Kathy Ryan had to sew up a gaping hole into another dimension—and if possible, find a team of missing people before they were lost forever. And she had not one single clue as to how to accomplish either.
There had been a lead as to the whereabouts of the missing Paragon Corporation employees. A single member of the recon team, who had been sent to the other side of the portal to recover Claire Banks and her people, had managed to stumble back through the gateway. He’d been alone and in pretty bad shape, but he was alive. A lot of the debriefing statement he’d made was jumbled. He’d been in shock, badly hurt on both physical and psychological levels by what he only seemed able to refer to as the “Wraiths from the trapezoids.” He hadn’t been able to tell them much; he claimed he couldn’t remember most of his experience beyond crossing through the gateway, and what he could remember were snippets so horrible that even his nightmares tried to eject them from his mind. Kathy suspected he knew somewhere deep down that, despite the genuine and significant gaps in his memory and his ability to relate any useful information, he’d seen too much, knew too much. Even if he couldn’t remember, it was still all back there in his brain somewhere. He was a carrier of that most feared and dangerous virus, knowledge, and that made him something of a ticking time bomb, set to go off and recall everything. That made him a threat, either to himself or the corporation or both, and he was scared.
Despite the fugue surrounding most of the broken man’s experience, there had been some useful tidbits. Kathy had found that a lot of times the trick to reading government and corporate documentation, especially that of groups working in under such clandestine conditions as Paragon, was to read what was not stated in that documentation. The surviving recon member’s debriefing report had been the one piece of information she’d had to request, based on a passing reference to it from a memo. Paragon hadn’t handed it over with the initial materials, and there was usually a reason for that beyond mere oversight. She suspected the omission was because of a short section near the end where the man, a Lieutenant Jeremy Briggs, goes off in the weeds with the interviewing scientist, a Dr. Greenwood:
Greenwood: And you can’t remember anything else?
Briggs: No, sir.
Greenwood: How about your escape? How did you find the portal?
Briggs: It was in the forest, where we’d come in. I, uh, don’t really remember how I got back there, though.
Greenwood: Were you alone?
Briggs: Sir?
Greenwood: Were any team members with you at this time?
Briggs: No, sir, not that I recall. I don’t remember when I lost them. It was somewhere back by the statues, though. I remember that. Back where the statues were.
Greenwood: And you don’t remember anything spurring you to run? Anything chasing you?
Briggs: The Wraiths from the Trapezoids. They brought light…and then blood. And the voices were awful.
Greenwood: I’m not sure I understand, Lieutenant. Can you explain?
Briggs: The whispers told me awful things. They took the Green Team. Did you know that? Ask Rodriguez. And then they tried to follow me from the city, and—
[A pause in the recording]
Greenwood: Is there something wrong, Lt. Briggs?
Briggs: Can you—can you get rid of that curtain there?
[the shuffling sound of someone moving in a folding chair]
Greenwood: That one there?
Briggs: There’s too much of it. It has too much space to do things.
Greenwood: I suppose we could open it, if you prefer…
Briggs: You oughta take it down and burn it. That would be better.
Greenwood: What’s wrong with the curtain?
[A pause in the recording]
Briggs: It’s making faces at me. Fucked up faces.
Kathy had listened to that recording three times. The third time, she thought she’d heard whispering in the background once Briggs had mentioned the curtains, but it went without remark or acknowledgment from anyone else on the recording. Regardless, there were a few possible reasons why Paragon had overlooked sending it. The most likely was that the corporation thought what Kathy did—that whatever Briggs was seeing, or possibly hearing, was not a result of pre-existing mental illness or even trauma.
It was something else, something which contradicted the belief Claire Banks had stated in her journal that nothing from the far side of the gate could be brought back.
Kathy hadn’t been able to reach Lt. Briggs by phone or email, so she’d driven three and a half hours to Picatinny Arsenal Army Base in Morris County, New Jersey, where he was stationed post-quarantine, to talk to him.
Lt. Jeremy Briggs had gotten into a fatal car crash three days before her arrival. Despite a consistently clean bill of health throughout his army career, the coroner’s report cited enough cocaine and uppers in his system to have exploded his heart long before he’d ever gotten behind the wheel of his car. He’d left behind a bewildered sister and mother who proved, understandably in their grief and utter confusion, to be of little help, insisting their Jeremy had never done drugs in his life.
