The Delusion

by Laura Gallier

  “What, Owen? You don’t feel like what?” She paused, then leaned away from me. “You’re scaring me.”

  Irony at its worst.

  I felt myself inhale. “I just—don’t know—what else to tell you.”

  She sighed, then put one foot on the floor and bent forward in her chair, extending a hand. I shuddered back into the couch cushions. She pressed her eyebrows together.

  “Hand me the remote, Owen!”

  I should have known she wouldn’t push me for more information. She was an expert at changing the subject. I guessed she just didn’t care enough.

  I didn’t have the remote. It was at the end of the coffee table, beyond our reach. “I’ll get it,” I said.

  Too late. She was on her feet. My jaw dropped as a wall of chains draped over the back of her chair, forming a metallic canopy. There were too many to count. She bent over, and a dozen gnarled cords slid and dangled down her left shoulder. She stepped to grab the remote, and the chains jerked from behind the chair, slamming to the floor. It was like a crate loaded with pots and pans was hurled down from the second story of our house, shattering at her feet.

  I sprang up and covered my ears, stumbling backward, afraid to be in the same room with her. She didn’t notice—the noise or my reaction.

  “Owen, bring me a Diet Coke out of the fridge. And take some Aleve. That’ll make your headache go away.”

  In the midst of my catastrophic mental breakdown, I had two oddly practical thoughts. One, I never said I had a headache. Two, as far as I knew, we were out of Diet Cokes.

  I took a few steps in the direction of the kitchen without turning my back on her. “Mom?”

  “What?” She flipped through the channels, totally unaware I was dying inside.

  Frustrated as I was with her, I hated the sight of that shackle encasing her throat. Where had it come from? Was it really there?

  Either I needed serious help, or she did.

  “What, Owen? Out with it.”

  “Never mind.” I should have known better than to look to my mother for sympathy. She didn’t have it in her.

  I opened the fridge, refusing to cry. Sure enough, no Diet Cokes. I slammed the door shut.

  Why is this happening to me?

  I grabbed a stack of bills by the microwave and launched them at the wall, then collapsed into a chair at the breakfast table and stared out the window, rocking back and forth like a lunatic. As if on cue, Jess’s Mustang convertible pulled up.

  I darted out the door at the back of the kitchen and sprinted through the garage toward the driveway. I didn’t care if some scary figure lurched at me. If I could just get to Jess, my world would flip right side up. At least for a moment.

  The door on the driver’s side opened, and I ran faster. She reached out to me. I could smell her perfume.

  But then my legs jarred to a halt. Refused to go any farther.

  I couldn’t hug her. Couldn’t touch her.

  No way.

  I couldn’t get near anyone with a shackle.

  SEVEN

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO SLEEP. Or eat. Or concentrate.

  All of mankind, including the people closest to me, had morphed into metal-clad aliens overnight. I didn’t know if they were out to harm me or not, but I was terrified of them either way.

  It was eleven o’clock at night, eight hours since I’d seriously offended my girlfriend, and she was still texting me every couple of minutes. Jess had never been shy about dropping four-letter words, but this was getting ridiculous.

  Don’t get me wrong—I understood why she was upset. Right when I should have thrown my arms around her, I stared at her in horror, then ran like she was infected. But for all I knew, she was.

  I was still too frightened to try and reconcile with her.

  Lance had called, but I had ignored him, too, in case he was shackled and chained like the rest of them.

  Why wasn’t I?

  I sat next to Daisy in the squeaky bed I’d inherited with the house and tapped my head against the wall. For the first time ever, I let the thought tiptoe in . . .

  Maybe I should escape. For good. Just . . . end it all. My mom had more than enough sleeping pills.

  No. That’s wrong. I can’t.

  I tried to focus on something else, like piecing together some answers. But the dark ideas kept coming.

  I could sit in my car in the closed garage with the engine on.

  Maybe I could borrow Lance’s hunting rifle.

  I shook my head. What was wrong with me?

