Excerpt 5.

Mystery Trio No. 3

the space between love and loss

Masonry Assisted Living and Acute Care

Verona, Wisconsin

1991

Vlad didn't like his arms. He didn't like them more than he didn't like anything else, including his stomach, his feet, his neck, his face. The problem; his arms were always in sight, always right in front of him, always a reminder. His skin, once a soft brown even in the darkest winter days, had became sickly-pale. Like a porcelain doll, marred only by angry red patches. It used to be descriptively more olive, and his long black hair like silk. If he ever grew a beard he'd outmatch his father as the tallest, darkest, and most handsome in the family.

Not anymore.

He looked like a vampire. His hair dull, shineless, white. With every passing day it grew longer, and the black ends of his hair pushed further and further away. