Ghost Image...4

A new voice. A new person. Unless Romeo’s voice had changed so much in the past twenty seconds—but no. It was someone new, someone who limped into Booker’s field of vision.

“I think he’s ready to be taken in,” the new man said. He was skinny and dressed all in white, but the lab coat wavered between being a coat and an actual suit jacket, just in white. “Take him off,” the man in white said. “And I’ll take him up.”

Romeo Emerson cackled and then hit the edge of the board that Booker was bound to. He twisted in midair, turned until he was facing the ground and fell on his face, his arms pulled back behind him, so he didn’t actually fall on his face—just thought he was going to.

Booker stared at the ground, his torso sagging between where his wrists were still bound up and his ankles as well.

“All at once now,” the new man in white said.

Romeo Emerson kicked the edge of the board and Booker did fall flat on his face, then. He groaned, but Romeo and the man in white grabbed his heels and pulled him out from under the stretcher and hauled him to his feet. Romeo stared at him for a moment, then, and there was something odd in his eyes, something almost not mad.

Then he grinned.

“You’ll be dead before you know it,” Romeo said, and then kissed Booker, full on the mouth.

He tasted like sawdust and ash. Dead animals, and rotting meat. Booker gagged. Romeo Emerson slapped him across the face, still grinning. “I’ll see him on the East End,” he said, but to the walls, and Booker could only manage to stare as Romeo Emerson started skipping around the room in his white bindings, singing a high pitched, girlish tune about flowers and jars that turned bloody and violent just as the man in white dragged Booker out the door and shut it.

“Don’t mind Emerson,” the man in white said. “He’s a little different.”

“Only a little?” Booker muttered.

“Hard to get used to, I know,” the man in white said. “I’ll take care of you, now, though. You don’t belong down here, obviously.”

Obviously. Booker thought it was obvious too, himself, but he wasn’t sure how to say that without sounding self important, so he was silent instead. He followed the man in the white coat-jacket and kept his mouth shut, taking in the hallway as they marched down through it. The hall was white as well, and grey under the peeling paint, with huge chunks ripped out of the ceiling, but no crumbles on the floor. It was disturbing on a level that Booker hadn’t experienced before. The ground looked perfectly well kept and lived in. The ceiling, though...

The way it worked seemed to be that the lower floor was perfectly all right, but the higher one progressed, looking up the walls, the more age was hidden. There were ugly scratches across the walls up there, and almost all the white was gone, or spattered with rusty spots that Booker didn’t try to identify.

They stepped into a stairwell that was grey and cement everywhere, like a memory gone wrong, or hell frozen over. There was graffiti on the walls, just images that weren’t complete, and a painting of half a man.

“The rest of him is two floors up,” the man in white said when he saw Booker looking at it.

Booker made a sound like a strangled sob and jolted forward, jerked by an invisible tether of needing to be near some other human being. “I don’t need to see it, thanks,” he said.

“You wouldn’t be able to anyway,” the man in white said. “We’re not going two floors up.”

The stairwell screeched at them as they went up, as though the concrete blocks had minds of their own, because they were shifting under Booker’s feet, he was sure of it, and he wasn’t able to make them stop. It was the shifting sliding motion that made him slip against the man who was wearing white, and then the man who was wearing white turned on him with his eyes wide open and angry. There was something strange inside him, a desire that looked fierce and frightening and sexual all at once.

He wanted—

“I will kill you,” the man in white said, smiling gently. “If you do t hat again.”

Then they were walking up the stairs again, and the railing looked like it was coming closer, so Booker crowded against the opposite wall, trying to keep away from the man in white, and trying to keep from falling over the center guard rail because it kept snaking towards him, slithering like it was alive. He didn’t have the gumption to fight back.

“You’ll drown if you keep fighting like that,” the man in white said. “Ask anyone. They’ll tell you.”

“Yeah,” the walls agreed. “They’ll tell you.”

Booker gulped and drew himself in closer, just as he was seized by the man in white and dragged bodily up the final flight of stairs, and shoved through a door. The floors here were diseased, broken with holes that looked down on the lower floor. There hadn’t been holes in the ceiling from below.

Booker stepped over one, carefully, and stared down, watching in rapt fascination-morbid fascination in fact—as he saw himself, walking underneath, moving and shivering from side to side. He was dressed in white and his arms were tied to his sides with a black belt. Booker looked closer, kneeling—

Booker below looked up. His eyes were cold, bleak and dark.

Then he screamed, and Booker from above jumped back, away from the hole. There was a moment of silence then the whole building started to echo with riotous screaming. There were screams from everywhere.

“You started them!” the man in white said, angrily. He came up to Booker, and made as if to hit him, but then didn’t. “We’re going to fix you,” he said, instead. “If it’s the last thing we do. You’ll learn to behave.”

There was a terrible moment where Booker was being dragged through the air when he thought that he was going to land right in the hole—he passed over it though, and saw himself down below, still there, looking up, but as he watched, receding, he saw a bunch of men in black take his lower self out, tackling him to the ground as his lower self screamed like it was on fire.

“What are they doing?” Booker asked.

The man in white hit him across the face, and Booker went silent.

“You’re going to be taught a lesson for daring to fight back,” the man in white said.

Booker didn’t say anything.

“I said!” the man in white said, turning and hitting Booker again, “You’re going to be taught a lesson!”

“I didn’t!” Booker said.

The man in white grabbed the handle of a door and yanked. The door—already splintered—came apart in his hands so he was holding a length of wood, controlled by the door knob. Booker stared at it, and then backpedaled furiously, trying to get out of the way as the man in white came after him, screaming obscenities and trying to bash his skull in.

“You’re going to die for this!”

There was a moment like in the movies, when everything starts to move slowly, in slow motion, like the world is on pause, but someone hit fast forward anyway—like things were going, but not, at the same time. A contradiction, a paradox. Booker stopped being able to think when he saw himself dragging a host of men behind him up the stairs, arms tied to his sides.

Except that booker was in all white, and he was in his own jeans and shirt, dark-wash denim and black button up. It was trouble waiting to happen. Not-Booker started running, but it wasn’t clear if he’d been running before or if time had just gone back to normal speed. There were men behind him, attached by a black rope to his midsection, trying to pull him back, but Not-Booker tugged them forward with a strength that did not belong to Booker himself.

He stared, and the Not-Booker took it upon himself to fling his body right at the man in white, crashing into him and somehow getting the both of them tangled up in the ropes. The men behind Not-Booker started talking amongst themselves, calling out orders between gasps, and suddenly the man in white was being held hostage by them too while Not-Booker climbed slowly to his feet and turned.

Booker had collapsed to the ground, or maybe he’d been there all along—he wasn’t sure—and Not-Booker grinned and held out a hand, but when Booker went to take it, he noticed that there were missing fingers—two specifically. Someone had cut off the index finger and the pinkie of his not-self’s right hand. When Not-Booker turned the hand over, as though to assure Booker everything was okay, all Booker could see was the heavy scarring, extending from the tips of the fingers that were left up to where the sleeve fell down midway across the forearm.

He couldn’t put his hand out after that, just stared at himself, feeling like he was drained of energy altogether.

The men gathered up Not-Booker and the man in white and hustled them off, paying absolutely no heed to Booker.

They poked and prodded Not-Booker and screamed in their foreign languages at him until he moved away, reluctantly, from where he was standing, and started off down the hall. Booker lurched to his feet, but by the time he was heading after them, they were gone.