Born To Die

By Sawyer Black

Only his memories can kill him.

 

Casey Marlowe's life is a nightmare. Born during a tragic event that killed his mother and shaped the public psyche of his hometown, he grows up with the memories of his dead mother mixed inextricably with his own and the ability to see through The Gossamer.

 

Despite his best efforts to drown his visions with daily doses of alcohol, every horror his disturbed mind dreams up manifests physically to haunt his waking days. It's enough to drive him to end his own life. And he's tried. Both through suicide and recklessly heroic acts. But every time he dies, he wakes up again and has to go on living in his hell on earth.

 

Desperate to find a way to defeat his demons, he discovers a deeply buried secret and, finally, a way to fight back. But his use of The Gossamer's manifestations threatens to tear the fabric of reality apart.

 

If he saves himself, he might destroy the world. 

 

Warning: Born To Die is a new epic horror novel by Sawyer Black. It chronicles the adventures of Casey Marlowe through various levels of existence and hell and includes strong language and extremely graphic depictions of violent and torturous acts. Not suitable for all audiences and not for the faint of heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sterling & Stone
• Release date: Aug 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781393370543

Book preview

Chapter One

It’s a Tuesday, and the carnival’s in town, so it’s a good night to die. Like any night, really, but at least I’m wearing pants.

The dissolving cotton candy sits on the bourbon in my stomach like a slick of oil on a noisy sea, and I can’t tell if the memory of the flavor is mine or my mother’s. I feel her beaming grin burn through my mind. Get a whiff of an aroma from a childhood before my own, and I know the memory is hers. One of the few good things from her life worth remembering.

She died when I was born, and the single good thing about it? Wasn’t my fault. The heat of her smile becomes a burning shame in the back of my mind. She often feels guilty about what happened that day, and as she retreats into the depths of my subconscious, I can’t help feeling relieved that I won’t have to deal with it.

I look down to see a puddle at my feet. At first, it’s the red of reflected neon light, but then it becomes a pool of blood. I shrug as I step into it, and the crimson splashes up to stain my pant leg. A grinning skull nestled among the stuffed animals on the back wall of a bottle toss shrieks laughter.

Disturbed by my boot heel, squirming maggots float to the top of the puddle. I fill my mouth with the last gritty bite of piña colada-flavored sugar. Drop the paper stick into a trashcan full of bleeding fingers.

My mother never tasted the real thing. Only the artificial coconut cream and rum-flavored candy the corporations used to hook the younger generations. Teenagers with full bellies on the verge of starvation. French fries and soda. The new American diet.

I can’t say too much, though. I eat a lot of fries, but not so much the soda. Takes away space for the beer.

She was fifteen when the south wall of the Wainwright Memorial Sanitarium collapsed. In the final month of her pregnancy. Her swollen belly was a welcome respite from the attentions most of the juvenile patients endured. But up until then, she had been constantly harassed. 

Because she was beautiful. Heart-shaped face and a mouth like a red butterfly. Dark eyes. Slender neck.

Now just a name carved into a wall to commemorate the victims. Addison Marlowe.

I don’t know who my father was. Mom says he was a shit, so I was named after her father. Casey. I only know him through the memories I inherited, and he was a good and strong man. Dead too soon, and then Mom had nowhere to go.

The public trust just can’t be trusted.

A speaker on a pole next to my shoulder blasts my ear with synth-pop. It’s 1999. The year and the song, and I’ve heard the damn thing more in the last few months than in the thirteen years it’s been out. I can’t bring myself to blame Prince, though.

People have such bad imaginations.

Most adults, anyway. They usually have black clouds over them. A storm of worry only I can see. Or a literal faceless fear following along with an uncertain gait. Waxy cheesecloth skin stretched over a gaunt frame.

Children’s minds are more fertile. On one hand, playful and full of bright colors and sounds. On the other, terrifying. Full of unrealized concepts of death and sexuality.

Even a guy who likes having hookers stomp on his balls can’t conjure up the awkward misunderstanding of a child who overhears a conversation through the thin walls of a cheap apartment. Sure, the horrors my mind manifests are a bit more elaborate, but I’ve had a lot more practice.

Since birth, actually. Where my memories start as light and pain overlaying a reflection of the same coming from my mother. Screaming the name she had for me since the day she looked down and knew the growing bump was a baby boy that was gonna live a life better than hers.

If she’d only known.

That old shame of hers rises up again, and she retreats to her corner. A spot in my mind reserved for her spark. A re-creation of the end of the south hall. On the first floor of Wainwright Memorial. Next to a wide window full of bright summer sunlight. A small chair with a red cushion in the corner of gray stone blocks.

She sits. Draws her feet up and hugs her shins. Rests her cheek on her knees. Watches the finches chase gnats in the garden outside. In a way, she’s as much a manifestation as some of the other things I see.

There’s another world that exists at the edge of reality. It’s full of possibility. The energy of creation. We are separated from it by the fragile veil of a web spun between them, much like the sugar making my teeth ache. The Gossamer.

That’s what Dwayne calls it, anyway.

His nurse keeps him on a tight leash, but he manages to get around. Usually to my door, with a six-pack or a fifth. Money falling out of his pockets like mine piling up in my dresser drawers. Peas in a pod, we are. When he’s gone, I miss him, but when he’s around, I can’t wait for him to leave.

He may have a simple mind, but he knows things. He knows the Gossamer is a curtain that covers the privacy of our thoughts. It floats in and out with the breeze like it hangs over a window cracked open to relieve the stale odor of a long winter.

The wind passes by, and like a speeding train that pulls the occasional commuter off the platform with its passage, the wind pulls the curtain to press against the window screen. In that thinning of material between the worlds, imagination can manifest.

Most of the time, it’s in the form of headless bodies. Rotting corpses. Shapeless monsters and formless howls. The collective worry of a beleaguered humanity. Seen only in the rare flicker of movement in the corner of your eye. Or that feeling of being watched when you leave a dark room.

