“No time to explain, kid,” I said. “What’s important right now is that we get this butterfly back to Grace.”
“Sure,” Rory said. “I can get you there.”
A visible tension released from the room. We came so far to get to this point, if anything stopped us now, it would be unbearable. And Grace would be lost forever.
“Where’s the gateway?” I asked.
“Landon told you guys about my apartment being on a Nexus, huh?” Rory asked. “I knew I got too good a deal on this place. I mean, these apartments run for thousands of dollars a month. It’s swanky, you know? I didn’t have that kind of cash. But the landlord practically gave it to me. It was a steal. I couldn’t turn it down.”
Landon waved his fingers around like a spooky ghost. “Yeah, until he started noticing the veil was thin. Goblins and ghouls found their way in at night. Doors to other worlds emerged. That’s when he called me and together, we discovered it was a Nexus.”
“That was pretty much how it happened,” Rory said. “The landlord was desperate. He couldn’t rent this place for the life of him after word got out that the last few tenants either died or disappeared.” He got up and paced around the apartment. “I was only here a few days before strange things started happening. The shower turned on in the middle of the night. The radio would come on by itself. I thought it was a ghost. But then I started having terrible nightmares that I won’t even go into right now because you’ll piss your pants, let me tell you. I was about to bail on my lease when Mr. Landon helped me. He explained he thought this place was built on a Nexus by accident.”
“The last time I checked,” I said, “the general public doesn’t know about these kinds of things.”
“The builders definitely didn’t,” Rory said, glancing out the window. “But only this apartment has it. No other apartment is affected.”
“I helped him figure this place out,” Landon said. “We had awesome adventures together.”
“Want to get to the eighth circle of Hell?” Rory asked. “Fill up the bathtub, turn off the lights, and at 12:01 a.m., get in the tub. When you get out, you’ll be standing in Hell.”
Rory stared out the window. “Want to go to an alternate reality where modern technology is based off Nikola Tesla’s ideas instead of Edison’s? Walk into the coat closet, turn around three times while holding a screwdriver and when you walk out, you’ll be there.”
“Want to travel to Ghostworld?” He walked over to an old style radio that sat next to a pile of books. “Turn this radio to a specific station and the portal to Ghostworld will show itself. I can get you there, I just can’t promise you’ll make it back.”
“Is the gateway unstable?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “But the Recurrence is the awful of the most awful. Worse than Hell. Trust me, I’ve been to both.”
Landon patted me on the back. “Let me know how that goes for you, big guy.”
“You’re coming with us,” I said.
“I’m a ghost,” Landon said. “What could I possibly do in the Recurrence other than mill around in despair like all the other miserable disembodied schmucks?”
“It’s precisely because you are a ghost that we need you,” I said. “You may be able to do things, access things, and relate to things that Augie and I can’t.”
“Haven’t I done enough?” Landon said. “I got you to the gateway, didn’t I?”
“Serena?” I said, holding out the palm of my hand. “Give me the ring.” She sat Landon’s class ring in my hand. I took out a Bic lighter and flicked it on, holding the ring several inches from the flame.
Landon was sweating. “Okay, okay, okay. I’ll go with you. You don’t have to be a douchebag about it.”
“Thank you,” I said, handing the ring back to Serena, along with the lighter. “If we don’t make it out, burn the ring.”
Landon was deflated. “Aw, Ivy, you suck! You are a sucky, sucky friend. This is why I moved twelve times and didn’t tell you. You’re not cool, man. Not cool.”
Rory was staring at me with wide eyes. It was unnerving.
“What?” I said loudly.
“I never met a monster hunter before,” he said. “The things I see in other dimensions. The monsters, the backwards worlds, and the pain. Every time I come back from one, I’m relieved I don’t have to deal with the monsters once I’m home.”
“I deal with them every day,” I said.
“You have no home to go back to,” Rory said. “Your whole life is about monsters. I’m sorry.” He turned on the antique radio in the living room. He flipped through stations of static, old songs, and weird music I never heard before. He finally settled on one. It sounded like it was between stations, the music was full of static. He looked at us with worried eyes. “Are you sure you want to do this? It’s a nightmare in there, literally. There is no tether that will bring you back. You’ll just have to find your way.”
Augie stepped up. “We have to do this. For my mom.”
“I get that,” he said. He gripped the radio knob. “There are many lands in Ghostworld. This station will take you to the Recurrence.”
Serena handed me the jar. “The butterfly will lead you to Grace,” she said. “Keep it in the jar and see which way it’s pushing against the glass. But don’t let it out or it will fly away and you’ll never find her. Whichever side the butterfly is touching in the jar, that’s the way you need to go.”
“Like a compass,” I said. I took the jar and examined it. “And when we find Grace?”
“Open the jar and the butterfly will do the rest. It knows it’s way home.”
Augie and Landon stood beside me. I nodded to Rory. “Do what you do, kid.”
He slightly turned the knob and settled on the station. A song came on the radio. Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple.
I grinned. “‘Smoke on the Water’?”
Rory smiled. “Trust me, you don’t even want to see what happens when I play ACDC.”
