I’m aware that sweat is streaming down my forehead. My entire body is shaking, and my vision has started to get dark around the edges. I’m having trouble breathing, and I can feel panic building in me, a claustrophobic, hemmed-in, suffocating feeling. My arm is shaking like a tree in a hurricane. Muscles spasm up and down it like a bagful of snakes. My hand gets closer and closer to the gun, until it’s hovering just above it, and now the shaking is huge, has moved to my entire body, and the sweat is everywhere.
I leap up from the chair, toppling it over backward, and scream.
I scream, and I beat my head with my hands, and I feel myself starting to sob, and I know he’s done it. He’s cracked me, split me open, torn my guts out. The fact that he’s done it to help me isn’t any comfort, none at all, because right now everything is pain, pain, pain.
I back away from his desk, to the left wall, sliding down it. I register that I am moaning as I do this, a kind of keening wail. It is a terrible sound. It hurts me to hear it, like it always has. It is a sound I’ve heard too many times before. The sound of a survivor who has realized that they’re still alive, while everything they love is gone. I’ve heard it from mothers and husbands and friends, heard it as they identified bodies in the morgue or got the news of death from my own lips.
I wonder that I can’t feel ashamed right now, but there’s no room for shame here. Pain has filled me up.
Dr. Hillstead has moved near me. He won’t hold me or touch me—that’s not good form for a therapist. But I can feel him. He is a crouched blur in front of me, and my hatred of him, at this moment, is perfect.
“Talk to me, Smoky. Tell me what’s happening.”
It is a voice so filled with genuine kindness that it sparks a whole new wave of anguish. I manage to speak, broken, sobbing gasps.
“I can’t live like this I can’t live like this no Matt, no Alexa, no love no life all gone all gone and—”
My mouth forms an O. I can feel it. I look up at the ceiling, grab my hair, and manage to rip out two handfuls by the roots before I pass out.
3
IT SEEMS STRANGE that a demon would speak with a voice like that. He stands nearly ten feet tall, he has agate eyes and a head covered with gnashing, crying mouths. The scales that cover him are the black of something that’s been burned. But the voice is twangy, almost Southern-sounding, when he speaks.
“I love to eat souls,” he says in a conversational tone. “Nothing like devouring something that was destined for heaven.”
I’m naked and tied to my bed, tied by silver chains, chains thin and yet unbreakable. I feel like Sleeping Beauty, written by accident into an H. P. Lovecraft story. Waking to a forked tongue against my lips rather than the soft kiss of a hero. I am voiceless, gagged with a scarf of silk.
The demon is standing at the foot of the bed, looking down at me as it speaks. It looks both at ease and possessive, staring at me with the look of pride a hunter gives a deer strapped to the hood of his car.
It waves the serrated combat knife it’s holding. The knife seems so small in those huge, clawed hands.
“But I like my souls well done—and spicy! Yours is missing something…maybe a dash of agony and a side of pain?”
Its eyes go empty, and black saliva that looks like pus dribbles from between its fangs, sliding along its chin and onto its huge and scaly chest. The demon’s absolute unawareness of this is terrifying. Then it smiles a leering smile, showing all those pointy teeth, and shakes a claw at me, playful.
“I have someone else here too, my love. My sweet, sweet Smoky.”
It steps aside to reveal my prince, the one whose kiss I should have awoken to. My Matt. The man I’ve known since I was seventeen years old. The man I know in every way a person can know another person. He is naked, and tied to a chair. He’s been given a long, terrible beating. The kind of beating designed to harm without causing death. The kind of beating made to feel endless, to kill hope, while keeping the body alive. One eye is swollen shut, his nose is broken, and teeth are missing behind the shredded meat of his lips. His lower jaw is formless and shattered. Sands has used his knife on Matt. I see small, deep cuts all over that face I’ve loved and kissed and cradled. There are big slashes down his chest and around his belly button. And blood. So much blood everywhere. Blood that runs and drips and bubbles as Matt breaths. The demon has smeared the blood on Matt’s stomach to play a game of tic-tac-toe. I notice that the Os won.
