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Authors: Nelou Keramati

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BOOK: The Fray Theory: Resonance
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Chapter 9
Solace

Dylan finds himself inside
an empty room. Inside a concrete cube with no door and no windows.
He has no idea how he’s come to be here, but l
ooking
down, he realizes he is strapped to a metal chair bolted to the ground.

He struggles to free himself, but instead his restraints
become even tighter, trapping the blood his heart is pumping into his hands.

It feels like the space is getting smaller. As
if the walls are closing in on him, inch by inch.

With a loud and echoing blast, a spotlight is cast
onto him. It’s so bright that it bleaches whatever surface it touches.

And suddenly it starts to glide down Dylan’s
body, draping over his knees and sliding down his shins. It slips off the tip
of his shoes and begins a slow crawl towards the center of the confinement.

Panic rattles Dylan’s bones. The spotlight’s
crawl seems purposeful. But for the life of him, Dylan can’t imagine what it
intends to reveal.

Suddenly, the bright disc starts to deform,
crawling onto what seem to be a child’s shoes.

It creeps up the legs and torso, and when it reaches the collar,
Dylan gapes at the dark hair resting on the child’s shoulders.

With a blaring bang the spotlight is snuffed, and all that
remains is an echo, swelling up within the darkness.

Dylan quivers in place.

Not once has he encountered the Reaper in the form of a
child. So, what could this mean?

What’s going to happen?

The borders of the room reappear as soft light fills the
space from no apparent source.

The boy has vanished. And there seem to be no instruments of
torture lying around.

Has the cycle been broken?

Is today the exception to the rule?

His hope is extinguished when he notices a dark and veiny
pattern forming on the ground, like the growing branches of a dead tree. And he
jolts as he realizes what he’s witnessing is a crimson liquid oozing from the cracks
in the concrete floor.

It spills onto the surface, its borders quickly coalescing. Within
seconds, the entire floor is submerged beneath a thick veil of red—in the blink
of an eye, Dylan’s feet are swallowed by what looks, smells, and feels like
blood.

He exerts his full capacity, trying to break free, but his
bindings tighten in retaliation. His hands are turning blue, and the only thing
he feels in his legs is the warmth of the deluge slowly drowning him.

It’s already up to his knees. It’s as though time is skipping
forward in larger and larger increments.

Dylan stares helplessly as the red threshold swallows his lap.
It glides up his torso until it has engulfed his shoulders.

And then, it slows down along Dylan’s neck like an unwanted
caress, warm and invasive.

As though savoring the kill, it fills the space around
Dylan’s throat, curves along his jaw, and creeps up to his gaping mouth.

It lingers at the brim of Dylan’s lower lip, taunting him
with false hope. And then, like a merciless wave, it dives into Dylan’s throat
and fills his lungs with pain.

 

Gasping for air, Dylan
soars into consciousness in his bed. He clasps his hand onto his throat,
heaving wet coughs, but the wretched sensation of drowning refuses abandon.

He feels like such a fool
for thinking—even if for the briefest moment—that he would ever see an end to his
suffering.

He can’t do it anymore. This
burden is too heavy for him to keep carrying on his own.

He pulls his phone from
his pocket and sits up in his bed. It’s desperate, and probably futile, but
what has he got to lose at his point?

He clears his dry, aching
throat, and dials Alex.

Pick up
.
Just pick up and

It goes straight to
voicemail, reminding Dylan yet again of how things may never be the same.

“Hey, Alex… Um—I’m sure
you’re really busy. And it’s been forever,” he exhales, wishing he’d rehearsed
what he was going to say. “Do you think that maybe we could… catch up?”

Catch up
? He cringes.
Just cut the shit
.

“Alex, they’ve gotten
worse. Way worse. I’m—”

 

Drowning
.

 

With nothing else left to
say, he ends the call. This was it. He just played his final hand. If after
hearing this message Alex still doesn’t care to get back to him—like when he
screened Dylan’s call at UBC—then it really is over.

Suddenly, like a tidal
wave of warmth, a peculiar feeling washes over him.

He slides off his bed and
heads out into the living space, stopping a few feet shy of the front door with
his eyes glued to the buzzer.

σ

Neve waits
behind a regal pair of bronze doors—the twin gates to the antique elevator of
Dylan’s heritage apartment complex.

She barely remembers the drive
back from Elliot’s celebration of life, or how much she fed the parking meter. She
just can’t believe she’s here, when only a week ago the mere thought of it was stranger
than fiction.

The lift comes to lurching stop,
its sinewy gates sliding open. It’s a welcoming gesture, and yet Neve feels
like she’s being lured into a cage. ‘A birdcage lift’ she remembers Dylan
calling it.

How fitting.

She steps in and pushes onto the
topmost button for Dylan’s floor. The instant the doors begin to slide shut, an
onslaught of anxiety twists her core, and she knows there is no going back. She
peers down at the lobby through the gaps in the lift’s ornate skeleton. And
then—one by one—the floors are sliding down across her vision, bringing her
closer to him.

This was a horrible idea.

What was she thinking, dropping by
like this? She should make up some excuse and take off—just ride the lift back
down and text Dylan an apology.

But the lift is already coming to
a stop.

What the hell is she going to text
him? ‘Something came up’? What if he asks to reschedule? What if—

And she catches a glimpse of Dylan
in the hallway as the lift’s doors slide open.

At the sight of him, years of
suppressed emotions swell up inside, threatening to spill from her eyes.

“Neve,” his brows crease as he
steps forward.

“No—” Neve backs away, pressing
the button for the lobby. “No, no, no,” she keeps pressing it, but the damn
doors won’t slide shut.

And then, she bursts into tears.

