The Widening Gyre Read online

  The Mustang—a classic Brittany Blue ’68 Fastback—belonged to Rakel Anders, also a senior at East. Blonde, long-legged, blue eyed—a real “neck snapper,” as his dad would say. She worked the cosmetics counter, naturally, and spoke to only those coworkers whom she deemed worthy of her attentions. Zach wasn’t one of them. Neither was Randy, for that matter.

  “Good morning, Zach,” Cora said as she opened the door.

  “Morning, Ms. H.”

  She locked the door behind him, as they were still fifteen minutes from opening. “Rakel’s working cosmetics, Randy has the camera counter, and you’ve got the front register. Follow me to the office and I’ll get you your cash drawer.”

  Rakel briefly looked up as Zach and Cora passed the cosmetics counter. “Morning, Rakel,” Zach said. She ignored him, as usual. Zach got his cash drawer from the office, made sure it had the standard forty dollars from the safe, and made his way to the front register.

  “Hey, Zach,” Randy York said, looking like he’d barely made it out of bed in time for work. “My head is killing me.”

  “Long night, huh?” Zach asked.

  “Dude, more like a long morning. There was a party at Kurt Mason’s house last night and we all got hammered. I hope this place is quiet today.”

  “Not a chance,” Zach said. “It’s Sunday. There’s a big ad in the paper. Look.” Zach pointed out the door to the parking lot. “People are already lining up.”

  Cora turned on the remaining overhead lights and rounded the corner, store keys in hand. “You guys ready?” she asked.

  “Yep, ready to go,” Zach answered. Randy moaned.

  As soon as Cora unlocked the front door, a mob of bargain shoppers sprang from their cars and stampeded for the entrance. It was, after all, the Christmas shopping season. The store was packed, and Zach was busy enough that his workday passed quickly.

  After counting out his cash drawer with Cora, Zach waited by the front door with Randy. Rakel had already left for the night, as the cosmetics counter shut down an hour early on Sundays.

  “Man, my head didn’t quit pounding until about an hour ago,” Randy said.

  “Are you gonna do it again next Saturday?”

  “Nope, don’t have to wait that long! Jason Van Pelt’s parents are out of town this week and he’s having a kegger right off the bat. You wanna come?”

  Zach hesitated.

  “Come on,” Randy said, shoving Zach’s shoulder. “You’ve got to let loose once in a while.”

  Zach usually came up with some sort of excuse, as he wasn’t comfortable around people he didn’t know. Apart from Rakel, who ignored him out of principle, Cora and Randy treated Zach like they would any other person. They didn’t know what he’d done to himself, and they never would if he could help it. The only visible evidence were the scars on his wrists, and he kept them hidden under long sleeves. It had taken a few months, but he was comfortable around Randy and Cora. New people, especially a house full of them, made him nervous.

  Zach opened his mouth, but instead of making another excuse, he said, “Sure, sounds like fun. What time?” The doctors had said he needed to face his fears. Maybe stepping outside of his comfort zone would help him overcome the reemergence of his dream. Maybe he could stop it by himself, this time.

  “Great,” Randy said. “I’m gonna show up at seven, if I can get out of the house.”

  Cora started to unlock the door.

  Zach was startled. He hadn’t heard her coming.

  It happened in a flash.

  Zach wheeled toward her. It was time to kill.

  He grabbed her shoulder, turned her body, one hand covering her mouth. He swiftly brought the blade up with his free hand, placed the edge below the left ear, then cut deep, cut fast, carving a yawning furrow across the neck. Blood sprayed from severed carotid arteries, and a torrent of hot blood spilled from the mouth and through his fingers.

  He released the body, stood back, and watched as it slowly turned around.

  Not Cora. A man, in a uniform.

  Zach felt as if he were somewhere else; the air was gritty, blistering hot, and the smell of scorched sand filled his nostrils. A momentary flash of another place.

  And then it was over.

  Cora stood before him, a confused look on her face.

