The Killer in Me

by Margot Harrison

  When he breezed out of the house, I braced for him to return to Big Lots or the trailhead, but he headed for his favorite spot in the middle of nowhere. Staking out the mouth of the access road didn’t make for a fascinating eight hours, but I could be reasonably sure he wasn’t hurting anyone.

  If only I’d gotten there before him, hunkered down, and found a place to watch. Maybe he would’ve shown me the way to the mine Nina keeps talking about. Cached murder accessories aren’t evidence of murder, but a corpse helps.

  Now Shadwell’s back at home, sleeping the sleep of the unjust on his boring cul-de-sac. I made sure of that.

  “Glad you called,” I say. “Miss you.”

  Nina just breathes into the phone.

  “What?”

  “I had a bad dream.” Softly, like she’s apologizing.

  “You mean…that kind of dream?”

  “He dug a hole. Like a grave. I don’t know anymore if it’s real or not, but that’s what I saw.” On the last word, I hear her too-sharp intake of breath.

  “Like a grave?” I keep my tone casual, but my heart is battering my ribs again. What if she somehow saw him burying the cache? “Was it, like, just a hole? Or six feet down and coffin-shaped and everything?”

  “Coffin-shaped. Does it matter?”

  I keep forgetting I’m supposed to be discouraging her delusions. “Where’d he dig this hole? In your dream, I mean?” I try to sound flip, skeptical, but my voice falters.

  “In the mine shaft that probably doesn’t exist.”

  So he was there. Adrenaline streaks from my kidneys to my brain to my fingertips, and I sit up straighter, not feeling the sand or the sunburn now.

  A mini-movie blossoms in my head, all magic light and galloping strings. The sun dips over the horizon, and the villain drives up in his Sequoia. He pops the trunk and yanks out a struggling figure bound with zip ties and duct tape.

  But who’s that lurking behind a boulder with a bolt-action rifle? Our hero.

  “It was just a dream,” I say soothingly. “You know that now, right?”

  My foot on Shadwell’s back, my muzzle at the base of his neck.

  Cut it out and get real, Warren—the situation needs a detective, not a cowboy. I have to find the mine entrance before he ever has a chance to use that grave.

  “I hoped they would…stop,” Nina says. “The dreams where he’s hurting people.”

  “You’re awake now. That’s the important thing.”

  I’ll find an army surplus store and blow my last cash on a cheap pair of night vision goggles, and tonight I’ll go back to the desert. Get there first. I know where to hide the van now.

  “I’m sorry to bother you with my weirdness,” Nina says.

  With each word comes a fresh twinge of guilt, but I brush my doubts away. Stay strong. “You’re not bothering me. Ever.”

  For her own sake, she can’t know. Not till I’m sure.

  Becca says we’re not lost in the Painted Desert, but I think we are.

  This place is like a fever dream. No trail under our feet, just sand and dirt and dust. We passed two tiger-striped Egyptian pyramids a half hour ago, then skirted gravel heaps four stories high, then picked our way through a plain of cigarette ash strewn with black shards of petrified wood.

  Becca treats these bizarre visions like landmarks on a map, saying things like “Only a quarter mile to the Lithodendron Wash.”

  And that, too, could be part of a dream. Any minute the pyramids and giant ash heaps will slide into rubble. The sky will go dark, and I’ll lose the only thing I still recognize: the sun.

  It’s because of the dream last night, whispers the rational part of my brain.

  After so many nights of peaceful, almost normal dreams—his sleeping mind, his breaths matched to mine—I thought maybe I was free of the visions. But last night’s was as vivid as they’ve ever been.

  Thank God for Warren’s calming voice.

  Every August, my mom and I used to visit the Great Vermont Corn Maze. There’s nothing scary about corn until suddenly the world is all corn: a hissing green sea swallowing the horizon.

  My dreams have conquered my brain the way corn took over that landscape. Only they’re not dreams anymore, but waking visions that warp and fabricate memories. When Warren told me how he followed Dylan out to the desert, after Sky City, it was like my dreams had taken over his brain, too.

  I’ll call him when we’re out of here, to remind him what’s real. We can do that for each other.

