Memento Update 2

    Memento is still slowly taking shape. I got stuck for a very, very long time shaping this flashback. It went in a lot of different directions, and I'm not 100% convinced this is the best way to go here. I have a lot more concrete ideas for the next few parts though. Different sections are now labeled by the time they take place, to help identify flashbacks.

    Even if you've already read the first part from last time, I'd recommend going through it again. I've fine-tuned a lot of minor details. The large scale story structure is unchanged, but a lot of the smaller details have been cleaned up or smoothed out a bit.

    I've decided, also, to add at least one more illustration. I have a really good idea of what I want, but I realized that I wanted to draw another cartoon in here literally as I was re-reading this before posting it, so I haven't even started on a paper sketch yet. Look forward to that, I guess.

    October, 1985

 

        I’ve got a lot of memories burned into my head from my time in the Blackstone Youth Mental Health Center’s “red section”, a place reserved for teens deemed too violent or emotionally unstable to be supervised by the average dumbass. It’s hard not to see some memorable shit when a third of the kids there are on suicide watch, half the rest of ‘em have killed somebody, or at least tried to, and most of the adults are barely dodging PTSD from all the bullshit they’re wrangling on a daily basis.

      Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

        It’s funny how often I think of David. Or maybe it’s depressing. I don’t know; my sense of humor got real fucked up at some point. Sometimes, it’s hard for me to tell the difference between the two.

        David was a fucking dumbass. Room temp IQ would be generous. I heard he once tried to get high by stealing a blank check from his dad’s checkbook, writing just the word “drugs” on it, and handing it to the cashier at a local pharmacy/convenience store. When that didn’t get him … just “some drugs”, I guess, he went on a rampage, screaming and knocking shelves over, then promptly went to the payphone outside and called 911, thinking he could get the cops to “make them give him the good stuff”.

        I absolutely believe that story, considering I once watched him try to escape Blackstone by simply throwing a towel over his head and walking out the front door, because “If I can’t see them, they can’t see me! It’s a perfect plan!”. For reasons that were probably my fault, he was absolutely convinced the only reason that plan failed was because the place was staffed entirely by actual wizards, since he spent a bunch of time after that trying to spy on them or begging them to teach him magic.

     Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

        I … shit, what was I thinking about? I got distracted thinking about boobs for a minute, which is cool, I guess, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Boobs are the second half of the reason I’ve been sitting in an intentionally depressing detention room for the past 28 minutes.

        David would be the first half of that equation. Or rather, somebody like David. Problem is, David is not an isolated incident. There’s so many dumb, dense, ignorant motherfuckers out there that have either cheated their way into power, or lucked their way into it. Most people can’t go a whole week without running into one of ‘em. Some poor bastards have to put up with a David on a daily basis.

      Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

The gym teacher, Mr. Johnson, has his scuffed-up athletic shoes propped up on the desk. He’s scooted his chair real far back, a dark blue baseball cap tilted real far down to mostly cover his face. He’s barely moved in the past 20 minutes. It looks like he must have nodded off at some point. If I sit here and wait for him to dismiss me, I could be here for hours. There’s three other people in here. Two of them are also asleep at their desks, and the third guy has taken the chance to put on a pair of headphones..

        Fuck it. Twenty-nine-and-a-half minutes is close enough. Me and my allegedly magical, mind controlling boobs are out of here. I silently slip out of my chair, glide over to the door, and carefully slide it open just enough to get into the hallway. The halls are all empty by now. People can’t get out of this place fast enough. All that’s left are the posters reminding kids that it’s cool to do drugs because authority figures tell you not to, a sign by the entrance that reads “Hell Valley High School”, as if we’d forget which town we live in or which school we just walked into, and teachers silently working on a bunch of pointless bullshit in their classrooms.  

        I walk for the front door like I’m supposed to be here. You’d be surprised how effective that can be. If David had just ditched the towel and stopped trying to sneak out of Blackstone, he probably would have stood a chance at making it out the front door. Guess it’s a good thing he didn’t; that wretched motherfucker belonged there. Don’t ask; it’s a bit of a long story, and it’s not nearly as funny as the other ones.

