by Dale Bailey
Abel too seemed to feel it. He didn’t speak for a long time—and when he did, she had to strain to hear him. “Maybe you didn’t make the wisest deal, Doc,” he said softly.
“What do you mean?”
He nodded at the window. “It keeps up like this, none of us are going anywhere, no matter what happens.”
“You don’t have to go through with this, Abel.”
He laughed softly. “Oh, but I do.”
“What do you mean?”
“I really did come down here to thank you,” he said without looking at her.
“For what?”
“The gift of clarity. Getting some sleep cleared my head.”
“Did it?”
“There’s a funny thing about life, but you never realize it until it’s too late.”
“What’s that?”
“The way it has of disappearing on you.”
He glanced over as if to gauge her reaction to this. She held herself very still, gazing out at the snow, waiting to see where he was heading.
“You don’t realize it while it’s happening,” he said after a while, “but every day you’re making choices, and every choice you make, the range of possibilities before you narrows a little bit. And somehow, before you know it, you wind up someplace you never intended to go.”
“Where’d you wind up, Abel?”
“You said it yourself, Doc. I should stick to television.”
“I was joking.”
He waved a hand dismissively. “But it’s true.” He laughed. “The thing is, I never intended to do what I do. It was a trick I had, a knack. It was something I could do, that’s all. I didn’t have a job, or any immediate prospects, I was short on cash, so I thought, well, I’ll use this trick of mine for a little while, just long enough to get me out of the place I’m in, and then, once I have some money, I’ll go off and figure out what it is I’m supposed to do with my life.”
“What do you mean, a trick?” Lara asked, thinking of her humiliation in the lobby, feeling now the laceration that she had not felt then, or afterward, on the roof, when Ben explained to her how Abel had managed it.
“A trick,” he said, staring straight ahead. “Like a magician’s trick. An illusion.” He looked right at her then. “Like you said yesterday, I’m a fraud.”
Self-loathing radiated from him in waves, dampening Lara’s resentment. She said nothing, though, and Abel, too, was still. His nervous energy seemed to have evaporated.
Outside, the wind shifted, veiling the window in snow.
“That’s what I figured out this morning,” he said, “with the clarity of a night’s sleep. I mean, I knew it before, but I never really admitted it to myself. But this morning, thinking things through, I couldn’t deny it. What I do—and it doesn’t matter how you rationalize it—that’s what I am. The only choice left is where I’m going to do it—on television for car-loads of cash, or in a store front somewhere at a hundred dollars a pop.” He smiled grimly. “I chose door number one, and so I came to Dreamland. As for the rest of it”—he shrugged—”it’s too late to change.”
“I don’t believe that, Abel,” she said, turning to look at him. “I believe people can change. We don’t have to be prisoners of the past.”
“Oh, I think we do,” he said. “If we didn’t, I wouldn’t be so successful, would I?”
It was a difficult point to refute.
Frustrated, Lara turned back to the window. She stared out into the pelting snow, past the hollow ghost of her own reflection—her twin, she thought suddenly. Her double, her other self. She wondered suddenly if Abel was right, if she was a prisoner of her past. She wondered what she might have become if Lana hadn’t died—what both of them might have become. Tears stung her eyes. She rolled her lower lip under her teeth, biting down until the pain drove them back unshed.
“So you got all this from Ambien,” she said. “Maybe I should pop a couple myself.”
Abel laughed. “That’s only half the story,” he said. “You haven’t heard the other half yet.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Lara turned away, strolling back to her seat, annoyed by this vulnerability to tears he seemed to summon out of her. She’d spent her life on the other side of this equation—searching out the weaknesses in others and applying a healing salve. You’re the one who likes to take care of everyone, Lana had told her, and Lana, as always, was right. Lara wasn’t entirely comfortable with the reversal in roles: in fact, she resented it.
She sat back, crossing her arms. “So what’s the other half?”
