The Felix Chronicles: Freshmen

by R. T. Lowe

  She hadn’t thought to bring an umbrella in her rush to leave campus. Not that it would do much good. The winds would chew it up and spit it out in no time at all. The clouds swirled overhead, hanging low. She heard a clanking noise in the distance.

  Once her eyes adjusted to the bleakness, she made her way up the short, slightly inclined driveway, leaning into a fierce headwind, the rain slapping her face. A sliver of soft yellow light seeped through a window next to the front door. She wiped the water from her eyes and stepped off the rain-puddled concrete, slogging her way through the front yard. Squeezing through a clump of foundation hedges, she pressed her nose right up against the rain-streaked glass, squinting hard, trying to see into the house. A light was on somewhere in one of the back rooms. She stood there for a while watching, but there was no movement inside.

  Before she could make her way to the door she heard it again. Metal against metal—clankety-clank clankety-clank—then it died back to nothing. It sounded like it was coming from the back yard, but she couldn’t be sure. The rain was doing weird things to the world, dampening and distorting sounds, causing almost as much havoc with her hearing as her vision. She set off to inspect the noise, to see what it was, not sure if she was simply curious or if she was chasing some gut instinct. She reached the edge of the house. She took one more step—

  A gust of wind knocked her down, stealing her breath away. Without the buffer of the little Cape, the winds roaring inland from off the ocean were powerful enough to overturn a box truck. It took Allison a moment to realize she was no longer upright, that she was gazing up at the sky. Dark clouds covered most of the stars, but pockets of dim twinkling lights slid in and out of view. The moon was full or close to it. She didn’t stop to admire it for long. The rain was coming down hard and fast in enormous droplets, pricking and burning her face like the pecking of an ice pick. The ground was hard, wet and cold. The smell of the ocean filled her nostrils, intense and overwhelming, so strong she felt as though she’d been plunged into the sea itself.

  Clankety-clank.

  The sound was closer now, clearer.

  She rolled onto her stomach and pushed herself to her feet, crouching down low to stay balanced. A gust hit her like a freight train. She lost her footing and slipped. Her legs shot out from under her and she crashed to the ground, her face buried in an icy puddle. She scrabbled around helplessly on the grass like it was wet ice, unable to gain any traction, sprawling out like a newborn fawn learning to walk. Trying to stay calm, she slowed down her movements, taking her time, steadying herself. She made it to a sitting position and transitioned to her hands and knees. Then digging the toes of her boots into the unforgiving turf, she started to bear-crawl toward the ocean until she finally reached ground that felt a little less slippery. She stood up straight, bracing herself against the wind, looking around for the source of the sound.

  She found it: a flagpole. A flagless flagpole. A stretch of chain links connecting the pull cord to the base had come undone and was whipping about, banging against the metal pole.

  But there was something else.

  Someone was standing at the edge of the yard. He faced the ocean that loomed up in the distance, his bare skin glowing white under the dim haze leaking through the clouds. He was wearing only a pair of gym shorts, dark-colored and baggy, that rippled in the wind.

  It was Felix.

  Allison struggled toward him, resisting the desire to call out. He probably wouldn’t be able to hear her though the rain and the wind anyway. But that wasn’t the reason she remained quiet. Her concern was something else entirely: she didn’t want to startle him.

  Felix was standing on a ledge at the top of a cliff.

  Allison couldn’t remember where the drop-off points were. Drop-off points. That’s what Felix’s parent had called them. The yard wasn’t landscaped with children in mind; it didn’t end at a white picket fence. Or any fence at all. For the most part, it simply melded into the horizon (the ocean), a gentle slope that merged into a trail that crisscrossed the face of the cliff, leading to the beach down below. But there were parts of the yard where there was no gentle slope, just ledges with a straight-edged drop of ten feet or more before a flat piece of land—the trail—would catch you. If you were really unlucky and happened to stumble down in just the wrong spot, the narrow trail wouldn’t intervene at all; your descent wouldn’t end until you crashed into the rocks at the bottom of the cliff.