  Zach looked at his hands. There was no blood. No knife, either.

  “Dude, are you okay?” Randy asked.

  Zach’s mind raced, and he reached for the counter to steady himself. Nothing like this had ever happened before. He tried to speak, but his throat was clenched tight. He was breathing way too hard, and felt like he might pass out.

  Cora reached for him, then pulled her hand back. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m—I’m fine,” Zach croaked, finally finding his voice.

  Randy was smiling and trying hard not to laugh. “Jesus, Zach, I’ve never seen anyone jump like that!”

  *

  Zach opened his car door, started the engine, and turned up the defroster full blast to clear the fog from the windshield. He sat alone for the next few minutes, shivering, waiting for the windshield to clear and the inside to warm up.

  “First the dreams, and now this,” he whispered. It was a horrid thing he’d done—no, imagined—and he was thankful he hadn’t actually grabbed Cora, whipped her around, and acted out the motions of slitting her throat. Randy said he’d gasped, then waved his arms around, but nothing else. Thank God.

  As he drove home, Zach couldn’t get one thing out of his mind. Even though he’d imagined it all, it was as if slitting someone’s throat were something he’d done before. More than once.

  It’d been so easy.

  Too easy.

  Zach’s scars itched again. He pulled back the left sleeve of his coat to scratch his wrist, and the memories came flooding back. He remembered the razor blade. He remembered his parents’ terrified, mournful screams. Inside, Zach felt himself slide ever so slightly back into the chasm he’d worked so hard to climb out of, back into the dark place. His grasp on reality was slipping.

  The chasm below him—inside him—beckoned softly.

  *

  Cora waited inside the store until she saw Zach drive off. She was shivering, but not because of the cold night air that had crept inside the store when she’d let the boys out. When she startled Zach and he turned to face her, his eyes looked different, just briefly, but it was almost like another person was staring at her. She couldn’t explain it, but she felt as if those eyes had wanted to see her dead.

  5

  Peyton Sayre’s parents were at it again. Even though her door was closed, and her room was on the upper floor, her parents’ muffled shouts from downstairs rumbled through her room like distant thunder.

  Some nights, the storm in her home would blow over quickly, leaving a deathly silence in its wake. Other nights, the storm would build slowly and last for hours until the crash of breaking glass, or the sound of a hand slapping a face would bring crying, slurred apologies, and false promises to be broken the next night. For Peyton, the storms in her world never ended with a rainbow. As soon as one storm passed, there was always another building on the horizon. An endless cycle of heartache and pain. It had been this way for years.

  Peyton was seventeen years old, struggling through her senior year at East High School. Hers was not the life of the characters she’d grown up watching on television, where everyone was smiling, happy, and loving. Hers was a life torn from the script of a bad made-for-TV movie: an alcoholic father and a depressed mother, both seeking solace from a fifth of Scotch, or a bottle of pills hidden in the back of the medicine cabinet.

  The storm downstairs grew louder. Familiar, hateful sounds. She hugged her pillow tighter.

  Peyton often looked at the pictures taken when she was a little girl, which she kept in a small box in her bottom dresser drawer. There were smiles then, before her father had been hurt and lost his job. Before they had to move to a smaller hou
se. Before the phone would ring and ring, unanswered, her parents staring at it with a look of hopelessness on their drawn, exhausted faces. A different world, before her parents had turned their anger toward each other. And eventually, toward her.

  Peyton would turn eighteen right before she graduated. Once she was of legal age, she could escape the situation she was in and start down her own road. She knew in her heart that life didn’t have to be this way.

  A dull thud reverberated through her bedroom as her father shoved her mother against the downstairs wall. The sound of crying. There were no false apologies this time. Heavy, unsteady footsteps pounded up the stairs toward her room. Peyton knew what was coming. There would be cursing. A drunken stench. Probably a belt. Or maybe just a fist. She began to shake.

  The footsteps stopped at her door.

  Please, let it be over quick.

  A hand on the doorknob.

  A pause.