“Ambien gave me the clarity to think everything through. The impetus”—he hesitated—”the impetus came from elsewhere.”
He studied her, his back to the window, and when she said nothing, he crossed the room and sat across from her. He leaned forward, he clasped his hands.
“I didn’t lie to you yesterday,” he said. “Since I’ve been here I’ve been … hearing things.” He swallowed, looked at his sneakers. “Voices.” He looked up; he held her gaze. “Since I’ve been here, I seem to be able to do what I’ve pretended to do for years.”
A giddy cocktail of memories and half-formed thoughts stirred through Lara’s mind at this admission—the echoing laughter of a child and the clatter of a wind-blown shade, Abel’s words in the infirmary—
—twins you were identical—
—and a wild thump of elation in her chest. What if it were true? My God, did she want it to be true? Was that really what she wanted?
Even as she swallowed it down, that cocktail, another thought came chasing hard upon it: that there were levels visible and levels yet unseen, that this was Abel at the top of his game, not confessing—not really—but deepening the con, laying the foundation for whatever effect he hoped to wring out of her at this afternoon’s reading. She sensed once again the dizzyingly complex dynamics in play around her, the labyrinth of contending agendas and secrets yet unspoken.
You shouldn’t have come here, Lana said inside her head, and she wanted to cry out in response, But I had to, don’t you see? I had to! And wasn’t that also an admission of some kind—that Abel was right, that she too was a prisoner of the past, that everyone was?
“Lara—” he said.
You expect me to believe you, she wanted to say. You tell me you’re a fraud and then you expect me to believe you’re not? And she opened her mouth to say it, but what came out instead was a question: “What happened in the lobby, what you told me—”
“Trickery,” he said. “It was my standard act, until”—he stood, and turned away—“the voices, my God the voices, they overwhelmed me—”
She didn’t care about that, not now.
“And in the infirmary?” she demanded. “Afterward.”
“That was real.” He turned to face her, his eyes wide. “Something happened, Lara. I looked at her picture, I looked at Lana’s picture, and I could hear her voice inside—”
Had he really said that? Had he said her name?
“—my head, so clear we might have been talking on the telephone—”
“Shut up,” she said. “Shut up!”
“Shut up,” she whispered. “I have to think.”
But no thoughts came, only a fuzz of static and that name—
—Lana Lana Lana—
—like a siren hurtling down upon her over a foggy highway. Had she told him Lana’s name?
She hadn’t, she was almost certain of it.
“My sister,” she said. “Abel, what’s her name?”
“What?”
“What’s my sister’s name, Abel?”
He came toward her, his face puzzled. “I don’t understand—”
“If I find out that you’re lying to me,” she said, “if I find out that you tracked me down beforehand, that you knew all about me before we ever came here, Abel—if I find that out—”
“What?”
She shook her head, unable to meet his eyes. “I don
’t know,” she said. She laughed. “What’s my sister’s name, Abel?”
He sat before her on the coffee table. He took her hands.
“I have no clue, Lara. Why?”
And then she did it: she looked up, she looked square into his face, his open everyday face, his brow wrinkled in confusion, his eyes green and depthless as a forest pool. If there was a lie there, she could not see it. Vertigo swept over her in a nauseating wave. She teetered on a wire strung over twin abysses, on the left hand terror, on the right desire, and for a long moment she did not know which way she was going to fall. Then the vertigo passed, leaving her stranded there, suspended high above the void, still staring into Abel Williams’ guileless face.
“Her name,” Lara said. “You said my sister’s name.”
4
“During the opening credits of my show they used to play this montage of photos,” Abel said after lunch, toying under the table with a photo of his own. “The studio audience would bring them in, snapshots, studio portraits, school pictures, whatever—people who had died, the ones they wanted to contact. The production team would cobble it together, a fresh montage for every episode.”
“So you saw these before you went on?” Ben said.
