by R. T. Lowe
Bill was losing his shit again. Felix couldn’t take it. Not now. He slumped to the floor, letting his head loll between his knees, jamming his palms into his eye sockets. The wide plank floorboards creaked under his weight. He was too tapped out to worry about the floor giving way. He almost welcomed it if it meant he wouldn’t have to listen to Bill.
“Hey,” Bill said after a while. His voice was softer now. “What’s going on? I wouldn’t be so tough on you if I thought you couldn’t handle it. Something’s been bothering you all night. I can see that. Talk to me.”
The floorboards popped and groaned.
“C’mon. Talk to me. What’s on your mind?”
Felix sighed heavily and removed his hat, stuffing it into a jacket pocket. Steam floated off his sweating hair-matted head, drifting up and mingling with the smoke that had nowhere else to go; they couldn’t crack the windows with the bookcases blocking them. Bill had taken a seat on the floor across from him, staring at him, his expression almost tender.
“My Western Civ prof was talking about dreams, and it got me thinking about my dream,” Felix began, his voice gritty with smoke. “She said something about life being a dream. And then this line from the journal came back to me. It was like in my head, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. You know—the one where Lofton’s mom is worried about him leaving the castle. You know what I’m talking about?”
Bill nodded.
“So it goes like this,” Felix said, reciting the journal from memory. “Lofton says, ‘Really mother. You honestly believe that I have anything to fear from someone who thinks a knife and a garrote are weapons’. That’s exactly what it says.”
“I’m familiar with it.”
“It’s that one word that’s messing with me. I mean, I thought it was real. Then I thought it was a dream. Now I think maybe I was right the first time, and it really was real. Now I’m flipping out because I don’t know what to think. One goddamn word.”
Bill tilted his head questioningly. “What word?”
“Garrote. When I read the journal, I didn’t know what a garrote was. I thought it was a sword or something.”
Bill shook his head. “It’s a wire assassins use to strangle their victims. It’s a weapon used by the Protectors.”
“I know what it is now. I looked it up. That’s the problem.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at. What’s the problem?”
“It was in my dream,” Felix tried to explain. “The garrote. The garrote was in my dream.”
“You dreamed about a garrote?” Bill said, confused. “I thought you were dreaming about a fire?”
“I am. This was a different dream.”
Bill gasped softly and coughed, as if his breath had caught in his throat. He focused his gaze on Felix and said gravely, “Tell me the rest.”
One of the bulbs in the chandelier directly above them went out with a loud clap, startling Felix. He rocked himself to his feet and went over to the table, brushing his fingers along the scorched remains.
“Felix?” Bill prompted.
“Sorry. So this was back when school just started. Right before the first football game. Me and Allison went to this lady’s house in no-man’s-land to buy some skis. She asked us to go around back. The skis weren’t there. Then two people tried to kill me. There was a woman. She had a garrote. That wire thing. I was fighting with her and then this guy tackled me. The woman got the garrote around my neck, and then the guy pulled out a knife. It was long.” An image of the knife swam up in his mind and his eyes misted. “Long and curved. He was going to stab me. Right in the chest.” He placed a hand over his heart. “That’s the last thing I remember. I woke up in my bed.”
Bill’s face went dark. “What happened to Allison?”
“Nothing. The next day I told her about it and she looked at me like I was crazy. She said it was a dream and laughed it off. My friends all laughed. They still give me shit about it. She bought the skis. I saw them. Still has ‘em. She said we just went out and had some food. We drank a lot of beer. So of course I thought it was just a dream. But now that I know what a garrote is, it just seems…”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Bill exclaimed, springing to his feet. He clenched both hands, veins bulged in his neck.
“I didn’t even know you! I hadn’t read the journal. And I didn’t know what the hell a garrote is. What kind of word is that, anyway? And Allison told me it was a dream. Everyone told me it was a dream.”
“It wasn’t a dream!”
Bill had just confirmed what he’d strongly suspected. But for some reason, it didn’t lift the cloud of confusion. He ran his hands over his face. He was just so tired. Every day was more confusing and exhausting than the last.