  If I ever do get out of here.

  On our way around a hundred-foot-tall pyramid of shimmering, coppery something, we meet a family of backpackers. I fight the urge to ask them where we are. Becca’s “Hi” sounds too chipper, and we all imitate her, echoes of the kids’ shrill voices pinging off the monolith.

  Then they’re gone.

  At the top of a rise, Becca stops to glug water. Sweat sheens her face as she takes sharp, staccato breaths. “I used to be able to do this hike in ninety minutes with Edgardo. Now I feel like we’ll be making a full day of it.”

  “Are you sure we aren’t off course? Should we look at the map? Or my phone?” In a detached way, I hear the panic in my voice.

  “No, hon, we’re almost out. Your phone wouldn’t work anyway.” She wipes her face. “This hike is baby stuff, Nina. Nobody gets lost on the edge of the wilderness area.”

  “That’s what hikers always say in the reenactments on I Shouldn’t Be Alive. Then they end up spending a week in the desert drinking their own urine.”

  Becca laughs weakly. “You have to know the desert. Respect it. Too many tourists think it’s just a big sandbox.”

  I remember how I wandered around looking for Dylan’s mine, the sun beating on my head, and shiver.

  The right ledge should have been so easy to find. I can close my eyes and find it now.

  From outside, the crevice looks barely wider than a mail slot. You ease your knees over the rock lip and slide your pelvis in flat, then let go and jump blind, trusting you’ll land on your feet. From the next sandy ledge, a wooden ladder takes you the rest of the way down. That’s where Dylan missed a rung and hurt his knee.

  Except there is no such place, I remind myself, and none of that happened. Just like the map in the shed. Just like the Gustafssons, who could be alive somewhere for all I know.

  If I can’t trust myself to sort out fantasy and reality, maybe I can trust Becca. She’s so sure she knows where we’re going.

  We’re back at the sandy riverbed Becca calls a “wash,” though it looks like it hasn’t seen water for centuries. “We’re close to the parking lot, right?” I ask.

  “Heading that way.”

  On the far side of the wash, I zigzag through a field of chest-high boulders, rusty and sulfur-splotched. One appears to be stenciled with a pale spiral—no, an ancient handmade doodle like I’ve seen on Warren’s tourist sites. Petroglyph.

  “Hey, Becca!” When I turn to survey the landscape, I see only boulders and a sky so blue it burns my eyes.

  “Becca!” I scramble too quickly over the rocks, scraping my right shin when I fall and then my left forearm as I hoist myself up.

  I leap off the last boulder and land practically on top of her. She’s slumped in the grass, her back against a pitted boulder, her eyes closed.

  “Becca! Hey!” I try to get water, but the zip of my pack catches, and I grab hers, pull out the bottle and shake it helplessly in front of her. How far away is that family?

  “It’s okay. Jus’ tired.” Becca opens her eyes.

  She tries to drink, but the cap’s still on, so I untwist it and raise the bottle to her lips.

  “It’s okay,” I echo, more to myself than to her. “What happened? Did you faint? Should you be in the shade?” Don’t leave me here alone.

  Becca shakes her head, takes the bottle from me, and drinks for a while. When she finally lowers it, she says, “I lied to you.”

  “What?” Terror closes
my throat. “We really are lost, aren’t we? You don’t know how to get back.”

  “No.” She raises the water and takes another swallow. “I know exactly where we are.”

  “Then what?” I lean back against the pockmarked boulder, feeling its heat through my T-shirt. The sandy wash below us glares so hard I squint.

  “I was here with your dad,” Becca says, low. “We sat here with our backs against these very rocks. I think it was the same week you were conceived.”

  “Oh.” I feel a little queasy. No more trips down memory lane, please. Just show me the way out.

  “I lied.” Her voice cracks. “I did have a reason for not telling you about your brother, but I thought you’d think I had a screw loose. Crazy lady with all the birds. You didn’t hardly know me yet, Nina, and I didn’t want you running for the hills.”

  I dig my hands into the dry grass, grinding sand into the tender skin under my nails. For a few seconds, I can’t even speak.

