by Alisa Valdes
“No!” I cried, trying to see the bird in the tree, feeling more miserable than I’d felt in all my life. “Everything’s not okay. Everything’s over.”
“I think you should call her mom,” said my best friend. “Shane had an accident, and she might have hit her head. She doesn’t mean any of this.”
Kelsey ran to me, and hugged me, telling me everything was going to be fine. I couldn’t stop crying.
“Come on, now,” she said. “Let’s get you to the nurse.”
On feet and legs numb with cold and grief, I staggered upright, holding Buddy like a treasure I didn’t want anyone to take from me, and I stumbled along with them, looking every bit like the mental patient they were all certain, at last, that I was.
Chapter Nineteen
After visiting a brain doctor that afternoon, I was told all looked good and I was allowed to return to school for the rest of the week to finish my exams. I forced myself through the motions of my old life, and tried to remember that I had been happy and productive before I met Travis. Somehow, I told myself, I would not be a girl who fell apart because she lost a guy; not even one as remarkable as Travis. At night I slept and hoped he’d come to me, but he did not. Travis, it seemed, was making good on his promise to leave me alone, and as the days passed, I began to understand that he might have been right. Life would never be the same, and I’d always know that there was more out there, but at least I wasn’t afraid anymore, as I had been before. I realized that ever since meeting Travis, life had changed forever, with no way back. It had been loving, what he did, abandoning me. This, I knew. It did not make his absence any easier, but it made the sadness easier to endure—that somewhere out there he still existed, and he still loved me.
I went home with Kelsey after finals that Friday afternoon, with my mother’s permission, to help her prepare for her holiday party. We both wondered whether people would still come, knowing that she was my friend and I was the school pariah, but she, a good friend in spite of it all, assured me that she would rather be my friend than be popular, which I am certain was supposed to sound a lot nicer than it actually did.
Kelsey lived in the university area in the center of town, in a neighborhood known as Ridgecrest. I was sorely tempted to run off to the university to talk to Mr. Hedges, but Kelsey would absolutely have told my mother if I did anything weird anymore. I had to give the total illusion of being a normal girl again.
Her house was a lot older than mine, but it had a charm and warmth that my house—both my houses, really, if you counted my dad’s, which I saw so infrequently it didn’t count—lacked. It was located on a tree-lined street with a grassy median, was white stucco with a red tile roof, and had turquoise trim on the shutters, doors, and windows. While in our High Desert neighborhood it was against the rules to have grass or anything that required a lot of water to grow, there were no such regulations here, and the front yard had a nice lawn.
Kelsey’s parents were home when we got there. They were still almost sickeningly in love, after more than thirty years of marriage, and I envied Kelsey for that. Most of my memories of my parents together were of them fighting. I envied Kelsey’s parents for other reasons, too. They were artsy; and calm, relaxed people; and seemed genuinely grounded, balanced, and interested in anything you had to say. They didn’t hover and act like military interrogators the way my mom sometimes did; they didn’t mope around looking guilty for taking a single second for their own needs and fun. Kelsey’s parents, luckily enough for her, had lives of their own, and those lives seemed rich, rewarding, and full of interesting people.
Kelsey had a couple of younger brothers, but her parents had the nanny over to watch them in the nursery wing of the sprawling one-story house, so they wouldn’t get in our way. Kelsey had her own wing, adjacent to it, separated from the younger boys by a large laundry room and a music room that housed a baby grand piano, a drum set, guitars, and all sorts of other cool stuff. Kelsey’s room itself wasn’t nearly as large as mine, but it was more interesting in some ways because it had a loft for a bed, accessible by a ladder and descendible by a circular slide. This had been more fun, of course, when we were a little younger, but we still managed to make good use of it. The room was decorated in muted earth tones, and had real art on the walls. It was elegant, but still a teenager’s room, and at the moment we had music blasting.