Bill started pacing. “I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe I’m even saying this. The Protectors. You and Allison had an encounter with the Protectors. That’s the only rational explanation.”
“But then who—”
“Who saved you?” Bill said. “A Sourceror, obviously.”
“I thought they were gone. The Protectors wiped them out.”
“No. The Order was wiped out. The Protectors can’t prevent Sourcerors from being born. They’re probably born every day for all we know.”
“So the Protectors… they… they tried to kill me? That woman. And that man. They were Protectors? And they really tried to kill me?”
Bill nodded. “You just described their weapons.”
“And a Sourceror saved me? So that means… that means there must be other Sourcerors out there, right? Other people on… on our side?”
“It seems so.”
“Is it the Order?” Felix asked. “Is the Order back? Are they following me around?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on. I honestly don’t know.”
“But why… why would Allison lie to me? Does that… does that mean that…?”
“I don’t think she’s lying. She actually believes you weren’t attacked. Remember what your aunt said about persuasion?”
Felix nodded. ‘”The Source touches Sourcerors in different ways,’” he recited from the journal.
“Right. Your aunt persuaded her husband and father-in-law to talk. And your mom, she… she persuaded me to look for the journal in her apartment, and to…” Bill stopped pacing and looked down at the floor, rubbing his eyes fiercely with the back of his hands. Then he shook his head and shuddered. “The person who saved you must’ve been a Sourceror with the power of persuasion, and that person persuaded Allison to believe you weren’t attacked. But like your mom and aunt, their power isn’t limitless. Remember how your aunt couldn’t persuade Lofton to tell her what he was thinking?”
“So Allison was brainwashed to think that nothing happened?” Felix was struggling to work out the implications in his frazzled mind. “That we just ate pizza and drank beer?”
“Yes. But you’re too strong. You’re just like Lofton. You can’t be persuaded. Your memories can’t be manipulated. That’s why you remember what actually happened.” Bill dug his hands into his jacket pockets and stared at the floor with an uncharacteristically dull expression. His eyes were distant, vacant, as if he wasn’t entirely present.
Felix waited a full minute. “Bill?”
“Sorry.” Bill put his hand to his face and looked up at Felix. “This is what your pseudo-intellectual professors would refer to as a paradigm shift. My world just changed in an instant. I’m sure you can relate.” He chuckled humorlessly. “I thought I was all alone in this for so many long years. But now I know I’m not. We’re not. Don’t you see? This changes everything. The war never ended. The Protectors and the Sourcerors are still out there waging a battle that started two thousand years ago.” He pointed at Felix. “And in the center of this whole thing is you.”
“So what do I do now?” Felix felt oddly calm. One good thing about sleep deprivation was its numbing effects. At least he could count o
n that. “They know who I am, right?”
Bill shook his head. “Only we know you’re the Belus. But the Protectors seem to have discovered that you’re a Sourceror. And to them, it doesn’t matter. They’re sworn to kill all Sourcerors.”
“So they’ll come after me again, won’t they?”
“I’m surprised they haven’t already. That’s another reason you need to be more focused on your training. They’ll be back. And if you can’t protect yourself they’ll kill you.”
“Great,” Felix said sarcastically. “My life just keeps getting better and better.”
Bill smiled. “So how do you like college so far?”
If he wasn’t so tired he would have laughed. “Love it. Let’s get outta here. I’m wiped out.”
Chapter 43
Quinn
Quinn Traynor uploaded the last of the pictures from his cell phone onto his laptop. The quality wasn’t great, but there were people in the paper’s creative studio that could clean it up. He was sitting in his kitchen at a found-on-the-side-of-the-road folding table. He’d shimmed up one leg with a copy of The Weekly Sturgeon (he thought of it as graffiti with punctuation) to keep the top level, but if he rested his arm on it or placed too much weight on the edges, the legs would buckle, causing the whole thing to collapse. He’d learned that the hard way. The first time it tipped over, his computer had slid off and the monitor shattered on the floor. He wasn’t having much luck with electronics lately.
