Happy Birthday to Me Again (Birthday Trilogy, Book 2)

by Rowe, Brian

  “After first meeting you in Almanor, I decided to stay in Reno for a while, see if I could ruffle some feathers. It didn’t surprise me one bit when I managed to seduce you into kissing me, making you call off the wedding, but it sure threw me a big surprise when Alicia tossed a spell your way to make you start aging backward a year with every day. I’ve gotten a chance to talk with my sister, and she told me something like this happened before. Boy, my sister must be a hell of a catch. Every time you screw up, she curses you with a life-threatening disease! Now that, my friend, is love!”

  I sat in the crib, completely stupefied. For the first time I realized the similarities between Hannah and Liesel (or Alicia, if I were to believe this quack). Secondly, I also knew that it was going to take a miracle to escape this lunatic. Cool and calm, with her moments of bizarre eccentricities, she unfortunately seemed to know what she was doing.

  “You don’t know anything about love!” Liesel shouted from her cage. “You never have, never will, Hannah!”

  The evil sister turned around. “What was that?”

  “You heard me. You can’t feel love for anyone. You have to take all your anger out on me, someone who actually had a shot at being happy.”

  Hannah stuck her hand out in the air and closed her eyes. A bright red light shot out violently from Hannah’s palm, only to strike Liesel’s cage and send her into a seizure. Hannah was electrocuting her! Just by using her hand!

  “What are you doing?” I shouted. “For God’s sake, stop!”

  She stopped. And then turned to me. “In here, I am God.” She turned back to Liesel, who had a white foamy substance erupting from her mouth. “You don’t think I’m capable of loving? How about those four years I spent with our mother? How about those four years taking care of her day after day, making her meals, doing her laundry, wiping her ass and her shit? Do you think I did that for my health?”

  “You have no one to blame but yourself,” Liesel said, in the tone of a whisper. “You can’t blame me for throwing these last four years of your life away.”

  “I did it because she was our mother, and I loved her, with everything in my being. You, Alicia… you just abandoned me. You just left me with her, so I could watch her suffer, so I could watch her die—”

  “I saw an opportunity,” Liesel said. “An opportunity to get out. And I took it.”

  “And so you went to Reno? To be a waitress? To marry a boy you barely know, who had no trouble making out with another girl just weeks before the big day?”

  “You coerced him, Hannah. Don’t try to convince you didn’t.”

  “I simply laid out the temptation. And he took it, head on. Do you think I made him tell you on your birthday that he didn’t want to go through with the wedding? That was all him, baby. Because he was contemplating whether he still loved you or not—”

  “That’s not true!” I shouted, wishing I had some magical powers of my own about now so I could slice this chick in two. “You want to talk about lies? Everything she’s saying is a lie! Leese, please don’t listen to her!”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not,” Liesel said. “No matter what happens, I love you, Cam.”

  I nodded and couldn’t help but smile. “I love you.”

  Hannah rolled her eyes and walked back over to the couch. She lay down in the center of it and kicked her feet up in the air. “You two make me sick.”

  “So what’s your plan?” I asked. I had to know.

  “My plan?”

  “Wait! First of all, where are we?” And then the big question: “And what is that horrible smell?”

  “Don’t, Cam,” Liesel said, worrying me even more.

  “Oh, what is it?” Hannah asked. “You don’t enjoy the smell of rotting flesh?”

  “Rotting… rotting what?”

  Hannah giggled and jumped back up to her feet. She ran toward the crib and pulled out a stretcher behind a curtain on the side of me. “Forgive me for being so rude, Cameron. I’d like you to meet…”

  She pulled a blanket off of a dead, rotting corpse, and I upchucked all over my little crib.

  “…my mother… Veronica.”

  The woman on the stretcher looked like she’d been dead for weeks. Most of her face was melted off, with little worms crawling all over her body.

  “What… why…”

  “Let her be a reminder of what you gave up, Alicia,” Hannah said, facing the other side of the room. “Of who you gave up to be with him!”