  Dylan is my brother. He loves me too much. She thought he’d spook me. That’s all that’s all that’s all.

  I ask, “What did you lie about?”

  “I came here with your father,” Becca starts, and then corrects herself. “With Steve. When we were sitting here, that’s when he told me about him and Denise.”

  Denise. Dylan’s aunt, my aunt.

  “I don’t want you thinking mental illness runs in your family. Steve was never diagnosed. And Dylan—he was a kid with an overactive imagination. His dad said something to him once, and he ran with it.”

  “Ran with what?” I drank an iced coffee on the way here, and it’s curdling in my stomach.

  “Steve thought he visited his sister in his dreams.” A small voice, like she doesn’t want anybody to hear. “Like he was inside her head.”

  Too late. All I can do is sit frozen, listening.

  “Every night Steve would visit with Denise, no matter how far apart they were—that’s what he told me, right here, like it was something normal between siblings. And one of those nights, Steve saw Rick—that was Denise’s husband—knock Denise on the floor. Bruise her up, kick her bad.”

  My hand covers my face, protecting it. Can’t be.

  “I don’t know if Rick really beat her. Denise and Rick lived in San Bernardino, and we were in Phoenix. We only saw her a few times a year. But Steve believed it.”

  My father had the same curse I do.

  “That’s why he killed Rick.” My voice sounds tiny, childlike, helpless. Like my dad must have felt when his sister insisted that the scenes he’d witnessed were just his imagination. Stop being crazy.

  My dad executed a man to protect his sister—to save her life. She didn’t back him up. She denied his visions. She took her husband’s side.

  Becca’s still talking.

  Steve and Denise were always so close it was hard for them to live apart, she says. It practically killed Denise to testify against her brother, and maybe it did kill her, since she took her own life not long after Steve took his.

  “Did she see the murder?” I whisper. Meaning: in her sleep.

  But no. My dad was crazy. I’m crazy.

  “When she walked in, Rick was dead on the floor, and Steve had the gun on his knee. He’d been waiting for Denise and said he could explain. That’s what she testified.”

  I shiver, imagining my dad on his knees trying to justify a cold-blooded murder on the basis of a dream.

  “That’s why, after you were born—well, I went a little off the rails, Nina. I shouldn’t have let it spook me. But one night Dylan started talking about seeing inside your dreams, and I couldn’t help it—I panicked.”

  The too-bright sky lurches above me, pivoting into a new alignment.

  No.

  “I started worrying he had whatever his dad had. Schizophrenia, maybe. It started off innocent. But four nights in one week, something happened that chilled me.”

  “What happened?” My voice doesn’t sound like mine.

  “You’d be upstairs sleeping, and Dylan would pad downstairs in his pj’s and say, ‘Ma, the baby’s awake. She’s gonna cry.’”

  Becca smiles like she can’t help it, remembering six-year-old Dylan. “I’d say, ‘Shush and go back to bed,’ because it was crickets on the baby monitor.

  “But then two minutes later, you’d be wailing. I’d ask Dylan how he knew ahead of time, and he’d say, ‘I was with her in my sleep. She wasn’t happy.’”

  Becca breaks off, her dark eyes probing mine. “Nina, what is it?”

  I can’t breathe, my throat burning. Above Becca’s head, two hawks—buzzards?—wheel in the sky.

  Can’t be true. Can’t be.

  Here she is saying it is true, not knowing her words are impaling me like a cold steel girder, because I knew this I knew this I knew this.

  I just didn’t want to know.

  The water I just drank bubbles back into my throat, and I lean over and retch while Becca pats my back and throws an arm over my shoulder to bring me closer.

  “Oh, honey,” she says. “I don’t think Dylan ever hurt you. I swear he didn’t hurt you. I think he was just ultra-attuned to the sounds you made. But back then, I thought—I don’t know what I thought. That he might be sneaking into your room, pinching you or something. Causing the trouble himself.”

  I shake my head. My eyes ache with unshed tears. No, Dylan never meant to hurt me, not physically.

  This whole time, he’s been inside my head, too.

  Like Aunt Denise, but for his own darker reasons, he’s acted perfectly innocent. Tried to convince me I imagined everything I saw him do. Succeeded.