Or like me, you can see it all the fucking time.

I call ‘em the jakes. Mom heard that word as a term for toilets, and it always seemed appropriate to me. Plus, when you get so familiar with the manifestations of your own mind, you might as well be on a first-name basis. 

And I grew up always knowing them, which means I grew up … troubled. And growing up in various Wainwright Memorials of my own, doped into oblivion, I was thought to be a lost cause. Another drooling head case waiting for Chief Bromden to hurl the water fountain through the window. 

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a tremendous movie.

One night, I lay strapped to a bed. Out of my mind on chlorpromazine and fuck all else. I could see the TV through the little window set into the steel door of my cell.

One of the few times my photographic memory has failed me because I don’t know why I was there in the first place. I blame the drugs, and I think I deserve to, but I remember the screen bulging as a jake pressed through into reality. It crawled right out of a movie about monsters in the deep of the ocean. Black and white became color.

A waterlogged zombie inside a diver’s suit made of torn canvas and pitted brass. A slit down the front where the pressure had crushed the sea into his sternum, and the tentacles of black squids encircled his shining ribs.

Between heartbeats, he transitioned from outside to inside, and he lifted one heavy boot to stomp toward my bed. It rang off the floor like a captain’s bell. I screamed until I tasted my own blood. Smelled the vomit that splashed across my chest, and when the holy diver stretched his rusting harpoon to me, I rolled my eyes away.

He opened a gash down my belly that split both my shirt and the waist restraint. Blood poured from the wound to soak the sheets beneath me, over the edge of the bed to patter on the floor like rain on a tiled roof.

It was the only time the jakes allowed me to die. I guess I was just too pathetic. No fun anymore. I’ve tried suicide by gun. Usually, they just harass me with sounds and smells. Noises and feelings. But one night, when I sat in the dark with the pistol held under my chin, I felt them descend in a cold wave, and I woke up the next day with a bruise around my throat.

The gun was in the corner under the bed. I didn’t bother reaching for it. 

They let me try to drink myself to death, though, so there’s that.

When the nurses found me still strapped down in a locked room with barely enough blood left in my body to keep my brain from dying, the doctors started to listen.

Dr. Prescott even showed me the video. A grainy static-filled black-and-white image looking down at a rail-thin victim. Not a patient. A victim. Me. And I’m screaming. My neck distended with effort. And my skin opens up as if the force of my voice split it apart. 

Even though I can see them, jakes don’t appear on video. Kind of like vampires and mirrors.

Prescott’s hands shook as he took the black cassette out of the VHS deck. Dropped it into the trash and told me to stay out of trouble … and that was that. The last time I saw that place was when they took the stitches out.

I get a deposit into my bank every week, and I’ve never bothered to find out if it was him or somebody else. It keeps my rent at the Wainwright Stay Right paid up. New shoes every month. Enough booze to kill me eventually — with any luck — and the jakes don’t seem to mind. 

I can sit by myself and smoke my lungs black over a bottle of rye until cancer eats me away, and they won’t lift a finger to stop me. Tie one noose around the light fixture, though, and there’s a fucking riot.

Chapter Two

Most of the time, I only see my jakes. Manifestations of the worst things I’ve ever seen crossed with the worst things I can imagine, but here at the carnival, they are out and about in force. Remnants of a community’s combined anxiety. Maybe it’s always like this. I tend to stay away from groups of people with active minds. That’s why I like bars so much. I rarely see a jake at Old Marie’s Tavern. A drunk mind is not an imaginative mind.

But this place is alive. As the whole town of Wainwright seems to be. Mom emerges from hiding to agree, and she would know.

In October of 1976, the Gossamer was so thin, every worry and fear manifested a string of summer colds. Tornadoes seemed to pop up over Wainwright and none of the surrounding towns. Unsolved thefts. Domestic violence was through the roof.

Sometimes, if social anxiety becomes too strong — if it becomes a part of cultural identity, the Gossamer will manifest something a little bigger than a shadow at the patio door.

A train derailment. A power grid blackout. 

A bombing.

The aftermath of the Vietnam War weighed heavy. The Cold War gearing up as Watergate eroded whatever trust anybody had left in institutions. Add a hospital that was built to aid those that couldn’t fend for themselves but ended up being a teenage sex smorgasbord for rich fuck friends of the Wainwright family, and you had a good recipe for that something.

On the morning I was born, my mother sat by a window with a newspaper she struggled to read. Nobody had ever bothered teaching her, but it was something she wanted me to learn, so she needed to be good at it before she could show me how. That breaks my fucking heart.

Sounding out the words in a whisper as her breath fogged the glass, she read an article citing the number of bombings in America that year. By the FBI’s count: over two thousand. 

A painful contraction twisted through her abdomen, and she bent over with a scream. The thought of all those explosions became a vision of fire. An imaginary inferno that leaped higher with every twist of the knife inside her, and the Gossamer manifested that thought into a realization of the facility’s collective worry and fear.

Beatrice Wainwright, a young nurse and great-granddaughter-in-law of the town’s founder, survives with disfiguring injuries that keep her inside to this day. Except for a little baby born through a bloody slit in his mother’s tummy, there were no other survivors.

Judging from what my mother’s memories tell me of the place, all those kids were better off, and fuck the rest.

The glass from the window removed most of the skin from her face. Flames licked the hair from her head. Broken ribs stabbed pain into her insides, and when the warm hands of the paramedics tore the remains of her floral dress open, she sighed in gurgling relief.

She knew I was going to live. We passed each other in the dark space between birth and death, and the Gossamer brought me into the world as surely as her rapist deposited me in her womb.

Sometimes, the Gossamer manifests something good. 

Even though my mother is the only person to think of me that way. Her smile inside my mind distracts me from the carnival frenzy around me. She loves me, and to a person that can’t figure out how to love himself, it’s the best thing in the world.