  She shuffled forward on the slick grass, slowly, mindfully. It was hard enough to see with what little moonlight managed to wriggle its way through the shifting clouds. But when the cloud cover clamped down overhead the world went black. The darkness was confusing and deceptive, blending the ground the sky and the ocean into a single contiguous backdrop. Each step was a leap of faith.

  She stopped. She was close now. Felix was just a few feet away, balanced precariously at the edge of one of the drop-off points, with only the blended darkness of the ocean and the sky in the background. There was nothing in front of him but cold swirling air. He was staring out at the ocean, his eyes open but unblinking. His face and his body were stark white, deathly pale. The rain engulfed him, the wind whistled over him. But somehow, he remained statue-still, unaffected, as though the night sky was clear and calm and the rushing winds a tickling breeze.

  “Felix,” she said softly—too softly. She raised her voice, straining so that he could hear her over the roar of the ocean winds. Rain dribbled into her mouth—it tasted salty—as she called out his name.

  The chain clattered against the flagpole.

  Felix didn’t move.

  She shouted his name again. Nothing in response.

  The rain tore through Allison’s clothes, drenching her to the skin. For a moment, she was conscious of everything around her, overly conscious, hyper-aware of every detail. It flooded her senses, overstimulating her, clogging her bandwidth. She felt the vastness of the ocean and the smothering force of the elements. The darkness weighed down on her. She felt small and vulnerable.

  She took a second to find her center, to collect herself. Then she reached out and touched Felix’s bare arm, expecting it to be as frosty as the bitingly cold night. She gasped and pulled her hand back when her fingertips felt skin as warm as the cup of coffee she’d longed for during the drive. She shouted his name again. No response. No acknowledgment at all. He was lost in his own world.

  Felix didn’t appear to be freezing. But Allison was. Her ears and cheeks were starting to go numb. Her fingers felt stiff and heavy. She needed to get inside. She took hold of his arm with both hands and tugged him backward, pulling him away from the cliff and toward the house. At first, she felt resistance, not conscious resistance, but it was there all the same. Then his body loosened and she dragged and nudged him across the yard to the side door, his bare feet shuffling unsteadily alongside hers. Soft light filtered out through a frosted glass window in its center. She expected to find it locked, but the knob moved easily when she turned it. The door swung open. She shoved Felix inside and then followed behind, the blowing rain howling in after them. She pushed the door shut, fighting winds unwilling to give up so easily on their newfound foothold.

  The space she found herself in was narrow and multi-purpose: a mudroom that doubled as a laundry room. On one side there was a washer and dryer with shelving above full of neatly stacked towels and containers of detergent and fabric softener. On the other side, a pair of wicker laundry baskets sat on the floor. A varnished captain’s wheel hung on the wall between them, the top pegs used for hanging coats and hats. A cascading motif of canary yellow flowers with faded green stalks and leaves papered over the walls.

  Allison stood there for a moment, breathing hard, shivering, and dripping water onto a beige runner that foot traffic had stained dark down the middle. She stared at Felix. His size surprised her. He was wider in the shoulders and thicker through the chest and arms than she remembered. He didn’t look like the kid she used to hang out with at
the lake. His skin was disturbingly white. It didn’t seem possible that blood could flow beneath skin that appeared so frozen. But when she touched him, he felt warm. His face was a mask. His eyes were distant, vacant, and paler than she remembered, like blue ice. If he knew that Allison was there, he gave no sign of it. There was no spark of recognition on his face. Nothing to indicate he was aware of his environment or where he was. She shouted his name several times. Nothing. Nothing was registering.

  She quickly formulated a plan. She didn’t know if it was one of those things people only do on TV—like reading a book and drinking wine by candlelight in a bubble bath—but she was about to find out.

  She slapped him in the face, hard. Felix didn’t flinch. Didn’t react.