I open the big glass door at the front of the high school with a hip check, and duck outside to the top of the stairs. There’s hardly anybody still outside right now. Just a bunch of tall pine trees standing watch over the vacant lot across the street, a huge overgrown field in front of The King’s Carcass. That would be the boarded up, rotted out remains of a failed Burger King, rumored to be a den of candlelit Satanic worship and ritualistic animal sacrifice. Unfortunately, rather than being something totally rad like that, the ol’ King’s Carcass is really just a den for nerds to gather on weekends and play board games about wizards and dragons and shit. I know. I’m disappointed too.

        I hike my backpack higher onto my shoulder; it’s an ugly, decade-old garage sale bag, a rotting shade of “forgotten basement” green, one of the pockets held shut by a dog leash and bits of chain wrapped around the bag. I’m always fretting about how many textbooks to keep in here, torn between my lazy side wanting a lighter load, and my walloping side wanting a bigger sack of bricks to smash shit with. Maybe it’s best not to think too long about what the way I see books says about me.

        I run up to jump down the six or seven concrete steps to the sidewalk, and remember midair that I wore a skirt today, awkwardly fumbling to hold it down, landing with a heavy, stumbling thud and the clattering of backpack chains behind me.

        “What’s up, nerds?” I ask, trying my best to pick up my backpack as if I’d just done all that on purpose.

        Ada still hasn’t looked up from her book, either because she didn’t notice, or because she’s used to me doing this shit by now. Her wheelchair is tucked into the corner between the stairs and the beige brick of the school’s outside wall. She’s always finding an excuse to hide behind something; poor girl’s cursed with being both very shy, and very, very pretty. I have watched more than one fist fight break out between guys competing over the chance to be nice at her. I’ve definitely had to introduce a few creeps to the pavement for her too.

        Keith, a scruffy hippie in an oversized Grateful Dead T-shirt and ragged jeans, sits cross-legged on the grass across from her. He smiles when he sees me. I can’t quite tell if that’s supposed to be an “I’m happy to see you” smile, or a “Nice butt, dumbass” smile, so I figure it’s best to be embarrassed anyway, just in case.

        Bethany sits on the second-lowest step, looking into a mirror to casually apply clown makeup. She’s wearing a pink shirt with a black graffiti heart painted on it, and black jeans, her whole closet full of nothing but that one matching outfit, like a cartoon character. A wild tangle of pink hair spills out from underneath her black aviator’s cap. I’m not sure if she noticed me either.

       Bonnie stands by the path to the sidewalk, casually leaning against an invisible wall. She’s dressed like she doesn’t know if she belongs with the goths or the … uh … I guess “mime” isn’t really a high school clique, is it? Her bangs are swept over half her face, topped by a black beret. She’s always wearing pale makeup and black lipstick, and a black and white striped tank top, to show off her arms. Years of holding odd positions for pantomime gags have built her almost like some of the athletes around here. Mimes ain’t nothing to fuck with, man.

        Elaine stares at me like I’m a wizard, apparently not exactly sure where she is or what’s happening. She almost looks like a tiny cartoon Scotsman was bitten by a vampire, her pale face framed by fiery, curly hair, dotted by countless freckles. She’s wearing an oversized black jacket and a red plaid skirt over a pair of wicked witch stockings.

        “What kept you so long?” Keith asks, still smiling a bit.

        “What else would it be?” I shrug.

        “I mean, what specifically did you do this time?”

        “Apparently, I was being “disobedient and disrespectful” in gym class.”

       “Really? That hardly ever happens,” Ada says flatly, like even sounding sarcastic is too much effort.

        “I know, right?” Keith adds, apparently having plenty of energy to be sarcastic. “So what exactly went down?”

        “I was walking laps instead of running. Mr. Johnson started yelling at me for not participating enough, but when I tried to pick up my feet a little, he just got even madder and wrote me up for “disrupting the activity”. After all, how could all these teenage boys focus on running when there’s boobs jiggling over there? Clearly, I must be doing it deliberately to ruin gym class out of spite. I asked him if he wanted me to run or not, and he just got real angry and started ranting a bunch about me being a smartass and wrote me up to “teach me a lesson”.”

        “The fuck?” Keith seems baffled beyond the ability to complete sentences.

        “You … got in trouble for “running while female”?” Bonnie asks.

        “Hey, to be fair, Lyra is fucking stacked,” Bethany says. “I know I couldn’t focus on running with such a killer rack bouncin’ across the field.”

        “Thanks for the support, Pinkie,” I grumble.

     “No problem,” She smiles. “I’d “support” you any day,” She makes a boob-grabbing motion at the air in front of her, raising an eyebrow and smirking at me suggestively.

        “I’m sorry,” Bonnie sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose in frustration. “I don’t get it. What actually happened here to land you in detention?”

        “Isn’t it obvious?” I ask. “Clearly, I must always be thinking about my breasts and have perfect control over every part of my body. Obviously, the only explanation must be that I’m intentionally trying to revert all the guys into boob-obsessed chimps and incite a riot with my sinful jiggling. Otherwise, I would have just chosen to not obey gravity.”

        Elaine is staring at me and Bonnie intently. It seems all this talk of boobs and tits has captured her attention.

        “That … that can’t be what he said to you,” Bonnie says.

        “I had to paraphrase a little, but yeah, it was pretty much that.”

        “I swear to God …” Bonnie shakes her head at the ground. “Some days, I swear this school is staffed by actual demons.”

        “Demons?” Elaine snaps, apparently on high alert.

        “You feelin’ alright, girl?” Keith asks. “You’ve been acting real weird lately.”

        “If nothing's faster than light, how does the dark always get there first?” Bethany asks.

        Now, if that sounds like it has absolutely nothing to do with anything, that’s because you’re correct. Few things can be predicted for sure, but Bethany constantly saying some of the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard in my life for absolutely no reason is about as reliable as the sun rising.

        “Wh … what?” Keith asks.

      Elaine’s face collapses, radiating the energy of an engine struggling to start. Bethany looks up from her mirror, and smiles subtly.

        “And if you eat a donut without eating the hole, does that mean you ate more stuff, or less stuff?” She asks.

        Elaine’s face twists as a drive shaft snaps in her brain. I swear smoke’s about to start pouring out of her ears.

        “What the fuuuuck ...” Her voice trails off.

       "Oh yeah,” Bethany continues. “Sounds like somebody got one hell of a bite from Gram Toker’s Count Dankula.”

        “Who did?” Elaine asks, concerned.

        “You did, honey,” I answer. “Exactly what are you on?”

        “What am I on? I’m on the fuckin’ grass, ya dumb cunt. What’s it look like I’m on?”

        “No, drugs. Elaine. What drugs are you on?” I ask.

      “Nuthin’! I swear!” Elaine snaps. “I’m so clean, germs are a-phobic of me! My body is a temple, full of beautiful women that warm the mansion of my heart, on, like, a big party boat, or somethin’. I’m sorry, I’m so fuckin’ high I forgot what we was talkin’ about. What was the question?”

        “Have you been doing drugs?”

        “Never. Wouldn’t dream of it,” She answers, with extreme confidence.

        “Are you guys really just now noticing this?” Bonnie asks. “She’s been like this since lunch.”

        “She always gets like this,” Bethany chimes in. “I bet she stole the wrong snacks from somebody’s snack cupboard without realizing it. She’s usually not dumb enough to eat this much green stuff at once, or, I assume, eat it with her lunch.”

        “I know YOU are, but what am I?” Elaine snaps, with the kind of spiciness usually reserved for that one fucked up nuclear hot sauce that makes you to sign a waiver before they let you taste it.

        “Oh boy …” Bonnie says, defeated. “Trouble incoming …” She points off down the road somewhere.

        Way down the street, a dark silhouette is coming into focus. A dark skinned girl with meticulously straightened hair is coasting down the sidewalk on a bike. Cloaked in a dark, smoky purple trench coat several sizes too large for her, she’s almost got a grim reaper vibe to her, especially since she’s wearing it over a black T-shirt with a glow-in-the-dark ribcage printed on it, and black gloves with white bone hands painted on the back.

