by Matt Carter
Briefly, I began to regret calling this meeting. By the look in his eyes, I could see Billy’s thinking wasn’t far from mine.
“Want your usual?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said dismissively. She reached into her bag and pulled out three quarters, pressing them into Billy’s hand. “ ‘Kashmir’ and ‘Immigrant Song’ should do it, but if this goes long, pop in some Butterfly.”
Seeing how serious she was, Billy dropped his smile. “Gotcha. I’ll get your malt coming right up.”
Mina sat across the booth from us as Billy fed one of her quarters into the jukebox. After a few seconds of silence, the pre-programmed music that had already been playing gave way to a heavy beat of electric guitars and brass. When I recognized the song, I couldn’t help but crack a smile.
“You like Led Zeppelin?” I asked.
“I neither like nor dislike them. What they are is long, loud, and on this jukebox, all of which work well toward our not being overheard here,” she said, eying the tourists as they grabbed a booth.
We waited in silence for Billy to bring out Mina’s drink. Once he did, she took a long, luxurious sip from the overpoweringly chocolate concoction, and let out a heavy sigh.
“All right, we should get started,” she finally said. She pulled a taser from her bag and set it down on the table, casually but threateningly aimed at Haley’s chest. Haley recoiled, but boxed in by me on our side of the booth, she could not escape.
“Mina!” I exclaimed. “What the hel—”
She raised her other hand. “Ben, be quiet. If you trust me, trust that I know what I am doing. She will get her chance to talk, but I must have mine first. Okay?”
It wasn’t okay, but she left me little choice. I looked at Haley. Her eyes were wide, but she hadn’t tried to run for it yet. Maybe she’d be able to get through this.
Mina addressed Haley, “If you are who you say you are, then I would like to apologize in advance for whatever inconvenience this may cause you, and I would like to assure you that this is a necessary precaution. If you are not, then you know as well as I do that if you force me to use this, it will hurt you tremendously and might even cause you to lose your composure in a public place, which I’ve been told is quite unwise. So, that out of the way, has Ben told you about them?”
“Yes,” Haley said.
“That will save some time then. The situation is this: three months ago you went missing. Though the official story is that you wandered off in the middle of the night, got lost, and wound up surviving for two months off of whatever you could find in the woods before blundering back to town in time for your funeral, I can say that I am effectively certain that story is a lie. With the possible exception of some mild post-traumatic stress, you haven’t displayed the kind of symptoms of psychosis necessary to have done that by sheer accident. I am also effectively certain that you were taken by Splinters for assimilation and replacement, and I also believe it probable that you are not the real Haley Perkins, but are rather a Splinter replacement of her. Ben, on the other hand, believes that you are not a Splinter. Since I have come to trust his judgment recently, this puts me in a quandary.”
Mina paused, took a long sip from her malt, then asked, “Who are you?”
Haley looked taken aback, “What?”
“Who are you?” Mina asked again.
“I’m Haley Perkins,” Haley replied, confused.
“What are you?” Mina asked.
“I’m . . . what?” Haley asked. She looked to me for some help. I couldn’t offer any.
“Mina . . .” I said, trying to calm things down.
“Why are you here?” Mina demanded.
“Ben told me you could help,” Haley said.
“Why are you here?” Mina demanded more firmly, tightening her grip on the taser.
“Because I want to help you,” Haley pleaded. “I mean, if you’re trying to stop things like what happened to me . . .”
I raised my hands. “Listen, Mina, maybe you should—”
“I don’t believe her,” Mina shot back.
“Don’t believe what?” Haley asked.
“That you’re human, that you’re here to help, that you—”
Haley slammed her hands on the table in frustration.
“If I knew this was the ‘help’ that Ben promised you could offer, I’d have never come here! I came because he said you knew how to fight them, because you could make them pay, because I wanted to make them pay for what they did to me!”
Mina was silent. Haley shook her head, laughing angrily.
“You want to know who I am? Fine. My name is Haley Perkins. My birthday is April fifteenth, my mother’s maiden name is Kent. When I was five, I accidentally killed my goldfish when I knocked his bowl off the bookshelf, which until fairly recently was the saddest moment of my life. When I was seven, I had an unhealthy fixation on Orlando Bloom, which I thankfully got out of pretty quick. I’ve got a scar on my foot from when I stepped on a nail when I was ten. It went all the way through, and I had to get a tetanus shot. My dad left us four years ago when he refused to keep taking his meds because he thought they made him dull. He’s schizophrenic, did you know? Not a lot of people do. I hated him for leaving us. I hated him more for potentially passing it down to me, and until recently the thing that scared me most in the world was the chance that I might wind up exactly like him! Is that human enough for you?”
Mina considered Haley. I could tell that she still didn’t believe Haley, not by a long shot, but something she had said clearly got to Mina. She loosened her grip on the taser, slightly.
Haley sighed. “I don’t need you to believe me. I don’t need you to trust me. I just need to know what happened, what’s happening to me. I don’t know if I can trust anyone else around here, so I think . . . I think I have to put my trust in you. Ben says you know a lot about these Splinters. That you’ve been fighting them for a very long time. If anyone can tell me what’s happening, it’s you.”
