Arcane Dropout 4

by Edmund Hughes

  He caught a single glimpse of what looked like an animal with dark fur, standing nearly shoulder-height on four legs. Some type of wolf, or panther? The screech of twisting metal came from the end of the alleyway as it flung itself deeper into the fog. Eldon hesitated then, lifting his arms up to defend himself if needed.

  The fence had a gaping hole in its center, with the metal ends of the chain link snapped and pointed in the direction the creature had fled. They’d posed as much resistance to it as a beaded doorway curtain. The fear hit Eldon then, the fear that came with the knowledge of how the creature had been on his balcony, waiting outside the apartment.

  Waiting for him.

  CHAPTER 3

  Eldon slept fitfully. Upon arriving back at the apartment, he briefly considered calling 911 or the number for animal control before throwing the idea out. He wasn’t sure why the idea rubbed him the wrong way so much, but the situation felt personal to him. Regardless, if he was going to seek help, he felt like there were better people to reach out to, more suited for the nature of the challenge.

  He just couldn’t remember who they were.

  He left for the market that afternoon. It was far enough to justify taking the bus, and as soon as he’d reached his destination, he took out a shopping list he’d written up earlier. The act of making his way from aisle to aisle was familiar and routine. It brought him back down to reality. He was a young man in recovery, still finding his footing in the world after having his life derailed the previous month.

  He was almost able to convince himself that he’d imagined the entire incident with the creature as he pulled more frozen pizzas out of one of the grocery refrigerators and loaded his cart up. He made his way to the checkout counter once he had everything and slowly began shifting his items onto the conveyor belt.

  He was feeling more or less normal again when she appeared.

  Nothing about the girl looked like it belonged in that place or in that moment. She was a special effect. She was dreamlike, ethereal blue and wispy in form. She had big, beautiful, searching eyes, though they hadn’t landed on him yet. Her body was petite, with small but adequate curves given emphasis by the thin blouse and tight jeans she wore.

  Eldon glanced around at the customers in line behind him, then toward the ones nearer to the girl. Nobody could see her; he was sure of that. They wouldn’t have kept quiet and continued on as normal if they could. He shouldn’t have been able to see her either, and for a couple of hopeful seconds, he tried to step forward and use one of the display stands to block her from his view. Out of sight, out of mind, end of hallucination.

  She was still there, standing with a single finger tapping against her lips, looking like a ghost out of a movie with an advanced CGI budget. As Eldon caught another glimpse of her face, a flurry of disconnected emotions flooded through him.

  Confusion, sadness, a profound, unnerving sense of familiarity. Another deeper sensation was thrumming through his heart, too intense for him to want to understand or express. It had to be fear. That was it. He must be afraid. No other emotional state could strip him so bare or leave him so vulnerable.

  She saw him then, and it was like the first flash of lightning ahead of a world-breaking storm. Her eyes lingered on his for a moment that beckoned into eternity. Recognition, flickers of other versions of the girl’s currently dumbfounded face. The echo of laughter, beautiful as a bell. The hint of her dimples, like a playful goddess.

  “Uh, sir?” asked the cashier. “Cash or credit?”

  Eldon exhaled forcefully, glancing around again and confirming what he already knew. The girl was going completely unseen by the other patrons of the grocery store, which led to the obvious conclusion. The only conclusion. She wasn’t there. She was a hallucination.

  “Cash,” he muttered.

  A stroke? Bruised neurons, firing out of sync? A separate untreated mental illness?

  Eldon forced his gaze downward, watching the cashier bag his frozen pizzas. He forced himself to calm down and risked another look around, hoping the girl might be gone, like she’d never been there to begin with.

  She wasn’t. In fact, she’d drawn closer to him. She said a name then, a single syllable escaping her cute lips, more of an involuntary squeak than a proper greeting.

  “Lee?”

