Secrets 12

“This room is a mess,” I told Kevin. How are we going to fit everything here into one box?” I pointed to a cardboard carton lying next to my open bedroom door.

“You only gotta take what’s important,” Kevin said. The light coming in through the window shone through and onto his face, making him look almost angelic…almost.

I went over to my closet and began to rummage through my clothes. “I’m going to need a pair of shoes. I can’t wear the ones I have on.”

“Sean, you’re not gonna need shoes where you’re going.”

“Yeah, but I’m probably going to be gone a long time. I can’t wear the same thing everyday.”

“You wear your skin everyday don’t you?” Kevin asked.

I turned around and looked at him. “No, you do.”

Kevin smiled. I had forgotten how handsome he could be when he wasn’t trying so hard to be intimidating. “I’m already packed. My shit is downstairs. I’m gonna go down there and wait for you.”

The room started to grow cold, not a whole lot, but just enough to give me goose bumps. “No, you’re not. You’re going to leave me.”

“I wouldn’t leave you,” Kevin said. “You’re my brother. I wouldn’t go anywhere without you.”

I found the shoes I was looking for: a pair of expensive-looking brown leather shoes that looked as if they had been crafted in the early 1900s. “These were Granddaddy’s, weren’t they?”

“Probably,” Kevin said. “Sean, we really need to go soon and you haven’t even put one thing in that box yet.”

“I’m still not sure what to bring.”

“There’s really only one thing you need to bring,” Kevin said to me. “And you probably don’t even need that box to carry it with you.”

I thought I saw something small but fast move in the corner of my closet. When I looked closer I saw that it was nothing. I reached down into the pile of clothes all the way to the bottom, touching the closet floor, and my hand came across something round and metallic.

“Sean, let’s go,” Kevin said. He was more than a little agitated now.

“Wait a second,” I responded. “I think I found something.”

Whatever the thing was, I pulled it out of the pile of clothes and examined it. A watch. At least that’s what it looked like. It had twelve numbers on it, two hand dials, just like a watch, but the numbers were not in order; instead they read, starting from the top and going clockwise: 9, 13, 01, 10, 14, 02, 11, 15, 03, 12, 12, 04. The largest of the hands was on the 13, and the smallest on the 9. 9:13. I looked at watch on my wrist. It was 6:57. I whirled around to tell Kevin. “Kevin, you need to look at this!”

But he was gone. He left me. The box was still there, however, empty and waiting.

* * *

“How did you do that?” The doctor asked. He had dropped the pen he had been using onto the shiny white ground.

“Magic,” I told him.

He stood from his chair and took a few steps back. He was still looking at me with that mixture of apprehension and attraction. I could tell that he wanted to stop looking at me but he couldn’t. He was hypnotized by me, just like I wanted him to be.

“Just a trick of the light,” the doctor said. “That’s all it was.”

I took my right hand and just like an eraser against a chalkboard wiped the tattoo off my body as if it were just specks of dust that had settled on my skin. With my left hand I rubbed it softly across my chest and abs, causing the tattoo to reappear again. “Still believe it’s just a trick of the light?”

The doctor was more amazed than frightened this time. He bent down, retrieved his pen, and began to frantically write things down on his little notepad. I just looked at him amused.

“How come when you’re writin’ about me, you still refer to me as Sean, when he isn’t here?” I asked. “How come you only call me his ‘alter-ego’?”

“I…” The doctor was lost for words.

Without even being able to see his notes, I began to quote the words from his paper:

“Admitted 05-17-2004. Patient #3062/// Sean Timothy Brown: Age 18. Diagnosis: suffers from audio and visual hallucinations; strong sense of paranoia and feeling that he is being conspired against (paranoid schizophrenia); also suffers frequent moments of catatonia and Dissociative Amnesia (he is unable to remember significant moments from the last six years of his life—including the death of his parents and childhood friends Daniel Madison and Patrick Coleman). Lastly, patient seems to be experiencing a consistent state of fugue (confusion about self-identity or the assumption of a new identity). In this case, Sean has adapted a new persona, a highly aggressive, unpredictable, but intelligent alter-ego whom he calls (as made evident by journals found in his home) as Kevin Ford. The alter-ego of Ford is often provoked when Sean experiences strong feelings of anger, grief, and/or confusion…”

I stopped for a while to catch my breath and to enjoy the look of astonishment on the cute doctor’s face. “That’s a good analysis doc. You’re a smart dude. Hot and smart. Too bad none of that shit is true. I’m not alter-ego. I’m real as real can be.”

