I stopped, confronting more memories.
“When we were about sixteen, we came out here on a summer afternoon,” I said. “We saw a little kid flailing in the water. His mother was distracted because her youngest was crying. The two of us plunged in and saved him. Did that happen here, too?”
“Yes, it did.”
“His mom bought both of us new bikes.”
“I remember.”
“I always felt good about what we did. The strange thing is, now I know there’s also a world out there where we didn’t save him. We failed, and he died.”
Roscoe put a hand on my shoulder. “I prefer to look at how hard God worked to put us on that beach at the exact moment when the boy was drowning. We almost missed the bus going down here—do you remember that? We were complaining because we were going to have to wait another twenty minutes for the next one. But as it turned out, the bus we wanted was running late. So we made it. If that hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have been here to save that child.”
“Yes, but there’s also a world where we missed the bus,” I protested. “So what’s the point? There’s no meaning to any of it. There’s no plan.”
“Not at all. It simply means in a different world, there’s a different plan.”
A sad smile creased my face. “I’ve always envied the strength of your beliefs, Roscoe. I wish I shared them. If there’s been one good thing about being here, it’s seeing you again. I’m going to miss you.”
“Are you saying you have to go?”
“You were right all along. I don’t belong here.”
“Will you follow this other Dylan again? And stop him this time?”
“No, it’s time for me to go back to where I came from and face what I left behind. That’s what you said I should do, isn’t it? Say the word and go home. I was a fool to think I could change the world.”
Roscoe squatted in the sand and let it run through his fingers. Then he spoke to me softly. “Actually, I’ve changed my mind about that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t think you’re ready to go home, Dylan. That’s not who you are. If you believe in what you’re doing, the worst thing you can do is give up. The fact that you failed doesn’t mean that you should quit. The friend I’ve known my whole life would never give up.”
“You really think I should try again? After everything that happened here? What if I make it worse wherever I go next?”
He shrugged and looked up at me. “What if you make it better?”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence, Roscoe, but even if you’re right, it’s a moot point. The only thing I can do is go back home. I have no way to go anywhere else. I can’t chase him, even if I wanted to.”
“Why not?”
“I have no way back into the portal without Eve Brier.”
He flinched at the sound of the name. “Eve Brier?”
“She’s the therapist who sent me here. The idea of trying to bridge the Many Worlds was her idea. But as far as I can tell, she doesn’t exist in this world. There’s no record of her anywhere.”
Roscoe dipped his hand in the cool water and shook his head. “God really does work hard to make things come together.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know her,” he replied.
“What?”
“Well, I don’t know if she’s your Eve Brier. She’s not a therapist, that’s for sure. But I do know an Eve Brier, and I’m not surprised you wouldn’t find any record of her online. She’s a drug addict. Homeless, has been for years. She comes into the parish sometimes when we’re preparing meals.”
“An addict?”
“Yes, she’s very smart, but she went off the rails a long time ago and never made it back. Actually, I think she was in medical school once upon a time. She got thrown out over theft of prescription drugs. It’s only gotten worse since then. She’s been hospitalized for overdoses multiple times.”
“That’s got to be her,” I told him. “How can I find her?”
“If she’s still alive, you’ll probably find her sheltered under the train tracks west of my church. That’s where she usually hangs out. But I wouldn’t count on her being able to help you, Dylan. Eve doesn’t live where the rest of us do. She spends most of her time in other worlds.”
CHAPTER 27
The streetlight near the railroad tracks had been shot out, leaving the tunnel ahead of me pitch black. I parked near a fence that guarded a vacant lot overgrown with weeds. Using my phone for light, I walked down the middle of the road. Spiderwebs of cracks ran through the pavement, and loose gravel crunched under my feet. Where the asphalt had chipped away completely, I saw layers of red cobblestone. Above me, dense trees leaned over the railway bridge. Retaining walls supported the overpass on both sides, and ribbons of ivy and green mold ran along the concrete.
Inside the tunnel, brown water dripped from the low ceiling. The I beams were connected by round archways, where the white paint had mostly flaked away. I wasn’t alone here. The night people were with me, and I was conscious of being watched by a dozen sets of eyes. The smell of weed hung in the air, thick enough to make my head spin. I saw a lineup of old blankets, sleeping bags, and pole tents crowded against the walls. The broken glass of a tequila bottle glinted in my light. A feral cat sniffed among the debris for food and rats. Someone near me talked to himself incessantly, stringing together random words that made no sense. I heard the splatter of someone urinating against the wall.
I stopped near a kid no older than twenty, who skipped rope with nervous energy in one of the archways. The snap of the rope echoed in the tunnel. I waited until he missed a step and then approached him. I dug out a ten-dollar bill from my wallet as an incentive.
“I’m looking for Eve Brier. Have you seen her around here?”
His jaw pumped as he chewed tobacco. I could smell it on his breath. He spun the jump rope in his hand like he was Will Rogers with a lariat. “Who wants to know?”
“I’m a friend of Roscoe’s. Roscoe Tate from the church.”