“Babe—” he steps into the lift.

“No, don’t you
dare
CALL ME
THAT!” she shoves him back.

Dylan staggers out of the confines
of the lift, his expression a blend of shock and hurt.

And instead of taking the ride
back down, Neve steps out into the hallway and shoves him again, and again,
until he is backed up against the wall.

With tears streaming down her
burning cheeks, “I loved you,” she barely manages to get out, “and you just
left… You
left
,” she heaves, “
he
left,” her anguish bending her
at the waist, “everybody leaves…”

Dylan reaches out, but Neve swats
his hand away. He goes to pull her into an embrace, but she pushes him away.
And then her efforts are too feeble, and he is wrapped around her, warm and
strong.

“I’m so mad at you,” she sobs into
his chest. Her arms are folded, and her fists are too weak to pound onto him.
“I am
so
mad at you,” she cries, her throat tight and throbbing.

“I’m sorry,” Dylan buries his face
in her neck. “I’m sorry, Neve. I’m sorry,” he repeats over and over, his voice
tainted with guilt and regret. And even when Neve’s knees give out from under
her, his hold keeps her from falling to the floor. So she surrenders to the
compulsion, and cries over what feels like a lifetime of heartbreak, longing,
and loneliness.

“Come on,” Dylan whispers while
gently stroking her hair. “Let’s go inside,” he starts to shift, and like a
crutch she needs to keep her from crumbling, Neve lets him lead the way into
his apartment.

Once within the confines of his
home, Neve pries herself away, adamant to hold her ground.

“Can I get you something?” he
asks.

“Don’t do that,” Neve looks at
him, fury encasing her pain. “Don’t go acting like everything is okay. It’s
not
okay.
You don’t get to walk back into my life
and act like nothing’s happened.”

Dylan’s shoulders slacken, the
sorrow in his eyes draining Neve of her intensity. And once again, she’s feeling
vulnerable and defeated. The same goddamn feeling she’s been struggling to
suppress all day.

“They all just stared at me like,
‘who’s
this
bitch’? ‘Why is
she
here’?” Neve shakes her head and
diverts her gaze. “Just because they didn’t know me, it was like I didn’t have
the right to be upset over
their
loss. Like what I was feeling wasn’t
qualified.”

“People grieve in different ways,”
Dylan says.

“They were
judging
me,
Dylan. It was almost like they were blaming me.”

“For what?” concern twists his
brows.

“I don’t know. Not being a good
enough friend? Or maybe they thought I was his psychotic ex-girlfriend. That
I
drove him to it.”

Dylan squints, visibly perplexed
by what she just said. And in that moment, Neve realizes she never explained in
her text to Dylan
how
Elliot died... only that he did.

“He killed himself,” she
practically whispers.

 

And silence swallows the room.

 

Dylan breaks eye-contact and slips
his hands into his pockets—what he does when he feels defeated.

“God—I’m sorry,” he shakes his
head. “I thought it was an accident, or something.”

“Oh, it was anything but,” Neve
walks over to the window and leans against it, gazing out at the urban
congestion—at the view she never thought she’d see again, at least not outside
of her memories.

“I don’t know… Maybe they’re right,”
she mutters as Dylan approaches her from behind. “Maybe it
was
my
fault.”

“Don’t say that,” Dylan rests his
hand on her back. “I know blaming yourself may seem comforting, but it’s just a
way for you to feel like you’re in control.”

“I knew…” she says, oblivious to
Dylan’s attempts at consoling her. “I
knew
… I
must
have.”

“Knew what?” Dylan sits down on the
windowsill, looking up at her.

“I had a dream about it. About his
death.”

“Neve. Hindsight is twenty-twenty.
You look back and feel like the answers were right there in front of you, and
start blaming yourself for not doing things differently. But you can’t think
like that. You need to make peace with things that are out of your control.”

“What if it was?” Neve whispers as
though telling him an ugly secret. “What if it
was
in my control?”

“How do you mean?”

“It wasn’t just some random dream.
When the cop explained—” Neve’s heart skips a beat, “Jesus, it was like he was
describing my own dream to me.”

Dylan’s gaze darts between Neve’s
eyes as though searching for something. Does he think she’s lost it? That she’s
crumbled under the stress of it all?

“People don’t have control over
their dreams,” he finally speaks. “I
wish
they did, but—”

“Do you remember the nightmare I
told you about a few days before you took off?”

He squints. “The one with the red
river?”

Neve nods. “I was standing on an
old, stony bridge all by myself. And the water running below was this deep,
deep
red. And it felt like everyone in the world was dead, and their blood was
tainting the waters.”

“Right,” he nods. “What about it?”

“A few days later—after you were
already gone—I read about a group of Czech artists that had poured gallons of paint
in the river to protest animal rights. Everyone thought it was such a brilliant
idea,” Neve drops her head. “And
I
was fucking terrified.”

Dylan’s eyes lose focus, and then his
sinking gaze is zigzagging through the air.

“I told you,” Neve diverts her focus
back out onto the horizon. “It was my fault.”

“No,” Dylan shakes his head and rises.
“It wasn’t.”

“It
was
, Dylan,” she
insists. “I
lied
. I didn’t want to get locked up in a psych ward, so I
told everyone the dreams were all made up!”

She heaves an exasperated sigh and
rubs her face. But the tightness of the dry trail of tears remains.

“Maybe I should have just let them
lock me up. Maybe if they’d done experiments on me they could have figured out
what the hell is wrong with me,” she continues in spite of Dylan shaking his
head. “I could have helped them. I could have helped prevent horrible shit like
this from happening, and Elli—”

BOOK: The Fray Theory: Resonance
2.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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