by Amanda Frame
“What happened? Did you have a stroke like they said?” I asked, concerned and baffled by his nonchalance.
“No,” he chuckled, “I guess I just passed out. The heat, I suppose.” I wasn’t convinced.
He filled out some paperwork while a doctor spoke to him. I saw John shake his head and sigh after the doctor walked away.
“What’s that about?”
“Oh, nothing. Just treating me like an old man. Talking loud and slow like they assume I’m deaf and senile. Telling me to drink enough water.”
“Yeah, I mean you’re obviously only like, thirty,” I laughed. He chuckled, Becca laughed along, obviously not in on the joke.
We reached her car and she held the back door open for John. It was cute. I rode shotgun.
We had been driving for several minutes and Becca was making small talk. I had been silent.
“Everything okay, Anna?” John asked.
“Becca knows almost everything,” I blurted the out the words before I had the sense to change my mind.
“What?” John asked slowly, his voice tinged with confusion.
“I was doing research, like you said I could, and then I found someone online who seemed like she might have some information about the Void, so we went to go see her and it sucked and I think she has a Leech attached to her and I think some serious shit is happening to Brian,” I rushed, just a little too loud, ringing my hands and waiting for his response. I heard Becca facepalm and groan.
Silence.
“The only thing you specifically told me not to do was go into the Void on my own.”
“You’ve involved her in a dangerous situation and that’s on you. I hope you realize that.”
I nodded. I did realize that and felt guilty about it every time I saw her. Becca pulled into John’s driveway.
“Come over later so we can talk more about this,” John said as we got out of the car.
“Can I come?” Becca asked.
“No!” John and I both responded.
“Fine, geez. See you later, Anna.” She gave me a reassuring nod and drove off.
“What were you thinking?” John asked, clearly annoyed.
“She already knew a few things and she could tell something was going on with me so… okay, I screwed up. It’s done, can we move on now?” I crossed my arms over my chest.
“Yeah, nothing we can do now except keep her as far away from all of this as possible,” he responded, his lips pressed in a hard line.
“Oh, John! You’re okay!” my mom said loudly from across the yard, walking toward us. He let her know that he only fainted and thanked her for her concern, asking if I could come over and help make him something to eat since he was still feeling a little weak. She of course agreed.
Making him something to eat equated to me ordering pizza. John grilled me on what I had told Becca. I told him I hadn’t said anything about our trip to the Void together and everything I had learned that day, like that he was actually a thirty-year-old man who looked like a nineteen-year-old kid who was living in an almost ninety-year-old body he had stolen from a dying man. Just saying it out loud was ridiculous in itself. She didn’t know that there was a way to intentionally enter the Void, and that it required leaving your physical body. I didn’t tell her we were making headway on the plan to banish or kill the Leech that had attached itself to Brian.
“Okay, so she actually knows a lot less than I assumed,” John said, nodding. “That’s good. So what about you guys going to see someone who had information about the Void?”
“Well, we didn’t really go to Charleston…” I told him about Jackie and what I had seen. He listened with a grim expression until I was finished. “So we have to kill the Leech that has latched onto Brian, right? Because it seems pretty likely that this will happen to him, otherwise.”
“Yeah, seems that way,” John said, shaking his head. “This makes things more difficult. If Brian is in the same boat as Jackie, which seems likely, the Leech probably won’t want to return to its body in the Void.”
“So what’s the plan now, then?” I asked, unable to hide the distress in my voice.
“I don’t know. I’m going to have to start over.”
I groaned. Every day that went by was one day closer to that happening to Brian.
“But we have another problem,” John said, closing his eyes and leaning back on the couch.
“Great. What now?”
“I didn’t pass out. I slipped into the Void accidently and couldn’t get back right away. I’m losing my connection to this body. Even if I come up with a plan, if we don’t act soon, I might not be around to help carry it out. You’ll be on your own.”
CHAPTER 48
JOHN
Light blinded me, even behind closed eyelids. I squeezed my eyes shut tighter and tried to bring my arm across them to block the brightness. I couldn’t. My arm barely moved; I had never experienced weakness like this. My muscles were nonexistent, pulling at my bones without success.
There was a beeping like a hot poker piercing my eardrums. Too much light and sound and feeling. I felt cloth on my skin like sandpaper, a hard pillow under my head, a stinging draft on my face.
After the burning in my eyes subsided enough, I opened them to slits. The ceiling tiles above my head were painfully white and clean. The walls were sky-blue, crystal clear and blinding. Too much sensation. I wanted to scream.
I coughed and it hurt. There was something in my throat. It was hard to breathe around it, I choked and sputtered, the sound ringing inside my skull.
The beeping grew faster and I heard footsteps. Gasping for breath, I looked towards the sound, a woman ran in and stopped dead in front of me, mouth agape.
“Oh my god,” she whispered. A man followed a moment later, his expression mirroring hers.
“Code…code…I don’t know! Just get a doctor in here now!” he yelled to someone behind him. The red of his uniform was too bright, his voice too loud. I shut my eyes again. Everything hurt.
I heard a third set of running footsteps and a moment later felt the tube being pulled from my throat. I gagged and coughed.
