7 Souls (15 page)

“No,” Dylan whispered, grabbing her ankle as she tried to move past him. “No, don’t—don’t go …”

“I have to,” she told him. “I
have
to.”

T
HE TAXICAB SPED EAST
along Central Park South, lurching painfully to a halt at each red light that burned through the windshield like a demon’s eye and then speeding forward as the light changed. Mary had told the driver to
hurry
, to move as fast as he could—that it was life and death—and he had taken her seriously, racing down Broadway at nearly sixty miles an hour. Mary curled up on the torn vinyl of the backseat, staring at the passing buildings and overlit closed stores and random, middle-of-the-night passersby. The rain had stopped. The streets were shining beneath the streetlights, soaked in rain that reminded her of the blood pool beneath Dylan’s shaking, trembling body.

The ambulance still hadn’t arrived when Mary grabbed three twenties out of Mom’s top dresser drawer (not the first time she’d done this) and galloped down the stairs and out of the building, screaming for a taxi. She’d tried to call Ellen back, but hadn’t gotten through—she’d heard the beginning of Ellen’s impossibly chipper outgoing voice-mail message four or five times, like a communiqué from another world, one without guns and ropes and screams and blood and death.

“You wanted the Peninsula, right?” the driver called out. “The Fifth Avenue entrance? I have to circle around.”

“Fine,” Mary responded hopelessly.
Just get me there—get me to Ellen, because she’s the only one left
.

Who was she kidding? There was no way to avoid the real story of the day, was there? It was a chain of disaster … a chain that started and ended with her, the one and only birthday girl, Mary Shayne.

Amy was gone, missing; vanished after she’d selflessly agreed to drive Mary out of the city on her ill-fated, desperate attempt to save Joon.

Joon was gone.
Because that
couldn’t
have been her, outside Dylan’s window
, Mary had to conclude.
I was dreaming—I was seeing things. It’s the only explanation that makes sense
.

Especially since I fainted just a few minutes later
.

So Joon had taken that wrong turn that every New York girl dreads taking. She’d left with the wrong guy, and he’d taken her on a one-way trip to the dark side.

Dylan, asking her out; getting punk’d along with her; taking it like a man, then showing up out of the blue and trying to save her; rescuing her like an action hero in the movies and taking a bullet in the chest for his trouble.

Amy, Joon, Dylan … all gone. And it’s all my fault, isn’t it?

“Peninsula Hotel,” the driver announced, slowing the cab as it approached the gigantic limestone columns of the hotel’s vast, ornate facade, which was lit up like an inferno with blinding yellow floodlights.

Mary tossed two twenties at the driver and slammed the taxicab door. She stared up at the looming hotel, the cold night wind blasting through Dylan’s sweater and freezing her arms and chest.

I’m in hell
, Mary thought, pushing her way through the thick brass-framed doors and crossing the carpeted lobby, heading for the elevators. I
might as well be dead, because I’m already in hell—I’ve been in hell since I woke up today
.

The concierge recognized her, as always, tipping his cap and waving her by. The elevator doors slid shut and the chimes bonged as the elevator rose, and Mary remembered the last time she’d ridden this elevator upward, with Dylan beside her—Dylan, who’d volunteered to come with her to get her stuff from Patrick’s suite, who’d shown up out of nowhere to help her, who was now dying on her bare wooden floor.

All for me
, she thought miserably as her ears popped and the elevator arrived and the doors slid open.
Everyone, all of them—all loving me, helping me, doing everything they can for me, all through the seventeen years of my life
.

And what had she ever done for them?

For a second time that night, Mary wished she was dead. It was a calm, measured feeling, and she welcomed it like you’d welcome getting kicked out of a class you were failing, or getting ejected from the big game—the way she’d seen happen with her jock friends—when you weren’t playing well, when you were jeopardizing the team.

W
ALKING DOWN THE CORRIDOR
toward Patrick’s suite, Mary sensed that something was wrong. There weren’t any party noises—although, she realized, she hadn’t heard any sounds behind Ellen’s voice, either. It was late; the guests had probably scattered to find ragers somewhere else.

But that wasn’t it.

The door to Patrick’s suite was half open—and inside, everything was dark.

Mary put her fingers on the glossy surface of the door and pushed. The suite was pitch black and deserted. The only light came from the wide picture window—the blazing golden fire of Fifth Avenue, shining through the glass like a dream city.

The room was trashed. Broken champagne bottles, splintered furniture, discarded cups and plates, cigarette butts and overturned ashtrays littered the floor. The room stank of alcohol and tobacco and pot smoke.

