“Union,” he said. “I know where I am. I’m close. January will help me figure out what’s wrong when I get there. She can fix me after I save her.”
It occurred to him the orgy guards might refuse to admit him if he was not careful. He had to pull himself together and act the part. Easy. It was something he had done his entire life. No one would notice as long as he focused. When he found the playpen, everything would fall into place.
Dothan dug in his jacket for the building address, but as he pulled the note from his pocket, the writing fell from the paper to the ground as if made from overcooked spaghetti. He dropped to his knees, trying to retrieve the wiggling letters, following them into a doorway.
“This ain’t yours,” shouted a voice in the corner. He stood to face a skinny, filthy man wrapped in a blue tarp.
Dothan placed a finger to his lips, shushing the scowling man.
“Fuck off, leftie maggot. This is my place, and ain’t yours.”
The man shoved Dothan backward onto the sidewalk. He wandered along the crowded city blocks. His eyes became dazzled by the bright lights as they shimmied and swayed around him. Lost and unable to continue, he stopped, sitting in the middle of the street to watch the colorful squares and circles fly past him.
A woman with an arrow-shaped head lifted Dothan to his feet and asked if he was all right. He nodded and asked if the arrow could help him pick up the pile of spaghetti letters, but she just turned her pointed head toward a bright neon sign in the distance.
“Yeah, that’s it! That’s where I wanted to go.” Dothan placed his palms against his cheeks in rapturous joy. “The Bella Domo Apartments, that’s it.” He walked in small, careful steps until he reached the bright lights surrounding enormous glass-panels. Fatigue overwhelmed him. He leaned against the edge of the building, longing to enter through the lobby. January, though, told him to take the service entrance and climb the stairs.
“No mistakes,” he whispered, trying to lift his head from the pale stonework. “I promised her I would get this right.”
He eased around the corner to a lighted sign identifying the service entrance door. After removing the note containing the door code, Dothan tried to unfold it, but it fell from his hand. His legs gave way beneath him, and he crawled toward the crumpled paper. As he reached out his hand, it transformed into a strange colorful bird comprising graphic blocks straight from an old computer game. The eight-bit creature grabbed his wrist with its pixelated claws and lifted Dothan to his feet. It used its beak to punch in the code, and, as the heavy steel door unlocked, the bird flew into his pocket.
Dothan entered a tower-like enclosure of winding metal stairs and landings. To avoid stumbling on the swaying staircase, he crawled one step at a time. At the first landing, he tried to stand, but wobbled and leaned against a spongy wall. Grabbing the writhing banister, he climbed with slow, measured steps, ignoring the waves of gut-wrenching nausea produced by the colorful vertigo.
I can’t stop. January needs me.
Careful to avoid staring into the vast, black chasm separating the sets of stairs, Dothan pushed toward each level, until he reached a door leading into the eighth floor. The block-bird flew once more from his pocket and pressed the code for him. As he waited for it to re-enter his jacket, it emitted a loud squeal and lifted the penthouse number skyward in its beak.
“Come back, you little shit,” he shouted.
The creature stiffened and broke into tiny pixels, dropping into the void and taking the precious note from January with it.
Dammit. I’ll never figure out which apartment it is now.
Dothan used his remaining strength to push open the door, revealing a long wobbling hallway. January said the playpen was at the end of the corridor. Which way did she mean? He chose the right, and, after shuffling forward a few feet on the bouncing carpet, grabbed the chair rail for balance. His desperate fingers dug into its rounded edge, but it wriggled and melted, and he fell to the ground.
He crawled, inching along the hallway. As he grew closer to the last apartment, he stopped and forced himself to his knees.
I can’t go in there looking like this, he thought.
He tried to straighten his jacket, but his hands expanded into puffy balloons, leaving him unable to grab the edge of the seams.
“Dammit, dammit,” he said, shaking them in the air.
Hauling himself to his feet, Dothan leaned against the last door and read its nameplate: Penthouse 5. That was it. That was the one. He was sure of it.
He pressed his face against the soft burl of the wood panel.
“I found it,” he muttered. “January, I found it.”
The heavy door flew open and Dothan fell into a dark cavern, hanging from the edge of a jagged cliff and sliding backward toward a black abyss. Desperate to save himself, he grabbed a mass of roots hanging from a craggy hole in the rock, but the slimy writhing tendrils pulled away. His hands flailed in wild motions as he fell, howling in terror, into the fissure and landed with a thud against a hard surface.
Unable to move, he cried out for January, but the blackened walls throbbed with a loud, swishing noise, drowning his cries.
Why was he in this hellish nightmare?
Dothan closed his eyes. As he lay motionless, the heavy silence was broken by the distant sound of someone calling his name.
Chapter Nineteen
“Dothan.”
He opened his eyes, but his vision was blurry and distorted.
Where was he?
Dothan blinked until his surroundings came into focus, and he recognized the dismal, disgusting squat he had shared with his mother.
Please. Please don’t let this be real.
He groaned in horror and desperation, unable to move his arms or legs.
