The Felix Chronicles: Freshmen

by R. T. Lowe

  “Keep your eyes on the coin,” Bill intoned. “Relax and breathe. Focus on your breathing. In and out. In and out. Nice and easy. That’s it. Now follow the coin with just your eyes. Keep your head still.” With a slight turn of his wrist, Bill began to rock the coin back and forth in a smooth, steady, undulating arc.

  Felix followed its graceful motion with his eyes. There was something strangely magnetic about it; he wasn’t sure if he could take his eyes away from it even if he wanted to.

  “Watch the coin and listen to my voice. Can you hear me?”

  “Yes.” To Felix’s surprise, his voice sounded flat, almost a monotone.

  “I want you to return to the place in your dream. I want you to return to the room where you saw the fire. Can you do that?”

  “Yes.”

  Felix was standing in a room, a room that looked nothing like Bill’s office. He looked all around, wondering if he was dreaming. If he was, he was sharing it with Bill because Bill was right beside him, still holding the silver chain in his hand. The floor was heaped with clothes. Posters—concerts and sports—covered the room’s dark blue walls. Thumbtacked to the back of the door was a Seattle Seahawks cheerleader calendar. A blond wood Ikea desk sat near the wall in one corner beneath a window that looked out onto a road with streetlamps some distance off and houses shadowed save for their porch lights. Scattered across the desktop were books, an iPod, stacks of CDs, a laptop and an orange cereal bowl with melted ice cream at the bottom. A clip-on desk lamp with a stretchy flexible neck was radiating down directly onto the varnished wood, amplifying the bulb’s wattage, illuminating the room with streaky diamond-patterned white light.

  In the closet next to the door, shirts hung from a sagging wooden rod, and carelessly stacked bundles of pants and sweatshirts leaned against each other on a shelf mounted above it. On the closet floor, shoes, more piles of clothes and several shoeboxes competed for space with baseball bats, a basketball, footballs, a lacrosse stick, baseball gloves and a pair of heavy dumbbells. A bed stood under a window hidden behind cream-colored curtains. There was someone in it. He appeared to be sleeping. His hair was thick and sandy blond and his arms were at his sides resting loosely above the covers.

  An icy shock of recognition coursed through Felix. He knew where he was. But it wasn’t possible. That room no longer existed. “Holy shit!” he stammered, baffled. “This is my room. That’s… that’s me!” He pointed hesitantly at the bed. “What the hell? What happened? This is my bedroom!” He stared at himself lying in bed. “What the hell’s going on? This isn’t the room from my dream. This is my room.”

  Bill was just as surprised. He stood stock still, stroking his chin, assessing the room. “Hold on,” he said, his voice rising a notch. “Just keep it together.”

  Felix crossed the room—his feet lifted, his knees bent, and his legs extended forward like he was walking, but it felt different, like he was half-floating and half-treading water. The floor wasn’t exactly supporting his weight, and he wasn’t sinking through it either. He reached out for a Coldplay poster and his hand passed cleanly through it—and the wall—all the way up to his wrist. But that’s where it stopped. He couldn’t force it in any deeper. He kicked at a T-shirt lying on the floor and his foot didn’t disturb it.

  “Weird,” Felix said, his head swimming in confusion. “It’s like we’re ghosts. But this… this isn’t the right room. What are we doing here?”

  Bill didn’t say anything. He was staring at the door with an odd look in his eyes, as if he was expecting something to happen.

  “What’s going on?” Felix demanded. “Bill! Hey! What is this?”

  “I’m not sure,” Bill said thoughtfully, turning to face him. “We’re not really in your bedroom. We’re still in my office.” He glanced down at the chain in his hand. “I think we’re actually in a memory. And in this particular memory”—he gestured at the bed—“you were sleeping.”

  “How can we be in a memory?”

  “When you read your aunt’s journal, you felt what she was feeling, right?”

  Felix nodded, staring at himself sleeping in bed.

  “And why is that?” Bill asked.

  “Because it’s cursed,” Felix said quickly. “That’s what you told me.”