Mina cocked her head slightly, giving Haley another of her long, appraising looks.
“Will you at least hear her out?” I suggested. “She guided us to that party. She gave us a lot of names we didn’t have before. Don’t we at least owe her the benefit of the doubt?”
This further seemed to trouble Mina.
“Please, just hear what she has to say,” I said.
Mina reached into her bag and pulled out a handheld digital recorder. Pushing it towards Haley, she pressed the record button.
“Talk,” she said.
Haley smiled slightly, grateful, I’m sure, for anyone to give her a chance.
She started off slowly, recollecting what little she could remember with any certainty of her disappearance, her time away, and of her eventual return to town. At best, her information was spotty, recalling just vague, confused images that could easily have been mistaken for dreams. It was as she began to open up about her actual dreams that she gained more confidence. Though the images she spoke of terrified her, the fact that Mina neither stopped her nor laughed clearly gave her strength. After a while, I started watching Mina more than Haley. As usual when she was focusing intently on a subject, her face looked almost blank with eyes that stared at and through Haley all at once. It was a look I was still having a hard time getting used to.
The bell above the door rang. Instinctively I looked over, checking for any of the faces from Mina’s ECS list, or someone I might recognize from our escape the previous night. I couldn’t help but imagine The Reaper standing there, telling us to move on with that horrible bone sickle.
Instead I saw the very human silhouette of someone looking our way before dodging outside and to the left. Something about the build, the hair . . . it was familiar.
I stood up, ready to pursue. The girls looked at me.
“I’ll be right back, I just have to check something out,” I said.
I walked to the door, went outside. Heading around the left side of the Soda Fountain, I c
ould see no one on the sidewalk, but a bicycle speeding away. Gotta be sure . . .
Pulling the cell phone from my pocket, I made a call.
“What’s up, Ben?” Aldo asked.
“Can you pull the tracking data from the GPS unit we put in Kevin’s bike? See if he’s anywhere near The Soda Fountain of Youth?” I asked.
“Two seconds . . .” Aldo said. I waited closer to ten. “All right, yeah, he’s close by, riding away like a bat out of hell. That what you were looking for?”
“Yeah,” I said, unsettled. “We might have to get out of here sooner than I thought. Keep an eye on him for us? Something might be going down soon.”
“No problem,” Aldo said. “Bad?”
“Maybe,” I said as I hung up.
By the time I got back to our booth, Haley was finishing up recalling her nightmares, tying the faces she remembered seeing in the darkness with the people she’d seen watching her in town since she had returned. They both looked up at me, worried.
“Trouble?” Mina asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “We might need to wrap this up sooner rather than later.”
Mina nodded, subtly, then dropped back into one of her blank thoughtful looks. Haley looked at her, concerned.
I sat down next to her. “She does this a lot. It’s a good thing, I swear.”
Haley looked at Mina as she tried to collate the information. “Are you sure?”
“Not really,” I admitted as the clock ticked on. I looked nervously over my shoulder, expecting a Splinter invasion at any moment. I had never seen Mina lost in thought for this long before. Did it mean she believed Haley, or was she getting ready to attack? I didn’t think she’d dare attack Haley in the middle of a diner, but when it came to how Mina responded to Splinters, I chose not to rule anything out. She tightened her grip on the taser ever so slightly, but she did not raise it from the table.
Finally, she said, “Given everything you have described, I can state with effective certainty that you were taken by Splinters, in all probability so they could assimilate you.”
Haley nodded softly, gripping my hand tightly. This was clearly news she expected, but it still wasn’t easy to accept.
“I see two possibilities for what happened next,” Mina said. “Well, there are actually many possibilities, but two that hold the highest level of likelihood. The first is that they tried to take you but were unsuccessful. There have been cases, extremely isolated and rare, but documented, where a person with some major mental defect or brain damage was taken for an extended period of time and ultimately rejected. If this is the case, if you have inherited some or all of your father’s mental problem and just have yet to exhibit signs, then you are incredibly lucky.”
The look on Haley’s face was not one of gratitude. Mina didn’t seem to notice that she had delivered potentially devastating news.
Of course, the fact that she was hesitating told me she was holding back something even worse.
“What’s the second possibility?” I asked.
Mina hesitated, looking from Haley to me, then back to Haley.
“What’s the second possibility?” Haley repeated, sounding scared.
“That this is all one big lie. That you’re a Splinter who’s been impersonating Haley ever since she supposedly stumbled out of the forest, and that you’re trying to manipulate us toward whatever nefarious ends you might have.”
I was about to speak up and try and offer some more defense for Haley, but Mina raised her free hand again.
“But since Ben seems to believe in you, and since much of the information you have provided would do more damage than good to the Splinter cause, it seems more likely at the moment that the first possibility is correct.”
This should have been great news. I should have felt some great victory at getting Mina to bring Haley into the fold. I didn’t. She was still holding something back.
