Standing in our place again, I miss our place. Dreaming about the ghost town of Gothic, Colorado is just about the only thing that makes me homesick for my childhood. Even in sleep, I usually don’t allow myself the chance to miss my old sanctuary, because acknowledging its absence mixes with my anticipation of my one glimpse of Ellie. Tonight though, something like peace counteracts the eagerness. I sit on the banks of the stream and listen to the water lightly smacking against the smooth river rocks at the base of the waterfall. I watch the tips of the surrounding aspens sparkle, while their leaves sway and twist in the breeze.
Letting my heart rate match the patterns of motion and sound, I start rocking back and forth; closing my eyes I can almost feel the pressure of Ellie’s back resting against my chest. Keeping my eyes closed, I wrap my arms around her, feeling her warmth swaying with me. I know she is gone, at this moment far away, probably touching others’ minds … I wonder if she dreams about me.
Michael is here this time, mumbling in the background about Lilly. At first I am angry about the intrusion, but when I open up my slumbering eyes, I realize he isn’t talking to me. I was listening to his dreaming mind, while I was asleep. This is a first; I guess not living under the same roof with another human, for almost a year now, changed my ability to deflect others’ thoughts. As a defense mechanism, when I was a little kid, my mind naturally filtered most people’s thoughts from invading my own. When James and I talked about the development of our talents, he thought they were probably strongest when we were born. Then as time went by, we learned to suppress them for the sake of sanity and conformity. He told me he remembered his mother’s moods changing, coinciding with his own. He learned quickly that he could force emotions on those around him. The problem with his particular ‘talent’ was his strongest emotions tended to be negative ones, especially when he was little. A tantrum from him would result in his mother angrily breaking his arm. Then he figured out that he could share the hurt she caused, and that was when he would make her feel the pain she had inflicted. Later he discovered how to control, and focus, his manipulation of others … but in turn, his mind had to learn to not feel … and a sociopath was born, or so he thought.
Ellie is a different creature altogether; instead of retreating from emotions, like me, or suppressing emotions like James, she yearns to touch others so that she can understand what they, and in turn, what she is feeling. Kind of like: calmly forcing yourself through a maze, because it's the only way to find the exit. Ellie is the strongest person I’ve ever met, just for embracing her own vulnerability.
The voices of loss, always here, start yelling again from within my dream forest… “She left you, promises broken, pain left behind; she is just like everyone else in your life. A LIAR!” The voices are so much more pronounced now that I am not enveloped in my typical obsession with Ellie. I can hear it clearly; it isn't just one voice, but many voices speaking together … a legion built within the loss, anger, and pain, coming from trusting, and being let down. I can hear one voice above the others … James.
Focusing on his voice leads me to memories of the night he was killed by V.
Gothic, Colorado disappears and I find myself standing in James’s penthouse apartment facing the wall of mirrors in his bedroom; subsequently, an unknown sensation waves over me from James: admiration and jealousy.
“I almost think you look better in Armani than I did. It would be a shame to let my wardrobe just collect dust; even though you’re a loser, you’re better than nothing.” James’s backhanded compliments were about as annoying as a fly buzzing; at first they were like listening to fingernails down a chalkboard, but with time and desensitization, I simply stopped noticing.
When another sensation drifted into the room, emptiness and frigid hatred, I heard the sound of James’s voice again, “What can we do for you, Sir?”
V’s presence always brought about fear and regret in James. Luckily for us, V’s ego kept him from acknowledging James’s outpouring of emotions as a form of lie detector. If V actually had cared to look closely at the unintentional feelings that James forced into the air, all of our withheld information would have been obvious in a moment. To tell the truth, I think V’s only reason for keeping James around was to feed on the emotions that oozed, so freely, out of every one of his pores.
When V spoke, he left the impression that the words were being sucked in, like a whispered whistle that was inhaled instead of blown out. Dry and aged, his voice alone made me feel like I was standing in the middle of an empty, lifeless desert. I imagined the heat evaporating every fluid in my body, and taking away all of my prized memories in the vapors. My brain seemed to reshape into a comatose position, rocking back and forth in my skull, completely withdrawn, while I tried to ignore V's impact.
I felt more than heard his command to call James’s mob father, “It’s time we met the man that helped create our dear friend here.” V's whisper had as much force as a tornado.
Still looking in the mirror, and only seeing my own reflection, I answered the command with a slight nod in what I thought was V’s general direction. Walking over to my cell phone and picking it up, I waited patiently for James to tell me the number for his father’s direct line. I imagined the drain placed on James, as if a movie was playing in the back of my head, where I could pretend I wasn’t watching what was happening. His weak, pained voice, forced the numbers out between clenched teeth. Releasing James momentarily, to focus on me, V drained everything from my emotional banks … everything but anger.
