Sins of the Fathers Read online

THIRTY

  JEREMY HAD ONCE been a boy. A child of uncanny brilliance and potential to be sure, but a normal child in the ways that matter. Now, he was a cored-out shell, a suit of nerve endings, skin and muscle fiber—a play costume for a demon. The boy that had been Jeremy Mason existed in a state between dream and consciousness. From time to time he would connect with the reality in which his abused frame existed, the bedroom wavering into focus just long enough for him to feel excruciating pain. Then it was gone as he fled back to the dream. It didn’t hurt there. At least, not physically.

  He walked over a moonscape of blasted, friable rock skimming the edges of slag-rimmed craters so deep he lost the bottoms in a haze. The Abyss was at the bottom of those canyon-like holes. He knew that quote about staring into the abyss too long and having it stare back. That was Nietze. Neet-zuh or Neechy, he still wasn’t sure how to say that guy’s name. He had written Mensch unt Ubermensch. Man and Superman. Jeremy had given that one a try last year but put it down. Philosophy was pretty neat, but not as cool as physics. Boy, what he wouldn’t give to be Superman right now. He could just fly right off this dead place, this skin stretched over the Abyss.

  It wasn’t that he was lonely, or really even all that scared. He was scared. Shitting bricks, if you wanted to be honest. It was just that he was used to it. His regular life was one big study in scary most of the time. This nightmare wasn’t any worse than that. In fact, it was kind of better. Jeremy didn’t have to worry about his father, or school, or bullies in this place. It was more like a big waiting area here, like being stuck between rooms. He did miss Rosario and watching Star Trek Next Gen. And he missed Mr. Horton. When Jeremy woke up he would have to tell Mr. Horton all about this. It was the strangest nightmare he’d ever had. If he could just get over the feeling that he was walking on top of a big lake of emptiness everything would be okay. Well, if he could get rid of that and the dead woman.

  She had been following him for the past... Jeremy stopped and stared at his dirty feet. How long had he been here anyway? He had no concept of the passage of time here in the waiting room. It was actually one of the nicer features. The dead woman had been with him almost from the start, though, he was pretty sure about that.

  Jeremy attempted a casual glance over his right shoulder, brushing his face against his shirt like he was just scratching his cheek. There she was: a woman with light hair and a kind face. Her skin was shark-colored and puffy, stretching against her bones in some places, sort of pooling in others. Her sundress clung to her, the dye long since bled away. A small puddle of water gleamed at her feet. She caught him looking and winked.

  Jeremy started walking again. It felt better if he was moving. The dead woman hadn’t tried to talk to him or touch him or anything, but it was really icky to have her back there like that. Whenever he turned around to check she’d be there just hanging out, keeping tabs. He’d tried to talk to her once, screwing up his courage and saying “Hi.” The dead woman had smiled, her head tipped to one side and her eyes bright with tears. It might have been water, he couldn’t be sure because he freaked and turned back around too soon. When she’d smiled a whole bunch of black water had trickled from her nose.

  Jeremy didn’t think she was there to hurt him or anything. Kind of the opposite really. It felt like she was his guardian angel or whatever. Pretty lame-ass guardian angel, he knew, a soaking-wet dead lady. He glanced back again and she gave him a small wave. Definitely lame-ass, but still, there was something familiar about her. Safe. And safety was something he was fresh out of.

  Jeremy wondered what this place was all about. Was it a parallel dimension? Einstein had talked about there being something like twenty-six different dimensions and that human beings lived in just the third. And Hawking, oh boy, he talked about the possibility of infinite dimensions. That was all quantum mechanics and had something to do with potentiality. Jeremy had been reading A Brief History of Time when whatever was happening to him started, and he’d stuck on that part of the book. He’d gone over it and over it, the concept of parallel dimensions branching off from every single moment hummed for him.

  As far as he could wrap his mind around it, the deal was like someone running into a fork in the road: the person goes left and sets off a chain of events. But it doesn’t stop there. Another person, or the quantum potential of another person—this is where it got kind of hard—goes to the right fork setting off a whole bunch of consequences too. And every single one of those consequences branches off into other quantum potentialities and it just keeps going. So what you end up with is the idea that all things that can happen do happen no matter how improbable, and that we experience what we experience because we choose to do so, like picking out a series of events because they make sense.

  Jeremy had been reading under his favorite oak tree at school when he’d reached that conclusion. He wondered if you could choose an alternate experience.

