Patchwork

by Karsten Knight

  The assassin is almost on me now, iron raised to bludgeon me, and I hear the scream of rebellion somewhere beneath the tides of fear and grief. It sounds like the caw of a crow at first, until my skin burns white hot and I hear six words, six words that spill out of my mouth, in my own voice:

  “You can’t take them from me.”

  As the fire swells in my chest, I squeeze the locket around my neck, squeeze it until I feel the glass face of the clock crack—

  Squeeze it until my body explodes into a billion particles of light, and my soul takes flight to the haven of another world.

  The Fourth Shade of Darkness

  Osiris’s Book of Riddles, 1203 A.D.

  They created me

  out of three kinds of darkness:

  The trunk of an African ebony tree

  carved to make my bones

  Black sand from a faraway shore

  where lava clashed with the sea

  melted to make my flesh

  And asphalt from a tar pit

  that has been bubbling since

  the earth thundered into being

  steeped and boiled to make my blood

  But there is a fourth shade of darkness

  which they’d forgotten

  An ingredient more important

  than sand and tar and wooden bones

  I am the silhouette of their dark hearts

  the deeds they could not do themselves

  the blood they could not spill

  They molded me out of shadows

  to stop the phoenix, because mankind

  Should not be saved from their sins

  by a time-traveling demon.

  They molded me out of shadows

  because it takes a time-traveling demon

  To catch one of its own

  I am the sphinx

  devourer of phoenixes

  feeder on fear

  demon of death

  And in the tradition of my namesake, Osiris,

  lord of the underworld

  Only I shall decide who lives and who dies.

  Patchwork Twisted

  When I rematerialize and the blinding light fades, I’m back on the same Vermont road.

  I lift my bowed head and lunge for the masked killer, ready to make him pay for what he’s done to my friends. Even if he kills me in the process.

  But my curled fingers find only air as they pass right through him. His body, from his black robe up to his terrifying mask, is only a ghostly, insubstantial hologram of the real thing, another memory in this godforsaken other realm. Soon, even his outline fades away like smoke carried off by the wind, and I’m alone.

  I’m back in the Patchwork world. Once again, my anxiety must have ripped me free right before the assassin could finish the job. To be certain, I unclasp the locket around my neck. The hands have returned to spinning in reverse.

  Like last time, it takes a minute for my brain to catch up with the events that just happened in reality … including the two buses in flames down in the ravine. I edge toward the cliff, terrified of the mass grave of teenage corpses I’ll undoubtedly find strewn over the river rocks below.

  I’m nearly there when the bus comes flying up out of the gully, landing back on two wheels, then four, its yellow siding just six inches from my face. It careens past me in reverse, brakes screeching furiously, while the massive eighteen wheeler blasts past me on my other side. The two vehicles rocket backward up the winding Vermont road to be joined by the other resurrected bus, until all three disappear around a sharp curve.

  As the aggressive hum of their engines vanishes into the night, I hear a familiar rumbling. My eyes grow wide. I know this sound.

  The guardrail ahead quivers. The earth at the edge of the valley rises up, then collapses altogether. The soil and grass and asphalt are one flaky pie crust, falling apart under the quake’s heavy fingers.

  And the line of the unraveling is moving toward me.

  I start sprinting toward the tree line, up the mountain. I’m a fast runner, and one hell of a base-stealer, but I’m not exactly a seasoned cross country athlete. The rough terrain of the mountain, the sharp incline, the nest of evergreen roots that I keep stumbling over—any poorly placed step could send me plunging into the oblivion behind me. The sound of world-crumbling draws nearer, the pine trees creaking and cracking and snapping in half as the abyss devours them.

  Just as I feel like I must be approaching the top of the mountain, a thick fog descends out of nowhere. As soon as I enter the mist, the sounds of destruction are replaced by a stillness as airy and light as the mist around me.

