True North

by S.M. Winter

behind me I struggled to breathe. My sister’s chest rose and fell in time with the beeping and whooshing of the machines that kept her anchored to life. Soon those machines would be turned off and she would no longer be anchored. She would float away like a boat untethered. I heard wracking sobs, so I looked around for a source. The burning in my chest was distracting me, and realized that the wrenching noise was coming from me. I couldn’t breathe. I stumbled forward to the bed and sat next to Samantha. My sister. Sam. It was hard to say her name, let alone think it. My entire torso seemed to collapse in on itself. There was a sucking vortex in my chest where my heart used to be. My sister, my best friend, was going to die today, in one hour. How do I cope with that?

  Eventually my sobs grew slower and my breathing finally became even. How do you say it? How do you say goodbye to the only good thing in your life? Exhaustion finally began taking over and I knew it was time to leave. Touching her hand, I began to step away when her hand jerked.

  “Sam?” Hope sharp and sweet burst through me. I touched her hand again, but there was nothing. The hope that had been born died just as swift and with it returned the crushing loneliness. I turned to leave again but was held back by a hand on my wrist, strong and tight. Looking back, my sister’s hand was gripping my wrist so tightly that her fingers bent at odd angles. Her eyes sat open, vacant and her mouth moved like a fish out of water. The machines began to trill noisily. Finally, like an old transistor radio, sound began to pour from her mouth. My sister looked through me, rather than at me. The hand on my wrist hurt but I was too stunned to pull away. At first the sound fountaining from her was jumbled words, then as if the radio had found the right dial, it became a message.

  “Challenge Talent Gradual Handy Haversham Candles Candles Fire Water Air Earth, find them Find the Elements. Find your Element. You must find them before you are taken. You will be taken. Take heed child! Run.”

  A knock on the door broke whatever it was and my sister’s hand became limp. She seemed to shrivel in on herself, mummifying before my eyes. The grotesquery of the situation was worsened as the machines continued to breathe for her. The heartbeat that was left barely registered on the machine. My sister was dead. Of this I was sure.

  The doctor entered the room soon after the knock and smiled politely at me. He didn’t seem surprised by my sister’s state so I made a quick exit. Before I could run, as the specter had suggested, my mother grabbed the same wrist that had been crushed just moments ago. As I attempted to push by, I cried out in pain.

  “Oh hush,” she said. “I barely touched you. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “Mother I don’t have time for this,” I cried as I tried to leave.

  “You should be ashamed,” She dug a finger into my chest. “Trying to steal your own sister’s husband before she’s cold. How dare you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw you two, whispering in the corner, the way he touched you” she spat. “And in front of the children. Have you no shame?”

  “Whatever mom,” I pushed past her and continued down the hall, my throbbing wrist a reminder of the message.

  “You’re dead to me!” She said. “You hear me? Dead!”

  It was not a surprise to hear, as I was reserving my attention for what was happening to me it was hard to react. I waved behind me and left the hospital as quickly as possible. I needed to take a breath and gauge my mental state. So, for the first time in days, I went home.

  My tiny brownstone seemed like the perfect utopia at the moment. I closed the door behind me and leaned heavily against it. I’d convinced myself that I’d imagined everything on the long walk home. Avoiding taking a cab, I’d used the busy streets of New York to comfort me. The hive of activity on the streets always reminded me of the constant running thoughts in my own mind. It was a rare moment when my thoughts, just like the city, were not racing along.

  During my walk I’d felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end and I looked for a reason, but I had come up empty so I’d continued on. I was probably just feeding into my paranoia over the events from the last day. The safety and security of my little home surrounded me and I breathed in the scent of lemon and lilac. My two favorite smells.

  Pushing away from the door I moved to the security panel next to the door, setting the alarm and locking the doors. I may love this city but I wasn’t stupid. Walking to my kitchen I started a pot of coffee, out of habit more than need, and scrounged through the fridge for dinner. Though I’d eaten some of the pizza I’d bought for the boys, I was ravenous from the walk.

