The Hollow Prince

by Mark Teppo

  “He's just going to dope her in submission,” Gloria whispered. “He doesn't have any idea what's wrong with her. He doesn't believe she is haunted.”

  “But you do?”

  “I do, Harry. You know me. I have a feeling for these sorts of things.”

  Yes, you warned me once, and I didn't listen.

  *

  AnnaBeth's chest rose and fell slowly, her body on automatic pilot while her brain skipped town. I stared at her face for a few minutes, memorizing the shape of her skull—things can change on the Other Side, but generally the skull stays the same. She had a flat face, her cheekbones nearly perpendicular lines down the front of her head. A cosmetic surgeon had done some work to her nose so that it wasn't such a prominent point on her face and her lips, while full, weren't swollen with wasp toxins or pork fat or whatever the hell was the current injection treatment of the day.

  She was tall, topping my 5'10” by at least two inches and she picked up another two inches from her Italian leather shoes. I took them off her feet and massaged her toes for a little while because I could. Her skin was warm and soft. Recent pedicure too.

  There was no reaction—involuntary or otherwise—when I pulled hard on the little toe of her left foot. She was ready.

  I washed down the slow release tablet with a large glass of filtered water—it would be three hours before the gel cap ruptured and lit my stomach on fire—and laid out the chemical regime required to get me in AnnaBeth's head. After injecting and snorting everything, I lay down on the cot next to her and nuzzled my face into the hollow of her neck, breathing her scent deeply as I waited for the separation.

  It gets easier every time.

  I was in the mid-’60s of my mental countdown from one hundred when a pinwheel of lights exploded through my eyelids, outlining the room like a photographic negative, and my skin erupted in a thousand points of goose flesh. My cock went hard instantly, and there was a hard pop of changing air pressure against my eardrums as I pierced the thin veil of reality and fell into her brain.

  Vertigo assailed me and I ran through a couple of Tantric chants to reset my equilibrium. As I leveled out, I opened my eyes and, while waiting for them to solidify, I examined the subtle differences in the room. The wallpaper and carpet were purposefully bland and, as the room had no window, there wasn't any daylight to ignite my translucent eyes. There is a reason most native shamans do trans-reality travel after nightfall: the shadows are your friends until your spirit completes the transference. Light has a tendency to get in through the cracks and wreak havoc on the soft spots.

  AnnaBeth was gone. I was mildly surprised. Most of my clients don't have the spiritual faculties to do a Houdini on me, but there have been a few.

  Nora, for one.

  I shook my head. I had been thinking about hauntings, thinking about AnnaBeth's claim as I had split the veil. Suggestibility came with the territory. You have to be careful to not let yourself get too influenced by your environment. You have to cautious of your own guilt and nightmares: they grab any hook they can. It's best to remain focused: I had three hours until the pill in my belly broke and my stomach acids went ape-shit on the homeopathic solution that would snap me back to meatspace. I stood up and went out into my office.

  AnnaBeth had really done a runner. She wasn't there either. The east-facing window was open, the cheap Levolour blinds knocked askew, and a small breeze was coming in from the fire escape.

  I geared up—gun, hat and the old knuckles of my patron saint—and climbed out onto the narrow metal balcony. In AnnaBeth's world, the air smelled like it only rained at night and, by midday, the only hint remaining of the previous night's rainfall was how metal still smelled cold after a few hours in the weak morning sun. The fire escape creaked and groaned underneath me as I climbed up to the roof.

  Subtle differences. I knew the fire escape was solid. I had rebolted it myself earlier this year, but AnnaBeth didn't know that and her perception of fire escapes on old brownstones was that they were all ready to fall off. You have to be cognizant of the subtle differences. You are, after all, not in your own head.

  There was a pigeon coop on the roof, straight out of a ’40s noir film. Several uncaged pigeons rose up in surprise as I came over the edge of the roof, the sound of their wings shattering the crisp silence of the air.

  AnnaBeth was waiting for me next to the coop, a wide-eyed pigeon held tightly in her hand. She was naked and the flesh along her left flank was smooth and unmarred. The distortion in her body started at the shoulders, her collarbones forced outward like cracked rock to make space for a second head. Her right one was normal, very much like the head I had been staring at a little while ago, and her left was gaunt and starved. The right seemed to be asleep and the left glared at me with visible hatred and hunger while her hands stroked the pigeon with manic fervor.

  “Hello, little sister,” I said.

  The eyelids on her right head fluttered but didn't open.

  “She can't hear you,” the left head said. Her voice was flat and hard like stones skipping across a pond. “She doesn't want to hear you.”

  “That's alright,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you anyway.” I moved closer, drifting casually forward as I spoke. I kept my hands in plain view, giving nothing away as I approached the naked two-headed woman. “It's been a long time since anyone has talked to you.”

  The motion of her hands stopped for a second and her left head nodded. “A long time.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “She knows,” she said, her eyes rolling towards the other slumbering head. “Ask her.”

  “I can't do that right now, can I? So I'm asking you.” I had come five steps closer, close enough for hand-to-hand combat if it came to that. Close enough for the gun. I flexed my shoulder blades and felt the muscles in my left arm jump, just enough to bring the handle of the gun forward.

  She anticipated my next move. Her right hand rose up, knifing towards the sky while her left rotated in a clockwise direction and hurled the startled pigeon at me.

  Not as startled as I. I had barely gotten the gun out of its holster when her avian projectile hit me. She had shaped the bird into a missile and its wings never even opened as it flew at me like a softball champion's record-breaking fastball. The gun went off, the shot going wild, and the other loose pigeons took flight in a spasm of white and grey feathers. I stumbled back against the brick-layered wall of the building's decrepit elevator, the fedora falling down on my face.

  The bitch had javelined me with a pigeon.

  The bird came out of its stunned state as its head pierced my side and it started banging its wing against my chest and arm. I pushed the hat out of my eyes and, making an effort to ignore the bird embedded in my side, I tried to get off a shot at the two-headed naked lady before she could throw another bird at me.

  AnnaBeth's left head ignored me and her right lolled unconsciously, looking back at me with its silent eyes as she ran towards the edge of the roof, a pigeon clutched in either hand. With her arms spread wide, she leaped off the roof. She didn't fall; she just dipped a little and then rose back up, her gold hair streaming out behind her as she flew off.

  I got a hand on a wing of the bird in my side and yanked the pigeon free, feeling the hot pulse of blood from the hole left in my chest. I heard the bird's wing snap as I tossed it aside and it flopped on the rooftop, its head stained red with my blood.

  I staggered like a drunken prize-fighter to the edge of the roof and fired a few shots. AnnaBeth twitched once, a dark line creasing her naked ass, and a pink mist rose up in her wake—a drifting vapor trail that I could follow.

  It's funny how people react to dream states, even when they know they are in one. I knew I could fly, just as easily as she was, but I had never been able to do it, never quite had the mental acuity and wherewithal to trust myself enough to stay aloft. But I had no trouble flying in a vehicle. There was something about the persi
stence of a conveyance that gave me the security I needed to transverse the air.

  I summoned a ghost cab and, while it formed out of the available ambiance of dust particles, I dressed my wound with spider silk from the dark corners of the pigeon coop.

  Lancelot. Jesus Christ. The King in Winter. These sorts of wounds never healed well. Not the haunted ones.

  *

  Time flows differently in dreamspace, and there was no way to tell how AnnaBeth's mental state matched up with the perpetual decay of the Cesium atom. The three hour alarm clock ticking in my stomach was just a real world reminder to surface, a hard anchor that would allow me to break free of her dreamspace. It was easy to get lost in these places—any recovering drug addict will tell you that it only takes a three minute surcease of their eternal vigilance to undo years of therapy and self-control. In the mutable realm of dreamspace, a three hour submersion was more than enough.

  “What the point, Harry? What does the real world have left for me?”

  Sure, I could come back in again—just around round of hard psychotropics and black market pharmaceuticals—but the environment would be stale. AnnaBeth would be gone, lost somewhere deeper in her psyche, and it would take more chemicals to peel back her brain to that layer.

  You can always give someone more drugs, but there's a law of diminishing returns that starts to come in play. Not to mention toxicological issues. Yeah, all those licenses I showed AnnaBeth weren't just DIY kits. There's actually some accreditation that exists for psychic surgery.

  I didn't have a lot of time. Too many risks. AnnaBeth was haunted. I could taste it—I could feel it—the atmosphere was wet with the fecund stink of ghosts. I didn't want to stay longer than I necessary, and I certainly didn't want to dive any deeper.

  The driver of my spectral cab was the merest suggestion of a person, an ephemeral phantom with hollow spots for eyes and a wisp of swirling smoke for its mouth. I pointed towards the faint rose of AnnaBeth's expressed blood. “Follow that trail,” I told my driver and, as I sat down on the fluffy cloud of a back seat, the cab lifted off from the roof, startling the recently returned pigeons once again, and floated off across the black and white cityscape.

  Her city was drenched in noir, white lights against black basalt towers as if Technicolor had never been invented. She could dream in color—the rosy tint of her naked flesh and the crimson stain of her blood across the sky was evidence enough of a reasonable palette—but her mental representation of the city was leeched of color.

  It wasn't an unreasonable situation to find in someone's head. Much like turning off the lights in the parts of the house you aren't in, the landscape of your dreams can be reduced to simpler representations in order to alleviate use of the neural pathways. I've seen a few who dream in two-dimensions. For some, sleep is all about shutting down as much of the active brain as possible.

  But AnnaBeth dreamed; she had an electric current in her head, a pulse of electrochemical energy that I could ride. It ran through the soft pulp of her head and would take me to the dark center she didn't want to talk about.

  I looked through the windows of the tall towers as the ghost cab weaved its way through the forest of buildings along the trail left by AnnaBeth. I looked into the structures—the tiny windows into the memory cubes of her mind—and saw all the things she loved and hated and feared and desired.

  By the time the cab descended to the ground, I knew what had happened to her twin sister.

