Page 52

51

Agita

They were cycling rooms again. It was how they moved through this place, Owen and Nick. When at a doorway, they stepped through and back again, triggering the rooms to cycle. Then they waited till they found the right room—or, at least, the right kind of room. Place to eat. Place to piss. Place to rest their head. Safe places—as much as they could guess at, anyway.

But it was wearing on them. Grinding them down.

Owen could feel it. The endlessness of it. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. It felt like madness. Doorways and staircases and dead rooms. By now, he was chewing his nails in secret. They were ripped, jagged things. Hangnails and ruined cuticles. They hurt. Nick had seen it, but blessedly had said nothing.

Presently, the room they were in seemed safe. A laundry room from 1992—easy to know that, since there was a calendar on the wall, one with normal family things written in the calendar blocks. Valentine’s Day dance. Church bake sale. Barbecue at Bob’s . Only awful thing in this room was the bloody bedsheets in the washer. It gave the air a faint coppery stink competing with the oversaturation of hyper-clean chemical laundry smell. Otherwise? This room was quiet as they hopped in and out of the doorway, then closing the door and reopening it again to see what the randomizer gave them.

On the sixth time, it gave them a bedroom where a filthy-looking orange lump of a cat was eating a dead woman’s face. She lay there on her back, and the cat ate from her head like it was Fancy Feast. Wet, smacking sounds. Gore clinging to its whiskers like morning dew on onion grass. It made little happy sounds, mow mow mew mow, as it gorged.

Owen wanted to throw up.

They stepped back, shut the door.

Nick backed away and sighed before hopping up on the washing machine, his legs dangling over the edge. He had a bag of stale cheese balls from a few rooms back, and he crunched on those and stared at the middle distance. Owen gave him a quizzical what the fuck look.

“I just need a minute,” Nick said. “I’m tired. This is tiring.”

“You’re always the one who wants to keep moving.”

“Well, now I’m the one who wants to cool his fucking heels. Relax.”

“Okay. Yeah. Fine.”

Owen stood there. Awkwardly. His stomach flirted with hunger, but then—the image of the cat, the woman, the red mess on the animal’s face. Then the hunger was gone again, replaced with a sour pool of acid.

“You don’t like me,” Nick said. “You never liked me.”

“Jesus, Nick, c’mon. We’re friends.”

“?‘Friends.’?” This he said with one hand up doing the lazy bunny ears of air quotes. “Friends, but not like you are, or were, with the others.”

He kept crunching cheese balls between his teeth, showing what he was chewing with an open, almost feral mouth.

“Nick, why are we doing this? Far as I can tell, I was the only one to ever answer any of your emails.”

A shrug. “Yeah. Always so polite, too, overly, obsequiously polite, like you were responding to a weird neighbor asking you to sign up for their pyramid scheme or send around their chain email or some shit. But you never said yes. Never joined me in trying to find Matty.”

“Well. I’m sorry for that, but—” Owen did a half-assed, weary gesture around him. “Look where it got us.”

Owen knew he was goading Nick, poking that bear. And he instantly felt bad about it. Did they really need to do this? But Nick just shrugged.

“You were jealous of Matty.”

“No, I—” Owen sighed. “Fine, whatever, I was jealous.”

“Lore and him had a thing, and you wanted that thing to be with you, not Matty. So.” Another shrug. More crunching.

“What are you getting at?”

Another shrug.

Owen persisted. “I’m half waiting for you to say I killed Matty.”

“Not saying anything. Just saying, you didn’t do much to find him.”

“And you did?”

From Nick, a piercing gaze, like a pair of hot needles. “I tried.”

“And we followed.”

“Only because I lied to you all. I had to trick you into giving a shit. Ain’t that a bitch.”

He was about to say, Yeah, about that, how’s your pancreatic cancer, Nick? But what was the point? “I don’t want to fight.”

