Someone Like Me

by M. R. Carey

  Nissan should build that into their advertising, Beth thought.

  Before she set out, she sent a couple more texts in Fran’s direction. The coup de grâce would come later, but it was no bad thing to keep the channel open. Beth hoped it was open. If Fran had just turned her phone off for the night, this could all fall apart on her.

  Either way, she couldn’t afford to dawdle from here on out. She locked up the house, got into the car and drove, not toward Lenora but toward Washington—and then across it into Homewood.

  She hadn’t been to the Perry Friendly Motel since before she was married, and she wasn’t entirely sure of the way. She could have used the car’s built-in GPS system, but that seemed like a bad idea for any number of reasons. She just drove slowly, following her instincts and turning in whenever she saw anything that looked familiar. She missed it on the first pass, but the lightbox sign and the wrought-iron gateposts registered a second after she drove past it. She turned around and found the lightless access road almost at once. She kept an eye out for headlights, but there were no other vehicles in sight as she turned in off the street and bumped and rocked her way up the crumbling flags of the driveway to the Perry Friendly.

  The abandoned motel was a sinister place after dark. Shit, it was probably sinister in broad daylight. No wonder Bruno Picota had chosen to bring his kidnap victim there. The ambience was perfect. Of course, Beth was seeing it as a ruin. Maybe it had been a happening place back in the day.

  It would have been possible, just about, to drive the car across the weed-choked lot and park it in the rear courtyard, but the crushed-down and ripped-up weeds would have left a spectacularly visible trail. Instead, she parked at the end of the driveway, where the undergrowth began in earnest. She would have to carry the kids one by one through the arch and across the courtyard to room 22.

  The cold air hit her as she got out of the car. It seemed much chillier here than it had been back at the house. Her breath steamed against the backdrop of the headlight beams like writhing ghosts, and the crunch of her feet on the gravel chased up echoes that seemed to come from unlikely directions. Beth changed her mind: open or closed, this place had always been a creepy fucking dive. Even its name, the Perry Friendly, was trying suspiciously hard. You didn’t give your establishment a name like that if people got a positive vibe as they walked in.

  Zac and Molly still hadn’t stirred. Beth took Zac first, carrying him slung over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Over this longer distance the weight quickly started to tell. Putting one foot in front of the other required a real effort, especially since she had to place her feet carefully to avoid trip hazards buried in the weeds.

  By the time she laid Zac down on the floor of room 22, she was sweating like a Sumo wrestler and breathing like Molly on a bad night. She needed to take a short rest. She used the time to write her message for Fran on the wall in black marker, using multiple strokes to thicken each letter so they would show up better in the photo.

  Then she went and fetched Molly, which was a stroll in the park after carrying Zac. She laid the little girl down next to her brother, careful not to jolt or bruise her even though she was so deeply asleep she wouldn’t have felt a thing.

  In fact, she wouldn’t feel anything again, ever. That thought brought a wrenching sob into Beth’s throat, so powerful it was almost like vomiting. She didn’t want to have to do this. She wished there was any other way, any route to her own safety that didn’t involve the children’s deaths. But there wasn’t. She had to see it through or else surrender everything she’d won. Go to jail for Marc’s murder, or flee into the void and leave Doormat Liz to face the music for her.

  No. She had fought too hard and suffered too much. She had bought this life with her own blood, a whole ocean of it. And now that interest was due, she would pay in someone else’s.

  She took a photo of the message on the wall, following the template she had already found in the message history on Zac’s phone. It would either work or it wouldn’t. If Fran Watts took the bait, this ended tonight and the rest of Beth’s life began. Until then, there was nothing she could do but wait.

  She sat down just inside the door. From this vantage point she could look out into the courtyard while keeping one eye on her unconscious kids. Time went by very slowly. The crickets sang and occasionally some animal, most likely a rat, scratched against the wall behind her or scampered across the floor. She used Zac’s phone at first to keep track of time, since the face of her watch couldn’t be seen in the near-perfect dark. But she forced herself to stop when three successive glances, seemingly long minutes apart, all showed the time to be 10:43 p.m.