Matt’s one open eye meets mine, and the perfection of the despair I see there fills my mind with a terrible howling. It’s a howl from the gut, a soul-shattering sound, horror put to voice. A hurricane shriek strong enough to destroy the world. I am filled with a rage so complete, so intense, so overwhelming that it destroys conscious thought with the violence of a bomb blast. This is a rage of insanity, the total darkness of an underground cavern. An eclipse of the soul.
I screech like an animal through my gag, the kind of screech that should make your throat bleed and your eardrums explode, and I slam against my bonds so hard that the chains cut into my skin. My eyes bug out, trying to burst from their sockets. If I were a dog, I would be foaming at the mouth. I want only one thing: to snap these chains and kill the demon with my bare hands. I don’t just want it to die—I want to eviscerate it. I want to tear it apart so that it is unrecognizable. I want to split the atoms that make up the demon and turn it into mist.
But the chains stay strong. They don’t break. They don’t even loosen. Through this, the demon watches me in bemused fascination, one hand resting on the top of Matt’s head, a monstrous parody of a fatherly gesture.
The demon laughs and shakes its monstrous head, causing its multiple mouths to mew in protest. Speaks again with that voice that doesn’t match its form.
“There we go! Cook and baste, bake and broil.” It winks. “Nothing like a little despair to bring out the taste of a heroic soul….” A pause, and then the voice goes serious for just a moment, fills with a kind of perverse regret: “Don’t blame yourself for this, Smoky. Even a hero can’t win all the time.”
I look at Matt again, and the look in his eye is enough to make me want to die. It’s not a look of fear, or pain, or horror. It’s a look of love. He has managed, for just a moment, to push the demon out of the world of this bedroom, so that it’s just he and I, looking at each other.
One of the gifts of a long marriage is the ability to communicate anything—from mild displeasure to the meaning of life—with a single glance. It’s something you develop in the process of mixing your soul with your spouse’s, if you’re willing to mix your soul. Matt was giving me one of those looks and saying three things with that one, beautiful eye: I’m sorry, I love you, and…good-bye.
It was like watching the end of the world. Not in flame and fire, but in cold, drenching shadows. Darkness that would go on forever.
The demon seems to sense it as well. It laughs again and does a little prancing dance, waving its tail and dripping pus from its pores.
“Ahh—amore. How sweet it is. That’ll be the cherry on top of my Smoky sundae—the death of love.”
The door to the room opens, closes. I don’t see anyone enter…but there is now a small, shadowy figure at the periphery of my vision. Something about it fills me with desperation.
Matt closes his eye, and I feel the rage again and tear at my bonds.
The knife goes down, I hear the wet, cutting, sawing sound, and Matt screams through his ruined lips as I scream through my gag, and Prince Charming is dying, Prince Charming is dying—
I wake up screaming.
I am lying on the couch in Dr. Hillstead’s office. He is kneeling next to it, touching me with words, not hands.
“Shh. Smoky. It’s okay, it was just a dream. You’re here, you’re safe.”
I’m shaking hard, and I’m covered with sweat. I can feel tears drying on my face.
“Are you all right?” he asks me. “You back?”
I can’t look at him. I
bring myself to a sitting position.
“Why did you do that?” I whisper. I’m done with the pretense of being strong in front of my shrink. He’s shattered me, and he holds my heart, still beating, in his hands.
He doesn’t reply right away. He stands up, grabs a chair, and brings it close to the couch. He sits down, and though I still can’t look at him, I can feel him looking at me, like a bird beating its wings against a window. Tentative, persistent.