Plus funnel cakes. I smell the frying dough on a sudden gust, and she laughs to herself as she fades from awareness.

Prince cuts off in a squeal of feedback, and a thick Russian voice booms into the night. "Is final hour, children! All rides half off! Tell Mom and Dad to hurry to Comrade Crank’s Garage! Get the last tickets of the night, and remember— I wince away at his amplified shout. There is drawing this Friday! Beeg prizes!"

The music picks back up with a pop so loud, I imagine the compression wave of sound spread through the air. I give a theatrical shake of my head. Not for the passersby, but for the trio of jakes coming toward me in lockstep. 

Naked clowns. Smiling makeup melted to their skin like ruined cake icing. They hit the shadows and disappear, and I focus on my feet as I dig for the can of Miller Lite warming inside my jacket pocket. I look around for cops. Nosy adults and curious children. Can I drink this thing here? I shrug in answer as I crack the tab and tip it up.

I wash the cotton candy away with watery beer, but it’s the only kind I drink through the week. I start with whiskey to get the drunk going, then keep it buzzing along with a light beer or fifteen. 

A case a day keeps the jakes away.

Except for tonight. It must be this place. Like the expanding foil on a Jiffy Pop pan, the energy is swelling under my will to be here. The fuck did I come here anyway?

My mother puts her hands behind her back. Shuffles her feet like, who me? That’s right. She wanted fair food. For her, taste is a memory unless I’m eating something she remembers liking.

So I finish the beer and slot myself into the line at the funnel cake wagon I smelled earlier. The big yellow sign over the window is outlined with old-timey lightbulbs—Mother Margot’s Funnel Cakery. A poem flits through my mind like Dr. Seuss driving the bus of my thoughts.

The fakery cakery, not good for the jakery when Casey is standing with so much at stakery.

Mom giggles and claps her hands. 

A big ol’ gal with a ruddy smile peers through the little window under the sign, and I wonder if it’s Mother Margot herself. I share Mom’s anticipation. Mother Margot looks like she knows what a good funnel cake tastes like.

But something nabs my attention. A smell over the sweet dough sizzling away in days’ old grease. My head tips up like a dog scenting the air. My nostrils flare. Ozone and sweat. A hot vacuum tube burning in the dark of a root cellar. The dank rot of the Messenger Tide.

That name is also from Dwayne.

There is a thin layer between the Gossamer and reality. It lubricates the passage between those planes. It is the source of inspiration. When you jump straight up with a eureka moment, that idea came through the Messenger Tide. Probably where Edgar Cayce got all his bullshit. Him and Einstein.

But when something isn’t manifested through the Gossamer. When it is actualized. When it becomes real. When it can be experienced by anyone, it passes through the thin layer that eases the transition from imaginary to real.

I smell it now, and like that dog locked onto the scent of a criminal, my head turns to direct my gaze to the back of a man hunched over something clutched in both hands. He turns and looks behind him. As if he feels my sudden attention. His fingers part and I see a knife. Curved and flaking with rust.

He’s dressed for the cool night we all stand in. A tan blazer over a sensible shirt buttoned all the way up to the sallow flesh under his chin. Belted jeans. Loafers.

I know everyone that passes him can see him, but only I can see the glittering sheen of the Messenger Tide drying on his shoulders—evaporating like a splash of alcohol on a dry countertop. A wave of spectral steam.

His shoulders move up and down with his panting breath. His lips part to show his dark tongue sitting behind teeth edged in brown, like a recent coating from his bleeding gums.

His eyes are wide and staring. Afraid and excited. Red and watery and bloodshot.

He turns back around, and when I shift to see what he’s looking at, I feel my mother clap her hands over her mouth so her scream won’t fill my mind. It has targeted a child.

The jake looks at a little girl rotating in a slow twirl. One hand holds a sucker to her stained lips. The other holds the hem of her skirt up as she spins.

There is nobody nearby for her. She is alone in the crowd, and I know what the jake wants.

Chapter Three

The little girl spreads her hands and jumps into a fresh spin. Her skirt kicks out like the swirl in the drain after a bubble bath. She wears denim shorts underneath. Yellow rain boots with kitty faces on the toes.

Her cheeks are rosy. The color of pinches and squeals.

The jake leans forward, but his glance shifts from the girl to the surrounding crowd, taking in every face like a butterfly bouncing from one lit candle to the next.

His attention drops back to the tiny ballerina splashing in the remnants of a late summer rain. He takes a hesitant step. A tremor races through my body. From the insides of my thighs to the hollow of my throat, and I remember my mother curling up on the floor, pressing herself into a corner. Hiding her eyes from the man as he came through the door. As if she knew I would remember everything about her, she avoided looking at his face so I wouldn’t have to see it every night.

But I imagine it. I dream about it. And the face I see when I close my eyes is the face I see on the jake staring at that little girl.

Not identical, but it’s him all the same. Slack muscles under sagging skin. Fevered expression. Bulging pockets of bruising below his wide eyes. The face of mindless obsession, and though I’ve seen it in real men and women before, it was made for the kind of evil that was born into bad times.

I first saw a jake wearing that face after somebody set fire to the daycare on Seneca. Thirteen children burned. All three workers. It went up during nap time, and the monster they caught was a man. Just a man. 

His name was Emmet Barnes. His friends called him EB. He’d been setting fires all his life. In and out of jail for a drinking-in-public history much like mine, but no matter how long he held out, he always went back to the matches. Old cars. Abandoned houses. Barns full of hay. The Wainwright Wee Wuns Daycare was not his typical target, but when he ducked under the porch roof after it started to drizzle, he noticed the dark inside.

He said it was so quiet, he didn’t know the kids were still there. But when they started screaming, he stayed to hear what he called their sweet chorus. The first responder saved his life. Pulled him away from the fire before he could burn up too, and when he resisted, they thought he had been trying to save the children inside, but no. He only wanted to listen.

