Twisted (24 page)

80

Wake up, Christopher. Can you wake up?

I have to wake up. Someone is telling me I have to wake up.

I blink a few times, then look down at myself. Lying in bed, I examine the Posey Net that covers my entire body. Arms, neck, and legs pulled through the openings. Ankles and wrists secured with loop straps. I’m sweating, trembling with fear.

Footsteps move toward me, and I lurch back against the bed, hands clenching the guardrails, biceps flexing, breaths speeding. My restraints clatter; perspiration slides from sodden bangs down the bridge of my nose.

I raise my head, and the first thing I see are those evil eyes coming at me.

What the . . . Didn’t I just . . . ?

My vision wanders.

His room. What the hell am I doing in his room?

Donny Ray now stands a few feet away.

“Why am I being restrained?” I shout at him.

“You’ve been deemed a danger to yourself and others,” he explains.

I release an angry howl and violently try to jerk myself free; the bed rattles, squeaks, and shimmies. Recognizing my efforts as futile, I let out a tiny, helpless moan.

“It’s okay,” he tells me, keeping his body still and voice level. “Nobody’s here to cause you any harm.”

A low and inarticulate sound escapes through my chattering teeth.

He waits in silence and watches me. A few moments later, my breaths slow and my jaw relaxes, but I turn away to refuse him eye contact. Hearing him move closer, I react instantly, shooting my terrified gaze directly at him, but now Donny Ray is the one who seems startled, staring into my eyes with what can only be recognition mixed with curious confusion. He examines my other features.

I keep hopscotching through time, don’t understand how I landed here, but one thing is absolutely certain. The man who’s been turning my world into an empty shell has now drawn me to the heart of the whirlpool, the epicenter of evil. The man who keeps broadening his web and pulling me deeper into it. I have no idea what he’s doing, but there’s not a doubt in my mind that Donny Ray has taken over complete control of this hospital. That there is only one way out of Loveland, and he’s holding the key.

“You have to take me out of here!” I blurt, voice fraught with desperation, eyes begging.

“I need you to try and calm down,” he says. “Do you think you can do that for me?”

A slow nod. A vulnerable expression.

A phone rings from somewhere off to the side. I jerk back. He raises a hand of assurance.

I settle.

Still mindful of my overall appearance, Donny Ray says, “I need to ask you a few questions.”

I’m fearful but compliant.

“Do you know where we are?”

“We’re at Loveland.”

“Do you understand why we’re here?”

“Please!” I shout. “Help me!”

“We’re going to find the truth. Whether that helps you or not remains to be seen. Are you able to tell me your name?”

“But you already know all this! What does it have to do with—”

“I need your name,” he says, this time as a firm mandate.

“Yeah . . .” I surrender. “Okay. It’s Christopher Kellan.”

“What’s your date of birth?”

“June twenty-ninth, nineteen seventy-six.”

“Can you tell me where you were born?”

“Johnson City! Why are you doing this to me?”

Donny Ray circles back to the original question I failed to answer. “Do you understand why we’re here?”

I look down at my bound hands, look up at him and feel my expression change—something like nervous confusion diluted by distress. “I think . . . I mean . . . I just don’t know anymore! As many times as I’ve turned things around in my head, I can’t make sense of them. And then I keep forgetting things, and everything around me doesn’t fit, and that just makes it worse . . .”

“
Forgetting things,”
Donny Ray repeats.

I close my eyes for a moment, then open them. “Like I don’t know where I’ve been for a while.”

He leans in closer.

Tears start as I shake my head.
“I’m not afraid of you . . . I’m not . . . ,” I tell him, but it feels more like an attempt to convince myself.

“You have nothing
but
fear, Christopher. Fear has taken you over, and because you keep hiding from it, you keep losing things, and you’re going to continue losing them.”

“What in God’s name are you telling me?”

“What in God’s name are you hiding from?”

“I’m not hiding!”

“Fear is the most powerful emotion we can feel, right?”

I don’t answer.

