Glimmer (8 page)

Chapter 16
DARK-EYED BOY

Word spreads fast through the crowd. Something went wrong on the Ferris wheel. Knowing Elyse was heading for that wheel, I push through, determined to make sure she’s okay, trying not to think of the worst.

But long before I get there I can hear the screaming of a guy, can hear the sad, hushed murmuring of the crowd. “Football hero . . . maimed . . . lost his foot . . .” And I know it’s not Elyse who’s hurt.

Almost as quickly as the rumors fly, mass heatnaps start erupting. People to my left and right just start dropping, and I feel a now familiar zap in my chest and see the blue light for a moment. If Elyse were here, would she have seen a ghost retreating, repelled by my tattoo?

The people on the Ferris wheel are all asleep themselves, and I hope to God none of them fall out and die. Scanning the faces, I don’t see Elyse, though I do see the dumb jock who pulled her away earlier.

Even though all the people around him are down though, one person stays up and alert. I see a tiny flash of pink light in front of the doctor as the people around him clatter to the ground. So he’s immune to the heatnaps, like I am. The ghosts can’t touch him. I look him in the eye, wondering if he has a tattoo like mine and how he got his. He doesn’t notice me, of course—I haven’t said anything—but he runs to the Ferris wheel and quickly injects the screaming boy with a syringe. The boy screams one more time and goes slack.

Almost instantly a black car pulls up as close to the Ferris wheel as possible, and quickly a crew of gray-uniformed medics descend on the now silent, unmoving boy. Two of them load him onto a stretcher. The other two shut down the Ferris wheel and begin wiping away the blood and bits of bone.

Fuck. If he lives, he’s going to wake up without a foot. That’s got to be even worse than waking up without a past. He’s going to be as confused about his identity as we are. Overnight he’ll have gone from football hero to “that guy without a foot.” I can’t help but notice everyone in Summer Falls is super-healthy-looking and attractive. He’ll stick out, even if they fit him with a prosthetic at the hospital. Assuming that black town car is in fact taking him to a hospital. The thought sends a chill of terror up my back. Where else might they be taking him?

As they finish cleaning, one of the medics pulls the lever and the wheel whirs to life again. The black car pulls away.

Moments later, people start waking up. The people on the Ferris wheel, incredibly, keep riding it. The people on the ground look around with confused expressions, then shuffle into food or game lines. Conversations resume all around me. Casual conversations. Nothing about the boy who just got carted away. They’re not wondering what happened to him.

It’s like they don’t even remember that a guy got his foot caught in the Ferris wheel’s gears.

Because they
don’t
remember. It hits me suddenly.

Just like the Bishops after they were squared off in the kitchen, fighting their way toward an ugly divorce.

It’s not just that they moved on. It’s that they lost the ability to look back.

The heatnaps aren’t random, like Wikipedia said. They happen after traumatic situations. They erase traumatic memories somehow. But how?

Nearby I hear an old man’s plaintive voice and look up to see Hazel, the baker, still down. “Come on, sweetie. Get up.”

Sheriff Hank is on the scene within moments. “Come on, get up, old girl.”

“Come back to me,” the old man pleads.

Hank kneels down to take Hazel’s vitals, but it’s clear she’s alive. Her eyes are even open. But she’s not moving, not responding to anything anyone says. The doctor talks quietly to Hank. Then together they lift Hazel onto a gurney and carry her to the sheriff-mobile. Her husband, I notice, has instantly fallen to the ground in a second heatnap.

“Elyse?”

At the sound of her name I whip around and see the jock guy who was asleep on the Ferris wheel. He’s searching through the crowd, calling her name.

Without thinking, I walk right up to him. “What happened? She was with you a minute ago.”

He blinks at me. “Oh, it’s you. Since when has Elyse needed someone like you looking out for her?”

“Apparently she does, since you lost her.” While you were passed out like every other idiot in this town.

Letterman jacket grabs me by the arm. “You don’t need to worry about my girl. We clear on that?”

