I close my eyes and concentrate on home.
When my eyes open, I’m back in my apartment. The thin, pale memory of my apartment.
After the brilliance of the colors I’ve just witnessed, my apartment seems dull and lifeless. The cherry wood floors that I used to admire, now seem faded as driftwood. The walls and artwork hanging on them are colorless and drab. Even the photo I have on the wall of my friends and me after winning the league softball championship has become washed out. The faces of Carson and Blake and Robbie peer back at me from the photo. I’m in the shot too, but it seems a lifetime ago. Another person’s life. I frown at the scene and look down at my hands. My own body seems colorless too. The other me was so alive, vibrant and fresh. I am his shadow. The ghost of his future.
Somewhere in the background of this illusion of memory, those rivers of time and color still pulse, but I am outside of their flow. Remote and disconnected.
I lean back against the couch and relish the feeling I had of being alive. The scent of Caribbean salt air, the warm breath of the ocean. How did I fail to notice before how vibrant and lush it all was? Living was so tactile. My senses were able to soak in so much then. Every moment a new texture, a smell, some vision of depth and beauty. Right now I would take even the ugliest sights of my life over this nearly transparent illusion.
My determination to leave this place has never been stronger. Also my fear. I can see now how Benny has become so disheartened. He must know. He must see this place for the illusion it is.
If I am going to get out of this, I can’t concentrate on the past. I’ve done what I can there. I can only hope that I’ve succeeded in changing things. The earlier me has been set on the path to find me. What I need now is his later incarnation. I need the me who came home. The survivor.
He shut the door on me when I entered his mind, but there has to be a chance he’ll open it again. He knows Mym is in danger. He has to follow that lead. I would, and he’s me. It’s inevitable. Isn’t it? What can I offer him by way of assistance? What proof can I give him to show him that Mym might suffer if he fails to protect her?
I think about the tombstone in the cemetery with the name Mym Juniper Quickly engraved on it. The raggedy figure of Benny standing over it.
The image is disturbing.
I’ve never learned where Benny came from. Is it possible he is the end result of this journey? If I fail, will Mym die anyway and cause the other me to end up in The Neverwhere?
The thought gives me pause. It’s an unknowable paradox. Even if I knew it to be true, how could I stop it? By trying to prevent it, I might cause it, or, by doing nothing I might cause it anyway. Perhaps outside circumstances guide Benny’s fate and they have nothing to do with mine. It’s impossible to say. Perhaps the decisions I’ve made have already altered the course of events enough to avoid that fate.
During our last conversation, Benny threatened to stop me if I tried to see Mym again. Does that mean he thinks I might be causing her death? After our last encounter, I don’t feel especially inclined to ask him. At the time, I felt inclined to punch him in the face, and that feeling hasn’t receded much.
Honestly, I don’t want to keep thinking about it. I want action. Any kind of action.
Pushing myself off the couch, I get up and move toward the kitchen. It’s only when I’m near the refrigerator that I notice the apartment seems to have dimmed. It’s stormy outside again. Black clouds are roiling across the sky.
Him.
It’s only a feeling that makes me turn around. The way the shadows are playing across the floor, daring me to look. I raise my eyes to the front door and the pane of its curtain-less window. Zurvan is looking back. Face pressed nearly to the glass, his beard partially obscures his lips, curled into a menacing scowl. Lightning flashes behind him and I jump. If I had a real heart anymore, I’m sure it would have stopped.
The chill in his glare is palpable. In his right hand he is holding something metal. It takes me a moment to recognize it, but it’s my aluminum softball bat, the one I dropped in the desert during our first encounter.
He tracked me here.
The logistics of the situation are beyond me. I don’t know what link in my memory he followed, but somehow he’s been able to use an item from my experience of this place and follow it, tracing the thread, navigating my own memory to find me.
His stare through the window is calculating. I can sense him sizing me up, studying my surroundings, perhaps seeing if I hold any advantage here on my home turf.
I wish I did.
I don’t own much in the way of weapons. He’s already holding the one item I would lunge for in the event of a home invasion. There are a few knives in the block on kitchen counter, but I’ve already seen the knife he carries beneath his robes. It’s easily twice the size of anything I’ve got. And the last thing I want to do is start a knife fight, especially with someone swallowed in billowing robes. It’s hard to tell where his clothing ends and body begins. He is amorphous and immaterial in his dimensions.
But not his movements.
He tries the doorknob—tests the lock.
The jiggling doorknob registers almost physically in my mind. It’s as if the ability of the door to resist him is somehow tied to my force of will.
Zurvan smirks. He taps the glass with the handle of my bat, gently at first, then a bit harder. Tap. Tap. Tap.
The scene playing out before me is dreamlike in its intensity. No. Nightmarish. This is the sort of dream I would wake from with heart pounding, fists clenching sheets. The kind of dream that makes a person fear falling back asleep. Within him I can sense every nightmare monster I’ve ever faced. Every witch, every venomous animal, every phobia and terror that I’ve ever seen in my sleep since childhood. Somehow he is connecting to that part of me.
He’s been inside my head. Is that what he found there? Is he using that fear somehow?
