Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Paul
The mirrors don’t distort.
That’s the thing I keep returning to, even as I move through them, turning left and right, finding the same wall of glass at every angle. Any other nightmare bends the image, gives me spiders with impossibly long legs, hollows out my eyes, or stretches the darkness in the room.
That’s standard dream architecture.
That’s textbook.
These are mirrors.
Just me.
“Paul. Paul, please…”
She’s back to being somewhere I can’t find.
Only this time, it’s not her eyes haunting me or her lips.
It’s her voice. I press my hand to the glass in front of me, and the glass gives me back my palm, my face, and the gray at my jaw.
My reflection looks at me with the expression I apparently wear when I am trying not to panic, the same one I wear for most things. Maybe that’s the problem.
But it’s a fraction too slow.
Or am I?
It’s hard to tell.
I’m lucid in a dream. I know that, but the dream is steering me, not the other way around.
“Paul.”
“Lennon, darling,” I say to the mirror, my reflection mouthing it back. “I can hear you. Tell me where…”
“Plea—”
Her plea cuts off, followed by radio silence. I stand with my palm flat against the glass and breathe through the absence of her voice, which is somehow louder than her voice was. I run through it the way I always do when a nightmare tries to take me with it.
You are asleep, you are aware, you know where your body is.
I am in the armchair in Tessa’s room. I am…
Am I?
No, no, I am.
I fell asleep in it again, for the third night running, because I’m not leaving. I know where my body is. This is a dream.
Knowing where your body is doesn’t help much when someone is screaming your name from inside the walls.
That is not how this works.
I know where her body is as well, so is this her subconscious pleading for me?
Or is it mine torturing me for all the ways I fucked up with her?
“Paul, help me. Paul…”
“I’m here.” Both palms now. “I’m right here.”
Silence.
I have studied the architecture of nightmares for twenty years.
I know this room was built to keep me moving without ever letting me arrive.
This Man knows me well enough to know that.
He tortured me long enough with my worst fears, but this one is worse than the street and the car hitting a stranger I know belongs to me.
Because now I know what I’ve lost.
I move, and the corridor of mirrors shifts and replicates itself with every step.
Every time I think I’ve found the edge of a seam, a wall, or a door, I find more glass.
More of me. I don’t run because running feeds the urgency, and urgency feeds the architecture.
I am trying very hard to be someone who does not run from things, but it’s taking everything I have right now.
“Paul. Please. Help me!”
Ahead. For the first time, her voice is directly ahead, coming from one mirror and not everywhere at once. I walk toward it because what else can I do?
My reflection in the mirror changes to someone else as I step in front of it, and now he’s looking back at me.
“Dr. Bennett, good to see you.” This Man is standing with his hands in his pockets, and he looks the same as he always does, as if absolutely nothing is wrong with him, and yet, everything is wrong with him.
“Let her go. Take me instead.” I don’t know why I said that.
I do.
“No hello?” He chuckles. “Where are your manners?”
“Let Lennon go, and we can exchange all the niceties you want.”
“Why would you think she’s with me?”
“Lennon…” I stop and try to reset my brain, which seems to turn more and more to mush. “Lennon joined Tessa.”
“That was Lennon’s decision.” This Man smiles, and my neck prickles at the sight.
“Because she thought there was no other way to save her best friend.” I keep my voice level by considerable effort, hoping it doesn’t show. “Tessa has been deteriorating, and Lennon was scared out of her mind. Falling into this… this state with her was not an informed decision.”
“Tessa,” he says quietly. “Is the best she has ever been.”
So Tessa is with him.
I suspected it but never had it confirmed.
“Tessa’s body isn’t.” The clinical part of my brain, which is still on, lines the facts up in order. “Progressive respiratory compromise. Supplemental oxygen. Diminishing response. You cannot sustain someone at this depth indefinitely, no matter what your dreamscape offers—”
He cuts me off with a laugh, and it’s genuine, almost warm, and fucking unsettling.
“Of course, you can, if you choose elsewhere. The body follows the mind, Paul. Come on. I know you’ve been studying this. Don’t act all dumb. You’re not.”
Right now, I feel dumb.
“Then why is she struggling?” My voice has acquired an edge I did not authorize. “If Tessa chose this and is there willingly, why is her body fighting? Why is her breathing…”
“Is it fighting?” There is something behind his eyes in that moment, not quite amusement. “Or are you the only one left fighting, Dr. Bennett?”
