by Micah Thomas
“I want to.”
“Do it. Burn the past.”
Thelon closed his eyes and tossed the phone into the flames. His body shivered and his teeth chattered as a wave of fear and anticipation passed over him.
“Thelon, can I say something? And I’m really not trying to be offensive here.” She gestured for him to sit closer to her and he did.
Cassie rubbed his back with one hand and together they watched the phone’s rubber casing melt. “Psych isn’t my specialty. I was a triage nurse. Emergencies. Battlefield injuries. Most of what I know about the mind I learned in my own therapy for PTSD.”
“You think there’s something wrong with me?” Thelon asked, vulnerability in his tone. He thought about his Google searches and frightening mental illness self-diagnoses.
“There’s something called Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Panic Disorder. When we get done with whatever it is we are doing, maybe find a therapist who specializes in that? There’s things that can help when the feelings start to overwhelm you, you know?”
“Yeah,” he said, choked up.
Cassie sighed and patted his back a couple times, almost too hard. “How about this? When strange shit start going down, we do strange shit back.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like laughing at it when our nerves are shot. Stand on our heads, talk like Cookie Monster. Whatever. In therapy, that was one way of coping with trauma.”
“I’ll give it a shot if you do.”
“Okay, me give it a go,” she said in a Cookie Monster voice.
They sat silently by the dying fire. Thelon’s breathing slowed and a weight lifted. There’d be no more nerve-shattering calls. That part of this thing was over, but Thelon wondered if it was the worst. Nestor wasn’t helping me. He was fucking me up, but this whole plan is his. If Henry and Cassie are remembering things too, I can just trust that the three of us can figure it out together, without T or Nestor. Just us.
He yawned, an automatic act of the body. “You mind if I go to sleep? It’s been a long mother fucking day.”
“Go on. I’ll douse this when I’m done sitting out here. Good night, Thelon. Try not to worry so much. Everything is going to be okay.”
“Oh,” he said, suddenly remembering. “Henry, um…wanted me to give this to you.”
She took the note, smiled, but didn’t unfold it.
Probably something private. I wonder if it’s a poem.
Thelon crawled into his tent and under the worn sleeping bag. A moment later, he heard Cassie laughing and it was a comforting sound. The ground was soft under his back and the night was close to silent. He’d done something just now and he regretted it, but he trusted in Cassie and Henry. He only hoped that he wasn’t fucking up too bad. He listened to his breathing and the hiss of what he presumed was Cassie pouring water on the fire. Then all was fully quiet, and he slept.
~
THELON WOKE TO the sight of Cassie holding his tent flap open, kneeling, head up and alert. It was still dark.
“Hey, you’re awake,” she said.
“Yeah, you just woke me up.”
“Did you hear something?”
“Other than you?” He listened now, poised and waiting as Cassie. He did hear something. Music; electronic, but he couldn’t make it out. “Sounds like there’s a party going on. Maybe a hillbilly rave or some shit?”
“No. I heard something strange. It was close and loud as fuck. Like an elephant screaming.”
Thelon got up and crawled out of his tent. “Henry snores.”
Unsatisfied, Cassie shook her head. “Henry,” she said with an urgency. In one , she stepped over and unzipped Henry’s tent. “He’s gone.”
Her head snapped back to meadow, posture determined.
“Maybe he’s taking a piss or went over to hang out with the party kids.”
“I don’t know. Something feels off.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to crash a party. You coming with?”
With flashlight beams catching on rabbits running through the grass and their shoes getting wet with dew, they walked down the gentle slope towards the direction of the noise. Thelon saw the party was a small ruckus. He’d been hoping for gentle hippies, but found five ugly dudes looking fucked up, unaware of their approach, nodding off despite the music blaring.
Cassie shut off the stereo and that got their attention—two were sober enough to glance up in surprise. The others remained mostly unconscious. “Hey, did you see a dude come over here a little while ago?”
These two dudes could have walked out of the 1990s slacker era; torn jeans, flannel shirts, filthy beanies over greasy hair. One tall, one short, they both stood and angrily shouldered up, puffing their chests, and attempting to look tough at Cassie and Thelon.