  A glance at the clock over the oven told me it was just shy of ten o’clock at night. A pang squeezed my heart at the realization that Sam was gone. My eyes were dry, but not from a lack of wanting to cry. They burned and as I rubbed them I realized they were filled with grit. I sighed and turned off the coffee pot. It was probably inadvisable to strain my already exhausted eyes.

  Mentally and physically exhausted, I climbed the stairs to my loft bedroom. All thoughts of food were forgotten as I struggled to hold my eyes open. Fully dressed I dropped to my mattress and thought dully about kicking my shoes off. Before I could work up the energy to follow through with this line of thoughts I dropped into oblivion.

  The dryness of my throat and the gurgling of my stomach is what woke me. Running my tongue across the sandiness of my teeth told me I should probably give them a brush as well. Blinking the sleep from my eyes, I looked blearily for my alarm clock. Seeing that it was three o’clock in the morning I stretched and sat up. Frowning I realized I never took my shoes off, so I corrected that oversight. As I took them off, I looked around my room and sighed. It was a mess. Piles of clothes covered the floor. The only clean spot in the whole room was my bed.

  All around me I studied my inexpensive, oft found at flea markets, furniture. The only place I didn’t scrimp was my bed. Sleep, to me, was the most important part of my day. It sounds odd, stated as such, but I can’t function properly without a good night’s rest. It was a tall king size bed with a firm mattress, covered in a pillow top to give it that firm yet soft back support. I stood and pulled the blankets straight. I’d never even made it under the covers. After patting the pillows, I walked to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I stared at the woman moving the brush back and forth inside her mouth and had a hard time finding myself. This woman had hair mussed not just from a night’s sleep, but from days of neglect. Dark bruises shadowed under her eyes, belying her lack of sleep. Completely make-upless, she stared hard eyed and blinked away the glimmer of moisture that threatened to spill out.

  Turning away from the mirror, I moved through my room to the stairs and down, where I planned to rewarm that pot of coffee I had abandoned the night before. Lack of sleep could explain my delusions from the day before. I shook my head, baffled by the disappearance of my trusted logic in favor of the belief in fantasy. As I reached the bottom of the stairs, I noticed right away that the alarm wasn’t set.

  Frowning, I looked into the kitchen and back to the alarm. Shrugging I reset the alarm, watched it blink green in confirmation, then moved into the kitchen. I had been so tired when I got home yesterday I must not have set it when I thought I did. As I grabbed the pot to refill the water it sloshed and hot coffee hit my wrist. Hissing, I set the pot back on the burner and ran cold water over the injury.

  “Ouch,” I muttered. Had I been sleepwalking when I came home? I know I tried to start the coffee but I was sure that I had turned it off before going upstairs. As I was soaking my hand, light filtering through the window over the sink caught my eye.

  “That can’t be,” I said confused. Using my good hand, I bent the blinds to see that I was right. It was day time. So it wasn’t three in the morning, it was three in the afternoon. Had I really slept for over eighteen hours? I saw my tiny little back yard that I shared with the brownstone behind mine. The neighbor’s twelve-year-old played with the new puppy his parents had finally gotten him for his b
irthday this year. I smiled at the familiarity of the scene and let the blinds go, concentrating on my hand again.

  I turned off the tap and heard an echoing water shut off in the half bath off my kitchen. Immediately on edge, I reached for a kitchen knife. Before I could even pull it completely out of the block the bathroom door opened and out walked my sister. She smiled brightly while she dried her hands. The knife fell from my hands and clattered noisily to the floor.

  “Well good morning sunshine,” she laughed her familiar laugh and lobbed the balled up paper towel into the trash can. When she made it she whooped. “Two points!”

  “But...” I stammered.

  “I thought for sure you’d sleep all day,” she said turning to the fridge. “Hot date last night?”

  “I...” My brain was having a very difficult time forming words. “How?”

  “How’d I get in?” She looked at me oddly. “You gave me a key when you moved in and the alarm code is my birthday so... yeah. You ok? You look kinda green.”

  “I need to sit down,” I weaved drunkenly to the kitchen island and sat stiffly.