  Jeremy had stared hard at three boys who were over by the fence doing their best to hide a shared cigarette. Could he choose to experience the reality in which these kids had tufts of grass growing out of their heads instead of hair? He squinted his eyes and balled up his fists. Nothing had happened, but he didn’t give it up. He’d looked skyward, trying to make the clouds break up, and thought that maybe he was making headway, but that maybe it was also just wishful thinking. Jeremy wondered then if there people walking around who had mastered the ability to choose, if they were hiding among the rest of us.

  It was around then—as he thought more and more of the people who might be hiding, choosing their realities—that he’d found himself wandering the broken fields of the waiting room. Could this place have something to do with alternate reality and choice?

  Jeremy stopped. He checked over his shoulder for the dead woman. Yep, there she was, head to one side, expectant. He looked forward again and exhaled. He set his mouth and faced her. The dead woman looked at him with what might have been a species of pride. It was hard to read her water-logged features. Jeremy took a deep breath and raised his voice.

  “I choose for you to speak.”

  The dead woman opened her mouth and coughed a gout of brackish fluid. She bent over at the waist and hacked for what seemed like a long time, more dark liquid splashing her fishy white feet. When her retching finally ceased, she straightened and stood, a little wobbly, with her hands on her hips. She turned her head to the side, hawked and spat a glorious wad of something Jeremy could go the rest of his life never seeing again and be perfectly happy about it.

  “Thank you,” she said, her voice clear and warm. “That was driving me crazy. I’ve been wanting to talk to you for so long, Jeremy.” Now her pride in him was unmistakable. “I knew you’d start to figure it out.”

  Jeremy felt himself starting to smile but caught it. “Thanks,” he said, standing up a little straighter. “Now, that I’ve decided you can talk, I have some questions for you.”

  Her eyes sparkled “Shoot.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Your head.”

  “Huh?”

  “You never left Kansas, Dorothy.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re good at that one, know any others?”

  Jeremy stared, blinked. “Okay, wait, so…” he swept his arm across the landscape. “You’re saying that this is a dream or something?”

  She nodded. “Or something.”

  “So it’s not a dream.”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s whatever you want it to be, Jeremy.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You do. Or rather, you can if you want to. If you choose to.”

  Jeremy’s face lit, his eyes sly. “Ohhhh, so this is like, what? Quantum Land?”

  “If that’s what you say it is.”

  He frowned. “That’s annoying.”

  She smiled with maddening serenity. “It�
��s whatever you want it to be. If you want me to be annoying, I’m annoying.”

  “You’re not real, are you? None of this is.”

  “Care to define ‘real’, quantum boy?”

  Jeremy squinted at the dead woman, trying to find the live person under that pale tissue. “I know you from somewhere.”

  “You do. That’s right,” she said. “But you never saw me like this.” She plucked at her sundress, leaving a pucker of wet fabric. “I’m what you know deep down happened to me.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “On some level you do.” She grew stern. “Leave it alone, though, Jeremy. You don’t need to unearth me any more than you already have. It wouldn’t be healthy for you. You’re in enough trouble already.”

  “What’s going on?” he whined. He hated how he sounded, but he was just a scared kid. Dammit, he was allowed to whine a little wasn’t he?

  “Whine all you want. Just make sure you’re brave when the time comes, that you make the right choice.”

  “Hey! I didn’t say that.” He took a step back. “You can read my mind.”

  “I am your mind.”

  “I still don’t—”

  “You’re here because you want to be. Someone gave you the choice and this is the path you decided to walk down.”

  “But I didn’t choose anything.”

  The dead woman looked at her feet. “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I don’t want this!” Jeremy shouted.

  She made as if to reach out to him, to place her hand on his shoulder and pull him to her breast, but pulled back, fingers wilting. “Oh, sweetie, when that’s true you’ll be able to leave.”

  Tears warmed his cheeks. “How long ‘til that happens?” The weight of his sadness pressed Jeremy’s head down, his chin almost on his boney, little boy’s chest. He sobbed. “I can’t take much more of this.”

  “Then it shouldn’t be long,” the dead woman promised. “Just make the right choice.”

  Jeremy looked up, his eyes huge and wet. “How will I know what that is?”

  “That’s the easy part,” she said. “It’ll be the one that hurts the most.”

