CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Something wet trickled down the left side of his face. He dabbed at it and came away with a shiny crimson stain coating the pads of two fingers. Blood. While his mother and the nurses saw a groggy and incoherent Jeremy back to bed, Tab crawled to his feet and went to examine his reflection in the bathroom mirror. It was blood alright, drooling from the center of his bump.

He snatched two brown paper towels from the dispenser and ran them under cold water. Balling them in his left fist, he squeezed out the excess and squished the gooey mess against the bump. Direct pressure stopped bleeding. It was one thing he remembered from the fire and first aid lecture the chief of the Hollow County Volunteer Fire Department delivered at his school earlier that year.

While he waited on the bleeding to stop, he explored the floor outside the bathroom, seeking what he might have hit. A couple of small dark droplets of his blood dotted the linoleum tiles outside the bathroom, but nothing shown in the area he’d landed before Roy disappeared. No hospital equipment or furniture with hard edges stood close by, either. He didn’t remember striking his noggin on anything at all.

Noggin? he thought. It was not a normal word he used to describe his own head. It sounded like an old-fashioned word, something Gramma or Grandpa might have used when they were trying to be funny or folksy. Or by an adult using euphemisms to smooth over a painful experience suffered by a child. It was a Roy word.

Tab left the bathroom, piling himself on the floor by his mother’s chair. The nurses continued their attempts to comfort his brother. Jeremy fought them, probably unaware he was doing so. When one of the women tried to reattach a cable he’d ripped loose, he batted her hand like a kitten playing with a shoestring. Otherwise, his face was frustratingly blank. The second nurse produced a pair of arm restraints from her cart. She attached them to the bed and had one around each of Jeremy’s wrists before anyone could protest.

“It’s only until he can relax and be himself again,” she said to Sandra. His mother watched the procedure with haunted eyes brimming with unshed tears. “With the state he’s in right now, he might end up hurting himself or you or one of us.”

“It’s all happening at once,” his mother whispered. “Everything’s happening at once.”

Anger boiled up from Tab’s gut. Jeremy not only being hurt but looking stupid while doing it annoyed him. His mother’s tears annoyed him. Her tremulous voice even more. Once annoyed, it was an easy transition to frustration and, from there, anger and hate. Tab was the one with the big problems. Tab was the one being haunted by a nasty man he’d never met but who claimed to be his real dad. The only reason Jeremy got involved at all was because his own dad had connected to him somehow and that scared Roy away. Well, it used to.

I ain’t scared of him, Tab thought. Then: Of course I ain’t scared of him. Tim Beard is my dad. Why would I even think I would be scared of him?

Jeremy might have been scared of him. Jeremy seemed to be scared of a lot of things. That’s why he was such a jerk. If he hadn’t been stupid enough to trip over Tab’s ankle when he stood up to go after their mother at home—. Hell, if he hadn’t been stupid enough to get up and go after her in the first place, he might not be in the hospital now.

Or you should’ve kept your feet to yourself, his brain replied. Or you should’ve kept Roy from getting inside your head like he is right now.

“Oh,” Tab said aloud. “Oh no.”

***

The next thing he became aware of was a stiff breeze in his face and a repetitive slapping sound in back of him. He opened his eyes to a set of bright yellow double doors at the end of a long corridor. The hall was painted in a duotone with white on top and gray on the bottom. He sped toward those doors faster than he could walk. It dawned on him then that he was strapped in a wheelchair. Whoever was pushing it seemed in one hell of a hurry. The slapping sounds were the soles of shoes against the floor.

The wheelchair slowed to a stop when they reached the door. A meaty, hairy masculine hand and forearm stretched out from behind him and slapped a giant square button, opening the door. Beyond the opening stood a nurse’s station enclosed by thick glass above the countertops. Behind the glass stood a series of long black vertical bars, presumably made from some kind of metal. It made the enclosure look a lot like a prison cell. A small sign at the window read CHILDREN’S PSYCHIATRIC.

“Mom?” Tab’s voice was weak and tremulous. He drew breath and then shouted, “Mom?”

“I’m right behind you, sweetheart,” she said. A wave of relief washed over him at the sound of her voice.

“What’s happening?” His stomach turned over. He gagged once, but nothing came up. The hairy nurse’s arm finished pushing Tab’s wheelchair up to the station window, then slapped a sheet of paper on the counter and shoved it through. A series of slapping sounds faded into the distance. “Where are we?”

Tab’s mother appeared at his side. She knelt while the silver-haired severe-looking nurse behind the glass gave the paper a once-over. She had not yet acknowledged either Tab or his mother. “We’re still at the hospital, hon. You had a, uh—you had an incident back in your brother’s room. I’ll tell you about it when we’re settled.”