  I tried to throw up again, but I didn’t have any more half digested food to let out. So instead I just gagged a few times.

  Liesel started crying again, and I turned to her sister, someone who up until this point I assumed was crazy. Now I knew she was a real psycho bitch.

  “You’re not gonna get away with this,” I said, trying to sound confident, even though I sounded like a little girl.

  “Oh… what… a little child like you’s gonna stop me?”

  “Whatever you’re planning on doing… it’s not gonna work. Liesel has powers. Did you forget that?”

  “She has powers? Don’t you say!” Hannah slapped me in the face before I could react, and then she slugged me in the nose with her elbow. A thin trail of blood started running from my nostrils down to my chin.

  “Stop!” Liesel shouted.

  “I’ve got three times the amount of power your little girlfriend has,” Hannah said. “While she’s been keeping her powers—well, mostly—on the down low these last four years, I’ve had nothing but time to keep myself occupied with my training. There’s only a few other known people in the world who have the capabilities we have. And one was our mother. And as hard as she tried, and I tried, she still couldn’t cure herself of that cancer. That, my friend, was the greatest mystery of all. I can cast spells, make objects disappear, raise fifty-story buildings right up off the ground. But I couldn’t cure my mom. I couldn’t do a damn thing.”

  “Why can’t Liesel get out of the cage?” I asked, fast.

  “What? Oh, you mean, why can’t she just say a few magic words and fly up into the sky?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because the cage is lathered in our one and only kryptonite. You know what that is, don’t you?”

  I just shook my head.

  “Wet. Silver. Paint.”

  Liesel looked beyond sick. She looked as if she was dying. I wanted to rush over to her and give her a big hug and kiss and tell her everything was going to be all right. But honestly, at this point, I had no idea if I was going to live through the day. I noticed the silver paint dripping from her cage, and I could see her whole body weak and trembling, like the strong smell from the paint was suffocating her on the inside. I couldn’t really smell the paint all the way over here, given that the odor of the dead mom was still the forefront calamity in my nostrils. But I knew it was hurting her.

  “So you kidnapped her?” I asked. “What? To make me suffer?”

  “To make her suffer, dipshit. This might be a surprise, but none of this has anything to do with you. I just want to keep her in that cage long enough to see you de-age all the way into nothing. And then I’ll let her go.”

  “She’s gonna kill you as soon as she leaves that cage,” I said, knowing it was the truth.

  “Yeah? Let her try.” I stared hard at her black-painted fingertips, now cackling with mini flames. “I never intended for her to see you again. But when your dad took you out of the city, I knew I couldn’t let him try to help you. I had to make sure… under my close, personal supervision… that you weren’t going to make it out of this alive.”

  I had just about had enough. But as long as she kept talking, I kept talking. “So you’re just gonna keep us in here, locked up, until I live out the rest of my days? Until I die?”

  “That’s the plan,” Hannah said. “Yeah. I want her to know what it feels like to lose a loved one. She cursed you. Twice. You gotta admit, she had this coming.”

  “It was an accident!” I shouted.
<
br />   “And not to mention, showing off at your graduation like that, floating up in the air, for the entire world to see. That was a big, big no-no. What I’m doing to her now should be far worse a punishment. This, my friend, is nothing.”

  “Stop calling me friend!” I spit a huge lougee up into the air and watched with glee as the glob of gunk smashed into Hannah’s right cheek.

  She blinked a few times and then wiped the blob of snot away. She smiled and just stared at me for a moment.

  Then she lifted up her right hand, pointed her index finger at me, and started to lift me up off the crib. Here I was, floating yet again. This would’ve been a great chance to escape, but my hands were chained to the crib, which was itself chained to the basement floor, and my hands weren’t about to go anywhere. The pain in my wrists became so excruciating as my body continued to rise that I wanted to just end it then and there.

  “Stop it!” Liesel shouted.

  “Oh God… Oh my God…” I said, the sharp pains overwhelming me.

  “You want to spit on me?” Hannah asked, her rage intensifying. “You want to spit on me?”

