Orphans of Wonderland

by Greg F. Gifune

  Above it was the small apartment where Dorsey Hill lived with his girlfriend.

  Dodging traffic, Joel crossed the street. He entered the building through a door to the side of the liquor store entrance and was met by a battered, graffiti-covered hallway and a staircase leading to the second-floor apartment.

  He climbed the stairs and arrived at a door scarred and worn, its paint old and badly chipped. Joel knocked, and a harried-looking woman in a tan polyester dress with a white apron answered the door a moment later.

  “Yes?” she asked, annoyed.

  Joel tried to smile, probably failed. “Is Dorsey in?”

  The woman looked him up and down. “Who’s asking?”

  “If you could tell him Joel Walker’s here to see him, I’d appreciate it.”

  “What do you want with Dorsey? Leave the man alone.”

  “I need to talk to him. Is he here or not?”

  “Nita, it’s all right,” a voice said from behind her.

  The woman sighed, gave Joel one last dirty look, then moved away.

  Before Joel could fully process her reaction to him, Dorsey stepped into view. He looked a lot older and very tired, his Afro gone, the hair now buzzed close to his scalp and peppered with gray. His body was still thin and well muscled, but his posture was hunched, and he moved as if it was difficult for him to do so without pain. Though his eyes were not as bright as they’d once been, like he always had, he smiled with them first. “Sally said you’d come.” His voice was raspier than in his youth. “How you been, cuz?”

  “Been better, man. What do you say?”

  “I say it’s been too long.” Dorsey wrapped him up in an unexpected hug.

  He smelled of cheap cologne and cigarettes, but it was such a pure and genuine gesture Joel couldn’t help but be deeply moved. “Good to see you, Dorse.”

  His old friend let him go, and they both stood there awkwardly.

  “I’d invite you in,” Dorsey said, “but I don’t like white people in the house.”

  Joel laughed lightly. If nothing else, Dorsey’s sense of humor was still intact. “Can’t blame you there.”

  “You’re not missing anything, and besides,” Dorsey said, lowering his voice, “Juanita’s the protective type, dig? She’s getting ready for work, doing the dinner shift tonight, so let me get a coat; we’ll talk outside and stay out of her way.”

  Moments later, as they took the stairs and ventured out onto the street and into the cold air, Joel noticed that Dorsey, now wearing a gray knit hat and a pea coat, walked with a slight limp. Traffic was heavy, but otherwise there weren’t many people on the street. Dorsey motioned to a nearby playground surrounded by chain-link fence, and they headed in that direction.

  It smelled like the ocean here, as it wasn’t far, but mixed with engine exhaust, grime, baked goods and a mingling of other foods—largely a combination of fresh and fried fish—from local establishments. At the far end of the avenue, wind blew in off the Atlantic, bringing with it an icy chill. Joel stuffed his hands in his pockets, tucked chin to chest and walked on, ignoring the pain in his ribs and along his jaw.

  “Sometimes I feel the need to get out on the street,” Dorsey told him. “Walk the neighborhood and breathe the air, feel the city pulsing and moving all around me. Helps me remember I’m not so alone in the world, reminds me I’m connected to something bigger and alive. Makes me feel…normal. Close as I ever get, anyway.”

  Normal, Joel thought. He had no idea what that even meant anymore.

  “Didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” Dorsey said.

  “Didn’t think I’d ever be back.”

  “Still doing the reporter thing?”

  “So they tell me.” Joel slowed his pace a bit so Dorsey could keep up.

