Harken (Harken Series)

by Kaleb Nation

  “Let’s keep it to us for now,” I told him. “I just… I want to find out why he wanted to kill me. And they might not even believe me just because I found a car.”

  “But if there was one guy, what if someone else tries finish what he started?” Spud asked. He sounded far more afraid for me than I was.

  “Now you’re the one talking conspiracy theories,” I said, putting on a reassuring smile.

  I was good at acting confident. It was enough to convince Spud to stuff the note into his pocket without any more protest.

  Still, the racing feeling that shot through every vein in my body told a different story. A simple murder attempt against me was too large for me to comprehend—but now there was more. Unintentionally, my hands had unfolded the newspaper clipping one more time. I was greeted by the girl’s face again and the mysteries that it bore.

  Who are you? Maybe if she’d been alive, she could have told me what was going on.

  When Spud wasn’t looking, I stuffed the newspaper into my pocket. I couldn’t help but glance back over my shoulder as we left the car behind, the folder of photographs in my hand. With its window broken, the car didn’t appear nearly as prestigious as it had before. Now it was like a lonely, injured beast staring after us, warning me that I should stop now…that I was venturing deep into something that I shouldn’t.

  * * *

  Spud didn’t say a single word during our drive home. I could feel his anxiety from across the truck. He remembered to leave me at the corner and I let him go without trying to diffuse the anxious air. I knew if I said anything, it’d do little but frighten us both even more.

  Getting back into my room proved to be much more difficult than getting out had been. My mom knew all my tricks now, and it’d be a shame for me to be found when I was nearly able to hang a “1” on the mental X DAYS SINCE MICHAEL WAS CAUGHT sign.

  Luckily, we kept a long aluminum ladder stored between our house and the neighbor’s. But if I used it to get onto the garage, I wouldn’t be able to hide the ladder once I was up. Since I couldn’t go back in through my room, I lifted the ladder onto the side of the house and climbed toward my sister’s bedroom window instead.

  The window was unlocked, as usual. That was our deal. My sister knew that I sneaked out sometimes to do work for clients, and it was her unspoken vote of support to give me a way back in again. She didn’t care about the college money she could’ve gained; she wanted to be screenwriter fresh out of high school anyway. If she’d been anyone else’s sister she probably would have turned me in long ago, but she was Alli.

  I crept inside and eased the ladder away, so that it went across the space between our houses and tapped the roof of our neighbor’s. I stood like Dracula over the bed, arms frozen out as I listened for any stirring from my mom’s bedroom. Nothing. In the morning I would take the ladder down, but this was just in case she happened to walk outside before I could.

  I checked on Alli briefly but she was still sound asleep, so I hurried out. I closed my bedroom door behind me but even then I didn’t think it wise to turn on a light. With careful steps I went to my desk, emptying my pockets onto it and crawling under the sheets.

  I didn’t even try to sleep. Minute after minute, I lay staring up at my photographs and the ceiling fan, mind racing faster than its rotating blades. There were no answers for the host of mysteries that bombarded me, and I knew even though Spud had told me he’d work on it in the morning, he was probably at his house already trying to break into the website. I wondered if I had dragged him into something I should have left him out of. But I needed someone I could trust, and there was no one better than Spud.

  When I was certain that the creaks of our house were not my mom coming to check on me, I rolled over and reached for the newspaper again, looking at it in the light from my cell phone screen. I stared at the photograph of the girl.

  Did you really have to die? I wondered. Spud was right: it was a shame. A waste, even, when you got down to the gritty technicalities. This girl—Callista—she would have had an amazing life. Just looking at her, surrounded by that family—she’d have gotten some degree in a nice college whose air I’d never afford to breathe, and probably marry some genius guy who was starting up a million dollar company.

  The girl in the newspaper certainly looked like she had everything together, yet I didn’t get a feeling of any arrogance that should have gone along with it. She’d been heading nowhere but up, and she’d actually deserved it.

