What just happened? What the fuck had just happened?
The strange man was gone. Eaten. Entirely absorbed into my person. His crumpled clothes lay on the floor like he’d been raptured.
I braced myself, waiting for the memories to hit me like a tidal wave.
My heart was banging on my ribs so loudly it felt like my father banging on my door at night, losing his temper when I was being too loud as a kid.
Was that a memory of mine? Or his?
I didn’t know.
But I didn’t lose sense of where I was and there was no overwhelming deluge of strange scenes and emotions. That was almost worse. More signs that something was going horribly wrong and I had no idea what.
The man had said he was made by Chase. A trap specifically for me. A bomb? A poison? What was the play? Distance myself to protect the others? Or was sticking close better to make sure they would notice if anything was strange about me?
That thought brought my awareness crashing back into reality.
Everyone was looking at me with worry clear on their faces and it wasn’t out of concern for my well-being. Hands rested on weapons. Postures had changed, waiting, ready to spring into action if I attacked.
Indignation welled up in my throat.
Why are you looking at me like that? I didn’t want this.
Kay took a step towards me, but then hesitated. That was a gut punch more than anything.
“Marrow,” Conrad said loudly. The corner of his mouth twitched as he continued, “Why did you do that?”
“I-” the words caught roughly in my throat. “It wasn’t on purpose. I couldn’t stop.”
“Any evidence to support that claim?”
I looked down at my feet. “No.”
He stared at me for a long moment, before turning to Wilson. The traitorous H.E.S.P. operative had been restrained with zip ties on his wrists and ankles and there was another soldier kneeling on his back to stop him from moving. His eyes were unfocused and there was spit hanging from his lip.
“Operative Wilson, you will be charged with treason and attempted murder,” Conrad said plainly. “I will see to it that you are imprisoned for the rest of your life. You won’t see whatever rewards you were offered for betraying your country and comrades. Was it worth it?”
Wilson said nothing. He didn’t even look up at Conrad.
“All those years of service, thrown away like they meant nothing. Any regrets? If there is an ounce of humanity left in you, perhaps you will tell us what Organ has in store for us, to keep us safe as we did for you all this time?”
Wilson blinked and his mouth widened into a gaping smile. “The only regret I have is not killing all of them.”
Some of the soldiers turned their heads away at those words, like they couldn’t bear to look at him any longer.
Conrad didn’t flinch. “I see. And your wife? Isn’t she important to you? You would give up your life with her for some ridiculous conspiracy?”
“Yes. She’ll understand. At the end, when all the falsehoods of this world are torn away, she’ll understand.”
Conrad curled his lip in disgust.
“Hey,” Kay said softly, taking another step towards me. I couldn’t look her in the eyes. “Are you okay to touch?”
“I don’t know,” I said, barely a whisper. “Best be safe.”
A butterfly stung the back of my hand as it landed. I turned it over and the butterfly alighted on my palm instead. It opened and closed its wings, like the slow blink of an eye. I didn’t mind the pain.
“We can’t be safe right now,” Kay said. “So don’t fret. We’ll see this through like we always do.”
I nodded.
“Marrow,” Conrad said.
I steeled myself and looked up.
It didn’t work.
I saw the man with cuts all over his face. His neck was hanging over Conrad’s shoulder, bent over it, like he had broken it and draped it across. Despite Conrad’s height, the man was taller. Then he was gone and I was left with the image of his knowing grin imprinted on the shadows.
“I’m choosing to let that indiscretion sit for now. But there will be a full investigation into who that person you just killed was. If it is found that they were an innocent, you will reckon for it. Do you understand?”
I stared at the faces of the soldiers. Was it just me or were they even more revolted by me than a moment ago? Had I lost every bit of trust I had earned over my time at H.E.S.P.?
“Marrow, do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said weakly.
Conrad turned to the others. “Let’s move. Leave Wilson, we can’t afford to have him with us. When we get back in contact with Command we can get someone to collect him.”
The group sprung into motion with urgency. No one wanted to remain here with their former comrade. I let the group go first and one soldier very pointedly waited for me to walk ahead of them. I nodded and obliged.
“You’ll succeed where I failed,” Wilson called out after us. “I have faith.”
He kept talking like there was someone else in the room besides us.
Without him, six soldiers were left, along with Isipho, Capiz, Conrad, and Kay. Socorro had a nasty foot wound so we really only had five combatants. And what if there were more traitors among them? Suddenly having someone at my back didn’t feel as safe. Their watchful presence felt like a pressure on the back of my head.
Capiz wouldn’t even look at me, raising her shoulders as she quickly walked past.
The theatre had been a dead end, so we moved back the way we had come, through the room with the grand piano and back into the hallways that stretched towards the west wing, where we had entered the manor originally.
Retracing our steps was reassuring. The manor wasn’t shifting around us and there were no signs of disturbances in the rooms since we’d last seen them. Perhaps Organ had truly placed its strongest resistance outside of the manor, hoping that the cut-off communications and the planted traitors would be enough to finish the job.
“We can’t be sure, but there’s no sense worrying about it.”
I glanced down at my radio. The buzz was a comforting sound after being in silence for so long.
“Nick, you can hear us, can’t you?”
I raised the radio to my mouth and pressed the talk button, “Yeah, I can hear you.”
A few of the soldiers glanced back and I felt a chill at the hostility that lingered in their eyes.
Kay slowed down and walked next to me. “Nick, what’s going on?”