Tap. Tap. TAP.
My resolve wavers. The glass cracks. A thin spider web spreads across the pane from one side to another.
He’s getting in.
The glass explodes on the next tap, spraying across the floor, little chunks of it skittering across the hardwood to vanish beneath the couch, the bookshelf, the coffee table. It fans out toward the kitchen, seeming to multiply as it spreads.
I’m rooted to the floor, paralyzed with fear, just like so many other nightmares, unable to imagine the next move, therefore unable to execute it.
The door swings open, my flimsy defenses failing fast. Zurvan takes a step, one foot invading my sanctuary. Then another. He’s over the threshold now. He blocks the doorway, the only exit from this apartment.
I need to run. I should be far away from here.
My feet are rooted to the spot. I’m unable to take my eyes off this turbaned invader. His eyes are bright. He looks pleased. He’s come for me and found his job uncomplicated. My ability to resist him has been tested and found laughably inadequate. I am unprepared. An easy target.
The bat falls from his hand, thudding to the floor and rolling away. It comes to a stop at the foot of the coffee table.
His fingers twitch at his side, flexing. It’s the anticipation of a gunfighter, our eyes locked together like an old western. Clint Eastwood versus some hapless, short-lived bandit. I suffer no delusions about which one I am.
I know what comes next. He’ll take my mind—extinguish me like he attempted to do before. I don’t have Benny to save me this time. He knows that too and he’s relishing his victory.
What will he do with my memories once they’re his? Will he use them to hunt Benny down? Perhaps he’ll browse through the accumulated years of my life and judge them for their merits. What will he think of my life? Will it seem an uninteresting tedium? Year after year of softball games and fixing old boats. Nights out with friends, long swims at the beach. A smattering of underwhelming romantic relationships that never seemed to stick. I could almost be willing to sacrifice some of those memories. But t
here is one I can’t give up.
I won’t let him have her.
Inside Zurvan’s eyes I can sense oblivion. That is what I will find there if he takes me. It’s not merely a guess. I can read it plainly in his expression, a stark reality, merciless and absolute.
He raises his arm—fingers spread wide—stretching across the space between us, using the force of his own mind. It prickles at my temples, toys with my already frayed edges.
I am only my memories, but here, in the Neverwhere, I have experienced new life. New memories.
New tricks.
Concentrating, I make the transition to this space in the real world, where I am merely a ghost.
Zurvan’s fingers spasm, clenching hard to crush my mind in his grasp. His fist finds only air. My eyes are closed tight and I’m falling. Down, down through cherry wood floor, through the plaster and the paint. I fall to the concrete, cold and solid inside my garage, transitioning back to the Neverwhere memory of this place.
This is my house. My memories. He can’t have them. Not yet.
Zurvan is yelling. His shout echoes through the apartment upstairs and the door slams open against the wall, shaking my tools hung on the pegboard at the far side of the garage. He’s never seen inside this room, so he won’t be able to envision himself inside. He’ll have to attack again from the exterior. He might still get in, but I’ve bought a little time.
I immediately begin working on a portal, fighting to open a gate to somewhere else. It’s slow going. I can feel the assault on the garage, feel Zurvan’s memories competing with mine for the space, pressing on the walls, trying to crush this whole place or turn it into something different. The walls flicker with his attempts to change the scenery, but my memory holds. The force of my will is all that is keeping the room intact. Each time I attempt to concentrate on somewhere new, however, I can feel the image of the current room around me weaken.
I can’t afford to lose the memory of the garage before I escape, but I can’t take my mind off of it long enough to open the portal to elsewhere.
Zurvan slams against the door.
It holds.
He slams again.
I will not break.
Somehow, just getting out of sight has helped. Here, in my own garage, my resolve is absolute. I will keep these doors shut till kingdom come.
Zurvan has other plans. I realize I’m too late.
Even as I hold the door tightly closed with my mind, he has changed the rules.
Water begins to pour in under the garage door and over the threshold of the pedestrian door as well. His memory of the outside world he is using against me is a watery one—wreckage and ruin—and my memory is unsealed.
The water level in the garage rises quickly, spreading from wall to wall and soaking my sneakers, then the bottoms of my legs. The garage flickers with iridescent fog now also, this aberration of a memory from the future eroding my resolve.
I know this place. It’s mine.
I fight back, restoring the dry floor around my feet, my motorcycle, my toolbox. My mind aches from the concentration. Dry walls. Dry workbench. Dry pegboards. The water retreats in patches as I replace it with the memory from my time. Despite this small victory, I can feel Zurvan creeping into my mind. The water pouring in from outside may as well be him. It’s almost waist high around the bubble of my memory. The hinges on the door are creaking, the bottom one is now rusted to ruin and the door begins to splinter around it, breaking under the onslaught of time.
I’ve trapped myself. I need an escape route.
Struggling to hold the memory of the garage intact, I try to think of another safe place, some memory with vivid enough details for me to open a portal. With the water swirling around me and the sound of the door caving in, I can’t focus on anything. Zurvan kicks his way through the door, and I turn and run—ghosting again—and sprint, eyes closed, straight through the main garage door.