Within the darkened room, his mother lay upon a filthy mattress covered with rags. Thin to the point of skeletal, she turned to face him and snarled through dark, rotten teeth. Her red-rimmed eyes widened as she pointed her bony finger, blackened with death, and howled through cracked, gray lips.
He knew there was only one way out for him. Clear and yellow prescription vials lay littered across the floor. If he could just find the strength to collect them, it would be easy to empty their contents into the bottle of vodka she craved and stop her noise forever.
As he stretched his fingers, a soft, lyrical voice swirled around him in a ribbon of light.
“Can you hear me?” it asked.
How the hell can I hear anything with Gina howling?
“If you don’t stop, I’ll do it,” he shouted to the screeching woman. “I swear I’ll do it again. Just shut the fuck up!”
“Hush. It’s me.” The melodic glow grew brighter as it circled him.
It was so hard to move, but with every ounce of his strength, he lifted his head. The still form of an old man lay slumped beside him, staring into the darkness as thick dark goop dribbled from a hole in his temple.
Sibella’s decomposing cadaver mixed a cocktail for a very bloody Lucas Gilmore. While his mother moaned beside Dothan, the lawyer’s corpse turned his filmy eyes toward him and lifted his drink from the polished bar. The dead man smiled, his gray-white face glowing in the dim illumination of the room.
I must be dead, too, he thought.
Surprised by a gentle movement beneath his palm, Dothan flinched. Flares of glittering brilliance burst between his fingers, and he slid his hand away, revealing sparkling jeweled claws attached to a large flexing paw. He wanted to stand, but a pair of carved wings wrapped around his shoulders, restraining him.
As he struggled, Sibella’s corpse turned toward him, her unblinking eyes pulled wide by metal hooks in her bluish flesh.
“There,” she croaked through decomposed lips. “What you wanted. It’s there.”
“What?” he asked. “What do you mean?”
He stared at the shimmering gems decorating the paw feet and the intricate gold inlay on the wings confining him, and the realization pushed aside his horror.
This was her table. The one locked in the back of Sibella’s eye.
“Who owns this? Who did this to you? Tell me.”
The dead woman ignored him and turned her attention to the gentle swaying of the shining musical ribbon. It encircled two figures standing at Dothan’s side, and its soft gleam illuminated the faces of January and Althea Harrington, who whispered as she gripped the
younger woman’s arm.
This was not happening to him. It had to be just another horrible part of the inescapable nightmare.
“Is that really you?” Dothan tried to stretch out his hand to touch her, but his arm was too heavy to lift. “Please be you. Look what I found. Do you see it? Right here. It’s the table. Sibella’s table.”
January broke free from Althea’s clinging grasp. She smiled as she knelt beside Dothan, laying a latex-gloved hand on his shoulder. “Can you understand what I’m saying now?”
Every word emerged from her mouth in a gentle, blue glow and swirled around her in soft, misty puffs. His heart pounded in wild, double-timed beats. Maybe she was just another ghost in this bizarre dreamscape.
“I guess those pills I left you were stronger than I thought,” she said. “I expected you to be dizzy and see a few weird things, but they seem to have taken you on quite a colorful trip. I’m impressed you made it here in this condition.” The odor of her plastic gloves turned his stomach as she smoothed his hair. “I’m very disappointed, though, as I went to a lot of trouble to make sure you had a ride waiting in that parking lot. I don’t know how you skipped right past our van, but you’re here now. If you’re a good boy, the rest should be simple.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. Dothan patted the jeweled feet. “But it doesn’t matter now. I found the table. Well, Sibella told me what it was. You’ll have to ask her, though, because she’s ignoring me. Hey, are you real? I just want out of here and to get married. Can we go now, please? Everything has been so awful.”
“I’ll make it better soon,” said January, letting her hand drift along the contours of his face. The touch of the latex was smooth and icy against his skin. “My god, you’re so handsome. No matter what you might think, I liked you, you know? If things had been different, I can’t even imagine what we could have accomplished together. I’m so sorry you have to die, but there’s no other way.”
Die? he thought. Wait. I’m not dead?
His mother’s corpse continued to howl while January said something about Joseph Harrington.
“God dammit, Gina! Would you just shut up and go rot somewhere else?”
“Listen to me,” said January. “She’s not here. There’s no one here but us. Do you understand?”
Her words pulsed from her lips in vivid colors. Their soft tones broke into wild erratic patterns expanding across the walls and ceiling. As he watched, the rainbow dissolved his dead mother, Sibella, and Gilmore into the cool darkness.
“You heal me,” he whispered. “You always heal me.”
She ran her hand along his arm and the dull, throbbing chime of the clock faded into silence. The horrible landscape disintegrated into a well-furnished living room.
He stared at January, still unsure if she was another shadow, when the bloody corpse beside him fell into a crumpled heap against his knee.
Dothan screamed, trying to push the dead man away.
“Stop,” said January, holding his weary arms. “I told you. There was no choice. We had to kill Joseph.”
“That’s Harrington?” He tried to pull away from her, but he was too weak to struggle. “What the hell? You never said shit about killing anybody. We have to get you out of here before the police find out.”
“Shh. Remember you said you would do anything I asked?”
Dothan nodded, dumbstruck.
“Here’s your chance to prove you meant what you said.”
“How?”
“By giving your life for mine.”
“What…no! What the fuck are you talking about?”
January grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands. Her eyes, filled with love when they were last together, blazed with hatred.
“You know, I could have let the world believe you were a psycho killer, but you found Lucas for me, so I thought I’d be kind.” She threw him back against the table and held a small note in front of his face. “Can you see this? It’s your suicide note. I’m going to leave it right here next to you. It explains how, after learning Joseph and I were having an affair, you discovered he had killed Sibella. It was more than your messed-up brain could handle. You shot him in a rage of jealousy and decided to kill yourself.”
Who was this creature waving around that piece of paper? January would never force him into a staged murder-suicide. Maybe the woman he loved was still in there somewhere. If he could just touch her and hold her body against his, she might come back to him and they could escape this horror together. Dothan tried to lift his hand, but it fell to his side.
January stroked his arm. “People will view it as a romance,” she said. “A handsome man gives up his life for the woman he couldn’t have, taking her murdering lover with him.” She pressed her cheek against his, letting her soft curls drag across his skin. “I’ll make sure it’s quick,” she whispered. “No pain. Goodbye, Dothan.”
Confused and desperate, he leaned toward her. January laughed and shoved him backwards. She moved to Althea and kissed a long, red scratch clawed across the older woman’s jaw.
“Let’s do this,” said January, handing a gun to Althea.
The older woman’s face transfigured into a misshapen grin. She glared at Dothan through bruised and swollen eyes.
Dothan groaned and fell to his side. Frantic with fear, he tried to drag himself toward the door, but Althea straddled his back.
“If you only knew how much I’ve wanted to do this,” said Althea. She cocked the gun and placed the nozzle against his temple.
“No!” screamed January.
There was a loud slap, and Althea fell beside him, the gun dropping from her gloved hands. The room was spinning as Dothan continued to crawl.
January pulled him upright, slamming him against the table.
Her face a hideous mask of fury, January grabbed Althea’s hair and dragged her toward Harrington’s body. “This is supposed to be a suicide, you idiot. Without his fingerprints on the gun or any residue on his hand, it wouldn’t be very believable to the police, now would it?”
She kicked over the corpse and shoved Althea’s face next to the congealing wound. “Why do you keep forcing me to do everything myself? First Sibella and now him. If you’d taken care of that asshole before I’d got here, we’d have been better prepared for this moron. Last chance, Althy. Screw this up again, and they’ll find you right beside both of them. Get his fingers around that trigger and end this.”
Althea stuttered an apology through swollen lips.
With the women distracted, Dothan fell forward, stretching his hand toward the pistol. January released Althea and stepped on his knuckles with the flat of her stiletto.
As he moaned in pain, she turned to Althea. “Get the damn thing.” January grunted as she pulled Dothan to a sitting position and grabbed his chin. “As for you, if you don’t stay right where you are, I’ll forget about that note and leave a dildo up Harrington’s ass. That way everyone can wonder what the two of you were doing in here. Consider that my wedding present, honey.”
Althea scrambled for the gun.
“Don’t do this,” he whimpered. “January, for fuck’s sake.”
“Is it cocked?” January asked Althea.
The older woman nodded and double-checked the weapon. “Y
es, I did that earlier.”
“Please,” he said.
January disappeared through the heavy door. It bumped
against its frame.
“I know you love me,” he whispered. “I know it. Stop. Please stop.”
Althea wrapped Dothan’s fingers around the gun and trigger and lifted it to his temple. “Shut the hell up!”
Oh shit. I don’t want to die! What should I do, what should I do?
Gasping for breath, he closed his eyes as the icy edge of the barrel pressed against his throbbing temple, and with every ounce of strength remaining to him, he fought, crying out, “No!”
A loud thud echoed and Dothan flinched.
Was it over? Was he dead?
There was a moan beside him. Someone grabbed hold of his armpits, and his heels dragged across the floor. Dothan opened his eyes, surprised to find a pair of dark-skinned hands clasping his chest.
“Lord, you’re heavier than you look,” grunted a woman, whose voice had the undertone of gravel.
“Agnes!” said Dothan. “Wait. Are you real?” His gaze fixed on the form of Althea, out cold against Sibella’s table, with a black truncheon lying beside her.
Dumped upon a large, overstuffed chair, he turned his head toward Agnes, who stood scowling at him with her arms crossed.
“You’re real.” Dothan laughed, his head unsteady on his shoulders. “You’re really, really real.”
“Didn’t I tell you not to get involved with this bunch?” she asked. “Didn’t I? What’s wrong with you? After everything I said, you still went and did exactly what I told you not to do. Lord almighty, save us, you are an imbecile.”
“I so totes am,” he muttered in between giggles. “I am an absolute dumb ass. Oh, my god, Agnes, I’m so happy to see you. I could fucking kiss you right now.”
He tried to purse his lips while pulling on the old woman’s arm, but Agnes slapped away his hand. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” she said, “but I got stuff to do. Sit there and be still for a few minutes, and then we’ll get an ambulance here to fix you up.”
The Optogram Page 22