  *

  The revolving door of AnnaBeth's condominium building spun at my touch. There was a bloody footprint in the foyer, a pool of congealed scent that told me I had come to the right place. I dismissed my ghost cab with a wave; I wasn't going to need it inside and keeping it solid was an unnecessary mental footnote. I checked my side through the ragged hole in my shirt; the spider silk was holding.

  AnnaBeth's condo was on the nineteenth floor—apartment 1916—at the end of the hall from the elevator. The whole building had been renovated at the turn of the century, putting a polish back on the Art Deco charm that had rusted and chipped off in the last sixty years. This was the daily texture of AnnaBeth's rendition of the world, the influence that made itself felt throughout her dreamspace, and it wasn't surprising that this building was drenched in color—the textures richer and deeper here in her spire to heaven than anywhere else.

  The door of her apartment was not only unlocked, it was unlatched. Most doors in dreamspace aren't locked; the environment is your own—the little extensible dreaming of your godhead—and, since you can go anywhere, there isn't really any reason to have the doors locked now, is there? Unless you're trying to hide something from yourself. Stealthy psychic visitors have the same access privileges unless the owner has consciously acted to seal off parts of the dreamspace from strangers. But not only was she not hiding, she was inviting me in. She wanted me to be able to find her.

  “I'll be waiting for you.”

  I led with the pistol barrel, letting its blank eye be my forward scout. I toed open the door and carefully peered into the entryway. A long hallway ran straight back ten feet from the door and then exploded into the central living space. I could see thick white carpet, the sort which invites you to take off your shoes and dig your toes into its heavy nap, and low-backed furniture. The room was summarily illuminated, a burst of light that hide all shadows and gave everything away. The entryway, on the other hand, was dark with a faint glitter of reflected light coming off the hard tiles.

  She was kneeling on the living room floor, a halo of pigeon feathers drifting about her heads. She had opened her stomach with a kitchen knife and was rooting about in the cavity as if she had dropped something. A line of dark blood ran down her belly and vanished into the nap of the hungry carpet.

  The right head was still asleep, hung forward with its chin nearly resting on her chest. Her eyes in her other head were translucent like chips of pale quartz. A pattern of blood dotted her cheek—the beginning of a written word . . .

  “What are you looking for?” I asked, my voice gentle.

  The eyelids of the right head fluttered at the sound of my voice and the lips parted as if a word was slowly forcing its way out of her mouth. She lifted her hands from her open stomach and showed me the bird clutched in her hands. The pigeon struggled in the prison of her fingers and she opened them, releasing the crimson-stained bird. It flew heavily, its wings slick and wet. It flew up to the ceiling and burst, scattering feathers in a bloody rain. The feathers floated and swirled on invisible currents, twirling and rotating until they became a second ring about her head.

  “That's a good trick,” I said, and the right head stirred a second time. She was hearing echoes, I realized, replay artifacts from our conversation in the hard reality. What had I said? I tried to remember the earlier discussion.

  “What's wrong with her?” Yes, that was it.

  “It's my twin sister,” the sleeping head whispered, her lips barely moving around the words.

  She's haunting me.

  I raised the pistol and the left head laughed at me, her guttural voice making the joyless laugh sound like the bark of a hyena. “So very phallic,” she sighed, running her bloody hands across her thighs. “Such a conditioned, such a male, response. Is this why you came?” She giggled at the word. “Is that all you want? To fuck me in a place where I can't deny you?” She spread her legs. “Give it to me, then. Shoot me with your gun.”

  I pulled the trigger and the hammer came down with a sharp click. She flinched, expecting the bullet, but the gun had transformed into a rain of daisies, yellow petals falling about my feet.

  “I'm not a Freudian,” I explained. My hand was still outstretched and I turned it up, palm held out. “I'm here to help. I want to offer you something.”

  She snarled, the halo of feathers turning their dark edges towards me. “I don't need your charity.”

  “Of course not. You're doing fine by yourself in here. What could you possibly lack? What could you po
ssibly need?”

  The hard case of her face twisted, as if a soft pulp was trying to extrude itself through the brittle shell. “I have everything,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I can see that.”

  “I don't need anything.”

  “Of course not.”

  Confusion twisted her lips. “Then why are you here? Why did she bring you here?”

  “To tell you something.” I inhaled deep into my belly and felt my skin change. My hair grew longer and my shell melted and reformed itself. It took just a few seconds and I could tell I had done a decent job by the widening of AnnaBeth's eyes as she watched me transform into a mirror image of herself. With just one head. “The world is a mirror,” I said with AnnaBeth's voice. “We're all reflections.”

  The pigeon feathers about her head twitched, dipping and turning so their pointed ends faced in my direction. “You are no reflection of mine.”

  “I am,” I said. “You've just never looked at yourself.”

  The right head stirred, its eyelids fluttering like the wings of a moth.

  “There was a lot of blood, wasn't there? They didn't realize what you shared, did they?”

  The feathers twitched again, a motion mirrored by the opposite corners of her mouths. Reflections.

  “They had to make a choice,” I continued. “Your father had to make a decision. He had to choose between two identical girls that he loved very much. He could only have one. But which one? Anna or Beth? Which girl would he take home and which would he leave on the table?”