  And then I started to smell something. It was nasty. Like rotten meat. And getting stronger.

  Daisy sat up and sniffed the air.

  “What is that, girl?”

  I checked my trash can—just a few scraps of paper and an empty Nutella jar. I poked around in the closet and under my bed, but I didn’t see anything. Oh well. It stank bad, but I had much bigger problems. I had to think: come up with a reasonable explanation for my circumstances, and more important, a way out—one that didn’t involve a coffin.

  The weird thing was, I felt doomed, but it was everyone else who looked doomed.

  I powered up my laptop and searched for “people wearing chains.” All that came up was stuff about fashion trends, jewelry, and some blog about a supposedly hilarious picture someone took of a Walmart shopper.

  I didn’t believe in extraterrestrial beings, but just in case, I clicked through a bunch of websites about alien invasions. None described anything like what I was seeing.

  I decided to search for “seeing things that aren’t there.” That didn’t help my anxiety one bit. From what I read, I was most likely suffering from schizoid personality disorder—a diagnosis that scared me so bad I slammed my laptop shut and buried every inch of my body under my covers.

  It’s a strange thing to hope that you have a brain tumor, but I’d take that over some incurable mental disorder. At least brain tumors are operable.

  Sometimes.

  I made up my unstable mind. When the sun came up, I’d check myself into the hospital, even if it meant having shock treatments or my skull sawed open. Sure, I could end up banished to some godforsaken insane asylum, but that was better than suffering in ignorance and denial. Probably.

  By four thirty in the morning, though I didn’t feel like eating, my frozen stomach was shrieking for food. I left the protection of my room, went to the kitchen, and forced down a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a sip of milk. The silence while I sat at the table drove me nuts—or more nuts. I was miserable. This degree of loneliness was foreign to me. It was like I was stranded alone in the middle of the ocean, yet my worst fear was that someone would find me.

  I thought stuff like this only happened in nightmares or movies. But here I was, trapped in a demented universe—a real-life zombie apocalypse undetected by everyone but me.

  I didn’t know if it was real or imagined, and I couldn’t decide which was worse.

  Slouched over in my chair, I clung to hope the best I could. Surely I’d find a solution. I was, after all, in the top 5 percent of my class, the go-to guy to score a clutch basket when the stakes couldn’t get higher. I never claimed to be a Boy Scout, but if anybody could find his way out of a wilderness, I could.

  I pulled my shoulders back and sat up straight. I trust in logic. Reason always prevails. I’ll figure this out.

  Despite my confident resolution, I was desperate to get back under my bedsheets. It was the only safe place on the planet, as far as I was concerned.

  I tiptoed up the stairs and down the hall, paranoid that I’d wake my mother, even though I usually couldn’t wake her when I tried. Once I passed her bedroom, I let out a deep breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding. I was relieved to be that much closer to my room, even if it did smell like something had died in there.

  But wait. My mom’s door was open.

  I knew what I needed to do, but it took me a second to find the courage.

  I we
nt back.

  Her night-light cast dim golden hues, just enough for me to see her sprawled across her mattress in a drunken coma. I took a careful step forward, then another. As much as I hoped there’d be nothing, from a few feet away I could see chains flung in every direction. And the nauseating shackle.

  Time to face my fear.

  I stood at the foot of her bed and watched her sleep. She was on her back but angled onto her right side, breathing through her open mouth. Her petite body was framed by the eerie metal mass. Cords were coiled like snakes through her disheveled hair. I leaned in. From this close, they appeared to be braided strands of a dark, leatherlike material studded with tiny, sharp-looking specks—chips of glass and ivory or bone, if I had to guess. The cords got thinner on the ends, like rat tails, and seemed as pliable as cable wires. Not that I was willing to touch one.

  I moved closer, bracing myself against the mattress, and zeroed in on a chain dangling a foot away from me. Freezing air assaulted my face. The links were more massive than I’d realized—at least five inches long and as thick as my thumb. I exhaled, and a cloud formed around my chin.