I showed her. “The radio just came back on.”
A concerned look crossed her face.
“Are you having second thoughts?”
I didn’t recognize the voice coming from the radio but it felt like a sign that things were getting better outside. So why didn’t Kay look relieved?
A numbing cold ran through my fingers as I looked down at the radio. The buzz didn’t sound like it was coming from the radio anymore. A chorus of whispers, blending together into a white noise of hidden intentions now echoed around me.
“Make sure your last breath is a good one.”
“You didn’t hear that?” I asked, suddenly terribly aware of what I had just sounded like. Please say you did.
Kay didn’t say anything, but her mouth pressed into a tight line as she searched my expression. I pressed the radio into her hand and sped up, heading for Isipho.
The spectres of my stolen memories were back and I hadn’t realized until now.
“No one’s in here but you.”
The voices had migrated to the walls, muted and distorted, they called to me from hidden places.
“Is your heart in the right place?”
Each time they spoke, it was like a string running straight through my head had been plucked, sending that buzzing sensation into my whole skull.
“Wouldn’t it be better if you lay down and-”
“Isipho,” I said, a little louder than I should have. He turned to me and his eyes seemed like water viewed under a microscope, full of microorganisms swimming about, undulating and quivering.
“Can you examine me?” I asked, keeping pace with him in the hallway.
“I already did,” he said quietly. He looked spent. Each step dragged along the carpet like he was only a short walk away from home after an exhausting shift. “There’s nothing in you that I can see is out of place.”
“A parasite? Or some anomaly in my head?” I pleaded.
There had to be an explanation. Some prognosis that would give me a way forward.
He just shook his head. Then I saw something in the background beyond him.
A dark room. Inside, the broken neck man stood in the darkness, the whites of his teeth staining the black, smiling in reverse.
I pushed Isipho out of the way and plunged into the room. But in that split second, the figure had vanished again. The whispers mocked me. They didn’t sound like my spectres anymore.
“Better run.”
“Have you thought about what your children would think?”
“We make up narratives about our past to help make sense of our fucked up lives.”
Distorted. Inhuman. Like the teeth, the tongue, the throat, and the soul were all in the wrong places each time they spoke.
I stared at the bed, wondering what it would feel like to lay down in it and simply wait for something to happen. Would the spectres come out of the walls to reclaim their stolen flesh from me, to build new bodies for themselves?
“Nick.”
I turned to Kay. The empty space where her arm used to be seemed to bend her body as she stood in the doorway.
“Whatever is going on, don’t do it alone. You can talk to me. You can commune with Nell. Pick one.”
And risk my madness infecting her? It could put her in danger.
I came out of the room, keeping my head down so I didn’t have to face the distrustful stares of those that had stopped to wait for me.
We started to move again.
I cleared my throat and set my focus on a single butterfly, floating along in front of me.
“I’m… just going to talk,” I said. “I don’t know about what.”
“Sure.”
The voices claimed the space between every sentence, so I spoke quickly, letting myself ramble, “Some days I feel like I’m viewing life from behind a pane of glass. Like I can see myself making decisions and I just think, well I had no other choice, it makes sense, given the kind of person I’ve become.
“In those moments, I look back on my past, on each previous action I’ve taken and it appears as this long chain of inevitable moments. And I want to scream. I want to bang on the glass that separates me from that person who is me. I want them to make any decision other than the one that they do. But I can’t change it. ‘Cause it already happened and I don’t get a say. I can only writhe in the discomfort or sit in it. It makes no difference. Why would anyone say to accept who you are when I didn’t have any other path? It’s a movie written for me that I can’t look away from.”
I paused and took a shuddering breath, then found that I didn’t have anything left to say.
“Damn.”
My eyes flicked up to her face, then down again, not wanting to spot the broken neck man again.
“Not going to try to reassure me?”
Her warm fingers found mine and I flinched, trying to pull away. She anchored her grip firmly, not letting go.
“Hey. It’s okay. See? Nothing bad happened.”
I stopped struggling and when I looked up, her face was inches away from mine. No space for the anything else to sneak in.
“If there was a way for me to reach through that glass and pull you into the real world, I would,” she said. “No one should have to feel like that.”
The warmth of her palm against mine muffled the voices, just a little.
“Do you feel any better?”
“A little,” I murmured.
“I feel like I know now why you wanted to smash that window at the stripper’s club.”
I gave a half-hearted exhale of amusement.
“We all get bad thoughts sometimes. You aren’t going to hurt anybody by sharing them. You aren’t going to feel free unless you do. All these connections you’ve built? With me, and Nell, and all of your friends. They’re the bridges that will bring your body back to you.”
“How can you be sure?” I whispered.
“Experience. Intuition. Hope.”
We passed through the room with the grand staircase.
I looked up at the second floor and saw it again.
Hair draped over the balcony. The neck seemed longer, more distorted, with the flanges of its spine pressing against the skin like the outline of an anaconda’s meal showing through its belly. The eyes were too small for the sockets and full of blackish veins, its dilated pupils threatening to encompass the entire orbs.
I recognized that look.
Kay’s hand didn’t keep away the tremors, but it did soften them as I squeezed her tightly.
Everyone else moved on without acknowledging it. But I took my time, not wanting to blink and give it a chance to disappear.
There was an Aberrant living in my head now, poisoning my thoughts, turning the ghosts into something more monstrous. I needed a cure before that look was reflected in my own eyes.