My gaze sweeps the rest of the page, the other few panels.
I turn the page.
Blank.
They are all blank, the rest of the book.
“What is it?” Thomas asks. I can’t tell what he’s been able to see, and I snap the book shut.
“Nothing,” I say.
My mother walks back into the room. “Give the tea a few minutes, then.” She clearly sees the fear on my face. “What’s wrong?”
If I tell her what I just saw in the book, she’ll freak out. Perhaps even more than I’m freaking out, and I’m the one with panic attacks. Then she’ll launch into a furious tirade against my father, worse than before, and I don’t want that. This house is toxic, and I don’t want to add to it.
“It’s nothing,” I say, a lie so obvious I wonder why I bothered with it at all.
“Alice—”
“Mom, please, just let it go.”
I shouldn’t have come.
She looks at me, her small eyes set back in her meaty face. She wants to assail my father more, reminding me why she tore me from him. She wants to justify her actions, wants to remind me my only chance at normalcy is thanks to her. But, in a sweet and seldom moment, she doesn’t. She lets it go.
Instead, she switches to small talk, her second language after her native language of complaint.
I last two more hours at the house next to the cemetery. Two agonizingly slow hours, and the whole time, my mind whirs about what I saw in the pages of that book. My mother carries on about things like Thanksgiving plans, a holiday we’ve adopted but that still feels like forced, manufactured happiness to me. I tell her, Of course I’ll be there.
Finally I escape. On the drive home, I keep checking my mirrors, feeling as if a ghost has stowed away in my backseat.
As I pull up to the curb of my Manchester home, I feel pricks on my skin and cold metal in my stomach, like an impending flu just beginning to dig its claws into me. It’s shortly after dusk, and the sky hangs heavy, barely holding in its guts. As I walk up the steps to my house, my tenant, Richard, descends the exterior steps from his upstairs unit. He’s tall and gaunt, his shoulders perpetually slumped forward, a sunflower too heavy to keep its face skyward toward the sun. His hands are burrowed in his baggy jeans, and an Army coat wraps his thin frame. Richard is perhaps my age, but age is somehow difficult to guess on someone who rarely smiles. As he sees me, his dark eyes brighten a tad.
“Hey, Alice.”
“Hi, Richard.”
I’m in no mood to talk, which is fine since Richard rarely says more than hello.
But this time, as I pass him on the walkway to the house, he calls to me from behind.
“Are you okay?”
Pricks on my skin again.
“It’s just…” He stammers to find his words. “You don’t look great. I mean, you don’t look bad, you just—”
“I think I’m coming down with something,” I say. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
He nods and then looks back to the ground, his black, stringy hair falling over his left eye.
“Have a good night,” he says and keeps walking to his car.
“You too,” I mumble.
Richard works mostly nights at Elliott Hospital as an RN. I’m happy to have him gone tonight, because I don’t want him pounding on my door in concern if he hears me gasping for air or sobbing in exhausted fear.
I fumble with my keys and barely seem able to let myself in the door. The security system chirps its thirty-second warning, and I manage to punch in the code on the illuminated pad. I race to every light switch and flip them all on. Along the way, I drop the book on the kitchen counter, facedown.
Then the tingling begins in my fingertips, tiny stings of frozen extremities plunged into hot water. A sign of an impending panic attack. Sometimes I can force it down, but I have the sense this one has come to play. You can’t battle a million firing synapses that force your brain to relive suffocating dark moments for hours on end. Well, actually, there is a way, and it’s called medication. I’ve tried them all—legal and illegal alike—and have given up on every single one. Medication is life’s CGI—a fancy trick that makes everything beautiful and surreal, yet astoundingly flat and hollow.
The attack barely even bothers flirting with me. I’m in my kitchen when I get a stronger sense of it creeping up on me, like a ghost that just passed through the nearby wall and into the room. I cannot hurt this thing coming for me; it can only hurt me. All I can do is suffer its blows and assure myself I’ll come out the other side. Sometimes, I don’t want to come out the other side. There are times when I want to be swallowed by it and suffocate into sweet nothingness inside its belly.
My breathing tightens. A thousand pounds of memories crushing me, forcing the air from my lungs and keeping me from taking in any more. I’m dying. It’s always my first thought, though I’ve been having these attacks since I was fifteen. I always get a chance to breathe again, but I never know how long this monster will sit on top of me before finally letting up.
My skin starts to burn. Eyes squeeze closed. I fall to the hardwood floor of my living room and stretch my arms above my head. Sometimes this helps.
Breathe, Alice.
But I can’t. I’m helpless against the thoughts in my head. I desperately try to relax, but desperation never begets any kind of peace. I tell myself I’m safe, that this can’t hurt me, but it does no good.
This is happening; I’m beyond the point of stopping it. I will go through this as I always do, immersed and yet detached from it. Acute, prolonged horror peppered with chunks of missing time, moments where my mind shuts down entirely.