  She let me go, and I landed head first, my left cheek smashing against the side of the crib wall. I felt a cut against the cheek, and blood started flowing from that part of my face, too.

  “Cameron, I have a question,” Hannah said.

  I tried to breathe. I tried to scream. Finally, I said: “What?”

  “How old do you think you are today?”

  I just shook my head. “You tell me.”

  “I’m guessing seven. Does seven sound about right?” She looked at Liesel for an answer, but she didn’t even acknowledge Hannah’s presence. “This means you’ll be six tomorrow, and five the next day, and so on, until you obliterate into nothingness on what would be… let’s see… this coming Tuesday night.”

  I didn’t want to agree with her. “That’s almost a week from now,” I said. “That gives me plenty of time to find a weakness in your system, to get me and Liesel away from your crazy ass.”

  She nodded. “You have a point. But…”

  “But?”

  “But what if I had the power to get there quicker. Cuz you know what? I’m getting a little tired of your attitude, boy.”

  “What?” Liesel shouted. “No!”

  “Oh yes,” Hannah said. “Alicia’s pretty special. In a matter of words and big emotions, she can turn another human being into a ticking time clock, where he or she can age a whole year of their life with each passing day. But I… oh, how sweet it is… can take that initial curse, and speed it up!”

  Liesel was crying intensely, as if she knew this horrific development had been coming all along.

  “What are you saying?” I asked.

  “The world’s gonna pay for what happened to my mother,” Hannah said. “It’s only starting with what I’m about to do to you and Liesel. Consider this a prologue, Cameron. A prologue to the big, epic, apocalyptic showdown. Consider this… your destiny.”

  I started breathing harder, and I tried my best to reach out toward Liesel, even though it would take a miracle beyond her extraordinary abilities to feel her soft, inviting hands ever again.

  “Cameron, what if I told you I was going to de-age you not a whole year with each day… but a whole year… with each hour!”

  With her punctuation on that final word, the entire room turned into a giant wind tunnel, the force of the fierce winds as powerful as a cataclysmic tornado. Hannah floated up five feet in the air and looked down at me with her scary eyes, both pitch-red.

  “Cameron, Liesel told me you have a thing with birthdays.” With a big, eerie smile on her face, she started to sing. “Happy birth-hour to you! Happy birth-hour to you. Happy birth-hour dear Cameron. Happy birth-hour… to… you!”

  I couldn’t believe it.

  My body started to shrink.

  12. Six

  Barely ten seconds had passed. But I knew I was a year younger. I could feel it in my bones. The large pajama clothing already felt loose. Hannah was laughing uproariously; that marked the final confirmation.

  Liesel put her hands over her face and started crying as Hannah slowly stepped up to my crib, her smile growing bigger by the second.

  “Six more days, Cameron? Try six more hours.” Hannah tightened my chains and started rocking the crib. I fell back against my side and glared at her, wanting to attack her with everything I had. “Rock-a-bye baby… on the tree top…”

  “Shut up!” I shouted. “Just shut up!”

  “With pleasure,” she said.

  I readied myself to unleash a dozen lougees against Hannah’s once pretty but now heinous face, but she walked away before I could do anything. I watched her sit back down on her leather couch, slapping her hands together and softly giggling. I turned my head to the right to see Hannah and Liesel’s dead, decaying mom lying on the stretcher. I looked up and around the room, which was uncomfortably warm and scarily dark.

  I knew I was going to die in here. And I knew there was nothing Liesel could do to save me.

  13. Four

  Two hours flew by. Hannah wasn’t joking. I was swimming in these pajamas, and I felt like I was suffocating. Worst, because the de-aging was happening so fast, for the first time since these bizarre aging conditions started afflicting me, I was literally feeling the quick, painful morphing of my body as I continued to shrink faster and faster.

  The cruelest thing Hannah was doing on the hour, every hour, was shoving a mirror into my young face and showing me the results of her mad witchy ways. I was having trouble breathing already, and seeing my now four-year-old face in the mirror was firmly depleting my confidence that I would ever see age five or six or seven again, let alone, age eighteen.