  Static filled his mind, like an old TV with tangled rabbit ears turned on with the volume at full blast. Eldon stumbled, knocking a jug of milk to the ground in his effort to steady himself, short of breath and utterly bereft of courage. The container splashed open, spraying his shoes with its contents and glugging as it distributed a mess across the floor.

  The cashier let out a tired sigh and grabbed her intercom. “Cleanup at checkout 14. Sir, my manager will insist that you still pay for that, since it’s already been scanned.”

  Eldon knocked several more of the items he’d picked out to the ground as he pushed his way back through the line, fleeing the ethereal girl as she hurried toward him with outstretched arms. She sounded hysterical, constantly repeating that single, painful syllable and reaching toward him to…

  To do what? Attack him or embrace him? Did it matter which?

  Eldon hurried through the store, barely watching where he was going in his haste to keep looking back at the girl. He was upset over so many different aspects of his own reaction, not the least being the way his muscle memory seemed to urge him to go to her and respond in kind.

  “Lee!” cried the girl. “Lee…”

  “No!” he shouted. “Get away from me!”

  He could feel people staring at him, and he could see one of the store’s managers making his way over to address the situation. He forced what little logic he could summon back into his awareness.

  He’d suffered a serious brain injury the previous month. He was still in treatment. He was making a scene in the grocery store over a girl who wasn’t there, a girl only he could see. He needed space, along with the help and opinion of a professional.

  Eldon sprinted out of the grocery store. He didn’t stop running for a long while, not until his legs were on the verge of cramping from exhaustion and the girl was out of sight. He slowed to a walk, making his way into a small park with a copse of trees near the center as the rain picked back up.

  A few local residents were walking their dogs or running laps along the trail that encircled the greenery. Eldon found a tree with branches thick enough to shield him from most of the rain and collapsed into a sitting position against it. He was cold, and reached his arms forward to grab his knees, feeling like a lost child.

  As soon as he’d calmed down enough to regain his wits, he pulled out his cell phone and called the number for Dr. Constantine’s TBI treatment unit at St. Mary’s Medical Center. Constantine wasn’t at the hospital, no surprise there, but a friendly secretary was able to set him up with an appointment with one of the nurse practitioners first thing the next morning.

  Eldon breathed a sigh of relief as he said goodbye, a sigh which he reflexively sucked back in as he glanced to his left and saw the hallucination standing over him, hands on her hips.

  “Ha,” she panted. “Finally! Why did you run away? That was so uncalled for!”

  “Jesus!” Eldon rose to his feet and moved to the other side of the tree, putting it in between them. “What are you doing? Why am I seeing you?”

  “I believe I asked my question first, Lee,” she said.

  “Why do you keep calling me that?”

  The girl shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Because it’s your name. Lee Amaranth.”

  “You’ve… got the wrong guy. My name is Eldon Br—”

  “Yes, yes, but I’m much more partial to Lee,” she said. “See, Lee was a proper gentleman. Well, maybe that’s not quite true, but at least Lee didn’t run away screaming from me, like I’m some kind of…”

  The girl trailed off and glanced downward, looking abashed and a little hurt. Eldon kept circling the tree.

  “You’re a hallucinatio
n. That’s the only explanation that makes any sense.”

  “No, that’s just the only explanation you can currently think of.” The girl spun around theatrically, and when she stopped, she wore an old-style dress that looked like it belonged to another century. “Ta-da! I’m a ghost, and you’re a mystic, and, uh, well, you had your mind wiped by an evil werewolf. Well, it was actually Constantine who did it, see, he’s an illusionist, and secretly, he’s evil.”

  “It’s official,” he muttered. “I really have lost it.”

  He remembered hearing once that crazy people weren’t supposed to realize that they were crazy, and then later on hearing that the idea was just an urban myth. He was well aware of the various different symptoms he was currently experiencing. Mania, paranoia, delusions of grandeur.

  “Just listen!” said the girl. “It’s all true! I can prove it to you, just please, hear me out.”

