by Rysa Walker
“Just stop fighting me. I’ve tried to get you—to get us—there twice now. I pulled you out at the school. And again when you were in the police car. But you keep clawing your way back.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t if you’d tell me what’s going on! Are you saying I’m like…in The Matrix or something?”
Even though Chase hasn’t seen the movies, he knows the memes. Real world, fake world. That Morpheus dude in the black glasses holding out his hands—choose the red pill or the blue.
Chase hears the noise again from the tree line, but he doesn’t pull his eyes away from Raum. He can almost see the calculation going on behind Raum’s eyes. Truth or lie? Trust or deceive?
And Raum can obviously hear that thought, because dark glasses appear out of nowhere. Raum’s eyes are totally hidden, and all Chase can see is his own dimly lit reflection. In the left lens, he’s standing behind a hand that holds a blue pill. Same thing in the right lens, except the pill is red.
“You’re not in The Matrix, Chase. You are the matrix. You’re breaking down, and you’re going to take us all…with…you…” Raum’s head jerks toward the trees, and then he takes three rapid steps forward. He places both hands on Chase’s chest and shoves him backward.
Chase expects his ass to hit the pavement. But it doesn’t. He keeps falling into blackness.
Directly above him, through a Chase-shaped hole, he sees hundreds of crows lift off from the trees to descend on the spot in the road where Raum had been standing.
But Raum is gone. The only thing he left behind is the pair of bright-orange sneakers, which tumble into the darkness along with Chase.
Six
BEN
Ben wakes to a whistling noise. A teakettle, maybe?
His eyelids flutter, but opening them seems like a gargantuan task.
No. Not a kettle. It’s the wind. A tiny trickle of memory says it’s coming in through the window above his bed. The events of the past two nights seem to be mashed into one confused, sodden lump, and he can’t quite piece together how the window got broken. Wasn’t his fight with Ralph in the living room?
But he fought Ralph at the Grimshaw house, too, right? Which had suddenly turned into a hospital or maybe a school, and then this trailer. Ralph had raised the gun, and Ben had squeezed his eyes tight, dead certain that it was the end, that he’d feel buckshot ripping him in half.
When he’d felt nothing after the gunshot, he’d cautiously opened his eyes to find himself on the floor of the Grimshaw house, mere inches from the spot where Marybeth had been swallowed up. No gun, no Ralph, no trailer. No rising-sun hospital sign over the doorway.
Just an abandoned house that stank of rot, mildew, and God only knew what else. Ben had staggered out the door. No pumpkin. No Marybeth. Even his goddamn truck was gone. So he’d taken the only option left and began walking down the hill.
Walking? That was a joke. He’d run, stumbling to the ground more than once. Not just to get away from the Grimshaw place, but because he needed to find—
Chase. Because Chase needs you. Wake up, Benjamin.
The voice is familiar. He was dreaming about her when the wind woke him up. She was trying to tell him something, but he can’t remember what. If he focuses, maybe he can follow that thread back into sleep.
Wake up!
Ben tries to lift his head, but it’s heavy. Swollen. And even though he’s freezing, he doesn’t want to move. He wants to crawl back into that dream. There was a woman. It definitely wasn’t his mom. Was it Marybeth? He doesn’t think so.
Is MB even real?
The memory that spurred that question shocks him fully awake. He’s still dizzy, and his head hurts like a son of a bitch. Yesterday’s events begin to fall into place, but he pushes them aside, trying to focus.
Chase. Where’s Chase?
Ben opens his eyes slowly. His bedroom. He’d know this dirty and threadbare carpet anywhere. The lamp is still on, casting a dim glow across the room. His father lies next to him. Facing him. Ben stares at the matted hair and clotted blood on the man’s head.
Close your eyes. Go back to sleep. You’re still dreaming.
Another whistle cuts through his stupor. The window is broken. He remembers the window breaking. His mother was there. And a bird. The bird from the library, with the white eyes. Then his father came in, and…
Dreaming. Maybe you can get back to that other dream. That was a better dream. You know her voice. She’ll help you. Help you find—
Chase.