“Albert? Can you hear me?” I heard the man say, his voice calm but with a slight quiver. I flinched away from a soft touch on my arm, the sensation so foreign that it was frightening.
I opened my eyes, the colors bombarding me. A man looked down at me questioningly. It was then that I realized his words were directed at me.
“Yes,” I croaked.
“How are you feeling, Albert?”
How was I feeling? Well, my name wasn’t Albert. All of my senses felt heightened to the point of pain, and I was clearly in a hospital. The room was familiar.
I had no answer for him.
“Can you stay with him, Shannon?” the man said, turning towards the woman. She nodded. “I have to make a few calls.”
Shannon. My sister’s name. Of course this wasn’t my sister. I hadn’t thought about her in so long. She was two lifetimes ago.
She waited with me. Held my hand. I tried to pull away at first, her skin hot, the touch rough. Had human contact always felt this way? I couldn’t remember.
Remember…
Memories. A daughter. She was a blurry image in my mind. Dusky blonde hair and a crooked grin. She had a daughter, too. Her first birthday cake was in the shape of a whale. A wife. Dead many years ago from a stroke. A small dog, maybe a Jack Russell terrier.
Facts and images peppered my brain. Hazy and barely within reach. I knew my name was John. But I also felt it in this other life that was materializing in my head. It was dimmer though, insignificant. A middle name. Yes, that was it.
The beeping slowed as the sounds grew less painful. The colors began to look familiar again, like I had been seeing them in a haze all this time.
The memories grew clearer in my head, but I was remembering them from a distance, like recalling a bedtime story read to me a thousand times. They always remained just out of reach. Never
really mine, just plagiarized. All of it was, I realized. I wasn’t me and I wasn’t him. The memories, the feelings, the humanity. A borrowed life. A stolen life. A life I could never return. But I knew that even if I could, I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to. It was mine now, and I was going to live it.
CHAPTER 49
ELIZABETH
The thought had been hitting me more often lately despite my efforts to shove it back into the little box in my mind. I wished my parents would give up. Curse my dad and his PhD in Computer Engineering with his three-hundred-thousand-dollar annual salary. I never thought that being able to afford to keep your child on life support would be a bad thing. I should have written a will. I didn’t want this; no one would.
But if they had faith that one day I would come back, I owed it to them to at least try. I was out of ideas, though, and with no one around long enough to help. I was on my own. I tried to deny it, but I wanted to make it back because of Jordan, too. Not because I still loved him, though I did, but because he had moved on, and I wanted to make him feel guilty about it.
This was terrible and irrational and I knew it. Did I really want him to live the rest of his life alone just because he couldn’t spend it with me? Of course not, and yet the feeling tickled the back of my brain.
Mindful Meditation and Yoga, LLC had been dissolved. Nobody wanted to run the business and no wonder; after two years I had only had eight regular clients and was tens of thousands of dollars in the hole. I looked back on it with embarrassment. The skills I taught my clients weren’t very useful in everyday life, although they might be if any of them ever ended up here.
I had stopped going to the boardwalk years ago; it was too painful a reminder of the life I no longer led. I spent most of the time at the hospital, trying to pick up the vibrations of a new vacancy. It was the only place that one would be around for long, and I only had the time and energy to keep one location protected from Stalkers, anyway.
I had felt something odd a week or so ago. It felt similar to a vacancy, but not quite as open, as if the soul was still hanging on. It was strange; I hadn’t felt anything like it the thirteen years I had spent so far in this purgatory. I let my mind flow out again, searching for the feeling once more. I would get a hint of it now and again.
There it was. Somewhere north of me. I sighed, kicking my heels against the front of the nurses’ desk, swinging my legs as I sat atop it, as I had done countless times over the years. Should I try to find it? It was something new, which could be bad. Or it could be a chance I had yet to pursue. I decided to go for it.
I took a moment to feel for my parents. They didn’t visit me often anymore. Maybe twice a month. Breathing deep, I focused my mind and shifted myself closer to the physical. Medical staff swarmed around like a busy hive of bees, their drone audible over the silence of the Echo. They couldn’t see me and it made my heart ache, how I longed to just be noticed. And while they weren’t solid to me either, just a projection over the empty landscape where I spent most of my time, I liked to pretend I was there.
I didn’t feel the presence of my parents. Disappointment resonated through me, just like it did every time. I didn’t bother taking my usual stroll through the hospital corridors, watching the people walk through me. Instead, I let myself fade back out, once again alone in the emptiness, only experiencing the physical world as a movie in the background.
I pushed open the hospital doors, then faded out quickly to make sure I remained unseen. I hated walking. I had yet to figure out how to travel without walking. I could skip a short distance but was still working on it; it was difficult and unsuccessful most of the time. I could project my mind far distances and yet still had to walk my only partially physical form from point A to point B. And having to fade in and out repeatedly to avoid Stalkers was draining.
I walked for a long time. When I finally stopped, I found myself in front of an ordinary-looking house, but it felt ominous. The vacancy was in there somewhere but I again felt that it was only…partial. Something was wrong. I peered through the hazy window, unwilling to open the front door. I was too nervous. I debated leaving, but again thought of my family and how desperately they wanted me back, and how badly I needed to escape.
