by L. J. Stock
Alexa was standing at the other end of the room, her eyes flickering between the two orderlies as though lightning bolts would strike them down if they dared to contradict her. Her tone had shocked Beth enough that I had managed to shake her grip completely, but Susan kept a hold of me with the same intensity as she had since we’d left my room.
“She hasn’t showered in four days, Alexa. If you weren’t going to do your job correctly, we had to,” Beth said defensively, narrowing her eyes in Susan’s direction. She was waiting for backup, but it was clear to everyone, except her, that it wasn’t coming.
“See, that’s a big lie. She had a shower at three o’clock this morning, Bethany. If you’d looked at her file, you would have clearly seen that. You’d have also noted that her doctor has given her special dispensation to do so.”
“Susan–” Beth started, but Alexa wasn’t in a forgiving mood.
“Susan obviously knows she’s been caught because she hasn’t said a word,” Alexa replied, staring at the woman who had finally stopped moving. Susan's chest was rising and falling with breaths, but her eyes were trained blankly on the showers. It was the first time I’d noticed it, but she was lifeless. Empty. The lights were clearly on, but nobody was at the helm. “Just go, Beth. I don’t want to have to report you.”
“Report me? For what?”
“Are you serious? You’ve just violated not only company policy, but federal also. If you’d looked at Cassandra’s file, you would have seen that. We cater to the needs of our clients and give them the best care we can. We take directions from the doctors, and offer suggestions that we feel work, but you don’t just force a client into something on a whim. Can you not see that she’s clearly distressed?” Alexa sighed heavily, her eyes meeting mine, the silent request to ham it up as clear as day to me.
Who was I to disappoint?
I started whimpering, quietly at first, the stuttering breaths of feigned weeping making it increasingly louder as I tried to pull my arm from Susan’s grip. It was more a suggestion than a blatant slap in the face. I didn’t want to oversell it, even if the panic was growing at the droplets forming on my skin. To add insult to injury, when Beth finally followed Alexa’s nod, I shrank away from her, blinking back the flickering scene of destruction I was now fighting with everything I had.
“Should I get the doctor?” Beth asked Alexa, suddenly concerned and backing away from me as though I would burn her if she got too close.
“No, I can calm her down. Just go.”
“But–”
“Go!”
I hadn't seen Alexa lose her patience often in the five years she’d been assigned to me, but the times she had, I’d known well and good you’d have to have been stupid to defy her. A quiet rage burned behind her green eyes, and the intensity of her stares could make even the strictest of doctors second-guess themselves. I actually pitied Beth. I'd had that stare turned on me once, but once had been enough. I’d made sure never to instigate that look again.
As though on cue, Beth practically ran from the room, the door slamming closed behind her when Alexa stepped out of her way and deeper into the room. Her green eyes were fixed on Susan alone as she moved, her hands trailing along the surfaces of the sinks with every step.
“Clever trick, but did you honestly think we’d leave her alone and vulnerable for the taking?” she asked quietly, her tone full of venom and completely unrecognizable. “How about you step out of that body before I force you out?”
“Umm, Alexa?” I asked, my eyes blinking between two scenes of contrasting light and dark as my legs began to tremble beneath me. The bruising force of the grip on my arm tightened, but my attention was torn between the pain and Alexa, unsure of what was going on.
“It’s okay, Cass,” Alexa cooed in a calming tone. “I just need you to focus on me for now, and when you get the chance, get the hell out of here, head back to your room, and wait for me there.”
I nodded. I wasn’t going to argue with her. The deep lines of her frown told me she wasn’t playing a practical joke on me, and no matter what was happening, I understood that she would explain it later.
Susan, ignoring the threat, started moving again, her hand squeezing my arm so tightly that her nails broke the surface of my skin, while my own fingers began to tingle from the lack of blood. She pulled me nearer to the water and the hell it brought with it, forcing an honest whimper of fear from me.
The steam around us grew thicker the closer we got to the showers, the fine dusting of water now sticking to my skin and beading on the fine hairs of my arm, making it look like I was caught in the white noise of a television set. In one reality stood Alexa and Susan, surrounded by a bathroom filled with steam and wet tiles that I couldn’t find traction on, while in the other reality was a village, coated in the glow of the fading day. The day was giving way to night, setting the scene alight with fire and smoke.
The orange glow touched everything in its path, including the masked man who was occupying the same space that Susan was. There was a glowing ball held in his open palm, while the other hand was gripped tightly around my arm. The connection was so weak a blink would propel me back into the bathroom again, but the sounds of the screams and shouts stayed with me, as clear as day.
“Cass, breathe and focus on me and my voice. I need you to stay here with me.” Alexa’s voice cut through a particularly loud scream, and my legs went weak with the relief. It was so hard to focus on anything but the sound of a battle raging around me, and the roar of fire was making the hair at the back of my neck stand on end as it crackled in its fervent freedom. The closer I got to the source of water, the harder it was to differentiate between the two places. As much as I wanted to stay away from the scene that matched the noises swirling around us, the pull on my arm was making it harder to fight. It was a losing battle. I could feel the heat from the water as it pooled under my feet and the patter of droplets as they began to rain down all around me, saturating the clothes I was wearing. I was still in the bathroom – I could tell because of the heat and the slippery tile I was standing on, but everything recognizable disappeared completely, transporting me into the burning village where the male inhabitants were trying to fight back, while the women threw buckets of water on the wood and straw of their homes.
