Harken

2 Delirium

Fear was usually a foreign sensation to me. In my mind, being afraid of something was little more than a waste of time, and at my hourly rate that meant quite a big waste of money. No matter whom I was meeting, or how dangerous my job became, I was always in control.

But this time, I wasn’t. This time, I ran.

My pounding footsteps carried me out of the woods—carried is a fitting term, because I was hardly controlling my movements as I darted in one direction and then another. When I had no more breath to drive me, I found myself far away from my car, stumbling across the yellow line in the middle of the road, in the middle of nowhere, so deep in the middle of the night that I could barely see my own hands. My mind told me this was a nightmare, but that wasn’t possible—not with the very real pain that stung from the knife’s gash down my arm.

The solidity of the gravel against my shoes was a strange security that nursed my senses back. I remembered all of a sudden that I still had my cell phone in my pocket. But it had no service. Typical Los Angeles. I kicked the grass so hard that some of the tall blades went flying, and I wanted to throw my phone at the nearest tree, but that wouldn’t have helped anything.

So I started running again, every hit of my shoes against the ground clicking into the woods like a steadily beating snare.

I am always in control… I told myself, over and over. This lie wasn’t its usual comfort.

Somehow—I wasn’t sure how long it took me—I found a spot in the hills with service for my phone and dialed 911. What followed was a dizzying rush of sirens, people in uniforms collecting me, an ambulance appearing and lights, lights…a cacophony of flashing, headache-inducing lights that burned my eyes and sent me reeling again.

Thankfully it was those same lights that broke me back into my senses. What had just happened to me? I expected for people with cameras to come running out and say that this was all part of a reality television show. That never happened.

Two officers sat me down at the back door of the ambulance, asking questions. I hesitated at first, because I knew how unbelievable my story was, but I also knew the proof was far too concrete. They just needed to go to the edge, to look at the corpse of the man with the silver claws, and they would be just as amazed and terrified as I was. Maybe they—professionals, no less—could drag the body up and find some explanation, some mechanical device that the madman had strung together that’d allowed him to soar through the air.

I only became more concerned, though, when the officers kept asking about the body, and kept forgetting about the silver claws. It was almost like they weren’t even surprised…or worse, I soon realized, they didn’t even believe me.

“Just go get the body!” I protested irritably, when they went back to asking about Mr. Sharpe for a third time. It was obvious I was tired of cooperating, so the paramedic shooed the officers away, saying I wasn’t in the right state of mind for questions anymore.

The police had done a solid job of putting me in a bad mood. I saw my mom’s minivan driving up. I was still sitting on the back of the ambulance, parked at the edge of the same forest I’d barely escaped from. Officers were spread out in the woods with flashlights, studying tire tracks and scratches and tears of paint from my car that marked the trees. The sirens were off but the lights still flashed in my face, a red and blue dissonance that illuminated my mom as she ran for me.

“Michael!” she shouted, voice cracking as its volume neared a scream. At the sight of me, she pressed her hands together in shock, face falling. This wasn’t her usual reaction—she’d seen me in spots like this before and was a pro at the you’ll-suffer-for-this-later-Michael shrug. Her brown eyes were marred with horror, slightly-over-forty wrinkles on her face and unkempt blonde hair evenly graying. I was probably helping speed the graying process along at the moment.

“Are you the mother?” the paramedic asked, his boots dangling inches from the ground as he sat beside me on the silver ambulance bumper. He was wrapping up the wound on my arm. My mom didn’t answer and moved to examine the cuts, but the paramedic put up a hand to stop her, holding the bandage together between two of his fingers.

“He’s alright,” he assured her. “Only a cut and some bruises. And some…head trauma, maybe.”

“The car’s in worse shape,” said another officer as she approached. She had DELANEY pinned to her shirt, one of the two officers who’d questioned me. She was dressed in full uniform, heavyset and a head taller than me even if I’d been standing, with large boots crushing the damp leaves under her steps as she tilted her flashlight out of our faces. Her radio buzzed as an officer checked in from another part of the woods. I was relieved—they’d finally found the crash. It’d taken them long enough.

“You’re lucky he’s still alive,” she went on gruffly, hardly directing any sympathies in my direction. Her glance to me could have been a glare.

“Looks like he lost control of the car from driving too fast,” Officer Delaney said, lifting her flashlight to wave at somewhere in the dirt, then in to the trees. She was so disinterested she wasn’t really pointing out anything.

“These are some winding roads and it’s easy to lose control, especially when joyriding in the dark,” she said. “The car is absolutely totaled too.”

My mom opened her mouth to say something, but I broke in before she could.

