Clearer in the Night (2 page)

The door smacked shut behind me. I glanced back; he hadn’t followed me. For this one, crazy second, I’d wondered if he might. But it was quiet out here, no…whatever was happening inside my head. Out here, it had stopped.

The alleyway was full of trash and piss and God knew what else, but I couldn’t stand. My whole body shook and shuddered. Wetness was squeezing out of my eyes and down my cheeks, and I scrubbed at them, hard, telling myself that I wasn’t crying. That these weren’t tears. This was so wrong. I felt broken and exhausted and so heavy, not purified and lightened like I had when I was dancing just minutes before. I wanted to curl up in a ball, my head on my knees, and cry. I wanted to go home to my mother and crawl into her bed and have her stroke my hair like she had when I was a child.

I stood up, ready to go back. I’d brave the bathroom to clean up, and then tell Shannon that it was time to head home. Only, the club door didn’t have a handle on this side. Nice, Cait, very smooth. I glanced both ways down the alley; one way ended in trash bags, the other lead out onto the street. I headed toward the street. I’d pout at the bouncer to get him to let me back in without waiting through the line again; if that didn’t pan out, I’d text Shan that we were bailing, and to grab my clutch on the way out. I walked back to the street and turned towards the club entrance, and ran straight into a cacophony of sound. I clapped my hands over my ears; I might have screamed. The noise didn’t lessen. It wasn’t just music, or noise, or anything else. Voices. A hundred voices, all talking over each other, until it seemed my head was going to burst. I stumbled backwards; people were staring at me, but I turned anyway. I had to get away. I stopped short of running. In my heels, I’d kill myself.

I was blocks away before I slowed down. The noise had settled down, but it hadn’t gone away entirely. Every time I got close to a building, it got louder; as I paced away, it dulled down to a mild roar. It was like listening to ocean waves—only, it felt like my brain was rolling in and out, instead of just the tides.

I tried to turn my feet around, convince myself to go back to the club and find Shan, who was going to have fits soon, if she wasn’t having them already. I should at least text her, let her know what had happened. Where I was, even, so she could come and pick me up. We could go home, and wash the make-up off our faces and the product out of our hair, and eat ice cream in our pajama pants and pretend that everything was fine, that nothing had happened, that I wasn’t spiraling out of control faster than I could catch myself. That I hadn’t planned to give her the slip tonight, to find a way out from under her watchful eye, so that…well. It was clear, wasn’t it? My feet kept moving forward, and I didn’t pull my cell phone out to call her.

I could pretend that I didn’t want to tell her about the wall of sound that had driven me away from the crowd. That would be the easiest. It had been getting worse for a while now. I’d always been one of those people—I knew just the right thing to say, or knew a secret that had never been told, or heard someone say a thing they’d only been thinking—but it had been dismissible. Ignorable. The hallucinations—they had to be hallucinations, people didn’t talk without moving their mouths, that wasn’t how things happened—were getting worse. If I told her, all she’d say would be that I should see my doctor. But what were they going to tell me, that I was losing my mind? That I had a tumor? Or even better, this was some long-delayed grief disorder because of what had happened to Dad and Sophie? No thank you. I’d pass. Because, if nothing else, Mom still needed me. I wasn’t exactly daughter of the year, but I was literally all she had left. I couldn’t just disappear.

My phone and my ID were tucked in my bra. My clutch didn’t have anything in it but lipstick and an emergency $20 for a cab. Shan would grab it, or she wouldn’t. I’d walk home. I’d tell her that I hooked up with some guy, but it went sour, and I’d needed to walk it off. She’d be pissed, but she’d let it go, eventually. It was about a two hour walk, if I followed the streets, but I’d cut half an hour off if I walked up to the high school, then cut through the woods. There were trails back there, and I’d walked them a thousand times before. Not at night, granted, but it would be quiet. Peaceful. That sounded like heaven right about now. And maybe, just maybe, I’d walk in and never come out.