  Stop thinking about that stupid girl. She was dead, and I’d almost been dead with her. I tossed the paper back. I wondered if it was even a good idea to keep it anymore.

  Sleep refused to come easily. I wanted to forget everything. But my brain wouldn’t allow that. It was for that reason I was taken by surprise when I finally drifted to sleep, and felt my skin brush with icy air.

  I was running again.

  Near-Death Experiences

  My legs moved frantically, winding up a circular stairway in a thin tower-like space walled by gray stone. I saw everything as if it was through my eyes, but as cognitive as I was for being in a dream, I had no control over my muscles.

  There was little light around me, only that which came from the old metal flashlight I clutched in my right hand. It was like the inside of a refrigerator. The steps rang like deep metal bells but I continued without stumbling once, hearing others chasing behind me.

  My pursuers were only a step or two away but I never paused to look back, only continuing to run, the surrounding chill clouding my frantic breath into a mist. The end of the steps came suddenly when I arrived at a doorway, the passage already open and waiting for me. My body raced out and then turned to close the door, but to my surprise I waited for the other two to pass with me. I realized they were not chasing me after all, but were my companions.

  I barely caught a glance of their features. One was a guy who appeared to be close to my age. He had long, black hair that went past his shoulders and hung over his ears but was free from his forehead, and green eyes with irises nearly unperceivable from his pupils in the low light. The other was a girl shorter than me, but I didn’t get to see her face before I turned, pressing something in the wall with my palm.

  Immediately, a massive wall began to move across heavy railings, closing over the doorway and sealing flat, now making it appear like there was no opening at all.

  “Hurry!” the girl said. Then I was running again. We had exited into a room with a low ceiling, only a few inches higher than my head—if I’d been claustrophobic I might have been petrified. We dashed up a set of stairs and around a corner that my subconscious didn’t even take the time to illustrate, and shot though another door into the cold night.

  There was a vintage Oldsmobile waiting under the moonlight outside, and I leapt into the driver’s seat. I turned the key in the ignition without hesitation. It rumbled to life, the old radio bursting out music as it did, and we roared away without taking a second to turn the sound off.

  My heart raced even though I still had no control over anything that was happening. My clothing felt odd: the design of my shirt was old, my jacket stitched tighter than I was accustomed to. On my right hand was a silver ring that glimmered in the lamps that hung outside of the buildings’ doors. We shot out of the alley and into a giant parking lot surrounded by buildings and a chain-link fence, racing toward an opening on the other side.

  But suddenly from all directions, a multitude of other cars appeared, and my foot slammed on the brakes. Tires squealed as the cars blocked our escape. But my dream self wasn’t giving up, switching gears into reverse and pulling around the other way, only to find that we were trapped in a corner.

  None of the cars moved, no doors popped open. I switched gears but saw that I was boxed in no matter which way I turned. There was nowhere to go.

  I turned my head to look at the girl who was in the passenger seat, as she searched our surroundings for a way out. But there wasn’t any. So she turned to
me, and for the first time I saw her face.

  I had seen her before.

  But where? It was like time had slowed to nothing. The dark hair, the blue eyes… Somehow I knew her eyes microscopically well, down to every fleck and line in her iris. I always remembered a pair of eyes.

  Callista.

  She didn’t say anything. She only stared deep into me as if she could read my thoughts.

  I heard doors popping open from the cars outside our windows, men in suits emerging. The song continued to play. None of us moved.

  A man appeared through the front window of the car, unhesitating steps as he moved to stand an inch from the center of the hood. He was thin and tall and wearing a long coat with no tie, arms nearly enveloped in his sleeves, his breath blowing mist. His chin was sharp and his gray eyes studied us through the window—no smile, just a dry and dutiful stare. His eyebrows were completely white in contrast to his deeply black hair. He held a pistol with a long barrel, which he lifted with no emotion and pointed straight at the side of my head. On one of the fingers he had wrapped around the gun’s handle, he wore a red metal ring.

