by Xander Gray
I didn’t want her to tell me anything.
She stumbled toward me. “You’ve been here before, in the dream place.”
The dream place. I had heard that phrase in some long forgotten fragment of my childhood. I waved the torch, making her shadow dance on the wall. “Stay back.”
“Not until you admit what you did!”
“I didn’t do anything.” I jabbed the torch at her. A trail of glowing embers swirled toward the floor.
She knocked the torch aside and pinned me against the wall, clutching my throat. Bolts of purple lightning blazed in her eyes. “Remember what you did to me. Remember what you did to Gar in grade school. Remember the trip into the cube that started it all. Now run away, little baby Joshua. Run away and get lost in the endless maze of the dream place and never see the sun.”
I bolted into the hallway, my fingers trembling, my torch flickering on the walls. I ran until my heart felt like it would burst, through an endless maze of corridors, casting glances over my shoulder to make sure Helena had not followed. Finally I stumbled through an arch into an expansive doctor’s office, and found myself staring at an egg-shaped pod.
I touched the platform where I had lain long ago, marveling at how real it felt. This was the most realistic hallucination I had ever experienced.
“You don’t remember.” Slaven stepped through the doorway.
He doesn't belong here. It was a strange thought, but I couldn’t shake it. He's invaded my hallucination somehow.
“I know more about your past than you do,” he said, “seeing as how I’m the one who wrote your record.”
“My prison record?”
“The official record.” His eyes were dead black. “Everyone who gets scheduled for transference has one. I’m not allowed to see yours anymore—they locked me out.”
I swung the torch at him, but he grabbed it.
Flames wicked up his sleeve, over his chest. The skin of his neck blackened. I smelled burning polyester, the sour char of flesh.
He didn't flinch. Instead he gave me a terrible, glittering smile, flames dancing in his eyes.
“Please.” My voice sounded small.
He took my shoulders with burning hands and pulled my face up to his. His pupils flashed with purple light. “I think you were sent here for a reason, Joshua Briar. I think you were sent to burn the gates of Heaven.”
I screamed, dropping the torch. Fear ignited in me like an electric current.
Two words flashed in my mind—exit simulation. When I concentrated on them a great light opened above me, shredding the hallucination into long, unraveling tatters. I fell upward, into the light. Slaven's screams followed.
Helena’s voice—guttural with rage—filled my head. You have to remember. You have to turn them off!
#
Slaven’s face, engulfed in flame, was still fading as I sat up in bed and tore off my breathing mask. I was back in the room where the faceless humanoid had injected me, where Slaven had unleashed a cloud of smoke.
Had those things happened?
From the center of the room rose a glowing monolith. A dozen hospital beds, including my own, encircled the monolith, each hosting an unconscious prisoner. Each prisoner wore a breathing mask, and a tube ran from each mask to the monolith like the spokes of a wheel. Beyond the beds, a vinyl curtain hung from the ceiling, presumably the same curtain I had encountered from the other side when I had first sneaked into the building.
I was wearing a shirt—the other men lay bare chested—and a nametag flashed above my breast pocket: Slaven.
I was wearing Slaven’s uniform. Why?
I popped a shirt button and felt along my ribs. Where were the stitches? I stood from the bed and started to unfasten another button, but my hands froze when I saw a mirror on the wall above the sink.
The face in the mirror was Slaven’s.
I raised a hand. To my horror, the reflection did the same.
I turned away, a frightened reflex, and noticed the man lying in the bed in front of me. He looked familiar, yet foreign: a sleeping stranger I knew intimately but couldn't recognize. When the realization came, the air went out of my lungs.
I was looking at myself. The man in the bed resembled me so completely he could have fooled my wife.
My head swimming, I reached toward him to see if he was real, but my hip bumped a button on the monolith. With a loud hiss, smoke flowed through the imposter’s breathing tube. He coughed, and sat up, snatching the breathing mask from his face.
Impossible. I tried to scream, but emitted only a croak. I backed up, hands groping behind me for the privacy curtain.
“You’re not supposed to leave the simulation.” He stumbled after me, chest glowing in the light like a radium dial. “It’s not supposed to be possible, even for you!”
I pushed through the curtain into an antechamber with rotten floors and crumbling walls—the same room I had entered upon my first trespass into the building. A door lay just ahead, the door I had smashed through. I hurled my weight against it, but it just shuddered in the frame. Had the lock been repaired? No. I needed to pull, not push.
Footsteps clomped behind me. Fingers grazed my neck. “Give me my body.”
I pulled the door open. A gust of fresh air washed over me—I was outside—and I descended the porch steps, raising my gaze toward the catwalk, its lattices silhouetted against the moon.
Behind me, something snapped. I spun around to see my doppelganger, lurching down the porch steps like a shambling stroke victim.
I staggered away from the death row building through knee-high weeds. A lightbulb above the GenPop door allowed me to examine the keys on my belt—Slaven’s belt—until I found one that clicked in the deadbolt. What would I find when I opened the door? Would the block be empty? Fully populated?
I pulled the door open and immediately noticed the din of prisoners. Not evacuated, then.
A corrections officer looked at me. “Sir?”