I kicked off my heels, hooking my fingers into the ankle straps, and padded on. Walking on the sidewalk barefoot was probably not the best decision ever, but I was just as likely to cut myself open and get tetanus as I was to twist my ankle in these ridiculous shoes. I’d manage. I always did.

TUESDAY, JULY 23

It slipped past midnight while I walked. I was tired sooner than I’d thought; I’d been into track in high school, but that had ended a long time ago. The steady pace of walking for miles was different than the give and take of dancing, even on a night where I barely left the dance floor. My feet ached, my ankles ached, my hips ached. I thought, more than once, of calling Shannon, but it would be harder to explain why I hadn’t already called with every step I took. So I kept walking, step after step.

I counted my footsteps to keep my mind from wandering. It was a kind of meditation, and I’d learned it when I was running. The magic of running was that you couldn’t worry about the next mile, the next yard, even the next stride. It forced you to be present, even when the present was tired lungs and exhausted muscles, and miles to go before you could sleep. There was a kind of peace in focusing on the now. Trouble being, carrying that sort of peace into the rest of the world, where there were bills to pay and mothers drinking themselves to death, was close to impossible.

It was about thirty minutes on foot from downtown to the high school. From there, I’d slip into the trails that threaded through the woods that lay at the heart of Meredith Falls; the rest of the town had built up around the trees, somehow deciding to protect them rather than destroy them. Instead of circling through the more industrial parts of town—the train station, the strip malls, the office complexes—I would come out in the residential area, with about half an hour left before I got to the apartment Shan and I shared. The trail I was going to take would basically take me through my mother’s back yard, and for one crazy second, I thought about stopping. Walking in, waking her up, and telling the truth, for the first time in a decade. Seeing what happened next.

My father and my sister were always with me, always a single thought away, and now they were surrounding me, filling my heart so full that I thought it might burst. My sister, laughing and teasing. My mom and dad, shouting in the living room, the last time I heard his voice. Ghosts with teeth, they swirled around me, and I tried not to swat at them. It wouldn’t chase them away any more than it would bother gnats.

The school was completely dark, the windows reflecting the light of the full moon, and nothing else. It made the building look like a many-eyed lizard, squatting in the field, ready to bite. I hurried on. I fought the urge to run. I didn’t look behind me. I was imagining things in the darkness, things with teeth, and if I didn’t stop, I really would be crazy at the end of it all.

It wasn’t too late. I could walk back to the main road and call a cab. It’d take them a while to get here, even on a Monday night, but I wouldn’t be stuck out here in the dark, by myself.

But what was the point, really? Nothing would have changed. Nothing would be different. Whatever was broken in my brain would still be broken. I kept walking. My legs were jittery with exhaustion, twitchy and tired. I wanted to just sit down, just stop, but my feet kept plodding on, too dumb to give up and rest. I followed them. I was attached to them after all. Ha, I killed myself.

I heard something. Everything froze.

The something was something bigger than the world, and I heard it with my actual ears, not with the broken corner of my brain. I couldn’t describe it, even to myself; it touched the part of my mind that had existed before words. I turned towards it. My eyes struggled to take in what I saw in front of me. They gave me snippets of information, but refused to bring the whole picture to my mind at once. I saw teeth, long and sharp like razors. Feet—paws—as big as cakes. A furred face the size of my chest. Flat, blue eyes, locked onto mine. There was a sound in my throat, like an engine trying to turn over when the starter’s busted, and my trembling legs were a heartbeat away from dropping my ass into the grass. I was a yard or two from the tree line, but what good was running going to do me? Was I really going to try and outrun a wolf the size of a pony?

That’s it, my brain decided. We’re done now. Checking out, see you on the flip side, dark side of the moon incoming.

