I should have felt comfortable lying in my linen sheets staring at my familiar apartment ceiling, but I was stiff enough to crack. They say home is where the heart is, and I had no idea where that was anymore, but I knew that at this moment, this wasn’t my home. Muted neon lights danced across my ceiling through the flimsy curtains I swore to myself I’d replace. They were supposed to be temporary, a placeholder for something better, just like everything else in my life.
I rolled out of bed and threw on my trench coat. If I wasn’t sleeping tonight, at least I’d drive. I needed to move. My heels clacked down the stairs and the engine reeved until the road curved in front of me, bending left and right, again and again, before splitting into smaller streets and I was everywhere and no one at once. My mind emptied and then it was just me, the wind, and the road. Like a moth drawn to the light, there was something pulling at the edges of my mind and I brought myself back to somewhere I was trying to avoid.
When I came back to my senses, I was idling in the parking lot of Silver Reach High – the very same high school Cassie went to. It wasn’t mine, but damn if it didn’t look just like it in all the ways that mattered, and just like the actual school I had attended in my teens, I didn’t want to be here either. It looked liminal at night, silent and empty, bathed in the cold glow of streetlights.
My body moved before my mind caught up and I found myself walking down those empty halls again before I knew it. Part of me wanted to know what I was doing, the rest didn’t really care, and my footsteps pulled me forwards while my mind was still swirling through feelings that were freshly uncovered from their graves, ready to haunt me again. It felt like some cruel joke an unforgiving god would play on his wayward flock. I shouldn’t have been here. It didn’t make any sense. I should have been still back home in bed reading faces into the meaningless shapes dancing across my ceiling, but the wind felt too cold on my skin and the goosebumps on my arms told me I was wide awake.
Distinctly, I heard footsteps trailing behind me. At first, they were muted, like the footfalls of a small animal in the brush, but as they grew closer the sound of heels hitting the concrete was unmistakable. I whipped around to face them, but there was only the cold night air. Again. Again. Again. Each time I spun around to check, I was greeted with more empty halls and a growing sense of unease in my gut.
“Great,” I muttered. “I’m finally losing my mind.”
Crossing my arms across my chest, I blew out a stray strand of hair from my face. Then there it was again. The only difference was that I caught it this time, or at least a part of it. It was something, a flash of a human form in my peripheral vision. A white dress, short black hair, porcelain skin, and a face with a hollow where her eyes should have been. In fact, the upper half of her face was cleaved straight off and the inside of her skull was pulling me in for just an instance until she was gone.
“What the hell was that?” I gasped, jerking backwards.
One step turned to two, then three, and then I was sprinting back to where I’d come from. With two fingers on my temples, I wound through the camera feed on my Iris, but there was nothing there. But I had seen her, I knew it as well as I knew anything at all.
“I need to get some sleep,” I muttered, rubbing my eyes. “I’m seeing things.”
Once again, I moved on autopilot. Belt meet buckle. Hands on the wheel. Pedal meet foot. I peeled out of the parking lot and collapsed back into my bed, frozen in place until I fell into what should have been a dreamless sleep.
***
No, instead of a deep and dreamless sleep, I found myself knee deep in nothingness. I was standing in a white void, bright white and sterile. There was a comforting brightness that embraced me just as much as it made my skin crawl. White on white on white. There was nothing but light and stillness, even my subtle breaths seemed to disturb this space that was too beautiful and too pure for my wretched soul.
I trudged my way forward as the inky white nothingness swirled around me like mixing paint as hints of black burst through the white. Each step disturbed the pristine sludge more and more and it responded in kind by pulling me in, deeper and deeper, where it met me had risen from my knees to my waist, and then I was spinning, spinning, spinning down into a deep black pit – a pit so dark it ate the light, but when I dragged myself back up to my feet, I saw a slender frame of a small figure crouched in the center of a faint white light.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Slowly, I made my way to her, step by step, until I was standing on the edge of the circle of white light stubbornly refusing to be snuffed out.
“Hey, can you hear me?” I asked, but the figure didn’t move.
She seemed motionless, inhuman, and weightless, like she was transposed on top of a scene she had never existed in despite the long shadows spilling out behind her, far too long for her small form. They seemed to flicker in the low light, intangible and fleeting.
After a moment that seemed to stretch on forever there was finally movement. The small head of black hair turned up to greet me and where her eyes should have been, I saw myself floating in the depths of her skull in between the mess of circuits and wires. The edges of where they were torn from her skull were jagged and jarring on her expressionless face.