        She’s wearing a pair of thick-ass Velma Dinkley glasses, which does little to dampen her frightening aura. Kinda like putting a bowtie on a tiger shark. A long, narrow scar runs all the way up the length of her left cheek, something I know she got from falling out of a tree when she was a kid, though she always has a different story whenever people ask her about it. Usually involving a demon or a knife fight. Sometimes both.

        Carrie skids to a stop, and steps off her bike. It’s a very small bike; knowing her size, it’s probably a bike made for an eleven-year-old, with a deep purple frame and a galaxy print, and a skeletal snake hand-painted around the frame. From this close, it’s apparent her right cheek is badly swollen. She looks at me, and smiles very, very slightly.

        “Aren’t you supposed to be at the dentist?” Bonnie asks coldly.

      “Oh yeah, she was at the dentist, alright” I answer, digging into my jacket pocket, and holding up a chain necklace with a little, silver teardrop shaped pendant, and shaking it in Carrie’s direction for emphasis.

        Carrie chokes back a giggle; maybe she only just now realized what happened. Everybody else just seems to be lost.

        “Wait, I don’t get it,” Keith says. “What does your best-friends-necklace have to do with anything?”

        “It’s a … inside joke kinda thing. You wouldn’t get it,” I tell him.

        Carrie smiles, still careful not to show her teeth. As I’m putting the psychic link back into my pocket, my hand touches the pendant, and I can feel something like a fucking bullet hole in my bottom jaw. The pain dissipates almost instantly after I get the pendant off my skin. God, I feel so sorry for her..

        Carrie slowly opens her mouth, and very gently digs a mass of deep red gauze out of her cheek. She pulls her cheek aside with a finger, and tilts her head down, showing off a mess of swollen gums criss-crossed by black stiches where a tooth used to be.

        “Damn, that sucks,” Bethany says, slipping into her “concerned mom” voice.

        Elaine suddenly shrieks a bit.

        “The hell happened to her mouth?!” She cries.

        “The dentist happened. Try to keep up,” Bonnie tells her.

        “YOU try to keep up,” Elaine grumbles and crosses her arms.

        Carrie drops the bloody gauze into her left coat pocket, and Keith grimaces.

        “Okay, that’s just disgusting,” He says.

      Carrie frowns and narrows her eyes at him, digging through her other jacket pocket for a packet of sterile gauze, tearing it open and cautiously tucking the gauze into her mouth.

        “Don’t look at me like that,” Keith whimpers, curling back away from her.

        “What are you so scared of? She doesn’t bite,” I tell him.

        “Wh- … Yes she does!” Keith snaps, baffled.

       Carrie suddenly leans in his direction, cautiously biting at the air between them. Keith flinches, nearly falling over.

        “Hey, be nice,” I warn her.

        “No,” Carrie says weakly, almost like she’s confused by the request. Her face looks like she just bit into a lemon.

        “Alright,” Bethany starts, finally standing up off the stairs. “Now that we’re all caught up, anybody wanna go shoot some hoops?”

        Silence.

        “Ada?” Bethany asks.

        Ada looks up from her book, confused. She’s not the only one.

        “Basketball,” Bethany repeats. “You in?”

        Ada curls her lip, looks down at her wheelchair, then back up at Bethany, as if she’s trying to figure out what she just said.

      “Come on, don’t look at me like that,” Bethany says. “We’ll figure something out.”

        “I don’t know …” Ada says softly, turning her head back down to stare into her book.

        “Alright, fine. We’ll play basketball with you,” Bonnie says, defeated.

        “Don’t be like that. It’ll be fun!” Bethany bubbles.

        “Right. Whatever.”

        “Hey, uh … you should probably take Elaine with you,” I cut in. “We probably shouldn’t leave her unsupervised when she’s like this.”

        “What?” Elaine snaps, insulted. “I don’t need a babysitter!”

        “No, you need a high sitter. Completely different skill set,” I tell her.

        “I’m NOT a BABY!” Elaine pouts, stomping her foot on the ground for emphasis.

        “Oh yeah?” Bethany asks. “Then where’s your name?”

        Silence again. The confused kind, this time.