  It was an out-of-body experience, watching my hand glide in slow motion toward the metal. Surely it wouldn’t kill me to touch it.

  Right?

  Finally, the tip of my finger made contact. The metal was frigid. I jerked away, but then pressed in again, trying to clutch the chain with my palm. I couldn’t. My fingers didn’t wrap all the way around, and I couldn’t hold on anyway. Too icy.

  I blew warmth on my trembling hand, making more fog, then gathered the corner of a plush blanket and wrapped both hands in it. I reached a third time, then hesitated. The colliding metal might wake my mother . . .

  No. Only I would hear it.

  I grabbed the chain and pulled as hard as I could, but it was impossible to lift it even an inch. I let go and traced the winding links with my eyes, focusing harder when I spotted a bizarre apparatus attached to the bottom link, hanging off the side of the bed—a half cylinder with a hinge in the middle. Some sort of open cuff.

  It had dents and dings like it had been dragged all over creation behind my mother, and it appeared scorched inside, stained with black soot. Cold as it was, I ran my finger over the cuff, venturing to feel inside, then touching the outside.

  I felt something rough under my numb finger. I reached for Mom’s cell on the nightstand and shined the light on the cuff.

  Couldn’t be.

  I blinked and blinked, but they wouldn’t go away. Words, chiseled into the cuff in crooked, sloppy letters like a small child had scribbled them on there.

  charles allen mabry

  Who?

  My delusions were getting more far fetched. This had to be coming from inside my head, even though I had no idea how I could have dreamed up anything like this.

  I counted fifteen chains in all, each with a cuff suspended on the end. I stepped to the side to examine another but was drawn instead to two straggly cords intertwined among the chaos spewing from the back of my mother’s head.

  Just when I thought I’d studied them enough, I saw something toward the end of a cord—a grayish tattoo-looking mark etched into the black pigment:

  angry

  All lowercase.

  There was no question now. I’d totally lost it.

  I collapsed to the floor. I was in a fight against despair—and losing. Then . . .

  No. Freaking. Way.

  I shined my mom’s cell at the ceiling.

  victim.

  Lowercase letters. Black graffiti.

  The phone slipped to the floor, and my mother tossed in her bed. That sent me scrambling out of her room, and I didn’t stop until I was in my bed, hugging a pillow so tight I thought it might rip open. Just like my world.

  I needed help—competent, extensive help from a mental health expert, with strong meds. And maybe a straitjacket.

  I stayed curled in a ball for hours.

  “You gonna make breakfast?” Mom. At least some things hadn’t changed.

  I wasn’t sure if it was the depression, the chill in my stomach, my ailing mind, or my body physically shutting down that pinned me to my mattress, but I could barely move. I heard my mother’s chains clanking down the hallway, getting closer.

  I was much better at creating cover stories than coming clean, but it was time to tell the uncensored truth. My mom wouldn’t take it well, but at least I might be able to talk her into driving me to the ER—although the thought of leaving the house terrified me, not to mention being confined in a car with a shackled driver.

  She burst into my room and looked at me without a hint of motherly affection. “Get out of bed, Son.”

  I propped myself up on my elbows and cleared my throat. That took a lot of effort. At least the rancid smell in my room was gone.

  “Mom, who is—”

  “Owen . . .” She narrowed her eyes. “You’re so pale. Are you okay?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the matter?” She stepped forward, dragging her metal.

  “I told you. I’m seeing things. Awful things that I shouldn’t be seeing.”

  “Like . . . ?”

  “Chains.” I pushed the sheets back and put both feet on the floor. “Words. A name. All kinds of irrational things.”

  “I don’t under—”

  “I don’t understand either, Mom! But it’s happening!” I was on my feet now, pacing.

  “You need to calm down.”

  “You need to help me!” I dug my fingers into my scalp. Thoughts swarmed in my head like agitated wasps. “Who’s Charles Allen Mabry?”