  All of this had faded into the background. I was unable to tear myself from my deep entrenchment in Callista’s merciless gaze.

  A burst of noise.

  A vicious crack.

  A shattering of glass.

  My bedroom ceiling fan whirred above my head like a cage of hornets was caught in its motor. I found myself staring at the fan blades going around and around before my eyes had fully focused on them, hypnotizing me as I lay motionless in wide-eyed terror, my bed drenched in sweat. The heavy click of the gun would not leave the recesses of my eardrums, even though it—and the stairs, the car, the girl—had never been real at all.

  I was scratching my hand furiously so I forced myself to stop, trying to slow my breathing before I hyperventilated. The darkness of night still surrounded me. I managed to turn my head to look at the alarm clock. 5:31 AM. Far too many hours until morning.

  Again, I had to stop myself from scratching my hand. The sweat was causing me to itch all over, and this only added to my growing misery as I forced myself to sit up.

  This is your own fault, I told myself. It was because I’d spent so much time concentrating on her picture before falling asleep. There is nothing more to the dream than what was caught in my subconscious.

  Yet I’d dreamed of running again, for a second time. Now I’d been running with the girl I’d never met—who was dead—and a boy I’d never seen before in my life. I couldn’t make the horrible images in my head disappear.

  “Crazy dream,” I hissed to myself, standing up but refusing to turn on a light. I wiped my forehead with the back of my arm, hair damp. When I couldn’t take the ferocious itching any longer, I walked quietly down the hall to the bathroom, closing the door so I wouldn’t wake anyone as I switched on the dim shower light.

  I went to the sink and tossed a rag into it, wiping my wearied face with the cool water. It was such a relief against the heat. I held the rag up against my neck.

  I dropped it in fright.

  In the reflection of the mirror, I saw that the black birthmark on my right hand was now surrounded by red. The line was still dark but now swelled to the size of my knuckle, and the skin surrounding it was vibrantly inflamed worse than any rash I’d ever seen.

  Startled, I touched my birthmark, drawing my hand back at the sting. The skin was hard. I scrambled to turn the water on and ran my finger under the cold, but it didn’t help.

  What is happening to me…? I thought, breathless. Poison ivy? Something that’d been in the work gloves I’d gotten from Spud’s truck? That was all I needed, something else to add on top of the gloom of this week. I rubbed the mark, struggling to numb it.

  The burning!

  I ground my teeth together, fighting back a sharp scream as it struggled to exit. A massive tremor of pain shook throughout me, heat seeming to radiate from the spot I had touched. The skin had come loose, sliding, peeling…

  My eyes had closed in the grimace but I forced them open, breathing heavily, looking down. Between my own two fingers, stuck to their tips by my own blood, was a thin strip of my skin that had fallen off.

  From my birthmark, a trickle of liquid started to run down my hand, staining the white porcelain of the sink with red.

  I found gauze in the cabinet above the toilet, wrapping it so tightly around my finger that it forced the flow of blood to stop and hid the wretched sight. The spot of skin looked mangled like a burn victim’s, so I covered my entire hand in ointment to be safe, making me wince even more. My finger continued to throb. I scrubbed the sink until it was clean again, and hid the rag in the trash under a wad of tissues.

  I didn’t sleep any more that night, mulling over the most horrible thoughts I could collect under the watchful eyes of the photographs on my walls. Maybe the briefcase had been booby-trapped with a chemical defense, and somehow I’d caught a skin-degenerating disease. Now there was nothing too supernatural, nothing too otherworldly that I could simply dismiss as impossible.

  I tried to forget the girl and the dreams. I didn’t need the distraction. The only real lead I had was whatever Spud could find.

  Now with a wrapped-up finger to add to my already wrapped-up knife wound on my arm, avoiding attention seemed impossible. I went downstairs and nonchalantly poured a bowl of cereal. Alli sat cross-legged on the couch with her own bowl, watching TV.