       “Your NAME, honey. Where did you put it?” Bethany repeats. “Like this,” She says, pulling an index card out of her pocket. The name “Bethany” is written in big, bubbly pink letters, and dusted lightly with glitter.

     “Has … she really just had that sitting in her pocket, ready to go?” Bonnie whispers to me.

        Elaine pats down her pockets, then spins around looking at the ground.

        “Shit! What the fuck? How did I lose that?!” Elaine panics.

      “Don’t worry. I got you,” Bethany says calmly. “I think I might have seen it earlier down at the park by my house, by the basketball court.”

        “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” Elaine hisses. “Come on! What if somebody else gets it first?” She lunges forward, suddenly running down the street.

        “Hold up! The van!” Bethany yells after her, pointing at the chunky, beat up, maroon van parked in the lot next to the school.

        “There’s no time!” Elaine yells back, without looking.

       “Come on, we better keep up with her,” Bethany says, rushing over to Ada’s side to grab her wheelchair and sprint her towards the parking lot next to the school. Ada shrieks in surprise, and Bethany yells out into the empty street, “Don’t worry! I kidnap her all the time! I’ll bring her home by six!”

     Bonnie sighs, shaking her head at the ground. “I’ll talk to you guys later, I guess.” She jogs over towards the van as Bethany is struggling to bear hug Ada from behind to scoop her and her wheelchair into the back.

        Keith watches her run off, then turns to me.

        “So … are you doing anything today?” He asks me.

       I know it’s kinda rude, but it’s hard for me not to flinch. Carrie might make this ugly.

“I … uh … I think you better go with them. We got plans, and Carrie doesn’t like to share.”

        Carrie’s glare almost punches a hole through Keith’s head. He timidly stumbles back a bit, and Carrie smiles.

        “R-right,” Keith says. “I … I’ll talk to you later,” he says, sheepishly backing off in the same direction everybody else just went.

“Absolutely,” I smile. “Talk to ya later.”

He turns around just in time to watch Bethany’s van roar to life and explode out of the lot into the street. Keith silently shouts “What the fuck, dude?” with his hands, and takes a second to sigh at the ground before walking after them.

I turn back to Carrie. She’s still smiling.

        “You’re a real cold-blooded, heartless little reptile, you know that?” I tell her.

        Carrie’s smile gets even wider. She takes that as a compliment. Which is fine. I kind of meant it as one. But only kind of.

        She follows me to the bike rack, and waits for me to unlock my bike. We both coast across the grassy vacant lot across the street, casually slipping behind The King’s Carcass. Again, walk like we belong here. Rushing off will just make us look shady.

      Tucked away in the trees, about twenty yards behind the decrepit building, there’s a shallow, unassuming ditch. Carrie and I lay our bikes down in the tall grass, bike locks wrapped around the same tree trunk. We hop down onto the rocky, uneven ground of the ditch. It’s bone dry today, but water collects in here like a motherfucker when it rains. That’s by design. I think.

       I’m pretty sure this a storm drainage system. It’s a huge, writhing leviathan slumbering between the town’s toes, burrowing under streets in places, until it eventually joins with the river. There’s a concrete tunnel ahead of us, about chest high on me. Carrie barely has to duck to get inside. You get around one of the turns down here, and it gets pitch black.

      This is one of the longest tunnels, and one with the least headroom. About halfway through, after two or three minutes of walk-crawling in silence, buried in the left wall, there’s a little side tunnel. It’s barely more than a foot tall, made of the kind of ribbed steel tube they use in sewers. You wouldn’t even find it if you were feeling along the wall to find your way through, since it’s right along the floor. And even if you brought a flashlight and happened to notice it, you’d have to be an insane person to try crawling through it.

        Sanity is in pretty short supply for teenagers, though. We’ve squeezed through forty feet of this pitch-black tunnel on our hands and knees when the standing water is cold enough to shock you to the bone and high enough to cradle your chin with your head touching the top of the tunnel. I guess it’s not much of a “squeeze” for Carrie, but you know what I mean.