Our friend Lindsey was there, too, having followed us from school in her own car, and having said nothing about me now being an outcast. We’d brought our dresses and collective makeup, shoes, and accessories. And I was doing a very convincing job of telling them I was getting better from the accident, and they were more than happy to play along. We seemed, in most ways, to be the way we might have been a month ago. A tray of snacks, brought in by the guest chef Kelsey’s parents had hired to cater the party that night, sat basically untouched on Kelsey’s desk. I wondered, silently, which dress Travis would have preferred on me, and bit my tongue against the powerful urge to tell my friends all about him.
In the end, I’d settled on a classic, elegant black sleeveless dress, taffeta, with a fitted bodice and a flared skirt that ended at the knee, with a playful pink sash around the waist, twisted into a bow in the back. It was flirty and fun.
“Forget about Logan, the jerk,” Lindsey told me, not realizing my depression had nothing to do with having broken up with Logan.
“Serious jerk,” Kelsey agreed. “After all you’ve been through, for him to pull this? Ugh. I knew there was a reason I didn’t like that guy.”
We all changed into our dresses together, and adjusted one another’s buttons and zippers. Then we took turns doing our makeup at the mirror over Kelsey’s dresser, helping one another. I went light on the eyes, but Lindsey set me straight. Her mother was an actress in the theater in town, and so she knew about stage makeup.
“A party,” she told us, “is a performance. The lights will be low, and you deserve to have eyes that pop.”
She lined my eyes in black all the way around, and stuck fake lashes to my top lids. It felt awkward and uncomfortable, but made my eyes look twice as big as ever. I wore my hair mostly down, with a few front layers pinned up, and my friends helped me set it with hot rollers so that it cascaded in pretty waves. Kelsey wore a sky-blue silk dress that set off her eyes beautifully, and Lindsey helped her pile her hair up in an elegant twist. Lindsey wore a hot-orange dress that set off her skin tone, and she put sparkly flower barrettes in her kinky hair. In the end, we all looked fabulous, and we knew it. When we went to the dining room to show the grown-ups, Kelsey’s parents looked completely surprised and overjoyed.
“You kids look like you just stepped off an episode of The Real World,” said Kelsey’s mom. We tried not to be too annoyed at the attempt to be cool. Instead, we just said thanks.
Soon enough, the doorbell rang and rang again and again as more kids came, which was good because it meant Kelsey’s reputation had not been tarnished for having known me. I began to let my guard down. I ate mushroom puff pastries, and drank root beer, and was pulled into a dance.
Kelsey and I went into the kitchen to tell her mom we needed more sodas, and she asked that we quickly take a couple of bags of trash out to the black barrel in the alley behind the house. We took the bags and headed outside, giggling about the success of the party.
Chapter Twenty
Kelsey lifted the lid of the trash barrel, and I hurled the green, bulging bags of noxious garbage into it. She’d just slammed it shut and turned with me to go back to the house when I first sensed, and then saw, a person standing at the gate to the yard, in the shadows, blocking our way. Whoever it was wore a long, dark hooded robe, monastic, that concealed their face. Kelsey hadn’t looked up yet and was still chattering on to me about the boy she had a crush on. I gripped her arm to stop her.
“Ow,” she said, annoyed, trying to break free. I guess I’d grabbed her a little harder than I meant to. My pounding heart was in my throat and I could barely fi
nd the air to speak.
“There’s someone there,” I whispered, pointing.
Kelsey’s eyes followed the line of my finger, and settled on the hooded figure. She stood stock-still, surprised but not yet afraid, perhaps because she did not yet know the sorts of things that existed in our universe, and what they were capable of doing.
“Probably homeless,” she whispered back as she turned discreetly to walk in the opposite direction, pulling me with her. “We’ve been having a problem with that lately around here. Come on.”
I walked with her, knowing she intended to simply double back around the block and go in through the front door, but I did not share her conviction that this was a homeless person we simply needed to leave be. My gut instinct told me it was something else, and every hair on my body rose up in terror. My mouth was dry, and my footsteps fell as daintily as I could make them, as quietly as they could go. I hoped we hadn’t been noticed, but at a deeper level I knew—with a sick feeling—that we’d not only been spotted, we had been watched closely.