  “I haven’t worked retail in years,” Dorsey explained. “Had a couple babies with my ex and all that changed. Needed more money, so I started fishing. Worked the same crew for years. Good money but hard work and away from home a lot. Stopped a while back, had to go on disability. My body can’t take it anymore. Bad back, my knees are all fucked up, got to take a handful of pain pills just to get out of bed in the morning. Sucks to get old, man. And the babies, a boy and a girl, they’re all grown up now. Don’t have much time for their pops these days, got their own lives and families. Always been partial to their mother anyway. Can’t blame them; she raised them and I was hardly ever home. Just paid the bills. Got lucky and met Nita a few years ago. She’s a good woman. Tough as leather and mean as a snake, but a good woman.” They passed through the gates to the playground, which consisted of a run-down swing set, jungle gym and basketball court with rusted hoops sans nets, and settled over by a couple out-of-the-way picnic tables. “Sad sight, isn’t it? Empty playground, I mean. Even in winter, doesn’t look right.”

  Sad was a good word for it. The entire neighborhood was draped in an intrinsic melancholy and dreariness so thick it was palpable. “Dorsey—”

  “Never got the chance to tell you,” he interrupted, pulling a pack of smokes from his pocket. “But I was proud of you, cuz. You lit it up back in the day.”

  “I crashed and burned, that’s all.”

  “What, all that devil shit? It got crazy toward the end, sure, every nut in the country got in on it, every bad psychologist and church-lady lunatic, but that doesn’t mean it was all lies. The radical religious types took it too far, not you. Never seen a group of people go on and on about Jesus this and Jesus that, then do everything they can to drive folks as far away from Jesus as they can get.” With a great deal of effort, he stepped up on the bench, sat atop the picnic table and lit a cigarette. “Smoke?”

  “No thanks.”

  He put the pack back in his coat pocket. “I read your book. You got it right. People around here lived it. Few even died. Shit, look what it did to you.”

  Joel held his tongue and stood between the tables and the fence, alternating his gaze between Dorsey and the street.

  Sounds of the city filled the silence until Dorsey said, “Never thought Lonnie would go first.” He let the cigarette dangle from his mouth, then put his hands in his coat pockets. “Maybe me. Or Trent, that crazy bastard, but not Lonnie.”

  The day was overcast and bleak, and in a few hours it would be dark. Joel didn’t want to be there once night fell. He didn’t want to be anywhere once night fell.

  “I used to bust balls, call him Deputy Dog. He’d get so pissed.” Dorsey smiled, took a drag on his cigarette and exhaled through his nose. “Remember how he’d get so pissed he’d start laughing? Could always make Lonnie laugh.”

  Joel wanted to smile too, because he did remember that about Lonnie, but he couldn’t seem to summon it. “Dorse,” he said, “we need to talk.”

  He looked out at the playground and street beyond, his smile dead. “Yeah.”

  “Did you know Lonnie was in contact with Trent before his death?”

  The sound of Trent’s name caused him to turn back to Joel. After a moment he looked away again, then shook his head no. “I didn’t think anybody saw or heard from Trent in forever. You sure about that?”

  “Relatively.”

  “Lonnie would’ve told me.”

  “If he felt he could’ve. He did talk to you about what was happening to him, didn’t he?”

  Dorsey puffed his cigarette. “Nita didn’t like him coming around. He was having problems and it upset me. I…I started having nightmares.”

  “About what?”

  “Hadn’t had them in years. It was one of the things I loved about being out at sea. Never had them out there. One of the most dangerous jobs in the world, but I never felt safer in my life. Before or since.”

  “What were the nightmares about?”

  “You know what they were about, Joel.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  Dor
sey finally plucked the cigarette from his mouth. “I thought it was over,” he said, his voice beginning to shake. “Lonnie did too—shit, we all did—but then it started up again. Whatever got to Lonnie triggered it, I…”

  “Triggered what, the nightmares?”

  “He was seeing bad shit.” Dorsey flicked the cigarette away. “Demons.”

  “Were you seeing them too?”

  Dorsey looked at him, his face a grimace of pain and terror.

  “Are you seeing them right now?” Joel pressed.

  As if in answer, the wind blew paper and refuse across the otherwise empty basketball court. A few blocks away, a siren blared, then faded.

  “Everything was okay for a long time,” Dorsey said, wincing. “Wasn’t it?”

  “I thought so.”

  “Why now? After all these years?”