  “Right. And because it’s cursed, whoever reads it feels your aunt’s emotions, what she felt when she was writing in the journal. And now, we’re… inside your memory.” Bill paused, scratching his chin. His voice sounded different, like he was thinking out loud. “But we’re not just experiencing your emotions. We’re actually experiencing the memory. We’re seeing what happened. But why would that be? Why… why would—”

  Almost immediately, the pieces of the puzzle shifted into place for Felix. “The memory’s cursed,” he said.

  A frightened expression crossed Bill’s face. Then very abruptly, he struck his hands together in a single sharp clap and drew them apart—

  “Stop!” Felix shouted, pointing at Bill. “We’re not going anywhere! Why’s this memory cursed? What’s going to happen?”

  “Felix,” Bill said softly. He’d gone slightly pale. “You don’t want to see this. Let’s go. There’s nothing you can learn from this.”

  “We’re staying!” Felix told him sternly. “Don’t clap your hands! Promise me!”

  Bill clapped them together twice in rapid succession.

  But nothing happened.

  Bill looked confused. Then he frowned and shook his head. “That only works if you want it to work. You’re in control. Please, let’s go. Trust me. Let me get us out of here. You don’t want to see this.”

  Felix looked around, ignoring Bill. Here he was, standing in his old room, seeing all his things exactly as he remembered them. He had to be here for a reason, and he wasn’t going to leave until he knew what it was. He went over to his desk and found the iPod that was lost in the fire. He’d bought a new one a few months ago, just before midterms, but the old one was a present from his mom and she’d had it monogramed on the back.

  “Felix!” Bill shouted, breaking his reverie. “Something’s happening.”

  The sleeping Felix—his past self—was moving. His arms were twitching a little. Then the movements gradually grew more pronounced. He flipped up the blankets and they fell in a tangled heap at the foot of the bed. Drenched in sweat, he was wearing only a pair of dark gray boxers; the perspiration soaked into the sheets around him, forming an outline of his body.

  “Please,” Bill pleaded, moving toward him. “Let’s get out of here. You don’t want to see this.”

  Felix stayed put. He had to see this.

  Everything near the sleeping Felix began to glow a deep shade of red, lighting up the room. His body spasmed as if he was having a seizure. Then he instantly grew calm. He lay there for a while, hushed and sedate. Seconds passed. He levitated off the bed, ascending slowly, incrementally, until he was close enough to touch the ceiling. And then he went quiet again, perfectly still, suspended horizontally as if he was lying on an invisible mattress. The bed bounced up and down violently, the metal legs slamming down so hard on the carpeted floor the light fixture on the ceiling shattered. The red light began to expand, edging outward, spreading languidly and inexorably across the room like a cloud, enveloping everything in its blood red embrace.

  Chaos ensued: a scorching wind blistered through the room with a deafening roar. Books, CDs, clothes, dishes and shoes lifted into the air and hovered for a moment before taking direct aim at the sleeping Felix like iron filings to a magnet. Larger objects soon followed in their wake: the Swedish-made desk and its matching chair; the shelf in the closet; and the pair of dumbbells, which smashed into a mural of the Cascade Mountains next to the bed, leaving two gaping holes.

  And then the flying objects burst into flames.

  Lit up like kerosene torches, books, magazines, and hundreds of DVDs, began zigzagging crazily, crashing into walls, spitting out puffs of blazing ash and splintered plastic. Burning
fragments whistled like arrows and fell to the floor, igniting the carpet and the curtains behind the headboard. The fire spread quickly. Smoke filled the room. And yet the sleeping Felix remained undisturbed.

  “Felix!” a man’s panic-stricken voice shouted from outside the room. “Felix! Open the door! Felix! Open the door now!” The doorknob rattled.

  “Felix!” a woman’s voice cried out. “Felix! Oh my God! I smell smoke! Felix, please open the door!” She sounded terrified. There was a resounding thump on the other side of the door; the molding and wood trim around the hinges made a creaking noise. “Come on!” screamed the woman. “Break it down! There’s a fire! Break it down! Use your shoulder!”

  “I’m trying, Patricia!” the man shouted back. “I’m trying!” The door shook, but scarcely moved inside its frame. “Felix! Come on, son! Felix!”