“It’s wired into us. It’s primitive. It’s instinctual.” He rubs his wrist. “Do you have fear, Christopher?”

“Why does any of this—?”

“DO YOU HAVE FEAR, CHRISTOPHER!” His voice is sharp, no longer posing a question.

“We all do.”

“No.” Donny Ray sweeps a finger across his wrist, faster now. “I’m not talking about everyday fear. I’m talking about the primal kind. The kind of fear that scrapes at your bones. The kind that sends your mind screaming. Your fear is what brought us together. You know that.”

The hairs on my arms start to rise. I’m quaking.

“And your heart will break, Christopher.” His eyes are a blaze of blue boreal fury. His voice climbs in pitch, the tone getting smoother, the speech pattern transmuting into one I recognize.

“Who . . . Who the hell are you?”

“You’ll have to accept that loss,” he says in the voice of my son.

I examine his eyes, his face, still no more certain now about their familiarity than I was from day one.

“Who are you?”
I ask again, barely able to get past the quiver in my throat.

“You know who I am,” Donny Ray says, returning to his normal voice.

“Why? Why are you taking my son away from me?”

“To break your walls.”

“I . . . I don’t understand . . .”

“It’s my job, Christopher. It’s what I do, and it’s what you need. This is how it’s done.”

“How what’s done?”

“How you make someone see what they refuse to. You take away the things they love most. You make it all disappear. That’s how we find the truth.”

“By stripping away everything in this world that matters to me?”

“By stripping away everything in this world that you
believe
in. Now we can start rebuilding. Just you and me, partner, brick by brick.”

“Get me out of here! Let me go!”

“Are you finally ready to make that choice?”

“What choice?” I say, but it comes out more as a plea.

“If I take you out of Loveland, are you ready to face what’s on the other side of these walls?”

“Yes,” I say without hesitation. “Please! Take me out of here!”

81

I see feet moving, but in my disconnected fog it takes a few seconds to realize they’re my own.

Where am I?

It’s like I’m walking through a void. Everything around me is oppressively still and silent. Even the air has an unfamiliar, motionless quality.

Is this real?

As my vision clears, ahead of me I see the Loveland parking lot. The only car left is mine, a little boat floating on a sea of blacktop. I turn toward the building, and more sedentary absence looks back at me. Nobody in the surrounding area, nobody coming in or out through the main entrance. I raise my vision toward the upper floors and find more vacuity: every curtain pulled open, every window like a black hole punched into rust-stained concrete.

Not a human anywhere. Everyone . . . gone.

Disappeared.

“Now it’s just you and me
.
”

I look to my right. Donny Ray is beside me, and I realize we’ve just walked out of Loveland together. He keeps his gaze aimed ahead. Like he’s leading me someplace.

But where?

“Now we can get to work,” he says with a single, affirming nod. “It’s time, Christopher.”

“You’re not taking Devon from me!”

“It has to happen,” he says gently, reassuringly. “You know it does.”

“Why are you destroying my life?”

“I’m helping you
see
your life. The destruction you feel is a result, not a cause.”

“I won’t let you wreck my world!”

He stops walking. “Christopher, wake up. Can you wake up? The world as you once knew it has slipped away and lost its shape. But this is actually progress. It won’t be long now.”

“Long for what?”

“Your truth is waiting.”

The glass shatters.

The white light goes off.

82

I’m parked under the Evil Tree.

This goddamned tree, this bastard that keeps pulling me back. I look up at the hideous beast, hovering so tall and proud, so arrogant, shielding what little light there is, casting me deeper into darkness.

A strong wind picks up, and the Evil Tree vigorously rattles its branches, shaking pollen over me like black rain.

Anger boils. Hatred reaches fever pitch. Outrage turns viral. I squeeze the wheel, chew my bottom lip, and hear a snarl deep inside my chest.

“YOU’RE THE REASON FOR ALL THIS! YOU’VE RUINED MY LIFE! YOU HEAR ME? YOU’VE MOTHERFUCKING RUINED IT!”