I walked so much that summer, my mystery money couldn’t keep me in shoes. It’s when I truly became a fixture of this town. Visitors don’t get the authentic Wainwright experience if they don’t go by the Memorial, or have kegs and eggs at Old Marie’s, or see Casey Marlowe humping it across Main Street.

Once I experience a thing, I remember it forever. Walking is a way to make me feel like I’m leaving those memories behind. Especially stories about an arsonist staying at the scene to listen to the children burn. Just one of a million fucking things I want out of my head.

But I didn’t see the face of true evil when I saw Emmett EB Barnes. That was when I saw a jake become real for the first time. An actualized being with mindless purpose. Not a feeling or a storm, but a creature created to manifest the fears of parents losing sleep to worry.

A new memory to walk away from.

It often rains when the jakes get restless. The human imagination isn’t creative enough to conjure a demon during the bright sunshine. It’s always in the gray and dreary light filtered through heavy clouds.

Many people stay inside when the weather turns, but I always go out when it rains. All because of Terrance Newton. 

A little black boy with the smile of an angel but the laugh of a grown man. His head was almost perfectly round. 

His murder brought the town low. Not just because such a bright light had gone out, but the brutality with which it was extinguished.

Then Barney Jackson. A small boy with floppy brown hair. Then Franklin Keen. Then Joseph Weller.

And every time, the murderer had been seen as plain as day … but nobody could describe what he looked like. For some reason, they couldn’t remember his face.

When I saw him walking through the chill drizzle at the edge of the trees behind the BP station, I figured out why.

He had no face. At least, no human face. It was a churning cauldron of flesh. Like mixing blood into hot taffy. But underneath was the jake. The focused need of a manifestation created for chaos.

I stood back then the same as I stand now. Frozen in terror. I am not brave, but my mother was, so I take a step to mirror his earlier move, and like so many years ago, the jake darts away.

Behind the gas station, he ran from me in fear. The shock of being recognized. At the carnival, he runs because the girl runs. Blonde braids streaming behind her as something grabs her attention. A bright light or a squeaking balloon animal. And she goes down the center of the street so fast. Feet splat-splatting along the ground, moving in a blur as if the kitty boots don’t even touch it.

I didn’t follow the jake into the woods. I have a long scar going from sternum to dick root that kept me from going after him. Fool me once and all that.

Nope, I went to the cops. Officer Pritchard, in fact. I’ve had my share of run-ins with local police. They don’t like me, but they tolerate me, and although that’s a mystery, I’ll sure as hell take it. But Pritchard is always busting balls.

A bit undersized, like me. But where my face is all angles, his is round and puffy. A constant look of distraction pinches the skin around his eyes and mouth. Where I have resigned myself to my childhood, he has dug himself free of his past, and it has made him a severe asshole.

I’ll give him credit, though. His apologies always seem genuine. Sorry to have to take you in, Case, but you’re drunk. Like he didn’t really want to do it. And maybe he doesn’t. Like he can see the strain of being in the imaginary hell inside the true hades of jail. 

The jakes in that place are special. Every wall crawling with decades of fear and hate, and all the things evil and desperate men imagine for each other rising out of the dark in every corner, under every rusty metal bed frame. Bursting like clotting blood out of the morning oatmeal.

It must have been the look on my face — the feeling in the town — but he let me ride in the front seat that time. 

He kept his lights off as he swung around the built-in car wash. No sirens. Only the rumbling engine and the crunching gravel under the tires. The wonk wonk of the wipers.

We didn’t know what was in those woods, but going in seemed right. He never told me to stay in the car, and I didn’t even try. My mother was in my legs by then, and she would never have let me. 

So I followed and learned that a jake could be killed. 

Pritchard found him sitting in a clearing scraped out of the brush. Rocking back and forth with a tiny sweater held up to his featureless head like he was inhaling the scent of the murdered child it had once kept warm, and Pritchard shot him in the neck. Another bullet in his chest after his hands dropped the sweater. Fingers clawing at the spray of blood.

A final bullet between his splayed legs, and I truly don’t remember which one of us was screaming.

Pritchard became a local hero, he stopped watching me so damn close, and I got at least one free drink a night for a month at Old Marie’s.

Every once in a while, he pulls up alongside me and asks if I’ve seen anything. There’s a weight to that word that neither of us acknowledges, and mostly, I tell him no.

I wish he was here so I could shout, "Yes! Holy shit, yes, do I see something now!"

I feel the jakes over my shoulder. I guess I can call them my jakes at this point. Always there in the shadows to set me off balance with a howling ghoul in the mirror or a rotting face in my bologna, but this time, they felt like a gathering storm. Like an electrical charge building in the air around me.

A tumble of screeching monsters drawn by my wake, and the carnival crowd turns away. Like you would turn your back to a cold wind, and the path to the jake opens up. I race to catch him, and I can see the little blonde braids swing back and forth just out of his reach.

The people in this fucking town. Willfully ignorant to the suffering of each other. A hospital full of abused children. Standing for a century before a girl, barely a woman musters enough pain and guilt to make it all stop.

And they built a memorial to honor the very dead who continued the systematic abuse. A tour of the grounds dotted by points of interest. A plaque describing the good and brave men and women that worked so hard to save these troubled youths. I’m the only one from Wainwright ever to go there. The landscapers are all from Canton. Two towns over.

Chapter Four

The center of the main thoroughfare opens wide as if the crowd is the Red Sea, and the little girl is an Israelite. So who represents the Romans? Me or the jake?

My mother ignores the question. Drives me forward. My gut rumbles in protest. A heavy slosh of booze and sugar. A warm beer on top of it all. I might have to stop and vomit just to get my weight down enough to move faster.

My mother clamps down on that thought, and she’s right. As the people turn their backs on us, it’s clear there will be no help. 

My jakes gain ground, and I actually see them surge around me. A roiling mass of horrors connected to my fear and panic.