  When I pop out onto the other side, I blurt out, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  So far, Patchwork—the best name I can think to give to a world that I would otherwise call Hell—has consisted entirely of places from my immediate past: Boston Harbor, the softball diamond, the Green Mountains.

  Now I’ve emerged into a relic from my childhood. The wrought iron gates to Reverie Lake Park loom over me. An enormous padlock lists back and forth like someone just clasped it shut. In reality, this amusement park is out in Western Massachusetts in my hometown. So naturally, here, it’s been mashed together with a random interstate in rural Vermont.

  If I’m going to be spending more time here, Patchwork really needs to come with a mall directory, or at least some street signs.

  I trace my fingers along the chains that weave through the bars. This place has been shut down for nearly a decade. My dad took me here for one last tour of the rides the week before it closed its doors. I was eight years old then.

  No, I realize—it’s more than a childhood memory. My friends and I climbed over the gates earlier this year for a little bit of mischief and nostalgia. I mean, what kind of respectable teenagers would we be if we didn’t break into an abandoned amusement park to frolic?

  In fact, as that memory replays in my mind, the chains around the gate melt and liquefy until they splatter on the pavement. The padlock rusts and snaps off.

  And the gates swing open.

  As soon as I’m inside, the rides all spring to life. Now that I’ve finally stopped running, the events of the last 24 hours catch up with me again. Maybe it’s the spinning teacups on the ride in front of me that makes me dizzy. Maybe it’s cheerful calliope music bubbling out of the tents with the carnival games. Or maybe it’s the fact that I’m in a place of happy childhood nostalgia during one of the unhappiest moments of my life.

  I choose this moment to keel over and vomit my pre-game spaghetti dinner all over the pavement.

  It’s my fault, I think as I wipe the spittle from my mouth. I let my guard down back in reality. Sure, I spent the entire day on edge, waiting to be attacked, making little adjustments to the train wreck that was my junior year, but the moment I foolishly thought that I’d bested the assassin and escaped my fate, he reappeared to take my friends from me. Again.

  Not to mention that I’d barely escaped reality in time. Ten seconds later and he would have bludgeoned me to death with that tire iron. What happens then? If I die over there before I can escape to this freak-show world of memories, then do the deaths of Slade, Ivy, Wyatt, Troy, and everyone on those two buses wind up permanent?

  Purging myself of my last meal actually makes me feel better in a way. Like if I can rid myself of my last supper, maybe I can expunge everything else that happened that day, too. When I finish, I collect myself as best I can. As much as I’d like to continue the one-woman pity party, there will be time to guilt-trip myself once I’ve conjured my friends back from the dead again. Given my run-in with the demons in the shipping containers on my last trip to Patchwork, the last thing I really want to do is wander into an abandoned amusement park that was creepy to begin with, but I don’t really have a choice. The way I came from is nothing but a dark void now. I can only pray that like the softball diamond, Reverie Lake Park contains some sort of portal back to an earlier time.

  I dab my wet eyes, swallo
w the horrific final image of Troy’s bus going off the edge of the cliff, and head deeper into the park. I only make it as far as the food court before the memories kick in.

  “Holy shit, I’ve struck gold.”

  This time, the voice belongs to Slade. His hazy, luminous memory-self pops his head out from behind a counter in one of the food tents. He holds up a bag filled to the top with cream-colored lumps on Popsicle sticks. “What are the chances that these corn dogs are still good to eat after ten years? Aren’t they supposed to survive a nuclear holocaust?”

  Two booths down, Ivy and Marcie Graham shimmer into existence. They’re both playing the game where you pitch baseballs at a conveyor belt with bottles on it. “You’re thinking of termites,” Ivy corrects him as she lets a fastball go. “You know, the organisms you evolved from.”

  I remember this. I was busy trying to plug the whack-a-dinosaur game back in, because Troy said it was his favorite.

  Slade ignores her. “Hey, Marcie.” He rips the bag open and waves one of the corn dogs. “I’ll eat this entire thing … if you flash me.”

