The Medium

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

He shouldn’t have been able to hold on to lucidity as long as he did. Maybe being bled is different from starving, he thought. Starving, you use up everything you’ve got until you’re dry. Not even a vacuum pump can suck all the blood from a body; there will always be some left in the tiny capillaries, some in the tissue.

So there had to have been something left. If there hadn’t been, he would have stopped feeling it quickly. But it didn’t stop.

He couldn’t remember hating anyone, prior to that. There were people he disliked and people he feared and people he knew he couldn’t trust. But he felt Sebastian’s teeth on him and in him, and he remembered Kate, pulling at his skin in the way the dead show love, and he hated him.

When he was drifting, too limp in body and mind to care anymore, Sebastian whispered in his ear and sent him down, and the hate dissolved along with everything else. Whatever Sebastian did, it took a long time, but Lenny listened, because the first thing the good ones do is make you want to listen.

He remembered Sebastian thinking aloud, wondering about things that didn’t matter, and then he slept.

He woke, and he burned, his veins empty. Sebastian whispered, and Lenny fell, and he slept. Repeat.

He didn’t know how many times that happened. By the time it was done, he could hear Sebastian whisper even before it happened, and he could see eyes even when he slept. He was cold through and through, but he burned all the same.

“What’s your name?” Sebastian asked finally, as though that had just occurred to him. “I don’t remember.”

The whispering was too loud. Lenny looked away.

Sebastian shoved his hands into Lenny’s pockets, complaining that he should have waited to sell his wallet. He came up with a crumpled piece of paper, encased in plastic, with a safety pin on the back. Part of it was soaked with dark, dead blood. He squinted and held it up to the light.

“Something Hugo?” He spat the name like an insult. “You know, you’re not exactly presentable. You make it hard to have people over.”

That sounded like an excuse to get rid of his victim. Lenny thought he should have felt something, maybe relief, but he didn’t. It was all he could do to understand the words. The name didn’t sound familiar. The blood on the name tag had his full attention.

Fast forward.

The sign said “Rocky Heights Self Storage.” He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there, though Sebastian’s death grip on his arm seemed like a clue. Sebastian pulled him along, but not hard and not painfully, just inexorably. It might have gotten painful if he tried to go in the other direction, but that idea didn’t interest him. The only thing he found interesting was the lingering scent of something alive. The windows of the office building were boarded up, and the front gate was padlocked, but something warm and fresh had passed that way recently. His veins ached.

Against Lenny’s weak protests, Sebastian picked him up and tossed him over the gate like a sack of flour. Lenny had never been the sort to land lightly on his feet, but before, he could have reacted fast enough to catch himself before the pavement got him. His cheek hit first, and the zygomatic arch gave way with a feeble crunch like a snapping pencil. While he tried to make it back to his feet, Sebastian touched down beside him with a gymnast’s grace, silent despite his size. He pulled Lenny up by his collar and pushed him out ahead, past the first set of buildings and toward the second, a block of climate-controlled storage units. No air conditioner buzzed and no furnace rumbled, evidence that the place was as abandoned as it looked.

Rocky Heights. Lenny didn’t know the name. He didn’t know where it was in relation to that apartment complex or to his hotel.

My hotel? Why am I in Austin, again? He should have been home, with Mara tucked up against his side where she fit like a puzzle piece.

Sebastian pushed him down into the dark. His eyes worked better, there, but it wasn’t the friendly sort of dark that could hide him from his enemies. It was a cold dark, an old dark. It had been dark down there for years, and it swallowed them. If there had ever been any ghosts down there, they had long since crossed over or faded away. There were no echoes embedded in the walls. No one had ever lived there, and no one had ever died there, and the air inside the concrete was empty and hollow.

Sebastian pushed him down again. They were underground, then. Lenny could feel the earth beyond the walls.

It was a cellar, a little square space where the air was cool and dry, intended for wine or paper or art. Sebastian knocked Lenny’s knees out from under him and sat on the stairs to watch him scramble. Lenny’s face hurt, and his throat burned, and it only took him a few seconds to give up.

