by Platt, Sean
“He’s good. That’s all I need to know.”
“Yes, he is good. But he’s not always in control of himself. And when he’s not, he’s not the John you’ve gotten to know. He’s … a monster.”
Abigail looked at John’s face, so serene and peaceful lying propped against the wall. His eyes moved beneath their lids, and she wondered what his dreams were showing him.
“I’m going to restrain him now, and I need to know you trust me. You can even keep the gun if you want.”
Abigail looked down at the gun, considered handing it to Larry, but then thought better of it. “Okay, you can restrain him. But if I don’t like what I see, I’m not afraid to use this.”
Larry looked at Abigail for a moment, as though tasting her words, or maybe feigning to take her seriously. Then he smiled his warm, friendly smile. “Deal.”
Larry reached around John, awkwardly dragged him by his armpits into the other room, then lifted him onto a chair before sliding the white jacket over him. The sleeves were much longer than John’s crossed arms, and Larry pulled the leftover length behind John’s back where he fastened the buckles. Abigail felt claustrophobic just looking at the thing. She could practically feel the breath tightening in her lungs.
Once finished, Larry rolled John back a few feet and turned his attention to Abigail.
He glanced at one of the monitors behind him, which showed the time: 4:40 a.m. He closed his eyes tight and paced the room, mumbling under his breath as if trying to work something out.
“What is it?”
“It’s almost morning. Which means we can’t bring John somewhere to feed. Which means … we need to bring someone here.”
Abigail stared at Larry for a moment before his meaning clicked into place.
“Oh my God, are you saying we have to bring someone here to die?”
Larry nodded. “If we don’t, John won’t survive the day.”
Twenty-Three
Caleb
Caleb stumbled through the doorway and into his darkened house — a cavernous hollow in the deep dead of night. It was close to dawn, and he was exhausted.
While Bob waved the carrot of promotion, he’d not been nearly as forthcoming with details as Caleb would’ve liked. There was a process, Bob said, which would be starting soon — after Caleb solved his current case. In other words, if he wanted to know everything, Caleb had to catch the killer he’d already been hunting for years.
He wasn’t sure why Bob had even bothered to call the meeting. Sure, he supplied him with some sensitive details — that he was hunting something not human. A big fucking deal, no doubt. But something wasn’t adding up. Why withhold other pertinent information? Why promise him a promotion he wasn’t even bucking for? Bob was putting the squeeze on him, a gentle one, but a squeeze nonetheless. Why? It wasn’t as if he needed more motivation than catching the man who murdered his wife.
Five minutes from Bob’s estate, Caleb called his second in charge and said he’d be out of commission for the day. Not exactly the best way to kick the investigation into overdrive, but it had to be done. He was falling apart and needed time to mend, a few hours to do nothing but lower his lids and surrender to the dark.
He fell into bed, not bothering to get undressed, reached into his nightstand, and retrieved his lone tether to peace of mind. The pills that made all his thoughts disappear — at least for a while.
Caleb quickly fell into a peaceful slumber, a blissful smile on his face.
Twenty-Four
Abigail
“It’s not that big of a deal.” Larry shrugged.
“Killing someone isn’t a big deal?” Abigail couldn’t believe her ears. They’d been debating Larry’s proposal for nearly ten minutes already.
“It’s no different from feeding a snake. Sure, you don’t want to kill the mice or rats because they’re cute, but you know if you don’t drop the cute and fuzzies into the tank, your snake will die. Same thing here; we need someone for when John gets hungry.”
“I don’t like snakes,” Abigail said, her arms crossed, “and people aren’t rats!”
“Apparently, we don’t hang in the same circles.”
“There has to be another way.”
Larry rushed Abigail, wrapped his arms around her from behind, closed his hands over hers, and pulled the gun up, aiming it straight at John’s head.
“No!” she screamed, trying to free herself from Larry’s sudden grip.
What is he doing?
“This is the only other way,” Larry whispered in a soothing voice that seemed at odds with his quick, abrasive actions. “If you want John to die, pull the trigger now so at least he doesn’t suffer.”
Abigail trembled, unable to speak, looking down at her angel’s calm and peaceful face. His eyes flitted under their lids, and again she wondered what dreams he might be dreaming, and if she was in them.
Twenty-Five
A Boy Long Ago
The boy clutched his pillow as the shadow in the corner subtly shifted, dark charcoal barely outlined against the black backdrop.
“Sorry I took so long.” The shadow’s voice seemed strained, brittle enough to break in a breeze. Despite its fragile quality, the shadow seemed to exude an incredible force of undiluted strength, gathering in the boy’s bedroom like a slowly churning funnel cloud, absorbing every available shadow and casting itself into an impossible shroud of darkness.
“Wh-what?” was all the boy could manage.
Downstairs, his father screamed incoherent curses at the boy’s mother.
The shadow’s head, if it indeed had one, spun quickly toward the bedroom door.
“Ah, Father is quite angry tonight, eh?”
The boy’s bottom lip trembled. The shadow swirled faster, as if gathering a solid mass of twisted knots of sinew, forming into something.