  Beth had read about what happened to people in sensory deprivation tanks. Their brains responded to the complete absence of information from the outside world by filling in the blanks with vivid hallucinations. Something like that started to happen to her now. She heard sounds out in the courtyard. A bleat of tinny music, a woman’s laugh. Those noises could have been carried on the wind from some house nearby, Beth told herself. But there were no houses: that was what made this place so well suited to her needs. Then from the room next door she heard a creak of bedsprings, followed by an unmistakably sexual moan.

  She scrambled to her feet and stepped outside. The door to the adjacent room was nailed shut and there was no light or sound from inside. Just nerves, then. She had never suffered from them before now, but this body had been Liz’s for a long time before it was hers. Maybe nerves had a memory the same way muscles did.

  She returned to room 22 and her vigil, trying to ignore the sense that the space around her was somehow aware of her. That the Perry Friendly, so long abandoned, wasn’t dead at all but just now waking from a light, unquiet sleep.

  Finally she heard the sound of someone approaching, rustling and stumbling their way across the courtyard. She dropped her hand to the taser, which she was wearing on her belt, and waited patiently.

  The sounds stopped. Whoever was out there—and this time Beth was sure somebody actually was—had slowed to a halt, almost certainly looking toward room 22 for signs of life. Should she provide some? Better to hold still and wait.

  “Zac?” The whisper came from close by, but it was hard to say in the dark exactly where the whisperer was standing. Beth needed Fran to be right up close when she fired. Inspiration came when she shifted her weight and felt Zac’s phone move in her hip pocket.

  She took it out and turned it on, then off again at once.

  It worked. The footsteps walked right up to the door of the room.

  “Next time I’m gonna choose the venue, goon,” Fran Watts said, sounding relieved. “I had about three heart attacks getting here.”

  She was standing square in the doorway, outlined very conveniently against the lesser gloom of the outside air. Beth raised the taser, slowly and silently, and took careful aim.

  Normally when Jinx left her den and headed back to the real world, Fran was her beacon. Jinx’s sense of her was strong and highly directional, and Fran was always the destination she was heading for. Now, for the first time ever, she turned away from that intense, steady signal and followed a different trail entirely.

  She went to Liz’s house, steering by memory: her recollections, powerful and recent, of the house where Zac Kendall lived, together with the tiny cub called Molly and the monster who looked like their mother. She breached from the void into their family room.

  The house was empty, but it smelled of recent occupation. The children had been here, and so had the monster. But not Fran. The monster hadn’t lured her to this place. Full of relief, Jinx padded from room to room to interrogate the smells some more.

  They weren’t really smells, she knew that: she was sensitive to the way people thought and felt, and the residue of thought and feeling was what she was looking for now. What she found was confusing. The monster had thought sad thoughts, and cunning thoughts. She had thought of her children, and she had thought of blood. In the midst of al
l this, she had thought—very strongly and clearly—about Fran.

  Considerably more alarmed now, Jinx ran through the house from room to room. The scents were strongest in the kitchen, but there was no way of telling what had happened there. The scent of Liz’s two children was very weak. They weren’t feeling anything much at all. But the monster’s spoor was strong, and rich with turbulent emotions.

  She should go to Fran, she knew. She needed to check that Fran was safe. But she had promised Liz, on her honor as a knight, that she would protect the children. She had to keep that promise, now more than ever. It was very clear that the monster meant them harm.

  Jinx loped straight through the wall, down the driveway of the house and out onto the road. They had lingered for quite some time in the driveway, but Jinx didn’t. She followed the trail, running hard with her head down through people and cars, houses and streets and gardens. She didn’t look where she was going because she didn’t have to: nothing could stand in her way.