“I did that…because I had to.” He’s silent for a moment. “Smoky, I’ve been working with FBI and other law-enforcement agents for a decade now. You people, you are made of such strong stuff. I’ve seen all the best parts of humanity in this office. Dedication. Bravery. Honor. Duty. Sure, I’ve seen a little evil, some corruption. But that’s been the exception, not the rule. Mostly, I’ve seen strength. Unbelievable strength. Strength of character, of the soul.” He pauses, shrugs. “We’re not supposed to discuss the soul, in my profession. Not supposed to believe in it, really. Good and evil? They’re just broad concepts, not things defined.” He looks at me, grim. “But they aren’t just concepts, are they?”
I continue to stare at my hands.
“You and your peers, you hoard your strength like a talisman. You act as if it has some finite source. Like Samson and his hair. You seem to think if you break down and really open up in here, you’ll lose that strength and never get it back.” He’s quiet again, for a good long while. I feel empty and desolate. “I’ve been doing this for some time, Smoky, and you’re one of the strongest people I’ve ever met. I can say with near certainty that none of the people I’ve treated in the past would be able to endure what you’ve suffered, are suffering. Not one of them.”
I manage to make myself look at him. I wonder if he’s making fun of me. Strong? I don’t feel strong. I feel weak. I can’t even hold my gun. I look at him, and he looks back at me, and it’s an unflinching gaze that I recognize with a jolt. I’ve given blood-drenched crime scenes that gaze. Dismembered corpses. I am able to look on those horrors, and not look away. Dr. Hillstead is giving me the same look, and I realize that this is his gift: He is able to give the horrors of the soul a steady, unwavering gaze. I’m his crime scene, and he’ll never turn away in distaste or revulsion.
“But I know you are at your breaking point, Smoky. And that means I can do one of two things: Watch you break and die, or force you to open up and let me help you. I choose the second one.”
I can feel the truth of his words, their sincerity. I’ve looked at a hundred lying criminals. I like to think I can smell a lie in my sleep. He’s telling me the truth. He wants to help me.
“So now the ball’s in your court. You can get up and leave, or we can move on from here.” He smiles at me, a tired smile. “I can help you, Smoky. I really can. I can’t make it not have happened. I can’t promise that you won’t hurt for the rest of your life. But I can help you. If you’ll let me.”
I stare at my shrink, and I can feel it all struggling inside me. He’s right. I’m a female Samson, and he’s a male Delilah, except that he’s telling me it won’t hurt me to cut my hair this time. He’s asking me to trust him in a way I don’t trust anyone. Except myself.
And…? I hear the little voice inside ask. I close my eyes in response. Yeah. And Matt.
“Okay, Dr. Hillstead. You win. I’ll give it a shot.”
I know it’s right the moment I say it, because I stop shaking.
I wonder if what he’d said was true. About my strength, I mean.
Do I have the strength to live?
4
I’M STANDING AT the front of the LA FBI offices on Wilshire. I look up at the building, trying to feel something about it.
Nothing.
This is not a place I belong to right now; instead, I feel it judging me. Frowning down at me with a face of concrete, glass, and steel. Is this how civilians see it, I wonder? As something imposing and perhaps a little hungry?
I catch my reflection in the glass of the front doors and cringe inside. I was going to wear a suit, but that felt like too much of a commitment to success. Sweats were too little. As a testimony to indecisiveness, I had opted for jeans and a button-down blouse, simple flats on my feet, light makeup. Now it all feels inadequate, and I want to run, run, run.
Emotions are rolling in like waves, cresting and crashing. Fear, anxiety, anger, hope.
Dr. Hillstead had ended the session with one dictate: Go and see your team.
“This wasn’t just a job for you, Smoky. It was something that defined your life. Something that was a part of who you are. What you are. Would you agree?”
“Yeah. That’s true.”
“And the people you work with—some of them are friends?”
I shrugged. “Two of them are my best friends. They’ve tried to reach out to me, but…”
He raised his eyebrows at me, a query he already knew the answer to. “But you haven’t seen them since you were in the hospital.”
They’d come to visit me while I was wrapped in gauze like a mummy, while I wondered why I was still alive, and wished I wasn’t. They’d tried to stay, but I’d asked them to leave. Lots of phone calls had followed, all of which I let go to voice mail and didn’t return.