A wave of interest circled the table. Keel looked up from the ring of condensation he’d been spreading with one blunt finger. Lomax narrowed his eyes. Even Lara, who knew, seemed to sit up straighter.
Abel didn’t rise to the bait. He regarded the other man mildly over the dregs of the meal—soiled dishes, a half-empty bag of chips, a cutting board bearing a quarter wheel of cheese and the knife that had been used to slice it. Half unconsciously, he turned the photo on his thigh, chipping at its grimy patina with the end of a nail. If you listened closely, you could hear it: the rasp of nail against a thick square of old-fashioned photo stock, like a distant whisper.
No one else seemed to notice, however.
A lassitude seemed to have seized them all, the meal done, the hour appointed for Abel’s little experiment at hand—a reluctance that was just edging into fear. That’s how Abel figured it, anyway.
Was he afraid?
He pondered the question, his fingers smoothing the photo against his thigh, flattening the peeling ridges where in some distant past it had been folded and folded again. Apprehensive, sure; reluctant, absolutely. Fear, though? He didn’t think so. He’d gotten past that.
No, he thought. I am not afraid.
He had to know, that’s all—had to know if he was losing his mind or if something else was happening, something stranger. Had to know if he could learn to control it, to turn it on and off at will. If he could use it. Either way, he was not afraid.
He repeated the words to himself, a private mantra.
I am not afraid. I am not afraid.
Whispers stirred in a corner of the kitchen, gathered to a crescendo and fell away undeciphered, water swirling in the mouth of a distant drain.
Abel turned the photo on his thigh.
I am not afraid.
Outside, wind soughed down Dreamland’s blank facade. Snow continued to fall. It was close to three, the windows storm-darkened, an early twilight looming in the sky.
Ben stared at him. Waiting.
Abel smiled. “No,” he said. “I didn’t look at them. They frightened me, actually. I don’t know why—or I didn’t then, anyway—but they did. They scared the hell out of me.”
“Why?” Ben asked.
I was afraid, Abel thought. Afraid they might suck me down into—
—the world beyond the fence—
—like my father oh god like my—
—a cold dark place I wouldn’t be able to escape.
A telephone began to ring inside his head.
I am not afraid, he thought. I am not afraid.
He said it aloud, his fingers nervous on the photograph, tracing the water-stained image of the girl, her dark hair knotted in an intricate pattern of braids, her small face smiling. “They don’t scare me anymore.”
He added, “I think I’m beginning to understand it.”
“Why?” Keel asked, but when Abel answered he kept his eyes fixed on Ben, gazing back at him from across the table.
“Because of this.”
Abel leaned forward, lofting the photo he’d been toying with toward the bare center of the table. The heat came on with a whump, and an updraft from one of the floor vents must have caught it, for it hung there momentarily, riding a column of air, a battered black-and-white snapshot with a scalloped border aged to the color of an unclean tooth. And then gravity snatched it home and it eddied silently down to the table before them.
5
Fletcher Keel saw it first—recognized it for what it was, a photo, as it drifted gently to the table, glimpsed within it the curving jawline of a child, and watched Benjamin Prather blanch and stiffen. And even before Ben spoke, his voice a hoarse whisper—
“Where’d you get that?”
—Keel understood what had just transpired with an absolute and unerring certainty.
A veneer of perspiration oiled his forehead. His guts spasmed. His fingers clenched the edges of the table. Lifting his eyes the length of the littered trestle—Ben and Lara on one side, Abel on the other—he met Ramsey Lomax’s unyielding gaze.
Make amends, a voice cried out within him.