  The monster had taken Zac and Molly, preying on the weak and helpless the way monsters did. But now the monster would reckon with Lady Jinx, and it would beg for mercy before it died. She allowed herself a brief imagining of that moment—when Oathkeeper’s blade cut off the monster’s head. It felt so good that she imagined it again and again, with different words from her and different wails and shrieks from the monster.

  She wasn’t looking or thinking. She was careless. The evil rose up ahead of her, a curtain of filthy smog that the eye couldn’t see. She was running too fast to stop in time, even if she had realized, and by the time she realized it was all around her. Her headlong gallop lost its rhythm as her feet scrambled on caked blackness. She staggered blindly back, eyes tight shut, to the perimeter, where she lay helpless, a trembling mass, until her thoughts gradually came back to her.

  The Perry Friendly. The trail led right to it.

  Or rather the trails. There were two now. The monster had passed right through this gate only a little while before. And so, even more recently, had Fran. Fran had followed Beth here, to the one place in the whole world where Jinx couldn’t go.

  Jinx couldn’t help herself. She threw back her head and howled, first like a fox and then, as the dams within her broke one by one, like a little girl.

  Fran woke, sick and groggy, to find that she couldn’t move or speak. She was lying on a solid floor—presumably the floor of room 22. Her hands were down by her sides, somehow pinned or held in place, and something had been taped or tied across her mouth.

  Beth was kneeling nearby, facing away from Fran. She was rummaging in a big canvas holdall, whose contents clunked and rattled and occasionally creaked. The smell in the room was a lot worse than before. Along with the mildew and damp there was an eye-watering reek of rot. Some animal must have died in here since the time when she and Zac had made their visit.

  Fran tried to tilt her head so she could see what was pinning her hands, but although there was now some light in the room it wasn’t falling on her. All she could see was Beth—and then, as Beth moved, Zac and Molly. They were lying side by side on the floor a little way away. They weren’t moving. Fran couldn’t tell if they were even breathing, but a milky drool was coming from the corner of Zac’s mouth.

  Beth unzipped her leather jacket and set it aside. Was she feeling too hot despite the biting chill in the air? No, Fran realized, it wasn’t that at all. She didn’t want the jacket, which looked very expensive, to get dirty. That meant she was about to do something she knew would make a mess.

  Fran’s mind flashed brilliant white with sudden abject terror. She didn’t want to die here! Not here of all places!

  Where was the light coming from? It must be on the floor somewhere, because Beth’s shadow, huge and shapeless, crawled across the ceiling as she moved. Staring up at it, Fran wondered suddenly if all her dreams had not been dreams at all, but memories of this moment that somehow got played out of sequence.

  Beth stepped in front of Fran and squatted down so suddenly it was as if the shadow had congealed into flesh and blood. In her right hand there was an X-Acto knife. Fran gave a muffled grunt of alarm and tried to squirm away, but with her arms and legs immobilized all she could do was writhe uselessly on the spot.

  “Easy, girl,” Beth murmured. “I’m not going to cut you. Take it easy. If you do what you’re told, none of this has to hurt.”

  She frowned, as though she disapproved of Fran’s fear. As though Fran was just being a baby and needed to grow up and be sensible. She leaned in with the knife, at the same time gripping Fran’s shoulder and rolling her over.

  Fran screamed behind her gag, making almost no sound at all. Beth made three passes with the knife. On the first two times it caught and she had to put some effort into it. With the third pass, something gave.

  It was Fran’s right arm. She realized that she could move her hand now. Just her right hand, and her right arm as far as the elbow. A trailing end of duct tape dangled from her sleeve. There must be a whole lot more wrapped around her, stopping her from standing up or moving her left arm at all. Maybe that was what was gagging her too.

  Beth leaned in close to her. “Now are you going to give me any trouble, sweetheart?” she asked matter-of-factly. “There are other ways of doing this, and they’ll hurt more. We’re going to play a little game, is all. Are you up for that?”

  Fran made a sound into the gag. It didn’t mean yes. It didn’t mean anything.

