He got nowhere…and still the gossamer spooling from that voice, those words, that cadence wound ’round him, covering him from head to foot, forming an interlocking prison that tightened, tightened…and somehow removed him from the bathroom he’d walked into.
Matthias started to yell, but he had the sense that sound wasn’t traveling, that whatever was going on with him was on a different plane—
The suction came next, the great pull making him feel like his internal organs were being drawn through his skin, his body somehow getting turned inside out. The pain was a stunner, a moan of agony rippling up his throat and breaking through his lips as he continued to fight within the cocoon—
Everything started to move.
The vibration began as a barely noticeable hum, but it soon reverberated within its bandwidth, multiplying until he was rattling within the physical sheath of the words, banging from side to side at a million miles an hour…until he was sure he was going to shatter.
And then came the rotating. Slowly at first, and then with gathering momentum, everything turning until the cage of light spun hard and fast around him. As the rotation took on impossible speed, pressure built to a bursting point, his ears popping, his lungs barely able to draw breath, his body taken to the limit of physical endurance.
He was going to get blown apart, every molecule he had straining—
The maelstrom started to lift, the whole construct rising from his feet, lifting…lifting…up his ankles, his calves, his hips…over his shoulders…and then finally off the top of his head, sailing free of him.
In its wake, he fell as if boneless, going down to the hard floor in a clatter of body parts.
But it was not over.
From the vantage point of his cheek on the tile, he stared up at an impossible sight. The spinning, shimmering chaos hovered above the other man; then began a descent, overtaking Adrian, covering first his head, and his pecs, followed by his whole torso…until he was subsumed by the maelstrom.
Behind the filaments, the man struggled as if being invaded, his body jerking and spasming, the grimace of agony suggesting he was where Matthias had just been.
Snap!
With a sharp sonic note, whatever it was dispersed in the same way it appeared, thread by thread coming loose and dissipating into the air like smoke, the cocoon peeling itself off strand after strand…until Adrian fell to the floor.
Matthias lifted his head and looked down his body. Then measured the other’s.
Ironically, the pair of them had landed in exactly the same position, one hand up, the opposite down, one leg stretched out, the other curled up.
They were precise mirrors of each other.
Matthias reached out to touch the roommate—
He blinked. Blinked again. Jerked off the floor.
Holding his hand in front of his face, he moved it forward and back, the distance changing.
With a shout, he surged for the counter and yanked himself up toward his reflection over the sink.
What he saw was impossible.
His cloudy eye, the one that had been ruined by his actions two years ago, was the same blue as the other.
Jumping to his feet, he leaned all the way into the glass, going nose-to-nose with himself—as if that would tell him the truth or something…and he supposed it did, just not in a way he would ever have thought possible: Proximity simply proved that the scars on his temple had, in fact, faded.
To the point where if he hadn’t been looking for them, he wouldn’t have noticed them.
Matthias stepped back and stared down at his body. Same height. Same weight. But the aches were gone, and so were the numbness and the random sharp shooters that had been racking his bones with such consistency that he noticed them now only in their absence.
He lifted up his pant leg. Scars lingered in the skin of his calf, but like the ones on his face, they were nothing as they had been. And a deep knee bend that should have left him gasping for breath didn’t faze him.
He looked at the man on the floor. “What the f**k have you done to me?”
Adrian grunted as he sat up, and then struggled to haul his way off the tile. When he finally straightened, a wince buried his eyes in low brows. “Nothing.”
“Then what the hell was that?”
The other guy turned away. “I’m going to check on Jim.”
Matthias reached out and snagged the man’s arm, a spike of fear hitting home. “What did you do to me?”
Except he knew. Even before Adrian looked over that thick shoulder, he knew.
He had been healed. By some miracle, Adrian, the roommate, whoever the hell he was, had done what two years of doctors, surgeries, drugs, and rehab had not.
His body was whole…once again.
Because Adrian had taken on all the damage.
Staring into the man’s now milky eye, Matthias didn’t dwell on the metaphysical stuff, the holy shits, the amens, or even the thank-you’s.
All he could think of was, How the hell was he going to explain this to Mels?
41
“Hi, Mom, how are you?”
As the reply came over the connection, Mels put another French fry in her mouth. “I’m still at work, yeah. But I wanted to call to let you know I’m okay.”
Man, those simple words had connotations above and beyond the hour of the day and the reference to “work.”
Closing her eyes, she forced her voice to be level. “Oh, you know how the CCJ is. There’s always something going on….Hey, how did bridge go?”
For once, instead of feeling weighed down by the mundane, everyday conversation, she embraced it. Normal was good. Normal was safe. Normal was totally far from cold water and an invisible hold and the specter of death.
She was alive. So was her mother.
This was…really good.
And it was interesting how much the response mattered. As well as the follow-up she asked—about how Ruth, their next-door neighbor, had played. And also the laugh about the trump that hadn’t gone well. She truly listened, actually cared, and that gave her a sense of how much she had been going through the motions lately.
Guess the shock of that chilly water had further woken her up.
Opening her lids, she focused on Jim Heron, lying so still under the covers.
What had really happened down at that boathouse?
“Mels? You there?”
She gripped her phone a little tighter, even though she was in no danger of dropping the thing. “Yeah, Mom, I am.”
How would tonight have been if things had ended differently?
A wave of fear burrowed into her bones, replacing her marrow with Freon, and a sudden shivering made her feet tap under her seat, and her fingers drum on the desk next to her nearly empty plate of food.