My scars pulse with heat. I struggle to still my mind and count them, because even counting can help. One, two, three on the back, four on the left shoulder, five on the forearm, six on the clavicle—
And then I see them, as I always do. Sylvia and Melinda Glassin, the twins who wanted to walk me home through the park that night. It’s all here, playing in my mind like a movie I’ve watched a thousand times. Gladstone Park. The little bridge over the creek. All the twins talk about is Mister Tender. How handsome he is. How he can fulfill wishes.
I tell them he’s just a character. Make-believe.
It’s so dark that I can’t see Sylvia’s hands, but I know what she is holding. She attacks me first, from behind, and she cries out as the knife blade slips so easily into my buttery, fourteen-year-old skin.
On the floor of my house, I open my eyes and manage to suck in the smallest pocket of air. It’s not enough, but it’s a start. It’s a sign I will at least survive tonight, but not before Sylvia and Melinda have their way with me. I have never been able to stop them, not even with the medication. But I have learned how to dull my mind against their faces, harden my skin against their blade. I look at the faux antique clock on my wall, its bronzed second hand ticking at a glacial pace. I count the seconds, knowing they will turn into minutes, and praying the minutes won’t turn into hours.
There’s nothing in this world more trapping than one’s own mind.
Forty-two minutes later, the initial rush of ease sweeps through me. It’s delicious morphine signaling the worst is over. I’m on the floor, stripped to my bra and underwear, slicked in sweat and tears, my paper-white skin splotched in heat rashes, my heart beating as fast as a hummingbird’s wings. The shortest attack I’ve had lasted seven minutes, the longest nearly three hours, and I’m grateful this one leaned toward the merciful.
I peel myself from the hardwood floor, noticing the sheen from my body’s imprint as I stagger to my feet. I feel like I’ve gone eight rounds in a cage match, and now all I want to do is sleep.
The book is on the kitchen counter where I left it. I reach to it with weak limbs, lift it with shaking hands. Turn it over, look at the cover, open and turn to the inscription.
Alice, what did the penguin always tell you?
“Don’t trust anyone,” I say. I turn the page over, and I imagine my father’s cologne as I turn to the first bursts of color.
I thumb past my father’s artwork and get to the second story, the one responsible for tonight’s attack. The imposter’s artwork. Again, the first pane, the one of me clutching a ticket to a movie I saw just two weeks ago.
I inhale deeply, count to four, hold my breath, count to four again, and exhale, count to four. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Sometimes this helps.
The second panel depicts me sitting at my kitchen table. Nighttime. I stare off into nothing, my face a blend of fear and gut-stabbing loneliness. A glass of red wine sits in front of me. The rest of the bottle is close by.
It’s the third and last panel that gets me the most. It shows me sleeping in my bed, and the clock on the nightstand reads just after two in the morning. The details of my room are exactly as they truly exist: same bedside table, same lamp, same artwork on the walls. Even my comforter is correct in its pattern detail. This is my cold-weather comforter, which I just brought from the closet to my bed earlier this month. And perhaps most unnerving of all, the point of view of this scene is not from my bedroom window, but rather on the opposite side of the room, near the door, as if the artist came into my house, up the stairs, and into my bedroom. Drew me as I slept. I realize a person wouldn’t actually have had to be standing in my doorway to capture these details; they could have just looked in my bedroom window and imagined the perspective. Still, the choice to draw the point of view from inside my house is especially unnerving.
Whoever did this was able to find these lost panels of my father’s work, the only depictions of Chancellor’s Kingdom that exist, and append them with their own copycat art. Moreover, whoever sent me this book is clearly watching me. Following me. I arm my security system every night, so I’m certain no one is standing in my bedroom as I sleep. Yet someone still knows the intimate details of the room itself.
The name Jimmy pops in my head, but again I can’t make sense of any connection. I would never credit him with the creativity and skill needed to accomplish sending me a hand-drawn graphic novel postmarked from England. Jimmy is a criminal and a heroin addict, or at least he was when I left him. He’s back in my mind, but it’s a stretch to title him Mister Tender.
And then there’s the creep from the gym.
I set the book down, labor upstairs, and crawl into bed, reaching over and turning off the lamp before collapsing my head onto the pillow. I grab my cell phone and launch the security system app. In it, I can see all the events for the last thirty days. Anytime I armed or disarmed the house, any time movement was picked up by a motion sensor. I look at each event and try to correspond with what I remember but quickly get lost. I can be up at all hours, so I can’t be certain if a motion sensor event was me or not. But nothing sticks out as unusual. And the arming and disarming events correlate with what I recall of my daily routine.
From the app, I arm the system for the night, then pull up my sheets and close my eyes.
I keep the light on.
It will be some time until sleep comes tonight, if at all.