“Where?”

She didn’t answer him.

Moments later, the severe nurse wheeled him into a cube-shaped room of sparse furnishings. Two walls gleamed a Tweety Bird yellow. The others loomed institutional gray. One window populated with reinforced panes allowed a sliver of light to permeate the area above the bed, which was clothed in Batman-themed sheets. The bed, the nightstand, and a short bookshelf were all of the oak-stained particle board stuff one might find at a Target or Wal-Mart. If not for the hospital whiteboard and the beeps and boops of equipment in other rooms, it might’ve been a hotel designed for a child.

“What are we doing here?” Tab pleaded as the nurse assisted him out of his wheelchair and onto the bed. He sat with his legs dangling over the side, unwilling to lie down in this strange place. “Mom?”

“You’re going to be okay,” the nurse answered for her. She didn’t seem as angry to him now as she had behind the glass. “Your mom’s here with you and your brother is fine.”

Tab glanced at Sandra, urgency in his eyes. “What does she mean? What happened to Jeremy?” His stomach twisted into a knot when the nurse cut her eyes to Sandra, who nodded at her in response. Whatever had been exchanged between them felt ominous. The nurse collected the empty wheelchair and rolled it out of the room, closing the door behind her.

“Son,” Sandra intoned. Another ominous sign. She sat beside him on the bed and placed a soothing hand on his right knee. “First, Jeremy is fine. You didn’t hurt him.”

“I—?” Tab started, but she cut him off.

“What do you remember?”

He thought for a few seconds. Soon it came back. “Roy! I jumped at him. I was able to hit him and knock him over, Mom! I didn’t think I would be able to do it, but I did. Then...then he got inside my head, I think. The last thing I remember is thinking he was inside my head.”

Sandra scoffed. “That explains a lot.”

“What do you mean?”

“You might want to take a few breaths,” she said. “This isn’t going to be easy to hear. You attacked your brother.”

“I attacked him?” Tab’s eyes went wide. The first two fingers of his left hand went to his bump. He massaged it, but only became aware of it because it felt different now. There was a small hard crust in the center of the outer layer of skin. Like a scab. He resisted the urge to pick it off.

“You did.” She cut her eyes to the ceiling. “How can I best describe it? It was weird. Almost like you had gone into a trance or were having a seizure or something. Your mouth was open. Your eyes were rolled back in your head. All I could see of you was—” Her voice hitched. She swallowed and recovered herself. “All I could see of your eyes was the whites. And you were making some kind of weird sound, like you were trying to scream in your sleep. It was this long ahhhhhhhhhhmm sound. The closest thing I can compare it to would be a white noise machine, a long constant humming but through your open mouth.

“It was disturbing, I guess would be the best way to put it.”

“It was him,” Tab said. “He took me over.” A revelatory thought occurred. “Oh my gosh! I’ll bet that’s how the drawing happened. The one of dad’s hand coming out of the ground! I bet Roy drew that! He was using me to try to make it come true the way the other stuff I drew did! To make dad come back! But why would he want that? He’s afraid of Dad. That’s what I thought, at least.”

Sandra shrugged. “I don’t know, hon. But that’s not as bad as what happened next between you two.”

“Between Roy and Jeremy,” Tab said. Sandra waved it away. “One of the nurses who came running to help Jeremy had a pencil tucked behind her ear,” Sandra said, punctuating it with a short chuff of air that approximated laughter. “That’s something you don’t see often anymore. When I was your age, all our older women teachers in elementary school used to have at least one pencil tucked into their hair and behind an ear. Some of them had one on each side of their head.”

Tab giggled, prompting Sandra to do the same. The room felt little lighter as a result.

“While they were getting Jeremy back into bed, I guess you saw the pencil. You jumped up and grabbed it. Nearly took the poor lady’s ear off with it, I think. She was still cradling the side of her head with one hand when they carted you out of the room.”

“Roy,” Tab corrected. “Roy did those things.”

“Right. Roy.” But it didn’t seem to register with her. “After you grabbed the pencil, you ran toward Jeremy with it. You were holding it weird, not like you were going to use it to draw or write something, but more like a weapon. You had it balled in your fist with the point facing outward like it was a knife. I don’t know what you were planning to do for sure, but you ran straight at Jeremy. It took me and both nurses to hold you back and knock that pencil out of your hand. We had to hold you up by your arms and let you dangle in between us. Your legs kept trying to run at your brother in mid-air.”

