7 Souls

by Barnabas Miller; Jordan Orlando

  “He changed his fucking mind!” Joon raged. “Goddamned Dylan what’s-his-name, he changed his mind! Just like every goddamned man who gets anywhere near that bitch! She batted her eyes at him and he melted and now he’s going to save her!”

  “Jesus—” Scott barked, downshifting as he pulled back out into the passing lane. “What do we do? What the hell do we do?”

  “Turn around!” Joon snapped. “Go back and get them!”

  In the backseat, Mary was trembling, nursing the bruise on her face. She was so frightened she didn’t dare move or speak. Both Scott and Joon seemed nearly insane with fury.

  “I can’t!” Scott yelled. His face was crimson. “I’d have to get off the Parkway; by the time I got back there, they could have gone anywhere!”

  Joon slammed her fists against the dashboard again. “You’re right,” she muttered. She was flipping open the glove compartment—its tiny lamp illuminated her fingers as she extracted a cell phone. “You’re right. Okay—okay.”

  “Are you getting instructions?” Scott asked. His nerves seemed to have settled down. “Are you calling in?”

  “I have to,” Joon muttered, dialing rapidly, her thumbs hammering the illuminated buttons. Mary craned her neck, trying to read the number, but there was no way. The pain in her—Amy’s—temple was spreading like a coffee stain.

  Who the hell is she calling?

  “Hello? It’s Joon,” Joon said. They were passing a sign for the bridge to Manhattan. “We’ve got a problem—Dylan flaked. He took her somewhere.”

  With the thumping windshield wipers and the drone of the engine, it was impossible for Mary to make out the sound of the voice on the phone.

  Who’s she talking to? Mary wondered again.

  Is somebody in charge? Somebody else?

  It seemed like somebody was—somebody to whom her friends were reporting all of their movements. Mary was feeling an entire new level of fear now.

  “Are you sure?” Joon was straining to listen. “Where?”

  “What do I do?” Scott asked. Joon waved a hand at him impatiently.

  “Okay, I’ll handle it,” Joon said confidently. “I’ll get her back—don’t worry. You can count on me.”

  Joon snapped the phone shut. Scott looked at her, his chubby hands twitching the wheel.

  Who the hell was that? Mary wondered. She couldn’t even begin to think of the answer. Who’s giving them orders?

  “We’re going to the Upper West Side,” Joon told Scott. “Take the Morningside exit—I’ll tell you where to go.”

  Mary was trying to figure out what to say—how to ask Joon who she’d been talking to—but before she could, the roar of the highway expanded like the dull sound of a seashell held to the ear and the pain in her temple grew unbearable, like a white flood; the whiteness and noise overwhelmed her again.

  No! Not yet!

  But it was too late—her time as Amy was over. Once again, Mary was lost in an infinite sea of white noise.

  4

  MARY

  HER EYELIDS FLUTTERED IN the glare.

  The bare overhead bulb shone blindingly in her eyes as she struggled with the much stronger shadowy figure who held her arms.

  I’m dreaming; I’m not dreaming—

  She was struggling with Dylan, who, in his ridiculous winter coat, was pulling on her arms and trying to get her back into his apartment. Dylan, who had not been shot—who was still hours away from that horrible fate.

  “Mary? What’s the matter with you?” Dylan’s grip relaxed on her wrists as she slackened them. “Mary?”

  Hello.

  The balance of her body; the feel of her hair against her forehead; all of it was back to sweet normality. I’m me. I’m me again—I’m Mary Shayne.

  I’m awake.

  That has to be it, she thought conclusively. I just kept dreaming, imagining that I was each of my friends. Didn’t Sigmund Freud write about that? How your dreams are a story; you’re exploring your subconscious mind?

  “Mary, can you hear me? What’s—” Dylan was obviously considering releasing her hands, but he didn’t seem sure that he could trust her—that she wasn’t about to stumble down the stairs and run away the moment his back was turned. “Are you going to come back inside?”

  We just got back to Manhattan, Mary reminded herself. He wants me to run away with him—to drive out of New York and keep going all night, all day, whatever it takes until we’re safe.