The little girl looks back. I don’t know what makes her do that. Maybe she felt us bearing down. Maybe she hears the panting breath from that jake behind her. 

The sounds of the carnival fall away. As if I’m rising above it. I only hear my own heartbeat and all the jakes giving voice to my subconscious from behind me, and the jake in front of me raises his knife. 

The girl’s face sags in confusion as her mind tries to forget what had just held her attention so it can ponder this strange new thing, and the knife cuts through the air as the jake brings it down in a desperate arc.

My feet are like her kitty boots. Skimming the ground as I launch into a tackle. The crumpled can is still in my fist. Beer splatters into my eyes.

I hit him flat on the back with my face smashed into the folds of cloth between his shoulder blades. He smells like composting grass, and then I only smell blood as my nose crunches, and light fills my eyes.

I barely register the little girl’s scream. My ears fill with the grunts of the jake as we tumble to the ground. Both of my elbows hit the asphalt, and my teeth clack shut on my tongue. Blood from my nose and my mouth. I’m drowning.

Sputtering breath as I gasp for air, and I roll away from the jake to look up at the sky. It seems to spin, like the lights on the merry-go-round, and I turn my head to puke a jet of frothy beer and stringy lines of artificial blue coloring into the street.

The jake scampers next to me, and I roll through my vomit to get away from what I know is coming. A slash from that curved knife. The little girl’s blood making a glittering arc as it comes for my throat.

But my fear is only in my imagination. He’s just getting to his knees, where he sways like the drunk that I am. He looks from side to side with a what the fuck face, and then he grunts to his feet.

My jakes close in to form a tornado of souls around us. Through the writhing throng, I see the little girl walking in a small circle of her own. Her face creases in terror. Her mouth opens to cry out.

There doesn’t seem to be any blood on her, but I can’t be sure. 

The jake turns toward me, and I see his knife. Dry as before, and I sag in relief. I stopped him. I saved the little girl. My mother clasps her hands in front of her face. Her tearing eyes are so full of love and pride.

My jakes close in. Tighten the circle, and the sounds of the carnival rise to penetrate the swirl. Around and around, and I step toward the spin, like a leaf lifting off the ground to follow the path of eddies blowing through the gutter.

The jake’s gaze widens when he finally gets his bearings. Looks up from the eye of the storm. Flinches back when bloody hands reach for him. Tentacles. Grinning gargoyles spreading their wings. Mutant hornets buzzing the tower of his head.

I’ve never seen anything like it. I probably look as confused as he does, but I quickly recover. Caught up in their current. Then the jake follows suit, and we circle each other. Like adversaries in a gonzo kung-fu movie. Our tournament ring is made from imagination become real. 

Only we can see it, and I suddenly realize only he needs to be afraid. They’re my jakes, after all. I put my hand in my pocket. Nice and slow, like I’m afraid to spook him, but really, I just don’t know what to do.

My fingers close around the switchblade I carry. A gift from a mugger. Two alleys over from Old Marie’s, and he steps out from behind a dumpster. This knife switched open and ready to use. I was stumbling drunk as usual, so I’m not even sure what he said. I remember everything that ever happens to me, but my memory is really only as good as my sobriety.

The knife in my face was threat enough, though.

My jakes grew behind me. I didn’t tell them to … they just took it on their own to protect me? 

The mugger’s mouth fell open, and his fingers loosened. I don’t know what he saw rising behind me, but it was enough to make him forget about little ol’ me, so I kicked him in the balls as hard as I could.

He wheezed over my ankle like one of those blow-up punch clowns with a hole in it, and I caught my balance as his face hit the greasy alley. He probably got an infection in that gash that opened in his eyebrow when he headbutted the ground, but I got a shiny new knife.

I laid my pinky open when I tried to close it, but a downpour split the sky as if it showed up just to wash the blood away.

I danced the whole way back to the Stay Right. Sang all the songs from Singin’ in the Rain. My mother and me? We make a great duet.

I never use the knife, but it’s always with me, and standing there with it in my hand, I still don’t know what to do with it. The jake’s eyes widen even more. He wipes his nose on his sleeve and watches my hand as my finger works the button to the right spot. Click, and the blade flashes out.

It’s like he has a rocket up his ass. He jumps forward with a battle cry that stops my heart, and I barely have time to slash with my little knife before we’re tangled up in each other’s arms. Rolling on the ground toward a patch of grass. 

I think there’s a waffle fry cart there because I smell vinegar.

We come to a stop, and the jakes that had surrounded us break apart into wisps of dark smoke. They flutter away like torn tissues, and the carnival crashes into my senses like I jumped into a river of it. Still, nobody looks at us. Heads are tipped up to look at the Ferris wheel lights. 

The stars seem to brighten for a moment, then they dim into the dark sky.

I look to both sides, but the little girl is gone. An ache in my chest takes my breath. I sigh, and more blood floods my mouth. I look down, and the curved blade is in me.

The jake is dazed. He rises up in confusion. Slaps his hand to a trickle of blood flowing down his face. That’s all I did with my switchblade? Just a scratch on his cheek?

The jake looks down at me with a snarl. He straddles me, and I am my mother, suffering beneath a man I can’t see.

He grabs the handle of his knife, and I wince with anticipation, but there is no pain. Just an icy numbness and I hear my jakes below me. No longer in this world, but through the Gossamer and waiting.

Blood pulses out of me from the hole in my heart. A spray that fills the jake’s eyes. He flinches back, and I take a final bubbling breath. Buck my hips to throw him off balance, and when he folds forward, I push up and wrap my arms around him. I imagine the crowd cheering me on. Chanting my name.

My breath leaves my body as surely as my life does, and I fall out of reality. The jake falls with me, and I smile. Again, I beat him. I saved the little girl.

And I can finally rest.

