The Danger of Being Me (36 page)

I stepped across the threshold.  Through the door.  Into the room.  I smiled.  Then I laughed.  And tears streamed down my face as I laughed.  Because after all the years and all the impossible miles, I had finally come home.

4.

I closed the door, threw the bolt to lock out the world.

I crossed to the table at my right, shrugged off my bookbag, set it on the narrow table in the corner with a heavy thump.  A window over the table framed the parking lot, and Route 119 beyond it, and I glanced between the drapes to watch the last of the day disappear behind the hill on the other side of the highway.

There would be no moon tonight.

The white letters of the Gateway's sign threw a harsh glare over the parking lot.  The Wagoneer waited at the far left, parked at the curb facing the highway, looking away.  Like it had turned its back on me.  Like it couldn't bear to watch what it knew I had to do here tonight.

I could understand that.  The Jeep hadn't asked to get wrapped up in this dubious endeavor.  It hadn't chosen to ferry me along this long and curving path into my own personal undiscovered country.  If tonight wound up going as badly as so many nights in this room had gone before, the Wagoneer would be left out on that cracked tarmac until the police came to claim it.

I felt a flash of pity for the truck.  It was just more piece of collateral damage in this idiotic adventure of mine.  But there was nothing to do about it now.  I had made my decision.  I would live by it, or I would die by it.  All that remained was the hope that tonight would not go as badly as so many nights in this room had gone before.

I shut the drapes over the window before the darkness could creep up to the building.  Before it could press its greasy palms to the glass and gape into my room with its bloodshot eyes and exhale its ghastly breath on the pane.

I crossed the room, rounded the bed to the sliding glass doors.  Through them I saw the breadth of Prophecy Creek a mile away down the rolling hill behind the Motel.  The lights of the city sparkled against the darkening sky like splintered glass thrown across concrete.  A beacon glowed within the restored commentator's tower at the Camlann Fields Baseball Park.  And straightaway, at the center of town, stood the Speaker Tree shrouded in shadow.

I looked into the coming of the night, and I thought of Winnie.  I thought of Helen and Phil and Erin.  I thought of Regina.  I thought of Angel Wings, and the waitress at the Snake Eyes Diner.  I thought of the contralto seraph in my operating room.  And I thought of Ethan Gibson.

But most of all I thought of Amber.  Thought of her shooting blacklight billiards at the Morris with her friends, or working a shift at the coffee counter at the Tetraplex with her uncle and cousin, or maybe just wandering the stores at the Winslow Graham Mall with Dawn.

Then I thought of her camped out in a boxseat along the third base line at Veterans Stadium with her father.  Wearing a Scott Rolen jersey and an infielder's glove.  I don't know why I didn't imagine her mother there with them.  Maybe she had been called away on an emergency.  A primary spontaneous pneumothorax, perhaps.

A bolt of heat shot through my chest at the thought of Amber.  So I yanked the blackout curtains across the doors to close out the darkness creeping up the hill.  I crossed the room to the bathroom, pushed the door open, reached into the shadows.  I groped for the switch, flicked it.  The bulb above the mirror ignited and an inexpressible creature lunged out of the darkness at me.

I choked on a scream that never made it past my lips.  Bloody claws reached for me with inhuman speed.  That thing's serrated talons would close around my neck and rip my throat out.  It would gorge on my blood right here on the linoleum floor of this squalid bathroom.

Then I blinked.  The unspeakable monstrosity that had slithered out of the creeping darkness was my own twisted reflection. It stared at me from the far side of a scummy film that stained a sheet-metal mirror above the sink.

I blinked again, watching the image on the far side of the looking glass, staring into its brushed-chrome eyes deepest of all.  They were my own, but older, and I knew without knowing how that I was looking into the face of John Doe 83.  I waited for him to stop imitating me, to flash his mad grin, to shatter the barrier between our worlds and drag me away into his nightmarish wonderland.

He didn't do that.  Of course he didn't.  He just stared at me with that cautious expression.  With those eyes.

I watched that twisted reflection for another thirty seconds before I started laughing again.

