36
M
ichael arrived at Rashod's studio in the hotel in a foggy state of mind. He couldn't remember the last time he had eatenâor even slept, for that matterâand he was hungry. He was also exhausted. The emotional roller coaster he had been set on was draining him.
He had this weird sense of being a spectator, as though he were watching someone else go through the motions, but that someone else was not him. Somehow he was not really attached. He put one foot in front of the other.
He needed to take one step at a time. That was it. He could do this. He just needed to take one step at a time.
He flipped out his spare set of keys, the same keys he used to let himself in with, to leave Rashod food and money at times when he was skied out of his mind on crack cocaine.
“Hey, Rebound.”
He turned, thinking he had heard Rashod's voice whispering to him. But of course, Rashod wasn't there. He was in the morgue. Michael knew that. He ran a hand through his thick, short dreadlocks and sighed.
He decided he would go home once he was done and have a serious chat with Tracie. He knew from the medical examiner that she had already been to view Rashod's body and that she was devastated over the loss of another of his brothers.
A sense of unreality settled over Michael, gripping his brain cells and squeezing tight. His head was pounding. The tension was starting to creep along just at the base of his neck. How could two of his brothers be dead?
Another day of school was being blown off. He couldn't play the benefit game with the Harlem Globetrotters. He felt as though his life in school and on the basketball court belonged to another person.
It didn't seem as if it was his life anymore.
He had another brother who had been put on ice. Surely that was a legit reason for missing school as well as basketball practices and benefit games.
Besides, he couldn't concentrate on anything. His focus was dimmed. All he could think of was the sketch that had portrayed Rashod's death, as well as his recent conversations with Rashod, although the last one had been more of a one-sided deal that he hadn't yet come to grips with.
Suddenly he recalled Rashod's words with stunning clarity:
“I know we didn't grow up religious man, but sometimes I wonder if there's something else out there. Do you believe in dreams? Or seeing things before or after they've happened? Even if you weren't there?”
Michael slipped his key into the lock on the studio apartment, trying to keep the recalled words at bay. He had lied to Rashod because something had happened to him that he hadn't felt ready to talk about.
Michael shook away the thoughts. He needed to concentrate on the task at hand. He decided he would probably need to open the windows to get rid of the closed-in, musty scent of the place and let some sunshine in.
Rashod needed to air the place out more. When Michael was here the last time, the place felt stuffy and airless to him.
Rashod had been something of a slob in his own right, except with his sketches. He was known to throw his things around everywhere. His room generally looked like a cyclone had hit it. You could clean up his room, and hours later it looked as if it had been turned upside down by a tornado.
He smiled at the memory of Tracie screeching at the top of her lungs for Rashod to clean up the room. She had actually chased him through the brownstone with a broom handle once because she was so infuriated with his pigsty methods of keeping his room.
Michael couldn't stand disorder, so in contrast to Rashod's bedroom, when they both lived at home, his room had been neat as a pin. They were probably about as different as they could be, even though they were brothers.
They had all been tight as a family at one time, because Tracie was all they hadâher and each other. Their father had died when they were young. There was little or no memory of him, except for the stories that Tracie had shared with them while trying to evoke a male presence in their lives.
Michael pulled himself from his reverie, deciding he would look at the sketches, search around for whatever else he could find that might lend some reality to the situation, and then later come back to put things in order.
He didn't want Tracie to have to deal with the pain of sorting through Rashod's room so soon after Randi's death. She hadn't touched a thing in Randi's room as far as he knew. Randi's room looked as though he would be back at any minute.
Michael opened the door to the studio, knew he was right about letting in some air, and flicked on the light switch. Before he was fully in the room, the first thing he noticed was another one of Rashod's sketches lying on the table in the small alcove that served as a kitchen.
That struck him as odd, because Rashod's sketches were the one and only thing he had kept in order. He had been meticulous with the keeping of his artwork. There was a sequence to Rashod's work; he had never liked it to be skewed. Michael sighed. He would need to go through the other sketches leaning against the wall, too. As far as he could see, only the one on the table was out of place.
A strange feeling shrouded him. He realized with a start that he did not want to see the sketch on the table. The feeling persisted, draping itself over him like a strong electrical surge. For no reason that he could explain, he just didn't want to see it.
But he was drawn like a magnet to the sketch on the table. He had absolutely no will of his own. His limbs were acting under their own influence. They drew him steadily and with fixed focus on his collision course. He couldn't have stopped himself any more than he could have stopped breathing.
When he reached the table, he stared down at the drawing. He reached out his hand to pick it up. The paper scorched his hand as though he had stuck his hand in fire. Michael pulled his hand back as a shocked gasp of air burst of its own accord from his lungs. His eyes misted over.
He was staring directly at a sketch of what had happened to him when he was cruising Chelseaâright down to the bloody raindrops falling on his head. It was unmistakably Rashod's work.
It was impossible. How could he have known? How could Rashod have sketched a picture of his shame in Chelsea? He hadn't been there. Michael stared down into the tracings of his own agonized image. His mouth was thrown open as a plea for mercy escaped his lips.
There was a tingling in his scorched hand. The pain in his hand receded as if it had never been there, as though he had only imagined that he scorched it. He needed air. He went to the windows snapped up the shades on each one, and opened the windows with a frightening speed.