  Beth took it for a yes anyway. She was kneeling behind Fran now, and her knees were in the small of Fran’s back, propping her up on her side. She reached out with one hand and picked up something Fran couldn’t see. The black blot of her shadow spread across the ceiling and down the walls as she moved the thing closer: a storm lantern, the kind that’s electric but has been made to look like something old-fashioned that has a candle inside it.

  By its light, Beth laid three items down in front of Fran. The X-Acto knife. A white cardboard packet a little longer and wider than a pack of cigarettes. And a red plastic dragon that Fran recognized from one of Molly’s Lego sets.

  Fran’s gaze went from the three objects to Beth’s hands as she arranged them in a line. Beth’s hands were yellow in the storm lantern’s glow. Yellow and shiny. She was wearing washing-up gloves.

  “Here’s how this works,” Beth said. “I’m thinking of one of these three things. You’ve just got to guess which one. Pick it up and show me. If you guess right, you get a gold star and a pat on the head. If you get it wrong, I’m going to cut you.

  “Ready when you are, sweetheart.”

  This time, when the fox returned it wasn’t gradual or mysterious. She shot straight out of nowhere, as if the air had spat her out, and tumbled end-over-end as she tried to right herself. Even before she was on her feet again she was babbling at Liz in a voice that seemed subtly changed.

  Come you’ve got to come you’ve got to save her. Please save her. I can’t go there, but you can. You’ve got to come right now!

  Actually it wasn’t even subtle. That was Fran’s voice. It was younger and higher, but the similarity was unmistakable In her moment of crisis, Jinx’s disguise was breaking down.

  Whoa, there! Liz said. Slow down. Tell me what—

  The monster’s got her! The monster’s got all of them! But there’s a place I can’t go! She took them to the place I can’t go! If you don’t come she’s going to eat them!

  Beth? You mean Beth? Liz moved as quickly as she could toward the little animal. She hovered right over her, a roil of troubled air like a tiny thunderhead. What has she done? Tell me!

  But Jinx could hardly talk at all now. She was convulsing with panic, ripples chasing themselves down her body as if she was a bad picture on an old TV screen. She spilled the story out in pieces, fragments of sentences like broken teeth. The empty house. The chase through the night to the Perry Friendly. Fran’s trail, cutting across the monster’s, going in after her.

  Why? Why would she go
there again? Beth is going to kill them! I smelled her thinking it! Come quickly, Liz! Come right now!

  Liz didn’t need any urging. The fox’s panic had infected her. Show me the way, she told Jinx. But you’ll have to go slow enough for me to follow you.

  If I go slowly, it will be too late!

  Jinx, we don’t have a choice. I can’t run.

  Then curl yourself up small. As small as you can.

  Liz didn’t hesitate. Jinx had been a ghost for a whole lot longer than her and had a better grasp of the rules.

  It wasn’t hard. Even in this place, where Liz had enough substance to feel the solidity of the walls when she tried to break through them, there was almost nothing to her. She folded in on herself, again and again, closed and held herself like a fist.

  Okay, now what do I—?

  Jinx opened her mouth wide and swallowed her.

  Not all the way down, just into the middle of her throat. Liz felt herself both engulfed and held in place. Stifling a scream, she kept her rigid, folded posture and braced herself.

  There was a sense of rushing, headlong motion. It went on for a long time, but any time at all would have felt long given where they were going. Who they would face there. What would happen if they arrived too late.

  Then she felt a different kind of movement, jerky and spasmodic. Jinx regurgitated her like a cat coughing up a hairball, with effortful heaves and hacks. Liz was spat out onto cracked asphalt, intact apart from her dignity.

  It was night and they were at the edge of the world. A low, sprawling building rose up in front of them, a cut-out paper silhouette. Between them was nothing but the broad, slightly curving line of a driveway and the dead ground of an overgrown parking lot. Something about the quality of the air—not its smell or its taste since Liz couldn’t access those things—suggested bruised ripeness turning into rot. The whole world souring, the way milk soured.