“Joyriding?” I protested. “What are you talking about? Didn’t you see my car?”

The officer looked at me and pressed her lips together. “Yeah, we found it, over the hill where you told us it’d be. Upside down and smashed.”

My mom’s mouth dropped further open in disbelief. I moved to stand but the paramedic shoved me back down, winding more bandage around my arm as I winced in pain.

“What about the man?” I burst. “I told you, he tried to kill me!”

“What the hell is going on?” my mom erupted. “A man? What man, Michael?”

Good thing so many paramedics were around because I was afraid she was about to have a heart attack. The officer, though, seemed far too unconcerned for my comfort. She just huffed, clicking her flashlight off.

“Come on,” she said. “You crashed your car. Don’t make this harder on yourself.”

“Because he was trying to kill me!” I shouted with dismay. “Didn’t you see… did you even go look for the body out there? Did you find the knife he nearly stuck me with?”

“Michael,” Officer Delaney sighed, “there’s no dead man by your car. We shone down lights and everything. You just drove too fast. Don’t make up some murder story to—”

I’d had enough. My rage at her insinuations reawakened me. I jumped to my feet and tore through the circle before anyone could react.

“Michael, stop!” the paramedic shouted, but I continued to run, holding the torn white wrapping against the cut on my arm as I pushed through the tangled limbs. I could hear their frantic footsteps behind me, my mom calling my name and the officer barking something sharp into her radio.

I crashed through a pair of trees and was back on the familiar cliff edge. In the moonlight I could see the tracks from where my car had skidded through the dirt, the places where the trees had been scraped from hitting my doors, and the underbrush that I’d dived into to hide from my ruthless pursuer. I could even see the spot where Mr. Sharpe had leapt into the air and crashed onto my car’s roof, tree branches cracked in his wake. There was no way I’d made any of this up, because I could still recognize the ground beneath me as the same that I’d dashed madly away from, shocked that I was still alive. I rushed to the edge, knowing that what I’d seen would still be down below, just as gruesome as I remembered.

But when I got there, shoes scratching to stop me, I was greeted with an even more appalling sight than the corpse that had been left behind. Now, there was no man, no long knife, and no silver claws—nothing at all beneath my car, not even a trace of blood to show that a corpse had ever been there. The only thing that rested over the edge of the cliff was my own BMW, smashed beyond repair. At that moment, the car didn’t even matter to me anymore.

My throat felt like it’d become a runaway elevator, dropping deep into my stomach as my eyes studied every inch, hoping the dark concealed the body. But nothing could have hidden those claws, not their reflective edges shining like mirrors. I continued searching though, even as the group appeared out of the woods and my mom pulled me back abruptly.

“Michael Asher!” she shouted in my face, as I stood like a wax figure. I had seen the man. I knew he’d been down there!

“We’ve got him now,” the officer said into her radio, pointing her flashlight straight into my face, not even trying to mask her disgust or how out of breath she was.

“When I tell you to stop, you stop,” she ordered me. She waved the beam of her flashlight at the edge.

“I know there was a man!” I insisted. “I promise, I saw him!”

I looked at my mom. “He was a client. I’m sorry. But it’s true: he was a client who wanted me to meet him to check on his wife, so we drove out into the woods and then he tried to kill me. But I kicked him out of the car and… and…”

I couldn’t continue, because my story was beginning to crumble even as I told it. I knew what I’d seen, and yet every rational, reasonable part of my brain knew that most of my story was something I’d have laughed at yesterday, the banter of a crazy person on the sidewalks. What had even happened? Flying and claws? I couldn’t say that again, not with the officer’s face staring incredulously at me, like I was a five-year-old saying I’d met a unicorn.

“And what?” my mom said, shaking me, still listening fixedly. Our trio was immediately left to silence, the officer’s face saying she already thought me to be a lying delinquent, while my mother’s intense stare told me the opposite. She believed me, or at least she wanted to.

“He was there,” I said, forging on. “Over the edge. He got stuck under my car.”

I waved to it. The officer shook her head.

“Look,” she said. She pointed her flashlight over. I wasn’t going to oblige her mockery.

“Go on,” she told me. “Go, look again. There’s nobody—”

“Shut up!” my mom burst, so harshly that the officer gave a small jump. My mom let go of me and snatched the flashlight from the officer, glaring up at her as she did. She was a kitten compared to the buffalo of Officer Delaney, but I saw the officer shrink back an inch.

“I don’t pay taxes for you to badger my son,” my mom hissed.

She went to the cliff’s end, swinging the light in front of her. The officer and I stared after her, neither of us able to say or do anything as we watched the light go side to side, my mom’s head looking down at the tire tracks then over the edge.