  “Please…” I said. “Please… stop this…”

  Hannah just laughed. “You know, the younger you get, the more your pleading sounds so… stupid…”

  “Please!”

  She took another step toward me and started making an annoying crying face. “Waaaaah…. Waaaaaah…. You really are turning into a whiny little baby, aren’t you, Cameron?”

  Liesel had her head buried in her knees, at this point refusing to look at me any longer. She didn’t have any more tears to cry, so now she was screaming with anger against her legs.

  I had more tears to cry, though. And I let them fall.

  “Tick tock, tick tock, Cameron,” Hannah said. “We’re getting closer.”

  She stepped out of the room, humming the “Happy Birthday” song, as I cowered in my crib and continued to cry.

  14. Three

  Hannah shoved the mirror in my face again, laughed, then left Liesel and I down in the dirty smelly basement to rot for another hour.

  Please God… please… I’ll do anything, I thought. I know it’s next to impossible that I’m going to make it through this now, but please… please don’t let Liesel die. Let her have a life past this dreadful night. I’ve said this to you before, God, and I’ll say it to you again. In the end… if it’s a decision between me and her, please, take me.

  I could feel my cheeks plumping up.

  Oh, God, I can’t believe I’m saying this… I miss being a teenager!

  15. Two

  I could hear Liesel calling out for me, but I couldn’t see her anymore. I had shrunk so much in the last ninety minutes that I could barely see over the top of the crib. The chains were looser but still tight against my wrists. Weirdest of all, I could see my feet, seemingly just inches away from my face. I couldn’t have been more than three feet tall now, less than half of what I used to be when I was getting down on one knee to propose to Liesel last Christmas.

  “Leese?” I asked.

  “Cam, I’m here.”

  “Leese… it’s going to be all right…”

  “Cam… I can’t… I can’t understand you…”

  “What?”

  Silence. “Cam?”

  Oh my God, I thought. She can’t understand m
e. I’m talking jibberish!

  “Leese, can you understand me?”

  “What are you saying?”

  I shook my head. I could hear it now. Instead of “can you understand me,” what was coming out of my mouth was, “cower stay me,” in a high baby voice that would be hilarious in any other circumstance than the one I was in right now.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry it had to end this way.” She didn’t respond. I knew she couldn’t understand me. But I decided to say it anyway. “And I love you. I love you so much. I just want you to know.”

  “Cameron!” Liesel shouted at the top of her lungs. “I’m going to save you! Do you understand me? I’m not going to let you die!”

  I heard an ominous whistling coming from behind me, and I knew my time was limited. I stretched up as high as I could, just to see something, anything.

  I caught sight of Hannah. As she walked in, hiding a box under her left arm, she picked up the poker stick with her right hand, raced across the room, and struck Liesel in her chest. Liesel screamed and fell back as Hannah walked around to the other side and slapped the stick against the bottom of Liesel’s back. She screamed again, this time in a more quiet, depressing manner. Her whole body was shaking as she slunk down to the floor.

  Even though I was only two years old, I had the kind of rage that existed in somebody twenty times my age, somebody with five lifetimes of experience with love and loss and jealousy and revenge. I knew if she unlocked me from these chains I would do everything in my power to injure or kill this evil, rotten witch of a woman. Not only was she enjoying my withering into nothingness, but she was hurting Liesel. This chick was messed up, and she had to be stopped.

  “Oh, Cameron… Mr. Cameron…” She tiptoed slowly toward me, and I noticed for the first time that she was out of her red dress, and now in a simple blue sweater and long jeans, like she wanted to go for a midnight walk. She revealed the box under her arm, which turned out to be a wrapped birthday gift. “I have a gift for you, birthday boy. I know this might be the last birthday present you’ll ever receive, so I was sure to make it a good one. You want to open it up?” She lowered the gift and smiled. “Oh. Right. You’re still in those chains. Don’t worry, I’ll open it for you.”