  “Ever heard of Tuser Industries?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “Company over in the south end.”

  “What’s it got to do with us?”

  “The name Pete Fernandez mean anything to you?”

  Dorsey shook his head.

  “Fernandez worked with Lonnie,” Joel explained. “But he and Lonnie were both also involved with some sort of program over at Tuser Industries. I think Lonnie might’ve even been unknowingly recruiting for them and brought Fernandez into the fold. Either way, they’re serious people, man. Dangerous people. They were experimenting on him and others there. Mind-control experiments, Dorse.”

  Dorsey dug out another cigarette and lighted it, this time with shaking hands. “What the hell’s that even mean?”

  “Something happened to us.”

  “Keep dazzlin’ and I’m gonna start calling you the Amazing Kreskin.”

  “Hilarious.”

  “Beats crying.”

  “Dorse, whatever happened, it happened to all of us—when we were kids—and whatever it was, it’s connected somehow to what was going on with Lonnie at Tuser and what’s happening to all of us now.”

  Dorsey manically smoked his cigarette a while. “Have you seen them?” he finally asked, his voice nearly a whisper.

  “No,” Joel said. “But I…back when I had my problems, I thought…I thought things like that were inside me, inside my head and…talking to me.”

  “But not anymore?”

  Growls and whispers at the very edges of his perception…

  “No. Not anymore.”

  He opened his coat enough to reach his free hand inside and pull out a piece of paper. It was folded up to about the size of a business card. Dorsey put his smoke in his mouth and, using both trembling hands, unfolded the paper. “Sometimes if I draw them, they get out of my head for a while.” Placing it across his knees, then smoothing it out, he held it up for Joel to see. “This is what they look like.”

  Done in pencil, a crudely drawn series of frightening humanoid figures filled the paper, their limbs long, distorted and extended, as if reaching out for him. They looked exactly like the ones Lonnie had drawn in his notebook.

  But this drawing included something more.

  In the upper right-hand corner was a much smaller but clear depiction of a car and four stick figures lying down in what looked like grass or weeds.

  A single snowflake appeared in the sky, slowly spiraling down toward the basketball court. Joel and Dorsey watched it ride the wind, dancing for them before making its final descent to the pavement. Just like the thoughts and visions in their heads, more would follow. This was only the beginning.

  “I never told anyone,” Dorsey said softly.

  “Me either.”

  Dorsey smoked the rest of his cigarette, then flicked it away. Smoke swirled around him like rolling fog. “Nita knows something happened when I was a kid, but she doesn’t know what. Never been able to tell her.”

  “Do you even know yourself?” Joel asked.

  He folded up the paper and slid it back into his coat. “The car.”

  “To this day Sal still says it was all just a game.”

  “For years I had myself convinced that’s what it was. Bunch of kids lying down in the grass, pretending we were…”

  “We were what?”

  Dorsey shrugged. “We were gone a day. A whole day, man, just…gone.”

  “We were in that car, weren’t we?”

  “I think so.” Dorsey ran a hand across his mouth and sighed. “We weren’t in the field the whole time, I know that much. We never even set up our gear.”

  “What did they do to us, Dorse?”

  “I don’t know, but whatever it was, it wasn’t the first time.”

  The revelation slammed Joel like a punch to the chest. He’d never thought of it before, yet the moment the words registered, he knew Dorsey was right.

  “Whoever they were, they already knew us,” he continued. “It wasn’t like they came across some random kids and made their move, dig? They knew we’d be there. They knew us. They’d taken us before, plenty of times, just not all at once.”

  A tremor shuddered through Joel’s body. “Why do you say that?”

  “I remember being in a place. It was all white, like a hospital maybe. I was on a gurney and these people were wheeling me down a long hallway. I remember the lights overhead passing by real slow. I dreamed about that for years before the day with the big black car. But when I remember that weekend, I remember the same thing happening, like in the dream. I feel it, and I know it’s something I felt before. Not once, but a lot of times.”

  “Do you remember anything else?”