I couldn't help myself.  The absurdity of waiting for an image of myself to burst out of a scummy sheet of metal in a squalid motel bathroom overwhelmed me.  I laughed until my gut cramped up and I doubled over against the doorframe.  Tears stung my face.  My reflection laughed along with me on his own side of the looking glass.  The same absurdity had struck him; he found it unbearably hilarious.  So at least we had that much in common.

Uncountable minutes later, I couldn't remember what had been so unbearably hilarious.  My laughter subsided.  I pushed myself off the floor, loosened the cramps in my gut.  Looked into the mirror above the sink again.  Just to make sure that the thing on the other side of the looking glass really was nothing more than a harmless echo.  It was.  I just nodded to it, gave it a short two-fingered wave.  It returned the gesture.  My reflection was left-handed.

I grinned, but my grin twitched as I saw in the mirror what I hadn't seen before.  Behind that other me, above that other twin-sized bed in that other room on the other side of the looking glass, hung a painting of an ordinary urban sidewalk in downtown Philadelphia.  A subway entrance that was a single block of rough-hewn marble.  The gasping maw of a cave.  It was no Gothic masterpiece, but it had its own undeniable dark brilliance.

Billy Penn faced in the right direction.

I turned away from the bathroom, but I left the bulb on.  My grandfather had given me his light, but reinforcements never hurt.  Even he would admit that much.  I crossed to the twin-sized bed in my own room, grabbed the comforter and the sheet and dragged them to the floor.  I pulled the bedsheet free from the blanket, bundled it into a ball in my arms, and climbed up onto the mattress.  I stumbled once, nearly went over, regained my footing, and stood in the middle of the bed a few feet from the painting.

This was as close as I wanted to get to the creeping darkness lurking beneath that ordinary streetscape.  But if I didn't want tonight to go as badly as so many nights in this room had gone before, I knew I had to get closer.

Close enough to that darkness to smell the paint and the brimstone and the cordite.  And I thought I could do that, because I had a creeping darkness all my own.  And mine might just be strong enough to hold out whatever monstrosities prowled beneath the brushstrokes.

I felt cool jasper against my breastbone.  My heartbeat slowed in my throat.  I closed my eyes, counted to nine, then stepped forward without looking.  I reached out, the sheet spread between my hands.  I took another step, and felt suddenly certain that I would twist my ankle and tumble off the mattress.  Then I took another step and felt the wall with my outstretched hands.

I hooked the bedsheet over the corners of the intricate wood frame, my fingers brushing against the grain.  I felt the dark pulse of inexpressible creatures writhing down in that marble passage. I jerked my hands away, waited for the shadows to swallow me.  Waited to be yanked through the canvas and dragged into that dusky otherworld.

Nothing happened.  I counted out twenty seconds, and then another ten.  Just to be safe.  I heard the soft growling of a patient dæmon, felt the humid breeze of each breath as it waited for me to open my eyes.  To look into its face.  To prove my worth.  So I did.  Because if there were horrors to be faced, then I would face them.  It was all I could do.

I blew out a long breath, and opened my eyes.  All I saw was a grey sheet that billowed gently in an idle breeze.  I inhaled, and smelled nothing but laundry detergent.

I eased away from the sheet and the painting behind it, not quite ready to turn my back on it.  I reached the foot of the bed, stepped to the floor without looking.  I folded my arms, watched the sheet billow in a breeze that came from nowhere.  That painting might have been the undiscovered masterpiece of a forgotten genius waiting to be unveiled.

I had to smile at that.  Because this work would not be unveiled.  Not this night.

Then I saw my bookbag on the table under the window.

My smile fell away.

Seven months ago, I had been hunched over a desk in the Writers Club room, waiting for the first meeting of the year to begin.  Helen, Phil and Winnie had lingered near the windows that looked out over the courtyard.  Ben had sat against the wall, rushing through a worn paperback to prepare for the discussion in Mrs. Kraven's fifth period American Lit class.  I recognized the
Avalon Rising
cover
artwork in an instant: a striped kestrel in flight over an ocean, lit by the reflected light of a hunter's moon.

I had staked out a seat next to the teacher's desk, which doubled as a snack table.  I had my faded-green notebook open.  I was so focused on the phrases arranged across the tattered pages that I didn't even hear the triple chime that marked the beginning of lunch.  When the stack of neon-orange pages crashed down onto the desk in front of me, I jumped in my seat, and looked up to find Ethan.