“Easy, guys. We’re just looking for our friend,” Thelon said raising his hands in peace.
“Fuck you,” the short one said and spat a phlegm loogie, which landed too close to Cassie’s foot.
She didn’t flinch. Thelon marveled at how she carried herself with an absolute sense of command. Here she was, standing off against two shady dudes and still exuding calm, steady, control.
When she talked, she intruded on the goon’s personal space. “Here’s what’s gonna happen,” Cassie said in a low voice.
Unsure whether masculine pride should make him step up or not, Thelon watched as the muscles in Cassie’s cheeks tightened. She’s gonna fight. Oh shit.
“Fuck you, bitch,” the other one said.
Shoulders straight, hair pulled back, and head up, Cassie looked every part the soldier as she stepped even closer to the dude. With crackhead speed, the tall man swung his fist at Cassie.
Thelon heard the hit on her jaw and knew it had to hurt, but he was learning Cassie made an art of ignoring pain. She straightened up and threw an elbow to the dude’s jaw that landed with a sickening smack louder than his own punch. That shit is broken. No wonder Henry fell for her. Girl is strong.
The short guy backed up, eyes darting around as if searching for a weapon.
“Don’t,” Cassie said, and her voice carried authority.
The man on the ground groaned.
“Did you see our friend?” Cassie repeated.
The tall man fixed his posture and cradled his face with his hand. The fight had left him, and he said in a meek, admonished druggie voice, “Yeah, he came over. Asked if we could turn the music down, but fuck that.”
Thelon saw glass pipes and noticed the stink of undeniable meth.
“Okay. Now we are getting somewhere. Where did he go?” Cassie pressed.
The short one sat down and picked up his pipe, readying another little tinfoil rock. “Oh yeah. It was kinda fucked to be honest. He got picked up.”
“Picked up?”
“Yeah. Some ugly fuckers drove up on us, grabbed his ass, and threw him in a van.”
“Did you call the police?” Thelon asked.
“Are you a fucking bitch or something? Why don’t you just go fuck yourselves.”
Cassie twitched her arm and said, “I can kick your asses all fucking day.”
“I don’t know, man. They just took him.”
Cassie squinted hard at them, teeth gritted in a frown.
Thelon reached to tug at her arm, thought better of it, and started moving away from the firepit.
The dimwits tended to their friend and lit a fresh rock as Cassie and Thelon exited their shitty scene, back across the field to their car in the lot by the restrooms.
Cassie shook her head and looked at Thelon. “Not good.”
Thelon paced back and forth, unable to hold her gaze. “Shit. Hold on. I’m operating on like, three hours of sleep and so are you.” Thelon struggled to find the rational path in his mind, but this was bad. This is unbelievably bad.
“What do you want to do?” Cassie asked.
“Give me a minute,” he said, raising a finger to his lips. Give me a mi
nute. Give me a minute. He went into the Porta Potty and reached into his pocket for his phone, but remembered he’d tossed into the fire. Thelon sat on the toilet seat in the dark stink of the stall, clutching his stomach, feeling the nerves fester into gut gremlins down below. Nestor, T, Jesus, what do I do?
No one answered his prayer, but he dissociated. He wasn’t Thelon. He wasn’t anyone. The toilet wasn’t the toilet. A parcel of information landed in his brain without metacognition or thought. He saw and knew. He knew where Henry was. He knew everything about it, except how it was that he knew. Henry was just down the street in a storage unit, but he wasn’t alone, and he was in trouble. That was the part that mattered.
He exited the portable bathroom, excited about his revelation. “I know where he is.” His eyes went wide at what he saw. Cassie was leaning on the car with the driver’s side door open, engine running, radio blaring rock music, while loading a handgun. “What the fuck is that?”
“Let me introduce you to an old friend of mine. I call her the Smol Dragon.”
“Oh, fuck no. You sure we need that?”
She gave him a funny look, but it wasn’t doubt that filled her features. No. Her lips pressed into a stern line as she squinted, eyes deadly focused.