What it meant materially to Kathy’s new case was that nothing the man had said could be followed up with an interview. The only possible lead to what might have happened to the Green Team had literally gone up in flames.
She would have to cast a wider net.
Through the Network, she had access to a part of the Internet where the most powerful and secret occult knowledge was exchanged regularly, and cultists congregated and shared information without fear of exposure, accidental or otherwise. Like the Dark Web, the sites had their own special addresses and a specific browser through which they could be accessed. Some sites required ISPs from a carefully curated and restricted list. Others provided a convoluted breadcrumb trail to find any actual information. The users called it the Indigo Web or the Starless Web, and it had bred a culture complete with its own language and memes, its own limited commerce, and its own cloaked social media platforms. Kathy didn’t expect to find anyone who had physically been to this new world, but she thought she might be able to find reference to someone’s magickal practices accessing information on it.
She switched browsers and searched under both “G-01-01-409763” and “Hesychia” but found nothing. Frowning, she tried the phrase “Wraiths from the trapezoids” and was surprised when the search engine pulled up three results. Two were simply links to the third, which was a message board post on an occult forum about psychic dreams involving a dead city. The original post was dated 2014, and the responses were mostly vapid offers of sympathy, questionable advice, or useless responses to other posters. Kathy was about to give up when a more recent reply to the thread caught her eye. Posted on May 1st, 2019—two days ago—it was only a few lines, but enough to pique her interest:
militman84:You’re talking about a real place, and it’s dangerous. I’ve been there, but I can’t say any more about that. I’m risking my life just posting this. Don’t dream there anymore, and for God’s sake, don’t open any gateways. The Wraiths will find you and the trapezoids will bring them here. If you believe nothing else I’m posting, at least, for the sake of the world on this side of the gate, believe that.
Kathy reread the entry with a grim satisfaction, then printed it out. It was the use of “Wraiths” and “trapezoids” that gave the post credibility in Kathy’s mind. According to Paragon Corporation documentation, the only people who had been in the room to hear Jeremy Briggs stutter through terrified whispers about the “Wraiths from the trapezoids” were DC George R. Sherman, Dr. Carter Greenwood, Dr. Robert Northwright, and Colonel Jacob P. Anderson. None of his fellow team members were believed to have survived. However, the lieutenant’s words suggested that possibly the only other people who would have known about these Wraiths from the trapezoids—the only people who might refer to them as such in this world—were Claire Banks’s Green Team itself.
“Ask Rodriguez,” Briggs had said, as if it were a fact that Rodriguez was alive and accounted for and available to be asked anything at all. Was it a credible conclusion? She couldn’t ask Briggs, but maybe…maybe she could ask “militman84,” whoever that might be.
It was clear to her that the last part of the conversation between Briggs and Greenwood was a significant lead—not just for her, but for Paragon as well. And yet, there was absolutely no follow-up on any of it. There was no further information in any of the correspondences, nothing in notes or emails, not even margin scribbles. It was, Kathy thought, one of the conspicuously sparse points in an otherwise detailed disclosure, and she suspected that meant the many things they had disclosed to her were not nearly as numerous as those they were still keeping from her.
It was possible that “militman84” might well be the only key to a number of those particular locked doors.
Kathy had never had the technological know-how or patience for the more complicated arts of computer hacking, but she did know Network members who did. They had given her some software and a few simple commands to trace identities, even on the Indigo web. The ISP of the computer used by “militman84” belonged to a Warner Müller of 35 Orchard Street in Haversham, New Jersey. The name didn’t ring a bell from any of the Paragon information, but that wasn’t necessarily a problem. If not an alias, then Müller might be a family member or trusted friend giving asylum to a Paragon employee off the grid, or maybe even to a Green Team member who had been recovered or somehow escaped.
Kathy didn’t think Paragon was aware of either the poster or Warner Müller, or there would not have been a post for her to find. Neither Paragon nor any of their government affiliations would want “militman84” posting information about a top secret project. If Kathy had found this post, it would have been naïve to think it would be her secret for very long, especially if “militman84” was indeed someone who had escaped Hesychia. It was a point she kept coming back to in her mind. If Briggs was somehow not the only person to have ever been to Hesychia and return, but he was the only one Paragon had recorded proof of having returned, then this other person had found a way back that was not through the Paragon gateway. That meant another way in and out of Hesychia. In Kathy’s experience, one doorway between dimensions was bad. Two might well be disastrous.