Mary gasped in shock, raising her hands to her mouth. A word was spray-painted on the wall, its huge, jagged black letters spreading across the silk wallpaper.

GOODBYE

It took all of Mary’s courage to step into the hotel suite—to keep herself from running blindly in the other direction.

“Hello …?” she called out. Her voice echoed in the empty room. “Ellen …?”

Nothing.

Mary’s eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, and she saw something familiar on the ruined carpet in the center of the room.

Ellen’s cell phone. Open and upside down, resting on the carpet. Its tiny screen was glowing.

“Ellen?” she called out again, starting to cry. Still nothing.

And then Mary realized that she could see something else. A thin band of light, along the floor, off to the far right—along the bottom of Patrick’s bedroom door.

Someone’s in there
.

A strange sensation was coursing over her—a feeling she couldn’t name—and she realized that she wasn’t frightened anymore. Not really. The feeling was like a cold, calm certainty, a sense of inevitability.

I’m not going to run. I’m going to go through that door
.

Apparently, her feet had already decided. She was crossing the trash-strewn carpet.

She pushed the door open.

Patrick’s bedroom was empty. The bed had been stripped; all of Patrick’s belongings were gone. No Ellen, no Patrick.

The last two
, Mary thought, still swimming in the unfamiliar sensation of certainty, the strange deliberate calm that washed through her and made all the fear drain away. She had reached her limit; she simply couldn’t run anymore, couldn’t be afraid anymore.
Now the last two are gone
.

The ceiling spotlights were on. The wide, deep room—where she’d spent so many lazy weekend mornings devouring eggs Benedict that Patrick had gotten her from room service or lying back on the soft bed as Patrick leaned to kiss her—was empty, bare, deserted.

In the center of the bed, on top of the bare mattress, lay a polished wooden box. Mary walked toward it, her feet moving with the same strange, calm feeling of inevitability.

She watched her feet cross the soft carpet; she watched her hands reach for the box and pull it forward, the expensive wood scratching the mattress as she slid it close and opened the lid.

The inside of the box was lined in bright red velvet. A single square sheet of thick yellow paper lay just under the lid. When she picked that up, she saw what was underneath—the spotlights gleamed on the smooth metal like summer sunlight caressing a car’s chrome.

A gun.

A beautifully polished handgun.

Mary watched her hand pull the gun from the box, her wrist straining at the surprising heft, the sheer weight of the weapon. She watched her other hand extract the paper and unfold it.

And she recognized it. The giant man in her vision had held out a gleaming square of paper—and now she had it, in real life. It was the same piece of paper; she was sure of it. An unrecognizable symbol was drawn in red ink at the top of the page—a stylized, asymmetrical line drawing of an almond-shaped eye. Staring at the eye, Mary felt a strange sensation, almost like she was dreaming or sleepwalking.

It’s just a drawing; it’s not moving
, she told herself dazedly, but she found that hard to believe as she stared at the red ink. The eye looked like it was moving—or, rather, it
felt
like it was moving, if that was possible; like it was staring back at her, returning her gaze, filling her with a strange, otherworldly calm. There was writing on the page below the eye—three lines of handwritten block text in the same clean red ink—and Mary tore her gaze away from the mesmerizing, calming gaze of the almond-shaped eye and read the words that had been scrawled below.

WHOM DO YOU HATE THE MOST?
WHAT WOULD YOU DO ABOUT IT IF YOU COULD?
TODAY IS THE DAY
.

Mary read the lines over and over, absolutely fascinated. It seemed to her in that moment that she’d never read anything in her life that made as much sense as these three lines. Finally, after all her troubles, after everything that had happened since she’d awakened, here was an answer. Finally, she knew what to do.

A blast of ear-splittingly loud music filled the air right then; somehow, it didn’t surprise her as snarling fuzz guitar blasted from the room’s hidden speakers—the ones she and Patrick had always been politely asked to lower by the hotel staff when Patrick was smoking his glass bong and turning up the Nickelback. The words seemed to fill her vision, expanding like commandments on a stone tablet, removing all responsibility, taking away all the pain, the need to think and react, the need to do anything but obey. The strange calm spread over her as she lifted the gun—
SMITH & WESSON
, she read the words engraved on its thick barrel—and pulled back the slide, just like she’d seen in the movies so many times.