       Finally, at the other end, there’s a little concrete room. I’m not sure what the purpose of this thing is, or if it even has one. This town once paid to have a bunch of two-foot tall miniature boulders placed in a row along a half mile of the river bank by the park on the edge of town, then paid again to have them each moved four feet to the right, then paid a third time to have them removed, all over the course of about three weeks. Weird, shady nonsense is a pretty regular occurrence around here, and not even just from the government.

Whatever this place was supposed to be, it’s taken on a new life as Carrie’s dank, underground lair. It’s a round room, with a floor that slopes downward into a drain in the center. Just barely too short for me to stand upright in. Couple of extra drainage pipes off to the sides. A bunch of demonic-looking symbols that Carrie painted onto the walls with red nail polish. You know. For decoration.

There’s some rustling of fabric and clattering of chains as I drop my backpack on the ground, and drape my jacket over the entrance tube. Carrie settles down onto the floor in the far side of the room. For a moment, there’s an almost death-like silence and blackness. Nothing but the sound of a hand digging through a pocket, and the glow-in-the-dark bones on Carrie’s shirt.

There’s a gentle click, and a faint, soft orange light fills the space. Carrie’s holding a cigarette lighter in one hand, using the light to help her awkwardly flip through a little booklet of paper talismans. Suddenly, she’s the real Carrie.

She’s always looked so out of place walking around in broad daylight, waiting in line at a grocery store or sitting at a desk bored out of her mind. She always wears darkness like it belongs to her; something in the flickering of firelight against darkness gives Carrie her actual form.

She cautiously tears a little talisman out of her booklet, licks the back of it, and slaps it down onto the concrete. The alien-looking symbol on the paper faintly glows white, gently leaking a smokeless red flame that just barely lights the room.

She rummages through her backpack for a minute, then lays down on the floor with a black, spiral bound notebook spread out in front of her. She awkwardly holds a pencil between her lips, and starts flipping through the pages. She stops flipping for a second, shakes her head, and keeps flipping. Finally, she stops, looks up at me for a second, and grabs the pencil from her mouth. Then she stares back down at the page for a while.

        “You want to read something for me?” I ask.

        Carrie looks back up.

        . . . . . .

        She nods very slightly.

“Alright. Start whenever you’re ready,” I lay on my back, trying not to think about the nearly five feet of earth piled on top of the concrete above us.

. . . . . .

We could be here for a while. Even in a place this far from everybody else on Earth, it could take her a long time to find her voice.

Carrie stares at the page for a while, then flips to the next one. Reading ahead, practicing the words. Now . . . it’s hard to fully appreciate what she’s filled that notebook with without understanding Demetrius Johnson

        Demetrius had scraped together whatever change he could between shifts as a dishwasher to buy the cheapest camera and sound equipment he could find, then started making spooky short films with his buddies. Eventually, they made a real freaky, hour long movie about a demonic possession, called “The Devouring of Emily Lane”, filmed in the motel he was living in at the time. Somehow, he weaseled that thing into an underground film festival, the right guys saw it, and he miracled his way into a small theatrical release.

        The guy had an unnatural talent for making incredibly raw movies. Writing around the fact that he couldn’t afford to fill the screen with fake monsters for two hours, he had to create real ones. And Carrie quickly became religiously obsessed with the guy’s work, and particularly the story behind his career. He wasn’t born into money. Guy was a goddamn high school dropout with a dream, and he made it real. Well, briefly. But that’s a whole other story.

        I’ve never had the heart to tell Carrie she was never gonna do the same thing. Not just that this happening once was like winning the lottery, but Demetrius lived in California. He knew a guy who knew a guy’s uncle who was a movie producer. Carrie lives in buttfuck nowhere, Minnesota, and the singular person on good terms with her is currently lurking with her in a dank underground lair. Not to mention Demetrius could actually get a job. Carrie’s too … troubled to hold down a job, and she’s already been banned from the laundromat for trying to stealthily steal change from the pockets in unattended laundry piles. A video camera’s even more of a distant dream for her.

        Carrie takes a huge breath, and sighs deeply.

        “A smokeless pillar of white flame kisses the night sky . . . “ Her voice is faint. Out of practice. “ . . . Little bits of ash tumble down like snowflakes . . .”

 

July, 1981 

        Carrie makes it to the end of the hallway way before I can. I can’t tell if the hall light is broken, or if Carrie just needs the darkness this bad. I stumble over a couple of empty cardboard boxes pushed against the wall, but Carrie doesn’t seem to notice. Or at least, she doesn’t care. All the way at the back, she opens a door on the left side and walks into absolute blackness with effortless confidence.

        Something dreadful flickers across the back of my mind for a moment, images flashing through my head of a bedroom that would make Satan hide back under the bed. But then she flicks a light switch, and I’m standing in the doorway of a painfully normal bedroom. I’m almost disappointed, honestly.

        There’s a big box fan sitting in the middle of the floor, pointed at the bed in the corner opposite the door. There’s a big, ultra thick, purple blanket draped over the bed. That bed looks out of place; it’s just too clean. It’s almost the only well organized thing in here. There’s a gnarly looking, ancient wooden chest sitting at the foot of her bed, covered in peeling black paint and rows of tarnished brass studs. Huge blackout curtains are hung over both her windows, and there’s a dresser shoved in front of one of them.

The bookshelf by the door is stuffed full of toppling piles of books in countless sizes, the floor loosely peppered with books with monsters on their covers, and a couple of issues of some science magazine. About all she has for decoration are a poster of what I’m pretty sure is a black hole, a picture taken of a great white shark apparently about to swallow the camera, and a black canvas hanging on the closet door with the menacingly cryptic message “REMEMBER TO BRUSH YOUR TEETH, BITCH”, seemingly spelled in blood splatter.

        The closet door itself is blocked off by a basket full of dirty laundry. Despite this, there’s still a bunch of socks and shirts and sweatpants scattered around the floor. And, like, three cans of air freshener sitting in the corner. I imagine most of them are probably empty. Carrie steps over a bunch of clothes for 11-year-olds, and I’m hit again by the strange realization of just how small she is. I mean, I know I’m pretty tall, but she’s on another level. Somehow, this girl is almost three months older than me, and she barely stands past my elbows.

        “Do you need any help clearing a spot on the floor?” I ask.

        Carrie stops and turns to look at me, then points at the bed and shrugs.

        “I ... what? What are you getting at?”

        “...... You can sleep on the bed if you want,” She says quietly.

        “Uh ... sure ... Where ... uh ... where are you gonna sleep?”

She just silently walks the last few steps to her bed, and lifts up the blanket hanging over the edge. There’s a foot-and-a-half clearance between the bottom of the twin-sized bed frame and the floor, where she’s got a sleeping bag and pillow set up. She’s got a couple of stuffed animals down there; a T-Rex, one of those long-neck-a-saurs, and a plush cobra. There’s a pile of notebooks by the sleeping bag’s feet, and a half full bottle of water by her pillow.

She lifts her head, and gives me a look like an unsupervised toddler who just found Mom’s cookie jar.

“Wanna see something cool?” She asks quietly.

“I ... I don’t know ... You have a weird idea of what things are “cool”.”

She slips her hand under her pillow, and pulls up something like a little silver chain necklace. She holds it up so I can see it; there’s a little, polished silver teardrop pendant, and a round, purple gemstone set in the middle of the drop, like half a Yin-Yang symbol. It looks like the other half of the pendant she’s wearing. It’s probably, like, aluminum and plastic, but it’s a very convincing fake.

        “... This ... one used to be my dad’s ...” She says softly.

        “Damn ... That is pretty cool, though.”

        It’s also surprisingly normal compared to what she usually pulls. I’m not sure if I should apologize for expecting something terrible, or try to figure out what the horrible twist is gonna be. Before I can commit to something, she holds the necklace higher, and closer to me, as if she’s expecting me to take it.

        “Huh? Oh, no ... you should probably hang onto that.”

        She gently jingles the necklace at me, and narrows her eyes.

        “Just hold it,” She insists. The corner of her lip curls back a tiny bit. Oh Jesus, it’s that second one. She knows something I don’t.

      Maybe I’ll regret this, but I grab the chain and lift it off her fingers. Carrie looks... disappointed for some reason. Her eyes flick down to the pendant, then back up at me.