Tears stream down my face, and I erupt into hysterical laughter, so instantaneous that it startles me; then just as unexpectedly, that laughter turns into heaving sobs. Several seconds later a new emotion emerges, so powerful that it sends my body into a racking tremor.

Unadulterated fear.

You’ve got to get out of here.

“I’ve got to get out of here.”

Go! Go!

I start the engine, hit the gas pedal, and my car flies into reverse, but the exact moment my tires hit pavement is the exact moment a raging storm swoops down, unleashing a wrath like I’ve never before seen. Wrath that, with each passing second, gathers furious intensity.

An angry clap of thunder explodes that could shatter bone. On its heels, a volcanic flash of lightning fractures the sky and sets it afire. Night turns to day, and ahead in the distance, my enemy again reveals itself. The tree speaks directly to me as if all along it’s been waiting for this precise moment to deliver the message, one that couldn’t be clearer.

This is where it all started, and this is where it all will end.

More wind, more rain, more thunder, then another pop of lightning falls over the tree, and I catch something at the base of its trunk, but through the shielding rain, can’t tell what it is. I fling open the car door, leap out, and take off running, eyes focused on the one spot, wind belligerently shoving me forward.

And then I see him, and then my heart breaks into a thousand pieces. A sob escapes my lips, but a sharp gasp sucks it back in. “NO! NO, NO, NO . . . NOOOOOO!”

I fight my way through a thick wall of rain, feet stumbling into an unsteady zigzag.

I reach my son, my Devon, muddy and rain-soaked, lying across the trunk’s base like a tossed-aside rag doll. I collapse beside him, reach around his cold and lifeless body. As I lift him up, he arches away from me, head falling back, arms hanging loosely at his sides.

“NO, BABY, PLEASE!” I press his face against mine and rock him. “PLEASE! NO!”

But I know that there is nothing left of my son. That my world has collapsed around me, and that the only thing that held it together is now gone.

I lower him to the ground. I study his sweet, wonderful face.

“My baby boy . . . ,” I say, body shaking with the kind of grief that, before now, I never knew was humanly possible. I lean down, press my lips against his cold forehead, and a feeble whimper escapes me.

It’s that sleep of death, Christopher.

At last, the meaning is revealed, because I know that this world is worth nothing without my son in it.

I don’t belong here anymore.

I aim my gaze skyward. Rain mercilessly falls over me, battering my face and beating away the tears, but it’s nothing compared to the immeasurable torture my mind is only beginning to comprehend.

“I’m going with you,” I say through a defeated whisper.

I gather Devon up in my arms and carry him to the car.

With tenderness and care, I lay his body across the seat, then take one last look at my broken and beautiful son.

Tonight, I just want to save you.

But I couldn’t save him.

It was just an accident, Daddy.

This one won’t be.

I get behind the wheel, gun the engine, slam the car into reverse.

At fifty feet back, anger replaces pain, disgust overpowers regret, because I know that standing before me is the reason why my life has been so irreparably destroyed. My foot lands on the gas pedal. I hit the gearshift, hit the accelerator, and the car responds instantly, firing me forward at vicious momentum.

“C’MON, YOU BASTARD!” I shout with tears streaming down my face. “BRING IT ON! GIVE ME EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT!”

Just as we’re about to collide, a flash of light goes off between us.

And the last thing I hear is shattering glass.

83

The light fades, and I realize I’m . . .

What?

I’m back on the road again, driving the same path as before, rain pounding my windshield, wind sweeping up. I turn my head to the right and see that Devon is . . .

Alive?

Jake barks.

What’s happening?

Jake barks again, this time with more insistence. I look over my shoulder at him.

Devon yells, “Daddy! Watch out!”

Plonk.

Something
hits the windshield. I whip around and catch the rubber ball on a trajectory toward the road. But before it has a chance to meet ground, the boy in the red hoodie appears from out of nowhere and goes chasing after it.

The ball bounces on the asphalt, bounces again, then lands and begins to roll. The boy dashes after it, putting himself directly into my path.