Crap. This is not going well. Remembering how the lady in the antique store reacted to being insulted and reminded of bad memories, I say, “You just sat there drooling while your dumb jock friend’s foot got pulverized. Elyse doesn’t know you anymore and don’t tell me you can’t tell.”

The guy’s face gets redder with rage, then his grip on my arm slackens. He crumples to the ground.

As usual when people collapse here, no one around seems to care. They walk around him.

I’m not going to learn anything more tonight in this crowd of zombies and I need to talk to Elyse, so I turn and walk from the fair all the way back to Preston House.

Only thanks to my disguise as a Brazilian tourist, I can’t exactly knock on her bedroom door at night. I hope that if she saw half of what I did at the fair, she’ll want to talk as much as I do—and she’ll come find me.

Back in the Rustic’s Cottage, I take off my shoes and shirt, turn on the bathroom light, and stand in front of the mirror, washing my face and brushing my teeth. The eye tattoo in the center of my chest stares back at me, making me wonder about what the hell possessed me to get a tattoo like that in the first place. It’s disheartening that the whole day’s passed without my even getting close to figuring out who I am or what happened to me. And now I’m alone, without Elyse. Her absence gnaws at me.

Other than the ink eye, I look pretty normal. I have light brown skin and supershort dark hair. Eyes that aren’t too much paler than my pupils. My ancestry clearly isn’t European, or not just European. And I didn’t grow up in this town, or more people would recognize me. Even though Elyse doesn’t feel like she fits in here, she looks like she does. Her clothes, her haircut, her accent, her mannerisms. She was clearly born and raised in this town. But I could be from just about anywhere on earth. How the hell am I supposed to narrow it down?

Through the sliding patio door I can hear crickets chirping. I must be from a big city, because all this quiet is freaking me out.

I have to talk to Elyse about what happened to that boy at the fair. I don’t give a damn if I cause a ruckus by heading up to her room.

I pull my baggy shirt back on and slide open the patio door. The night air feels warm through the screen, and the blue-black sky is bright with stars. Endless stars. The breeze smells like flowers and freshly cut grass. I can see Jim and Candace lying next to each other on chaise lounges, talking softly.

Then I see her hurrying across the yard in white pajamas and bunny slippers. She’s clutching a large book to her chest. She nods a hello to the tourists without looking at them. I’ve opened the screen before she can even knock.

“Thank god you’re home!” she says.

Thank god you’re safe, I think. “Then you saw the accident?”

She nods. “The accident was horrible. His foot . . .” She shudders. “But what was even worse were the ghosts putting everyone to sleep.”

“Ghosts?” I think back to the mass heatnaps. “You’re telling me ghosts did that?”

“I saw it. I saw it and I ran, all the way home.”

I let out a sigh. “I believe you. And I need you to believe this: While everyone else was knocked out, a car with dark windows pulled up and hauled him away. After people woke up from the heatnap, they’d forgotten all about what happened. People at the fair went right back to dancing and playing, like nothing ever happened.”

“You’re saying heatnaps affect people’s memories.” She looks at me. “You think that’s what happened to us?”

“Maybe. But they all still seemed to remember who they were. Well, except one person. That old lady whose door we knocked on, she didn’t wake up from her heatnap. Her eyes were open, but you could tell there was no one there. The doctor took her as well.”

“We have to find out what’s going on. We’ve got to fix our memories before the doctor takes us too.”

“Yeah, get our memories and get the hell out of here.” Then I think about her mother and her dumb boyfriend. “Or maybe not. You’ve got family here. You’ve got friends.”

“You’re not going to like this.” She holds up the book. It’s a yearbook.
The Mountain Cat.
“But so do you.”

She opens the yearbook to a bookmarked page. It’s the portrait of Marshall King. The same picture in the Satanist guy’s house, on the bedroom wall. Photo guy. Me. It’s like a gut punch.

“Hi, Marshall.” Elyse waves at me.