  “My parents!” Felix shouted at Bill. “Mom! Dad! You’re alive!” He ran to the door, reaching for it, and his hand went right through the doorknob like it was mist. He tried to shimmy his way to the other side, to pass through it, but it was as though the memory had made him a prisoner and the room was his cell.

  A constellation of flaming debris was gathering around the sleeping Felix, circling him slowly as the swirling cloud surrounding his body began to pulsate like a pumping heart. Each ear-shattering beat released an explosive shock wave of energy, flaring like the sun.

  The room was quickly becoming an inferno.

  And for the first time, Felix realized what was happening: this room—his bedroom—was the room from his dream. But it was more than just a dream. It was a memory. A memory of the night he turned eighteen. A memory of the night his parents had died. At some cognitive level, Felix now understood that he wasn’t really in his bedroom. He knew that he was inside the memory. And in the memory, his body had no substance. He was just a shadow. But he had to do something. He turned away from the door and jumped through the fiery rubble encircling the sleeping Felix, screaming at him—screaming at himself—to wake up. It had no effect. He was perfectly at peace, his face an emotionless mask.

  “Get outta here!” Felix yelled at his parents, running back to the door. “Get outta here! Run! Get mom outta the house! Run!”

  “Felix!” his dad shouted back, as if he had heard him. “Open the door! I can’t get it open! Please, son! Wake up!”

  “Dad! Run! Run!” Felix screamed until his vocal cords ached. Until it felt like his throat would split open. He looked over his shoulder at Bill, who was standing in the center of the room, watching him, tears flowing freely down his face.

  “Bill!” Felix called out to him, his voice frantic and filled with desperation. “Help me! Do something! Oh God! Help me! Help me!”

  “Come on, Felix!” his mom screamed in terror. “Open the door! Wake up! Please! Wake up! Open the—”

  Fire and sound consumed Felix, a simmering gaseous ball of molten orange flames he could see and hear, but not feel. The room shook and rippled, surging upward as if it was resting on the mouth of an erupting volcano. Something passed through him—fluttering pages from a book?—followed by floorboards, pieces of glass, two-by-fours and chunks of drywall. Overhead the sparkling night sky stretched away endlessly.

  Where’d the roof go? Felix wondered faintly as he watched the bedroom walls exploding out into the driveway and the street in front. The frame of the house shifted, twisting, grinding and finally snapping. The floor collapsed, crashing on top of the kitchen below.

  Felix looked for the door through the smoke and fire. It was no longer there. The hallway outside his bedroom where his parents had been only seconds before was also gone. The top floor of the house had been obliterated. He stared in disbelief at the empty space where his parents had stood, where they had begged him to open the door. Now there was nothing. They were gone. In an instant, their voices had been silenced, silenced forever.

  The sleeping Felix tilted, almost machine-like, until he was perpendicular to the ground far below, then he drifted across the bedroom and out into what was once the hallway. The flaming ruins orbiting his body continued to pulsate with bright crimson energy, burning and destroying everything in their path, shooting off in all directions, annihilating all that they touched. He descended slowly, majestically, down the collapsing shell of a staircase to the lower level of the house where he came to a stop, his feet hovering just above the floor.

  Numbly, Felix trailed closely behind, tethered to his past self. He didn’t have a choice. It was as if the memory was forcing itself on him, imposing its cruel will, making him watch until the very end. The remains of the second floor came crashing down, sending up clouds of powdery white dust and smoke that spiraled into the warm summer air in enormous plumes.

  The walls twisted and bent, the wood splintering, bulging and crackling against the unnatural torque. The earth shuddered. Massive flaming sections of the house—walls, floors, entire rooms—rocketed into the night sky, circling overhead like burning airplanes in a holding pattern. And then with a sound that was eerily similar to a Fourth of July fireworks display, they all exploded into innumerable scorched fragments, tiny and feather-light, that blanketed the heavens, darkening the stars. The wreckage wafted down slowly, peacefully, like snowflakes on a windless night, forming little piles all across the property.