“Yeah, everybody knows Roscoe. What you want with Eve?”
“I need to talk to her.”
He snorted out a laugh. “Talk, huh? Lotta people like to talk to Eve. Best wear a sleeve when you talkin’.”
“I swear. Just talk. Do you know where she is?”
“Yeah, sure. Couple blocks up. Alley behind the cemetery. She takes her little rides up there.”
“Her rides?”
“That what she calls ’em. Seems like some crazy trips. When she goes away, she gone.”
I pushed the ten-dollar bill into his hand. He took off his baseball cap, put the cash on his head, and slapped the hat back on. Then he started skipping rope again.
On the other side of the overpass, most of the houses had barred windows. I passed a couple of late-night bars and some empty storefronts. Two blocks down, I found the cemetery, which was protected from grave robbers by concrete walls topped with barbed wire. A narrow alley ran adjacent to the cemetery wall, and I walked into the darkness, kicking garbage out of my way. In a small yard of mud and grass behind one of the buildings, I saw a woman slumped on a blanket.
I shined my light on her face.
It was Eve Brier, but this was a very different Eve than the one I knew. She wore a soiled gray sweatshirt and no pants, only frayed purple underwear. Her long legs were riddled with bruises. She had one sleeve pushed up, displaying the track marks of numerous injections. The long, elegant nails I remembered on her fingers were chewed down, her cuticles bitten and bloody. She lay on her side, her body wrapped in the blanket. Her almond-shaped eyes were closed. I didn’t know if this was sleep or unconsciousness. I knelt next to her and gently brushed the long hair from her face. She had no elegant highlights, just brown hair that matched the mud.
“Eve,” I called softly, getting no reaction.
My hand stroked her shoulder. “Eve?”
She moaned, a guttural protest t
hrough her closed mouth. Her limbs twitched as she stirred. Her eyes blinked open, failed to register her surroundings, and sank closed again. I patted her cheek.
“Eve, wake up.”
This time, she did. She opened her golden eyes as she rolled onto her back. When she focused on my face, her eyes widened in shock. Inhaling, she let out a primal scream and skittered away from me. I came off my knees and followed, but she beat at me with her fists, her throat wailing without forming words. She bumped into the brick wall behind her, and her hands flew at me as if trying to wave off a cloud of bees. I had to wrap her up tightly in my arms to stop her.
“Eve, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
She wouldn’t stop screaming. I was afraid the people in the houses nearby would call the police. I put my hand over her mouth, trying to quash the noise, but she bit down hard on my palm, drawing blood. When I drew my hand back in pain, she wailed again. One word.
“Dylan!”
She knew who I was. She’d seen me before.
“Don’t hurt me! Please don’t hurt me! Dylan!”
I grabbed her shoulders, with blood dripping down my wrist, and pushed her against the wall.
“Eve,” I hissed urgently. “Eve, listen to me.”
“Don’t hurt me, please!”
“Eve. Try to focus. I’m Dylan, but I’m not him.”
“You are, you are! Go away, leave me alone!”
“Look at me!” I backed away and shined the light of the phone on my face. “Look at me, Eve. You can tell, can’t you? We’re the same, but we’re different. I’m not him.”
I put my hands up, a gesture of faith that she wouldn’t run. That she should trust me. She summoned the courage to look at me, and I had the chance to look at her, too. I had no idea what she was on or how far gone she was, but when her animal instincts receded, I saw a little bit of the Eve Brier I remembered. Somewhere in there was the brain that had started all of this.
She was the portal.
“See?” I said quietly. “I’m not him.”
She touched my face, like a blind woman getting to know me. “You’re right. You’re different.”
“Yes, I am.”
“How? How did you get here?”
“Through you,” I said.
She didn’t look surprised. “You mean a different me? From somewhere else?”
“That’s right.”
Eve exhaled with relief. “So you know about the worlds. You know they’re real.”
“I do.”
“People don’t believe me. I tell them I go on rides, and I tell them what I see. They think I’m crazy. They think it’s nothing but the drugs.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy. Tell me about the rides, Eve. Where do you go? What do you see?”
“There’s a place where we all meet,” she replied dreamily, looking over my head at the sky. “There are so many of them. So many of me. I’m not like this everywhere, you know. I’m smart. Rich. Beautiful.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Sometimes I follow them. The other Eves. Just to see what it’s like to live like that. I hide, and I watch them, but I never stay. I couldn’t live in those worlds. I’d still end up just the way I am now. We all end up back where we belong sooner or later. Except for him. He goes wherever he wants.”
“Tell me about him.”
Her face darkened. “He’s evil.”
“You’ve seen him on your rides?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve seen him, too. That’s why I need your help.”
“Look at me. I can’t do anything.”
“You can send me after him,” I told her.
Eve stared nervously into the shadows. On the street behind us, headlights came and went in the alley. “I wasn’t always like this, you know. In college? I had a 4.0. University of Chicago, summa cum laude. Totally clean. No alcohol, no weed, no nothing. I went to medical school, and I was good, really good, but you can’t imagine the stress. You’re exhausted all the time. I needed something to keep me going, and a guy in the lab hooked me up. It was just supposed to be the one time, to get me through a rough patch, but the pills sucked me in. I tried so many times to stop, but I wasn’t strong enough.”
