He didn’t wear a watch or anything but guessed they had been walking longer than he’d thought. Or he’d gotten sidetracked on his way back. It took him a lot longer than he would have imagined. It still wasn’t close to twilight but the sun had dropped well below the treeline and the shadows had grown longer.
He came upon the campsite to find it empty.
He thought about lighting a cigarette and stopped himself.
Why? he thought.
The answer he didn’t want to give himself was, Because you don’t want anyone to know you’re here.
He quietly walked around to the back of the tent. It had a flap-style window covering a white mesh screen Lucas hadn’t bothered to put down.
Lucas sat on a blanket thrown across the floor of the tent, his shorts off, his legs straight in front of him. He had a hand wrapped around his cock, slowly massaging it.
Lena sat on her knees beside him. Lucas’s other hand stroked her cheek, brushed along her hair, and came to rest on the back of her neck.
“You want to put it in your mouth?” he said.
Grant’s heart raced. He shouldn’t be watching this. Yet there was an undeniable stiffening in his shorts. Of course he’d seen porn before, but this was different.
Lena nodded her head and cast a glance at the window.
Shit, Grant thought. Had she seen him?
Her glance lingered before she turned her attention back to Lucas.
“What is it?” Lucas asked.
“Nothing,” she said. Then she turned back to the window and Grant swore they made eye contact. “It’s nothing.”
Then she bent over and began running her tongue along Lucas’s cock, taking him in until she gagged.
She pulled herself off him, looked through the window again and pulled off her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra.
Lucas was immediately on her breasts, suckling the nipples until they were stiff, holding her slender hips in his hands.
Grant unbuttoned and unzipped his shorts and slid them down along with his underwear.
Did Lena know he was watching?
Did she like it?
He began to stroke himself. The only thing he was afraid of now was Lucas catching him. But maybe he wouldn’t care either.
Lena lay on her back and, even as Grant’s pulse quickened, his fear of being caught lessened. Lena had positioned her head at the front of the tent.
Grant stroked himself slowly, not wanting to come too quickly.
He watched Lena’s face as Lucas removed her shorts and underwear. She seemed to be looking right at Grant until she closed her eyes when Lucas lowered his head between her legs.
While Grant’s cock remained hard, he felt the beginning of that emptiness again. Even though he hadn’t eaten any of the mushrooms he felt some sense of perception shift within him.
Lucas seemed to change as he lapped at Lena. His skin seemed reddened and cracked.
He looks old, Grant thought. Almost ancient.
Lena gripped the crown of his head, her hips rolling to meet his mouth and tongue.
She writhed and moaned, not paying any attention to Grant now.
Grant continued jerking himself off.
He wanted to pay attention to Lena. Wanted to drink in her naked body, something he thought he’d never have a chance to see.
And you shouldn’t be seeing it, he thought.
But his eyes were continuously drawn to Lucas.
Lucas changing. Lucas becoming something else.
Lucas pulled himself to his knees and moved between Lena’s skinny legs.
Grant watched as he slid into her, heard her pained moan and slight wince turn into something deeply pleasurable.
He continued to stroke himself.
Now the tent began to fill with a strange light and Grant thought it smelled like something was burning.
He surrendered to some kind of state and had no idea how long it lasted.
There was that light in the tent and Lucas writhing on Lena and the not-Lucas writhing on Lena. Then Lena was on top of Lucas and the thing was separate from Lucas, standing beside them. They shifted positions until Lena was on her stomach, Lucas driving into her, Lena’s hand moving between her legs. Whatever attempt they’d made to be quiet had been long since abandoned with the rhythmic slapping of skin, Lucas’s grunts, Lena’s moans of ecstatic pleasure and . . . was that other thing making noise too?
It sounded like it was laughing.