  The sleeping Felix glided through the smoke-filled carcass of the house, crossing the living room and into the back yard where small fires were breaking out in the lawn and flower beds. He hovered above the grass, his back to the smoldering foundation of the house. And then the red cloud around his body faded all at once, like a lamp when the power cord is ripped from the wall. He fell to the ground and his face slammed into the lawn. He lay there motionless, blood trickling from his nose and from a corner of his mouth.

  Felix looked down at the sleeping Felix—at himself. He could hear Bill’s footsteps behind him and the sound of sirens far off in the distance.

  Bill looked at Felix with trepidation.

  “It was me!” Felix cried out. “It was me! It was me! It was—”

  Bill clapped twice.

  Chapter 52

  Into Darkness

  Made of silver, the coin was blackened, dull and scratched on its surface. Felix was reclining in an armchair, watching the coin swinging back and forth in his face; he was in Bill’s office in exactly the same position, doing exactly what he’d been doing before a cursed memory had taken him into its vortex. He fell forward, collapsing to the floor, screaming in agony. He felt hands on his back. Bill was saying something in a low voice, but the words held no meaning.

  Felix shrugged Bill away and stood up, then tripped over something—a stack of books? an umbrella?—and braced himself against a book-lined wall. As he stumbled toward the door, he heard the thumping sounds of heavy volumes falling from a shelf and Bill’s voice growing louder.

  He flung open the door and ran to the stairwell, careening down the stairs without holding on to the banister, crashing into walls, falling, descending each flight faster and more recklessly than the one before until he reached the lobby. He burst through the main doors, staggered down the front steps and lost his footing on the wet slippery surface, sprawling to the footpath bordering The Yard.

  Felix pushed himself off the puddled ground and ran headlong into a cold rainy December night. Everything inside him had shattered. He was broken. He felt only pain—an all-encompassing anguish that burned like acid, extinguishing everything in the world but the images of what he’d done to his parents. He needed to get away, to go someplace where he could escape from the memory. He had to hide from it. Bury it. Submerge it in the deepest ocean trench, a place without light and life, a place where he could vanish, lose consciousness and erase the memory forever.

  Felix wanted to die.

  Chapter 53

  Confession

  “Dad, it’s me,” Bill said tiredly. “I know it’s late.” His cell phone was on the table with the speaker turned on. His forehea
d was hot. He felt like he was running a fever. The jacket he’d been wearing earlier was now lying crumpled on the floor. He’d untucked his shirt and rolled up the sleeves to his elbows. His hair, already disheveled, spiked up into wayward clumps as he raked a hand along the top of his head.

  “It’s not that late, but I am in bed,” his dad croaked in a voice that sounded even raspier than usual. Bill had woken him up, but his dad wouldn’t acknowledge that because he thought it a sign of weakness that he required sleep. “I don’t want to disturb your mother. Give me a minute. I’ll go to the library.”

  Bill sat at the table and waited, unmoving, staring trance-like at his haggard reflection in the window. The same thing he’d been doing since Felix ran out of his office two hours ago.

  “Okay, William,” his dad said after several minutes had passed. “I assume you wouldn’t be calling at this ungodly hour if it wasn’t something about the boy.”

  “We have an issue.”

  “An issue?” His dad was suddenly alert.

  Bill described Felix’s cursed memory, sticking to the facts, recounting every detail. When he was done, he checked his watch. Twenty minutes had gone by.

  “That’s not an issue,” his dad bellowed. “I would characterize it as a full-blown catastrophe! How could you allow this to happen?”

  Bill had predicted this. Before hitting the call button on his phone, he knew that his dad would blame him. The last time they spoke, Bill had told him about Felix and Allison’s run in with the Protectors in no-man’s-land. The ‘implications’ hadn’t even surprised his dad all that much—the mobilization of the Protectors (which they’d thought were dormant) and the possible restoration of the Order—but he lambasted Bill for a full hour for nearly getting Felix killed, for failing to protect him. The prospect of being blamed for something beyond his control was so irritating he’d spent much of the past two hours debating whether he should even make the call; in the end, he’d decided it was just too important to withhold.