  That sounded like a good idea. Mary was relaxing her arms and straightening up to her full height, blinking to clear the spots from her eyes. She was ready to follow Dylan anywhere he wanted to go. The image of his blood-drenched shirt … of her mother crouching on the narrow corridor floor, with Dylan’s blood staining her dressing gown …

  No. I’m going to stop that from happening.

  Somehow she seemed to have made her way around an inexplicable cosmic circle, and here she was—back at the end of the day she died. (The beginning of the end, she corrected: the moment when she’d slid off the edge of the spinning record and descended into madness and death.)

  “Mary?” Dylan, still whispering, right in front of her. “Will you come back inside? Don’t worry about dropping that glass—I don’t care about that.”

  Mary lunged forward and grabbed Dylan’s coat lapels, hard. The sensation of returning to her own body was overwhelming; she felt like she had the balance and coordination of an Olympic athlete. “Joon’s out there,” she whispered in his ear, gripping the thick padded shoulders of his winter coat. “Out on the fire escape.”

  Dylan’s eyes widened. He looked down at her, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb. He had turned white. He didn’t look remotely interested in disbelieving her. Joon? he mouthed.

  Mary nodded, tugging on his coat and beckoning him down the building’s ancient stairwell. Dylan vaulted ahead, footsteps echoing harshly against the dirty cast-iron steps as he led Mary past a row of trash pails toward a thick metal door. She waited while he fumbled with a key chain.

  Good thing you got your keys, Dylan.

  Dylan got the door open and shoved Mary through. (Don’t trust him, Joon had warned … long hours ago, yet moments ago … Mary put it out of her head.)

  Stop thinking and run, Mary told herself. Dylan snapped on an overhead light and she got her bearings—a narrow, plaster-walled corridor that led past a washer and dryer—and followed him around a corner to another locked metal door. The door’s bottom edge rode at least an inch over the sill, and Mary felt cool night air billowing in, caressing her bare ankles below the hems of the borrowed jeans she wore.

  My own ankles—my own body, Mary thought luxuriously. She’d told herself not to think, but how did that fit in? Why was she back in the middle of the evening? Why was she herself again?

  Mary thought she knew.

  She realized she’d missed something—that there was an important idea she hadn’t quite considered carefully enough. Now it was time to get it straight—to think it through.

  “Come on—fast,” Dylan whispered as he pushed on the filthy back door. “We can get around to where we parked.”

  “Joon could be waiting out there—waiting for us,” Mary whispered, hurrying to catch up, and following him past the reeking trash cans into the narrow alley behind the building. Even with the sweater, Mary was shivering—the night had gotten colder and the wet wind stung her skin, passing right through the sweater like water through a sieve. Dylan hooked a left and Mary followed. “She’s had enough time, right?”

  “She’ll think we went out the front,” Dylan explained as he grunted with the effort of pulling back the edge of a broken chain-link fence. “We’ve got like a one-minute head start to the car. Here,” he added, pulling off his overcoat and shoving it toward her. “You’re still freezing from before—put this on.”

  “But why is she here?” Mary whispered, gratefully pulling the soft overcoat around herself, shivering convulsively as she pushed her arms into
its long sleeves. Her feet splashed loudly in the puddles of rainwater that filled all the spaces in the cement around them. The coat was thick and warm—she felt better already. “Why did she tell me not to trust you? I don’t—”

  “Later, we’ll talk later. Get in fast.” Dylan was gesturing up the block at his Taurus, about fifteen feet away, and at the stone archway and staircase further down the block; the one Joon was about to emerge out of. “And buckle your seat belt. We’ve got to get as far away as we can.”

  “DYLAN, LISTEN,” MARY SAID again. “You’re smart, right? You can help me figure this—figure this out.”

  Dylan was leaning forward, pressed against the steering wheel, his dark eyes flicking back and forth as he waited for the traffic signals to change. A light rain was falling again. They were just a few blocks away from Dylan’s apartment.

  “What?” Dylan’s eyes grazed across hers and then he was looking back at the street. She saw his Adam’s apple go up and down—he was obviously tense, on edge. “Figure it out—right. That’s what we’ve got to do.”