  “Hey, are you ok, really?” She asked. “You look sick. Stupid, of course you are. No wonder you slept so late. You never sleep in.”

  Sam thumped her head like she was trying to knock sense into it. An old habit so familiar my eyes began leaking before I even realized I was crying.

  “Oh, hey, it’s ok,” she said. “Do you want me to come back? I know I’m imposing, asking you to help me plan my five year anniversary.”

  “No!” I scrambled up and crushed her against me. “No.”

  “Alright, no worries sis,” she tried to pull away but I resisted so she hugged me back. “Sounds like you had a hell of a night. Wanna talk about it?”

  “No,” I said as I pulled away and looked at her. “Just a bad dream. What did you say we were planning?”

  “Duh, my five year anniversary to Jonathan,” she said. Reopening up the fridge, she pulled out the exact same cheese and meat plate we’d snacked on during the planning process several days ago.

  I listened to her talk about the plans she was never going to actually act on because it had all been a diversion. While we were planning her fake anniversary party, Jonathan was calling all of the people in my address book she had slipped to him earlier. I laughed softly at the thought. I didn’t care that I’d really fallen off the deep end. It wasn’t realistic to think that I was reliving the past or that my dream had been an extremely vivid, an accurate vision of the future. So I accepted the fact that my sister, as real as she seemed right at the moment, couldn’t in fact be real.

  I must just be having a hallucination. Though I knew and accepted that, I still enjoyed the fact that she was here in front of me. Living, breathing, and solidly real, at least for me. I watched her flip her hair effortlessly in a way I had always envied. A cold shudder ran through me with the motion as I watched her move. Something seemed off and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. So I observed her while she chattered about the surprise party. Then I saw it. Because it was something I had always envied, I knew every step of the flip and noticed that she was using the wrong hand in execution. I had tried to replicate her small hair twist and flip for years, but I’d never been able to do it just right or achieve the natural fluidness of the move. This person had matched the effortlessness. However, Samantha had been right hand dominant, the person before me was left handed. It was as if I were looking into a mirror and watching my sister. Everything was backward.

  Smiling, I nodded at what she was saying and moved to the coffee pot. This wasn’t my sister and it definitely wasn’t a hallucination. I poured a cup of coffee to cover the shaking of my hands and give myself a moment to work through this logically. If this was a hallucination, why would I insert imperfection? I had been perfectly content to accept and live in this fake world a moment ago. So why would I invent something to draw me out? Knowing myself as I did, I was aware that I preferred fabrication to reality, but chose to live in reality. I enjoyed romance and fantasy, but I knew that a life with those things would set me up to fail. I drank the hot coffee slowly, trying to puzzle it out.

  My sister laughed to herself about something while I looked at the back of my hand where I’d burned it earlier. It was red and slightly raised, but thankfully not blistered. Because it burned slightly still, I went back to the small window over the sink and picked a piece of my aloe plant that lived there. Absently, I raised the blinds so that the plant was able to soak in the impromptu sunshine. I watched the neighbor boy running around with his puppy, listening to their happy yips and squeals.

  Suddenly exhausted again, I yawned and realized I’d never picked up the knife that I’d dropped earlier. As I stooped to pick it up something occurred to me. There was a way to test this hallucination, or whatever it was. If I proved it wasn’t real it would go away, but how could I do that? What if she really was my sister? Should I stab her? Cut her somehow? Or if I just run the knife across the back of my hand would the pain should banish this false apparition, if that is indeed what it is.

  I frowned and decided to carry out the plan because it seemed the safer course. Even if my sister were a delusion created by my sleep starved brain, I would never be able to hurt her. Taking the knife, I turned toward the person pretending to by my sister, who was frowning at me.

  “Tab,” she narrowed her eyes. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m working on a new theory,” I replied and ran the sharp blade through my upturned palm. I was suddenly very glad my knives were sharpened on a regular basis. It took a moment for the pain to set it, but when it did, it was ferocious.

  Instead of disappearing or coming to my aid with a “what the hell”, my sister just sat there at the island and stared at me. Her body spasmed as her lips slowly curled upwards in a smile and she licked her lips. A shudder ran through me and I backed up against the kitchen counter.