He ran from window to window. He had to move. He could not stand still. His heart was pumping out an erratic tune he had never heard before. It was actually skipping beats. He hoped he wasn't having a heart attack. No, he couldn't be. He was too young to have a heart attack. Creepiness had clamped itself to his skin like a sticky slime he couldn't detach himself from.
He had the vague feeling that this was how a horse must feel when someone other than its owner was riding it. The alien rider was in control, demanding that the horse bow to his will. The other gave subliminal physical signals that the horse knew it must obey.
It also dawned on Michael that Rashod must have guessed or known all along that he was sadomasochistic. Yet he had never mentioned it or treated him like anything other than the little brother he loved. The force of this knowledge staggered Michael.
Once the windows were open, he walked back to the table with the sketch on it. Suddenly every shade and window in the place snapped shut, one by one. Michael watched in fascinated horror as the room began to shut him off from the outside world.
His surroundings had come alive. A force of energy swept through the room, causing the very air to shiver in its wake. A resounding bang reverberated like a firecracker exploding as each window slammed shut.
The shades on the windows snapped shut with an eerie finality. Rashod had one of those old-fashioned police bolt locks with the long iron rod on his door. It slid into place, metal banging against metal. Michael turned and jumped at the sound of the clanging metal lock.
The floor shook, literally knocking him off his feet. His ears exploded as though he were being dropped from a great height.
And then he was. “Sweet Jesus!” he yelled.
He was falling through the air. He threw out his arms, and he could feel nothing to latch on to. There was nothing for him to grab. He was flailing, sailing through the atmosphere. His oxygen supply was being sucked away. He gasped, trying to gulp in some air. His chest caved in. He was hit with a sledgehammer blow.
It was just like the dreams he had heard people talk about, so he knew he couldn't land or hit the bottom. If he hit the bottom, he would be dead.
“God, no!” Michael screeched as he fell through layers of air.
“Please!”
A loud thump, and Michael was gripping the threadbare rug on the floor of Rashod's studio. He lay on the floor like a beached whale.
The room plunged into total darkness. Not the same kind of darkness as when the shades were closed, but darkness that felt total in its completeness. This darkness was all-encompassing.
All along, Michael had felt that something was amiss when he stepped in the room, but he had not been able to put his finger on it. The dawning awareness of what that was made him grit his teeth in horror.
He could feel no trace of Rashod's spirit. It was as though he had never been there. But there was some kind of spirit in the room, and it was not a good one. There was a demonic force in the room.
Although Michael had no experience with it whatsoever, he knew it was so. He identified it as the same force he had felt when he looked at the sketch Rashod had shown him. The force was alive. It was very, very much alive.
He also knew from his brief experience with Randi's death that you could still feel a person you loved when you entered their personal surroundings. He had felt it when he had gone to sit and mourn by himself in Randi's roomâas though Randi's aura still somehow permeated the room.
But that feeling was completely absent in Rashod's studio. The studio was cold. In fact, it was downright frigid. Rashod's spirit was nonexistent.
He heard a sucking sound. Michael strained his ears. Oh, yeah, there it was. It started like the beginnings of a whisper. It was building to a full-scale wind tunnel.
It gathered speed.
Michael watched as it funneled into a whipping swirl of wind that contained itself in the center of the room.
As suddenly as it had started, it stopped. Abruptly. The sucking sound was gone. The wind tunnel was gone. There was nothing save the deep darkness that inhabited the room.
Michael tried to adjust his eyes to the blackness. He blinked. His whole body was trembling. It had turned into a mass of jelly. As he tried to climb to his feet, his legs unsure of what it meant to stand anymore, a slow, scrawling scribbling insinuated its warning on the wall, in crimson, glowing print: “Go.”
“What?” Michael listened to the word torn from his throat, but it might have belonged to anybody else, so foreign did it sound to his ears.
The scrawling grew more furious, bigger, as though it were yelling at him: “GO!”
Michael was on his feetâunsteady, to be sure, but he could feel the floor, which felt solid and comforting.
“What are you?”
Another scribble on the wall: “I AM ME.”
“Who's Me?”
Raw fear had taken control of his every word. He hated the tremor that was in his voice, but it couldn't be helped.
No scribbling this time.
In the instant that Me had hesitated, Rashod had scrambled full force from the bereft depths in which he was residing, and forced a projected picture of himself before Michael's face.
He had always worn his pants pulled low, below his belly, with his Ralph Loren undershorts showing the label just above the rim. Now he used the disliked fad of his black youth to his advantage.
Across his belly he scrawled the words, “Fight, Rebound. Fight. Tracie . . .”
Rashod couldn't speak; his windpipe was clogged, clogged with the damnable sunflower seeds.
That was all he could transmit before Me sucked his image back, clamping it into his biceps.
Me was stunned. He couldn't. Hell, no. He wouldn't believe Rashod had this type of capability. Aw, but he did. That kid was a pain in the ass. He had no gift, and Me didn't want him. How the hell did he bypass him?
However, there was little to nothing he could do right now about Rashod and his little bag of tricks. But he could do something about Michael Burlingame.
Michael grabbed hold of a chair that was in front of him. For one solid fraction of a second, he had felt Rashod's spirit. Rashod had broken through. He was trying to reach him, trying to tell him something.