The hallway to the bedroom shifted and moved. Parts of it gave way and crumbled into itself. It collapsed as if something was sucking the pieces of the wall into it from the other side. When the rumbling stopped, there was a seven-foot-wide hole in the wall leading to another dimension.
But if you didn’t know it was a gateway, it would look like it was part of the apartment. It didn’t look magical or brilliant. There were no flashing lights of energy or distortion waves. It was simply there, like a whole other room to the house. A room leading to the outdoors.
Seven stories up.
As the three of us gathered in front of the gateway, Rory gave us one last warning.
“In the Recurrence, time works differently,” he said. “When I went, every minute I spent there was an hour here. I wouldn’t take your sweet time if I were you. You don’t want to get back a hundred years from now.”
I tightened my hands around the jar. “Duly noted.”
“The Recurrence is the worst part of Ghostworld,” he said. “Your life force is alive still. They’ll sense that. And be attracted by it.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What do we do about that?”
Rory gave me a solemn look. “Run.”
We gathered at the entrance in the hallway. The world in front of us was full of gloom and despair, a wasteland of misery.
“Come on, boys,” I said, the butterfly compass in my hands. “Let’s save Grace.”
Chapter 43
The Recurrence
After a few minutes of hiking into the Recurrence, we walked through what appeared to be a desert made of garbage. It was a landfill going on for miles.
Landon turned around in a circle. “How are we supposed to find one person in all this mess?”
“Wait,” Augie said. “I recognize this place. It’s a junkyard.”
“Brilliant observation, Einstein,” Landon said. “How’d you guess?”
“No, I mean I know this exact junkyard. After my dad passed, my mom had to work two jobs
to keep up on the mortgage. She would drop me off at my uncle’s business while she was at work because she couldn’t afford daycare.”
“What’s your point?” I asked.
“My uncle owned a junkyard. This one. I remember this exact yard because I looked out the window every day at it. I used to explore and find cool stuff.”
I was coming to some conclusions. “Where’s your uncle now?”
“He died when I was four or five. Heart attack.”
Landon cocked his head. “You’re saying that the Recurrence is nothing more than the backyard of your uncle’s junkyard?”
“He has a point,” I said. “It’s possible we’re attracting the people in our lives who have died. People who are now here, in this dimension.”
Augie walked around the garbage heap. He approached a man crouched down going through a pile of junk. “Uncle Jake?”
His uncle turned around. He was dressed in a blue mechanic’s uniform. The name patch said Jake.
“You looking for some junk, boy?” Jake asked. “Jake’s Place has got what you need.”
“Uncle Jake, it’s me. Your nephew, August.”
Jake smiled a toothless smile. “You got a screw loose, pal? My little Augie is a kid. Same color hair though.”
“Uncle Jake, you’ve been here for over twenty years.”
“You need something?” he asked. “I guarantee, I got it in back.”
“I don’t want anything,” Augie said. “Why are you here?”
“Well, I live here, boy. This is my life. Where else would I be?”
“You’re supposed to be in Heaven,” Augie said. “With your wife. You shouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m right where I need to be. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have customers to attend to.”
He turned away. Augie grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. When Jake turned back, his face distorted. He looked like a tormented ghoul. Jake screamed like a banshee. The sound was shrill, bouncing off my eardrums.
I pulled Augie’s hand off Jake. His uncle’s face went back to normal and he walked away.
Augie took a step toward him, but I stopped him. “What’s wrong with my uncle?”
I watched his uncle walk aimlessly into the desert of garbage. There was no end to the heap. It went on forever. “Some people can’t let go,” I said. “Sometimes, the things they’ve known their whole life is all they dare to know.”
Augie shook his head. “No, no. My uncle was a good man. He shouldn’t be here. In this junk heap. He needs to be in Heaven.”
“It’s his choice,” I said.
“He doesn’t know any better,” I said.
“Maybe not,” I said. “But it’s still his choice. He has to learn and grow here just like he would on Earth.”
“He deserves Heaven.”
“With the state he’s in, Heaven doesn’t deserve him. Let him go, kid.”
“But it’s not fair.”
He stayed there for a few moments before I shook him free of his thoughts. We kept walking along a desert road. Tumble weeds passed by. It seemed as real as our world. It was no wonder ghosts got trapped here. They thought it was their waking life.
I held up the jar to see which way the butterfly was leaning. We kept going straight.
“It feels like we’ve been walking forever,” Landon said. He looked at his watch. “But it’s only been three minutes.”
“Which means three hours in the real world,” Augie said.
“No more delays,” I said. “We can’t afford to get distracted.”
“If it’s only been three minutes,” Augie said, “why does it feel like an hour?”
“Time doesn’t exist,” I said. “It’s relative.”
Landon rushed ahead of me. “You said we’re more likely to experience people who are connected to us somehow?”
“That’s my theory,” I said.
“I hope I don’t come across my ex-wife,” Landon said. “Talk about a monster.”
As we walked further, we came upon a city. It looked abandoned, decrepit, and destroyed. Like a nuclear bomb went off. The sky was black. The air was stale. There was no life to be seen or heard.