  Mary was convinced she’d already figured something out—something important.

  I’ve come back as Scott, and then Joon, and then Amy, she thought. I was each of them for a little while—one small excerpt of each of their lives, on the day I died.

  And they can’t remember it.

  But the same thing happened to me, Mary realized.

  There was a piece missing from her day too. After speaking with Joon through the window and then trying to flee from Dylan’s apartment, she’d just … stopped … and when she’d come to, it was much later on. The intervening time was just gone.

  Now I’m getting it back, she concluded. I’m “possessing” myself right now, just like I did the others.

  Mary still had no idea why—why any of it had happened, including this game of cosmic musical chairs she seemed to be playing—but at least it was starting to make some kind of sense.

  Maybe there was more she could figure out.

  The lights had changed and Dylan sped south, through the deep shadows of the trees that lined Riverside Drive.

  “Where are we going?” Mary asked.

  “Away.” Dylan still sounded strange. “We have to get away. We’re in danger.” Mary saw his hair toss as he shook his head, trying to clear it. “We’re in danger because—”

  “You all ganged up on me,” Mary interrupted. “Right? You, Scott, Amy, Joon. For my birthday, right?”

  Dylan wasn’t answering. He was staring at the road. She could tell that he was thinking hard.

  “You ganged up on me to ruin my day, sending me upstate, and then faking me out, making me think my friends were dead and then—”

  “How do you know that?” Dylan was glaring at her, his teeth clenched. She could feel the Taurus listing, pulling to one side. “How do you know—”

  “Wait a minute.” Mary had just realized something else. “You were driving me back to town, and Scott’s car was behind us, Scott and Joon and me—I mean, Amy—chasing you—and then something happened. You changed your mind about something; we nearly had an accident, because you got this funny look in your eyes—”

  “Yes!”

  “—and in the car behind us, Joon said you, um, that you chickened out—”

  (He changed his fucking mind! Joon had raged. Goddamned Dylan what’s-his-name, he changed his mind! Just like every goddamned man who gets anywhere near that bitch! She batted her eyes at him and he melted and now he’s going to save her!)

  “I don’t understand how you know that.” They had hit another red light. Dylan was rubbing his temples wearily. “I don’t understand how you could possibly know that when I can’t fucking remember—”

  “Dylan”—Mary awkwardly reached for his shoulder—“Dylan, calm down and try to help me think. We can figure it out together.”

  (Don’t trust him!)

  Joon’s hands clasping hers through the narrow crack of Dylan’s kitchen window. Joon hanging from the rope—her own arms burning with the pain of the ropes in the freezing rain. Joon telling her to run, chasing them, calling her a bitch …

  “The date,” Mary said suddenly. “Patrick breaking up with me … you asking me out … it was all part of the plan, wasn’t it?”

  “I think so,” Dylan muttered, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. “You understand I can’t remember any of it—it’s driving me insane. But you’re right.” He looked straight at her. “Something happened and I woke up; it’s like I suddenly woke up driving, and I realized what I was doing. I realized I was leading you …”

  “Where?” Mary squeezed Dylan’s shoulder. The light had changed, but it was all right—there was nobody around for miles in either direction. “Where were you taking me?”

  “The hotel,” Dylan whispered, nodding. “Get you out of the hole in the ground; bring you to the hotel. That was the plan. But—”

  “The Peninsula? Patrick’s suite?”

  “Yeah.” He shot her a frightened, confused glance. “We were there tonight, right? You and me?”

  “Yes. After our date.”

  “We went on a date?”

  Jesus Christ, Mary thought. He really doesn’t remember. How is that possible?

  How is any of this possible?

  Her own head was beginning to ache from trying to understand what was happening. And this is my head, she realized in dismay—the one full of wine and vodka and tequila and champagne from five hours ago. The hangover effects had receded, but she still felt a dull ache behind her temples that refused to go away.

  “There was something else …,” Dylan said quietly. They had stopped for another traffic light, somewhere in the mid-eighties, and he was tapping his fingertips impatiently on the steering wheel. Even here, inside the car, Mary’s chill hadn’t gone away—she shoved her hands down into her—Dylan’s—overcoat pockets to keep them warm. “There was something else that I was supposed to do that only I understood.”