Despite his arm getting tired, Grant pumped his fist faster and faster and shot his load onto the ground and had the horrible sensation of actually falling into the emptiness, the light from the tent spilling out and enveloping him before winking out and leaving him in total darkness and when he regained some sense of time and place the emptiness felt like it was gone . . . but something else had replaced it.
TWELVE
Grant had only stopped his narrative once so Lena could hold his hand to the fire.
Once he finished, there was silence among them, all of them gazing into the flickering flame.
“Lucas Wyatt,” Shawn said. “There’s a name I hadn’t heard until Lena brought him up earlier. Haven’t really thought about him too much either.”
“I’ve thought about him every day since then,” Lena said. “Even after the crash, I wanted to go out there looking for him but . . . of course I couldn’t. I always hoped I’d see him in town and then . . . well, we moved away and I knew it wasn’t happening. Just kind of wished he’d find me.” Then she turned to Grant and said, “You know, I knew you were watching.”
“I’m sorry,” Grant said. “I shouldn’t have.”
“This is too fucking weird,” Shawn said. “So . . . who the fuck is Debbie?”
“Debbie is the thing that lives inside me. The thing that came from Lucas. Debbie is just what I call her. It’s not her real name. I think she was intended for Lena. I think if I hadn’t been there . . . doing that . . . she would have entered Lena.”
“That sounds crazy,” Shawn said. “What does any of that have to do with the car crash?”
“Because Debbie likes pain. She doesn’t like to hurt. She likes to experience the pain of others. The fact that I’m mortal, that I can feel pain, is the only way I can retain any type of control. But if I die with her inside me . . . she dies too.”
“So . . . wait. The crash was on purpose?” Shawn said.
“I was scared. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Running the car off the road at fifty miles an hour was probably not the best thing to do. You could have killed all of us.”
“Well, I was the one who got hurt the worst,” Grant said. “I was in the hospital for a month. But Debbie was quiet the entire time. I think she was afraid. Or maybe just satiated for the time being.”
“Hence the beatings and the fire and all that?”
“That’s right. I have to feed her.”
“We all drifted apart after that, didn’t we?” Shawn said. “You were never really the same. Lena moved away. Edward practically stopped coming to school. My family members were the only people at my graduation party and I didn’t even like them.”
“I never went back,” Grant said. “Did you even notice?”
Shawn paused. “Of course I noticed. I was lonely as hell. I just thought we’d all changed and moved on. We never talked about it. We never talked period.”
“None of you even came to visit me in the hospital,” Grant said.
“I think I was mad at you,” Shawn said.
“My parents wouldn’t let me go,” Lena said. “They were convinced you’d been drinking. It was a big part of why we moved. My dad had had an offer from a hospital in North Carolina he’d been entertaining. The accident was all the fuel he needed. I’m pretty sure he accepted the offer within a week after that. Then we were gone within a month. He felt it was, um, pretty time sensitive.”
“I guess it’s nice to know you were all thinking about me,” Grant said. Shawn di
dn’t know if he was being sarcastic or not.
“I came to see you.” Edward appeared from the shadows at the perimeter of the fire’s light. “You were out. They had you pretty doped. Your mom never told you?”
Grant shook his head. “I’d never felt more alone. I thought I was crazy. Thought maybe one of you had slipped something into my beer and it was all a hallucination. Then, after I got home, Debbie came back. She . . . wanted me to hurt people. So I started hurting myself. That kept her quiet, but it didn’t take long for my mom to start noticing. That’s why she kept me out of school. By the next summer I was in Peace Point. They . . . kept me pretty drugged up and I guess that must have kept Debbie quiet too. I’ve been there off and on ever since. Mostly on. The drugs quiet her down. I start to feel like myself, the doctors think I’m doing better, and they release me. A month or so at home and Debbie comes back. The whole cycle repeats itself. Dad died a while ago. Mom died a few days ago. I . . . I don’t know what to do anymore.”
“You said you found Lucas,” Lena said.
“I did.”
“Where?”
“Here. This is his house. He’s always been here.”