She shut down the browser, that grim excitement tingling in her chest and limbs. It was time to get going. If “militman84” wasn’t dead already, it was possible Kathy was on borrowed time to find him. Paragon and especially the government’s various security groups made it a point to tie up loose ends, or make them disappear entirely. If she couldn’t find “militman84” before one of them did, he might just end up like Briggs.
Kathy stood and went to the kitchen. She needed to stretch and think. Warner Müller’s contact information had come from an encrypted source which, so far as she could tell, had only ever been decrypted once—by her. That meant those people looking to silence “militman84” one way or another hadn’t quite found him yet. Her gut told her this person was the lead she needed, but she was running out of time.
She took the vodka out of the freezer, stared at it a moment, then unscrewed the cap and took a swig. It occurred to her as she rubbed her aching neck with her free hand and stretched the tense muscles in her back and legs that she had been doing this kind of work a long time. She had learned some terrifying truths she could never unlearn, and in the face of those truths, in trying to take in their scope and power, she was exhausted. She often wondered if anything she did made a difference. All these other dimensions were like tides from multiple oceans, crashing on one little shore from all different directions. Although sometimes they ebbed, pulling back into their own dark vastness, they inevitably flowed forward again, washing toward Earth and eroding the security of its isolation. And it was happening more and more often now. Network data going back almost three thousand years had shown a negligible increase, as well as the occasional and manageable spike during historic cataclysmic events or eras of great upheaval. The spikes were extremely few and far between, though, and that nearly imperceptible rise had never been any reason for alarm.
Over the last 250 years, though, the incidents of other-dimensional interference had taken a sharp upturn. Further, she’d never had so much field work in the entirety of her career as she’d had in the last ten years. It meant something. It was hard to say just what, but the correlation of the data was pointing to something big on the way.
So many years, she thought as she took another swig of vodka. So many years of—what? Chipping icicles off an iceberg?
Was she really stopping any cataclysmic catastrophes, or just putting off the inevitable?
Like an echo in her mind, her brother’s words returned to her: “You’re not as different from me as you think…I wanted you to think I helped save the world to keep you safe from evil. Evil like…me. But I think…I dunno, I think maybe I did it so there would be other chances for those stressors to break you. As long as you have a world to keep saving, there’s a chance one day those stressors will make you just like me. Then—”
She took a final swig of vodka and replaced the cap. Her brother, Toby, was a monster. He’d been a monster for longer than she’d been someone who fought them. And he’d only helped her save the world because he wanted it to go on to someday be attacked again. Maybe he knew more about inter-dimensional endgames than she’d thought. Maybe he just hoped for worlds to keep colliding, over and over and over, until the stress of trying to fix it finally broke Kathy. He seemed to think that there was just one switch to flip, just one crack in the facade to widen, and Kathy would abandon all sense of human empathy or compassion and become a killer like him.
Maybe he was right. She had always believed there was a chasm, an illimitable gulf of difference between them, but…maybe he was right, and all it would take was one collision too many.
She opened the fridge and replaced the vodka on the shelf, then picked up her purse off the counter. Reece was working a night shift on a murder case—a teenaged girl who’d been found with her throat slit. They both kept odd schedules and that was okay, but she wished just then that she could see him before she left, just to hug him quickly and give him a kiss and tell him she loved him, for all that the love of someone like her might mean.
Instead, she sent him a quick text to let him know she was off to New Jersey for a new case, and that she’d call him when she could. She followed it up with a heart emoji. Then she swept up her car keys from the small table by the front door, and with her thoughts trailing behind her like smoke, she was on her way to New Jersey.
* * * *
On the thirty-first subfloor beneath the Paragon Corporation building complex, the gateway between this world and the other rippled and swirled. Had there been anyone in the containment lab just then, he or she might have found it hypnotizing to watch, with its twinkling lights and colors that emerged and sank within the black. One might almost have imagined living things swimming beneath the surface, silhouettes darker than the fluid of the gate. One might have been tempted to put a hand through the fluid, to feel its cold wet-not-wetness on the skin and the shiver that moved through one’s body from making contact. If there had been someone in the containment lab, that someone might have seen the odd distortion at its center, as if it were being spilled sideways, or perhaps being pulled at by something sticky.
There was no one in the lab, though. The cameras whirred on from the observation control room, capturing video of the gate, and while the distortion showed up in the recordings, the muscled claw that reached through it when the distortion snapped back did not.