As we fall into the Gossamer, in an embrace as tight as any lover’s, we both fade. The energy that animated him bursts from his body in electric waves, and I feel the black surround me. Now, I will die.

I feel the sad shake of my mother’s head, and she whispers.

If only.

Chapter Five

I wake up to the worst hangover of my worthless life. A blinding sheet of agony. Like my skin was made of pain.

It feels like my head is hollow, and when I crack open my eyelids, the light shines in to illuminate the back of my skull. My mother can make shadow puppets when she gets up.

I hear her laugh, and in spite of the cramps along my jaw, I smile.

I try to ask what happened, but the words won’t form on my tongue. They’re barely even thoughts, and in what would usually be the stark clarity of memory, there is only a blank. Like I traveled through time. From the moment when I sank into the Gossamer to the moment I realized I wasn’t dead.

A blink of a bloodshot eye.

I turn my head away from the sun streaming into the front window. I’m on my bed in my room at the Wainwright Stay Right. How I got here is a mystery for the jakes, but they ain’t talking. In fact, they ain’t making a single peep. Like they aren’t even there.

I dare to hope, and I open my eyes.

The first thing I see is my little buddy. Missy Hide.

She’s a small sock monkey. Darned and patched. Mismatched button eyes. Cute as shit, and the only thing of my mother’s to survive the Memorial Bombing. 

She fell from her constant grip to land beneath her when the wall blew in on top of her. They found Missy Hide when they freed my mother’s body from the aftermath. 

A firefighter named Tim Williams entered the nursery. The nurse scolded him for bringing his filth inside the hospital, but he shushed her with a placating hand. Dropped Missy Hide next to my head.

The little monkey was stained with blood and afterbirth and the ash-covered hands of a young firefighter who quit to become a teacher at a daycare.

He would die many years later during nap time, but he started his new career with a child in need of comfort, and boy was I ever comforted.

Sometimes, I talk to Missy Hide, and in my imagination, she talks back. But not now. Her lips are sewn shut.

Where is everybody?

My heart pounds at the sound of the voice that whips my head around. Regret follows the nausea that turns the earth beneath me, and I clamp my teeth against the heaving of my guts.

The wet hissing crack of a beer can tab, and the vertigo is banished in a flood of saliva. My eyes spring open to let in the harsh light, and there on the ratty couch under the window is Dwayne. He is to reality what Missy Hide is to imagination.

My friend.

He’s got me by half a foot and fifty pounds. Skin the color of smoky quartz. A scar over his left eyebrow makes the eyelid droop. Half his face looks sleepy, and he always wears a dazed smile.

He leans back with the can to his lips. Takes a long, loud slurp. Waves a finger at the ceiling. I ain’t used to the quiet. What happened to ‘em?

That’s all the light I can stand, so I close my eyes on the tears. Lift a shaking hand to wipe the trail of drool from my cheek. I point to where I think he’s sitting, but the room starts spinning again. You got another one of those?

Of course.

His voice is soft. Rough like an old blanket. He speaks the way a mouse runs. A headlong rush along the baseboard. Then stop and sit up. Look around for danger before plunging back to the path.

I throw my legs over the edge of the bed. I don’t expect to feel the floor, but when they touch, I roll up to huddle over my knees. My elbows dig into my thighs, and my head feels like it’s brushing the carpet. A thousand pounds of regret.

I reach my hand out. Can I have one?

Of course, but you gotta get it yourself.

I let my hand fall to hang at my side. Why?

I don’t like my whining tone, but I’m also about to cry. I look up at him.

He shrugs. I don’t know.

You don’t know what?

He shrugs again, and his dazed smile becomes firm. I just feel like you should do it yourself.

Fine. 

He leans back and looks up at the ceiling. My nurse asked me to come up for a cup of coffee this morning.

Is that right?

He nods. Then he draws breath through his nose like he’s sniffing a cup full of the best part of waking up. But you’re my Bunbury. I told her maybe next time.

I push slowly to my feet. My thighs quiver from the effort, and I lock my knees at the top. Sweat springs out on my forehead. Slicks my back in crawling trails.

Dwayne looks like he’s trying to solve a complex equation in his head. Brows knotted. Lips pursed. He looks up at me with widening eyes, and his mouth relaxes back into his dazed grin. "Or maybe you’re hers."

I don’t have the energy to penetrate his nonsense. Instead, I turn toward the kitchenette. I swallow before I can speak again. Where is it?

I can hear Dwayne’s smile widen into a grin. It’s in the fridge. That’s where beer goes. In the fridge. Or maybe a glass. Or a mug. You ever drink beer from a mug?

I lift a foot that feels like a bag of concrete. Slide it along the floor so the toe of my boot won’t catch, and I force my head up. Open my eyes.

The little fridge is on the other side of a peninsula counter that separates the rooms from each other. I convince myself I can make it, and I feel my mother stir in my thoughts. Greeting the morning with a yawn and a stretch.

I glance over at Dwayne’s expectant face. Yes, I’ve had beer from a mug before.

He leans forward and tips his head. How was it?

I shrug as I turn back. Better.

"I knew it. The right tool for the job, you know. What happened to you?"

I sigh with relief when I grab the edge of the counter. I died.

Dwayne is silent as I make it around to the fridge. I brace my core as I bend to open it up and fish my hand inside—cold aluminum with a sheen of condensation. My heart sings.

My mother shakes her finger at me, but I just nod. We both know I’ll never change.

I crack the beer and knock it back in one go. It’s some of that three-two bullshit from the IGA, but like an odometer that rolls back to all zeros, my whole morning settles into normal. Like a reset.

I sigh my pleasure and stand up straight. My spine adjusts with rattling cracks, and I almost laugh, but the clarity of memory fills my mind, and I can’t be happy just now.

Dwayne sets his own empty on the floor between his feet and sits up with both hands out like a catcher. I pull two more cans out and whip one his way. He makes a soft catch, and we crack them open in harmony.