“You … won’t need to … worry any long … er.”
The shadow man drifted toward the doorway, shadows trailing him along the walls, floor, and ceiling like floating streamers tied to an automobile.
“No!” the boy cried out. “Don’t … ”
The shadow stopped and turned, fixing its eyes — if the two burning blue spheres were indeed eyes — on the boy.
“Surely … you want him to stop … hurting you … yes?”
A million thoughts raced through his mind.
What is this thing?
Why did it apologize for being so late?
Did the devil finally come to answer my prayers for God to kill my dad?
The boy was awash in guilt, fear, and confusion. The monster waited, shadows swirling around it like wisps of smoke caught in a holding pattern — waiting for the boy to issue his command.
“It can … all … be … over,” the thing said, its voice seemingly weaker, giving the boy the impression that if he didn’t act now, this thing, whatever it was, would leave forever.
“You stupid cunt!” His father’s scream was followed by a sickening thump of his fist on the boy’s mother.
Now or never.
“Kill him,” the boy said, his eyes steel marbles of clarity and conviction.
The monster flew from the room, its form tightening into an ever more human shape until the boy could clearly make out the features of a face, and two impossibly blue eyes. It turned to the boy, the shadows of its face rising in a smile.
“You w … won’t regret this, Caleb.”
Twenty-Six
Caleb
Caleb woke, the embers of that dark creature’s eyes still singed in his memory.
He glanced at the clock — a scant hour of sleep had hollowed his bones. He tried clearing the cobwebs from his pounding head, stumbled into the bathroom, and sat on the toilet, cradling his head as he emptied his bladder. The room was dark, but Caleb could do nothing about the bright light spilling into his memory.
That wasn’t a dream.
The thought led to a shudder. Images looped on replay, feeling less like the sequence
s of a dream and more like a forgotten memory.
A buried memory.
A terrible itch raged from the deepest recesses of his brain. Caleb stood, approached the bed, and collapsed on top of the sheets, eager to greet his dream and turn the newest pieces of the puzzle.
Caleb’s early memories were fuzzy at best. The only things he could recall with any clarity didn’t come until after his birth parents were killed in a car accident and he was adopted by Ed and Myriam Baldwin. He vaguely remembered his birth father, though certainly not as the abusive man who haunted his dreams. His father had been …
You can’t remember what he was like, can you?
His mom was even more of a mystery. Suddenly, maybe for the first time in decades, Caleb wondered why he couldn’t remember his birth parents. A wave of guilt washed over him.
He beat the hell out of you.
Caleb shuddered as vague memories bubbled from somewhere deep inside him. He saw his birth father, a balding, working-class man with a paunch and a horrible glare. As if prodded by the dream, more memories surfaced. The version of his father he’d carried for a lifetime was a forgery. Caleb suddenly remembered the man’s hateful gaze on him, judging him for one reason or another, always shaking his head in disgust.
Oh God, how could I have buried this?
He tried to draw more memories from the well, but it had run dry.
He stared at the ceiling then leaped up and yanked the ceiling fan, downing another two pills before falling back into bed, listening to the quiet whir of blades making orbit. If he allowed his focus on the blades to soften until they blurred into a singular shape, he’d fall asleep like he usually did. He had nowhere to be tomorrow and would stay in bed all day if necessary, in hopes of unlocking any memories awaiting discovery.
Twenty-Seven
John
John woke to darkness.
The last thing he could remember was looking up at Abigail after knocking Larry over. He was now lying nude in a bed beneath cool silk sheets. Upon remembering Abigail, he tried to jump from the bed and call out to her. But his body refused to cooperate. Panic seized him, until a voice called out.
“How long are you gonna be?”
After a moment, John realized it was his voice, spoken by his dream self. Suddenly, and without thinking it into action, John rolled over in the bed and glanced at the light bleeding from beneath a door.
“Hold your horses,” a woman’s voice said.
Hope!
He tried to get up but instead found his hand reaching down to coax himself to readiness.
Though John was seeing through his eyes, could feel the coolness of the sheets, and smell the scent of — what was that, jasmine? — he was only a passenger in his body. He was experiencing his past, unable to control events that had already happened.
He could only watch and remember.
“You promise not to laugh?” she said from the other side of the door.
“Scout’s honor.” John crossed his heart, though she wasn’t there to see it.
“If you laugh, I’m NEVER doing this again,” she warned in a slightly serious voice, laced with the laughter he loved. “And this will be the last birthday gift you ever get.”
The door opened, and there she stood: her milky white skin bathed in moonlight’s soft blue glow pouring through the open curtains. Hope, as she appeared in the gift of memory given by Abigail, though even more beautiful in this memory. And less dressed.
She wore a black-and-white maid’s uniform, the sexy kind you’d find in a costume shop or adult catalog.