It was more like a bad dream than it was a physical dimension. Cars were upside down or inside out. Street signs had words that didn’t make sense. Even the buildings were off, either crooked or melting, like a Salvador Dali painting.
In the middle of the road was a house. But fate was not on my side, because it wasn’t just any house—
It was my house.
The one I grew up in.
In the distance, music was playing. A song I knew all too well.
‘Papa was a Rolling Stone.’
“No,” I said under my breath.
“Hey, that’s your song,” Augie said.
“We have to leave,” I said. “We shouldn’t be here.”
Landon started being a dick. “Oh, is the great Ivy afraid of something?”
“We have to go around it,” I said. But the butterfly was leaning against that side of the jar. In front of us. It wanted us to go into the house.
Damn.
I’ve never been known to walk away from a fight unless it was a tactical decision. But never out of fear. That instinct didn’t stop me before. I couldn’t let it stop me now.
“Fine,” I said. “Have it your way.”
We walked into the house. An old record was playing on the corner table in the living room.
Directly in the center of the room, hunched over a woman, beating her senseless…
…was my father.
Chapter 44
Replay
My father turned around and glared at me. His face was enraged. He ground his teeth and spit out the familiar words I heard a million times before. “Don’t sass me, boy. You disrespecting me?”
He charged toward me. I turned my shoulder to him to protect the butterfly. Augie jumped on him but passed right through. He rolled to the ground and fell against the couch.
“I can’t touch him,” Augie said.
“Because he’s not your ghost,” I said. “He’s mine.”
My father threw me across the room. This was oddly familiar too.
I crashed into the lamp and shelves. Knickknacks flew to the floor. I peered at the jar in my hands. The butterfly was safe. For now.
My father rushed me. Landon tried to attack. My father backhanded him to the ground. Before the bastard regained his stance, I swung.
My hand was heavy. Slow. Like cement blocks weighed them down. Like all those dreams when I was a child and couldn’t fight back.
I know seventeen martial arts styles. And I couldn’t even throw a punch. It fell short, barely hitting him in the chest.
He grabbed my throat and raised me to the air. “Don’t you ever try that again, boy.” He chucked me across the room. I flew into the television, cracking the screen. Glass shards from the TV impaled my spine. I looked at the precious cargo under my arm.
The jar was cracked.
Before I could get up, my father’s boot drove into my ribs. “Who do you think you are, boy?” he said, kicking me on the ground. “You think you’re better than me? You think you’re a man?” I looked to the woman on the floor.
It was my mother.
But my mother was alive in the real world. The figure of her here on the floor wasn’t really her, just a Remnant. An echo. A replay my father used to play out the scenario in this world.
But it didn’t matter if she wasn’t real. I still needed to help her.
I crouched down to lift her up.
My father beat his hand across my head. “I said to leave her, boy. You do as you’re told. Don’t disobey me.” He slapped me across the face. What should have been nothing more than a slap sent me spiraling across the floor.
As if I was a weightless.
It was like I was a ten-year-old boy all over again.
I got to my feet. “You’re
not a man,” I said.
He got in my face. “What did you say, you little prick?”
I stared him down. I wanted to flinch but I didn’t. “I said you’re not a man.”
He belted me across my face. It held the weight of forty years. But I stood my ground and didn’t fall.
His face was red, his veins were popping. “You think your shit don’t stink, you little asshole?”
I turned up straight and glared at him. “You’re a tiny, little man.” His knuckles barreled across my cheekbone.
“Say it again,” he said. “I will beat you so hard your mama will feel it. Say it again, you worthless piece of shit. I dare you.”
I returned to his eyes. “I don’t know why I was so afraid of you,” I said. “You’re a coward.”
He got his face so close to mine, I could smell the stench of his liquor-soaked breath. He yelled at me, spit spraying over my face. “You want to cry, you little bitch, I’ll give you something to cry about!”
He raised his fist.
But I learned a long time ago that the pain didn’t matter. All that mattered was how much pain you could take. All that mattered was getting back up again.
BANG!
Blood soaked the front of his shirt. He stumbled. He looked back at his shooter. It was a scrawny ten-year-old boy with dark hair. Holding his father’s .38 Special revolver.
He fired again.
The bullet tore through my father’s collarbone and out the back. He fell, dead, on my grandma’s quilted rug.
I helped my mother off the floor. She was so young and beautiful. I had forgotten how much.
I looked deep into her crying eyes. “You’ll never have to be afraid again, mom.”
With tears in her eyes, she smiled. Her hand came up to my face and stroked my cheek as if I was ten years old. I grabbed her hand and leaned into it. A warm smile lit up her face. “You’ll always be my handsome, strong, young man,” she said. “I’m so proud of you.”
She faded into dust. The ten-year-old boy with black hair stood on the other side of my father’s dead body, pistol in hand. He looked up at me.
His eyes were as dead as the body at his feet. In a wisp of wind, he faded into nothingness.
Memoirs of a Monster Killer: Killing Forever Book 1 Page 24
