Red Rain: Lightning Strikes: Red Rain Series #2 (16 page)

“Don’t freak out, buddy. It’s okay. I’m not here to hurt you or anything like that.”

The teacher stood five desks in front of John, speaking, but his words were the smallest murmur from the smallest person in the history of the world.

John slowly turned his head, almost as if he didn’t control it. Something else made him look, and as Harry came into his vision, a repulsive horror sprouted in his mind, growing like a steroid injected weed—evil tendrils reaching out to every part of his brain, sucking it of all life besides this horror.

“Hey, John,” Harry said, no smile on his face. “I’m not going anywhere, so it’s best you stop freaking out whenever you see me.”

John shook his head, a slight movement, barely perceptible to anyone not paying attention.
No
, his mind said.
No, he’s not here. Nothing is there, no matter what you see.

“Yeah, that’s what you think? I’m not here and you’re just hallucinating?” Harry shook his head, too, but his was a firm no. “Sorry, kid, but that’s not the case. I’m not a hallucination. No more than you are to everyone else around you, I suppose.”

John turned back to the front of the class, his eyes wide and sweat popping up across his body.

“Alright, I’ll let you get back to class, but I’m not done. Not by a long shot. We’re going to need to talk when I return.”

He listened as the large, bloated Harry stood from his desk, it sliding as his large body tried to escape its constraints. The desk’s legs scraped across the floor, and John’s eyes flashed to the rest of the room seeing if anyone else heard.

No one looked his way.

Harry’s fat, bluish hand tapped the corner of John’s desk as he walked by.

“Talk soon,” Harry said.

* * *

J
ohn sat
through his classes like a zombie, at least to the outside world. He answered no questions and offered no contributions for the next six hours.

Inside though, things weren’t as dead as they appeared to the rest of the world. Inside, his mind blitzed with questions and frightening scenarios—
what if you’re losing your mind? Someone will find out and they’re going to throw you in a cell, where it’ll just be you and that bloated dead
thing
sharing a room.

John didn’t call Cindy when class let out. He thought about it, but understood at a cellular level that any conversation he had with her right then would end their relationship—however new it was.

He didn’t go back to his dorm, either. He was too frightened, because in there he would be alone, and if Harry showed up—where could John go? He could try to get out the door, but what if Harry appeared standing in front of it? Where could he go then, out the window for a two floor drop?

John waited on a bench on the north part of campus. The weather was still warm and the lawn green, with pressure-washed pavement sidewalks crisscrossing the grass. Tall, old buildings lined the quad, creating a certain sense of regality to the whole area.

He didn’t wear a watch, so he didn’t know how long he sat for, only that he wasn’t leaving until that thing came back; he just didn’t want to be alone with nowhere to go, not with that destroyed eye staring at him.

But Harry showed. God bless him, he did.

John saw him walking from across the quad, exiting the old, historic English building and slowly crossing across both grass and sidewalks, making a straight line to him.

“Hey,” Harry said with hands in his pockets and no smile on his face.

“What is this?” John said, his back pressed firmly—almost intensely—against the bench.

“What is what?”

“You? Why am I seeing you? You’re not real. You’re dead.”

“I’m going to be honest, John, I’m not sure what real is anymore. Are you? Sure, I mean, not real.”

“Yes, I’m fucking sure. You’re dead. I watched you die and it’s impossible that you’re here. No one else sees you, no one else hears you. Just me.”

“Well, there’s something to that, I guess,” Harry said. He looked to the right, staring across the quad. “However, I’m still standing in front of you … you can see and hear me. So, something about me has to be real.”

“You know what the fuck I’m saying. Stop twisting words.”

Harry looked back to him. “All that matters is I’m here, John, and I’m not going anywhere. That’s what you need to understand, because you’re going to have to get control of yourself if you don’t want to end up in a straitjacket.”

A long pause followed while both looked at each other.

“You’re just a part of my mind,” John said. “I can make you go away.”

“No, you can’t. Or else you would have. You’re sitting on a park bench right now, and from the looks of anyone walking by, you’re just staring into space—not even speaking. What are you really doing, though, John? You’re having a conversation with your dead best friend.”

Harry walked to the bench and John nearly jumped to the other end trying to get away.

“Calm down, man. Just calm down. I want to talk to you, not argue. We’re not adversaries here and I’m not going to hurt you. Truth be told, I didn’t ask to be here, and more, I’m not one hundred percent sure what I am. Am I me, Harry, or am I something your mind’s created? Who knows, and if you want some more truth, I don’t care that much. I’m here and there are things we have to do.” Harry looked over to John, that single large pupil seeming to hold all the universe’s secrets. “And you know what those things are, don’t you?”

John did. At his core, he knew since the moment Harry arrived in his room. The thoughts, the
desire
that he felt hadn’t died—but merely been masked by the newness of this world.

But he couldn’t mask it forever.