I glanced back down at the heap of paper on top of my notebook.  A few sheets had slipped free and floated to the floor.  I asked, "What in the fresh hell is this?"

Ethan grinned.  He slipped into the desk to my left, and tapped the cover page.  He told me simply, "My story."

I nodded.  He laughed.  It had been more than a month since I had seen him.  I was mostly surprised that I was not at all surprised to learn that he had written a book in that time.  I gathered up the loose pages, saw that they were numbered, slapped them on top of the stack on my desk.

I dragged my bookbag out of the wire basket under my seat, unzipped it, and crammed the entire pile inside.

"I want your honest opinion about that," Ethan said as I stuffed the bookbag back under my desk.

"Honestly," I told him, "it weighs a fucking ton."

Dr. Lombardi cleared his throat from his desk.

Ethan grinned again.  Phil took the seat on his other side, and Helen sat next to Phil, and Winnie took the seat beside Helen, winding up next to Ben as well by accident.  Mr. Lombardi checked his watch, and announced that the meeting would begin in five minutes.

Beside Ethan, Phil asked, "How was Meadowbank?"

"Scottish," he said in that diluted brogue.  "I think I met roughly all six-hundred members of Clan Gibson, and that includes Alexander Gibson, 22nd Lord Hedgerow."

Phil grinned.  "I don't know what that means."

"It's a peerage title.  It doesn't mean anything."

Ben turned a page, and looked up.  "Was the University of Glasgow crawling with attractive and eligible lasses?"

"You wouldn't know what to do with a university girl," Helen told him.  "Let alone an attractive or eligible one."

Ben smirked.  "I'm sure I'd figure something out."

"I met with the editor of the
Guardian
," Ethan said.  "She was a lovely redhead.  And the captain of the ladies' rugby team cleaned up quite nicely."  He snapped his fingers.  "This one brunette professor at the Medical School earned extra points for being forty-six and fetching."

"Not many women can claim both," Phil said.

"Kirstie Alley," I said.  Phil pointed at me, nodded.

"Shohreh Agdashloo," Ben said from behind his book.

"Nobody but you has seen
Twenty Bucks
," Winnie said.

"You've seen
Twenty Bucks
," he told her with a smirk.

Winnie rolled her eyes.  "You
made
me.  You called it 'a wonderment at this unpredictable world and the subtle way chance guides our lives.'  You called it brilliant."

"And you believed him," Helen said, shaking her head.

"It is brilliant," Ben said, turning another page, sighing.  "Even if some fail to grasp that brilliance."

Ethan laughed, and our group was whole once more.

I had settled in at home that night seven months ago with every intention of reading Ethan's story.

His style was surrealistic and nuanced and literary and gloriously self-aware.  It was so unlike the sprawling space operas and dystopian cyberpunk I had recently discovered that I quickly lost interest.  I took a break, stowed the thick manuscript on the bottom shelf of my computer desk, and found a slice of cold pizza in the refrigerator.  I flipped on the TV, convinced myself that I would only watch until I finished eating.  Then I'd get back to Ethan's story.

I promptly got distracted by a
Mission Genesis
marathon on the SciFi Channel, the neon-orange pages forgotten.

I tried twice more to make good on my promise to give Ethan an honest opinion of his book.  Once during Winter Break, and once after our conversation on the roof.

Both times his prose left me exhausted and perplexed.  Both times I failed him.  And now he was dead.  His story was over.  His body had been flown back to Scotland and buried under a yellowed lawn in Meadowbank that overlooked the Firth of Forth.  He was gone.

And standing at the foot of a stripped twin-size bed in this notorious room at the Gateway Motel, I knew that those 716 sheets of neon-orange paper were his legacy.  His afterlife.  The part of him that had survived his death.  The part that would exist forever and change the world for as long as I managed to guard it for him.  I knew that he had entrusted the totality of his own memories to me, all those months ago.  And he had not visited me last night under the sane light of an all-night convenience store on a street corner in Prophecy Creek to bring me a message.

He had come to remind me that I had been carrying the message with me all along.