  She flinched.

  “Wait, Mom, do you—you actually know him?” I moved toward her. “Is that a real person?”

  My whole life, I’d known that my mom kept secrets from me. I could only hope she’d be honest now.

  She faced the window, then snapped her head around toward me. “What are you trying to do? Dig up my past? Throw it in my face?”

  “What? I—no. I just—”

  “I’ve done the best I can, Owen. Mind your own business!”

  She started to storm off, but I grabbed her arm and made her face me. Her chains gathered at my ankles.

  “So you do know him?”

  She did nothing but breathe hard.

  “Mom, tell me. I have to know!”

  Her chin sank into her chest.

  “Mom!”

  “It was a long time ago,” she said. More like mumbled.

  “So Charles Mabry is real?”

  She pulled her arm away and looked up, her lips pressed together tight. “You were what, four years old? Gimme a break!”

  She ran out of the room.

  I fell back onto my bed. I didn’t think it was possible to become more confused.

  Eyes closed, I thought back, panning through memories as fast as I could. Charles Mabry. Then it hit me. Charlie—the shaggy-haired guy who reeked of cigarettes and beer. He’d hung around the house for a while, a few months maybe, when I was little. I remember he got mad and smashed some holes in the wall with my T-ball bat, but that’s about all I could recall.

  I tried to come up with a reason—some sort of formula—that would explain how I saw that man’s name etched on a cuff dangling from one of my mother’s chains. I got nowhere.

  I’d been convinced I was hallucinating . . . but what now?

  The front door slammed, and I watched through the blinds as my mother jerked her SUV into reverse. So much for having her drive me to the hospital. Oh well, I needed to rethink my plan anyway—go back to when everything started and work my way forward.

  It didn’t take long. It was obvious. All hell had broken out after I made the asinine decision to drink that well water offered by the bizarre man in the woods.

  I needed to know what was in that water.

  I had a new plan now. But I dreaded going through with it.

  EIGHT

  I THREW ON A SHIRT and jeans and
my American Eagle baseball cap and grabbed my mom’s spray bottle of Mace from her nightstand, just in case.

  Time to hop on my bike and drive to the woods behind Masonville High—easier said than done. My new agoraphobia threw a major kink in my plan.

  I stood at the front door squeezing my keys, waiting for the fear to subside. It didn’t. I leaned and stretched from side to side and rolled my neck in circles, trying to loosen up and get a grip. Then my cell phone rang, and I jumped, hurling my keys in the air.

  Calm down!

  I looked at my phone. Jess. I couldn’t ignore her forever.

  “Hello?” I already wondered if answering was a mistake.

  “Wanna tell me what’s going on?” That’s the clean version.

  “I, uh, don’t feel good.”

  “Well, I’d like to be there for you, Owen, but you won’t let me. Why did you run away from me yesterday? And why aren’t you returning my texts?”

  “I’m dealing with something. I drank some water in the woods, and everything’s been messed up since.”

  “What?” She sounded even more annoyed now.

  I took a deep breath. Here goes nothing. “Jess, I’ve been seeing things. I thought it was all in my head, but then something happened this morning, with my mom, and now I’m not sure. Does that make sense?”

  “Um . . . no. Have you gone to the doctor?”

  “Yeah.” So I lied. Like I was going to admit I’d done nothing but hide under my covers.

  “You sure this isn’t about prom?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve heard from, like, all these people that you’d rather go with Cindy Rosenberg. Is that it? You’re ignoring me ’cause you’re too scared to tell me?”

  Seriously? Jess was still in high school world. I wanted to tell her how ridiculous she was being, but all I could come up with was, “I barely know Cindy.”

  “Well, Stella said she heard you say you’d much rather go with her. Prom is in a month, Owen. I can’t believe you’d pull this.”

  Nothing about the prom scene was even remotely appealing at this point, but I promised over and over that I wanted to go with her, not Cindy. It didn’t matter, though.