Curse (Blur Trilogy Book 3) (4 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

SATURDAY, JUNE 8

I wake up slowly, caught in a wrestling match with my dream, trying to will myself free from its clutches.

Trying and failing.

It’s as if I’m reliving last night’s accident over and over again.

It’s all there: the boy, the truck, the headlights slicing through the forest.

But in my dream I’m surrounded by a thick blanket of darkness that comes alive and turns into thousands of bats, all winging their way around me, their leathery wings and clawed feet brushing and scratching across my face, my arms, my hands.

I duck and swing at them, trying to get them to leave me alone. But they crawl on me, get caught in my hair, bite at my skin. I cry out. And then all at once, they’re gone.

It’s pitch black, yet somehow I can see that boy standing in the road.

It’s a dream.

It follows its own rules.

Then I’m sprinting toward him.

But I’m too late.

Here in my nightmare, the truck hits him. There’s a sickening crunch and a spray of blood, and then a lifeless mass in the road.

Suddenly, I’m there beside him, kneeling over his broken body.

A few bats return and stalk across his face as he stares with unblinking eyes at the night. I brush them away and as they scatter, he tilts his head toward me.

His hollow stare unsettles me.

Even though someone with his injuries couldn’t possibl
y
have survived, he whispers to me, his voice thick and wet from the blood dribbling from his mouth, “He never meant to go. It all began right here. Follow the bats. Find the truth.”

I tell myself that it’s not real, that none of this is real, that all I need to do is wake up and all of this will disappear.

It’s all a dream.

Just a dream.

Then the scene plays itself out again.

But this time, at the end, the boy’s words become living things. They take form and turn into bats themselves, circling up past me into the night—fanged, newly formed creatures escaping into the darkness.

And at last I’m able to stir, to free myself.

I open my eyes.

Instead of sitting bolt upright in bed like people do in movies but almost never do in real life, I lie there taking short, shallow breaths, trying to relax the tight, anxious muscles in my chest.

Sweat drenches the neckline of my T-shirt.

I blink against the sharp morning light cutting through my window.

The images recede like a tide washing back from shore, but the emotions don’t go away and I feel a deep, primal weight of sadness and loss.

For the boy, for myself. I’m not sure which.

M
y
room is on the second floor, and as I get out of bed I can hear Mom downstairs in the kitchen putting dishes awa
y.

I check the time.

8:02.

Both my shoulder and ankle are stiff, so I opt for some of the meds the doctor gave me.

As sore as I am, it’s awkward getting dressed, but I manage to change clothes and snug up my left arm into the sling. Then I head downstairs toward the living room.

Mom must hear me coming, because while I’m still on my way down the steps, she emerges from the kitchen, drying her hands nervously on a dishtowel.

“Daniel. How are you?”

“I’m alright. What time did you get in?”

“Just after three. Are you really alright or are you just saying that?”

“Nicole asked me almost exactly the same thing last night.”

“That’s because we both know you pretty well.”

“I’m fine, Mom. Really.”

She wrings that towel in her hands. “Your father had to head to work. He wants you to call him this morning after breakfast.”

“Okay.”

She eyes me for another moment as if she’s not sure if she should believe me or not that I’m okay. Then she finally puts on a smile, joins me on the stairs, and offers me a hug.

I hide the limp from my sprained ankle as much as I can as we head to the kitchen.

A bowl of fruit and a sweating glass of orange juice are waiting for me on the table.

She asks me to tell her what happened and how I ended up in front of that truck.

And, while I grab some milk and cereal to go with the fruit, I tell her about the deer I saw last night and reassure her that I’m good and that the doctor gave me the sling just to keep the swelling in my shoulder down.

Then I take a seat, snatch an apple from the bowl, and crunch into it.

But I still haven’t mentioned the boy in the road.

I’m not sure how to bring that part up.

After making some coffee, she settles into the chair across the table from me.

On the surface, everything might appear pretty normal here: just the two of us having breakfast, a teen guy and his mom eating quietly together. But there are all sorts of doubts and unspoken questions lurking here between us.

As we eat, I realize it’s not going to get any easier to tell her about the blur so I decide I might as well just go for it.

“Mom, I saw something out there last night. Out on the road.”

“The deer?”

“No. A blur.”

She pauses with her coffee cup halfway to her lips. “Of what?”

“A boy. I tried to save him. The truck was coming right at him.”

“And that’s why you ran in front of it?”

“Yes.”

Slowly, she lowers the cup. “And were you able to save him? Were you able to get there in time?”

I shake my head.
“
He disappeared when I reached out to pick him up. That’s when the truck hit me.
”

“
Daniel, you could have . . . That accident could have been fatal.”

I get the sense that she chooses to put it that way since it’s not as blunt and doesn’t carry the same weight as saying that I might have “been killed.”

“I couldn’t just stand by and watch him get run over, Mom. I was sure he was real.”

She lets that sink in. “Did you recognize him? Do you know who he was?”

“No. He looked like he was maybe in kindergarten. Nicole, Kyle and I searched online but we couldn’t find anything about boys who were killed by trucks recently.”

“Your grandfather was killed out on that same road. With the deer and the logging trucks it’s . . . I can’t even imagine if . . .”

Huh.

I’d forgotten about that. Grandpa did die out there, right near that very spot.

That boy in my dream had said something about everything beginning there and that he never meant to go.

Was he talking about Grandpa?

“Daniel, we need to find a way for you to tell what’s real and what’s not. We can’t have you running in front of trucks.”

Last year when the blurs first started, I’d tried pinching my arm to see if I was asleep or not. Then I tried touching the people in the blurs to see if they were real, but I found that, in time, neither of those approaches was foolproof.