“My mom’s been talking about moving because the neighborhood’s deteriorating,” Kelsey whispered, looping her arm through mine. “She says I’m going to have to grow up streetwise if we stay near the university, and—”
Kelsey stopped talking abruptly, because two additional hooded figures stepped out of the shadows in front of us now, blocking our way. They made no noise, and seemed to float ever so slightly above the earth. Ghostlike, I thought.
“What the—,” Kelsey said. She spun to look behind us, and screamed. I turned to see what had caused this, and saw four hooded figures behind us. Spinning once more, I saw that the two who had been in front of us were now joined by two others. There were eight hooded men in all, moving silently, eerily toward us in the darkness of the narrow alley.
“Just stay calm,” I said. “No sudden moves.”
“Mom!” Kelsey shrieked, ignoring my advice. “Mom! Help! Somebody help us!”
The shadows rushed us then, soundlessly, surrounded us, and I could see that while some of them were solid and visible at night, others were not. It appeared to be a mixture of the living and the dead.
“Help!” screamed Kelsey, but I was unable to choke out a single sound, for I had noticed, upon trying to see the faces of the hooded figures, that one of them had familiar red eyes glowing out at me. I became numb with fear.
Two enormous figures, whatever they were, picked us up from the ground, one hoisting me effortlessly over his shoulder and the other stuffing Kelsey under his arm as though she were light as a rolled-up newspaper. Surrounded protectively by the rest of the group, as though this had all been skillfully choreographed long before, they carried us away, both of us instinctively kicking and struggling pathetically. The creatures moved swiftly, smoothly, as though they were on wheels and with nearly superhuman speed, first to the end of the alley, and then around a corner, and finally to an unlit nearby park. They flitted from one dark shadow to the next, the sheer fluid flowingness of their motions keeping them undetected by anyone who might have been passing by. I started to scream, but the creature who held me clamped his cold fist like a hard, dead stone over my mouth.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he said with a bit of a snarl, in a voice that sounded more monster than human.
Kelsey continued to scream as we approached a large, dark SUV. The creature holding her took a handkerchief from his pocket and held it hard and fast over Kelsey’s nose and mouth as she struggled. I watched in horror as she appeared to suffocate and pass out, her arms and legs splaying limply in every direction.
“No!” I tried to scream, but it came out muffled through the hand over my mouth. One of them was on top of me then, binding my wrists and ankles with rope and duct tape. They tied Kelsey up in the same way even though she wasn’t conscious. One of them held a cloth like the one they’d used on Kelsey, and pressed it over my nose and mouth. I breathed in a noxious poison and felt woozy, sick, lost, and dizzy. They lifted me up, and tossed me into the cargo area in the back of the vehicle. I landed with a whump that I knew should have hurt, but I couldn’t feel my body anymore. The world grew fuzzier, and farther away, quieter, more echoing and vague. The hooded figures receded, and I was fading, fading, and the doors were slamming shut, and the car was starting, and then . . . nothing.
Chapter Twenty-One
When I came to, I didn’t know how much time had passed since I blacked out in the back of the SUV. I found myself still tied up, on a bed in a half-dark room. I was panicked because my mind went to the worst possible place it could go. I prayed that nothing horrible had happened to me, that I hadn’t been raped. I prayed for Travis to find me. I prayed that Kelsey was unharmed.
I lifted my head, which pounded as though my brain were swelling in pulsating rhythm, and saw that my dress and stockings seemed to still be intact. My mouth was dry, and I tried to move my hands but they were bound behind my back. My shoulders and neck ached from the awkward position. Travis, I thought, where are you? Help me.
