by Steven James
“So,” the doctor concluded, “the medication must be helping.”
It didn’t really sound like a question.
Daniel said nothing.
They talked for another twenty minutes or so, Daniel reiterating that he was doing alright, Dr. Fromke looking pleased. “The last time you were in here we talked about your grandmother’s death.”
“Yeah.” It was true, the topic had come up, even though she’d died when he was nine.
“How has that been for you?”
“It’s good. I’m fine.”
He explored Daniel’s feelings about that for a couple minutes and then wrote out a new prescription and handed it to him. “Just give that to your dad. He can fill it at the pharmacy.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t forget: Two pills in the morning. Take them with food.”
“I won’t forget.”
He wasn’t exactly sure why he’d bailed on taking the meds. Maybe it was because the blurs had stopped on their own. Maybe because he didn’t want to chance coming up positive for anything if he was tested for drugs for sports, or that the meds would muddy up his thinking or slow down his response time.
Or maybe it was because he just didn’t like the idea of admitting that he needed help.
Schizophrenia?
Yeah, it was possible that’s what was wrong with him.
Or at least part of what was wrong.
For people who have it, the voices in their heads can be so real that they don’t even question them. The hallucinations can be so convincing that people simply accept them as fact.
When he’d been having the blurs it was almost like reality was there around him, but there were fractures in it, tiny, invisible cracks that were letting through thoughts he shouldn’t have been having at all.
Daniel was the right age for someone to be diagnosed with it.
He was exhibiting enough symptoms to make Dr. Fromke think that it might be schizophrenia, and that’s why he’d prescribed the antipsychotic drugs.
But Daniel wasn’t convinced.
There had to be something else.
After all, when the dead girl had grabbed his arm, it’d left a mark, red and swollen, in the shape of her hand, as if her fingers had burned their way right into his flesh.
That was real.
The pain was real.
The mark was real.
He hadn’t imagined that.
Even if you start hearing voices that aren’t real or seeing things that aren’t there because you have schizophrenia, you don’t have burn marks appear on your skin for no reason. Especially ones as severe as that, ones that miraculously heal on their own in less than twenty-four hours.
No, schizophrenia doesn’t cause that.
Daniel wasn’t sure what to believe about the paranormal, the supernatural, but he wasn’t ready to discount anything. Something had happened to him that normal logic, normal reasoning, normal science couldn’t explain.
After finishing up with the psychiatrist, Daniel left for home. The office was four miles outside of town and he had to pass the prison to get to his house.
Guard towers. Razor wire fence. The whole deal.
He always slowed down when he passed it.
Just curiosity, maybe.
Some people sped up.
Nerves.
After the Derthick State Penitentiary was constructed two years ago, it’d become one of the biggest employers in a county that had always depended mostly on outdoor tourism for jobs—guided fishing tours in the summer and snowmobile and cross-country ski rentals in the winter.
But people in the area had mixed feelings about it. Sure, they were glad for the jobs, but the idea of having a prison nearby didn’t exactly thrill them, even though the government assured them that it was safe and there was nothing to worry about.
While Daniel had been in the psychiatrist’s office, the clouds had parted and the snow had stopped. From what he could tell, maybe an inch or so had fallen since last night.
Unless Coulee High, which was an hour away, had gotten hammered with snow, the game would be on for tonight—which was good because Beldon High was 6–0 so far this season and this game was important for the conference standings going into the new year.
Besides, he would have already gotten a text if the game had been postponed.
The snow that covered the ground glistened in the emerging sunlight. Everything looked so pure and clean, just like it did after every snowfall.
Typically, when the plows went by—especially when the snow was slushy—they would kick up exhaust-stained snow along with the sand that the county sometimes put on the roads to help with traction.
Piles of snow got pushed up along the roadsides and when the fresh snow melted away it left a layer of grime on the crusty snow left behind. But a snowfall always covered that, so everything ended up looking pristine again, even though there was something ugly right beneath the surface.
There was probably some deeper meaning there; symbolism he didn’t need Teach to point out to him—symbolism about the appearances of our lives and how they can hide what’s really going on underneath.
We are, each of us, both the protagonist and the antagonist in the stories we live out each day.
Two wolves inside of us.
Battling it out to the death where no one else can see.
His dad’s squad car was in the driveway.
Daniel had thought he might be out on patrol somewhere, but his hours weren’t exactly nine to five and it wasn’t really unusual to have him home—or gone—at odd times.
He was in the kitchen emptying the dishwasher when Daniel walked in.
“Hey, Dan.”
“Hey.”
His father avoided using the word “psychiatrist.” It made it easier on both of them. “How’d the appointment go?”