The claw fingers stretched and the palm flexed as if it had been cramped for a long time. As the fluid of the gate receded, the rough ashen skin, reminiscent of birch bark, began to smoke and curl, but the owner of the claw took no notice. The filmy eye at the center of the palm blinked, adjusting to the harsh light, and the long, hard talons, so dark a blue as to be almost black, glinted.
The claw trembled a moment, and then stopped smoking. The charred marks healed until they were little more than smudges of soot. The fingers spread wide, then hooked as if grasping at the foreign air, before the claw receded back through the gate.
There was no one in the lab to notice, and so there was no one in the lab to worry.
* * * *
When the curtains began to make faces at Warner Müller and whisper terrible things into the oppressive atmosphere of the living room, he decided he needed some air.
It had been three weeks since he’d promised his sister-in-law he’d give her brother a place to lie low for a while. Three weeks of feeding and sheltering a madman, was what Müller had thought at first. The things that man said in his sleep as he tossed and turned on Müller's couch were strange, to say the least, but it was the look in his eyes that was really unsettling. It was as if he'd seen something so horribly bright that it had left an imprint behind his eyes and a pulsing corona on his field of vision. Everywhere he looked, he was still seeing that terrible, bright thing, and no matter how many times he blinked, it wouldn't go away or even fade. He hadn't spoken much during the time he'd been in Müller's home, but he didn't need to. The haunted expression on his face and the hesitant way in which he moved said more than words could, even in his night-time ramblings.
Then came the man’s confession three days prior. Müller thought of it as a confession, but as such things went, it wasn’t much. The man had been dreaming on the couch, and had awoken with a shout. Müller, who had been passing through the living room with a sandwich, had paused uneasily to check on his house guest, who’d been sweating and sucking in lungfuls of air. The man had looked up at him and muttered, “I escaped. It was horrible. Horrible.” He’d put his head in his hands, but then bolted upright suddenly as if shocked. He’d uttered a little cry, cast a wounded, suspicious glance at the back of the couch behind him, and said, “Did you feel that? Can you feel that? It’s all around us. I didn’t really escape. You can’t escape them. They infect you, and…and that infection comes through.” He started laughing to himself then muttered, “I didn’t know. How could I? Nothing that came back through from there survived. But not nothing, I guess. Not nothing…and it makes you crazy, gets into your dreams and the floor and the air and the walls and makes them crazy.” He gestured all around him. “It gets into the fabric of the world. I just…I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
“Are you okay?” Müller had felt silly even asking the question—clearly, the man on the couch hadn’t been okay—but he hadn’t been sure what else to say to such a litany of crazy statements. “Can I get you some water or something?”
“No, thank you.” After a moment, he’d risen shakily, muttering something under his breath that Müller thought might have been “just didn’t know,” and retreated to his room. Müller had found himself relieved to be rid of the man’s presence, but had felt guilty for feeling that way. He’d stood for a moment in the center of the living room, staring at the couch as if the nightmare his houseguest had left behind could come up from the cushions and envelop him if he sat there.
A silly thought…but he’d chosen the nearby easy chair anyway.
It was as he’d chewed thoughtfully on a bite of sandwich that a section of the curtains about eight inches down from the top had scrunched together and pulled themselves into the features of an angry face.
Müller had blinked, swallowed the bit of food in his mouth, and, moving the small rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, rubbed his eyes. He’d been tired. Work had been piling up at the office, bills had been piling up at home, and his head had been aching a lot lately right behind the eyes. He’d glanced back up at the curtains, which had hung smooth and not at all face-like, as he’d known they would. He had just exhaled in relief when another spot in the curtains, lower and off to the right, had pulled together into a face, more distorted and angrier-looking than the first.
“What the bloody hell?” he’d said to himself. He usually wasn’t one to use harsh language of any kind and never in mixed company, but the surrealism of the face in the curtains had drawn it out of him. He’d stood and made his way past the couch of nightmares and over to the curtains, stopping about three feet from the face. His proximity had distorted the features once more, morphing them into mere wrinkles and thread pulls in the fabric. Nothing sinister there.
What was it that he’d been told before? “…gets into your dreams and the floor and the air and the walls and makes them crazy. It gets into the fabric of the world.” The words were clearly playing on his tired brain. The notion of faces in the curtains was ridiculous. And yet…
He’d yanked the curtains open, bunching and binding the fabric by the hooks to either side of the window. The faces may have been tricks of the eyes, but the effect had been disturbing nonetheless. He didn’t want to see it.