  “I don’t think it would be, ah, healthy for me to do that,” he said. “Sorry, you seem nice enough, but I need to get back to reality now.”

  He started jogging again, figuring that it had already worked to escape from her once.

  “Get back here!” shouted the girl. “Lee Amaranth! You get back here right now. You can’t hide from me! I’ll find you, and when I do, I–I’ll… oh, dear. That sounds even worse.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Eldon alternated between jogging, running as fast as he could, and doubling over and panting in an effort to escape. It wasn’t really necessary, as it became clear after the first half hour or so that the ethereal girl’s petite legs and average conditioning gave him enough of an advantage to avoid her if he wanted to.

  And he did want to avoid her. The emotions she’d awakened within him were too complicated, too messy, and most of all, far too unpredictable. Even now, he had to continuously remind himself that the girl was most definitely a hallucination. His reality was slipping, giving way to what lay underneath, like a scab that proved irresistible after that first itchy touch.

  He took the long way home in case she was still following him, just out of sight. Certainly nothing paranoid about that. He scowled as he unlocked the door to the apartment. Bryan wasn’t home, but that was expected and welcome. He needed some time alone to calm down.

  Dinner was a simple affair, a cheeseburger with chips, sliced red peppers, and carrots. He played video games while he ate. He listened to some music after that. He tried, and failed, to get the face of the girl out of his mind.

  His dreams that night were impossibly vivid and just as impossibly, well, impossible. Ghosts and undead monsters attacked him from every direction. A sorceress battled another sorceress, both of them familiar without being recognizable. The girl kissed him. She did more than just kiss, and he loved every second of it.

  Eldon went straight to his appointment at the medical center the next morning. He left the apartment cautiously, expecting to be ambushed by a renegade hallucination. She wasn’t there, however, which was somehow both a relief and a disappointment.

  Most of the hospital staff in the TBI ward knew him already. He settled into one of the seats in the lobby after checking in with the secretary and carefully thought about how to explain the events of the previous day to the doctor. One of the nurses called his name after a few minutes, and he set the magazine he’d been thumbing through down on the side table.

  “You’ll be with one of our new nurse practitioners today,” she said. “She just transferred to the area, so she’s still getting into her groove.”

  “I know the feeling,” said Eldon.

  The nurse led him into a hospital waiting room with a wooden bench, a desk, and an examination table. Eldon took a seat on the bench and waited for a few minutes. The door opened, and a woman walked in.

  She wore a white doctor’s coat over a grey blouse, black skirt, and pantyhose. Her modest outfit couldn’t hide the curvaceous figure underneath, the pleasing, eye-catching plumpness of both her breasts and hips.

  Her face was thin and her complexion was flawless, which was enough to push her into intimidatingly beautiful territory when combined with everything else. She was like an intricate decorative weapon, candy for the eyes but still sharp, still commanding of respect.

  She also had pink hair, currently done up into a neat, professional bun, which gave Eldon the strangest sense of déjà-vu. The color choice mirrored the playful confidence with which she held herself, a woman who’d somehow managed to become a grown adult without ever really growing up.

  “Oh!” The woman’s jaw dropped, along with her clipboard. “Well now! You’re just about the last person I was expecting. This is quite the welcome surprise, though I do have a patient to attend to, so we might have to meet up later.”

  “I am he. Eldon Brock.”

  “Eldon Brock…” The woman turned each syllable of his name over in her mouth, as though testing it for pronounceability. “Oh my. This explains so very, very much. How unfortunate.”

  She stared at him, and he wasn’t sure he liked what he saw in her expression. Abject disappointment, along with an edge of poutiness, like a jilted lover at the wedding of their former flame. Eldon felt annoyed by that, but her demeanor snapped back into polished professionalism after a moment.

  “Yes, ah, Eldon, it’s very nice to meet you,” she said. “My name is Suzandra Cartier. You can call me Dr. Susie.”

  He shook her hand. She pulled the wheeled office chair out from the desk and sat down, smiling as she crossed her legs and gave him that look again.