I struggled to sit up, and turned my head this way and that, searching for Kelsey. But all I saw was a very small, very dingy room, with a bed and a dresser and a chair that appeared to be falling apart. There was a smell of mildew and stale cigarette smoke, and possibly a clogged toilet somewhere. It was rank, rancid, disgusting. A single naked bulb dangled from a frayed cord in the ceiling above me, buzzing on and off at random intervals, as though there was a storm somewhere. There were curtains on the windows, but they were open and I could see that the sun was either just coming up, or just going down. A closer look revealed them to be stained children’s sheets, with cartoon characters on them. My pulse raced. I had seen these sheets before.
I wriggled and grunted, trapped and desperate. All I could think about was getting out of here. How could I do it? I opened my mouth to cry out, but thought better of it. What if the only people—or things—who would be here to hear my cry were bad? What if my scream brought nothing but those hooded figures and more poison? I clamped my jaw shut, and began to look for something, anything, to use as a tool to free myself. Something sharp, maybe, to cut the bonds. That was when I noticed the man standing in the shadows near the closed door. He was tall and lean and his eyes, shiny in the dark, were watching me. I saw a red ember just below them. It grew brighter for a moment, then dimmed again. Someone was in the room with me, and he was smoking.
I backed instinctively away from the figure, toward the rotten plywood headboard of the creaking bed. This only caused whomever it was to laugh to himself. I recognized that voice, that low smooth tenor, that unsympathetic guffaw.
“Good morning, sunshine,” he said, as he stepped out of the shadows. The pale glow of the light made his skin glow with a red hue, but the rest was as it had been the last time I’d seen him, at school. Khaki pants, an Izod sweater with a button-down shirt beneath it.
“Logan?” I asked, confused. “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”
“Shane, Shane, Shane,” he said, sucking the ember bright orange again. In the light from the end of the cigarette, I could see his eyes crinkle in a smile—but it was a smile without a hint of kindness. I had never seen him smoke before, and he seemed like a completely different boy from the one I used to date. “Nice to see you again, baby.”
“Don’t call me baby,” I spat.
This seemed to excite him, and he chuckled some more, walking slowly back and forth at the foot of the bed, looking at me with eyes that seemed to have a supernatural yellow glow to them.
“Why not, baby? Don’t you like it? You never complained when I called you baby before, or when I touched you.”
He came closer, and made as if to touch me now.
“Get away from me.”
He laughed. “Oh, if only it were that simple,” he said.
“What are you going to do to me?” I asked him.
He came close now, and touched my hair, my cheek. It felt disgusting, filthy, terr
ifying. “What am I going to do to you?” he repeated thoughtfully. “Now there’s a good question, baby.”
He sighed deeply and sat next to me on the bed. How could something so attractive be so evil? I thought. Looking at him was something like looking at a lion close up at the zoo. You recognized the majestic beauty of the thing, but you also realized it could easily slice you in two and eat you for breakfast.
“What did you do to Kelsey?” I asked.
“She’ll be here as soon as she wakes up. We have her in the next room. I wanted to have a moment to chat with you alone first.”
“What did you do to us, while we were unconscious?”
“Don’t worry. Much as I would have liked it, I didn’t defile you. No one did. We were under orders not to.”
“From who?”
“My new mentor,” he said. “You might not have understood what I meant about power and life and death, but he does. He’s smart, unlike some people.”
At that moment, the door opened, and a flood of light poured in from the dank hallway. It looked like we were in an old trailer of some kind. The trailer from the dream, I realized. Victor’s house.
In the doorway, I saw two men standing on either side of Kelsey, who looked like she’d been roughed up a bit. A third man I could not quite see stood behind them.
“Shane!” she cried when she saw me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I told her. “Are you?”
“I’m okay.”
“Shut up, please,” said a familiar, sickening voice, low and rumbly, completely psychotic. “You’re giving me a headache.”
Victor.
The two men came into the room, and dumped Kelsey on the bed. Victor followed, as ugly and hideous as he’d been in the dreams. He was whole again now, and wickedly excited to see me.
“Do you have any idea how sick this guy is?” I asked Logan. “What are you doing? He wouldn’t hesitate to kill you, too.”