“In all the world, there is one truth,” she said in a small and delicate, childlike voice.
“What is it?” I whispered, unable to tear my eyes away from where her’s should have been.
“I’m-“ she says, abruptly cut short by my reappearance in my bed, heaving and sweaty.
I glanced at the clock; it read six on the dot, only two hours before I’d have to drag my ass out of bed. Sweeping my hand across my face, I sighed. It was going to be a long night, but then, in some twist of fate, I fell back to sleep the moment I had resigned myself to it and this time, somehow, my sleep was deep, heavy, and dreamless – the way every night would have been if I could’ve gotten my way.
***
My eyes shot open as a powerful, ethereal vibrato shot into my ears; I recognized it instantly as my ring tone. It was still my favorite song, a classic from Marla and the Ghost and more than sufficient to catch my attention. I answered the call reluctantly.
“Do you know what time it is?” Ethan asked.
“No, should I?” I groaned, already regretting the question.
“Take a look for yourself,” he sighed.
I had a bad feeling about this, and it was justified by the time flashing across my Iris well past noon. Shit.
“Wasn’t sure if I should call,” he continued. “Thought I’d let you sleep in.”
It was just like him to do that; he had a nasty habit of looking out for me without being asked. A mix of gratitude and frustration swam through my head. I already knew where this was going, it was the same place it always did.
“Lana, are you really up for this?” Ethan sighed.
There it was. I tensed up even though I already knew it was coming, the part where he askes me if I’m alright and I lie through my teeth. If he could see me, maybe I would have even puffed out my chest to sell the act. It was the same song and dance we went through again and again even though each time we cycled through it we believed it less than the time before.
“Stop asking me that; I’ll be there,” I shot back, already half dressed. “Gabe, where are you?”
Without waiting for him to answer, I stepped out the door and got on the road. I hated them babying me because what I really needed was tough love. No, that wasn’t right either. I didn’t know what I needed, but what I did know was that there was a small part of me desperately trying to claw its way out of my heart, screaming out its little lungs that I didn’t deserve it – neither their concern nor their mercy. It was a part of me I’d kept buried since my youth, but the passage of time hadn’t made it any clearer to me why it was there or why it had formed in the first place.
“Nowhere yet,” Gabe said, keeping a cheerful lilt in his tone. “Was just about to head out.”
“New lead?” I asked.
“Yeah, you could say that. Turns out those kids were onto something talking about Cassie rummaging through trash,” he said.
“Since I can’t stop you,” Ethan sighed. “I might as well catch you up.”
A matrix of data flashed over my iris. Ethan explained it all with a bit of pomp and flair, threading together connections in that matter of fact tone he always had. When I was a kid, I hated his know-it-all nature, but these days it was a comfort at times. I smiled a bit despite the heavy thrumming in my head, curtesy of the whirlwind I went through the night before. His voice drifted in and out of focus, running together and melding into some sort of soup – the kind where you smiled and swore you loved it even though the only discernable parts of the sludge were the eggshells.
"Got an address?" I asked. “I’ll meet you there.”
Through pure strength of will, I had caught just enough to get the gist of it—Cassie had been poking around places she shouldn’t have been. And the rest? I’d pick it up later.
“We’re skipping the explanation today?” he asked.
“Don’t need it,” I shot back. “I trust you. I know you wouldn’t send me on a wild goose chase.”
Ethan scoffed and Gabe laughed easily, a warm full bellied laugh.
“Yeah, sure. Next time you think I’m talking too much, be more subtle about it,” he quipped. “I’ll send it to you now. We tracked her down to this junkyard, seems like she’s been there a lot. It’s the sort of place that doesn’t bother to kick kids like her out. No reputable place wants a teenager poking around and dying in their junk. The liability isn’t worth it.”
“It’s the sort of place that easy for something or someone to go missing,” I observed.
The address popped up on my Iris. I didn’t recognize the name, but places like this were a dime a dozen in Volare City. There were a lot of sketchy unlicensed junkyards hidden away in the outer crevices of the city. No one bothered to check them unless someone ended up dead, and sometimes, not even then. Not every life was worth just as much in this city. Someone like Cassie, a girl who no one was looking for, could be dumped in a place like that and no one would be the wiser. The thought made my skin crawl, and my mouth suddenly tasted bitter. Copper. It was the tang of blood. I licked the nick my tooth left on my bottom lip and drove faster.