  “Trying out as a mummy?” she asked, spotting the new gauze immediately. There was no getting past her. I tried to give her a sliver of a smile so she wouldn’t think anything was wrong. My acting skills were deteriorating though.

  “You look like a mess,” she told me.

  “Why thank you, Miss Positivity,” I replied, pouring the milk. “Anything else I need to know about myself?”

  “You eat little kid cereal,” she said, stirring hers and taking a bite.

  “I prefer my breakfast to have cinnamon, not just raisins and flakes,” I retorted and began to shovel food in. This proved to be a bit more difficult than usual with gauze wrapped around my finger, but I managed.

  “Any more dreams?” Alli asked without warning, and at first I had trouble swallowing down the food in my mouth. I debated not telling her, but I knew she’d see right through that.

  “Yeah, maybe,” I told her without commitment to elaborate.

  “And you said I need a therapist,” she said, grinning. She shook her head.

  “Same stuff as last time?” she asked. I did a small nod-and-shrug combination.

  “Somewhat,” I said. “Running again, at least. But this time there was a girl.”

  I knew that would set Alli off. I heard her legs scratching across the couch cushions as she pulled them under her, turning to face me, completely ignoring whatever was on the TV now. I grinned because I couldn’t help it.

  “A real girl?” Alli said, sounding out a fake gasp. “She must have been coming to kill you.”

  “Can’t I be around a girl and you not think she has ulterior motives?” I protested. Alli shook her head. She had a point. I bit into my food with a sense of vengeance.

  “No,” I told Alli. “She was actually running with me. Are you a dream expert now?”

  Alli gave me an unamused look. “Well everyone knows dreams reflect what you obsess over in real life.” She shrugged. “Creeper.”

  I certainly wasn’t about to tell her that the girl who’d been in my dream had been dead for nearly a week. So I sniffed at her and washed my bowl out, and left.

  I started on foot in the direction of Spud’s house. His was only a short distance from mine, a left on the corner of Hogan Lane then a few blocks of sidewalk, the streets still lonely due to the weekend’s late-sleepers. He lived in one of Arleta’s rare two-story places, painted dark blue with fake white shutters. In contrast to my mom’s small and progressively dying garden, his mother’s covered about half of their front yard, with nearly-bursting tomato
es and an assortment of vegetables. His parents were invested in being energy efficient: skylights and solar panels cut into a roof of temperature-reflective metal. Spud’s truck was parked across the street, a distance he’d probably been hoping would get him indoors undetected the night before. I envied him having parents who slept like rocks.

  I knocked softly on the front door. He was there in seconds.

  “You’re up early,” I said.

  “I don’t know if I even slept last night,” he returned, but he didn’t look entirely defeated and that gave me hope. He led me upstairs through upholstered couches and traffic-flattened orange carpet, a finger to his lips as we passed the rooms shared by his seven siblings, then his parents’ door, then his grandmother’s door, and finally to his.

  Spud’s bedroom was even more of a wreck than my own. Instead of camera equipment, though, his was packed to every wall with parts of computers and old video game consoles. If any collector were to creep about—if they could, seeing as there were very few places to step—they would have been greeted by countless old Ataris, Segas in color and monochrome Game Boys, and tons of other gaming systems and circuit boards I couldn’t identify. In the corner was an old arcade system with a busted screen, the sides advertising a fighting game whose image was defaced in marker and pen from years of abuse by teenagers. For a moment, I wasn’t watching where I was going and nearly tripped over a pizza box that had wires coming out of it.

  “Careful!” Spud warned in a whisper. He produced a folding chair from against the wall and slid things aside with his foot until there was a space for it. I sat next to him in front of a computer monitor—it was one screen in a row of eight, the others dormant.

  “So,” he began, “I don’t have the news I was hoping for. But I do have something good.”