Ben opens his eyes again. This time, he props himself up on his elbow, even though it hurts like hell. His muscles are stiff, and his joints are locked from the cold.
For a moment, he thinks he’s found Chase, but it’s just the kid’s tattered Transformers blanket. Bits of the broken window glass litter the carpet around it.
The weird toy monkey lies on top of the blanket, now so misshapen that Ben wouldn’t have been able to identify it at all if not for the brass cymbals. One of the arms is partially detached from the body, and the monkey’s brown fur is matted and stained, its cymbals and wooden base smeared with blood. Did Chase do this? Or maybe it was his mom. Maybe she came back and—
No. Aileen Rey didn’t kill Ralph. He’s not sure she could kill him, but the monkey makes him certain that it was Chase. He hated that thing with the same fury he hated Ralph. Ben feels a nervous laugh rising in his throat, wondering if the tiny cymbals clashed when Chase brought the thing down on Ralph’s skull.
Ben glances back at Ralph’s body, wondering if he should check for a pulse. He doesn’t want to touch him, though, and there’s really no need. It’s pretty obvious that the man is dead. Ben’s only question is how? The monkey isn’t all that heavy. How could it have possibly done that much damage?
Then he sees the baseball bat on Chase’s bed. Hair and blood cling to the smooth wooden surface. Did he start with the bat or the monkey? Ben really hopes the bat was first. Otherwise, Ralph would have fought back. And Chase…
“Chase?”
But Chase doesn’t answer. Ben calls out his name a few more times, then slowly pulls himself to standing. He makes it as far as the bedroom door before the dizziness takes hold and he has to stop, leaning against the frame until the world stops spinning.
When it does, he risks a look back at the bedroom, hoping Ralph will have vanished like before. But no such luck.
Ben surveys the room again, trying to think through his options. He could call Tucker. Say he killed Ralph in self-defense. In defense of Chase. Of his mom, wherever the hell she is. He thinks there’s a chance he’d get off with little more than a slap on the wrist. Like Chad said earlier, it’s an open secret that the man is abusive.
He could torch the trailer. Pack a bag for him and Chase…
Chase.
Ben drags himself into the hallway. He checks the other bedroom, then the bathroom. For once in his life, he’s glad the trailer is so tiny, because there just aren’t many places to hide. By the time he reaches the kitchen, Ben is certain that he’s the only person in the house…or at least the only one still drawing breath.
He finds a bottle of ibuprofen, shakes three into his palm, and hunts for a clean glass. When the search comes up empty, he dry swallows them and sinks down into one of the kitchen chairs.
Chase must have panicked once he realized what he’d done. Panicked and ran. But where? And why hadn’t he waited until Ben was conscious?
Maybe Mom had—
No. None of what you’re seeing right now is real, Ben. Focus on what’s important. On the one thing that’s real.
The voice in his mind is the woman from the dream. But focusing isn’t exactly an easy task at the moment. Ben read the Signs of Concussion checklist they passed around on the first day of football practice, and he can tick off most of them right now. Ringing in the ears? Check. Blurred vision? Check. Temporary loss of consciousness? Check. Headache? Check, circle, and underline.
You just focused enough to
remember the signs of concussion, the woman in his head says. So fine, stick with lists. List all of the things that cannot be real.
It takes a moment, but he finds a pen and an old envelope in the stack of junk on the end table. And even though it hurts to focus his eyes, he does, and begins writing in chronological order.