And then the monster, the huge wolf, snarled, and my feet were smarter than my brain. They took off running without waiting to see if the rest of me was going to follow. My hands were empty—my spike heels gone—and I stumbled a couple times, falling and catching myself on my hands before I found my stride. The wolf was right behind me as I hit the tree line and shot up the path. Wolves could outrun humans, easily, so why was I still moving? Didn’t matter, keep moving, keep running, and maybe you’ll get away.

It herded me. I knew it, even while it was happening. When I exploded into a clearing I’d never seen before, with an idyllic little pond, and no breaks in the tree line other than the one I’d just come through, I knew I’d been neatly corralled. I tried to turn, to head back down the path before the monster caught me, but that was a joke. It had already filled up the world. My feet tangled underneath me, and I crashed down. My hands clawed into the ground, trying to drag myself away, but the soil was packed harder than stone, and I gained no purchase.

I squeezed my eyes tight, breathed in silence, and then flipped over. It was a hallucination. It had started in the club, started with sounds. Now I was seeing things. I was dreaming this, or I was crazy, or there was a gigantic tumor in my brain showing me this nightmare, but it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.

I opened my eyes, and stared straight into blue eyes that didn’t care if I lived or died. Teeth closed on my throat, and someone far away started to scream. Not me. I stared up into the moonlight and thought to myself, this is a good place to die.

THURSDAY, JULY 25

Pain. Burning pain. Everything hurt. Thinking hurt. Shouldn’t do that. Just float. The rest would pass. Soon.

My name on the wind, hard to ignore. Sound in the chaos, the susurrus of voices that were crushing my mind. I shook my head, and lights exploded behind my eyes. I had eyes. Why have eyes, if they were only going to hurt?

“Cait,” I heard sometimes, and sometimes “Caitlyn.” Those weren’t my names, even though I answered to them. Explaining that would require moving, and moving made everything go white hot and then shockingly gray. No. I’d lay still and float, until I disappeared or died.

And that was an interesting thought. Why wasn’t I dead, as a matter of fact? The monster had killed me. It had mangled my belly, torn open my throat, raked its claws over the tender flesh of my chest. I’d watched it happen, shock dulling the agony, but still somehow conscious as I screamed and it chewed. I’d watched myself gush blood until the leaves turned black, and my skin turned as white as fine china. I wasn’t alive. It was all a hallucination—there was a lot of that going around lately. I let it float away in a purple soap bubble of quiet.

The voices came and went, near and far. I listened to them, letting my name fall into nonsense syllables, and I drifted on the wind. Some of them I heard with my ears, and some with my brain, but they were all far away and difficult to pick out from the wind and the rot and the everything other than me. And then, right in my ear, a deafening whisper. “Caitie.”

My eyes flashed open. The sunlight bored into me, and I flinched away, my arms flying up to try and protect my face. My shoulders and back screamed in pain as blood flooded back into my limbs, my body dissolving into pins and needles. I felt my throat open and a scream tried to come forward, but my mouth was so dry that all that came out was a dull squeak. I was on my side, panting, as the pain twisted me up and hung me out to dry. There was one tiny part of my brain not consumed by sensation; that minuscule corner informed me that no one had called me Caitie since my sister died. Mom had always hated the nickname anyway; she said she’d named my sister and I Sophia and Caitlyn because she didn’t want a matched set. But we’d liked it. We’d like matching.

My sister. She was kneeling over me, her blue eyes narrow and concerned, and her lower lip between her teeth. “Caitie,” she said again. “You have to wake up now, okay?”

I tried to say something, and got nothing but dead air. I swallowed twice, then tried again. “Hi, Sophie,” I said. My voice was gravelly and weak. “What are you doing here? Am I dead? Are you here to take me to the next big thing?”

The ghost of my sister slapped me as best as she could while I was lying down. I yelped, and my hand flew up to my cheek before I thought. I winced in anticipation of agony, but none came. I moved my arm a couple of times, experimentally. It wasn’t comfortable, not by any stretch of the imagination, but the searing agony of just a few moments ago was gone.