I saw nothing through the front window, so I circled the house, looking for others. Coming around to the side of the house, I spotted another window. Standing on my toes, I gazed in. A boy sat on a bed. I could see the overlay of sheet and blankets covering a mattress, where in the Echo, it was nothing but an empty bedframe. The boy was neither here nor there, which was what I would have expected in regular circumstances, except he wasn’t right in the middle, either; he was much further toward the physical.
I furrowed my eyebrows, confused, and leaned to the side, trying to get a better view of the rest of the room.
There, in the corner. A Stalker.
I ducked quickly, heart pounding. Normally I wouldn’t be too concerned, I would just press myself closer to the physical and it would leave me alone, but this one was different. It was here with me, in the Barrier.
How? How? It was far more solid than the boy, but still not completely in the Barrier. I had never come across this before. It felt…dangerous.
I slowly peeked inside again, rising on my toes. The boy’s soul was still inside his body, but it felt slightly off. Almost like it was out of sync with his physical form. It only took me a second to realize why.
The Stalker was no longer in the corner, instead, I could see the two forms overlapping, moving as one. I gasped aloud. It was like the boy’s soul and the creature were both trying to inhabit the body. The wrongness of it made my skin crawl.
How was this possible? The Stalker seemed to be feeding off the boy, just as I would see them do all the time, but this was far different, more parasitic. They were connected somehow.
I sank down to sit against the siding. What did this mean? The Stalker was clearly in the Barrier with me, between both places, existing wholly in neither one, the same as I was. Somehow, it was using this boy to do that, to get one step closer to the physical. Was there something special about him? Maybe there was some way I could I use him to do this too.
Use him? What was I thinking?
The thought of using someone made me feel dirty. The rage that I had felt when Albert’s body got taken bubbled up. I thought of this often. As angry as I was that someone used Albert like they had, I sympathized. He saw a way out and took it. I tried to tell myself that the man didn’t know what he was doing. He seemed compelled, in a trance almost. If I had found a way such as this to escape, would I have taken it? I couldn’t deny that I might have.
Maybe it was time to think more selfishly. I deserved to be free. I had served my time and more. I could figure out what the Stalker was doing, and do the same. Maybe this boy could finally connect me to the physical world. But how?
It was likely that I wouldn’t be able to fade away from the Stalker if it was here in the Barrier with me, so how would I observe it without a confrontation? Thinking about coming face to face with it made me woozy, so I went back to the front window and peered through the glass once more. Nothing notable, nothing to make it seem that this house would be different. I faded in to see more clearly. A woman sat on a couch, just staring, maybe at a television I couldn’t see. A girl had turned a corner, heading in the direction of the bedroom with the boy and the Stalker.
I rested my forehead against the glass, remaining closer to the physical world, since it seemed I would be more out of phase with the Stalker here. I should probably just leave this alone. It was obviously dangerous and I didn’t even know if I could benefit from observing the situation.
I was startled when the door was flung open on the physical side, a jarring contrast to the motionless rotting wood in the Echo. Even after thirteen years, I was sometimes still startled by the overlap, like trying to watch a 3D movie without the red-and-blue-lensed glasses.
The girl I had seen a minute ago stood on the threshold
, and our gazes locked. I thought it was just my eyes playing tricks on me—obviously she couldn’t see me. But her face bore a look of terror as well as confusion. I looked behind me to see what she was looking at, but there was nothing there. When I turned back again, she was still staring at me.
“What…” she trailed off, our eyes locking once more. I inhaled sharply. She was looking at me! Then I saw the Stalker behind her, its red eyes peering out from the bedroom, giant claws gripping the doorframe, and I yelped, losing my shift toward the physical and coming to rest back at the center of the Barrier, opaque in neither world.
I ran, I even managed to skip a few short distances, putting more space between me and the Stalker with each passing moment. I risked a glance back and didn’t see it. I wasn’t going to pursue this. Not a chance. But that girl. I needed to find that girl.
CHAPTER 50
ELIZABETH
I spent an absurd amount of time trying to locate her. I stopped searching for other vacancies. I neglected my weekly task of lugging water up to the ICU to keep the Stalkers away, and would lose the safe place I had created if I didn’t do it again soon. But I didn’t care. I found a possible connection to the physical world. A way to talk to my parents and tell them what I truly wanted. Or maybe the girl would do it.
I couldn’t stay at the boy’s house for long because he and the Stalker were almost always there, so I followed his mother to work instead. I was getting better at skipping, so I was able to keep up with her car. Keeping myself next to the physical for such long periods of time was incredibly draining, but I had an opportunity that I wasn’t about to let slip away.
His mom, Sue, was a receptionist at a dental office. She had pictures of her son playing football and talked of him often. His name was Brian.
The other employees talked in hushed tones about Sue’s son. Wasn’t it just so sad what happened to Sue’s son? Did you hear he might not ever recover? She needs some time off, others would say, feigning genuine concern. Mental health issues run in the family, you know.