Before
CLARITY WAS A double-edged sword.
Maddy Boyle’s mind and memory, for weeks now, had slowly been returning, bits and pieces from her childhood, and most recently her time in college before the attack. Despite what her parents had insisted, that she wait until next semester to go back, to not do too much too soon, she’d felt she was sound enough of mind to return to her fall classes at the College of Charleston right away. She was certainly physically ready, strong enough to run now—she’d done three miles this morning—but she’d feared the attention her walking into the classroom would bring. The stares, the questions she couldn’t answer. Her awakening had been front page news for three days. Charleston College Student Comes Back to Life!
But school would be there when she returned.
When she’d left home, she hadn’t been as confident in her mission as she’d pretended to be with her mother. She knew where she needed to go—Harrod’s Reach, Nebraska. She knew who she needed to see—a young boy named Solomon Dupree. And she also knew he was a coma patient but had been under for much longer than she had. And that he was important over there. The rest had begun coming back to her within hours of leaving home, and the memories of both her previous life and Lalaland had come at her like a tsunami before she’d hit the South Carolina border. So hard and fast she’d had to pull over on the emergency lane gravel and vomit as semi trucks zoomed by. Waves of dizziness had forced her to take breaks at three different rest stops on the first day, until she’d ultimately decided to stop for a night on the north side of Atlanta to mentally regroup.
And that night, despite the intense urgency she felt to reach Harrod’s Reach, had turned into three. She hadn’t felt it was safe to drive, not with her mind fluttering so freely and without warning between reality and … and the memories of where she’d been, which was not only coming back in pieces during the day but as nightmares when she slept.
A Charleston detective named Phipps had called during her second day in Atlanta, leaving two messages, wanting to see what she remembered from that night at the Charleston Harbor. Even though there’d been no more reports of attacks in the area since her attack, they knew the Horseshoe Rapist was still out there. They needed her help bringing him in. They understood her reticence but would appreciate a few minutes of her time. Detective Phipps called again the next day, left another message. She would have loved to help, she’d told herself inside the hotel room, as she drank coffee and watched the world go by outside, but that motherfucker’s face, thank the Lord, was still a blur to her.
Or at least it had been, until her third night in that hotel room, when the smell of his foul, rancid breath came back to her while she’d been watching the news and eating carryout Chinese. She’d eaten half of her shrimp fried rice when the stench hit her. Nausea sent her to bed early. That night she awoke sweating, having gone deep enough into sleep to bring back with her a nightmare. A nightmare where she’d been back in Lalaland, and that’s when she’d fully started to understand about that place. That that was where everyone went briefly when they dreamed, when they had nightmares. They catch glimpses and then they wake up and mostly don’t remember.
Because everyone has been to Lalaland, Maddy, Sully had told her in her first days there. Only the strongest can stay. The rest of the world wakes up and goes about their days.
But not you. You stayed for a time, and now you’re back. Do what you need to do.
Along with a clear picture of her attacker’s face, she’d awoken in the hotel room that night with another name on her lips.
Amy Shimp.
Throughout the day, four more names had come to her, and she’d written those down as well, but by then she’d already spent hours locating Amy Shimp, making phone calls and eliminating those she felt weren’t her Amy, scrolling online before finally pinpointing a seven-year-old Amy Shimp in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who’d been comatose for two years. She’d been struck in the head by a foul ball during a Houston Astros baseball game, spending a month in intensive care in Houston before finally being transferred back home, prospects negative in terms of recovery.
Maddy checked out of the hotel that next morning and hit the road, no longer suffering the bouts of dizziness and nausea that had come along with what she now called her memory dumps. She could stop by and see Amy on the way to Harrod’s Reach. After a few miles, she’d thought, Quit kidding yourself. You don’t mean to just see her. You mean to take her with you. Not kidnap, thought Maddy as she sped west through Georgia, but convince the parents to let her go. At that point Maddy’s nerves started shredding for different reasons, because how in the hell could she convince two grieving parents that their dead-head daughter needed to go on a sudden trip?
And dead-head? Where had that thought come from? It was heartless, and that wasn’t her. Someone else called them that.
Dead-heads? Them …? Because there’s more.
Every name coming to you now, they’re dead-heads, Maddy, and they need you. They need you to get them before … before he gets them …
A headache started behind her eyes, so she drove for the next few miles in quiet contemplation, no longer allowing herself to think of the big picture because the big picture right now was too big. Too much.
Do your best to not sound like a lunatic and get to Amy Shimp before he does.
On the road, she called Detective Phipps, and while he seemed pleased to hear from her, she kept it short and ended it abruptly when he suggested meeting in person. “He was tall,” she told him over the phone. “Six foot four at least, and well over two hundred and fifty pounds.” She wondered all over again how in the hell she’d fought him off. “His eyes were brown. Dead. Like there was no life in them. His face was doughy. His cheeks and neck were pockmarked, like he’d had bad acne as an adolescent. His hair was long. To the shoulders. Uncombed and greasy.” The detective had asked if that was all. She said, “That horseshoe he left on me. That wasn’t the only one on him. I know what you guys call that, like a calling card or something, but it wasn’t the only one on him.” Even now as she drove, she remembered the way the horseshoes at his waist had jangled and clanked together during their struggle. “You know how a janitor wears a bundle of keys off his belt. That’s what the horseshoes made me think of. They just hung there, heavy and loud.” She told the detective she had to go. She’d let him know if she remembered anything more, and no, it wasn’t in her best interest to meet in person. Not right now.
