I had driven for five hours and fifteen minutes; my body ached, my mind tired, and I fell prey to a cascading fatigue. My anxiousness compelled me to cast repeated glances at the paper bag beside me; as if it would go off at any second. This was the culmination of the sensibility vacating my sleep deprived mind. When they are able to see you when you sleep, a reckless abandon awakens.

  I crossed the state border with an unregistered weapon; all in the name of rest and revenge. I had reached a level of sensliness that seemed far removed from sensliness. I only knew that I remained sane because I was questioning if I had gone mad.

  I tried to reach Barny, to no avail. Call after call, I desperately tried to tell him to stay away from Oakvane. All of these attempts were lost to his impersonal voicemail. Oh god, Barny, I could have sent you money. You could have been safe with me.

  At twenty minutes past two PM, I knew the call was coming. I almost prayed that he’d be on the other side. I dared to fantasize that he was in Visage City, waiting for me; that I could turn around and abandon revenge. That would have saved me from crossing that damned threshold.

  I knew it was unlikely, maybe even impossible, to hope for such a thing. Was hoping for something like that crazier than stealing this car and getting this questionable gun?

  Probably not, actually. Any reasonable person would argue that the actual crimes are crazier than hoping your friend would call you so you didn’t have to go to your cursed hometown. Reasonable people also get to sleep at night, rather than suffer ghostly encounters with their cousin. Reasonable people don’t have injuries from their dreams manifest on their body when they awaken.

  Fifteen minutes until three PM was when I entered the outskirts of Oakvane. The car was silent. I tried the radio, but only Rapture Radio came in clear:

  “The book Zalkriox teaches us that transformation is key. Only through drastic sacrifice can we ascend to finally meet our true selves…” Darnette preached with a haunting fervor.

  I slapped the radio off. I’d rather drown in my anxiety than listen to the man I came to kill. Oakvane’s pressure bore upon me; I felt like I was strapped into the chair again, minutes before the injections and extractions.

  I pulled into the parking lot of a long disused mini golf place, steeling myself for the call. It was a site of abandon; the sign had fallen upon its face. Weeds and wild grass had claimed the terrain, choking out most of what once was. Only rusted shadows of once colorful obstacles remained. I just sat there, locked in the gaze of a hot dog with a face whose features had been stripped away by years of neglect. The crown upon the weiner hung low, drifting down the brow and threatening to fall free from the spring that kept it anchored.

  A black sports car roared down the road behind the parking lot, that gave me a breath of relief. I know I was talking about sensliness, but ever since the accident- I’ve held this belief that no one but me escapes Oakvane. For years, I believed with all my heart that Oakvane had killed my parents. I fought back against that traumatic memory rising to the surface of my thoughts, of the fire consuming the overturned car and them yelling for me to keep running, to never stop until I was out of Darnette’s reach.

  I was here, so close to where it happened. The fact that Barny had taken a job in Oakvane could not be discounted as chance. Whatever my parents ran me from, I was sitting at the precipice of it after twenty years.

  At three PM, my phone lit up and “B.Whistler” scrolled across the screen. I steadied myself, allowing that little bit of hope to bloom in me. “Maybe he would be on the other side of the line this time,” I thought. “Maybe I would hear something other than static and smacking lips.” I fished the pistol out of the bag, I don’t know why. It was much heavier than I expected it to be.

  I answered, very conscious of how my voice wavered. My cousin’s voice slithered out from the speakers like a velveteen serpent.

  “Hello, Boy Who Ran, we’ve missed you.”

  I pushed back in the seat, an icy dread bubbling up from my pores and drifting across my skin. My words stopped in my throat and clogged it. I could feel the leather straps, the steel buckles, the splintering wood working its way under my fingertips.

  “What’s wrong, Teenie Deanie? Surprised to hear from your favorite cousin?”

  My voice burst free from the blockage, I told her to cut the bullshit- to put Barny on the phone. She told me that was no concern of mine, that her god only had eyes for me. My response was simple, put my friend on or I would hang up. Claudia laughed at that; a horrible sharp sound with an uncomfortably rasping decrescendo.

  She made it clear that if I hung up, something terrible would befall Barny.

  “Do you think my father loves you more than me?” Her voice made me uncomfortable; she was taking this strange, sultry tone to paint over abandon and uncertainty. She sounded like an infected scab that started to rot.

  I told her that was very likely since she was fucking psychopath.

  This prompted another of her uncomfortable laughs. The laugh’s trail off was puckered by a deep breath, one that sounded laced with relief. She whispered to me that “such sights awaited me in Oakvane; that the stars would sing again.”

  That I “should feel privileged to be born with such a fate.”

  She asked me what my fondest Oakvane memory was. Having none, silence was my answer. Claudia let the conversation ferment in that discomfort. For fifteen seconds, she left me hanging with her too loud breaths.

  Then she said something that turned my bones to ice: that her favorite memory was when we were children. Her favorite memory was going to Harvey’s Hot Dog and Putt Emporium.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  My gaze snapped up to the hot dog I was parked beneath, with those features stripped away by the years. Claudia hung up, then a car honked behind me. In my rearview mirror, I could see that black muscle car blocking the only exit to the parking lot. The presence of the car had a potency to it, the blackness of a quickly approaching storm began to steal away the light.

  Both doors of that car opened, with Claudia slithering out of the driver’s side. She was dressed in some pantsuit- designer stuff, it made her look like a lawyer to the elite.

  “May as well face her head on”, I remember mumbling. I exited my vehicle after stuffing the handgun in the front pocket of my hoodie. My steps made a muddy squelch, apparently I had found the solitary puddle in the otherwise dry parking lot. I had one certainty; regardless of how she tried to intimidate me: I was the one with the gun. That made me the one with the actual power.