Sebastian watched him, still as stone, elbows propped on his knees and his chin resting on balled fists, waiting. Lenny didn’t know what he wanted. Whatever it was, giving it to him was the smart choice. If he wanted questions, Lenny could do that. If he wanted begging, Lenny could do that, too, though he was too dry for tears.

Lenny dragged himself into the corner, as far from Sebastian as he could get. There was only one exit, and Sebastian was in the way. The secret hideout smelled like cement, that sour and dusty smell all unfinished cellars have. It covered that live, sweet smell, whatever that had been. Lenny focused on his extended eyeteeth and tried to make them go away.

“I’ll bring you some blankets,” Sebastian said at last. “This shouldn’t take long. You’re weak, but I can free you from all of it. You’ll thank me someday.” And the door slammed shut and disappeared.

There had been a door. That was simple fact. Both perception and logic demanded it still be there, but it wasn’t. Lenny could barely tell; the darkness was nearly complete, and everything needs at least a little light to see. But if there had been light coming from around the edges of a door, even a few stray photons, he could have seen that. There was nothing.

He forced himself up to his knees and crawled across the tiny space and up the stairs to run a hand across the wall. It was smooth, the dusty grain of the cement unbroken by a single groove to let him know how the hell he’d gotten into the place to begin with. No door.

He slid down the stairs on his back, wary of falling, and tried to apply reason. Sebastian had left. He meant to come back, but he left, and when he came back, he would bring… what? Amenities? That look on his face, waiting, the same look he wore for his patient explanation, calmly waiting for Lenny to understand he had him, owned him. Waiting for him to understand.

Lenny had a sudden morbid vision of Sebastian padding out an enormous hamster cage and stuffing him inside. Giant aquarium. Terrarium. The lizard Mrs. Hernandez kept in her biology classroom. Sebastian in shorts and knee socks, pulling Lenny’s wings off.

A horrible sound reached him, a cracked, shrieking laugh that bounced off the walls. He begged. He cried.

And finally, at last, something let go in the back of his mind. It felt like a tightly-wound elastic band coming loose, going slack. He relaxed and stopped thinking.

*

The emptiness didn’t last as long as it should. He had no idea how long it did last—it was impossible to form memories when most of his brain was shut down—but it wasn’t nearly long enough.

Sebastian was there again when Lenny came around. It was that voice that brought him back. Sebastian’s voice was lovely. Warm enough to bring feeling back into his limbs and cool enough to cut through the burning inside him. Sebastian had brought blankets. Lenny was wrapped snugly, which gave a tiny twinge of sensation, something like security. He didn’t feel better, but he didn’t feel worse, either, so it couldn’t have been too long. Or perhaps… Wait.

Something gave when he tried to push himself up. It was soft and warmer than the air, warmer than Lenny’s skin. It was a man, or what was left of him.

“Well, well,” Sebastian said, smiling, “take a look at what you did. Feels good, doesn’t it?” That was wrong, that was impossible, but Lenny couldn’t remember why.

He went down again, and eventually, his mind went limp, and he went still inside.

The emptiness didn’t last as long as it should. He had no idea how long it did last—it was impossible to form memories when most of his brain was shut down—but it wasn’t nearly long enough.

But that happened already, didn’t it? It felt like a recurring dream, but it might have been recurring reality. Sebastian’s voice brought him back, warm and smooth, and the bastard looked ridiculously pleased with himself. The body was younger, the second time. Very dead. And that voice whispered in the back of his head, the one that sounded like Sebastian. You killed him you killed him you killed him you killed you killed you killed.

He went down again, and eventually, his mind went limp again, and he went still inside.

The emptiness didn’t…

The third time, it was a woman, very old. At least, he thought that was the third time.

And the pile of bodies grew, and Lenny weakened until not even Sebastian’s voice could pull him back, and he fell into the whispering. Killerkillerkillerkillerkillerkiller.

Bodies are only vessels, only tools. Lenny’s was broken, so he left it lying there and went somewhere else, somewhere he could sleep in peace.