake up, damn it? Snap out of it! This is serious.”

  “Serious,” Mary repeated, as the memory came into focus. Her mouth tasted like blueberry Pop-Tart. “Right, I was—you were supposed to meet me—I forgot that we were—But—”

  She was gazing around Scott’s bedroom, squinting through the dust motes at the East Side morning sky beyond the plate glass. She had never been here, of course. Probably, no girl had been here, ever. Posters around the room showed fantasy girls, all pretty and skinny with big chests, all drawn or painted or digitally rendered, pubescent dreams frozen and reproduced in rows across Scott’s walls.

  “Scott!” On the phone, her voice was louder—her impatience was growing. To Mary, it was the voice of the happiest, most carefree girl in the world. “Scott, I’m trying to remember last night—what happened last night, I mean. I’m blacking out on some of it and I can’t remember if I met you after dinner or—Hello?”

  Mary could hear the world’s squeakiest sneakers beyond the bedroom door. Mrs. Sanders was moving around. Mary really didn’t want to deal with her again.

  I have to get out of here, she thought. The cell phone was warm in her hand, its amber light blinking. I have to get out of here right now. It was nearly an animal impulse; her spinal column felt electrified and her breathing was getting faster. Her bare feet were cold from the parquet floor.

  Mary slapped the phone shut. A flush was coming over her face and her vision was darkening; she clenched the edge of the desk with Scott’s fat fingers and tried to clear her head. Frantically looking around at the mess strewn around the floor, she saw a pair of nearly new Adidas along with a tangle of T-shirts and the pleated pants that Scott always wore. Mary had managed to get her balance, but she was still stumbling since Scott’s arms and legs were so different from hers—she banged her elbow against the desk’s edge and felt a dull pain spread through her arm.

  I’ve got to get out of here. She was close to panic as she picked Scott’s loose khaki pants up from the floor and began pulling them on, reeling back against the bed, getting the pants on over the loose gray sweatpants and reaching for Scott’s familiar-looking near-virgin Adidas running shoes. Why does he even wear these? she thought distractedly as she fumbled with the laces, impatiently tangling Scott’s sweaty fingers around them. He never runs, anywhere.

  But she had to. It was like the times that Mary would end up collapsed somewhere, at the end of a party, on a sofa or along the edge of a well-made bed, the room reeling drunkenly around her, and she would think, time to rally—she would understand that Joon was gone and Amy was gone and she was going to have to make
it out of there, wherever she was, alone. She would picture the obstacle course: getting to her feet, finding her coat, putting on her coat, checking if she had both earrings, then propelling herself down an unfamiliar corridor to a big front door, past whatever drunken people were still there, and outside. Then an elevator and a lobby and a sidewalk and a taxicab and she would be home, her ears ringing, the party sounds fading behind her.

  Time to rally—she was doing it now, stone-cold sober, in the bright morning light, and it was exactly the same: stumbling out into a strange corridor, trying to find her way to the front door. The apartment was huge—Mary glimpsed a concert grand piano through one doorway and a kitchen table with a pitcher of grapefruit juice and an unfolded New York Times through another. Got to get out of here, got to get out of here, she was thinking over and over, her heartbeat clicking in her ears again as she propelled Scott’s heavy body toward the giant front door.

  “Wait! Don’t leave!” Scott’s mother called out, from somewhere in the vastness of the apartment. Mary froze, cringing. She could hear the basketball-court sounds of Mrs. Sanders approaching. Frantically, she started fiddling with the brass knob on the front door. “Scottie, wait!”

  Mary finally got the door open as Mrs. Sanders appeared behind her. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” she said, holding out Scott’s red backpack—Mary noticed its familiar Harry Potter and Dandy Warhols stickers. “You’re not going anywhere without this.”

  Mary tried to speak, but couldn’t quite get herself to make any coherent sound. She reached out and took Scott’s book bag—it felt much heavier than she’d expected—and catapulted herself out of the Sanders apartment, pulling the heavy door closed behind her as fast as she could.