  “What?”

  “I had to—” Dylan squinted his eyes, his jaw muscles clenching as he struggled to remember. “Something about the hotel; something about a gun. I was being told what to do….”

  “Being told … by whom?”

  Joon called in, Mary remembered. Scott told her to call for instructions, and she did. But I never found out whom she called.

  There was something in her pocket. Mary’s fingers, pushed down into the soft recesses of Dylan’s right overcoat pocket, brushed against something stiff and brittle—a thick piece of paper.

  “By somebody,” Dylan responded. The light had changed, reflecting in the shining rain on the wide avenue, but he didn’t move the car. “Somebody important … somebody I had to listen to.”

  Mary pulled the paper out of Dylan’s overcoat pocket. It caught on the fabric, and she had to wiggle it to get it out. There was something familiar about the feel of the paper, something that was making her apprehensive. She held the single page up to the ghostly light from the high, pale streetlights, opened its single fold—and felt the chill return to her spine and the back of her neck as she stared at it.

  At the top of the page was an asymmetrical red eye, almond shaped, simple, yet stylized like a corporate logo. And below that, three lines of text in block letters, neatly handwritten, in a style she recognized instantly.

  WHOM DO YOU HATE THE MOST?

  WHAT WOULD YOU DO ABOUT IT IF YOU COULD?

  TODAY IS THE DAY.

  “Dylan—” Mary could barely speak. Ahead of them, the traffic light changed, but Dylan didn’t respond; the car didn’t move. “Dylan, what—what is this? Where did you get it?”

  Dylan didn’t answer, and Mary looked over and realized with a sick sort of fascination that Dylan was nearly in a trance; he was staring at the note in Mary’s hand the way a cat stares at a motionless bird, unblinking, eyes wide, totally alert.

  “Dylan? What’s—”

  Dylan blinked rapidly, suddenly shaking his
head back and forth violently, as if to clear it. “That’s it! That’s—that’s it.” His voice was strangely weak, like the awestruck tones of someone witnessing a car crash or a spectacular sunset. “That’s the whole thing. Oh my God—”

  “What whole thing?” Mary’s heart was racing. “What whole thing, Dylan?”

  “Put that away,” Dylan said quietly. His eyes were squeezed shut. “Get that thing away so I can’t see it.”

  Mary folded the note in half, ready to return it to Dylan’s overcoat pocket, when she suddenly noticed something else. A weak, fragrant aroma, barely noticeable—nearly recognizable—coming from the parchment in her hand.

  Wrinkling her nose, Mary brought the paper close to her face and closed her eyes, breathing in its smell and realizing, with slow, inevitable dismay, that she did recognize it; there was absolutely no mistaking it.

  The shock, surprise, and dread that shot through her wasn’t a flood of adrenaline or fear—it was something else. A deeper, more unsettling sensation, a growing awareness that she was on the edge of real understanding—and that everything that had happened up to this point was just the beginning, just the outer walls of a dark labyrinth she would have to enter.

  “What is it?” Dylan asked. “Why are you—”

  “Turn the car around.”

  “What? Why? I don’t—”

  “We have to go back uptown. Come on—turn the car around.”

  Dylan was craning his neck, looking for traffic as he obediently flicked the turn signal. “But where are we going?” he demanded. “What are we doing?”

  “We’re going to jog your memory.”

  DYLAN HAD FOUND A parking spot—miraculously—just around the corner on Ninety-fifth Street off Amsterdam, and had quickly locked the car. Mary looked around uneasily at the familiar shadows of her own neighborhood. Now, with the two of them crammed into the tiny elevator on their way to the fifth-floor landing, she found herself wondering just how safe they were.

  “Do you have your keys?” Dylan asked. Mary nodded as the elevator door rumbled open (in its usual maddeningly slow way). She led him out, past the dim bulbs and the other apartments and over to the familiar, hateful front door with SHAYNE M still printed on the small card beneath the doorbell (although it had been ten years since her father died).