A strong sense of déjà vu flooded his brain. A swarm of memories rushed him — both the Past him and the Passenger him. He remembered looking at the outfit with Hope at a costume shop a few months before that night. He joked that he’d love to see her in the uniform. She must’ve taken him seriously and decided to feed his fantasy. Another memory, this one from earlier that night — they were out to dinner when she whispered in his ear, “I have something special for your birthday.” He was excited and curious. Hope wasn’t overtly sexual. Her charms were usually more subtle, though no less intoxicating.
He couldn’t remember what was about to happen next in this replaying memory, but other memories of their lives together began to surface. Her love of painting, how she always carried a book, her attempts to play cello, the way her nose crinkled when she laughed, and how she got super silly after her first sip of alcohol. John the passenger smiled, even if his past self didn’t.
He looked at Hope with a renewed sense of longing. He wanted to reach out and touch her, hold her, hug and never let her go. If he could feel her, maybe he could somehow wake in that moment, never return to his current life’s nightmare. She was right there, real enough to smell her skin. He desperately wanted his dream self to reach out and touch her, and prayed that the senses he felt as a passenger would extend to touch.
“Wow.”
“Happy birthday,” Hope said in a huskier-than-normal voice, slowly moving toward the bed.
The dream John laughed.
Passenger John wanted to reach through and strangle his past self. Don’t laugh, you ass!
Hope’s eyes widened. She pulled back, hurt.
“I’m sorry.”
He reached out to touch her, but she stepped farther back, standing just out of reach.
“I knew I shouldn’t have done this!”
“No, no, no.” John stood, awkwardly aware of his erection. “I’m not laughing at you. I swear.”
She looked up, wounded eyes peeking from beneath her dark shelf of bangs. “Then what’s so funny?”
He stammered, trying to find a way to explain what he was thinking. The passenger John could hear the flood of thoughts echoing in his head, crossing over his own.
“You just surprised me,” he said in the desperate tones of an accidentally honest man. “That’s all.”
“I look ridiculous, don’t I?” Hope looked down and covered her breasts.
“No, you look stunning.” Passenger John felt as if he were also speaking, a simultaneous echo of his faded self.
He felt like such an ass for laughing. Of course he found her sexy — didn’t she know that by now? She was such a strong and confident woman and rarely showed such frailty. How could she not know? She looked up, and their eyes met. He held her gaze. Hours of conversation passed without a word. He stood and seemed to be instantly beside her, longing to be inside her.
“I was just surprised; it would be like if I dressed up like a … I dunno, one of those Chippendale dancers or something.” He laughed. “Sure, I’d be sexy as all hell, but you’d be surprised.”
“So modest,” she said, the smile returning to brighten her face. “You sure I don’t look stupid?”
He reached out. “Come here.”
They touched.
He wrapped his arms around her, and their bodies blended. Passenger John felt the warmth of their embrace. He’d almost forgotten how good it felt to touch another. His fingers caressed her hair, tracing the arch of her back as he pulled her tightly to him. His hunger to touch her, to feel her, to explore every inch of her body was fed insatiably by the dream self as he kissed and licked the small of her neck, downward, to her breasts and back up, licking her lips before their mouths locked. Their eyes closed, and for a moment there was only darkness and the sense of touch, the glorious warmth of their fingertips exploring.
If his recent hours had been hell, this was heaven.
While kissing, he opened his eyes and found she was looking at him. The Passenger John felt his heart leap in hopes that she was recognizing him, not only there in that moment, but also the him passed out in a motel room.
He wanted to ask if she could see him, but his dream body wouldn’t cooperate. Their eyes locked, and he was certain that somehow, if he just knew how, he could find a connection, somehow find a way to her in the present. Failing that, he was prepared to live forever in this moment.
“Fuck me
.” Her hands slid down to his cock.
This time, John didn’t dare laugh.
She pushed him gently down to the bed, and he fell into the soft sheets.
And he kept falling.
John woke up in the motel room, body and heart equally broken.
Twenty-Eight
Larry
“How about that one?” Larry waved his finger at an old man slowly peddling a decrepit 10-speed in the dark, likely on his way to a job that had been swallowing his soul one sip at a time. Two plastic grocery bags dangled from the handlebars, heavy with a cheap prepared lunch or pages to turn while whittling away a thirty-minute break.
“No,” Abigail said, sitting beside Larry in the darkened van.
They were parked beside two other cars, both broken down by the looks of them, at the far end of a gas station parking lot. From their position, they could see the station/convenience store and a small strip plaza, which was closed. They’d hoped to find some wayward soul up to no good, someone Abigail could agree was a “bad person.”
Unlike Larry’s disastrous motel headquarters, the van was immaculately clean, well organized, despite its outer appearance. Along one wall stood a built-in table with a few monitors and onboard computers, along with a chair. The opposite wall held a long row of dark, heavy duty plastic totes that drew her curiosity, though Abigail had refrained from asking about their contents.
Larry had allowed her to continue holding the gun, while also giving her a quick lesson in aim and handling. He had both a .45 caliber of his own and a stun gun, which he was ready to use once they found the right person to accompany them back to the motel. Whoever they brought back had to be alive for John to effectively feed.