  The footsteps continued down the hall to her parents’ bedroom. The sound of a door slamming.

  Not this time.

  The storm had passed, for tonight. Tomorrow, it would build again. A tear ran down Peyton’s cheek. Sleep came later, and Peyton dreamed of being little again. She dreamed of storms.

  And of other things.

  6

  When Zach returned home, his parents were already asleep. He was still shaken by what happened at work, and if his parents saw him now they would know something was wrong. He crept upstairs to his room, undressed, and crawled into bed.

  Zach closed his eyes and tried to make sense of it all.

  When Cora startled him, everything happened quickly. One moment, he was talking to Randy, and the next, he was somewhere else, standing on sandy ground, the heat beating down on him from a blistering sun. Even more peculiar was an awareness of not being in his own body, as if he’d jumped into another person’s skin and was looking through those eyes.

  Zach feared for his sanity, but he wasn’t ready to face all the pills with their mind-numbing side effects, prescription after prescription shoved down his throat by doctors who didn’t really understand how to help him. At least he wasn’t ready yet.

  Zach tossed and turned, struggling with his inner turmoil. He was scared and confused, but knew he desperately needed to sleep.

  But sleep brought other troubles.

  Every night since the dreams had returned, Zach fought to stay awake as long as he could, to delay the inevitable meeting with his personal demon who lurked in the darkness behind closed eyes. In time, he knew his exhaustion would be impossible to hide—not only from his parents, who already suspected something was going on—but from everyone else.

  The minutes ticked away.

  Sleep finally prevailed.

  He dreamed.

  *

  Zach walked through a thick, clinging fog, inexorably drawn toward a rendezvous in the mists. He strained against the pull but couldn’t will his legs to stop. The dream he had experienced since childhood—this dream—was scripted from beginning to end, each second of it unfolding just as when he was younger. Zach could do nothing to alter what was going to happen, forced to suffer through it as he had countless times before.

  The child, and the thing, were both waiting for him. Zach knew they were not to be denied this night, same as every night for the past three weeks since the dream had returned, when they demanded their pound of sanity.

  It was there, up ahead in the churning mists. The shadowy figure of a small child, a baby, arms outstretched, beckoning to him.

  Zach drew closer, overwhelmed by a crushing sense of sadness so deep and painful, it was nearly unbearable.

  The baby opened its tiny mouth, and the words erupted like a mighty lion’s roar, a growling blast like the voice of an ancient god returning to destroy a civilization that had forgotten to worship it. “I WILL BE!”

  No! Stop screaming! Zach pleaded, but as always, the words never left his mouth. He tried to cover his ears, but his body was frozen in place.

  “I WILL BE!” Another ancient roar, rumbling across the dreamscape like thunder.

  And then, silence.

  The baby slipped back into the fog until it was totally obscured, leaving behind an insufferable pall of sadness and despair.

  Zach knew what would happen next. The thing was coming.

  The mist grew colder, clinging to his skin. Freezing cold.

  It was near.

  He could hear its footsteps as it approached from behind, each stride shaking the ground with a heavy thud.

  It was directly behind him now. Zach could feel its fetid breath on the back of his neck. The stench of feces was thick, nauseating, as the thing spoke.

  “I know who you are, Zach. Do you know me?”

  A million voices, speaking as one. This was the voice that had stolen his sanity and driven him to attempt suicide, when other boys his age were riding bikes, having fun, living life.

  In his head, Zach screamed at his tormentor. I don’t know who you are! Leave me alone!

  “You are the one I’ve been searching for,” it hissed.

  Zach felt the thing’s claws scrape down his back, tearing through his clothes, into his skin.

  “Your time is over,” it said, the combined voices high-pitched, shrill, full of a dark eagerness.

  A massive taloned hand snatched Zach from behind. He felt his ribs crack as the thing began to crush his body, its razor-sharp claws piercing his skin and tearing through muscle. The pain he felt wasn’t a figment of his tortured imagination, however. It was real. In the morning, Zach would find tiny spots of blood on his sheets and scratches on his chest, evidence of the monster who stalked his nights, somehow reaching across the void separating his nightmare world and his conscious existence.