  What has he seen? What does he know? Why did he walk up to me at Home Depot and pretend nothing was wrong? Invite me into his house? Ignore all my tests and provocations?

  Why not? I know how good he is at putting up a false front, at pushing ugly thoughts to the background of his mind. He knew I’d never beat him at his own game.

  I used to go to sleep way earlier than he did—but not anymore, and certainly not on this trip. So he’s seen me planning, plotting.

  And then it comes to me: how my eyelid twitches, but only late at night. How his eyelid twitches, but not when we’re face-to-face. Only when I’m inside his head.

  It’s not just a symptom of sleep deprivation; it’s a signal. A warning.

  Frantically I try to remember when I last had the tic. The night I spent on the ridge in the desert. Probably a few late nights in the car, driving. Almost definitely that night after Sky City.

  Warren. He knows about Warren.

  I free myself from Becca and rise shakily to my feet. “I need to make a call.”

  I turn my phone on; it searches for a signal. “Can we go back to the car? Right now?”

  “’Course.” Becca settles her daypack between her shoulders, her color healthier, like I’ve jarred her back from the edge of heat exhaustion. “We can make it in fifteen. Who do you need to call, sweetie?”

  “My friend in Albuquerque. There’s something important I forgot to tell him.”

  Her. I told Dylan my friend was a Jaylynne, and he may have told Becca, but I don’t bother to correct myself.

  As we clamber up the rocks, I try to think of an excuse for my sudden need to call, but I’m too focused on helping Becca over the tough places. Anyway, she’s stopped asking questions. That’s good, because I can’t think of a way to tell her the truth without mentioning the part where her son is a monster.

  In fifteen endless minutes, we leave behind the surreal world of giant ash heaps and anthills. We stagger across the lot to her truck, where I pull out my phone—thank God, bars.

  My text looks like the handiwork of a drooling idiot: Stay @ motell tonite, lck door. Dont go out, wait 4 my call. Pls.

  My hands shake too much to correct anything, so I just send. As soon as I’m alone, I’ll leave voice mail.

  If Dylan knows everything, maybe he’s the one I should be calling and texting. But I ca
n’t.

  He was digging a grave, but not for Warren. I would have known that. As long as he’s busy with random “targets”—and I hate myself for thinking this—maybe we’re safe.

  Blood pounds in my temples as Becca pulls us out of the Painted Desert, switching off the radio. We listened to a country station on the way here and even sang together on a couple songs, our voices falling easily into harmony. She must know I’m in no mood to sing now.

  The phone itches in my pocket, but there’s no buzz of reply.

  By the time we’re back on the interstate, Becca’s talking again, her voice riding nervously up and down. She’s trying to explain something that makes her sound like she’s fighting nausea. Like the words are rocks in her throat.

  “I could’ve brought him to therapy. I should’ve had him evaluated. But I was just a kid myself, and I was scared stiff to find out craziness ran in the family. If my old man hadn’t been a raging boozer, I’d have brought you to my folks’ house, Nina. But I couldn’t think of anywhere safe.

  “Getting Dylan out of the house—I thought about it. I imagined Child Services taking him away. How he’d look when they put him in the van, his eyes like his dad’s—his eyes pleading with me. No.”

  “It’s okay,” I whisper. She doesn’t seem to hear.

  “You were an adorable baby—who wouldn’t want you? But Dylan was almost seven, with scraggly hair and missing teeth, and I couldn’t give him up. He’d go from foster family to foster family. That was my reasoning—no, it was panicking, Nina. But I didn’t know; I wasn’t sure—”

  On and on like that. On and on, till I stop whispering and start practically yelling: “It’s all right, Becca. It turned out okay. I’m okay. Dylan’s okay—and you needed him. You don’t have to explain.”

  She stops talking.

  We’re not home yet, haven’t swallowed enough miles of asphalt and sand and sagebrush that all look the same to me now because—

  Warren. He has to get safely back to the rolling green hills and valleys of home. It’s all that matters now.

  Nothing on my phone.

  “After I left,” I ask, “did Dylan still say he was inside my dreams?”