That had been three days ago. In the time since, he’d seen the curtain-faces again, as well as faces in the wood paneling of the finished basement, one of the potted plants Dehlia kept in the kitchen, and in the plaster cracks in the den wall. The nightmares had indeed seeped from the couch cushions toward Müller’s bed, getting into the fabric of his pillow and then into his head. For three nights in a row he’d had horrible dreams about a huge altar of rough-hewn rock in a great stone city, and of the unspeakably brutal acts of violence committed on that altar to appease monstrosities so horrible that even his dream-self couldn’t look directly at them. The dreams were always filled with whispering descriptions of the violence, and of the pain and suffering caused by it, whispering that told him it would never end, that bodies could be made to be pulled and stretched and shredded and remolded on and on and on for the lifetimes of galaxies, and that madness would be no escape…
He often woke from these dreams as his house guest had, shaking and sweating and gasping for air. Dehlia, who would have slept like stone through apocalyptic explosions and rending of the earth, barely noticed, even when he shouted himself awake. She’d mumble non-words in her sleep that her dream self probably thought were soothing, then turn over and return to her light snoring.
The living room had become almost unbearable, though Müller wasn’t sure why. Nothing had changed physically—the furniture stood where it always had, the tables dust-free and the chair and couch cushions free of lint, the carpet neatly vacuumed and the afternoon sunset stretching its warm, golden fingers through the window. It was something in the air though, something palpable enough for Müller to taste in the back of his throat, something he felt like a weight on his shoulders, sagging them. When he was in the living room, especially alone—and he was often alone, since Dahlia worked and then had yoga or painting or book club or whatever, and their house guest hadn’t left his room except to go to the bathroom in those last three days—he felt the weight of whatever had been brought into his house, whatever his brother-in-law was running from. Standing too long in the center of the room made his head hurt and his stomach turn a little.
When, on the third day, he went out to get the mail from the box at the curb and, turning back toward the house, found one of the living room couch cushions inexplicably on the front porch, a part of him immediately suspected it was a trap.
A trap, the rational part of his mind countered sarcastically. Really? And just who, exactly, is trying to trap you? And for what purpose?
The thing in the curtains, the instinct-part of Müller thought. It wants to lead me back into the living room.
He made his way with uneasy steps back to the porch and picked up the cushion. The fabric felt damp and somehow slippery, igniting an instant revulsion in him. He wanted to toss it toward the curb, to get it as far away from him as possible, but the rational part of his mind chided him for being stupid. It was a damned couch cushion, and that was all.
Still, he thought he could feel the wet-but-not-wet wrongness of the fabric, could almost smell it.
He carried it back into the house, breathing shallowly to keep whatever it was from getting into his lungs. When he reached the living room couch, he did toss the cushion onto it, then quickly fitted it back into place and stepped away from it.
He turned to go, and that was when he saw the new face in the curtains. It had taken on the features of a countenance from one of those awful dreams, and before he could catch the sound in his throat, he cried out loud. The noise was vulnerably resounding in the empty, heavy room, and Müller couldn’t shake the feeling that it had somehow woken something up that he would have done better to tiptoe past.
His eyes on the curtain-face, he backed toward the doorway. The face turned to him and began whispering.
Müller knew the words weren’t English, but he understood them. He didn’t know how—the syllables were long and ugly, like trying to navigate chunks of glass in his mouth—but the language was familiar on a primal level, like something he knew through his skin, his cells, his very animal instincts.
