Havana or Hell, part two
#2 of Havana or Hell
III
Some times, when I lie awake, I feel like I'm a tiny pinprick, floating in an endless void. It's a physical sensation, but not linked to any of the usual five senses, and the feeling disappears as soon as I open my eyes. It's accompanied by a sense of restlessness, or anticipation, like I'm a seed about to germinate, or an egg about to hatch.
I lie awake a lot these nights. It's been ten years since dad left, but it still makes me sad now and then. I was five at the time and I only knew him as my dad, but I was too young to think of him as a person, someone with his own feelings, desires and trouble. He was a reliable constant. Someone who was always there, until one day, he suddenly wasn't there anymore. Lately my mind has started thinking in ways that are new to me. It's like I have the thoughts of three people inside my head, all of us sharing the same brain and thinking at the same time. That's a lot of thoughts. It's confusing and scary and it makes me very tired.
And this is when I think about dad, because I think he went through the same thing. They all say he was crazy and talked to invisible people. Sometimes he'd go missing for days, because the voices told him to. Normally, he'd return after a few days, apologizing and bringing back presents for everyone. Only that last time, he never returned. The police looked for him for weeks, dead or alive, until they decided not to spend more time on a solitary nutcase, and put his disappearance on the back-burner. Maybe he wandered north into Canada and settled down, pioneer style. Maybe he got himself eaten by a bear. Maybe he moved east and became a Nashville country singer. Or maybe he moved south and drowned himself in the Mississippi river.
It's past midnight and I'm awake in bed. I must have dozed off at some point but now I'm awake again and I know something is not right. I can't put my finger on it, but there is a threatening sensation in the house, as if some invisible evil has embraced our house and has slid in through a half-open window. Mom and Katryn must be asleep and the lights are off, but I hear voices coming from somewhere in the house. Man and woman. They speak quietly among themselves.
Maybe dad has returned, ten years later like Ulysses. And now he and mom are talking and making up?
I get out of bed and stumble through the hallway without turning the lights on. There is no one in the living room but I still hear voices. They whisper words I almost understand. I flip the light switch, but the lights don't work. The bulb only gives off a feeble light, only enough to illuminate itself. The little spiral inside the bulb glows orange, like a curled up snake burning in a black void. The rest of the room is still cast in darkness. I turn on the other lights, the table lamp and the reading lamp, but neither light up the room. The darkness is oily and suffocating and my legs are heavy, and I'm having difficulty moving.
Maybe I'm having a bad dream? A really bad lucid dream.
I recall reading something about how books don't make any sense if you read them in a dream, so I grab a book from the coffee table. It's a romantic novel by a writer named Dianne Walsh - the queen of romance writing. It must be one of mom's. I can't make out anything except the title page because it's so dark, so I put the book back down and check the TV set. It's off, but the voices still keep talking. I can't make out what they say, although I think I recognize individual words. The language sounds vaguely like English, German and French all mixed up, but I can't make out any whole sentences. Maybe mom or Kat watched a movie in foreign, possibly Dutch before heading off to bed, and the TV set is on the fritz, stuck halfway on stand-by. The voices make me uncomfortable. I feel they are somehow malicious and judgmental. There is definitely something wrong about them, so I unplug the TV set from the wall socket, expecting the noise to stop. Only, it doesn't. The voices keep talking about something I don't understand and I feel them drawing close. I know they are searching for something in the house; something they can't see, but I get the impression I'm the one they are looking for. So I hurry back to my room, making sure to close every door behind me.
Here I am, sixteen years old and hiding under my duvet, like a five year old kid who's afraid of the dark. It's embarrassing, but I AM afraid of the dark, or rather, I'm afraid of the disembodied voices that float around, searching for me. Afraid they will find me and crawl into my body. Terrified they will climb up my spine and settle down in my brain like squatters. I've never been a religious person, but now I pray in a desperate, last resort
Please God! Don't let them find me.
I don't want to have voices in my head telling me what to do, like dad. And I don't want to see the things he did, and I don't want to hide behind the couch, covering my ears and eyes and begging for the shadows to stop moving, like he did. I don't want to take medicine by the handful for the rest of my life. Pills that make me grow fat or make my teeth go rotten. And I don't want to be that crazy guy on the park bench and have the neighbors say:
That's Mr Kent. He's crazy you know. He talks to himself all day and shouts at pigeons that have long flown away.
And I don't want to get up at three in the morning because the voices tell me to, and run from the house wearing only boxers and leave my family behind. So I pull the duvet over my head and curl myself into fetal position and stay really quiet, so the voices can't see me, hear me or smell me.
Minutes later, they found me.
IV
"I really don't know what to tell you," I told the officer sitting across the desk. "I had an episode and I was freaking out bad in there."
The police officer was a man in his forties. He had red hair and a neatly cropped red beard. He wore badge that read Chief Inspector Amari Quinn, Oakfort Police, pinned to his civilian clothes. They looked like designer brands to me. But then again, any price range above Walmart is pretty much out of my league.
Inspector Quinn brewed us both a mug of coffee from an expensive looking espresso machine on a shelving unit by the window.
"Havana Espresso? Cortado? Latte?" he asked.
"Just black," I replied. "Black, with some milk in it."
We were on the second floor of the station and you could just about make out the city skyline from here. With its 150.000 citizens, Oakfort is pretty much your average city. We have schools and a hospital. We have parks and a harbor that connects us to the Pacific. We have a rich side of town and a poor side. The poor side is where I live.
"How's the leg?" Inspector Quinn asked, nodding towards my bandaged right leg. The bullet had passed right through, grazing my vastus literalis, but causing only minor damage. The surgeon stitched me up good and sent me on my way with a bottle of antibiotics and a prescription.
"The painkillers are wearing off," I groaned.
Quinn nodded and sent a junior police officer, named Sgt O'Hare off to the local pharmacy with my prescription.
"A man was murdered at the convention center, yesterday," Quinn said. "He was shot with the same pistol that put a bullet in your leg. Another person has gone missing, possibly kidnapped. Hallucinating or not, you seem to be the only witness we have. Anything you can remember is important."
"Zombies," I explained. "I saw everyone turning into zombies. Guests, guards, the people in the basement corridor. When I have an episode, I can't tell what's for real and what's a hallucination."
"You said something about three people?" Quinn asked.
"There was the tall guy with bleeding eyes who shot at me, a zombie who screamed and gave me a magic wand. And there was this regular looking human with glasses."
"Could this be one of the people you saw?" Quinn slid a photo towards me. It was a portrait of a friendly looking man with short ginger hair and wire-frame glasses. It was the same man, I had seen in the basement. I nodded at the inspector.
"That's the regular looking human."
"His name was Kendall Duran," he said. "Ever heard of him?"
I shrugged.
"Duran was dead by the time we found him in the basement. He was at the Oakfort convention to promote a board game he had created - something called Future Battalion."
"I didn't have the time to look at too many games before I panicked," I apologized.
"So," said the inspector, smiling for the first time. "At least, we've established the identity of the victim. Next, we need to figure out who the screaming person is."
I think the inspector was only thinking aloud, and I was afraid to look at the photo of Kendall Duran again, in case his face came alive to wink at me. I'd already heard voices hiding in the sound of the cooling fan, just waiting to break free, and my leg was aching from the stitches. I desperately wanted to go home and hide.
"Are we done?" I asked. "My leg's really beginning to sting."
Inspector Quinn scratched his red beard.
"We're done for the day I guess. But there is one problem," he said.
"You may not recognize the murderer -but he knows who you are.
He knows what you look like, and he knows you are the only surviving witness."