“I didn’t want to see anybody then. And after…” I let the words trail off.
“After, what?” he prodded.
I sighed. I gestured toward my face. “I didn’t want them to see me like this. I don’t think I could stand it if I saw pity on their faces. It would hurt too much.”
We’d talked about it a little further, and he’d told me that the first step toward being able to pick up my gun again was to go face my friends. So here I am.
I clench my teeth, call on that Irish stubbornness, and push through the doors.
They close in slow silence behind me, and I’m trapped for a minute between the marble floor and the high ceiling above. I feel exposed, a rabbit caught in an open field.
I move through the metal detectors of security and present my badge. The guard on duty is alert, with hard, roaming eyes. They flicker a little when he sees the scars.
“Going to say hi to the guys in Death Central and the Assistant Director,” I tell him, feeling (for some reason) like I have to tell him something.
He gives me a polite smile that says he really doesn’t care. I feel even more foolish and exposed and head to the elevator lobby, cursing myself under my breath.
I end up in an elevator with someone I don’t know, who manages to make me feel even more uncomfortable (if that were possible) by doing a bad job of hiding his sideways glances at my face. I do my best to ignore it, and when we get to my floor, I leave the elevator perhaps a little faster than normal. My heart is pounding.
“Get a grip on yourself, Barrett,” I growl. “What do you expect, looking like the hunchback of Notre Dame? Get it together.”
Talking to myself works most of the time, and this is no exception. I feel better. I head down the hallway and now I’m in front of the door to what used to be my office. Fear rises again, replacing the nonchalance I had mustered. There are parallels here, I think. I’ve gone through that door without thinking about it more times than I can count. More times than I’ve picked up my gun. But I feel a similar fear here, in a more minor key.
The life I have left, I realize, is beyond that door. The people who make up that life. Will they accept me? Or are they going to see a broken piece in a monster mask, glad-hand me, and send me on my way? Am I going to feel eyes full of pity burning holes in my back?
I can picture this scenario with a clarity that appalls me. I feel panicked. I shoot a nervous glance down the hall. The elevator door is still open. All I have to do is turn on my heel and run. Run and just keep running. Run and run and run and run and run. Fill those flats with sweat and buy a pack of Marlboros and go home and smoke and cackle in the dark. Weep for no reason, stare at my scars, and wonder about the kindness of strangers. This appeals to me with a
strength that makes me shiver. I want a cigarette. I want the security of my loneliness and my pain. I want to be left alone so I can just keep losing my mind and—
—and then I hear Matt.
He’s laughing.
It’s that soft laugh I always loved, a cool breeze of kindness and clarity. Riiiiiight, babe…hightailing it away from danger. That’s so you. This had been one of his gifts. The ability to chide without ridicule.
“Maybe it’s me now,” I murmur.
I’m trying to sound defiant, but the quivering chin and sweaty palms make it hard to pull off.
I can feel him smile, gentle and smug and not really there.
Damn it.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah…” I mutter to the ghost as I reach out and turn the knob.
I push him away in my mind, and I open the door.
5
I STARE INSIDE for a moment without entering. My terror is pure and clean and nausea-producing. It occurs to me that this is the core of what I hate the most about my life since the “big bad” happened. The constant uncertainty. One of the qualities I always liked about myself was my decisiveness. It was always simple—decide and do. Now it’s: what if what if what if, no yes no maybe, stop go, what if what if what if… and, behind it all, I’m afraid….
God, I am afraid. All the time. I wake up afraid, I walk around afraid, I go to sleep afraid. I am a victim. I hate it, I cannot escape it, and I miss the effortless certainty of invulnerability that used to be me. I also know, however much I heal, that that certainty will never return. Never.
“Get a grip, Barrett,” I say.
This is the other thing I do now: I wander, without ever going anywhere.
“So change it,” I murmur to myself.
Oh yeah—and I talk out loud all the time.
“You one cwazy wabbit, Barrett,” I whisper.
One deep breath and I move through the door.