  She did it again, even harder this time. The next time she slapped him, the sound echoed in the little room. The left side of Felix’s face was strawberry red. But still no reaction. No expression. He didn’t feel anything. Oblivious to the pain.

  “Sorry Felix,” Allison muttered under her breath.

  She staggered her feet with her right foot set back slightly behind her left, a half step at most. She balled her hand into a tight fist, her knuckles going white. She rotated her shoulders a quarter turn clockwise and pulled her arm back like she was drawing an arrow in a bow. Then she brought her arm forward in a crisp straight line, generating power and speed from her hips and legs, driving her fist straight into Felix’s face.

  Chapter 56

  Grandma’s House

  Lightning crackled and flashed behind Felix’s eyes. He heard his parents’ voices. They were calling out to him, begging him to open the door. The door shuddered. His dad cried out. His mom screamed. Everything went hot, orange and confusing.

  Then it all blinked out, fading into nothingness as a stinging sensation passed over his face and warm liquid filled his mouth. The pain and the rich metallic taste of blood tugged at his memory, dredging up new images. He was on his back, dazed, looking up at an azure sky through the facemask of his football helmet. The sky vanished, turning into an office with book-lined walls; he was sitting in a chair staring down at the mottled pages of a cursed journal. Now he stood in a parking lot rubbing his forehead, a sharp splintering pain creeping up to the crown of his head; a lamppost stared back at him impassively, the football stadium looming in the distance. Then the blacktop beneath his feet became the grainy coolness of a wooden floor, the night sky the ceiling of a dorm room, smooth, white and unbroken except for the face of a girl—Allison—hovering over him, shouting his name, shaking him by the shoulders. The scene shifted. He was viewing a wall from an odd perspective, an unnatural height, like he was standing on a stepladder; the wall was gray, ugly and stained with a splash of blood that looked as if it had been smeared on in a single swirling brushstroke. His feet thrashed out, searching for solid ground as the hand of a giant crushed his neck.

  And then, once again, the images faded away.

  Familiar sounds reached out to him, thawing the ice, chipping away at his defenses: water rushing through pipes; a storm door rattling in its frame; a furnace whirring and hissing from some subterranean lair; plantings, rustling outside, bending with the wind, scraping against a house; rain drumming on the roof, tapping on the windows. A cornucopia of sounds. Familiar sounds. He knew where he was.

  Felix blinked hard.

  He saw green eyes, soft and sad. Hair that was dark, wet and matted. Cheeks smudged with mud. A chin speckled with blades of grass browned like straw. Allison’s face. She was talking to him, saying his name, drawing him out of himself, luring him into the world.

  Yet there was a part of Felix, a quorum perhaps, that resisted. It didn’t want to come out. It wanted to remain frozen, to stay numb. If it relinquished its icy grip and allowed him to break free of the protective shell, there would be repercussions. He would have to feel. He would have to open his eyes to the dark truth hiding just beyond the reach of his conscious self, the catalyst for what he had become.

  But Allison was crying, and as he watched each tear well up in her fierce green eyes and slide down her face, something inside him—his resistance—started to melt. She stood there, drenched, sobbing like a little girl. Then she fell into him, holding onto him, burying her face in his chest.

  The fog was lifting.

  “I thought you were dead,” Allison said through her sobs. She was here, Felix realized. Here with him. Speaking to him. And he understood she was here—understood what her words meant.

  Awareness crashed down on him like a waterfall. Now he was exposed, naked, at the mercy of his memory. It went to work at once, stripping away the vestiges of his psychic armor, digging into his flesh, boring into his raw nerves, tearing him open and leaving him with the knowledge of a terrible, singular reality: It wasn’t a dream. What he’d done to his parents wasn’t a nightmare. They were dead. And he had killed them. The ache was in his bones, in his chest and in his throat, heavy and hot. The guilt twisted itself around his heart, forming a hard knot that squeezed with each beat, stealing the air from his lungs.