GOODBYE
, the jagged writing on the wall had said; Mary felt tears tickling her cheeks as she turned the gun around, staring down its barrel like it was a tunnel to oblivion. All she had to do was pull the trigger and it would all be over—the pain and blood and fear and death and tears and agony would be over.

The deafening music was still blasting.

Mary’s fingers trembled as she raised the gun to her head.

Goodbye
, she thought.

She couldn’t do it.

She couldn’t make herself pull the trigger.
Come on
, she thought desperately, the heavy gun trembling in her hand. But somehow, she thought of Ellen right then—the pain in Ellen’s voice when she’d told her Dylan was shot. Ellen mourning Dylan; Ellen and Mary and their mother mourning their father.

No
.

Mary cried out as she forced her arm to drop, forced her fingers to open. The gun thumped to the carpet at her feet.
I can’t do it
, she thought wildly as the tears flowed freely down her face.

She stood there staring at the empty box on the bare mattress and the note in her hand, when a tremendous blow knocked into her from behind.

Mary gasped in pain as she was driven forward onto the bed, her face pressed against the mattress. Somebody had tackled her and was now lying on top of her, a heavy weight that she couldn’t possibly escape. She felt cold metal pressed against the back of her head and she knew what it was; she had something like one second—the final second of her life—to feel and recognize the pressure of the gun barrel against the back of her skull before a blinding explosion filled the world with silent light and she was dead.

II
7 SOULS

1
SCOTT

I
N THE BEGINNING THERE
was darkness. Mary was alone, at peace, at rest—all those things they said about you right before they put you in the ground.
Finally at peace
. The thought didn’t seem to bring her any grief, or rage, or any feeling at all. She felt nothing, and it was good. The pain throughout her body was gone. The blinding spotlights and the deafening music before the bullet shattered her skull were all gone; everything was gone.

Whatever had happened to her, it had come fast and hard, like the storm that had drenched the city. She had not been ready for its full force, she realized: the rain had fallen, wild and powerful, and there was no getting out of its way. The darkness had shrouded her all day; she had seen it outside the windows, in the gray sky above the city—the rain had lashed down, spattering across her as she lay planted in the cold ground at the empty house, like a girl half-buried by a grave digger, already half dead. Her friends had vanished. She had tried to run, but the storm raged and the bullets came, first for Dylan and then for her—they paid the ultimate price, as those
Daily News
crime stories always put it. The victim paid the ultimate price—and here she was, paying it.

Because I’m dead
.

The strange calmness that followed the realization—the way it was no more shocking than
I have a cold
or
I’m late for school
—convinced her.
I can’t feel anything
, she confirmed to herself, and it didn’t make her afraid.
I can’t feel anything because I’m dead
.

But she did feel something: she felt regret. Regret that she had failed to escape whoever had it in for her; regret that she was too slow, too stupid, and now it was too late to do anything about it. Regret that she would never see any of them again, never be able to explain.

And she felt something else.
Physically
, she felt something—which was impossible, an illusion. But, concentrating, she was sure of it: a sensation was penetrating the void, barely there but growing, like the drone of an approaching plane. Something was pressed against her back. There was no getting around it. She wanted to move; she had to move.

I’m sleeping
, Mary thought dazedly.
I’m dreaming. I’m waking up
.

That had to be it. I
dreamed all that. I had a nightmare, a paranoid nightmare
.

And why not? An
anxiety dream
—waking up naked with a skull-pounding headache, and a scornful crowd pointing and laughing. Isn’t that the standard paranoid fantasy? A slow ride into panic, where everybody’s trying to get you, trying to kill you; you try to run but you can’t move, you can’t get away. And then you wake up.

And it was all a dream.

Right?

Isn’t that it? Isn’t that what happens next?
Mary realized she could hear her own breathing. She’d been ignoring it, pretending it wasn’t there. But she was breathing fast; not exactly panting in terror but not exactly calm, either. I
hear my breathing, because I’m alive. It’s later and my headache’s gone and I’m waking up alone
.

I’m alive
.

That made sense, didn’t it?

“Wake up.”

She heard a female voice, youthful and distorted, blasted with static as if coming in on a radio station. Mary’s eyes snapped open. Her heart was pounding. The voice was
right there
, just inches from her head. Her eyes were watering and she reached to wipe at them with hands that felt sluggish and swollen; her fingers felt oddly thickened as they bumped against her eyelids and the bridge of her nose.
Am I bruised?
she wondered dazedly.
Did my face swell up?