It wasn’t just the table that belonged in a landfill. The entire house did. He hated it. The smothering ambiance of general decrepitude tugged at his insides—and his pride. Living in a boarded-up two bedroom mold pit in no-man’s-land wasn’t what he’d envisioned when he chose a career in journalism. The assignment coordinator at Hollywood Reality Bites had insisted that in order to ‘maintain his cover’ he had to avoid communal living, and that included any apartment buildings near the Portland College campus. And with a miserly pittance of a rental stipend, it was either this foreclosed dump on 17th Street that he was renting from the bank or a refrigerator box under the bridge.
At least the electricity was working for the moment. Without it, he would lose the heat—a tragic but not unlikely occurrence on a bitterly cold night like tonight. The electricity had gone out so many times since he’d moved in last August it felt like he had a personal relationship with Trish and Nevaeh, two of the call-center reps who worked for the power company.
He went through the pictures (fourteen in all) of Lucas Mayer kissing Caitlin. She was pretty, but the pictures weren’t exactly ideal. He would have preferred a photo of Lucas making out with the hot blonde in the short skirt—or even better, Lucas having a threesome with the hot blonde and the tall dark-haired chick. Now that would be ideal. But back to reality: the photos he’d actually taken weren’t worth very much—$300 for the best shot. If he created a story around it, however, spun it into something tawdry or illicit, the price would climb exponentially. Instead of kissing a college freshman, maybe Lucas was kissing a high school freshman. A fifteen-year-old. Now that would be worth something ($3,000-$4,000). His editor wouldn’t care enough not to believe him—Hollywood Reality Bites wasn’t known for vigorous fact-checking or third party corroboration—so his only risk was Lucas coming forward to challenge the story. But then his friend would find herself in the anonymity-stripping glare of the media’s spotlight, and Caitlin seemed like the shy prudish type, not one to own up to tongue fencing with a reality star. Lucas, predictable jaw-thrusting-chest-thumping meathead that he appeared to be, would do the chivalrous thing and stay quiet to protect his friend’s innocence (and anonymity). And the story would run unimpeded. He smiled to himself. Sometimes, even Quinn was impressed by his own cleverness, his ability to see things steps ahead of everyone else.
But none of that really mattered, anyway. He’d finally acquired his photo. He was done with his assignment. The extra money would be nice, but he just wanted out of this dump. This lowest circle of Dante’s hell. The ceilings sagged. The walls were streaked and splotched with water stains. He was beginning to feel sick. Sick all the time. Probably from the mold. It was in the walls. The ceiling. Everywhere. It darkened the lathing and showed through the cracked decaying plaster. But thanks to the photos on his computer this would be his last night in hell (morning actually; it was already 2:30, but he was too excited to sleep). He’d already booked his plane ticket. At eleven o’clock he would be on a flight to L.A.
Quinn wasn’t exactly proud of what he was doing with his life, though he’d come to terms with it. The paper paid him a base salary of $30,000 and ‘bonuses’ for photos it published in print or on its website. When he first started working there after graduating from Dartmouth, he’d spent two months chasing down a story involving the Russian center for the Lakers, Arvidas Karielinko. ‘Arvi’, as he was known to everyone, was born in Chechnya, and Quinn, through countless hours of painstaking research and several nights hiding out in the shrubs across the street from Arvi’s mansion (during which he fancied himself an actual investigative reporter) discovered that Arvi had ties to Muslim extremists. After two weeks of sixteen-hour days at his computer, he produced a Pulitzer-worthy article—at least in his mind—which he proudly submitted to his editor, expecting praise, money, promotions and the more discerning women in the office to instantly fall in love with his brilliant mind.
His editor’s response after reading it: “What the fuck are you doing, you fucking idiot? You think you’re working for the Wall Street Journal? Get rid of this shit and go help Nicole. She’s working on something hot.”