  I strode about half the distance between us, then stopped. I didn’t want to draw closer, her presence was an anathema that I could not perceive or define. Here she was, the living ghost of my past- unshackled from my dreams and presenting some very corporeal threat. My first bully, my first kiss, the banshee that disrupted my heart’s harmony.

  Heavy tension gripped in the air, the thick kind that sticks to the inside of your lungs and clings to your brain. She leaned over her door, biting on the nail of her pinkie as she smirked and spoke.

  “It’s time to come home. Time for your story to really start.”

  “I don’t care. Where’s Barny?”

  “Doesn’t matter, Deanie. You’re home now and it brings Our God such joy.”

  “I do not give a fuck about your ‘god.’ Give me back my friend."

  She let out a hollow laugh before speaking, “Your friend? Or the man you love? Poor Audrey, she bore you a beautiful child and you abandoned her. We always knew you were a queer one, Dean; but this is just cliche. A little boy leaves his loving family, goes to the big city, and comes crawling back stained with sins.”

  “You don’t know me! I loved my wife and I love my child. Do you really want to talk about sins, bitch? You kneel before a monster and call him a prophet. He hurt me! He did things to me and my ‘family’ did nothing.”

  “Oh, boo-hoo. Poor Dean, so special and loved by everyone; yet somehow always the victim. Always in his big feelings and complaining about made-up hurts.”

  There was a distant peal of thunder, which was answered by this quartet of eldritch bays; something that sounded like wolves intermixed with whale sounds. I could feel my posture going rigid when my hand slid in my belly pocket and gripped my weapon. Fear and tension became a discordant song in my head, rumbling through my body.

  Her passenger emerged; a schlubby young guy with blood staining his flannel and his face, like he wallowed in a slaughter pit and let it dry. He was the spitting image of Tommy Grey, plucked out of early high school and returned to give me one last beating. There was no visible injury, and nobody would still be standing after losing that much blood. My mind went to the very justifiable conclusion that I was looking at a murderer.

  I pulled the gun, Tommy grinned wildly with his mouth full of too yellow and too big teeth. Claudia simply tutted at me before gesturing toward me, like she was commanding her dog to attack.

  I shot, shattering the window and catching her center mass. She dropped raggedly, without a cry of pain. I, however, had a much more visceral reaction. I had come this far with deep seeded intentions to kill a man, but now all of that malice and hurt imbued itself into a bullet lost in my cousin’s gut. I could feel my skeleton threaten to vibrate free of my muscles and out of my skin. This didn’t feel anything like I expected it to. It locked me up, making my body a prison that I yearned to escape.

  Tommy was approaching, with not a single glance cast toward Claudia. His smile was growing wider and bigger still, peeling away at the edges of his lips and splitting them. His cheeks began to tear with an unremarkable sound. His oversized flannel now struggled to contain the intense mass of his frame. He was growing in front of me, almost doubling. Small splits began to manifest across his exposed skin. His knuckles burst free of the restraining tissue as toothy protrusions. Behind me, I heard water moving; but there was no time to look back.

  Tommy lumbered closer, all of his teeth now visible through the ragged spaces where his cheeks used to be. I seized my adrenaline and stole control of my body from the paralytic bindings of shock. “Stop,” I hollered with all the words I could muster.

  He just kept coming, slow and steady. There was no more than fifteen feet between us when I fired.

  He didn’t flinch when the bullet hit his neck. No arterial spray followed, just a lazy dribble of blood lost in the mess that caked his clothing. I began to backpedal, desperately pulling the trigger again and again to the same result.

  I turned to make for my car. The sheriff waved merrily to me, leaning casually against my driver side door. He smiled widely, his soaked uniform clinging to his frame. The last of his left shoe was bubbling into being, taking shape from the drying puddle I had stepped in.

  “Welcome home,” his voice was slimy when he spoke. “We have such wonders for you to see. Such wonders for you to feel.”

  I was trapped.

  Your mind can only hold back a surge of memory for so long and that dam broke in my panic. I remembered the way the leather bit against my fourteen year old wrists, the welts that manifested from the memory of them when I sleep. I remembered the way the tentacles slithered across my skin and remembered all of the hundreds of eyes, neon and watching from above. I remembered the way Darnette’s smile seemed too wide for his little mouth, no longer obscured by his beard.

  I couldn’t go back. I wouldn’t go back. I refused to let them take me again.

  I ended it. More efficiently than when I tried in college. I pulled that trigger before the barrel was even flush to my temple.

  ....but then it didn’t end. You still see and hear afterwards. You are aware of everything shutting down and it feels like you are suspended in a tormented eternity. Blackness creeps in, an impossible and all consuming dark. The thunder of my gunshot hovered in this space, sound stretching out and mutating to something even more limitless.

  Finally that sound died out too; just after I lost sight.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Claudia said. “We only need his eyes.”

  I still felt it, the way the bridge of my glasses dragged across the skin of my nose.

  I could still feel it when they took my eyes. The coldness of the rain could not distract from that.

  I remembered Audrey looking back at me, her red curls entrapping fat flakes of snow while we walked the park- our first date. I remembered Amber's little hand clutching my finger as if begging for confirmation that daddy would always be there to keep her safe. There was a flash of Barny looking down at me, just after he hauled me back from the edge. All three of them had such beautiful eyes; what a strange thing to focus on.

  A sudden clarity shook my mind, shattering memories and making everything go still: I finally controlled the narrative. I would never release that again.

  After all these years, I would tell the story.