Daniel handed over the prescription. “He wants you to fill that.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
They didn’t have extra money floating around so Daniel wasn’t excited about his dad having to buy medication that he wasn’t even going to use, but he wasn’t ready yet to tell him that he hadn’t been taking the pills. He didn’t really know how that would go over.
Maybe he would start taking them in the morning.
Yeah, maybe you should, since you’re doing things again without remembering them, like writing mysterious phrases in your notebook—in someone else’s handwriting.
“Anything I should know about?” his dad asked.
The question caught Daniel slightly off guard. “That you should know about?”
“From the doctor.”
“Oh. Yeah. No—things are fine. It’s all good. You need any help?”
“No. I got it.” He put the last few dishes away. “So, you ready for the game?”
“Yeah. Hey, I heard they found another wolf.”
His father nodded somberly and closed up the dishwasher. “We’re looking into it. In fact, that brings up what I needed to tell you: I’m not going to be able to make it to your game tonight. I have to follow up on something related to the case.”
“That’s fine.”
His dad had done a good job of balancing things out: coming to most of his games, but not hovering and coming to all of them. He made it clear that Daniel was important to him, but he didn’t make it weird.
“Well.” His dad dug his keys out of his pocket. “I should get going. Have a good game.”
“I will.”
“Text me. Let me know how it goes.”
“Sure.”
The headache started while Daniel was putting his books away.
It began in the back of his head and then moved steadily forward like a swarm of bees crawling through his brain, buzzing, stealing his attention, pierci
ng his thoughts with their stingers.
Last autumn when he’d had the blurs, intense headaches had almost always preceded them, and he didn’t take it as a good sign that he was having that same kind now again.
He told himself that it would go away on its own.
You know that’s not going to happen until you see another blur.
Well, if that was the case, it’d be better if the blur would just come right away so his head would be clear during the game, but considering that the last time he’d had this kind of headache he’d seen a dead girl standing in front of him, he wasn’t exactly sure he wanted that either.
After answering a few texts, Daniel grabbed his basketball uniform and shoes, stuffed them into his gym bag, and took off for the school parking lot where the team bus would be waiting.
CHAPTER
FOUR
At this time of year in northern Wisconsin, days were short, and at five when the bus left for Coulee High it was already dark.
During the drive, a few guys on the team talked or joked around, but most of them texted, played games on their phones, or listened to music in their headphones or earbuds.
Stephen Layhe, who started at small forward and shared some classes with Daniel, was sitting next to him and asked him where he’d been that afternoon.
“Doctor’s appointment.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. It was just sort of a checkup, you know, just to see how I was doing.”
“Gotcha,” Stephen said. “So, you ready to take these guys tonight?”
“I am.”
“Just like last year in the playoffs.”
“Just like last year.”
They talked for a few minutes. The headache didn’t go away, making it hard to concentrate. Finally, he told Stephen he was going to listen to some music.
Nicole had put together a pregame playlist for Daniel and now he scrolled to it. Rather than boy bands or top twenty pop tunes or anything like that, she was into electronic violin and techno music. A driving beat. No words. She liked to dance to it; he liked how it helped him get into the right mindset for his games.
He stared at the dark window, watching the reflection of the inside of the bus created by the greenish glow of people’s phones merge with the moonlight coming in off the snow-encrusted landscape outside.
The two worlds passed across each other in the pane of glass: a snowy forest and the outline of the kids around him. Two images meeting there, becoming one. And if you didn’t know any better, you might be confused about where one ended and the other began.
But you do know better.
You can tell what’s real and what isn’t.
The music pulsed in his head.
He turned it down, but that only made him notice the headache more, so he punched up the volume again to distract himself from it.
As he watched the black night mix in the window with the faint reflection of the inside of the bus, he found himself somehow drawn outside, standing in the snow.
It wasn’t dark anymore. Daylight swept over him.
The snow was disappearing, not melting, but simply passing back into the land, and then it was autumn, the seasons cycling backward. Leaves covered the ground. Bare trees clutched at a wide open, steel blue sky.
It’s a dream.
You’re just dreaming.
But that realization didn’t stop the images from unfolding before him.
He was walking along the edge of a fencerow paralleling a barbed wire fence. He’d made it about halfway to a barn at the end of the field when a girl emerged from behind one of the trees nearby.
He couldn’t see her face, but based on how tall she was and how slight her build was, he guessed she was maybe ten or eleven years old.
She wore an old-fashioned white nightgown with lace fringes.
When she faced him, he froze.
She was opening and closing her mouth slowly, not speaking, not making a sound, just letting her mouth gape open as if there were words that wanted to come out but couldn’t. Dark blood oozed from her eyes and trailed down her cheeks in two macabre streaks.
Tears of blood.