He smacks his lips with pleasure. You don’t look dead.

I acknowledge what he says with a nod. Imagine my disappointment.

How come?

How come what?

He shakes his head, and his brows knit in confusion. What?

I shrug again. I don’t know, man. I went to the carnival because my mother wanted some cotton candy.

His face brightens. Hey, tell her I said hi.

She can hear you.

His mouth falls open in a rueful grin. That’s right. He waves. Hi, Miss Marlowe.

I feel her hug herself with bashful arms. I roll my eyes. She says hi too.

He flops back into the couch and lifts his beer again. But then he pauses. Lifts a finger to point at the ceiling. So where are they, then?

I stand still. Strain to listen to something more than my rumbling stomach. Look at the dark under the bed. And nothing. 

I look at Missy Hide. I don’t know.

She still doesn’t say anything. 

I drop my gaze to my shirt, expecting to see the horror show of my murder, but it looks as fresh as when I donned the thing yesterday. Did I dream it?

I don’t realize I said it out loud until Dwayne laughs. God dreamed the world into being, so why not?

I shake my head. There’s a tuft of cotton candy stuck to the teeth of my jacket’s zipper. I’m not God.

Yeah, but you’re made in His image.

"So are you."

He sits up with surprise. That’s right.

We seem to have better imaginations than God, though. All He ever created was man. Gave us free will so we could choose. And some of the shit we choose, man …

Pritchard rolled up on me one morning in October of ’95. I’d been walking most of the night after making the mistake of seeing the movie Se7en the day before. My jakes took advantage of that shit for sure. It was weeks before I stopped seeing a naked fat man rushing at me from the dark with bloody vomit spewing down his front. 

Or that zombie guy with air fresheners hanging off him. I can still smell that pine crap trying to cover the stench of open wounds and human shit.

Instead of asking me if I’d seen anything, he told me to get in. Popped the front door. I knew it was serious if he was letting me ride in the front again.

We drove in near silence out to the west side, where the run-down concrete surrendered to weeds and trees. Like the city acquiescing to nature. Eventually, we hit cornfields and the reek of cows. Jacob Michael’s dairy farm.

He’d long ago leased his farm to some corporation to stay at home with his dementia-suffering wife. They both looked a quarter-millennium old between the two of them. Mom was fascinated by all the wrinkles. She was still just a kid, really.

Pritchard stopped his cruiser a couple of yards before the old man’s porch. Killed the engine, and before I could ask what the fuck was going on, he pointed at the well in the center of the front yard. Pretty, stacked stone in a neat circle covered by a cedar peak. A bucket hanging from a rope twisted around a crank axle. The picture of quaint country living.

Except for the green glow shining up out of its depths. The creep of swirling mist. The smell of rotting milk.

The well was full of brownies. And not the kind you eat.

Old Man Michael went out there to fetch a pail of water, and caught a tiny arrow in the dead center of his nose. Good thing it wasn’t a full-sized arrow, or he might’ve bought the farm. It seems his wife was Scottish, and her failing mind imagined the folklore of her youth to become true. Her mind was nothing but fear and despair and half-remembered reality.

She knew her husband’s land was cursed. Visited by spirits from her ancestral home. The only thing her diseased dreams could think to do was a gift of cream. For two weeks, she poured it into the well as an offering.

I have since learned that brownies aren’t evil or even very mean unless angered. But these little fuckers were pissed.

And I went down that well. Clinging to old iron pipe handholds set into the rock. The bottom opened up into a dark glowing fairy underworld, and they came for me, but they were incomplete manifestations from a mind slowly forgetting the world.

I came back up covered in their black blood and spoiling curds. A dozen tiny arrows hung from my face like junkie needles. I had squished brownies between my fingers. My own blood dripped down my face and neck. My switchblade covered so thick with dead fairy, it wouldn’t close.

Pritchard made me sit in the back on the way home.

Chapter Six

I have developed a habit of not caring. Not paying attention. I rarely have a desire to solve any mysteries and usually give up easily. I’m not lazy. I’m just in a kind of holding pattern. So many years of waiting for the next fucking thing has ruined my ability to anticipate. To be surprised. 

I hold my free hand up to slow this conversation down. I dreamed I saved a little girl last night.

It doesn’t sound right. It can’t be right. But like Dwayne asked, where are the jakes? I feel my mother shrug, and she sits down to think about flowers. I smell honeysuckle. 

I set the beer down and run my hands down my body. Not a cut. No drying blood. Not even a sore spot. Then my hand drops to my pocket.

My knife’s gone.

Dwayne sets the second empty by the first, and he looks around like he’ll find the switchblade with just his eyes. Where did you see it last?

In my hand.

Yeah, but where?

Like I said. At the carnival.

He stands up. Then let’s go there and find your dream. Or your knife.

Okay.

But let’s have another beer first.

Sure.

I drink the rest of the open beer on the counter and a fresh one. Cross the room on legs steadier than when I woke up. Splash water on my face and comb my hair. My eyes have black hollows beneath them.

I expect a hand to rush out from under my bed. Blood to drip down the walls. A limbless torso to tumble out of the cupboard. Every little sound is louder without the cacophony of the jakes.

I didn’t know the fridge made that hissing rattle every time it shut off. I wonder if I shout every conversation, like a teenager wearing headphones. Yelling their answer to every question until people just stop asking.

I leave with Dwayne pulling the door shut behind us. A fresh can of beer rides in the left pocket of my jacket. Just like last night. 

The sun is at our backs as we cut through the gap between the motel and the crumbling stucco of an old Taco Bell. It moved a couple years ago across from the Sloppy’s out by the mall, and good riddance. I’m as sick of that bug-eyed dog in the commercials as I am that Prince song.

The one I heard last night before I died.

I can’t think of what to say. We walk without talking as I replay what happened in my head. I remember everything, but it seems … distant. Not like a memory, but like a hazy dream.