I slam on the brakes. The car swerves. Devon cries out. Jake yelps.

We miss the boy.

But the car wheels into a monstrous spin, then careens off the road. A muddy skid propels us even faster, and now we’re headed straight for the Evil Tree.

Headlight beams mix with rain and obscure my vision. We are about to hit the tree when an explosion of white light blinds me.

I wake up seconds later, rub my eyes.

Wait. Seconds? Or is it weeks? Months?

I don’t know. I don’t know . . . Oh, God, I don’t know.

Everything is tilted.

I look out my side window, see the tree a few feet away, and realize we narrowly escaped the collision by landing in a ditch.

My son lets out a whispery moan.

“Devon!”

His eyes are half open, his shirt quickly darkening with blood that runs from the gash across his neck. So much blood.

Jake lets out a frightened howl from the backseat.

I reach for an old T-shirt, a roll of tape from the glove compartment. I wrap both around Devon’s neck, hoping to stem the flow of blood.

But it’s too much blood, coming out way too fast. I scramble for my cell, try dialing out, but the signal keeps dropping. I crank down the window, extend my phone outside. The effort proves useless.

“Daddy, I’m scared,” Devon says, voice so frail that I can barely hear it.

I crank the ignition key, slam the gearshift, punch the pedal. My car thrusts forward and the tires whine as we move out of the ditch and back toward the road.

But halfway up, it becomes clear we won’t make it. There’s not enough traction in the mud. And there is still no cell signal.

The wind howls, the rain picks up, and I’m so scared of losing my son.

“Daddy . . . please . . . help me . . . ” His eyes are almost half closed, body swaying weakly, swaying sickly, the blood now pooling in his lap.

I slide the car to a stop, then turn the steering wheel hard, jamming the tires sideways into the turf in an effort to anchor us. Then I sling the door open and race for the road. Jake gives a sharp bark and jumps out of the door behind me, then trots in my path as I run.

Four agonizing breaths later, bars appear on my phone. I dial.

“911. What is your emergency?”

“My son—” I can barely get my sentence out, the most important I’ve ever had to speak.

I hear a strident groan coming from behind me, then the crackling of dirt as tires grind against asphalt. I reel around.

The car is sliding downhill.

And through the windshield I glimpse Devon, head dropped back, body joggling loosely to every crack and bump in the road.

“No! NOOOO!”

I chase after the car, feet pounding pavement, but I’m no match for the gravity that pulls my son downhill. Still, I keep running as the car picks up speed. Tiny stones pop beneath the tires like spiteful messengers of tragedy. Jake lets out a mournful moan. I can’t hear Devon, but through the glass I see his mouth saying,
Daddy.
And though I keep running as fast as I can, I’m too slow to reach the car before it slams sideways into the tree.

“DEVON! NOOOOO!”
I crumple
to the pavement. My body collapses onto itself.

The white light goes off, this time as if exploding through my veins.

In a flash, I’m standing motionless and numb, mind dazed, as medics pry open the car door. They pull my son’s body out and lay him across the base of the tree.

Again, the light explodes
.

Jenna and I are rigid with misery in a hospital hallway, speaking to a doctor. His mouth is moving, but the message comes out so slow, so thick and muddled, that I can’t understand it.

Until I do.

I let out an agonizing wail. Jenna collapses into tears.

And as I watch this event play out, the sudden yet inexplicable realization that I’ve experienced my son’s death twice—first at Donny Ray’s hands, and then at my own—destroys me.

Trying to offer comfort, the doctor reaches for my shoulder. I grab the pen from his lab coat pocket, then jab it into my wrist. And I keep jabbing. A river of red pours out of me and crawls along the floor. A river of pain, of regret . . . of loss.

And I feel my heart slow, my whole existence fragment. There is no sound, there is no light. There is unequivocally . . .

Nothing.

Nothingness that tumbles into an abyss, a deep, black, penetrating hole, as everything around me disintegrates into complete, encompassing darkness.

I disappear.

I am gone.