Daniel stumbled backward, but she moved toward him as if she were trying to keep the same distance between them. She raised one hand and pointed at him, then opened her mouth silently once again.
He wanted to ask her who she was, what she wanted—but then she turned and started toward the barn.
Both disturbed by her appearance and curious about her, Daniel followed.
He couldn’t help it.
She seemed to walk slowly but also move swiftly and he knew it was because this was all a dream and dreams follow their own set of rules.
Then they were at the barn. She entered it.
Somewhat apprehensively, he went in behind her.
And found her standing ten feet away, staring at him with those terrible bleeding eyes.
She opened her mouth again and this time he could hear what she said. Her voice was scratchy and harsh, but was also somehow marked with the soft innocence of a child: “Madeline is waiting for you, Daniel. Madeline is waiting.”
“Who is Madeline?”
The girl didn’t answer, but rather lifted both arms and stared up at the barn’s hayloft.
“Who are you?” he asked. “What do you want from me?”
The flames started at the bottom of her nightgown but rose quickly as they engulfed the fabric.
In his dream.
His dream—
Daniel rushed forward to push the girl down, to help her roll across the ground to put out the fire, but when he reached out to touch her, his hands passed right through her.
He felt his arms rage with pain from the fire and he nearly cried out as he drew backward.
Yet he didn’t wake up. He wanted to, tried to, but he couldn’t make himself wake up.
The fire was hungry and consumed the girl quickly until she was nothing but a blackened corpse standing before him as the flames flickered out. Thin curls of black smoke rose from her body and wisped off into the air.
She lowered her head, but kept her arms raised high. Somehow she managed to smile, revealing white teeth that contrasted sharply with her gruesome, charred skin. “Hurry, Daniel, you have to stop him,” she said in that coarse, yet tender and childish voice. “Before it happens again.”
And then she began to disintegrate.
“Stop who?” he asked her urgently. “Before what happens again?”
Small pieces of her face peeled off and floated away like dark sparks from a campfire, embers caught in the wind.
And then it wasn’t just her face, but all of her—layer by layer, the black flecks that used to be that living girl swirled away until nothing was left.
Then, even though he wanted to stay and see if she would return again, he was drifting backward out of the barn and into the day where he heard the distant, lonesome howl of a wolf echo across the hills on the horizon.
A storm had moved in and the field, which had been sunny just a minute before, was draped in the gray shadow of a cold autumn rain.
Somewhere within the rumbling thunder he heard his name: “Daniel.”
More thunder rolled across the landscape, which was transforming from a field to what looked like a ragged sea, or the waters of nearby Lake Superior or—
He felt a hand on his shoulder, someone shaking him.
“Dan?”
Lightning crackled across the sky while the rain sliced down at him and—
“You alright?”
Daniel didn’t consciously open his eyes, but then they were open and he recognized that he was in the bus. Stephen was standing beside him. “You good?” Stephen said.
“Yeah.” Daniel rubbed his head. He wasn’t wearing his earbuds
anymore. Either he’d taken them out without realizing it or they’d somehow fallen out on their own. “Must’ve dozed off.”
The bus had stopped.
They were at Coulee High.
Daniel’s headache hadn’t completely gone away, but the bees weren’t swarming as much as they had been earlier.
Usually, whenever he woke up, his dreams would fade away almost immediately, until he was left with only a dim impression of what they’d been rather than a specific memory of what he’d dreamt about. This time, however, the dream seemed to become clearer the longer he was awake and the more alert he became.
The girl.
Her eyes weeping blood.
The flames enveloping her.
Her corpse flaking apart and blowing away before his eyes.
All the guys in front of him were leaving the bus.
Daniel collected his things.
Last fall when the dead girl had grabbed his arm, it’d left that wound behind on his arm and now he looked uneasily at his hands to see if reaching into the flames in his dream had scarred him, had burned him for real, but thankfully, they looked okay.
The pain was gone.
The memory was not.
Since he was the captain, his teammates were waiting for him outside the bus.
Daniel tried to act like everything was fine, but noticed that his hand was shaking as he followed his coach and led the guys into Coulee High for the game.
CHAPTER
FIVE
People talk about being in the zone, and they’re right. It happens. It’s a real thing.
There’s a time to tinker with your shot and there’s a time to just play the game. During practice you can tweak things, adjust your hand position on the ball, work on your form, but in the game you need to respond to what’s happening on the court.
As soon as you start focusing on the technical aspects of your game rather than just being present and trusting your preparation, you’ll be distracted.
But when you’re in the zone, things flow naturally. You get into a groove; you respond without thinking. The noise of the crowd is there in the background, there at the edge of your awareness, but it becomes something that you somehow do notice and don’t notice at the same time.