The mirrors crack.
The crack happens simultaneously in every panel, floor to ceiling, all around me, every surface splitting in the same direction.
I take one step back, and a black spider comes through the fracture.
It’s the size of my hand, moving fast. It is followed immediately by another, and then the mirrors are pouring them out.
All of them.
Every panel, every angle, every version of myself I’ve been staring at for the length of this nightmare, replaced in an instant by the sound of them, which is the sound from my childhood that I cannot name without it doing what it does to my chest right now.
I back up, but there is nowhere to go.
They descend over my shoes first. The weight of them is wrong, more than it should be, more than any single thing has the right to be. When the first one reaches my collar, it makes a sound I can feel in my back teeth, and I…
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Take control, Paul.
I try. God, I try, but I can’t.
My hands don’t feel attached to me.
He is watching me come apart in a room full of mirrors, standing exactly where he was, hands still in his pockets, when one of them climbs across my jaw.
They’re in my hair.
They’re down the back of my collar.
They’re everywhere. They are the floor, the walls. Every night I’ve lain awake with the light blazing because the dark does this to me. The dark does exactly this, and I cannot—
I gasp as awareness slams back into my body, which has me pinned to where I’m sitting. The weight lands all at once. My arms and legs lock, and my chest is compressed like something is sitting directly on my sternum.
I go through the same steps I always use to get out of this.
You are awake. You are in the armchair. You can see the book you just read on the side table. You are safe.
I don’t fight it. Fighting extends it. You breathe, and you wait.
At least in this position, I can scan the room because my eyes can move, allowing me to find the clock, the book, the oxygen unit with its small green light, and then the bed.
My Lennon. And her Tessa.
Both of them are exactly where they’ve been for three days, under the bright ceiling light I leave on because I refuse to sit vigil in the dark. Tessa’s chest rising and falling, Lennon with her face turned toward her, lashes still, one hand open on the pillow. She appears to be simply sleeping.
She looks exactly like herself, except for the absolute absence in her that I cannot clinically or otherwise explain.
Yesterday, they installed the nasogastric tube that rests along her cheek, disappearing into her nose, and something in me that has spent years learning to look at broken bodies without flinching does not want to look at this one.
The pressure on my chest does not ease. It increases.
I see him before I process what I’m seeing. He’s standing at the foot of the bed, looking down at Lennon.
He’s not really here. This is what always happens when I’m stuck between sleep and waking, when my subconscious still clings to the dream I left.
The dreamscape and waking life overlap in my mind.
His knuckles pass over Lennon’s cheek, right over the tape, but she doesn’t stir.
Every muscle I have strains against the paralysis at the same moment.
Both hands clench against the armrests, while my jaw locks so hard I can feel my teeth.
I’m trying to stand, trying to speak, to tell him to get his hands off of what is mine.
The clinical part of my brain that I normally rely on to get me through the paralysis, has gone somewhere I cannot reach.
This is not the ordinary nightmare. This is her, and he is touching her while I’m sitting in a chair completely unable to do anything about that.
He turns to look at me and smiles, because he knows perfectly well what I can and cannot do right now.
“She hasn’t had any difficulty breathing, has she? Tessa… since Lennon found her.”
My throat only produces something that isn’t words.
More stable, I’ve been noting in the chart I keep in my head. Tessa’s oxygen levels and her pulse. The steadying of her breathing since the night Lennon ran away from me. I’d told myself not to read into it.
I’d been reading into it anyway.
“You can stay in elsewhere forever,” he says to the room as he strokes Lennon’s face again, and the sound I make is involuntary and undignified, though I make it anyway. “Lennon will. Just as Tessa does… just as I do.”
The light flickers once, and the paralysis loosens, but just my face. This Man smiles at me, like he expects me to be thankful for that.
“Everyone will be fine. We will be, you will be, and your writer friend will be.”
Your writer friend.
“Ridge?” I press out. “You promised.”
“So did you. But you broke your promise, and because of that, Ridge Wells has been having a rather difficult few months.”
Fuck. I thought he was safe.
“What did you do to him?”
“Oh…” he tilts his head, the picture of mild consideration, “… not much. I simply kept him still, since you couldn’t. The trick was to pin. Him. Down.”