  Allison stepped back and looked up at him tentatively. She was shivering. Her teeth chattered. She tried to speak but her voice caught in her throat.

  “Can you hear me?” she asked after a moment, her eyes tear-soaked.

  Felix nodded weakly. His throat was dry. His mouth burned. He ran his tongue over his teeth and felt splits and cracks all along the soft tissue of his gum line. He didn’t think to wonder what had happened.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” Allison reached out for him again, holding him and running her trembling fingers over his back. “Can you talk?”

  Felix couldn’t remember the last time he talked. He couldn’t remember much of anything. He had no recollection of coming to Cove Rock or any idea of how long he’d been here.

  “Just say something.” Allison shivered, soaking the rug beneath her.

  “Something,” Felix murmured. His voice sounded ragged and hoarse.

  A sad smile tugged at Allison’s lips. “I’m just glad you’re okay.” She hesitated, her lip quivering. “I’m so sorry about… about your parents. I spoke to Bill. He told me everything.”

  Felix didn’t answer. There were no words.

  “I know what happened,” she sobbed, her eyes filling with tears.

  Felix let the roar of the storm sweeping over the house fill the silence between them. After a long pause, he said stiffly, “You know what happened?”

  She nodded, the tears mixing with the rainwater and running down her face like rivulets on glass.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Felix said slowly. There was a hollow resonance to his voice. He turned and stepped away, leaving Allison alone as he went down the hall to the living room, stopping in front of an undraped picture window. His reflection stared back at him and he quickly looked away, unable to meet his own gaze. In the window, he saw Allison approaching from behind. She’d taken off her jacket and boots and was drying her hair with a towel. She came up beside him.

  “I would’ve been here sooner if Bill hadn’t…” Her expression hardened as she wrapped the towel around her shoulders like a shawl.

  “You should go,” Felix told her.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “You shouldn’t be around me. Just go. Please.”

  Allison stared back stubbornly at his reflection, defiant, unmoving.

  The rain slammed into the window in wind-swept sheets. The room was bright and warm but drafty in the way old houses tend to be.

  “I could… hurt you. Don’t you understand? There’s something”—Felix looked down helplessly at his hands—“something wrong with me.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Allison said. “You didn’t—”

  Felix cut her off. “Didn’t what? Didn’t kill them? I saw it with my own eyes. Don’t you get it? I killed my parents. I’m a monster.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she said again, softly, biting back tears.

/>   “Tell that to my parents!” Felix snapped.

  “You were sleeping.”

  “So what?” Felix said, a sudden anger coiling inside him. “That won’t bring them back.”

  “I know,” Allison said, and the sadness in her voice only made him angrier. “But it wasn’t your fault.”

  “Then whose fault was it?”

  “It was nobody’s fault.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “But you—”

  “I don’t care!” Felix shouted, his eyes bulging. “You can’t change what I did! You can’t change what happened! You can’t change what I am!”

  “Some adventure, huh?” Allison said abruptly.

  “What?” he said, confused.

  “Do you remember when you told me about the journal? Remember how excited I was?” Allison shook her head, smiling humorlessly. “I thought we were embarking on some great adventure, just like in the books. You were going to save the world, and I was going to be your faithful sidekick. I was such an idiot.”

  Felix watched her reflection in the glass, his anger fading.

  “I didn’t realize it until the drive here,” she went on. “I was thinking about it in the car. The kids in those stories don’t feel like they’re on some epic adventure. It’s just cool and exciting if you’re not doing it. If you’re living it, like we are, it sucks. Now look at us. Your parents are dead. You killed them in your sleep. That’s a really shitty adventure story.”

  Felix swallowed down a mouthful of blood and grimaced at the taste.

  “But none of that matters,” Allison continued. “You didn’t want this. You didn’t ask for any of this. I get that. But you don’t have a choice. You need to understand that the world needs you.”