She studied the rocks below for far longer than anyone could have been compelled, even someone who truly wanted to believe me. Though I hoped that she would spot even a hint that a dead man had been there, in the end her eyes just continued searching. My shoulders fell when I saw her blink and a dejected expression overtake her face.

She turned to us, appearing exhausted.

The flashlight was handed back to the officer without another word. In the silence I heard volumes of defeat. My throat went dry, and I didn’t even feel the pain in my arm anymore.

“He…was…” I said. My mom didn’t reply, only starting back through the woods toward the road. The officer, smirking slightly at us, nodded for me to go ahead.

I followed my mom, buried in devastation. The beam of the flashlight lit the way from the officer behind me, who was likely taking up the rear in case I decided to run again. When we reached the road, the paramedic greeted me with crossed arms. Everyone had his or her arms crossed at me now: Michael Asher, the boy who’d made up the story of nearly being killed to cover for wrecking his car. That was the type of thing a normal person would do—the same type of normal idiot I’d always tried to never be.

My mom stopped near her minivan, running her fingers through her hair.

“Do I need to fill out anything?” she asked, now timid, now set back into her place—the lion caged again because I had led her to a dead end. There was nothing left for us to do. The paramedics deemed me well enough to skip a hospital visit, probably because they were tired of dealing with me. The police told us that my car would be collected and scrapped. I winced, because as inappropriate a time to think of it was, I remembered my $2,500 camera was still somewhere in the car, soon to be smashed and shredded and melted.

My mom and I got into the minivan, but she didn’t start to drive. She stared straight ahead at the scene before us as the officers began packing up. The road, tired now of all the action, had fallen asleep again, and even across the street barely showed any more disruption.

“Really, Michael,” she said.

I didn’t reply.

“Really?” she pressed.

“I know what happened,” I insisted.

“Shut up about the man!” she exploded at me. There it was. I was finally going to hear it now.

“Seriously!” she said. “You could have sneaked out without getting caught. I’ve been awake the past three hours waiting to hear you get home, and instead I get a call from the police!”

I blinked. That was not at all what I’d been expecting to hear. She’d been awake all this time? Then she knew I’d been going out… she knew?

I opened my mouth to splutter a protest but she held up her hand.

“No, I’ve had enough,” she told me. “You’ve made this impossible on me. Last week, I completely ignored you sneaking out at two in the morning, pretty much making an earthquake of noise on the stairs. Not to mention the night before that, when your keys were louder than my alarm clock.”

I’d made noise with my keys? All of this was jaw-dropping news to me. How in the world was I such a miserable failure at sneaking out? And she’d known all this time!

“You go out the door at midnight and forget to lock it,” she went on. “And I can’t just leave it that way—not in Arleta—so I have to lock it behind you, and stay awake watching out the window for you to come back so I can unlock it again before you notice. And all this time, I’m like—Cheryl, don’t say a word. Don’t get on to him. He’s spreading his wings like teenagers do. Except my teenager meets adults in the middle of the night and brings home money for it.”

Crime after crime was being piled onto me at once. All this time that I’d thought I’d been cleverly getting out under her nose, she’d been two steps ahead of me. She’d practically been covering up my tracks for me.

She sighed. “I’ve done so well at this for years now. But the car…I just can’t ignore the car. You crashed a car. You ran a car over the edge of a cliff, and now it’s just impossible for me to act like that didn’t happen. Why, Michael? Why would you do that?”

She lifted her shoulders in exasperation, and any words I might have prepared in my defense raced out of my open mouth like butterflies. One of the officers glanced toward the minivan, but seeing the pantomime of what appeared to be my mother’s fiery wrath, he grinned and continued his work.

“I… I don’t know,” I stammered.

“You don’t know?” she said. She laughed, like my reply was absurd.

“You’re a genius, and you don’t know why you crashed your car,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say you didn’t know something before.”

“I know it happened,” I said, trying to pick up the pieces of my story that her revelation had shattered to bits. She rubbed her temples, trying to squeeze the tension out.

“I know the man tried to kill me,” I continued. “I know exactly what I saw. I didn’t make that up. And that’s how the car crashed.”

She sighed, releasing her fury and confusion. At least she’d gotten all of her yelling out. Even though she couldn’t read eyes like I could, she had a way of telling things from my face. I wished I could have just told her what she wanted to hear, and she knew that, which was why I saw her expression soften.

“Come on,” she said. “I want to believe you. So you better not be lying to me.”

She studied my face for a few seconds. Her lips twisted up.