He couldn’t run, not to another country or another life.

That’s what Harry meant. What John saw now with this fat, dead thing in front of him.

“Yes,” Harry said. “Think whatever you want about me, but you understand the truth. You see it fine.”

* * *

D
ays passed
.

Harry came and went on a whim, and John couldn’t figure out any of it. He felt like he should be able to control Harry, to make him disappear whenever he wanted, but he was powerless—absolutely so. Sometimes Harry showed up just to shoot the shit and other times to turn the screws about what he wanted.

John didn’t understand it, but as the days moved on, he accepted it.

And, truthfully, Harry wasn’t
that
bad.

In certain ways, he was kind of nice to be around. He had a sense of humor, if darker than before he went out into the ocean. He
wanted
John to talk, to think about all those horrendous things. Ripping flesh. Screaming vocal chords. Blood. He encouraged it, and at least a part of John craved it.

“You’ve got a real opportunity here,” Harry said.

“You’re insane,” John responded. He might think some of those things, but he wasn’t nearly at the place Harry wanted him at.

“No, no, just think about it for a minute. You’re in another country, John. Why do you think your mom sent you here?” Harry raised his eyebrows comically. “It wasn’t because she wanted less money to retire on or that the education is so much better in England. You kind of have a free hall pass to do whatever you want. Who’s going to know?”

“Harry, just because I’m in England, it doesn’t make murder legal.”

“Well, not legal perhaps, but easier?”

John stood up from the bench and paced in front of it. He still didn’t like meeting Harry in private, or rather, in enclosed spaces. He actually asked Harry not to come to his room anymore, and so far, Harry acquiesced.

“How’s it easier?” he said, looking down at his feet as he walked.

“No one knows you here. If someone disappears, perhaps someone not noticed by you or the community—no one is going to suspect you.” Harry followed John with his eyes, his head moving slowly left and right. “You’re like a ghost here, just some kid from America finishing up high school. Think about how many murderers already live in this city—they’re going to pin whatever happens on one of them.”

John stopped walking and looked at Harry.

He would ask this question many times in the future, perhaps every time Harry showed up, but this was the first. “And what about me? What happens to me, Harry, if I do this? I don’t know if there’s a God. I don’t know if there’s an afterlife. But how do I go on living after I’ve killed someone.”

Harry didn’t answer at first. He looked down at his feet, black Nikes with the white check mark along the sides. “Well, John, you already know how, right? I mean, look at me.”

* * *

“
H
ey
, honey,” Lori said.

“Hey!” John said and the excitement in his voice nearly made her melt.

“What are you up to?” she said, a smile coming through in her voice.

“I was just about to head to lunch. Finished up third period.”

Lori looked at the clock on the kitchen counter. Six in the morning. She still hadn’t gotten used to the time difference between the two countries.

“I’m having my first cup of coffee,” she said.

“Americans are so lazy.”

Lori laughed into the phone. “You’re a turncoat now, huh? Taking on the nationality of your current living arrangements?”

“Get in where you fit in, Mom.”

Lori took a sip of her coffee. “How are things over there?” She wasn’t sure what she meant, whether she was talking about class or about … the other—but she felt good simply hearing her son’s voice.

“They’re good,” he said, but she heard a slight change in his voice. Still happy, but the enthusiasm died a little. “As we say in London, the
marks
I’m getting are good so far, A’s.”

“Well that’s to be expected. If you don’t want your father to hurt you, of course.” As she said the words, she recognized the morbidity in them and hoped John wouldn’t. “Anything else going on?”

A pause, one that felt entirely too long.

“Do you ever think about Harry, Mom?”

Lori looked at the clock again. Had only a minute gone by? Somehow she felt like she'd been speaking for at least ten.

“Mom?”

How was she supposed to answer the question?

“No, honey. I haven’t in a long time.”

“Why not?” he said.

Lori gritted her teeth, not wanting to answer the question. Not wanting to be asked it, for that matter. “Are you thinking about him?” she said, trying to keep her voice light, but knowing she failed desperately. Because John wasn’t
light
. A heaviness resided in his voice like a cancer weighing down a body’s energy.

“Yeah, Mom. A lot.”

“Did you before?”

“No. Not in a long time.”

She didn’t want to ask the next question, but knew she had to. “Did talking to Dr. Vondi help with it?”

Now John paused for a few seconds. “I … don’t think so.”

“Why are you thinking about him then?”

Another pause. “Why have you always been scared for me?” he said.

And just like that, everything Lori tried to hide under everyone’s radar—even John’s to a degree—was out in the open.

“Because, John, there’s something not right with our blood,” she said quietly. No one else was awake in the house, but that didn’t matter. Lori could have stood in the middle of an arctic storm, and she still would whisper those words. “There’s something inside me, and was in my mom, and I think in you, that might make you do something … that you don’t really want to do.”