The Freebie (Fiction) – Part the Last

At VERY long last, the end is nigh!  For the beginning, start here.)

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The Freebie (continued)

And on, and on, pausing only to send the obligatory emails to Nick St. James.  Emails in which she tried to capture exactly how she was feeling – even when she wasn’t entirely sure of that herself.  Who could blame her really, given the subject matter?  She read about stalkings and cat-and-mouse games, through physical torture and psychological abuse.  She read about blood and gore and sweat and tears.  She read about predators and prey and the descent into madness.  And she started noticing things.  Odd things.  Like how every time Mandy heard a sound, her own head would snap up and her heart would start to race.  Or how her telephone rang once, twice, three times in the dead of night just after Mandy received the three consecutive wrong number calls the evening after she told the seemingly-kind writer she had met that she was not interested in a job as his assistant.

At first Callie smiled at these odd coincidences.  She loved when a story wrapped her up so completely, when an author managed to completely transport her into a book-world.  She mentally congratulated Nick St. James on his engaging writing style and his linguistic prowess, and could not imagine how any of his books had ever not met with raging commercial success if this was how he wrote them.  And then, when she wrote her check-in email at the conclusion of section three, she verbally congratulated him (albeit in short, clipped prose – it turns out she couldn’t completely overlook the pressing issue of data costs after all).  She mentioned the odd coincidences casually, anecdotally.  She used them to illustrate how thoroughly caught up she was in Mandy’s story.  Nick St. James responded with a surprisingly brief (for him) and oddly cryptic message after section three: “It’s not just Mandy’s story, my dear, it is yours too.  You, after all, are the reader.  And the reader is as crucial to the story as any other character.”

As she started the massive fourth section, Callie started to find the coincidences a little less charming.  And then a lot less charming.  Instead of nifty signs of her deep involvement in the story, as the first few had been, the next several flukes were vaguely disturbing bits that pressed the boundaries of fluke-dom.  When Mandy was stabbed in the leg, Callie’s own leg began to throb; when Mandy managed to break free from the maniacal journalist and flee into the dark woods, Callie’s breathing became labored and heavy. When Mandy saw a face in the window during a flash of lightning, the street lamp outside of Callie’s window briefly flared and she gasped as she saw two frantic eyes staring back at her during the power surge.

As the story continued to unfold, Mandy’s chances looked increasingly grim.  And Callie’s nerves were stretched tauter than a tightrope.  Callie read all through the night again, and when her alarm screamed in perfect syncopation with Mandy’s terrified cries for help, the poor girl leapt out of her chair with the fearsome shriek of a caged animal.  It was time to go to work again.  But there was no power on earth strong enough to drag Callie away from the story.  Not now, not with the end of section four just pages away.

Callie did something she had never once done before – she called in sick.  With the credibility that only the formerly genuine can even hope to generate, Callie told her boss that she was not feeling well and would not be able to make it to the store that day.  Her boss was not surprised; he had noticed Callie’s bizarre behavior the day before – everyone had, really – and he told her to take care of herself and to get some rest, that he would see her on her next shift, and that she shouldn’t work so hard because, after all, she was only human.  Callie mouthed the appropriate platitudes and thanks, rushing through the telephone call slightly faster than propriety dictated.  And when he finally said goodbye, Callie hung in the phone in a rush of disgruntled gratitude.

She was free, finally.  And so she headed back into the book.

“I’m such an idiot.” Callie berated herself as though self-flagellation were the latest sport.  “Such an idiot.  Spent all my life being strong and self-reliant, doing right, working hard – and what did it get me?  A boss that believed my stupid, transparent lie, that fell for it hook, line and sinker and told me to stay home.  Why couldn’t that idiot have seen through me, have demanded that I show up for work?  If only he hadn’t…” Callie sighed internally.  “It’s not his fault.  None of this is his fault.  It’s all mine.  Mine and Nick St. James.  But mostly mine.  After all, he’s just doing what a good author is supposed to do, right?  Pulling me in.  It’s my fault I fell in so far, my fault I couldn’t put the damn book down…”

Callie finished section four, and sent her obligatory email to Nick St. James.  The tone of her message was different this time – she felt skittish and wrong.  She chalked it up to nerves over calling in sick.  But she knew that wasn’t it – not really.  She did feel badly about calling in, don’t misunderstand, but that wasn’t what had her stomach in knots or her fingertips tingling.  No, that was all the story’s doing.  She tried to encapsulate this for the author, but frankly didn’t have the patience for word-smithing.  She had to know what happened next, just had to!  And so she told Nick St. James the truth, but in a loose rambling fashion: that she was utterly lost in Mandy’s world, that it was creeping her out, that she was feeling weird and off, but that she had to know what happened next.  True to form, Nick St. James responded almost immediately, with an even briefer and more cryptic message than his last: “Excellent, just as I’d hoped.  The end is near now, soon it will all make sense…”