“Maybe,” she said, “you just think it happened. Maybe you hit your head and now you’ve imagined all that stuff when really, it’s all from delirium.”

A weak response, especially from her—mental alarms shouted at me to protest. I knew that if I did she would believe me, and might even jump right out of the van that very minute and go with me to look for clues the police had missed. That was the way my mom was. She’d figure it out based on my word, and ask for evidence later.

But the last officer had just started her car and was driving off, and my mom and I were the only ones left. It was late. So I chose to lie.

“Maybe so,” I resigned. She saw past it immediately but we both knew that rationally, her theory was the more solid one. After all, I had hit my head pretty hard while careening through the woods. Maybe I’d left the client behind hours ago, and all the extra parts were made up in my head during the aimless wandering after the crash?

Without anything left to say, my mom turned the key and started to drive.

Part of me hoped she was right.

The night’s ordeal had exhausted me, so as soon as we got home I went straight to bed. I heard my mom’s key ring rattle as she hung it onto the tack on the kitchen wall, and suddenly I was aware of just how much keys echoed in the house. It was funny and bitter at the same time—how long had I thought I’d been making it out undiscovered when my mom had been patiently locking doors and closing windows behind me? I felt like the world’s most bumbling spy.

This is going to make work ten times harder now, I caught myself thinking. But it was true. I needed to figure out entirely new escape plans.

And like that, I was already thinking of work again. I’d nearly been murdered—or at least thought I’d been nearly murdered—and already work was back on my mind. I was an addict.

I heard my mom’s steps as she laboriously climbed back up the same stairs she had likely dashed down a few hours earlier. Of course I’d had no scruples about sneaking out for work. But that guiltlessness only lasted until I realized how many hours of rest my mom had missed for me. She didn’t need anything else to add to her current list of reasons to lose sleep.

My head pounded wickedly, the heartbeat in my ears overtaking the silence my house soon fell into. I wanted to pore over all that’d happened between the two times I’d gone to bed, but I forced myself to leave it alone. I was starting to feel sore, probably from the swerving I’d done in my car. Sleep crept up slowly, though just as I became certain I’d never get any rest before morning, I was gone.

The moment I drifted off I found myself awakening again—this time, somewhere other than my room. Dreaming.

I was falling backward. Not the typical of dream where I was simply dropping through the air but more of a steady plunge into darkness behind me. It was like I was being carried on a feather through a black mist, until the invisible ship on which I floated entered into a place of whirling gray. This gray soon became watery colors, then formed shapes, then all of a sudden I was back in the woods.

I was running through the trees, this time without the protection of my car. Where the branches and sticks had once torn paint from the car’s doors and sides, they now ripped into my skin, forcing tears into my eyes.

And my finger…there was now a heavy, silver ring around the third finger from my thumb on my right hand, just like the white ring I’d seen on Mr. Sharpe but with three vertical cuts instead of one. It was throbbing and bleeding so terribly that I held it in my left fist to stop the flow of red liquid, like the band itself was digging into my skin. Still, even as it dripped across my shirt, I couldn’t stop.

Every few seconds, I looked back, seeing something moving between the gray towers of trees that stood like prison fence posts—a flash of muted blonde hair, a gleam of silver. It made a rustling noise, diving from side-to-side, its breath even louder than my own. I could hear it against leaves, my steps heavy but my pursuer’s nearly silent.

I was vulnerable without my car’s layer of metal between me and the relentless man. So I continued to run, not daring to stop even though I spotted countless tree trunks I could dive behind. My pursuer was always four steps behind me—just far enough so he couldn’t reach me, but always so close I could hear him and the torn spots in his coat that fluttered in the wind.

“We’re almost there,” I heard him say, voice like a whisper beside my ear. “The lights.”

I slid to a stop, but only because I’d reached the edge of the cliff. It was hazy this time, darker than it had been in real life, but I could tell where the edge dropped into nothing. Rocks I’d skidded against went flying over, clattering against the metal wreckage of an upside-down car below. Its wheel was still spinning.

I whirled around. Mr. Sharpe had stopped at the edge of the trees. His fingers were spread open, long claws in a brilliant array. There was little emotion on his face, no reaction or feeling for what he was about to do, like I was merely an item for him to cross off a list.

He stepped forward. My feet slid back an inch and I could already feel where the rock ended. Mr. Sharpe didn’t grin, didn’t acknowledge that he had cornered me.

No words. No warning or threat. He just moved forward, fingers twitching and curling with anticipation.

I stepped back again but my foot slipped against the dusty edge. Before I could catch myself, I heard my shoes scrape, the gasp of my own breath, and then I stumbled into nothing.