Thelon gulped hard and nodded.
“Let’s go get him then.”
He was glad Cassie didn’t ask how he knew. Didn’t press on that weirdness any more than acceptance. What could I even say? Explaining visions to someone would sound ridiculous, but Thelon, man, she doesn’t even think that.
They got climbed into the car and Thelon drove slowly, minding the speed limit, not wanting to get pulled over at this exact moment with a weapon in the car. More than that, he worried about gun play. He’d never been comfortable around them; never really been around them. This could get fucked up. Fucking potato heads. What are we doing?
“What’s the situation?” Cassie asked as they maneuvered through a small downtown, traffic lights blinking red in idle warning rather than cycling from red to yellow to green.
“It’s a storage unit place,” Thelon said. “We’re almost there. A row of storage units and he’s in one of them.”
“Here’s what’s gonna happen. When we get close, lights off, pull up around the back. Slow.”
“Anyone tell you that you’re kinda scary?”
“From time to time,” Cassie said without a hint of humor.
Thelon marveled at the change that had come over her since Henry went missing. She was different. Laser sharp, decisive, her usual Joking banter gone. She’d taken his word without explanation.
He took several deep breathes in succession. If she could be calm, he’d try to match her. Who does this? How does she know what’s right to do? How are things so clear for her? Cassie had mentioned her military experience. In a compartment of his mind, Thelon knew that fact about her. Still, he’d spent time with Cassie, observing her goof off with Henry and never anticipated seeing the soldier. Everyone carried secret selves. Thelon supposed he did, too. Henry and Cassie gave him trust and he lured them into trouble. Pointless, wheel-spinning trouble. Where is this fucking trip going?
Thelon had to shake it off and focus on driving. He followed Cassie’s instructions, and killed the headlights as he turned into the complex. Not even fenced in, the lot presented no to barrier to entry. An anxious excitement crept up Thelon’s belly and his bowels rumbled. He wasn’t a tough guy. He’d never been in a fight, let alone one that involved guns. He sank, retreating mentally from the present to visualize himself as a tiny little Thelon in his mind’s control room; his body was just a thing to operate like a giant robot.
“Thelon?” Cassie asked, voice calm. “Is this it? Is this going to be the big one? Good times over?”
“What do you mean?”
She looked into his eyes, searching. “When the bomb went off in the war, I almost died. Afterwards, I wanted to die. The pain was too much. Later, I couldn’t make anything of my life because I had trouble letting go of that dead feeling.”
“And now?”
“I’ve never told anyone this. Not even my shrinks. Three times since the accident. First, lying on morphine expecting to die. Second, months later, this gun in my mouth as I worked up the nerve to end the pain. And then, third, a few days before you showed. Each of these times, I heard another Cassie and I thought it was like my subconscious or something, but she said the same thing each time. She said: ‘Live. Wait for a sign. The worst is yet to come.’”
Thelon nodded meekly.
“You are my sign. So I’m asking, is this going to be the worst? The reason I stayed alive?”
“No. I don’t know what this is.”
“But you know what I’m talking about, right?” Cassie’s face dropped its tension and she looked at Thelon with more openness than he’d ever witnessed in another person. Total vulnerability, but also bravery.
“Yeah, Cassie. Whatever is at Black Star is going to make this look like small potatoes. We just have to get through the weird shit to reach the end of the rainbow.”
She closed her eyes and breathed deep. After a minute, she asked, “You ready?”
Cat meowed in her carrier as if to say, yes.
Thelon flinched at the sound, at the situation, but an earie calm descended upon him. “Yeah. I’m ready.” His words came out slowly—no, time slowed. Or he had sped up.
Unexpected, a jolt of clarity filled his mind too fast for him to wonder where it came from. Thelon saw again. The image formed crystal clear in his mind’s eye. Henry, tied to a chair in the dark; a busted lip, black eye, smiling through spittle and blood on his chin. The three dudes he saw standing over Henry didn’t have faces. What are they? Fucking hell, what are they? In this knowledge that hit him, he knew they were not people. He wasn’t even sure if the gun would be useful, but he didn’t know how to describe this to Cassie.