Playground. The crowd pouring out the door as soon as he thought about how odd it was to see only a few kids. Identical pink-clad sextuplets. And it wasn’t just him who saw that. Chase had confirmed it in the car later, without Ben even mentioning that part. He said he’d seen duplicates and had also seen kids vanish. Ben had written that off as crazy, but he’s seen more than one person just flat-out disappear in the past twenty-four hours. Chase had said a lot of other stuff in the truck as they drove to the library, and he’d written all of that off, too. Stuff about Ben being his dad, not his brother. That still feels false, but why does he keep seeing these older versions of himself? Even as a dead body, Ralph Rey looks more like Ben than he did in the one…
…the one photograph he’d kept hidden in a dresser drawer, rolled up inside a sock. Ralph and Aileen Rey on their wedding day. That sock had followed him each time he moved. Through college, marriage, divorce…
Ben shakes his head, sending a ripple of pain from temple to temple. The thought dissipates, scattering like raindrops. All he can remember is the word sock. He jots it down below the word playground. Maybe it will come back to him later.
Locker room. He underlines those words twice, because everything that happened after he stepped into that shower felt wrong, like a living nightmare. From Freddy Freaking Krueger to the blood to the black dot slowly appearing on his lottery ticket. None of it felt real.
Grimshaw. Marybeth vanishing. Chase appearing out of nowhere and then disappearing. The painting over the door—Every Day a Brighter Day at Hillcrest—and then he’s in this trailer, eyes squeezed shut, expecting Ralph’s gun to blow his head off.
Truck. Gone, even though he knows damn well he didn’t walk up that hill.
Bird. Not a normal bird. And whatever that was in their bedroom last night, it hadn’t been Aileen Rey. The white-eyed thing that had punched the living hell out of him hadn’t been Ralph, either. And it wasn’t just the eyes. Ben remembered when the Ralph-thing landed the first punch. It felt like his father’s fist had morphed into lead.
Ben scans back through his list of not-real things. The only thing connected to this trailer that feels real to him is Chase. Not the weird ghostlike Chase who was at Grimshaw, but the solid flesh-and-bone kid who shares a room with him. The kid who has been trying to tell him that none of this is real. The kid who has been begging him to listen.
And the kid who had to kill the monster back there in the bedroom all on his own, because Benjamin Rey was too lost in whatever godforsaken fantasy this is to pay attention to his own son.
His son. Not his brother.
Find him. Find Chase.
The woman’s voice again. The one he still can’t place. But it doesn’t really matter whose words they are. All that matters at this moment is that she’s right.
He pushes himself to standing and goes to the back door. The clock over the microwave says it’s nearly two in the morning. What time did Tucker drop them off? He can’t remember, but he’s pretty sure it was before midnight, which means he was unconscious for a couple of hours, at least.
He pushes the back door open, expecting to see the front of another trailer, as always. There are fourteen trailers on this lot. Someone with a perverse sense of humor named the place Sycamore Meadow, but there’s no meadow, and if there ever was a sycamore tree, someone must have chopped it down so they could squeeze in another mobile home.
But there’s nothing outside.
No trailers, no cars, no moon, no stars.
The rhyme catches Ben off guard, and he barks out a laugh. That has to take the prize for the bleakest Dr. Seuss book ever written. He stands there, staring out into the void, and remembers the playground when the kids came rushing out the door, almost as if he’d willed them into existence.
It’s worth trying. Ben squeezes his eyes shut for a few seconds and imagines the other trailers. But when he looks again, it’s still the same sea of total blackness.
He closes the door and opens it again. No change.
“Chase?” he yells. “Are you out there? Can you hear me?”
He gets back nothing. Not even an echo.
That seems like a pretty clear message to him. You’re going the wrong way.
But what if he opens the front door and finds nothing there, either? That prospect fills him with pure terror, and he runs to the front door so fast that he bangs his shin on the edge of the couch.
When he flings the front door open, a wire fence stares back at him. For as long as he can remember, he’s hated that their tiny strip of front yard looks straight into the backyard of the trailer in front, owned by the woman who runs the place. Norma had been known to call the cops from time to time if the noise level at the Rey house exceeded her expectations, and she would rip your head off if you were tossing the ball around and it happened to roll across the narrow gravel drive and onto her turf. She’d finally put up that ugly chicken-wire fence to keep kids off her lawn.
He’s never been so happy to see anything in his life.
Beyond Norma’s trailer, he sees the sky. A sprinkling of stars. The moon. And below that, the road into town.