That he did understand them was not nearly as mystifying to him as what the words were saying. Right now, the curtain-face was whispering about the torture and death of his wife and grown daughters, about a horrific series of monstrous acts inflicted on them that would ultimately reduce their softest tissue to a bloody, bubbling mess and their minds to empty shells trapping a ceaseless echo of horror whose reverberations would stir the last liquefying nerves in their bodies with agony. It made him queasy to listen; those ghastly things wouldn’t stay in his ears, but instead traveled to his brain to explode into images he could feel all over as well as see behind his eyes. His vision grew fuzzy and white. He could feel washes of unpleasant heat drawing a prickly sweat out of his skin. It was getting hard to breathe, painful even just to draw in air. He thought his body might have been slowly sinking toward the floor or possibly even that damned couch, and he panicked. If he felt the cool hard surface of the wood planks, he might be okay. If he sank into those cushions, though, that were soft in that terribly wrong way, they would suffocate him, overpower him with fabric germs he couldn’t see, choke him with faint odors of rot and death that had soaked into the fibers long ago and hibernated there, those cushions drenched with nightmares…
When his cheek brushed against and then settled on a too-warm cushion of the couch, he screamed, or at least thought he did, but whether any actual sound came out, he couldn’t be sure. He wanted his hands to prop him up and away from that cushion, his arms to shove him back, but his cheek still felt the couch and his skin still crawled at the sensation. He couldn’t see; he thought his eyes might be closed but everything was white instead of black. That his eyes might still be open struck him as even worse, and he tried to close them, to blot out the white with the familiar darkness behind his lids. Pain engulfed the eye closest to the couch cushion, and then his vision finally did change, first to gray, and then to black. He felt a brief sensation of falling, and then conscious thought sank into the couch and made way for something else to seep up and take its place.
* * * *
Müller awoke to rough hands shaking his arm and a voice far off that was vaguely familiar, but not enough to conjure a name in his groggy mind.
“Warner! Warner, come on, man! Jesus, this is bad. Look, I can’t call 911—I need you to wake up. Warner!”
Müller opened his eyes and for a moment, his chest hitched. He was looking at a white expanse again…although, he noticed with relief after a second, it was only the ceiling. He was on his back.
On the couch.
He jerked so suddenly and so hard that he fell off onto the rug. Above him, his brother-in-law looked down at him, concerned. He offered a hand to Müller to pull him to his feet. Müller was surprised to find the young man was as strong as he was.
“Stay off the couch,” he told Müller, who glanced back uneasily at the faint impression his body had made in the cushions. Dead weight, he thought.
“How long was I out?” Müller asked. A steady throbbing pain had begun just behind his right eye, the one that he remembered had been close to the couch cushion.
The other man shook his head. “I don’t know, man. I don’t know. All I know is, when I came in here, you were breathing funny, like these short, panting breaths, and you were very pale. And then…that started.” He gestured at Müller’s right eye.
“What started?” Müller’s hand moved to touch the cheekbone just beneath the eye. He flinched. The skin there was swollen and tight, and he could feel heat radiating off of it. The mere touch of his fingertips had sent a bolt of pain through his head.
“I hope it isn’t some kind of blood poisoning,” the young man said. “Here, let me show you.” He took Müller’s arm and led him gently toward the first-floor bathroom, flicked on the light, and then stepped out of the way so Müller could see.
“Oh my God in Heaven.” The face in the mirror was as white as Müller’s vision had been, but the orb of his right eye was entirely a shiny black. It was as if a dark supernova had exploded in his pupil and expanded across the entire eye. Or, Müller thought grimly, like something had gone out entirely there, a dark part of space where stars and planets alike had died.
The skin of his eye socket had turned a crumbly-looking black as well, and tendrils like tiny veins of ink had branched out beneath the skin across the whole top of his cheek, reaching down toward his jaw. The skin beneath the thin, red-lined threads of black was as swollen and waxy as it felt. The infection that had reduced his eye to an ebony orb was spreading quickly.
“Oh my God,” he repeated again. “What the hell is that? What’s happening to me?”
“I don’t know,” the man beside him said, trying to sound calm. Both his eyes were fine, but they looked scared as they traced the tiny pathways across his cheek. “But we’ll figure it out, okay? We’ll get you to a doctor and, uh, get you fixed up in no time.”
“It was the couch,” Müller muttered. “First the curtains, but then the couch…it was the couch that got me.”
The fear in the other man’s eyes flickered for just a second to understanding, then back to fear.
“You know,” Müller said, and what little anger he could muster made the infection pulse beneath his skin. “You know what this is, don’t you? Tell me what’s happening to me.”
“I don’t know. I swear. I only—”
“Yes, you do!”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. You need a doc—”
“For God’s sake, Jose—just tell me!”
Jose Rodriguez glanced from Müller’s face to his reflection and back again. He sighed. “Okay, I’ll try. I’ll explain in the car, huh? Let me drive you to the Urgent Care clinic on Beaumont.”
“No…no, not yet. Tell me first.” As crazy as it felt to say it, Müller knew he couldn’t go to a doctor. Something inside him insisted on stalling, for his own safety.
“Okay, fine, fine. Let’s at least go somewhere far away from the living room, huh? I’ll try to explain.”