He clamped down on it, returning his attention to the photo. A little girl peered back at him through a stain of reddish-brown—
—blood it was blood—
—rust. Looking at her, Keel felt time slip its chain, the years unreel. The kitchen shimmered, as through a sheen of water blown back across the windshield of a speeding car. Threads of black mist unspooled at the periphery of his vision, stitching themselves together before his face, weaving a tapestry of night. In the succeeding darkness he was there, in the south stairwell, dank water dripping, breath laboring in his lungs. The fire team ascended in a controlled panic of soft-soled boots and muttered curses. Muffled echoes scaled the risers. The yellow eye of the flashlight mounted on his weapon bobbed like a target on Patrick Mitchell’s back.
Just looking at the man sent a flood of shame tumbling through his veins—
—you need to step out, Martin, you look fucking green—
—shame and anger, too; most of all the humiliation of the confrontation in the lobby, mere tributaries to the black and depthless river of fear—
—fear is a doorway, open it up anything might walk in—
—carving its channel through the bedrock of his soul.
There in the south stairwell, it took him.
He felt it seize him and slide inside him, a cold intelligence, utterly remote, swollen with its own sure mastery: strong where he was weak, fearless in the deep places where wellsprings of terror fed the river in his heart, and knowing—God, so knowing. It plumbed him through and through and it knew him, every cell and every muscle, bone and ligament and brain.
Keel swallowed.
Calming himself by sheer dint of will, he stared down into the bloody face of a child—
—LaKeesha, LaKeesha Turner, you stand accused—
—do you understand the charges against—
—the conversation running on without him, Abel saying, “I found it upstairs, in apartment 1824,” and Ben responding, softly, so softly, and aggrieved, “My sister, she was my sister,” confirming as from a great distance what Keel had known from the minute the photo settled to the table and he saw Benjamin Prather stiffen in his seat and draw in a single hissing breath, like a man in pain or sorrow.
Keel sat upright, his face impassive.
Something black and familiar assailed him, dark wings beating, battering for admission to his soul. Clutching the table, Keel resisted. He stared at the girl, her face masked in blood, and he resisted.
The burnt-rope stench of cordite filled the air, a chaos of gunshots and screaming and the coppery reek of gore steaming in his nostrils, his finger squeezing, sque
ezing, squeezing, three-round bursts, just like Parris Island, just like the range, his cock rigid as railroad iron—
Not me, he wanted to cry, not me, the thing inside me—
His father’s voice rose up in response, disdainful and cold. Fear is a doorway, he said. You opened it, you invited it in, you welcomed it and bent your knee before it. You surrendered your honor.
You. You. You.
And a final voice in answer, Susan’s voice, his own true voice if only he could dredge the strength to sustain it from the sucking river mud that clogged the bottom of his soul.
Make amends, it said. Make amends.
6
After a moment of silence, those words—
—my sister she was my—
—still dying in the air, Ben reached out for the photograph, shaking his head in disbelief. “This is unconscionable even by your standards,” he said. “What you did to Lara was bad enough, but this—this—”
Abel’s hand closed over his wrist like a vise.
“Don’t,” Abel said. “Just don’t.”
The words faltered on Ben’s tongue. For a single frozen heartbeat they hung suspended like that, in silent tableau, Abel’s hand like a shackle at Ben’s wrist, Ben staring down at it, white on black, startling by contrast, his brain humming with adrenaline overload. The kitchen screamed with the lemony tang of dish detergent and light glared back from every polished surface, the whole place suddenly sharp-edged and hyper-real as a surgical theater, and Abel wielding the scalpel, just waiting to carve him up.
Wind clawed the building, flinging a renewed volley of snow at the window.
“Gentlemen, please—” Lomax began.
Ben cut him off, his voice pitched low. “You’re going to let go of me right now, you son of a bitch—”
“Come on now, guys,” Lara said.
“—or I’m going to take your fucking head off.”
Still the hand did not relent.
“Ben,” Abel was saying. “Ben—you’ve got to listen, please, you’ve got to listen—” And something in the other man’s voice, a hue of desperation or fear, compelled Ben to look up, to gaze into his face, twisted and desperate and pale, pale as the hand at his wrist. Hardly a human face at all.