When I open my eyes, I had thought I’d be in my driveway. It’s possible I am, but there is none of it to be seen. I’m thigh deep in water, but the world around me has vanished into the fog.
Zurvan is full of tricks himself, it seems. He’s forced me outside, presumably into a time of his choosing, but it seems he’s using a new strategy, the absence of memory. There is only the general flooding and the glistening fog. Now neither of us has real bearings in this place.
Okay. I can play this. If I can’t see him, he can’t see me either.
I concentrate on the nothingness, wiping away any thought of other locations from my mind and concentrating only on the fog, holding it in place in case he decides to shift the memory again and take us elsewhere. No more changing the rules.
All around me is obscurity, but I can hear him. Sloshing footsteps are making their way through the water, perhaps a dozen yards behind me. I consider running, but he’ll be able to follow the sound for sure.
This is a duel of wills now. Determining whose concentration will break first. The fog flickers once. Then again. He’s testing me, seeing if my nothingness will withstand his memories.
I stay still, clearing my mind, only seeing the fog. I don’t know if he needs to aim at anything in particular to attack me, but if so, I don’t want to give him a target. Frozen in place, I wait, hoping he’ll turn away, or wander past in the mist.
My luck is not that good. With each step, he moves closer, no doubt tracking the last sound he heard, my splashing exit from the garage. I hesitate, clinging to hope and resisting the urge to flee and identify where I am.
He is walking slower now too, moving more quietly, but as I look down at my thighs, ripples are flowing past.
He’s close.
I can think of only one good option and sink gently, and I hope noiselessly, into the water.
The fog had been difficult enough to navigate, but the view underwater is even more so. Lying on my back, I’m staring up through a few feet of water, and the colors of the fog float by me in sparkling ripples. I’m holding my breath, though I realize after a moment that I probably don’t need to. I’m already dead, and I’m only interacting with this memory through my mind. Even so, it’s difficult to fathom the idea that if I were to open my mouth and nose, I wouldn’t drown. I’ve spent so much of my life in the water that its rules are ingrained deeply in my consciousness. Is it possible that I might drown myself with my own memories? Would it be like dying in a dream? What happens if you have no real life to wake up to?
Uninterested in finding the answer to that question just this moment, I keep my breath held and wait. It’s Zurvan’s shadow that finds me first, a further darkening of the obscurity above me. Something brushes my leg and I realize it’s the flowing edge of his cloak. The ripples stabilize and I find that he is stopped right next to me. I’m staring up the length of his right side, his figure blurry but ominous.
The fear is almost overwhelming. The terror of this particular nightmare is raging through my mind. I’m prone and vulnerable. It’s as if I can sense the oblivion on the other side of his mind probing the water and calling for me.
Can he see me? Is he looking down?
My body is taut, expecting any moment to feel his crushing grip on the roots of my mind.
After what feels like an eternity, he takes a step.
He’s moving away.
The edge of the billowing cloak floats above me and then passes, replaced once more by the multicolored light refracting off the fog. Zurvan’s sloshing steps recede slowly into the distance, the sound muffled but carrying underwater.
Relief bubbles up from whatever recess of my mind it had been cowering in, and I unlock my rigid limbs. I wait a little longer, then ease myself up slowly, breaking the surface as quietly as I can. I keep the nothingness firmly in place around me, my protective cocoon. Listening, I can still make out the distant sloshing.
Where is he headed? Back to a place he remembers better?
I realize with awe that I’ve been successful. Not only have I kept him f
rom discovering me, but my concentration on the environment around us has been strong enough to keep him from opening another portal to leap through. He’s walking out, getting away from me.
Dripping into the water below me, my mind is finally settled enough to conjure up another memory of my own. With Zurvan no longer assaulting my mind, the portal springs open this time, almost lazily, as if I hadn’t needed just this escape moments earlier.
I frown at the view through the portal, my momentary joy at the success of opening it fading in the face of reality. The view is of Blake’s back yard. A memory vivid enough that I can see individual blades of grass and the blackened fire pit around which we had spent so many evenings with friends. What I can’t see is anything that will give me answers.
Cursing inwardly, I close the portal.
I close my eyes and listen to the distant sloshing of Zurvan. As much as I hate the reality of the situation, he’s the only one here with answers. Somehow, this futuristic, ruined St. Petersburg is a piece of the puzzle. If I run again, I may never figure out how it fits.
I’m emboldened by my victory. Cautiously optimistic.
I’m still scared of him, but his memories could hold the clues I need.
Whatever happened in this drowned city of his is a strong enough memory that he keeps returning to it. He’s waiting for his release from this place and somehow it involves St. Petersburg sometime in the future.
The mind of my other self in the real world seems to be closed off now. If I want to convince him to let me back in, I’ll need something to share. Some solid bit of information regarding the future. This could be it.
I want to get back to Mym. Back to living. I need a way out. It seems, right now, Zurvan is the only one holding a key.
I mentally psych myself up for what I’m about to attempt.
I’ll be careful. He won’t hear me. I can stay hidden.
In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3 Page 127