I fished for some excuse for being outside my cell after lockdown, but the officer's expression said he wasn’t looking for an excuse.
“I’m not feeling well,” I said in Slaven’s voice.
The officer unlocked the door to the education wing and ushered me into a hallway lined with classrooms. “Where you parked? Deck B?”
“Yes.” Sure. “Deck B.”
The officer pressed a button. The front doors buzzed.
He was setting me free.
Chapter Fourteen
This was madness. I walked distractedly along Canal, a two-lane road leading toward town, until I came to an intersection and noticed light from a street lamp illuminating my unusually large knuckles and realized this was really happening.
I retrieved Slaven’s wallet from my back pocket and flipped it open. It was almost empty— no family photos or money—but it did have some insurance cards and a driver’s license. Derek Slaven, 42 Canal. Just up the road.
Slaven's place was a brick ranch, its address stamped onto the mailbox. It was separated from the neighbor’s houses by wide expanses of lawn. All was dark and quiet, bathed in moonlight the color of dreams.
I crept along the gravel drive, watching for any sign the house might be occupied. The windows on either side of the concrete patio were dark, the blinds still.
The third key unlocked the deadbolt. I made my way over green carpet in the living room, past a dead spider plant hanging from a ceiling hook. As I stepped into the kitchen, the linoleum creaked. I froze, listening for movement deeper in the house. Once I was certain nothing had responded, I opened the cabinets. Plates and drinking glasses stocked the uppers; the lowers contained silverware and knives.
I moved down the hallway to the bedroom. The bed's sheets had been folded over the lip of the comforter, like in a hotel, and the furnishings were sparse—a bedside table and wooden bench. No alarm clock, no laundry, no sign anyone slept here.
There were some clothes in the closet, along with a metal box containing three drive
r’s licenses of middle-aged men and various ID badges and documents in each man’s name. All had addresses in Pine Bluff. I tucked the box under my arm.
The only room left lay at the end of the hallway, presumably a bathroom. Bracing myself for a glimpse in the mirror, I stepped in and flipped on the light. Slaven’s cobalt eyes blinked at me. The harder I tried to picture what my face was supposed to look like, the more alien my reflection became.
Then my right eye came unglued and melted down my cheek.
My mouth deformed into a grotesque black slash. “Somebody help!” I placed my hands on the mirror, on either side of my reflection, and concentrated on my breathing.
This is crazy. I know what I look like, and it’s not this.
The metamorphosis took less than a second—my mind distilled every detail. The puddle of skin on my chin crawled back over the bones of my face and solidified. My mouth straightened and my brow elongated until I was staring at the reflection I had known my whole life.
When I pressed my fingers against my cheek, the flesh was solid. Slaven's clothes now sagged off of me. Instead of a melting horror, I was a regular person wearing another man's uniform.
I collapsed on the linoleum, hugged my knees, and moaned in the empty house.
Headlights slashed through the aluminum blinds in the living room. Outside, tires crunched on gravel.
I slipped through the back door and ran to the tree line behind the yard, where I slid onto my belly beneath a shrub and watched the back stoop.
A silhouette moved from room to room inside the house, turning out lights. Finally the real Slaven stepped onto the back porch, a pale ghost scanning the trees. He took two steps into the yard and looked toward me. I held my breath, my fingers curling into the earth. He paced along the porch, looking all around, before finally going back inside.
I scrambled up the muddy hill behind me, fighting for purchase on the wet leaves. I didn’t stop running until the house disappeared behind the trees.
Chapter Fifteen
It took most of the night to get to my grandmother's farm. When I finally arrived the next morning, I pulled Slaven’s phone from my pants pocket, suddenly cursing myself for leaving it on. Cell phones doubled as tracking devices.
Crystal answered on the second ring.
“Crystal, it’s me. I escaped prison.”
A pause. “Joshua?”
“Don’t ask questions. Don’t call the cops. Get out here to…” I almost said my grandmother’s farm, but thought better of it. “Meet me at our spot. I need help.”
I turned off the phone and stepped onto the lawn. No one had lived here since Grandma’s death—the rose bushes along the weathered porch had grown into half-dead juggernauts, and the grass rose to my knees, bursting with seeds. It was so peaceful I could almost forget I had ever roamed a stinking prison, but neither the bright summer sun nor the fresh country air could make me forget seeing Slaven’s face in the bathroom mirror.
To my right lay a dirt path. Hallucinations could shift like smoke, but no matter how crazy I became, that path would always lead to the rocky lakeshore where Crystal and I had spent our adolescence. I needed to see it.
I took the path past the hickory grove and the old barn, my shoes—Slaven’s work shoes, half a size too big—kicking up clouds of dust. The lake was flat and black, just like I remembered, at the base of the limestone bluffs. I stood on the rocky washout at the lake's shore, listening to the birds chirp and the wind rustle the canopy.
Yes, the lake was here. Yes, I was truly free.
I climbed the bluff and dangled my legs over the edge, looking down at the black disc of the lake and listening to the lost laughter of two teenagers, high and sweet.
