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A mix of fear and exhaustion moved like waves over Aaron, lulling him in and out of sleep. He had been hiding in the locked bathroom for ten minutes, alerted by any number of noises, but none of them had been the approach or attempted intrusion into his hospital room.
He gripped the cell phone with one hand, curling his fingers around it tightly, the sweat beginning to dampen his palm, the phone slowly slipping from his grasp, and his heart still thundered in his ears.
The phone suddenly vibrated and the screen lit up. Aaron looked at it, and saw that it was a text message from Chase’s mother.
“Hey, I thought something about the wedding didn’t seem right,” Aaron read in a hurried whisper. “Pamela couldn’t have been pregnant with Bailey when she got married. I found our invitation to their ten-year anniversary party—it was from 1990. You and Bailey had just met that year.
“Maybe she was just a little fat?”
Aaron sat down the phone and shook his head, listening for his attacker and trying to make sense out of what Cordelia Sheppard had just revealed.
Who was this person who knew about him and Bailey? Who was it that had been tormenting them for the past month? Perhaps it was Van Nguyen, desperate for revenge for the lasting damage that day in the bathroom had done to his wife?
When it finally happened—when the stranger had finally made it to his hospital room door—Aaron startled himself by letting out a panicked yelp, and he was quick to slap his hand over his mouth and shut his eyes tight against the coming threat.
First, there was the sound of the door banging, followed by the snap and thud of what he knew to be the chair being forced out of the way, and then the door scooting across the tile as those heavy footsteps made their way into the room.
The tears began to well in his mossy eyes, spilling down his face and his breath caught in his throat as he watched the bathroom door begin to thud. The guy was throwing himself into it, using all of his weight to force it from the frame.
The hinges broke and the door was flung open. It slammed into the wall, and the metal handle busted through the plaster. There was no way out, and Aaron scurried on all fours towards the back wall between the toilet and the shower.
“Found you!” he said, his voice heavy from behind that mask.
He began making his way into the bathroom slowly, revealing that familiar buck knife, and Aaron could see nothing beyond that veiled skeleton mask and those large shoulders and broad frame. He was too scared to scream. Too scared to move. The only thing Aaron could think to do was cling to the wall and pray that his death would be quick.
“He wants you. He told me all about you. He won’t leave me alone until I do it. Until I send you to him. Until I make you hurt, like you made him hurt!
“He lives in me and he wants you! He wants you dead!”
He came in closer, looming over him with that skeleton face and those black eyes staring into him.
“Bailey?” Aaron suddenly found himself asking.
The man stopped and nodded.
“He wants me to fix it!” he grunted.
“Bailey’s dead! Bailey’s dead!” Aaron yelled over and over again, closing his eyes against him and shaking his head defiantly.
“Hey!”
Aaron opened his eyes in disbelief at the familiar voice that called out from behind the man.
Chase brought his foot up into the man’s gut, forcing him to reel against him. The man reacted to Chase and lunged at him with a loud cry, throwing Chase into the wall and knocking his skull against the white plaster.
Aaron was brought back to himself by the memories of bathrooms, urinals, and blood; all of the horrors that had corrupted his childhood and had stayed with him for the past nine years, refusing to let him go.
“No!” Aaron cried.
He felt for the wall and pulled himself up by the railings fixed to it, and in the corner beside the toilet was a fire extinguisher.
He ripped it from the wall and lunged at the man in the mask, who was leering over Chase, twisting the sharp, glinting knife in his hand. Aaron brought the base of the extinguisher down on the man’s head. He stumbled forward and began to turn around, swiping with the knife.
“Fuck you!” Aaron shouted, slamming it down over and over again. He felt everything inside of him boil to the surface. Thoughts of Andy, thoughts of the kid he used to be, and thoughts of five lives lost on the afternoon of April 7th, 1998, one of them in the ground and four left to live in the world forever gripped by the secret they shared, and that dead boy who had infected them all with his poison.
He thought of all of his guilt, thought of his own intrepid weakness, and the strength he had discovered through his bizarre confrontation with death and the delirious vision of Bailey in the bathroom.
With each assault he landed on this man he could feel himself getting all of those things out. He could feel all that he had kept inside for the past decade driving him to keep bringing the extinguisher down on the guy’s skull.
He was on the bathroom floor now, between Chase’s legs, and the blood was pooling out of him as his body convulsed.
“Aaron, it’s over!” Chase said from the floor, the sweat in his hair, specks of blood on his face as he stared wide-eyed at the brutalized head between his legs.
“No!” Aaron continued to the strike the back of his head, and the blood was now sticking to the red cylinder, along with bits of hair and membrane, and there was a broken crater of pink and bone at the top of the man’s skull.
Chase got to his feet and stepped over the still body.
“Hey, it’s all right, Aaron. It’s all right.” Chase was holding onto him now, attempting to steady his boyfriend and trying to calm his desperate cries.
They both watched as the pool of blood flowed from the back of the lifeless skull and oozed from the mouth and ears.
Chase knew what Aaron was seeing.
For Aaron, it was Bailey Nguyen. It was Bailey Nguyen of the bathroom floor, Bailey Nguyen of the grave; it was the Bailey of the basement and of the woods and the log. It was the boy who had tormented him and had hunted him, who had terrorized him and had counted on Aaron’s shame to keep him safe.
“Shh... it’s over, baby, it’s over.” Chase hummed in his ear.
Aaron finally dropped the extinguisher, and it made a loud clank when it hit the tiled floor, rolling in a half circle and tapping the dead leg before finally coming to a stop.
“Jesus Christ!”
They turned to see Tammy staring at them, along with a couple of police officers and a handful of orderlies clamoring in the doorway.
There was a man dressed in a black suit and matching trench standing above the body. He kept looking from the corpse to Aaron, and his brown hair was slicked back and damp with sweat, and his eyes were full of suspicion.
“Excuse me?” he finally said to Aaron.
“Yea?” Aaron asked, his breath labored and his hospital gown and arms were covered in blood from his torn stitches.
“I’m detective Randy Kit,”
Aaron blinked. “Yeah?”
“Is this you?”
The detective reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a copy of a black-and-gray yearbook photo, and both he and Chase gasped when they saw it.
It was him.
The Aaron of 1998, staring at them as if a ghost, returning to haunt its older self.
“Yeah.” Aaron nodded as he allowed Chase and Tammy to guide him back to his bed. “Yeah, it is.”
Detective Kit nodded and looked down at the body, taking in the scene before him.
Did he know that this wasn’t the first time for Aaron Christopher? Did he already know the depths of spilled blood on tiled floors? Was he aware of how familial this already was for him?
“Any idea why this guy would want to kill you?”
They shook their heads. It would all come out soon enough; it always did, and Aaron was sure that the media was already on its way.
“Can someone help me?” Aaron asked.
He lifted his wounds to the orderlies so they could see his torn stitches.
Aaron looked at himself and sighed. Once again he had found himself caked in human blood, only this time most of it had been his own.
It was just blood.
Nothing was in it.
It couldn’t take him over or breathe some sort of beast inside of him. The spirit wasn’t in the genetics; it was in something else—something ephemeral and out of reach. It couldn’t be grasped in anyone’s hands or be consumed and taken into himself. He wasn’t a witch. He didn’t have that kind of power, if that kind of power even existed.
In the end blood could be washed away. It could be wiped clean as if it had never been there. Wounds healed. Scars got stitched up, and cuts eventually scabbed over before falling away to reveal the fresh new tissue below.