  Jeremy closed his eyes and shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he whispered. When the dead woman didn’t answer, Jeremy opened his eyes. Two wet footprints darkened the gray rock, but she was gone.

  Jeremy turned all the way around, twirling almost like a kid trying to make himself dizzy, but all he found was the ragged, rolling landscape. “Hey!” he called. “Dead lady!”

  Nothing. Not even an echo.

  Jeremy sniffed and wiped at his nose. Some lame-ass guardian angel she was. Talking to her had been like talking with the Night of the Living Dead version of Mr. Miyagi from the Karate Kid. He kicked a piece of rock with his toe and watched it skitter across the hard ground. The fragment smacked into a small boulder and flaked into dust. Jeremy moped over and sat down. The rock was warm, but not warmer than his skin, as if the ground and his body shared the same temperature. “Yuck,” he muttered, but sitting felt good so he put up with it. He squinted down at his rock tuffet and sneered. “You start talkin’ like her and I’ll fart on you.”

  The rock did not talk.

  Jeremy giggled. A fart joke was still a fart joke no matter what dimension you’re stuck in. He sighed. The laugh dried up the last of his tears, but he was still here. He sat up straight and slapped the tops of his thighs. Okay, where was here? The dead woman had said that here was wherever he wanted it to be. He looked around at the rock and bleak sky. The rim of one of those craters puckered on the near horizon. The air was sterile. He wanted this? This sucked.

  Maybe he wasn’t seeing all of it, though.

  Jeremy looked at the tops of his smooth hands and concentrated. What else was this place? Maybe it was more than what it was. Maybe what he wanted was what this place wasn’t. His eyes opened wide, the thought thrumming a string of truth in his head. This place wasn’t school, or bullies, and it wasn’t home with his scary, double-edged father.

  Jeremy had never lived under the illusion that Frank Mason was a warm man, but lately he had begun to feel that his father thought of him more as a tool to some end rather than an actual human being. Sometimes like a tool that didn’t do what it was supposed to do. When Frank Mason looked at his son like that, Jeremy got a squirmy feeling in his stomach. And if his father looked at him like that before bedtime, Jeremy often had trouble sleeping. It didn’t feel safe to close his eyes.

  There had been times when Jeremy had woken up, as if disturbed by a ribbon of cold across his exposed brow, to find a silhouette standing in his bedroom door. He knew who it was, but not what he wanted. Jeremy would have given just about anything to satisfy his father. He’d worked hard at school, skipping through grades until his teachers and assignments conformed to him instead of he to them. He was silent as a mouse in his own room, so as not to disturb or arouse. He always answered questions, snapping to like a dutiful drummer boy. And he never asked questions, even the one he longed most to have answered: What do you want from me?

  If what the dead woman had said was true about him choosing this place, then he must have done it because it was safe. “Jeez, you’d a thought I would pick something a little more like Disney Land or somewhere.” Jeremy looked up and his breath caught.

  Someone was standing on the rim of the crater.

  It wasn’t the dead woman. Even at this distance he would have been able to make out the dress and the long hair. Besides, the silhouette was a different height—Jeremy’s height. The figure on the rim had seen him, it was staring in his direction. Jeremy thought about calling out and began to lift his hand in a wave.

  He stopped.

  Goosebumps gripped his scalp with cold claws. Something was very wrong. This person wasn’t a part of him like the dead woman had said she was. A python of cold air wound around Jeremy’s ankles. It was flowing off the person on the rim. He didn’t know how he could know that, but he did. He knew something else too. No choice of his would affect this newcomer. It belonged to itself.

  It beckoned, “Come here, boy,” its voice a whisper but clear and strong, as if it were standing right next to him.

  Running at this point would be good. Running made a lot of sense. Jeremy’s feet were freezing. How much colder would it be ten feet closer to this thing, or even touching it? Jeremy took a half step backward, eyes locked on the newcomer, ready to bolt.

  Then he got it. His shoulders slumped. It was giving him a choice: come closer or run. Now, he had to make the right choice. Which one was that?

  “The one that hurts the most,” he whimpered. “Crap.”

  The thing on the rim chuckled, a fall of pebbles in a dry wash.

  Jeremy clenched his jaw and his fists. Sooner or later he was going to run out of courage. Jesus, he was just a kid. This was too much. Sooner or later he was going to have to do what other kids are allowed to do and just sit down and cry. He took a step forward, the first step toward the hardest choice of his life.