  The doctors had always said his wounds were self-inflicted. Zach knew differently.

  Agonizing pain shot through Zach’s body as the monster tightened its crushing grip. He could feel his insides being pushed up into his throat, could taste the blood and bile spilling into his mouth. But it would be over in a few seconds. This was when the dream always ended.

  Surprisingly, this time—for the first time—the dream continued.

  Zach fell to the ground, the thing behind him mercifully gone, but up ahead another figure emerged from the mist, this time of a man.

  He stood directly in front of Zach, his face partially obscured by a thin veil of fog.

  Zach wasn’t afraid. He felt he somehow knew this man, almost as if he’d encountered a long-lost companion.

  The man opened his mouth to speak, but his words were muffled, unintelligible. Zach couldn’t understand what he was trying to say.

  Zach sensed frustration from the man, but also determination, a need to finish something important that’d been left undone.

  The man motioned at Zach to turn around, then pointed at something behind his back.

  Zach turned, and stared into the face of a beautiful young girl, about his age, with thick brown hair, and deep, endless blue eyes. She was crying, the tears streaming down her cheeks.

  Zach saw a flicker of recognition in her eyes, and remarkably, he felt recognition as well, a sudden certainty that he’d stared into her eyes before, somehow, somewhere. Zach reached for her, wanting to take her hand in his.

  She disappeared as the ground between them suddenly erupted, blown high into the air by a roaring blast of sulfurous flame. The shock from the blast knocked Zach off his feet, and filled his eyes with stinging grains of dirt.

  As the dust cleared, he saw something emerging from the pit the blast had left behind. For the first time in his life, Zach looked upon his tormentor.

  Huge and misshapen, unlike anything he’d ever imagined, the thing stood before him. It opened its cavernous mouth, revealing thousands of tormented faces framed behind jagged, crimson-stained teeth.

  The faces were screaming.

  *

  Zach woke, clutching his sweat-soaked sheets to his body. His be
dspread lay crumpled on the floor, kicked off the bed. He glanced over to his alarm clock: 3:45 a.m.

  He slowly ran his hands over his chest and belly, and felt the raised welts he knew would be there, seeping tiny drops of blood. The dream wounds weren’t any worse than if he’d been scratched by a cat, but the simple fact that they were there terrified him.

  He retrieved his bedspread from the floor and settled back into bed, thinking how different the dream had been this time. So very different.

  The man he’d seen in the dream, a friend? Maybe someone he’d met briefly in his past? Zach felt as if he should know him.

  And the girl . . .

  For the brief moment he’d gazed into her eyes, Zach experienced feelings he’d never felt before from anyone other than his family: an utter and complete acceptance of all that he was, regardless of what he’d done to himself.

  He’d seen a flash of recognition in her eyes, too, as if she knew him. Zach was sure he’d never met the girl before, yet her name was on the tip of his tongue. As he tossed and turned, it remained tantalizingly out of reach.

  But what troubled him the most was the fact that his demon had finally revealed itself. At long last, he’d seen the thing that had tortured him for so many years. But why now?

  Zach closed his eyes. He needed to get some sleep tonight, as there were only a few hours left before he would have to get up for school. The dream, he knew from experience, would only come once.

  The furnace kicked on, and the air ducts made soft popping sounds as the warm air began to flow. It was a cold night. Outside, the softly falling snow began to coat the world in a silent white blanket.

  As he began to cross the conscious divide between awareness and sleep, a voice startled him. He abruptly sat up in bed.

  “Dad?” he whispered.

  No answer.

  He turned on his bedside lamp.

  There was no one there. He was alone.

  His clock read 4:07 a.m. He’d been asleep for only a few minutes.

  He started to shiver. Zach swore a person had been in his room. The voice wasn’t one he recognized, but still, it was familiar in a way, never before heard yet an old companion.