When all your mind feels is anger, your vision becomes red around the edges, and the rush of blood makes your ears pound. Rage is irrational, deadly, and intoxicating … the strength is primal, and when it's under the slightest bit of control, you feel … immortal. I punched in the numbers, and when the old man answered, I growled out my request for an audience with him.
“Christopher, I presume. I’ve been waiting for this call. Of course, you will come to me. I am not stupid enough to expose myself to you, on your terms.” While under V’s influence, my senses become stronger tenfold: I listened, pulling information through the satellite connection between our two phones. Or, more accurately, I honed in on the man's location, and became inhumanly perceptive to the traces of hidden thoughts inside the man's voice.
“Alright, you name the place.” I answered, still growling, tentatively holding on to my fury. The more I allowed him to talk the more thoughts passed through his head. Thoughts that included recruiting me, and ones that argued I should be killed right away, “The boy is too powerful to be brought into the inner circle … kill him now, before he can do any more damage to the company.” His thoughts only fueled my temper.
Trying to hide the fear from his voice, he crushed a quaver with forced coolness. “I think you should come here to my office … top floor, just up the strip from James’s apartment. I believe you already know the place, since you’ve been seen watching me here.” A laugh escaped from me that sounded more like bark, holding no mirth. Inside the snide tone behind ‘watching me’, the old man’s slick persona fell away to genuine fear. His mind was screaming orders as we spoke: a sniper was to take me down, long before I entered the elevator of his lobby.
“I’ll be there in two hours.” I could feel a taunting smirk, cut viciously across my face.
“Midnight?”
“Yes; what’s the matter? Has hanging around with ‘gifted’ people made you afraid of the witching hour?” From the tone of my own voice, I could imagine the sneer without looking in the mirror.
“No; midnight is fine.”
“Good.” Some part of my psyche knew the voice that left my mouth wasn’t my own … but I no longer cared.
Lune, who learned to ignore what was happening with a certain amount of false aloofness, growled from his usual spot on the bed. When I turned my burning gaze on him, he put his head down on his paws and looked at me with disgust. He never left my side, always continuing on as my trusted companion … but our friendship no longer ran as deep as it once had. He left me with the impression that he was preparing himself for the moment I turned my anger on him. His preparation didn’t include cowering, just an unwavering devotion that showed his absolute loyalty to me … even if that meant, I was going to be the one who brought about his death.
Sadness seeped into my thoughts while I was looking at my friend; and I knew V had released me long enough to torment James once again. I didn’t know what V was doing to James, but from the sound of his stifled sobs … I could only guess it had to be horrible. Walking over to the bed, and trying to ignore the obvious air of agony now filling the room, I kneeled down in front of Lune and placing my chin on the edge of the bed. I looked into his eyes, and wished he could read my thoughts.
Whispering as to not attract V's attention, I pleaded with Lune, “Please, please … help me.”
Exhaustion is the most immediate side effect to the rage. Adrenalin pumped through my body, reacting to primal emotions. My brain tried to make sense of the intensity, and reading it as a ‘fight or flight’ stimulus, it just turned up my survival instinct to the extreme. I had yet to break the hold V had put on me, and when he let go, my body felt like it had run a marathon. Lactic acid seeps into my stomach, always making me sick, and without the energy to lift my knees up off the floor … I leaned over and vomited next to the bed. Using every ounce of my remaining strength, I crawled up onto the bed, passing out, fully clothed, and smelling of puke; I curled up next to Lune.
Dreaming within my dream, I return to my beloved spot in Gothic. Praying to see Ellie, hoping she can save me from my memories … but I only find Michael’s voice.
“Bathing in blood? That can’t be right … what am I thinking, of course it's right, histories full of stories of homicidal freaks doing weird stuff like that. Psychologically though, it would take a real psychopath to enjoy the violence of killing and draining that many people, of that much blood. Even in his time, he had to be excessive … and we’re talking about a time, and culture, where they cut out the still beating heart of humans as a normal sacrifice.” Michael’s voice has the monotone droning sound of someone talking to themselves. I have to snicker at the fact that he’s so analytical, even when he is asleep.
The smile brings me further out of my painful memories of James and V, and as I look around the aspen trees again, the wind picks up. I know immediately that I will find Ellie standing by the stream this time. She smiles as the wind whips her hair, and she brings me home again. Home, the only place where Ellie still exists for me … in this broken record, skipping over and over again … and not in the waking world where I pretend she could still love a coward like me. While I gawk at the only remaining memories of my soul mate … the voices of the internal monsters, who reside in my dream forest, whisper arrogantly, “Finally, he sees his own lies."