        “What?” I ask.

        She stares down again ... And looks back up at me expectantly.

       Reluctantly, I hold out my left hand, and slowly lower the pendant onto my palm with the other ...

        ... Nothing happens. Carrie reaches for her own pendant, and-

        //I’m in your head now.\\

      Those words flash through my mind as if they belong there. I don’t hear a sound, but I can somehow tell it’s coming from Carrie. Suddenly, I feel overwhelming confusion and amusement at the same time. A laugh forces out of my throat. Somehow, though it’s still my voice, I can tell that Carrie is the one who’s laughing. She’s fucking laughing out of MY mouth.

        I drop the necklace on the floor as if it just bit me. The moment the pendant leaves my skin, all the funny evaporates. My heart’s racing, and Carrie’s just staring up at me, grinning like a lunatic.

“How the hell did you do that? ... Playing with my head like that ...”

Carrie crouches to pick up the necklace, and holds it out, expecting me to take it from her.

“They’re connected,” She says softly, gesturing between the one she’s holding and the one she’s wearing. “Complete the circuit, and you have two heads, one mind. Kind of. More like opening a door than burning down the walls. It takes some practice to manage your filters though. Keep thoughts in, or keep them out ... you know? You’ll have to wear it for a while to get used to it.”

“No way. That can’t be a thing. There’s just a trick to this. It’s like hypnosis or some shit. Planting thoughts in people’s brains or something.”

        Carrie frowns, steps over to her bed, and crawls under it. A few moments later, she slithers back out, holding a little booklet bound in black leather. She flips intently through countless crinkly, yellowed pages, stops, then flips a bit more. She stops . . . and very cautiously tears out one of the pages. There’s an ominous looking brown-ish symbol finger-painted onto the paper.

        She tosses the blanket off her bed, lifts her mattress off the bed frame to show me the bottom, and slaps the underside a few times for emphasis, staring at me menacingly.

        “W ... what? It’s ... it’s a mattress? What are you trying to show me?”

        She throws a punch at the mattress, shakes it a bit, then slams it back down onto the bed frame, glaring at me sourly the entire time. She gently licks the back of the paper square, and with a bit of a flourish, she sticks the paper to her forehead.

        She’s gone.

        She’s just fucking gone.

     Maybe her shadow disappeared a split second after she did, but there’s just nothing left of her, like she was never here.

Footsteps. Somewhere in the room, nearby. A hand firmly pinches me between my shoulder and neck, and I nearly jump out of my skin. I stumble, turning around, but there’s nobody behind me.

More footsteps. Circling around and hurrying away from me. Some dirty laundry is kicked aside by nobody. I glance around briefly, trying to work out which way the footsteps were going.

“The bed,” Carrie’s voice calls quietly from that direction.

I turn around, and a second later, something starts growing out of the mattress.

It’s her fucking head.

Carrie’s goddamn head is sitting on her bed like a fucking Halloween decoration, staring daggers through me and grinning with the insanity of an ax murderer.

        The rest of her body slowly appears, as if she were lifting herself up through an imaginary hole in her mattress. She awkwardly props herself up with her hands, seemingly struggling to lift her legs up onto the bed.

       And she’s just casually here now. Like she was never gone. She hops down from the bed, lifts the mattress up again, and punches the underside of the mattress. There’s no trace of a hole.

        “What the fuck just happened?”

        “Well, you’re only invisible until you ghost something. You can only ghost one thing, and you’re back to normal,” Carrie answers casually.

        “That is NOT what I was confused by. How the hell did you just do that? Where do you even GET the shit that lets you pull something like this?”

        Carrie’s ax murder smile swells even more.

        “I told you. I have friends in some very low places ...”

October, 1985

    The next section picks back up in the story's "present day". Anywhere the original plan would have just skipped a bunch of time, we'll get a shorter flashback sequence to build out characters a little more. This gives room for things like Carrie introducing magic to Lyra, and Lyra spending time in the psych ward that would have otherwise massively frontloaded the story, or been skipped entirely.

    See you in the next update, which shouldn't take nearly as long as this one.