“There are three of them.” Thelon heard himself talking like a record player set to too slow a speed.
“Armed?”
“I don’t know. There’s something strange. I don’t see it all.”
Cassie sighed and Thelon heard it stretch out in a loud hiss of air. “Everything about you is strange, but hey, Henry means a lot to you, doesn’t he?”
Thelon snapped out his time slurry and grounded in the moment with her.
He coughed and shook his head, relieved to be able to speak normally again. “In the other place, when I met Henry mind to mind, I was bound to him. Some part of that carried over to here, I think. I wonder if it did for all of us. Deeper than any of the memories or surface thoughts he ever shared, I knew that he loved you. It was such a complete feeling. I don’t have the words. Encompassing. Absolute.”
“Damn. I get it.”
“Me, too.”
His internal dialog swung on a pendulum and gears shifted inside him once more. The calm dissipated as if it had never been there, replaced by a pressing urgency. An invisible fist tightened around Thelon’s throat and gut. He felt he might get sick in the car and wanted—no, needed—to get this action over with. With effort, he barked, “Hey, are we waiting for one of them to come out or are we just going in?”
Before Cassie could answer, Thelon exited the car—or more accurately, his body started moving while he watched, unable to control himself. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
He existed as eyes, and racing intensities of excitement and dread separate from the body carried him forth. Thelon exerted pressure and found his jaw muscles; he clenched them until his teeth ached.
Still, his body pressed onward. Taking that horrendous tensing sensation, he craned his neck against resisting tendons and forced his gaze back towards the car. He saw Cassie mouth a ‘What the fuck?’ at him as she too got out of the car.
His vision whipped around to face forward, disorienting him. Thelon’s perception sped to maddening velocity and time slowed to a crawl. Oh, God, help me. From his perch behind his eyes, he watched the world shake as he sprint
ed straight towards the rear wall of the storage building. His rational mind flinched, anticipating the pain of impact. Thelon was certain that he’d break his nose as he zoomed right up the bricks, but no! In a rush of intense panic and confusion, he passed straight through the wall.
With the thrill of the impossible, the incongruity of experience without any point of reference, rational thought failed and shut down. Thelon’s energy entered the storage unit. He knew the three specters who abducted Henry couldn’t see him. He perceived them while he stood not even a foot away like store front manikins, cardboard cutouts, or movie props. He saw this. He interpreted it to be true. What are they?
Thelon also knew that his time in this special altered state would not last forever. Henry’s eyes…bound in a blindfold…he wouldn’t be able to see me anyway…I’m indivisible. No. Invisible. Indivisible. Thinking didn’t work as good as knowing. He let the knowing happen.
He knew he was in Henry’s presence, but Henry didn’t look like a man. I’m not looking with my eyes because I don’t have any eyes when I’m invisible. Thelon perceived, not saw, Henry as a glowing Easter egg, pulsing and emanating golden light. The specters, in contrast, held no light, containing only shadows wrapped in shadows with silver tendrils thin as spider webs stretching out the backs of their heads.
Thelon reveled in the sensory information passing through him. This is all important. More knowledge existed, ready for his acquisition if only he cast his attention in any direction. The thrill was like bumps of cocaine, like a hit of speed, and his rational mind grew drunk on the bafflement. The language part of him—his thinking apparatus—stopped again, replaced by the sensation of readiness for imminent action.
The urgency to engage and interact triggered another shift in his perception. Thelon saw light bleeding, particles penetrating through the front door, casting strange beams across the dark room. That luminous golden shine bore a signature, a personality, and he knew her because he has seen her. Cassie. Beyond the heavy door, her body yanked with sinew and strength at the handle. He saw. There was a latch in place. A bolt and lock.
Thelon experienced pleasurable pressure from all sides; a bubble of energy compressed upon him and popped. Protective, primal, and possessive emotions coursed through him. He wouldn’t allow the specters to touch her.