People moved quickly, weaving through the fighters as they struggled to make a path between the well and the burning buildings. Their clothes were different – older and handmade. The houses were from an era long before my time. They were crudely built structures with raw wooden doors, and windows with shutters rather than glass. There was no asphalt, no drains, no fenced properties or definitive storefronts. There were just buildings, all close enough to one another to allow the fire to spread rapidly.
The only thing resembling a road was a worn dirt track that ran through the center of the space, and that was only obvious because it had been used more than the other parts of the ground. I was curious, and by nature would have loved to have seen the place before the fire.
The grip on my arm tightened again as the masked figure pulled me closer to him. The hand with the glowing ball moved almost violently at something I couldn’t see, but instinct told me I had to be the one to get away and I had to fight my way back to my room like Alexa had asked. So I struggled with everything I had. My body twisted and writhed against the grip in an attempt to work myself loose from the nails digging into my arm. It was the wet floor I was still standing on that made it impossible to stay stable and fight with any effectiveness. Turning to the figure beside me, I stared up at the eyes behind the mask while I pulled on my aching arm in a last ditch effort to become free. The longer I gawked at the cold emotionless eyes, however, the more the fear clutched at my heart.
I was in full-blown panic mode when the placid eyes became responsive. It started with a blink of disbelief, before they widened and looked down and away from me. I would have followed the direction, but the grip on my arm was suddenly gone, sending me stumbling
backward while the figure crumpled like paper, falling to the ground and leaving me staring into a pair of the most beautiful mossy green eyes, set in a handsome and familiar face.
It had been twelve years since I’d seen that particular face, and those twelve years had been absolute agony.
He was older and more mature, but I would have recognized him anywhere. The tumultuous storm in my stomach erupted without any warning and my arms instinctively curled around me protectively as I stared at him.
“But you…” My words faded as he gave me an apologetic tip of his head before he ran toward the nearest burning building, and a child I hadn’t noticed, hanging from the window above. “Damon?”
He cast a glance over his shoulder at me and almost tripped over his own feet in the process.
It really was him.
He was here, and he was alive… but how?
The ringing in my ears grew so loud I couldn’t hear a word he said, and there was a slight flickering in the periphery of my vision as he shouted a warning to Alexa – something that didn’t make sense until it was already too late.
With the distraction from Alexa’s voice came acceptance of what was coming.
Whatever reality I was in, I knew it was going to hurt. The ground was rushing toward me faster than the darkness could eat my consciousness.
Journey of Uncertainty
I’d once heard that when you died, your life replayed in your head. I knew I wasn’t dying for three reasons. The first – I couldn’t be that dramatic. The pounding in my head was associated with passing out, something I’d done a couple of times in the past when the noise had overwhelmed me. The second – I couldn’t imagine fate being cruel enough to play even a snippet of my life before my eyes when I was about to go into an eternal rest. My highlight reel would do nothing but cause me eternal unrest; a clean slate would probably be kindest. And the third – seeing a ghost from the past really wasn’t sufficient enough to kill me.
With this in mind, I lay there with my eyes closed, hypnotized into a peaceful calm by a somewhat unfamiliar sound. It wasn’t the disembodied voices and battles like I'd been subjected to for the last twelve years; in fact, when I allowed myself to venture beyond the droning hiss, there was nothing but silence on that front. No, the sound I could hear was a whir, a constant, resonant hum that had no reason to exist but encompassed me nonetheless. I wasn’t quite ready to open my eyes yet, so I chose to ignore the source, and focused on the more important topic at hand: Damon.
There wasn’t much about my childhood that I remembered with any level of fondness. My brother, Steven, was the only constant silver lining throughout my life. He was the one person in my world who loved me unconditionally, and would have done anything in the world to save me from my fate. When he got married, his wife, Liana, had accepted me in much the same way. I wasn’t the crazy girl living in the psychiatric hospital. I was just Steven’s sister – the kooky kid that made her smile, and for her, there were no gray areas.
Then there was Damon.
The dark-haired, hazel-eyed boy, who just happened to be two years older than me, had been everything in my empty life. Even though he had been simply a voice in my head for the first few years of our friendship, to me, he’d been very real. Damon had been my version of salvation, all happiness and comfort wrapped up in one handsome package. When he was around, the sounds that had always confused me, even when they hadn’t been from a war, would dissipate and fade into manageable background noise. He’d always known what to say and do to make me feel better, even when we couldn’t physically touch. To my parents, however, he’d been my imaginary friend. He was a part of the dilemma with their problematic daughter – a delusion that needed to be taken care of. Steven, meanwhile, had played devil’s advocate for both sides. I think he wanted to believe me, even if he couldn’t see or hear Damon.