“Why do I sense a ‘but’ coming along?” I asked.
There was another jangling over the door. A boy and a girl, each no more than ten, came in smiling, sidling up to the bar. Too young to be Splinters. Mina put the taser back into her bag.
She continued, “It seems likely that the first possibility is correct, but unfortunately, for our purposes, it doesn’t make much difference. The memories Haley has are partial at best. If they’re coming out as dreams, it’s possible that there’s more trapped somewhere in the subconscious, but unless she can unlock any more on command, I don’t see what she can offer us.”
A few weeks before, I would have focused on the fight that followed. I would have focused on Haley protesting that she could be of some help, and Mina saying that she meant no offense and was just telling the truth. Before, I would have, but this time I didn’t. A memory from the first time I’d really talked to Mina suddenly hit me like a freight train. It fell into the category of “so crazy it just might work,” but if it did, I was fairly certain we’d know everything we needed to by the end of the night.
“Hey guys, quiet down,” I said. “I got an idea.”
Though they both looked at me like I might be a little crazy, they listened intently. With a smile, I craned my neck and called out.
“Hey, Billy! You doing anything tonight?”
21.
This is Trying Everything
Mina
Schizophrenia.
I’d never expected that word to make me so hopeful, especially not so soon after Mom had invoked its perpetual threat.
Schizophrenia.
It’s hereditary. That’s the real reason Mom would never take me to a psychiatrist. If schizophrenia did turn out to be the term of choice for what I was, it would haunt her for life, just like me.
And if Haley was telling the truth about Mr. Perkins, there was every chance she was carrying the gene, which meant there was also a chance, small but significant, that I’d been wrong about her, that she was telling the truth about everything.
As far as I could tell, Haley was as normal and functional as people came, both before and after her disappearance, but if there was something wrong, something small and buried, waiting to manifest, maybe something mild enough that the Splinters had expected, for two months, possibly, to be able to work around it, then her story held water.
Haley could be human. Not just human but a human who had been to the mine, who knew, somewhere in deep, repressed memory, where it was and what was inside it.
Of course, if she was a Splinter reject, that would also make her an ECNS. Permanently. There would be no danger in Ben or anyone else spending time with her.
That thought didn’t give me quite the hope and relief that it should have, but it didn’t make me any less desperate to know.
I don’t place excessive faith in the powers of hypnosis.
It seems a vague, imprecise, unreliable method of investigation to me, and I had no intention of accepting anything we might uncover with it without some solid verification.
But as much as I pretended otherwise to Billy, I still remembered the odd feelings and vivid, unfamiliar thoughts that had bubbled up in me the one and only time I’d allowed him to use me in his demonstrations.
There was some real, if unpredictable, power there, and if it could give us anything at all to try to verify, that would be something.
Splinters hiding from each other, appearing to help humans, disappearing a girl for two full months and then sending some version of her back. There was every possibility that some or all of these oddities were connected, and we might be very close to finding out how.
Billy pulled out all the theatrical stops for the occasion, enough that I really wanted to remind him that we were still investigating a Splinter abduction. We needed substance, not spectacle, but if the thrill of being asked to show off was what was going to make him give the task his best effort, it was worth sitting around in the dim candlelight with Ben fidgeting on one side of me and Aldo restlessly video recording nothing on the other, breathing incense far too sw
eet to contain any functional herbs I knew of, watching the smoke swirl in crushingly vast, empty silence.
The idea of all the stillness and quiet was supposedly to relax Haley as much as possible before we got started, but none of it really seemed to be working.
By the way she kept glancing at Billy, I wasn’t sure if she was more worried, or pretending to be more worried, about what memories she might uncover, or about being asked to relax in his intimately lit living room not half an hour after he’d handed her one of his characteristically un-charming compliments.
Either way, she was almost as pale as she had been on her funeral day, and every couple of minutes she would drop her head onto her knees and hyperventilate for a few seconds.
After nearly half an hour of this, if my internal clock was working with so few reference points to set it to, Billy got up and moved toward the one tattered pleather arm chair where Haley was sitting. This triggered, or at least coincided with, another gasping fit, so Billy stopped and glanced over at Ben.
“Help us out over here?”
“Please,” Aldo added, cleaning his video camera lens for the fifth time. “People don’t throw away decent camcorders. I have to have it back in Dad’s closet before he misses it.”
“I know,” Haley snapped. “Sorry, sorry,” she followed up right away. “I’m trying.”
Billy raised his eyebrows at Ben again.
Ben looked uncertain but got up from the equally tattered pleather couch we’d been waiting on and knelt next to the chair.
“It’s—”
“It’s not okay,” Haley stopped him. “They took two months from me. Two months, just gone! Two months of them doing God knows what with me! Nothing about this is okay!”
Ben didn’t claim to know or understand. He didn’t remind her how much might depend on what she could recall.
He just said, “You don’t have to do this.”
It took all the focus I could scrounge together to sit there without contradicting him and simply hope that this was one of his acts, the kind that could pry restricted maps out of historical society offices, even though it really didn’t sound like one.