Ghost Image...5

In the empty hallway, Booker lurched after the vanished set of men, but then stopped, wondering why he was bothering to try to follow them at all. He wasn’t going to do that! It was useless—pointless and stupid. Why would he follow the men who had tried to hurt him?

Shaking his head at his own stupidity, Booker turned around to walk out of the hall. The open door of one of the rooms beckoned. He paused, not sure if he should go in or not, but when he walked by, there was a bed that was bent at a curious angle, without sheets, in the corner facing an unbroken window, and a black belt lay on the floor, buckled.

It looked very much like the belt that had been around his doppelganger’s middle, that had held Not Booker’s arms in, to keep him from being able to wreck any specific havoc.

Booker shivered when he recalled how it had been to come face to face with himself. More so when he thought about how the men who had been following hadn’t seen him. No notice—not even that they had ignored him; their eyes their faces would have reflected that much. Just that he wasn’t there.

Booker turned away from the open room. He wandered a few steps more, drawn again to an open door, and the way the light played against the opposite wall from within. There were curtains over the window in this room, and bloodstains on the floor, but they looked old, and well-scrubbed. Booker wasn’t as revolted by them as he thought he should have been. They were just...part of the scenery.

He stopped long enough to poke his head into that room, and see that the opposite wall was almost completely destroyed, holes punched into it at all heights, and there was more blood work done on that wall, to the point where Booker thought he might lose the contents of his stomach. But nothing came up, he just dry heaved for a few moments, and then stopped looking at it.

The thing about this place, he decided, was that it was almost possible to get used to it. To think it was homey, or nearly. Acceptable. Not a loss. Not frightening.

It was just the people, he decided.

The people who weren’t quite right, and the ones who wrote on their ceilings.

Booker looked up, to see if this ceiling had been written on.

White glared down at him, except for one black smirch across the corner that read “gulible” in hard blocky writing. Booker wondered if it was a joke.

A mad joke, then, one played by mad men on other mad men.

He turned to go, realizing he’d walked right into the room, to explore. He hadn’t meant to do that.

“Leaving so soon?”

A women was in the doorway, her arms extended across, smirking at him. Her eyes weren’t staying still—one flicked from side to side like it was following someone pacing; the other jerked erratically. Booker blinked.

She might have been pretty otherwise, cleaned up, with makeup on and a bow in her thick curls to pull them back and make them slightly less unruly.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” the woman said. She giggled, a high girlish sound that was entirely inappropriate to be coming from a woman who looked like she was in her forties. “You better not tell anyone,” she said to the doorframe, threateningly, t hen turned her sickly sweet smile back on Booker.

“I won’t tell anyone,” she said, her voice jumping a few octaves upward. “Just don’t tell anyone I didn’t tell or I’ll get in trouble.” She simpered, and then her face changed again, hard and contorted. “You’re in my room.”

Booker followed the personality switches flawlessly, counting them with each new voice, posture and mannerism. He came to twenty four before they began repeating. An endless cycle. But she was almost coherent, like each one had a part to play, knew its lines, and was reciting along with the others, waiting for a cue to break out onto stage.

“You’re in my room,” the woman said.

“Who are you?” Booker asked. He didn’t expect a reply, really.

“Wolf,” the woman said. Her voice deepened with her name, and then the girlish voice came back, the high one that seemed like a six year old living in a grown woman’s body. “June,” the girlish voice said. “June Wolf.”

“June Wolf,” Booker echoed. She looked like she should be baying at the moon, with that mop of hair, he thought to himself. Or like she could be a wolf with how sharp her nose was—a touch too much so for classic beauty, at any rate. But she was mad, and wouldn’t be in any beauty contests anyway.

“You’re in my room,” the little girl voice of June Wolf said.

“No,” Booker said. “I was just leaving.”

“But I don’t want you to leave,” the little girl voice said. “I want to kill you,” the gruffer, almost manly voice added.

Booker sketched a smile. “All the more reason for me to go.”

He backed up, wondering where the Spanish Inquisition was now, when he really needed them to come to his rescue. Or even to his demise—it didn’t matter! As long as that woman got away from him, stopped talking to him, and staring at him like she was going to leech part of his soul out through his eyes—it was disturbing on a level that he wasn’t quite used to yet.

The window shattered inward.

Bruno wasn’t ready for it. He yelled in surprise.

The woman shrieked, her voice going high and wild.

There was a brief silence and then there was screaming all throughout the place again, the walls echoing with shouts. There were sounds of running feet, and a pair of men went by the door, but they were in white and one was beating on the other one.

The woman looked out the door and then back in, and leaned against the doorframe in an imitation of a sex icon model, her leg protruding from under the white split gown, but not nearly enough to be seductive. Only vaguely disturbing. Booker’s eyes couldn’t help but trace the line of her leg, from the knee showing down to her calves and marvel at how shapely they were. How—

She saw him looking and giggled again.

“Wanna touch?”

Booker shook his head.

“I want you to touch,” June Wolf said, her voice angry now, and she came forward, out of the doorway, stalking like she had murder on her mind. She was moving slowly, but with deliberate security to each step. Booker backed away, put a hand out to the window.

The shards of glass cut his palm.

He expected to wake up.

Nothing happened.

When he looked at his hand, there was blood across his palm, dripping down his forearm and seeping into his shirt sleeve.

“Shit,” he said.

“You’re going to do it with me,” June Wolf said. “I haven’t had a chance since they took me away from my home. He used to do it with me all the time.” She pulled at her white gown, attempting to rip it off. Booker looked away.

“Look at me!” she snarled. “Come here,” June Wolf said, extending a hand, and speaking softly, in a whisper. “Come touch me, darling. You want to. I want to feel you touch me.”

Booker shook his head. “No,” he managed, though it took him a few tries. “I—you’re not—I—no.”

June Wolf looked at him, and then started to laugh maniacally as she came forward, hiking up her white gown. “Then I’ll have to do it myself.” She looked away from Booker for a moment.

He followed her gaze to the belt on the floor and then looked up. She was grinning wickedly.

The bed was bent in the middle.

Booker froze.

June Wolf kept coming.

It took a moment of concentration, a moment of thinking what might happen if he didn’t move to make himself move. And then Booker was able to do so, able to walk backwards those few steps towards the imploded window, tripping through glass shards, and getting cut up on his hands and feet. He reached for the edge of the sill and a shard went right through his palm, coming up out the back and he screamed, but June Wolf was laughing as she lunged for him, and Booker couldn’t take it so he threw himself back trying to avoid her and fell—

The ground was not soft. It hurt when he hit, his back taking the brunt of the blow, and sending stubborn refusal to move through the rest of his body. His rib cage felt like it had cracked in two, and his spine didn’t feel like moving. Booker lay on the ground, staring up as June Wolf leaned out the window, but she didn’t look down. She looked out, instead, wildly from side to side like she expected him to still be on the same level as she was, running away. Her white gown had come completely off, and her breasts were dripping with red as she retracted back through the window.

Booker tried to move, tried to sit up, tried to breathe, but it hurt too much to do anything, so instead he lay there, and watched the tiny drops of crimson from up above as they slowly began to migrate down the walls of the building, slowing from a crawl to a frozen moment in time as they hardened and the sun’s rays flecked off them, sending sharp pains through Booker’s head until he thought it might explode.

From above he heard more yelling, and some high pitched shrieks that he assumed came from June Wolf. But there was nothing else to be said, nothing to be done.

Booker closed his eyes, and hoped that someone would come find him soon.