“I know you don’t. You never did. Not much of a fighter. Not for Matty. Not for your own life. Not even for Lore. That’s the thing, Nailbiter. I didn’t make much of myself, either, but at least I tried things. At least I fought.”

“Didn’t amount to much, did it?”

Nick laughed then. “There it is. A little fight in you. Come on, Zuikas. Let’s do that. Show me them nails, them bloodied nails. Scratch and claw, you little bitch. Tell me how much you hate me. Or hated Matty. Come on. Lay it on. Talk about how Lore left you behind, you poor thing. She kept going and you laid there, belly up, pissing and moaning.”

“Fucking hell, you are relentless.”

“You ever finally get together with her, by the way? You two went off to college together, right? Or was it that you followed her there, like a lost puppy? Or chased her. Like a stalker.”

“I did not fucking chase her there. Sarah Lawrence was a great school for people who wanted to be…creative. And yeah. Not that it’s any of your business, but we got together a few times over our time there and…it didn’t work out.”

“Doesn’t seem like anything really worked out for you, Owen.”

And then another shrug. Dismissive. Prickish. Pouty.

Something broke inside Owen. A boot pressing down on a bone. Snap .

He felt himself lurch forward, finger in Nick’s face, a finger curling inward toward the rest of the hand, forming a fist as he seethed: “I swear to god, Nick, you shrug at me one more time and I will bust your fucking teeth—”

— down your throat till you choke —

And in that moment, he cut his words short.

And he wanted to do it.

He really, really wanted to do it.

How easy it would be.

Not just easy.

Freeing .

How freeing it would be to let that fist slip its leash and force Nick’s teeth down his throat, just like Owen wanted, and then, even better? To keep hitting . Oh because all the teeth wouldn’t be gone. No, some would remain. He’d have to keep pistoning his fist into the other man’s face. His friend’s face—but a friend no more. A stranger. A foe . He could keep punching, keep knocking the rest of the teeth down into his throat like he was tossing a bowling ball to get the straggler pins, no strike on the first go, only a spare, and the blood would bubble up as he pushed his fist into Nick’s mouth, Nick’s lips splitting like torn lunch meat, Owen’s knuckles bulging down into the esophagus, finding the teeth that were lodged there, and Nick would try to scream, but how do you scream around a fist, a wrist, a pushing arm, and Owen thought it would be funny—no, that it was funny, because this wasn’t a vision, this wasn’t a dream, it was really happening, it had already happened, oh god, oh god, no, Nick, I’m sorry—

His fist—slick with blood, some of it his own from when the teeth shredded his fingers and hand—throbbed.

He stepped back from his dead friend.

His dead friend, who was grinning now through his broken teeth and ripped plastic bag of a mouth.

“Maybe you are a fighter after all,” Nick said, voice whistling through the thick blood in his mouth.

Owen blinked.

The blood was gone.

The teeth were there.

His fist didn’t hurt at all.

Nick’s fine .

“This place is messing with us,” Owen said.

“If you say so.”

Still alive, so still a prick .

“We weren’t close because we weren’t close,” Owen said. “You and me, I mean. We just weren’t. You were scary in a lot of ways. Intense. Kind of a dick, honestly. But I also respected you and looked up to you because you never seemed to give a damn what anybody thought. And all I did was care what people think. You were fearless and I was always afraid. I’m sorry we weren’t closer, but we just weren’t. If we get out of here alive, maybe we can do something about that. If we don’t, then just know I admired you. And I love you.”

There.

Nick looked like he had just been actually punched.

Like something had rocked him, knocking his head for a loop.

He said nothing, just offered a small, sad little nod, then stared down into the tube of cheese balls like he was an oracle reading the future in cheese pollen.

What the fuck was all that about, anyway?

Impatience suddenly nagged at Owen, so he said, “I’m gonna open the door, see where we landed, at least, and then we should get back to it.”

Nick, in a small voice: “Sure thing.”

Owen went and opened the door and—

And his breath was nearly stolen from his chest.

Because he was staring into—