“If you’re real then what is Sean?” The doctor asked. “Maybe I have this all reversed. Maybe you’re not the alter-ego, maybe Sean is.”

“Close but still so far away,” I told him. “You keep using that word ‘alter ego’ like it means something and it doesn’t.”

“That’s the only thing that can explain…”

“What did I just show you, Doc…Jake?” I asked. The quick look of surprise that lit up in his green eyes when I said his name was enough to make my dick stiff. “Have you been paying attention? For someone who studied at Harvard and graduated in the top ten percent of his class, you really aren’t all that bright sometimes.”

“How do you know all of these things?” Jake asked me. His face was almost as white as the floor beneath our feet.

“Sit your cute little ass back down in that chair and let me tell you a story.”

* * *

He was trying to kill me. He was really trying to kill me. There was so much hate in his eyes. So much anger. This couldn’t have been Patrick but it was. I couldn’t breathe. At first I tried to fight back, but the more I fought, the tighter his grip around my neck got. I thought that maybe if I stopped struggling that maybe he would stop. He didn’t. I tried to open my mouth to say something, to beg him to stop, but nothing came out. My chest was burning and I could hear my heart beating in my ears, and still he squeezed.
“Fuckin’ liar,” he kept repeating. “He didn’t say that. He wouldn’t say that. You fuckin’ liar. If he can’t do it, then I will.”

I could feel the darkness start to creep in on all sides. It was coming soon. I was going to be dead soon, for real this time. And there would be no more coming back. I wouldn’t be able to find my way back this time. But then I thought of Kevin and what he had said to me just before Patrick had come over. His words echoed over and over again in my head, and they empowered me, gave me the strength I needed.

I slammed my forehead against Patrick’s as hard as it could, and it was just enough to cause his hands to loosen a little from around my neck. I did the same thing one more time and he cried out in pain, let go of me and stumbled backwards. There was no time to waste. I tackled him; hands balled up like rocks, and as hard as I could began to pummel his face with my fists. He tried to stop me, but I was filled with a fury that was strong that I became unstoppable. I punched him over and over until his mouth and nose were bloody. He stopped trying to fight back. His body went still, but he was still breathing. I got up off of him and stood.

And then something happened. It was like someone had turned off all the lights suddenly and the world went black. Everything. There was no sound, no movement, nothing, just complete darkness. Just as quickly as everything went dark it came rushing back, me standing over a bruised and battered Patrick, except this time I was holding a gun in my hand, the same gun Danny had used to kill himself, and I was pointing it directly at Patrick.

Patrick was looking up at me though swollen eyes. I had never seen him look as defeated and fearful as he was in that moment. And it was all because of me. I pulled back the hammer and aimed directly in the center of his chest. “Sean, please…” he begged. “Put the gun down. Please. Don’t shoot me. Sean, don’t kill me.”

I said something that I didn’t understand and would only understand until that last day in the garden. “How can I kill you when neither one of us was ever here?” I pulled the trigger. The gun went off loud and violent. At first I thought I had missed somehow, and then I saw the circle of blood on the center of Patrick’s chest that grew larger and redder by the second. Patrick was still moving, so I shot him again, this time in the stomach. He looked like he was in so much pain. There was a gurgling sound in his throat, as he choked on his own blood. I didn’t want him to suffer anymore so I shot him again, one last time, directly in his forehead. He went still immediately. The smoke drifting up from the nozzle slowly went upward to my nostrils. The whole room smelled of smoke and death.

Standing in the corner of the living room, among the shadows was someone I wasn’t expecting to see, but someone I should’ve been expecting to see the whole time: Rose. She was still wearing that red dress, the same color as Patrick’s blood, and that same demonic smile. “Now you can finally wake up,” she said.

To be continued...