  “Now,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me a bit about what brought you here today?”

  There was a flicker in the center of Eldon’s vision, a shift that he would have written off if not for the fact that it occurred twice in quick succession. Dr. Susie became someone, or something, else. A demon. Pale-red skin, black wings, a body even more voluptuous and sexualized than her current one, which was already far beyond adequate. Then it was gone.

  “I’ve been having… hallucinations,” he said. He exhaled, feeling a bit relieved to say it out loud, as though putting voice to the issue made it as much her problem as it was his.

  “Ah,” said Dr. Susie. “That’s concerning, though there are plenty of approaches we could take for treatment. Can you tell me a bit more?”

  “Yesterday, I was at the grocery store, and I saw—or hallucinated, I guess—a ghost. The ghost of a girl. She kept chasing after me, telling me stuff that sounded insane.”

  “Like what?”

  “That she knew me under a different name, among other things.”

  Susie let out a small, somewhat condescending chuckle. “A ghost. That is funny. It does make sense, in retrospect.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Oh, nothing.” Susie scribbled a few words down in her notebook. “Did the ghost threaten you or seem aggressive?”

  “No,” said Eldon. “Well, kind of. She said that I couldn’t hide from her, and she’d find me if I ran away. I did run, though, and she hasn’t managed to yet.”

  “Has anything else unusual happened to you recently?”

  He considered telling her about how he’d seen her as a monster a minute earlier, but hesitated as he contemplated the phrasing.

  “Lots of déjà vu, but I figured that was just due to the memory loss,” he said.

  “Can you tell me again what the ghost said to you?” asked Dr. Susie. “The specific words?”

  She was writing again, taking more notes than Eldon would have expected based on what little he’d told her. He felt like something was off, though he couldn’t place exactly what it was.

  “What are you writing down?” he asked.

  “Oh, just a few relevant details. You know… treatment information.”

  “Can I see?”

  Dr. Susie’s hands tightened on her notebook and she frowned at him. “It’s, ah, better if you don’t read this, I think.”

  A sudden suspicion prickled up the back of Eldon’
s neck.

  “Have you ever heard of Primhaven University before?” he asked.

  Dr. Susie’s eyebrows shot up. She snapped her notebook closed and held it in a tight, protective grip. Eldon was moving before he’d consciously thought through his actions. He stood up and made a grab for the notes.

  “Whoa!” said Susie. “Easy now. We should, uh—”

  “Let me see what you were writing down,” he said slowly. “If it’s just related to my treatment, it should be fine, right?”

  “Well, ah, it’s just that…”

  Eldon took hold of the notebook, trying to pry it from Susie’s grip. He was dimly aware of how what he was currently doing was exactly the kind of unpredictable outburst someone who’d been having hallucinations might engage in. He didn’t care.

  “Show me,” he said.

  “Not so close,” said Dr. Susie. Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “You don’t understand. It’s not just the notes, it’s a matter of proximity and… physical contact.”

  He pulled a little closer to her in his efforts to free the notebook from her hands, and an odd shudder ran through her. He caught the faintest scent of her perfume and felt suddenly intoxicated by her femininity. Arousal spiked through him, pooling in his crotch in a way that was seconds away from expressing itself in a borderline-embarrassing fashion.

  “Young man,” whispered Susie in a husky voice. “You’re too close. There are certain… inexplicable… dangers.”

  She seemed as affected by his presence as he was by hers, which was saying something. Eldon’s fingers brushed over hers on the notebook, and heat rushed through him, followed by a barrage of mental images of her naked and in various positions. He imagined her softly moaning, too. Wait… she was moaning, out loud, eyes fluttering.

  Lust like Eldon had never felt before seized him by the loins. New eroticism bloomed from every aspect of Dr. Susie: the tiny, peeking cleavage nestled within her blouse, the subtle angle of her hips that set her butt on a small diagonal. The fact that she was just barely biting her lower lip.