  “Well,” my sister’s voice had dropped several octaves and was now barely recognizable. “Looks like you’re offering something I’m willing to take.”

  I watched in horror as her lips continued to curl upward and fold back over her face, exposing her teeth-turned-razors shoved in sickly greying gums. Before the monster could even make a move, I turned to the window thinking only of escape. But glass had been replaced by ugly cement blocks, mortared and solid. Trying to make a break for it, I ran for the front door and threw it open, finding only more of the same ugly grey blocks. Looking over my shoulder I noticed the monster on the floor where my blood had dripped, lapping at it like a kitten would lap at a saucer of milk. A shudder ran through my body at the image this thing created. It still partially wore my sister’s body and I could see parts of her face, folded backward like some grotesque plastic Halloween mask.

  A pounding on the other side of the brick wall caught my attention, as well as the attention of the monster.

  “Go away!” It shouted between slurps.

  “Help!” I screamed and pounded back.

  The pounding paused, then intensified until dust was breaking free. A voice in my head told me I should probably step back, so I backed up a few of the stairs. I could see that the monster was still licking at the floor, where the last drops of my blood lay. Soon the grout from between the bricks began to come loose and I saw a curling vine poke through the cracks. Before I could even process that water began leaking through, slow at first, then faster as the pressure continued to break more grout away. A cement block fell from the doorway and a gush of water came forth, followed by an enormous vine that crushed the blocks in its path. It wasn’t long before the entire thing came crashing down with a flood of water. The monster gave a cry as what was left of my blood was washed away. Its eyes, located deep in its gaping throat, locked on me and it gave an odd howling sound as it rushed forward.

  Not giving a thought as to what may be on the other side of the doorway I jumped through, where arms caught and steadied me. Before I
could get my bearings and thank my savior, a pain exploded behind my eyes and darkness surrounded me.

  The sound of muffled voices woke me. I did my best to keep still but I must have twitched because the voices ceased. Listening closely, I could hear the rustling of clothes as people moved around me, but the bag still hung over my face. I could feel that my arms were bound behind me to a metal chair. A small feeling of relief trickled in as I realized my legs were unbound. A whisper and then a hushing from nearby had me jerking toward the sudden sound. If my captors saw the movement there was no reaction. A headache throbbed dully at the base of my neck and radiated through my skull. Groaning slightly I attempted to stretch my shoulders, which proved incredibly difficult as I was bound.

  “Ok,” I said grumpily into the silence. “I know you’re there, so why doesn’t someone tell me what’s happening. I assume this is just my delusional breakdown, so can we please continue onward and I can get comfortable.”

  “Why aren’t you scared?” Someone, a woman asked.

  “Because this isn’t real,” I replied flippantly.

  “She isn’t ready,” a man with a deep voice stated.

  “She has to be,” another man replied. “She doesn’t have a choice.”

  “Well then,” the first woman sighed. “Neither do we.”

  At that the cover was removed from my head and the light seared my retinas. I closed my eyes until my hands were unbound, then I whipped my hands in front of my face to shield my eyes from the rude amount of brightness in the room. That’s when I realized that it wasn’t a fluorescent light that gave off the bright, warm glow. I blinked my eyes to help them adjust to the intensity of hundreds of tiny yellow suns dancing around the small room. Larger than fireflies, I couldn’t consider them any sort of insect.

  Immediately I wanted to study them, but when I reached out to hold one in my palm it singed my hand. I gasped and pulled my hand back. A tiny, perfectly round, red welt sat at the apex my palm.

  A chuckle echoed around me and had the entirety of the tiny globes moving upward just overhead. They had been obscuring my view of the room at large I realized and my three captors stood several feet away. Two men and a woman, the voices I had heard only moments ago.

  One man towered toward the ceiling, where the globes busily got out of the way of his movements. A grin split his wide face, the color of good rich mocha, with eyes to match and a shiny bald head. He seemed to be excited by the entire prospect of my kidnapping, barely containing a chuckle, which