Chapter Eleven. Duncan
The black of the room was absolute.
Duncan passed his hand in front of his face. Nothing. The darkness was so deep it went beyond not seeing. It felt like maybe his body didn’t exist anymore at all.
Somewhere, Temperance was crying.
A candle flickered to life, but Duncan couldn’t smell a blown match. He moved toward the light, and the closer he came, the wider the radius of the candlelight grew.
Bodhi Rao was there in full physician’s garb. Navy-blue scrubs, white lab coat, stethoscope around his neck, scrub cap on his head. He sat in the chair from Ma and Dad’s living room at the old house in Westfall. Temperance was on his lap, weeping.
Naked.
Bodhi had a hand clasped against her hip, another around her shoulders. His skin melted into hers like wax, fusing them into a single organism. Duncan approached, unable to stop himself.
He wanted to throw up.
A thin finger of blood stretched toward him from beneath the chair. It rolled and ran like it was leaking downhill, even though the floor was flat. It glistened black in the dim light.
This is a dream.
When Duncan looked back up to Temperance, Bodhi was gone. Now, she sat on Harry’s lap.
Harry, no.
She wasn’t naked anymore. They wore identical clothing—all the way down to the bruise-blue color of surgical scrubs and the way stethoscopes draped over their collarbones. A bubble of blood hovered inside her nostril, and it burst with a tiny audible pop before it streaked down her lip, then her chin.
The name badge clipped to her shirt read DR. TEMPERANCE brADY, and Duncan knew she’d taken the Brady name because she’d married Harry.
Not him.
She’d always wanted to be a Brady.
Now Duncan was naked, wearing only a tool belt and work boots. The belt was bolted into his hip bones, fused to his body the same way Bodhi Rao’s fingers had flowed into Temperance’s skin. When he tried to take another step closer, he was fixed in place. The boots were filthy, cemented to the ground with mud and grime caked all the way up to his knees. Layer after layer continued to solidify, climbing up his body like masonry.
This is a fucking dream.
Now he was in a hospital waiting room. It smelled like sunscreen. Coconut, bananas. Salt and cream, and the mineral scent of healthy human sweat and hot sun on cut grass. Temperance smelled like that, just behind her ear, and beneath the crook of her jawbone. She’d worn that sunscreen every day he’d known her, even in winter.
It was dismal there in the waiting room, though. Monochromatic and bleak. That summer scent piping down from the ceiling was a misdirection and a lie. This place had never known warmth.
Duncan was the only person there. Jammed into a corner, in a chair too short for him. If he bent forward, just a little, he could touch his forehead to his knees. It made him feel paradoxically small. It wasn’t the chair’s fault, though. The problem was that he was too big. Too rough around the edges. Too everything.
He blinked, and there were more people in the room. A sea of bodies, shoulder to shoulder. The man in front of him turned. Slow and stiff, like a ballerina figurine in a music box.
It was Corbin Madigan.
“You’re the Brady boy,” he said.
He didn’t answer. Kept his eyes on the ground. Duncan didn’t know why, but it was important for Corbin Madigan to not know who he was. He needed to be like glass.
There was a chair beside him now. A nice chair, not the cramped thing that was trying to feed Duncan his own knees. The man in the chair was Corbin Madigan, too, even though Corbin Madigan already stood in front of him.
“Temperance was asking for you,” the second Corbin Madigan said, and that time, Duncan looked up. He couldn’t help it. You couldn’t not look at a person when an exact copy of them sat next to you.
Temperance was asking for you.The words were a test that Corbin Madigan knew Duncan would fail.
Hundreds of people stood in the waiting room now. Thousands. Different bodies, different clothes. It seemed like there shouldn’t be enough space in a hospital waiting room for that many people, but it also seemed like there shouldn’t be thousands of versions of the same person there, either. Every one of them had the face and voice of Corbin Madigan, and they all turned to him in unison. Then they parted at the center of the room, and he saw Temperance.
Two Temperances.
The first Temperance was in a wheelchair and had streaky tear tracks on her cheeks. The second Temperance stood behind her, wearing a white coat and a scrub cap the color of blood.
They spoke at the same time, in the same voice. Temperance’s voice. “You said we were all flame, Duncan. Have some light.”
Light flooded the space until it was a molten-hot whiteout. The light shrieked in Duncan’s eye sockets and ears, noise he could taste and brightness he could hear.
All the Corbin Madigans laughed. They laughed and laughed and laughed.
DUNCANscreamed himself awake.
He lurched upright in bed, huffing breath through his nose like a Clydesdale.
Jesus Christ.
It had been a while since he’d had one like that. Years ago, he’d gone through a period of months where nearly every night was a midnight showing of the Duncan Brady Nightmare Fuckery Cinematic Universe, and Temperance Madigan had top billing.
She was haunting him again. Right when he’d finally started to believe he didn’t need an exorcism.