  Marcie snorts. “If you’re looking for the place where dreams come true, try Disneyland, buddy.” She pitches one of the baseballs at Slade’s head. It misses by a solid foot.

  “Dreams still come true in Reverie Lake Park,” he protests. “Just mostly for, you know, raccoons and drug dealers.” With that, the three of them dematerialize, and the feathery remnants of their bodies drift away.

  Troy is the next person to make a cameo on my walk through the park. Strands of light weave together in the air beside me, and next thing I know, I’m holding hands with a ghost.

  When he excitedly says, “Come on!” and tries to drag me toward the Around the World in 80 Yards ride, my hand slides right through his transparent fingers. In the end, I’m left helplessly trying to keep up with a boy who’s actually somewhere else.

  Sounds a lot like the last three months of our relationship.

  We pause in the ride’s entrance, and Troy wraps his arms around me. I can’t feel them. I try to remember how it felt to have him touch me with that sort of yearning, but even that memory is slipping away. “I figure we can try to get the ride operational,” he suggests, “maybe cozy up in our little plastic boat as it sails along its track at breakneck speeds of up to two-miles-an-hour.” He leans in and whispers in my ear. “And most importantly, we’ll have five whole minutes unsupervised.”

  My mouth never moves, but I hear my voice echo down the tunnel of time. “Let me get this straight. You’re getting turned on … by a ride populated with creepy, singing dolls?”

  Troy cocks an eyebrow. “You found my personal in the man-seeking-ventriloquist-dummy section of the newspaper, didn’t you?” Then he dashes inside and his body evaporates before he reaches the stairs. I know he’s nothing but an instant replay of the real Troy, but it still hurts to see him go. Even the shadow of his memory is a comforting presence in my otherwise solitary confinement here.

  I linger outside. I can continue to wander without direction or guidance through the amusement park, or I can follow my boyfriend’s memory into the ride—knowing full well that it could be another demonic deathtrap like the shipping yard had proven last time.

  “You’ve never led me astray before, Troy,” I whisper. Then I cautiously enter the brightly colored pavilion and follow the ramps down to the “docks” below, where I step into one of the plastic boats. I’m a foot and a half taller than the first time I went on this ride, and it’s a tight fit. The smell of stale chlorine in the water is strangely comforting.

  The boat starts moving on its own, and maybe it’s my imagination, but I think I see a flicker of red inside the tinted glass of the control booth.

  My little ship passes under an ornamental archway and into a room where little dolls are singing and dancing in traditional Scandinavian garments. Toy soldiers pound on drums. They’re all singing this mind-numbing song about how “the children of all nations are one.” I wish they’d shut the hell up so I could think in peace, because I have a lot to process right now.

  Whenever I used to get really stressed about all the little things, my dad had this saying: “Whether a jigsaw puzzle has three pieces or a thousand, you still put it all together one piece at a time.” It’s about time I take that to heart, so I start at the beginning, and I start simple.

  1) Someone is trying to kill me. Well, not strictly me—he’s trying to kill my friends and classmates as well. But that taunting text message right before he rammed the buses off the cliff had been addressed directly to me.

  2) There’s a pattern to his killings. They’re not delicate assassinations, they’re mass murders. I’m just a high school girl. If I was the only one he was after, he could probably walk right up to me during school and slip a dagger into my back. No, both of his attacks have been large-scale and involved a sizable victim pool from the Daedalus student body. I may be lacking his motive, but if I’m to believe the demons in the shipping crates on my last visit to Patchwork, then at least I have a name to pair with his masked face:

  Osiris.

  3) Osiris must be able to remember everything as we travel back on the timeline—the same way that I can. If his memory of the prom and the month leading up to it had been wiped clean like everyone else’s, he wouldn’t have known to move his strike forward, to change up the game plan. But he knew.

  And he did.

  And he can.