The hot story Nicole was working on had turned out to be an exposé on why no one had recently seen the reality TV personality Cassie Studebaker in high heels. Nicole had a source who claimed that Cassie, who had regularly worn five-inch stilettos while she was eight months pregnant, couldn’t wear heels anymore because she had bunions. So Quinn had spent the better part of a week examining digitally enlarged photos of Cassie Studebaker’s feet to determine if she had any bony enlargements near her big toes.
Quinn never discovered any bunions, but he did discover that Cassie Studebaker had the brain capacity of a zoo monkey. He also discovered she was hauling in forty million dollars a year. Quinn, on the other hand, was a Rhodes Scholar semi-finalist with a 184 IQ, and his career path had led him to inspecting some idiot celebrity’s feet for toe bumps. Quinn’s parents had brought him up to believe that America was the great meritocracy, a country that rewarded intellect and cleverness with wealth and status—and maybe even fame. But no. It was all an insidious lie. The symbolism of the bunion hunt hadn’t escaped him, and it heightened his disgust for a society that worshipped vapid narcissists like Cassie, while leaving geniuses like him to live insignificant, meaningless lives.
After that, Quinn decided he would never again feel guilty about invading a celebrity’s privacy for financial gain. It was just like the situation with Lucas Mayer. Summer Slumming was being renewed—he knew a guy who knew a guy who was a grip for the production company. And the word from this grip was that each cast member would be making $75,000 an episode. It was infuriating. The ‘Summer Slummers’ as his paper sometimes called them, were relative nobodies, a million levels removed from the pantheon of the Hollywood elite, and they were set to make more in just one episode than Quinn had ever made in an entire year.
He scrolled down the screen, comparing the pictures. “Guess this is the one,” he said with a sigh. Lucas’s eyes were slightly bulging in the photo, making it look like he’d been caught in the act of doing something highly suspect. The girl he was kissing—Caitlin—was short enough to pass for someone much younger. He even had a headline in mind, something blunt and without irony or wit, something your Average Joe and Average Jane could latch on to without worrying about taxing their middle-of-the-road brains too much: Minnesota Mayer Caught Kissing Fifteen-Year-Old.
“I’m actually partial to the one just above it,” a voice said. “I
t’s much more intimate. More romantic.”
Quinn froze. The voice—a deep, rumbling voice—came from behind him. Slowly, he swiveled his chair around.
The man standing in his kitchen was at least a foot taller than Arvi Karielinko. And much thicker. He looked out of place, like an adult playing in a child’s toy house.
Quinn screamed, his insides turning to water.
The man was holding a bottle of beer in his hand. The bottle looked tiny, like one of those single-shot bottles of booze Quinn was planning to get loaded on during his flight. He smiled and took a swig. His teeth were gold. And pointy.
Quinn screamed again.
“Do that again, and I’ll dig your eyes out with my thumbs.” The man’s voice was pleasant, devoid of malice.
Quinn sucked in his breath, trying not to make a sound. The face looking back at him was bizarre and terrifying; everything was out of order, confused, like someone had played a cruel joke on Mr. Potato Head by putting the parts in all the wrong places. The man was unmistakable. Quinn screamed. He couldn’t help it. Terror gripped his brain.
He took another drink from the bottle. “Thanks for the beer. And by the way, another scream out of you, and I’m afraid I’ll have to kill you. Comprendes?”
Quinn nodded. He felt his mouth hanging open; the muscles and tendons that held everything together had gone slack. He felt some other muscles going slack. Please don’t pee, he said to himelf. Please. He didn’t have to restrain the urge to run. He couldn’t run. It was physically impossible. His muscles had frozen solid in fear. And he was afraid if he stood up, his bladder would relax and he would pee himself. He couldn’t let that happen. Not again. Not after what had happened so many years ago as a still immature thirteen-year-old too embarrassed to use the group shower after gym class. The older boys had seized the opportunity, taking his towel from him, leaving him fully exposed. The kids laughed. So did the teacher. He’d stood there in front of everyone, living a waking nightmare. And then the inescapability of the situation engulfed him in hot shame and he’d wet himself. There was no recovery from that. The kids were cruel. Relentless. He’d transferred to a different school, but the sense of humiliation couldn’t be left behind.