“Why did you invite us?”
“I didn’t,” Grant said. “Debbie did.”
THIRTEEN
The more Shawn listened to Grant talk, the more uneasy he felt. He didn’t know what he was expecting. A reunion of sorts, he guessed. Something fun. Or at least a night of drinks and conversation. While there had been drinks, the conversation was of a darker bent than he would have preferred. He should have just disregarded the email. Or found some reason to get out early after meeting Grant for the first time after so many years and figuring out how fucked up he really was. He should have pulled a Lexi.
Lexi.
For the first time since discovering her absence, he had a genuine pang of fear and concern. The note had allayed most of that. Obliterated it, actually, at the time anyway, throwing him into a spiral of self-pity, but now he found himself again debating the authenticity of it. He didn’t like to worry. He didn’t like to argue. So he just told himself that’s how things were. Like excusing Grant to Lexi. Lying to himself again.
He said to Grant, “You know how fucking crazy that sounds, right?”
“I’ve lived with her for twenty-five years,” Grant said.
Still, none of the others came to Grant’s defense.
“Did you do something to Lexi?” Shawn said.
“She didn’t belong here,” Grant said.
Shawn tensed up. “If you did anything to her . . .”
“I didn’t do anything to her,” Grant practically whispered.
“Then why the fuck did she leave? Did you see her go? Did that weird ass maid see her go?”
“Stop bullying him,” Lena said. “He said he didn’t do anything to her.”
“She didn’t belong here,” Grant said again. “She probably felt that.”
“Yeah,” Edward said. “Natalie picked me up at the airport. Took off once we got to town. Said she couldn’t take it.”
“She felt it,” Grant said. “You all feel it, right? The energy? In retrospect, it was there that night when we were kids, we just weren’t looking for it. Everything that happened had to happen. Just like tonight. There’s nothing we can do to change what’s going to happen.”
Shawn drained his beer and chucked it into the fire. “I just want your word that you didn’t do anything to her.”
“Of course I didn’t,” Grant said.
Shawn took his word. He had to. He didn’t even see how Grant would have had the time to do anything with her. He wasn’t lying when he told himself Lexi had done things like this before. Being married to her was one of the most painful experiences of his life.
“Anybody have a cigarette?” he asked.
“I’ve got some pot,” Lena said.
Shawn was momentarily tempted but weed always made him nearly catatonic and he wanted to have his senses about him.
“Here you go.” Edward proffered a pack of Newports.
“Jesus, menthol?” He took one anyway. “I think I’ll pass on the pot. Thanks for the offer, though.”
Shawn lit the cigarette and took a deep puff.
“And what the fuck was that about us all coming here to die?” Shawn said.
“You have to admit,” Grant said, “it’s a possibility. As with most things.”
“Still kind of a weird fucking thing to say. I just want to make sure you’re not planning on hurting us.”
“Shawn!” Lena said.
“What?”
“Never mind,” Lena said. “You’re right. It was a creepy thing to say.”
“I have no plans to hurt any of you. But you have to acknowledge that death is a possibility.”
“See . . . creepy,” Shawn said.
“Can we just . . .” Edward began. “Fuck, I don’t know, talk about anything else?”
They all laughed in something like agreement before falling silent.
The fire crackled. Night insects buzzed around them. An occasional breeze rustled the leaves in the trees.
Shawn knew everyone sitting around the fire was back there in the summer of 1993. It was monumental, sure, but there was also something mundane about it. In Lucas, they’d met an older guy who they all thought was pretty cool. They’d spent a lot of time with him. They’d supplied him with cheap beer and youthful company and he’d supplied them with drugs, probably ones that were cheap or homegrown, and something they took to be wisdom and experience. Shawn had met a lot of people like Lucas over the years. Everything he’d ever given them was “the best stuff ever.” Because they were just stupid kids, he knew they’d believe him. They didn’t know any better. That was the dynamic. And Lena had become smitten with him and he’d taken advantage of her. Still pretty mundane. Happens every day. Nothing out of the ordinary. He wasn’t discounting Lena’s pain, but it seemed like something everyone endured, young women possibly more so than young men, and he would have thought Lena’s life would have put that into some sort of perspective.