  4) What for years I’ve thought to be your run-of-the-mill anxiety disorder may be something far more powerful, something … paranormal. Twice now I’ve saved myself by ripping free of the time-stream, with only moments to spare, and twice, it’s been immediately preceded by the same searing feeling in my chest. Both times, it was as though the deaths of my friends had pushed me over an emotional threshold, and that was what activated my dormant ability.

  I lean out of the boat and dip my fingers in the water. Then there’s this place, this checkerboard of memories. For all intents and purposes, Patchwork seems to serve as some superhighway between a future that’s no longer happened and a past I’m about to do over. Why me, though? Why do I have access to this other realm? Why am I the one who’s been burdened with bringing my classmates back to life?

  Just prior to my last departure from Patchwork, that sinister-looking warrior in the medieval garb had called me a “phoenix.” I’ve never exactly been the most studious scholar in history class, so the only thing I remember about the phoenix is that it was a mythological bird that would die in a fiery pyre, then return resurrected from the ashes. I, Renata Lake, am not a bird. In the last forty-eight hours, I’ve almost drowned once, almost been murdered twice, but no fire, no cinders, and definitely no feathers.

  Maybe that’s how mythology works: you disguise difficult truths as fiction so they won’t be forgotten. Craft a myth about a big red chicken that spontaneously combusts and comes back reborn, and people think it’s a cute story. They pass it down for generations, until two thousand years later, even oblivious American students have at least heard the myth. On the other hand, tell a story about humans born with the power to make adjustments to the past, and everyone will simply write the truth off as the ramblings of some wild-eyed lunatic.

  While that might partially explain “what am I?” the question of “where am I?” remains a mystery. The longer I spend in Patchwork, the more I feel this tingling déjà vu planting seeds in my brain, this growing certainty that I’ve been here before. Not recently, and not with these memories, but another time long ago. I’ve never been one to believe in reincarnation, but when you find yourself being hunted on a journey through time, it makes you start to reevaluate your definition of “impossible.”

  My boat floats past a series of colorful windmills. Everything here, even a sacred childhood memory like this one, feels ominous to me now. Although escaping to Patchwork has saved my life twice, there’s something sinister about this place. My memories make up its individual pieces, bu
t overall it remains its own creature. The medieval warrior, the demons in crates, the way pieces of the landscape are slowly unraveling into the oblivion—it feels like Patchwork is intent on never letting me leave.

  That’s when I notice that the singing from the speakers has gone quiet. The dancing around me has stopped. And gradually, the upbeat orchestra music that has been annoying me for the last five minutes grows fainter, until it no longer even echoes from the rooms beyond. A lead-heavy silence fills the ride. And slowly, all the dolls turn to stare at me. The shepherd with the panpipes. The archers on the parapet. The spirited flamenco dancers. All leering down at me. Their heads gradually turn, keeping time with the speed of my boat.

  I haven’t been this creeped out since I thought I was being followed home after dark one night last summer. “How much longer is this ride?” I whisper.

  The boat stops dead in the water. I sigh and start to roll up the bottoms of my sweatpants. Looks like I’m going to have to wade my way out of this memory. If only I brought my galoshes.

  I lower one foot out of the boat. Right as I’m about to jump into the knee-deep reservoir, I stop myself, because I’ve just seen a yellow shimmer in the water that shouldn’t be there.

  I lean over the edge of the boat to get a better look. It’s difficult to see into the water under the low light, but when I recognize the creatures swarming around me, I fall back into the boat’s hard plastic interior.

  To anyone else, they might look like harmless, colorful frogs.

  But I recognize this species. They’re golden dart frogs.

  The most poisonous species on the planet.

  I know this because I’ve seen them before, on a biology class field trip to the University of Massachusetts last September, where the animal sciences department that my dad used to work for hosted an event called “Pick Your Poison.” It was a collection of venomous animals from around the world—most memorably, the golden dart frogs. Here in Patchwork, they look every bit as real as they did back in Massachusetts. Skin so vibrantly yellow it looks like hot rod paint. Black spots that portend death to all that touch them. The bulging coal eyes that unblinkingly follow you no matter where you move.