#
By the time Crystal crossed the gravel washout, the sun had risen to its midday zenith. Sunlight flashed between the rippling leaves and blazed across the lake.
I waved at her from the bluff. “Over here.”
She climbed the rocks, minding her briefcase, and scooted next to me on the ridge. She looked me over. “Are you hurt? Do you need a doctor?”
“Maybe a shrink.”
She hugged me, then sat back and stared. “Are you going to make me drag it out of you?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know how to explain.”
“You can start with this.” She reached out and rubbed the sleeve of Slaven's uniform between her thumb and forefinger.
“Jesus, Crystal. I don’t know.”
“Did you kill a cop?”
I couldn’t answer.
Crystal pulled a stack of papers out of her briefcase. “I could get disbarred. Start talking.”
I frowned at her, my eyes welling.
Her tone softened. “You know I love you. I just can’t believe you did this. Do you know the odds of successfully evading capture? And the life you’d lead? Our revelations about McSorley may have helped get a new trial.”
I wiped my eyes, nodding.
She allowed me time to collect myself. “Our man Pyxis has been busy.”
“What do you mean?”
Crystal lifted a stone, turned it in the light, and dropped it over the edge. It plunked into the water. “Let’s start with the believable part. He says McSorley was developing a model of the human brain.”
“We knew that.”
“Except his model was at the level of the cell.”
I suspected she had made an important discovery, but felt too overwhelmed to concentrate on the decades-old academic inquiries of a research scientist.
Crystal flipped through the pages in her lap, then abruptly set them aside. “How did you get out of prison?”
“The front door.”
“Bullshit.”
“They thought I was someone else.”
“Oh, come on.”
“You can believe what you want.” I knew I shouldn’t be angry—her faith in me usually bordered on delusional and my tale was beyond belief. “Just tell me what’s in that document.”
“Don’t get your hopes up.” Crystal looked between her knees at the lake. “It’s nonsense.”
After all I had experienced, I expected she and I had very different ideas about what constituted nonsense.
You’ve been here before, in the dream place.
I closed my eyes to calm myself, but the blank man swam out from the blackness of my memory, his flesh squirming like meal worms. My face tingled, losing circulation. Somewhere in the distance, Crystal screamed.
When the world snapped back into focus, Crystal was scrambling away from me.
“Your face.” She backed into a tree. “Holy Christ.”
A horrible 8-bit bleating vibrated my head.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“I think so.”
She fell to her knees, touching my face. “We have to get you help.”
“What?”
“Let me think.”
“What kind of help?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. Let’s start by getting you back to the car.” She looked like she'd just watched a rattlesnake slither out from beneath one of the boulders.
I might have felt ashamed if my head hadn’t been swimming. “I feel strange.”
“You and me both.” Crystal stood and pulled me to my feet. “Come on.”
#
I sat in the passenger seat as Crystal guided her car across the dirt shoulder and parked in the shadows beneath a row of oaks. She unclasped her briefcase and spread documents on the dash. “When was the last time you ate?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“That’s not what I asked,” she snapped.
“I don’t know.” I had bigger worries than my daily nutritional requirements. “It’s been a while.”
“Come on, Joshua.” She smacked the steering wheel. “Answer the question.”
I knew she wouldn’t press unless she felt it necessary, but it was hard to know how much of the past week had been real, let alone how long it had been sin
ce my last meal. I tried to work it out in my mind. “I was stabbed on Tuesday—”
“You were stabbed?” Crystal’s fist unclenched.
I lifted my shirt to show her, but my belly was unblemished. No stitches.
A feeling of unreality descended upon me, but then I remembered the moments after I had awoken in the old death row—when my hand had slid along my ribcage, searching for the wound and finding only unbroken skin. “There was a stab wound here.”
She still looked concerned, but went on. “What happened after you were stabbed?”
“I woke up in the old death row. That’s what we call it, even though it was repurposed as a storage facility years ago. Someone is currently using it as an infirmary.” I pictured the stacks of glowing cubes, humming in dim light, and the blank man rippling in the shadows. I tried to remember how I had come to wear Slaven’s face, but it was too much. “I was injected with something, and I fell asleep, and I had the world’s most vivid hallucination. When I woke up, things were different.”
“You were someone else?” she asked, without an ounce of condescension. Whatever had happened back by the lake had overcome her common-sense objections.
“That’s how I experienced it.”
She nodded. “You haven’t eaten since Tuesday?”
“That sounds right.” I had eaten lunch on the day Slaven had stabbed me.
Crystal leaned toward me. “Tuesday was five days ago.”
“Holy Christ.”
“And you’re not hungry?”
“No.” I should have been ravenous.
“When was the last time you felt any physiological need whatsoever?”
I shook my head. “I can’t remember.”
She looked through the windshield at the overgrown field and then back at me, shielding her eyes from the sun. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“You think you know something?”
She touched my shoulder. “Back there in the woods, your face changed.”
“What do you mean changed?” I needed to hear her say it. I needed to know I wasn’t the only one who had seen something impossible.
“You became this.” She grabbed a photograph from the dashboard, revealing the blank man—the same photo she had shown me days earlier. “According to Pyxis, that is a Capgras.”