That night was obviously a lot less traumatic for Edward and him. They had lain out under the sky, watching it darken and fill with stars. They’d fallen asleep or gotten bored or something before going back to the campsite, to sitting around the fire, drinking and smoking weak pot until they’d all gone to sleep for the night. Shawn had woken up the next morning deciding he probably didn’t want to play around with hallucinogens anymore. He felt hollowed out and depressed, the beautiful summer day seeming ironed out and flattened. He didn’t like that feeling.
Eventually they all piled back into Grant’s car so he could take them home, but they never made it. Instead they were all transported to the county hospital after Grant’s car swerved off the road. The doctor had told him he was lucky to be alive and that it was practically miraculous most of them were uninjured and Shawn had believed him because he didn’t know any better.
“I’m not a psychologist,” Shawn said. “But I think you’re reverse engineering your situation.”
“Debbie’s real,” he said. “You’re not going to convince me otherwise. You’ll all find out how real she is.”
“Hear me out,” Shawn said. “I’m sure you watched Lena and Lucas and maybe you were already feeling guilty about that. But then you crashed the car with us in it the next day and I’m sure you felt guilty about that. It didn’t help that we shut you out afterward. What I’m saying is, maybe all that shit at Lucas’s . . . all that shit with Debbie didn’t really enter your head until the accident.”
“Shut up,” Grant said, albeit not very forcefully.
“Let’s face it, the accident fucked with your head. We all knew that, right?”
“Yeah,” Lena said after a pause.
“You were never the same,” Edward said.
“All of you need to shut up.” Grant stood up, swaying like he was on a boat.
“You don’t need to feel guilty,
” Shawn said. “We’re not mad at you anymore. We should have talked this over a long time ago but, fuck, we were just kids. We all just . . . ran away. That’s what kids do.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Grant’s hands were balled into fists, clutched against his thighs.
“You were the most well adjusted of any of us. You had your job. You weren’t that into drinking or drugs or anything. Did your mom put all of that stuff about Debbie into your head?”
“You need to stop talking now, Shawn.” Grant turned toward him and, for a second, with the fire dancing beside him and casting strange shadows and highlights against his eyes, Shawn could almost believe he was occupied by a different person.
“Or what?” Shawn said.
“Come on, guys.” Edward now stood to come between them.
Grant shut his eyes and rolled his head back, his fists unclenching and his fingers splaying out.
Lena grabbed onto his wrist and pulled him toward the fire.
FOURTEEN
Lena kept tuning in and out, only half-listening to Grant’s story. She kept thinking about the weed back in her room and, ever since finding out this was Lucas’s house, her thoughts about him intensified. While this was the first she’d heard of Debbie, she felt like she was the only one besides Grant who’d experienced everything else that night. Since she’d been the one who had actually fucked Lucas, she felt like, if there was a situation, she was even more embroiled than Grant. Furthermore, she didn’t like the liberties and details he’d taken with the story. It wasn’t exactly like that. It had gone on for hours. She’d told Lucas she wanted to do everything and everything they had done. He was relatively rough with her and had come three times to her one. She’d been in pain most of the time. After he’d fucked her in the ass and come the second time, he’d gone down on her again, bringing her nearly to climax, before climbing on and fucking her slowly with a semi-hard cock. This time it actually felt good, she didn’t feel like she was about to split open, and she had come harder than she could have ever imagined. Perhaps it only seemed that way because it was the only orgasm she’d ever had. There wasn’t anything to compare it to. Maybe Grant had abridged the story to spare everyone the gritty details or maybe his grip on the realities of the past was as shaky as Shawn was now suggesting.
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