It seemed as though her ears were ringing from the gunshot to the back of her head. But no. There was no ringing at all.
No gunshots
, she told herself.
No rainstorm, no endless, baffling chase that turns into Death Race 2010 before you’re blown to kingdom come
. Just silence, and the low hum, which sounded like it was coming from a fan—an ordinary electric fan.

She could move, she realized. The numbness was slipping away, like the rough bedsheets that slid from her body as she flinched and sat up, squinting against the blinding, blazing white sunlight that bathed her face.

“Wake up.”

The same robotic voice.
Alarm clock
, Mary realized. Her heart was still thwacking in her ears like a snare drum as she tried to wipe her eyes clear with fingers that were too short and fat.
That’s an alarm clock, a novelty alarm clock that talks
.

Taking her hands from her face, Mary could see the alarm clock with the robot voice right next to her. It was a porcelain statue of a slender, buxom young woman holding a sword. The woman wore a colorful costume and a mask that tied around her long blond hair. The base of the statue was a block of stone that had a digital clock face set into it; the bright burgundy numbers said 7:01
A.M.

It was difficult to see anything else; the light was too bright. And her body was
heavy
and bloated. She had to strain to lift her own weight, just to sit up. The effort made her head feel light, and when she moved her shoulders and brought her thick new hands to her face she instantly realized her hair was gone.

Someone cut off my hair
. All the familiar touches of her hair—the flicking of the smooth ends against her shoulders, the softer waves that always cascaded down over her eyebrows and cheekbones until she swept them back—were gone. Somebody had taken a razor, a big electric clipper, and cut all of it off during the night.

Oh, Jesus, someone cut off my hair—

She could still hear the fan—
a computer fan
, she realized, looking around as her eyes continued to clear. The room she was in—a cluttered, wide bedroom with a bright triangle of sunlight spearing across its walls—had a big desk, covered in stacks of books and disks and boxes, and a pair of computers, their fans humming, with glowing neon lights, orange and green.

Where the hell am I?

A loud noise drew Mary’s gaze to the far wall, and the door in the shadows, back beyond the dim outlines of other furniture she couldn’t quite see.

Someone’s outside the door
. Footsteps were definitely approaching; Mary could clearly hear the repeated thump and squeak of rubber-soled shoes advancing.

“Scottie?”

A female voice, getting closer. Middle-aged, friendly. And
familiar
—Mary wasn’t sure why, but she was absolutely convinced that she’d heard it before.

“Scottie? Are you up?”

Mary noticed a sweet, candied aroma.
Industrial blueberries
, she thought: the kind of mass-produced processed food Joon always scorned (while scarfing down one of her macrobiotic box lunches). Those rubber-soled footsteps kept getting louder; it sounded like a basketball player was approaching across a newly waxed court.

Mary looked around wildly, like a cornered animal, trying to find a way out. She blinked but couldn’t quite clear her eyes; everything in the distance, beyond the bed, was hard to see clearly. There was a bathroom—with a hexagonal grid of gleaming white tiles stretching off into the blurry blackness beyond—but nothing else. Mary was trapped and the bedroom door was opening—she’d forgotten that door completely, because now she was looking full-on into the mirror on the wall that showed Scott Sanders, soft cheeks reddened by the sheets, short hair askew, brown eyes squinting in the glare of the morning light. Even out of focus, there was no question about it: Scott Sanders was staring back at her with a shocked, comical expression.

“Scottie! Wake up, sleepyhead!” The voice was huge, deafening as the door swung open and the woman with the loud sneakers was there, framed in the doorway.
That’s Mrs. Sanders
, Mary realized dazedly; she recognized her voice.

But Mary couldn’t tear her eyes from the mirror. She was still staring at Scott’s reflection, matching him blink for blink.

“Scottie?” Mrs. Sanders repeated. “Are you feeling all right? I thought you hit the sack early.”

“Wh-what?” Mary croaked. She tried not to jump as her voice rang out, reverberating inside her skull exactly as if it were her own, but it was
Scott’s voice
, a teenage-male tenor that buzzed and vibrated in her throat—Scott’s throat—as she spoke. “What—” she tried again.

“Feeling all right?” Scott’s mother repeated. She came forward, recognizable to Mary from years and years of school plays and home games and parent-teacher days. For Mary, the strangest part was seeing her
in her sweats
. “I asked if you were—Scottie, sweetie, what’s wrong? I’ve brought you breakfast.”