  “Being afraid.” Dorsey seemed to come back from wherever he’d been in his head and quickly dug his cigarettes out again. “Now it’s just the dreams. I don’t know how much more I can take, cuz. I’m scared all the time.”

  Joel remembered Pete Fernandez telling him the same thing. He decided to test the waters and cast a line. “What about the numbers, Dorse, the sounds?”

  “They’re in my head too,” he said. “Falling through my mind like…”

  “Rain?”

  Dorsey looked at him with equal parts terror and hope. “You too?”

  “No, but I have the dreams. The numbers and sounds were things Lonnie suffered from, and so does the guy he worked with I told you about.”

  “There’s a message in them but I don’t know what it is. It’s just out of reach. Like whispers you know you heard but can’t make out.”

  On the other side of the fence, three young guys in heavy jackets walked parallel to the playground. Joel watched them until they turned the corner and disappeared from sight.

  “It’s like sometimes the whole goddamn world’s inside my head,” Dorsey told him. “And it’s all in flames.”

  Joel wanted to comfort him somehow, but it was beyond that. It had been for a very long time.

  “Like the shit you ran into in your book.” Dorsey took a hard pull on his cigarette. “You think all that went away? What, evil got cured? That cult disbanded and they’re all living good lives now, baking cookies and shit? That what happened to those fucks? You proved connections existed between them and a nationwide group of sick-ass motherfuckers. That all went up in smoke, dissolved into nothing, huh? The psychos that slaughtered that poor Portuguese girl—what—they went straight? Shit, listen to people now and you’d think none of it ever happened. You’d think the Devil’s the good guy in all this and the rest of us are crazy.”

  Joel nodded but refrained from answering, the fear he’d felt back then boiling to the surface, strangling him along with all the rest.

  “That’s the beauty of evil,” Dorsey said. “It hides for a while, that’s all. Waits. Changes. Comes back. Stronger. Meaner. Not a villain anymore, but the hero. And we all open wide and swallow it down.”

  “Like the dreams,” Joel said.

&nbs
p; “Like the dreams.”

  “I need to find Trent. I need to know what he knows. We all do.”

  “Sal says Trent’s nuts.”

  “Maybe so. Maybe we all are. But this is no game, Dorse. Whoever these people are, they killed Lonnie, and there’s a good chance they’ll come after the rest of us too. I’ve already been threatened. I’ve seen firsthand what they’re capable of, and it’s hardcore, man. Serious hardcore.”

  “What are they going to do, kill us like they did Lonnie? We’re already dead, cuz. Been dead for years, just didn’t know it. We all died in that field back home. Didn’t none of us get out of there alive.”

  “I’m going to end this,” Joel told him. “One way or another.”

  Something shifted in Dorsey’s face. He smoked his cigarette a while. “That’s what Lonnie told me,” he finally said. “Last time I saw him alive.”

  A few more renegade flakes fell from the sky, riding the wind.

  “Trent’s mother’s in a nursing home here in the city,” Joel said.

  “He was never that close to his mother.” Dorsey’s cigarette was smoked down to the filter. He stared at it as if he’d only then realized it was in his hand. “Think about it. None of us were close to our parents. Before that day or after.”

  Joel nodded. Dorsey was right again. “Still, she might know where he is.”

  Dorsey flicked the butt away. “You think he’s close?”

  “I think he might be.”

  They were quiet a while. The snow picked up but still wasn’t accumulating.

  “There isn’t as much of me left as there used to be, but I can still rumble pretty good for an old man.” Dorsey smiled sadly, as if he’d remembered something. “You need me, I’m here. Sal too.”

  “Sal didn’t seem too receptive.”

  “You let me worry about that stubborn-ass guinea.”

  Just like old times, Joel thought. He can call Sal that all day, but let someone else do it and it’s time to throw. It brought back so many happy memories, it made him want to smile. Almost.

  Instead, screams whispered to him from the farthest reaches of his mind, dragging him back to the dark, and the madness that nested there.