In fact, once, when I was in an old abandoned lighthouse on an island in Lake Superior, I saw a man hanging from the end of a rope with a noose around his neck. His body banged into my shoulder, and when I touched his boot, it felt completely real.

But it wasn’t.

It was all in my head, and I still haven’t come up with a surefire way of telling fantasy from reality in the things that I see or hear or touch.

“Yeah,” I agree. “I’ll have to figure something out.”

Before it happens again,
I think, but I keep that part to myself.

After breakfast I check in with Dad, then I wrap my ankle, elevate it on the couch, and ice it. When you play high school sports, you learn pretty quickly that you’re supposed to treat sprained ankles with RICE—Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation.

Twenty minutes on with the ice.

Twenty off.

While I’m icing it, I answer texts from people in my class asking how I am. I know they care about me, but they’re also curious about what I was doing out there on the road and how I ended up in front of that truck.

And those are not details I want to get into.

I tell them I was confused, that I saw some deer—which was true—but I don’t bring up the boy.

I know that Kyle and Nicole wouldn’t go around sharing the details of what happened, but still, in a town the size of ours, when a couple of people hear about something, it usually doesn’t take long before everyone has heard about it, so keeping the blurs a secret hasn’t always been easy.

Last year, one guy in particular, Ty Bell, seemed to figure out that something was going on and gave me a hard time about it—although it was never really clear how much he knew and how much he was just speculating.

However, now he’s in jail for wolf poaching and for trying to physically assault Nicole, so he’s out of the picture.

Even with time off for good behavior, which—knowing him—isn’t very likely, he’s going to be locked up for years.

And, honestly, I don’t know of too many people who are going to miss him.

I’m answering a text from my basketball coach telling him that, yes, I’m still planning to go to the camp—even though I haven’t actually cleared that with my parents yet—when I get a text from Nicole, offering to come over.

Sure. You want some lunch?
I text her.

That’d be awesome! See you soon.

Mom is gardening out back, so I whip up some mac & cheese and slather it with BBQ sauce for Nikki—one of her favorite new meals since she gave up meat last spring after doing a report for school about what happens at meat processing plants to downed cows.

Barbecue sauce is still a yes.

Beef, not so much.

Honesty, the BBQ sauce is pretty tasty on there and when we’re done, Nicole joins me in my room, but pauses just inside the door when she sees my walls.

“You put up my sketches.”

“The other day I was looking through that sketchbook you gave me and I realized I didn’t really want to leave them in there where I would only see them once in a while.”

“And
yo
u hung them right next to
yo
ur Mavs and Packers posters. I feel special.”

“Yeah. You made it to the Wall of Fame.”

She sits at my desk, slides my journal to the side and sets her cell phone in front of her.

I pull out my laptop, then prop myself on the bed, elevating my ankle on a pillow. “Let’s see if we can figure out who that kid is. The one I saw last night.”

“What are you thinking? I mean, we didn’t see anything in the obituaries.”

“My grandpa died out there in a car accident. In my dream, the boy mentioned something about that being where things started. Grandpa’s accident might have something to do with it. Besides, maybe the boy didn’t die. Maybe in my blur he disappeared right before the truck would’ve hit him because, in real life, he survived.”

“Hmm.” She contemplates that. “I guess we could look through news about recent accidents, especially anything to do with logging. Who knows how specific your blur was—and we should probably go through the Internet history on your computer, see if there’s anything that might have prompted you to have that blur.”

I’m not psychic, so my blurs always come from things I’ve been exposed to. So, figuring out what those things might be—even if the stuff has only been registering in my subconscious—has usually been a good place to start in deciphering them.

We spend over an hour searching, but don’t find anything specific that seems like it would have caused me to see that boy out there.

We’re able to locate the news report about Grandpa’s wreck, but he just hit a patch of ice and crashed into a tree. There were no logging trucks involved.

Only as we review my search history do I realize the amount of research I did on hallucinations and the antipsychotic drugs I was prescribed but haven’t been taking.

I had no idea I’d visited so many medical websites.

Last year, the doctors weren’t sure what was causing my hallucinations.

One of them thought it might be a form of
palinopsia, which is when you keep seeing, as she put it, “recurring images or hallucinations that reflect echoes of what you’ve actually witnessed or experienced.” Others thought it might have to do with some sort of temporal lobe disorder, but those were all guesses. Shots in the dark.

They ruled out a brain tumor and prescribed the antipsychotics in case it might be a form of schizophrenia, but really, they had no idea what was happening.

When I met with the last doctor, he couched everything in technical jargon and Latin terms and assured me that I could control it with medication.

I didn’t want to say the word “crazy,” so I put it like this: “Basically, you’re saying I’m mentally ill.”

He scratched at his beard for a moment. “I’m not sure it would be helpful at this point to think of yourself as
ill
. We’re still not sure what’s causing the hallucinations and headaches.”

“But people who aren’t mentally ill don’t have them.”

“Let’s hold off judging this until we have a little more information.” Then he smiled in a way that I could tell wasn’t really a smile, and patted my shoulder condescendingly. “Alright?”

Still bothers me to think about that.

I don’t mention any of this to Nicole.

Eventually, we put the research aside and start talking about the trip to Atlanta.

“Have you thought at all about the camp?” she asks.

“I’m still planning to go.”

“Your mom and dad are cool with that?”

“I haven’t exactly brought it up yet. I’m hoping to talk with them tonight when Dad gets home. I’ve sort of been waiting for the right moment.”

“Practice on me. I’ll be your mom.”

“Seriously?”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“Okay. Um. Let’s see . . . Hey, Mom, my shoulder’s feeling better.”

“Nope. No good.”

“What? Why not?”

“You don’t want to just jump into things like that. Talk about something safe and noncontroversial first.”

“Like what?”

“Hasn’t anyone ever coached you on how to talk to your parents when you want something?”