The blueberry smell was overpowering, wondrous. Mary could feel her mouth watering as she fixed her eyes on the plate moving toward her, and she realized that the weakness and dizziness she felt was hunger.
Scott’s mother wakes him up with Pop-Tarts
, Mary realized. She wasn’t sure why, in the middle of the hallucination, the dream, the delusion, whatever it was, she found herself thinking about that, about Scott’s mother.
She brings him breakfast and asks if he’s feeling all right
. But she was fascinated, because it was so utterly strange.

“Go ahead,” Mrs. Sanders urged. Mary reached out with Scott’s pale, soft arm and took a Pop-Tart. Her eyes were beginning to water along with her mouth. She was
hungry;
she was taking a bite before she even realized it, her teeth squeezing through the hot pastry as if she’d never eaten anything before.

“Take the plate,” Mrs. Sanders scolded, mock sternly. “I’m not standing here waiting on you.”

Mary was chewing and swallowing. She bit the side of her mouth and winced; even her
teeth
felt strange, irregular and misaligned, and she had to chew carefully not to bite her own—Scott’s—tongue. Pop-Tart crumbs flew from her mouth and hit Mrs. Sanders, bouncing off her sweatpants. Mary reached to take the plate, the Pop-Tarts on it rattling and sliding. The sensation of tasting the food was incredible; she was barely done swallowing each bite before she wanted more.

“Look at my hungry little man,” Mrs. Sanders murmured as Mary finished the Pop-Tart—it had taken her three bites. She was so close that Mary could smell her scent and identify it—Clinique’s Happy—before she turned away. “Come on, champ—better get moving. It’s five past. And don’t you have a test today?” She was walking away, legs hissing beneath blue terry cloth, shoes squeaking on the polished floor. “That means
no gaming
—and be sure to leave time for a shower.”

I want to wake up
, Mary thought as the door slammed, feeling a sugar rush kicking in. I
want to wake up now; I’ve had enough of this dream
. She was breathing heavily again, out of fear; she could see Scott’s chest rising and falling beneath his yellow Grand Theft Auto T-shirt—she could barely read the blurred logo, backward, in the mirror.

A phone rang, suddenly. It was so loud that Mary flinched and nearly dropped the plate. The jangling, piercing chime—a cell-phone ringtone—was coming from Scott’s cluttered desk. Rising off the bed, Mary came to her feet, holding on to a bedpost as she weaved, unable to support herself and almost losing her balance. The ringtone was still blaring and Mary actually recognized the song it was playing: “Femme Fatale.” She stumbled to the desk, the plate clanking loudly as she dropped it there, the Pop-Tarts sliding onto a graph-paper notebook. Mary felt a cold wave pass over her when she saw Scott’s blue LG phone—the one that always looked so grimy—with its amber light blinking and its bright screen displaying the incoming caller ID:

SHAYNE, MARY

It was all so real—that was the thing about it—not like a dream at all. The phone’s display (four bars; full battery), the seven digital numerals of the world’s most familiar phone number … every detail was perfectly realistic, even through the maddening blur that she suddenly understood, staring down at the desk.

Glasses—Scott’s glasses!

There they were, on the desk beside the phone: Scott’s familiar, gold-framed antique glasses. As Mary fumbled them onto her face, the surrounding room snapped into exquisitely sharp focus. Looking in the mirror was unsettling; now she could see the red veins in Scott’s eyes and the millions of tiny white hairs on his smooth skin. A few yellowed, sticky grains of sleep were gummed to his eyelashes, and his lips were slightly chapped.

She reached down and touched the cool plastic of the phone, feeling its vibration along her arm as she picked it up, flipped it open and brought it up to her ear. Her thumb brushed against her—Scott’s—hair as she pressed the green Talk button.

“Hel—hello?” She jumped again at the sensation of hearing Scott’s voice coming from her own throat.

“Scott!”

A young female voice, garbled and distorted by the cell phone’s tiny speaker. “Can you hear me?”

“Wh-what—?” she heard herself responding—again, in Scott’s familiar tenor.

“It’s Mary. You there, Scott? I need your help.”

“Mary—wait,
what?”

That’s me
, she thought.
That’s me. Oh my God
.

“You’re
Mary,” she managed to rasp out. “What the—What day is it?”

“It’s
Friday,”
her own voice blared in her ear through the erratic connection.
“Friday
, Scott, the day of the
physics test
—the big killer test. We were supposed to meet last night to power-cram, remember?”

“Physics test.” There was something familiar about those words—something she couldn’t put her finger on.

I said that
, Mary suddenly remembered.
That’s me, this morning. I called Scott at seven, from the taxicab—on the way home from Crate and Barrel
.