I am gripped with the possibility that the doctors have all been right about any number of mental disorders, breaks with reality, I might be suffering from. My mother perks up, and I see what she wonders. If that’s the case, then maybe I’m getting better. After all, the jakes are gone.

But then again, talking to your dead mother who resides in your mind, like an Oedipal imaginary friend, might not be the best proof of improvement.

We near the center of town, and houses give way to businesses. The alleys widen.

It’s Wednesday … or maybe still Tuesday if last night was a dream. I look up at Dwayne. Hey, what day is it?

Today.

I throw my hands up. Thanks a lot.

He grins. You’re welcome.

I can smell the drift of the breakfast diner next to the pharmacy. And fresh coffee. My stomach growls. My mother agrees.

I chuckle. She never got her funnel cake.

Dwayne claps his hands. I fucking love funnel cake.

And there it is, at the big field. The red and yellow cart at the edge of the carnival. Dark and shuttered, it looks like an old circus train car.

I remember standing there in line. Looking at Mother Margot’s red smiling face as she dished out fried bread like it was her life’s only passion. 

I look up and down Main Street. Some pedestrians down the way to the left, but to the right is the carnival. Silent and lifeless. The rides are folded in on themselves. The booths all closed up like they’re ready for an invasion.

Trash flutters by.

Temporary metal railings close the field and the carnival on it, but there’s plenty of room for a couple of guys just looking to wander around, so I step through.

It feels weird to be inside during the bright of morning, with nobody there. Like I’m inside a store after it closes.

I walk to the funnel cake cart, and I stand with my eyes closed. I was right here.

Dwayne repeats me. Right here.

I reach into my pocket and pull out the sweating beer can. I drank a beer.

Me too.

We both crack our cans and start on our fourth beer of the morning. Then, I saw her.

The little girl you saved?

I spin and squint into the sun that spills around him like a burning aura. How did you know about her?

He tips his head, and the sun hits me full force. You told me when we were back home.

Did I? For the life of me, I can’t remember.

Sure, Dwayne says, and he drains his can. He crushes it in his fist and drops it in a steel trash barrel crawling with bees. It rings off the side wall like a gong.

We turn as one to face the end of the thoroughfare, and I sidestep to stand in the center. I straddle the yellow line. 

Then we ran.

Dwayne stands next to me. To the Ferris wheel?

No, but that direction.

I take a step, and I hear a skittering across the ground, like a paper bag blown by the wind. I look down, and I almost cry out. So much for getting better. It’s a giant spider with a deformed baby’s head and its legs clickety-clack as it ducks under the rear axle of the funnel cake cart.

The sun seems to dim, and the breeze sounds like a death rattle.

I’ve never had a morning like this, and I wipe the tears from my eyes as I march down the midway, retracing the steps of the jake I chased.

"I did save her," I whisper.

Dwayne doesn’t respond.

We get to the spot where it happened, and I see it. A stain on the ground. The slight shadow of the Messenger Tide in the shape of my body. Like a snow angel made from ectoplasm. I point. That’s where I went through. That’s where I killed the jake that was after that little girl.

I close my eyes and smell the fetid stink of death.

You shouldn’t be here, a voice says, and it’s not until I open my eyes again that I’m sure it wasn’t the voice of a jake coming back into reality.

It’s a man. Thin but wide-shouldered. Khaki pants and a white shirt. His friendly grin is so full of teeth, it almost seems like the leer of a vampire, and he tips his head back and wags his eyebrows as if he’s reading my mind.

My mother hangs back in the dark, peeking around the corner.

The man regains his composure, and he is suddenly less of what my fear can make him. He is suddenly normal. Deep lines in his face trace the history of his laughter. A man who loves to be happy. My confusion lowers my guard, and I smile back.

He brings a hand up, and at first, I think he wants to shake, but he’s holding my knife. Folded closed. Flashing with reflected light from his palm.

That leering grin again. Arched eyebrows. I think this belongs to you.

Chapter Seven

Harrison Leach, the man says with a nod. Owner and operator of all you see.

Instead of introducing myself, I glance around with what I know is a dumb fuck look on my face. What’s it called? 

Mine, he says, and that grin seems impossibly wide. Too many teeth. Row after row. His eyebrows lift, coming to wicked points.

Then he turns into the sun, and the light changes his expression into jovial glee. A look I want to copy, and my lips stretch to match his without my conscious input.

I don’t take my knife, so he uses the blade to punctuate his words. Naming things gives them power, he says, and he throws his arm over my shoulder. His accent sounds like New York. My ear isn’t good enough to know which part, or even if I’m right.

A jake peeks from behind the scale of a high striker. A gauze-covered face soaked with yellow fluid. It seems hesitant to show itself. Like the way my mother is keeping quiet in the back of my mind. Like an abused dog shying away from an outstretched hand.

But, Harrison continues, "if you want the thing to have the power of the thing and not the power of the name, then just call it what it is. The Carnival."

That makes sense, Dwayne says.

Harrison’s grin closes into a satisfied smile. His hand squeezes my shoulder, and I suddenly have a thirst. A deep desire to wet my tongue with the burn of something strong. I want to wipe the sweat from my brow, but Harrison leans into me to steer me through a row of colorful tents.

I hear the low bass note of a beastly growl. Like the earth itself is angry at our passage. A jake underfoot.

And I feel my own voice vibrate in a whisper I try keeping to myself. I don’t like being touched. Partly inherited from my mother. Mostly a need to keep something about my life my own. 

The jakes invade my space enough. I don’t need it violated any more. Especially by strangers, but something about Harrison Leach settles me. Like being in a strange place, but hearing a loved one’s voice in the distance.

I tell you, Casey— Then, before I can ask how he knows my name, he steps aside and covers his heart with his hand. His smile falters for the first time, and his brows draw down in concern. Or do you prefer Mr. Marlowe?

Dwayne’s laugh sounds like a wet cough. "Mr.