If you need anything, I’m half a mile down the road.
That’s what Tucker had said to Chase when he dropped them off. Daisy had seconded it and noted that Julie Kennedy’s house was even closer. Which is true, but it’s in the opposite direction.
Ben closes the door of the trailer behind him and heads toward the road. He looks left, toward the preacher’s house. Personally, Ben thinks heading to the preacher’s house would be the smarter move for a twelve-year-old boy covered in the blood of someone he’d just killed. She could probably offer him sanctuary or at least help him talk to the authorities.
But even in his thoroughly muddled state of mind, Ben hadn’t missed that there was a connection of some sort between Daisy, Tucker, and Chase. Maybe they’d listened to him when Ben hadn’t.
He’s also fairly certain that Daisy and Tucker are somehow connected to whatever the hell is happening in Haddonwood. What he’s not entirely certain about is which side they’re on.
So, Ben reverses course, back toward Casa del Rey, as his mom had occasionally called the trailer. In a perfect world, he’d never step foot in the place again, but he needs to grab a few things.
Ben goes first to the bedroom, snatching the Louisville Slugger from the bed before he even looks at the body on the floor. The corpse is in exactly the same spot it was before, but he’s not turning his back on it. He grabs a change of clothes for him and for Chase from the pile on the floor and shoves them into a pillowcase. Then, he moves on to his parents’ room. The shotgun is where it always is, under the bed. Loaded, of course, despite the fact that there’s a kid in the house.
What the hell good is an unloaded gun?
Ralph’s voice is so clear in his mind that Ben whirls around with the gun, finger on the trigger, certain his father will be standing at the door. But he can still see the man’s body sprawled out across the hallway.
Ben curses under his breath, fighting the urge to shove the gun back under the bed. It feels wrong in his hands. What if he’d turned just now and someone had been there? Given his current state of mind, he thinks there’s a damn good chance he’d have pulled the trigger instantly. What if it had been Chase?
But in the end, he grabs a few more rounds from the nightstand, along with his father’s wallet. Two twenties—Ralph’s emergency booze and cigarette money—are tucked behind the expired driver’s license. He puts the shotgun shells and the money into his pocket, along with the list of not-real things. If his brain starts getting fuzzy again, he can pull that out as a little reminder.
Ben just wishes he had a grenade or a Molotov cocktail to toss over his shoulder. He’d walk backward all the way into town just so he could watch the trailer burn. But he needs to keep his eyes on the road. Chase could be hiding in the woods. Or if Ralph got in even a few punches before the Louisville Slugger turned the tide, the kid could be lying on the side of the road.
With that thought, Ben picks up the pace. Maybe it’s the ibuprofen, but his headache seems to get a little better with each step he takes away from the trailer.
He adjusts the shotgun and moves into a light jog. It’s probably not the smartest thing to approach a cop’s house toting a weapon, but his options are limited. Ben likes Tucker. He likes Daisy, too. But his goal is to find Chase and get him the hell out of here. And if Daisy or Tucker, or anyone else for that matter, looks at him with bloodshot white eyes, he’ll be ready.
CHAPTER SEVEN
One
DAISY
Daisy snuggles her head into the hollow of Tucker’s shoulder, pleased to discover that it fits there quite nicely. She can’t count the nights she lay sleepless in her bed, just beyond this window and across the way, imagining that her pillow was Tucker’s chest and her quilt was his arms wrapped around her.
Sometimes her thoughts had wandered into other territory as well. And she was delighted to find that the reality was even better than her fantasy.
She didn’t get the sense that this had been true for Dani. Her sister had crept into Daisy’s room a little after midnight a few years back and crawled into the bed. This had been a common pattern long after their mom decided, when they were around seven, that they might argue less if they had separate rooms. They did argue less, but they’d shared a bed since before they were born, so it was a bit of an adjustment. For years after that, one of them—usually Dani—would tiptoe across the hall at some point during the night if she had a nightmare, or suspected there was a monster under the bed, or just wanted to snuggle or giggle under the covers.