I shake my head, not knowing what to say. “It doesn’t feel—”

“Like it’s really your name? Welcome to the club.”

The room’s spinning. If I’m Marshall King, if that room is my room with all my junk in it, then that means . . . the Satanist guy is my father.

“Maybe I should go back and talk to that guy at the house. I mean, you were right, it was my room. He must be . . . my father.”

“Who cares if he is?” She sets the yearbook down, her green eyes hard as glass. “He’s obviously not a good one.”

“Easy for you to say. You’ve at least found your family.”

“They’re not my family. They’re just people who look like me.”

“Well, for now, because you don’t remember them.”

“It’s more than that.” She speaks slowly, trying on the words. “I don’t know . . . if I like them. It all just feels so
random.
”

“Random?”

“Like someone put together this life for me from a box of spare parts. ‘Here, you’re named Elyse, and you’re an innkeeper’s daughter in a small town, and you have’”—she grabs a wavy lock of her own hair—“‘blond hair.’ But it doesn’t feel like
me
. It doesn’t feel real.”

“Right now,” I tell her, “you’re the only real person I know.”

A crashing sound interrupts us, followed by a muffled cry. We look at each other and run outside.

“Sounds like it was coming from the main house,” I say.

“Did you hear where that sound came from?” Elyse calls to Candace and Jim. But they don’t answer because they’re both passed out on their respective chaises under the moonlight. Candace is even snoring. They were awake five minutes ago.

Elyse grabs my arm. “There’s someone in the gazebo,” she whispers. “A tall man. He’s just standing there in the shadows, but I can see the top of his head. He’s wearing feathers in his hair.”

“I don’t see him,” I whisper back, trying to remember the ghost-tour brochure. I have no doubt there’ll be a description of the guy in the ghost tour. “What do you want me to do? We could make a run for the house.” And then I remember she says that woman—the ghost—went after me but couldn’t touch me. I’m about to suggest I get closer to investigate when Elyse screams.

“You didn’t see, right?” she asks. “He’s out in the open, creeping toward the basement window.” I look down at the lightly packed garden trail and suddenly under the porch light I can see footprints appearing on the ground, approaching the window. Goose bumps rise on my arms.

“Did he go through?”

She nods. “No wonder I got mad if she left them open,” she says as if to herself.

We dash inside after the ghost. It’s dark everywhere, except one bedroom at the end of the hall, where a shaft of light shines from under the door. Snoring comes from inside.

Elyse knocks. “Everything okay?” she calls.

No answer. She keeps knocking, over and over. The girl’s determined. Finally I hear footsteps walk to the door, and I duck into the hall.

“What’s wrong, Elyse?” Liz’s voice is groggy.

“Oh, I heard a noise,” she says. “It sounded like someone was hurt or something.”

“What noise? We didn’t hear anything.”

“Sorry to bother you, I . . . you really didn’t hear anything?”

“Everything’s fine, honey,” Liz says. “Go back to bed.”

“No way in hell am I going back to that tower room alone,” she says, so I walk her to her bedroom, praying her father doesn’t wake up and see me there. She searches the room until she’s satisfied it’s ghost free, then closes the window and sinks onto her bed, shoes and all, curling up into a fetal position.

“Don’t go giving up on me,” I say. “You said it yourself, we’re going to get our memories back. We’ve figured out so much already. Tomorrow we’re going to show up at school and see what we can learn from talking to our friends.”

Slowly she uncurls. “You’re right,” she says calmly. “My family’s useless, and your dad is crazy. Maybe our friends are the real key to getting our memories back.”

“We’ll get through this if we stick together,” I say. I tuck her into bed, close the door, and tiptoe down the creaky hallway.

Outside, Jim and Candace are awake again and flirting. “You didn’t happen to hear a loud noise, did you?” I ask. They shake their heads. “Or see anybody come through the backyard?”

“You mean like the innkeeper’s daughter sneaking out to see you?” Jim winks. “Course not, Romeo.”