And with that, Callie kept reading.  And Mandy kept struggling.  And so Callie kept struggling.  Somewhere, about three-quarters of the way through the last section, Callie stopped believing in coincidences – there had been too many and they had been too convincing.  There was something far creepier than coincidence at work here.  The parallels between Mandy and Callie were too numerous to mention; the sounds, smells, feelings of the girl in the book were not just on the page for Callie to read, they were all around her.  With every page, the two girls’ stories were becoming more tightly entwined.  Mandy would feel it, then Callie would too – everything from joy to terror to pain to sadness.  Callie felt the pangs of dread weigh heavier in her stomach with each turn of the page.  With a sour-sweet taste in her mouth, she started to unconsciously whisper-chant under her breath as she read: “It’s only a story, it’s only a story, it’s only a story…”

And then Mandy heard the noise.  And so did Callie.  It was an ominous scratch, a sound of claws and teeth, a hot-breath-on-the-back-of-your-neck sound.  It came from everywhere and nowhere, and it made the room feel dark and close.  Callie’s nerves were frayed raw.  She knew what Mandy was hearing – through a deft manipulation of foreshadowing and flashbacks, Nick St. James had been leading to this ending all along, it was inevitable, like time and tide, like death and taxes.  And because she knew what she was hearing, Callie was physically unable to turn the page.  She couldn’t take it anymore, wouldn’t be able to handle seeing it herself.  The sound was bad enough.  She slammed the book closed and stuffed it into the chair cushions.

“Maybe if I just stop…” she thought, her heart pounding in her throat.  “Maybe if I don’t read it, it won’t happen – not to Mandy, not to me.  I mean, it’s just a story, right?  Just a book?”  Callie pleaded with whomever might be listening – but quietly, in her head, just in case “whomever” turned out to be someone whose attention she did not want to draw.

But the noise continued.  And got just a little louder, just a little closer.  As she had known it would.

And with that Callie scrambled to find the deepest, darkest, most protected hiding place she could – no small feat given the tiny apartment and the wisps of sunlight battling their way past sunrise and in through the one curtained window.  She wedged herself in behind the sofa, building a barricade of a throw pillow and a blanket carelessly tousled to suggest they had fallen into place rather than been artfully arranged to create a hidey-hole.  And then Callie waited.

“It’s been forever, when is he going to come, is it going to happen, damn Nick St. James and his damn book straight to hell, why isn’t anything happening, what do I do, do I stay, I can still hear it, can anyone else hear it, what about tomorrow, I miss my mom, who will clean up after me, why did I ever even learn to read, who cares about books anyway?” Callie’s thoughts were a whirligig of absurdity, manically battering her brain.  Inane and random images, a montage of madness, played on the screen of her mind’s eye – long white bloodless fingers, like the tentacles of some bloated sea creature; a rich magical and oddly dissonant laugh, as if its owner was tickled pink by her fear; black funeral suits dancing in herky-jerky movements, as though the arms and legs were on strings.  A girl running through a forest begging her lungs to breathe harder faster deeper; the zzzzzt-zzzzzzt of a saw blade working its way through bone and sinew; the whistle-slap of a belt against a work-callused palm.  Callie and Mandy, Mandy and Callie.  The girls were intertwining, swapping places, “all skate, now reverse” on and on and on.

And still the noise, behind everything else, the noise kept skritching away, wearing grooves into her eardrums and eliminating all possibility of rational thought.  “If only the damn noise would stop,” Callie thought, “maybe I could find a way out, there must be a way out, Mandy must know a way out…”

At that moment, Callie realized what she had to do.  “I have to finish it,” she thought.  “I have to read it through.  He needs me to read it all.  Mandy needs me to read it all.  I can’t let her go through it alone.  She needs me, Mandy needs me.”  With that, Callie crept along the back of the couch until she could see the back of the reading chair.  Moving at a glacier’s pace, to avoid drawing attention, she inched – no, millimetered – herself toward the chair, toward the book thrust between the cushions.  Grabbing it roughly, she snuck back to her safe place, opened the book – it snapped to the exact page she had left, of course – and began to read.

Callie read through her fear.  She read through Mandy’s end – and her own.  And when it was all over, there was nothing left to do.  Nothing but check in with Nick St. James.  As promised.

“Dear Mr. St. James – I’m finished. I don’t know how you did it, but you completely pulled me in.  It was like I was right there with Mandy – too right there…  Thanks again for taking a chance on me.  I hope you’ll be pleased with the review, which should go live this week.  And thanks again for sharing the story.  You have a gift, a rare ability to completely pull your reader in.  I hope you don’t ever abuse that gift – I can only imagine the consequences…  All my best – Callie.”

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THE END (FINALLY)