“I’m not blaming you, Eve.”
“Except you know a different me, don’t you?” she said. “One with a better life.”
“Yes.”
“How do you know her?”
“She wrote a book about the Many Worlds.”
“And why do you care about that?”
“Because of the other Dylan,” I said. “He came to my world and destroyed my life.”
“He destroys everything.”
“How do you know him?”
“I saw him on one of my rides. I do it a lot, you know. Ride. I was spying on one of my doubles in the park, and I saw him talking to her. I could see there was something wrong about him. Something bad. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. So after they split up, I followed him. I saw him go into the park that night, and he met this woman and—oh, my God.”
She wrapped her arms tightly around her chest.
“Since then, I’ve seen him half a dozen more times in other worlds. I see the things he does. It’s always the same. He’s a killer.”
“I know.”
“The last time, he spotted me watching him. He recognized me. He knew I’d seen him, and he came after me. I had to say the escape word to get away.” Eve shivered. Her fingers twitched. “Since then, I’m afraid that wherever I go, he’ll find me. But I need to ride. I can’t stay here. I have to get away from this life, you know? It’s too much. I can’t take who I am.”
I grabbed both of her hands. “Eve, I want to stop this other Dylan. I never want him to hurt anyone else. I came here to do that, but I failed. He got away. Now I want to go after him again, but I need your help. I need you to get me to the Many Worlds again.”
She shook her head. “I only have one dose left. I don’t know when I can get more, and I can’t be stuck here. Not like this. I’ll go crazy.”
“Eve, I can’t do this without you.”
“What if you go after him and you fail again?”
“I’m not going to fail.”
“You might not be able to deal with it. The stuff I get isn’t always pure. When it’s laced, sometimes strange things happen to me when I ride. Weird, scary shit.”
“I’ll take that risk.”
Her face softened. She put chapped hands on my cheeks and leaned forward, and I was surprised when she kissed me. Her lips were gentle and submissive, craving any kind of human connection. I didn’t stop her. I let her kiss me for a while, and then she sank back against the brick wall. She lifted up her sweatshirt, exposing her flat stomach and the slopes where her breasts swelled. A capped hypodermic was taped across her skin.
“Take it.”
I reached forward, peeling off the tape and taking the needle in my hands. I removed the cap and studied the clear liquid in the barrel. For all I knew, I was about to kill myself. OD.
“Where do you go?” she asked me.
“What do you mean?”
“When you ride. Where do you go? The crossroads.”
I understood now. “The Art Institute. The painting Nighthawks.”
“I’ll talk you through it,” Eve said, “but I don’t know what will happen. I’ll try to guide you there, but if it’s a bad batch—”
“That’s okay.”
I stared at the needle and then rolled up my sleeve. When the moment came to inject myself, I hesitated. I rolled it around in my fingers and couldn’t bring myself to put the metal tip to my vein.
“Do you want me to do it?” she asked.
I saw a steadiness in her eyes. “Yes.”
She took my arm in hers with surprising skill and gentleness. But then I realized that once upon a time, she’d been on her way to becoming a doctor. She pressed the point of the needle into the seam of my arm.
“Are you sure?
Once it’s done, it’s done.”
“I’m sure.”
I watched the clear liquid disappearing through the needle as she injected me. The cocktail flowed like a cool river into my body, and the last thing I heard was Eve whispering in my ear.
“Kill him.”
Something was wrong. I knew it immediately.
I could see other Dylans coming and going, hundreds of them shuffling back and forth in front of me, but they were in a different place, separated from me by a window. I tried to get up from where I was, but I was paralyzed. I couldn’t even feel myself breathing. Glancing down, I saw the sleeves of a navy-blue suit and the brim of a fedora dipped low on my forehead just above my eyes. My arms leaned forward against some kind of counter. But I couldn’t move at all. All my limbs felt frozen.
“More coffee?”
I saw another Dylan. He wore a white uniform, a paper cap on his head. He leaned over the counter where I sat motionless.
“What?”
“I said, more coffee, buddy?”
There was a white mug in front of me. “Yes. Sure. Okay.”
He took the mug and went to a large coffee urn near the wall and refilled it. Then he put it in front of me. “How about the lady?”
I couldn’t turn my head, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw a beautiful woman in a red dress sitting next to me on the adjacent stool. Like me, she sat stiffly, not talking, not moving, as if she were some kind of mannequin. Her face was intimately familiar to me. Pretty. Vivid red hair to match her dress. I knew her well, but I had no idea what her name was.
Then I understood.
I was inside Nighthawks.
I was trapped inside the painting. The man I’d dreamed of being for years, the one sitting next to the woman in the red dress, was me. All the other Dylans were outside, in the museum gallery, moving back and forth on their way to their next destination. I had nowhere to go.
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