I didn’t really remember the exact day that Damon came into my life. When I thought back, he was always just there – a constant companion who listened to me through every stage of my life and always had time to respond. We'd listened to each other's problems and talked for hours about dreams and a future that invariably grew bigger and more fantastical as time went on. There were times when his descriptions confused me. There were things in his life that didn’t make much sense to me, just as there were things in my life that served to confuse him. It wasn’t until I was around five that my childish comprehension, and his verbal descriptions, allowed me to realize that our world’s and the realities that surrounded us were completely different.
As we grew up, and I was bullied at school or at the park for my reaction to the strange voices, Damon had always been the one to pick up the pieces left behind – just a crack in my tone as I tried to hold back the tears and he knew, so he would talk me through it. Just like when he was alone, and getting into trouble, or when he was hungry, I was the one who distracted him by humming music or reading endless books aloud to him. We were a team, best friends and soul mates, all rolled into one.
It was hard to be upset over the fact that I didn’t have many friends, because in my mind I had the most important friend I could ever imagine having. That illustrious best friend that people always talked about. He was a boy who was loyal and protective, and he was always there for me when I needed him the most. Even my big brother wasn’t that infallible; he had school, too, after all. When I thought back on those years, all of my happy memories belonged to Damon.
I must have been about six when I realized that I could physically see him when I was submerged in water. For most of my life, I’d seen things that didn’t make sense to me whenever I bathed. Whether it was a big empty field with cows, or a farmer tilling the land, there had always been something in my line of sight that never quite fit.
One night, Mom had put me in the bath and gone off to do whatever it was she did, and I’d been left there a little too long. The water had been cooling to the point where my teeth were chattering, and her big bathtub was too large for me to climb out of by myself. Before then, I’d only seen Damon through white noise, but he must have felt my distress, and as he wandered closer, I recognized him immediately. He talked to me, helping me pull myself and my small body from the cold water, making jokes about the mermaids in the story I’d been reading out loud. With the fear gone, he had helped me to save myself, and it was the thump of me falling onto the bathmat that had my mother running in with mumbled apologies for her forgetfulness.
After that night I’d found every excuse I could to be in water just so I could see him. The smile on his face had always brought one to mine, even if I got in trouble for playing in the rain or jumping in the neighbor's pond.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that I loved him. Even as a prepubescent child, I knew the gift I had been given, and the faster the hormones came, the less platonic my love. Falling in love with your best friend was hard enough, but when he was invisible, that love became a more complex issue. It wasn't as though I could explain how I felt to anyone or act on it. I was ten years old when my eyes turned into hearts and I started wearing my emotions on my sleeve. I started growing shy about stupid things and making ridiculous statements that made him smile in a special way.
I didn’t know if he ever figured out how I felt. He was always the same confident boy I’d known, just more protective of me the older he became. Damon was the one constant in my life that I knew I could count on, always, even when my father was being cruel, my mother was being dismissive, or when Steven discovered girls and became distracted. I thought I would always be safe with him, but I was twelve, when Damon just disappeared from my life completely.
It was one of those memories I would never forget. No matter what happened to me, it was always the one thing I could recall with absolute perfect clarity. The way he was taken from my life was brutal, more torn than taken. I never saw it happen. I had been nowhere near water at the time, but I’d heard every part of the struggle and his fight as it played out. His very disappe
arance, however, was a catalyst to the horror I was now experiencing every day without fail – the constant soundtrack of the war in my head. A horror that was brutally realized when I was closer to water.
This anxiety was exactly how I'd landed in the hospital. I'd gotten caught in a horrendous rainstorm. I had normally been much more careful and watched the weather report before leaving the house. On this particular day, though, I'd been on my way home and was distracted by the especially bloody battle playing out in my head. When the first drop of water hit my skin, I got a dull flash of vision and frozen in panic, effectively ensuring I was saturated within seconds.
I'd like to think I would have run for shelter if the scene had been anything other than the one that was playing, yet I couldn't say for certain. There, about forty feet in front of me, knelt a girl, her dirt-streaked face held high as her tears of defiance fell freely while two men wearing masks circled her. I couldn't hear what they were saying but I knew they were goading her as they looped like vultures.
I stood where I was, completely enthralled by her brazen lack of fear as she glared at each figure moving around her. The tallest of the pair grabbed her hair, and I winced in pain with her, my own follicles practically aching in sympathy as he wrapped it around his hand again and again. I didn't know what happened to trigger her reaction, or what they'd said to finally break the young girl, but her voice was loud and crystal clear as she spoke.
“She has been found.”
It was then that the other figure drew his sword and pushed it through her throat like she meant nothing at all. My own scream had surprised me, and as I stumbled forward to help her, bright lights came out of nowhere, the sound of a horn was deafening. I finally found myself on my back as the dust settled in my mind, leaving me blinking between my two realities.
There had been no explanation for my sudden launch into the air, but I’d heard the people around me exclaim that I would have been killed if it hadn't been for him. I didn't know who he was and I didn't stick around to find out. I’d run home and locked myself in my closet.