She drove the next several hours thinking of a plan, pondering what to say to the Shimps, trying to conjure up the resolve she’d need to even broach I need your daughter to come with me …
The drive gave her ample time to think. Dreams might be fleeting, but this most recent memory dump from her time in Lalaland stayed like an ingrained image. The Lake of Fire. The Island of Bones. The Field of Black Roses. The Forest of Mare Trees and the three Backwards Oceans. Where pink birds soared large as condors, where monsters were as likely as the sunsets, and where everything dripped with vibrant, lurid color. What struck her odd now was that both Amy Shimp and Sully Dupree in Lalaland were young adults, while they were still children here. Sully and his 1920s-style Applejack hat. Blue eyes bright and bold and confident. Skin, sun-touched and darkened by whiskers, but not enough to hide the inch-long scars at his chin and right cheekbone. His black shirt unbuttoned down to the middle of his muscled chest, rolled up at the elbows, revealing strong, ropey arms. Her first moments in Lalaland, other than walking through the knee-high yellow grass, where purple snakes slithered through rich, moist soil and red spiders climbed up and down every distinct buttery-yellow blade, had nearly been the end for her. Which, Sully had told her, would have also spelled the end for her over here. She’d stumbled across a cluster of barbaric men sitting around a campfire, roasting meat on a spit—not animal meat, but a human arm being turned and charred and blackened. Beside the circle of men was a wheelbarrow full of body parts—arms, legs, feet, hands—with stray fingers on the ground, resting there like giant maggots. The noise of her retching alerted the men, and two came sprinting up the hill toward her, one with a sword and the other with an axe. When they were no more than ten feet away, as Maddy had stood too stunned to move, two gunshots echoed from behind her and both men dropped dead. The ones below stood from the fire and ran off, leaving their wheelbarrow of body parts behind.
She’d turned to find Sully behind her, handgun still smoking like they do in cartoons. He kicked one of the dead men with his scuffed brown boots and spoke in a deep, weathered voice. “We call them door-runners. They scavenge the doors for severed limbs that get lopped off when the doors breathe.” He squinted against the intense sunlight. “Not all of us are good over here.”
Maddy flexed her hands on the wheel as she drove, sure that she could still feel Sully’s grip when, after saving her life over there, he’d shaken her hand, told her his name, and said in his deep, weathered voice, “Welcome to Lalaland.” By the time she pulled into the Shimps’ driveway in Tulsa and parked beside their modest ranch house, she had a carefully worded plan. But when she knocked on the door and waited, she grew nervous, because this was stupid, so irrationally senseless that her palms had begun to sweat. And by the time the door was opened by a woman way too old to be the mother, Tammy Shimp, Maddy panicked.
The woman stared. “Can I help you?”
Maddy said, “Is Amy there?” Which had not been her plan of attack.
“Is this a joke? Huh? A cruel prank? Or are you a reporter?”
A younger voice sounded from an adjacent room. “Who is it, Mom?”
That made sense, thought Maddy. This woman was her mother. Maddy’s confidence grew. “Can I please talk to Tammy, Amy’s mother?”
“I know who Tammy is. Who you are is the question.”
“My name is Maddy Boyle, Mrs. Shimp.”
“I’m not Shimp.” The woman glanced toward another room. “And I wish she wasn’t anymore either. Jeffrey’s long gone.”
“Um, this is awkward, but … Amy, she’s … You see, I was … like her …”
Just then Tammy Shimp showed herself in the doorway, smaller than her mother, in height and in build, but on first impression, mighty. Tammy was pretty like Maddy had seen in the papers, but older now, like a mother whose child needed around the clock care, and Maddy wanted to tell her that she knew all about it. She knew what it was like on the other side.
That there was a link between Maddy and this woman’s daughter she couldn’t yet explain, only that it was as real as the sweat now gathering in her armpits. Tammy must have sensed the nerves; she placed a hand on her mother’s shoulder to say without words I got this, you can go, and off her mother went, not pouting but certainly not trusting the stranger at the door.
Tammy removed an earpiece and small headphones and apologized that she’d been on a call, that she worked from home. She reached out her hand like she was eager for company.
That was what Maddy told herself, to make herself feel better. To prep herself for the weird ask she was about to throw out to this total stranger.
Only that her daughter Amy wasn’t a stranger. And she was not a little girl where Maddy knew her. She shook Tammy Shimp’s hand. “My name is Maddy Boyle. I’m a senior at the College of Charleston. Until three weeks ago I was …” Maddy trailed off when she saw how intently Tammy Shimp was watching her, and with pooling tears in her eyes.
“Maddy, I know who you are,” Tammy said. “Please, come in.”