She closed her eyes, remembering. “If we hadn’t stopped you, I think you might have killed him.”

Tab gulped. A hiccup arose from deep down in his gut, blowing out his airways. A hot stream of tears spilled from his eyes. “I didn’t know what I was doing!” he said. “I’m sorry, Mom! I didn’t mean to hurt him. I don’t remember anything. It was Roy!”

Sandra pulled him closer to her, nestling his face in the hollow of her neck. “I know, hon. I know. It was Roy. It’s all been Roy. Ever since he attacked me, in one way or another, it’s been Roy.” Tab relaxed against her, and that seemed to open her heart more. “I guess deep down I’ve always known nothing had been fixed, you know? Yeah, Roy died, and you and your brother have been the absolute lights of my life. But there’s been something dark in me ever since that day. Something I can’t put in the past. Believe me, I’ve tried!

“You know how when you have some homework you don’t want to do as soon as you get home, you kind of set the books to the side until you’re ready to deal with them?” Tab nodded, rubbing the top of his head against her jawline as he did. “Well, that’s how I dealt with what Roy did to me. I put it over there, you know? In some locked closet inside my head where I hoped it would never escape. But you can’t do that with my kind of trauma. You can’t.

“I have dozens of books on psychology and trauma and recovery, but none of them have done me any good. Know why? It’s because I’ve never been ready to deal with it.” She sniffled. “Now, because I’ve waited so long, he’s back. He took my self away from me. He took my husband away from me. And now he’s trying to take you. And Jeremy, too.” The last few words of the sentence wavered in the air as Sandra choked back her own tears. She cleared her throat and righted Tab, looking him in the eyes.

“Now I can’t do anything about him,” she said. “I mean, I can work on how the whole thing has affected me. I can make some appointments with Dr. Clifford for myself, let him guide me through all the crap and hope I come out better for it. But I can’t stop something I can’t see or hear or touch. I can’t fight him.”

“Only I can,” Tab said.

“I think so. You and Jeremy, maybe. Except Jeremy is hurt right now. The doctors thought you were having a nervous breakdown because of what you saw happening in his room. They thought that’s why you acted up, as they put it.”

“I think,” Tab started, unsure at first how much worse he was about to make things for his mother, “Dad took over Jeremy. Dad can see Roy just like I can, and Roy can see Dad. But they can’t hurt each other unless they’re real. Unless they become us. I think that’s what Roy wants.” He tapped at his bump. “When he went inside my head, I got mad all of a sudden. I got mad at Jeremy because of how he looked in bed, but I was mad at Dad, too.

“Jeremy can’t see Roy and I don’t see Dad, at least not since the funeral. But I think Dad is here. I think he’s trying to help.” He swallowed a thick glob of mucous that had pooled at the back of his throat. “Roy wants me to hurt Jeremy. Kill him. Because he thinks it will stop Dad or at least hurt him the way Dad hurt Roy.”

Sandra sat granite-faced, eyes locked on the closed door in front of them, jaw set. She sat there long enough that Tab became uncomfortable. He mashed his hands into the bed mattress to scoot himself away from her. Then she turned back to him, expressionless.

“He doesn’t want revenge on me,” she said, her voice flat. Then, as if realizing it for the first time: “He wants revenge on Tim. None of this has been about what he did to me at all, has it? It’s not even about you. As far as Roy is concerned, he’s the one who was wronged. By your dad. At the bar that night when he lost both his eyes and his life.”

“I guess so.”

Sandra sprang from the bed and pressed her forehead to the door. Her upper back and shoulders heaved. Her breaths came in huge, gasping sobs. She spun, eyes aflame. Her nose and lips pulled into a snarl similar to the enormous black dog Tab had seen the night of the storm. Her cheeks and the center of her forehead had gone pink.

“Roy is not the victim here!” she shouted, causing Tab to wince. “He did what he did to me. He hurt me. And because he hurt me, he also hurt your dad, and Jeremy, and you. That, that, that motherfucker has no right thinking your dad or any of us owe his miserable ass anything.”

Fear gurgled in Tab’s belly. Not fear of Roy this time, but of his own mother. He could not remember having seen her this angry before. Especially over something he had said. It reminded him of seeing his dad angry. He scooted backwards on the bed, pulling his knees up to his chest. His mother must have noticed because her eyes softened.

“I’m not mad at you, honey,” she said. “Not in the slightest. I just—” She was interrupted by a knock at the door and stepped out of the way in time for it to open. Behind it stood a broad-smiling older man in a lab coat with mostly white hair and a smattering of salt-and-pepper around his ears.

Tab sighed. Another doctor.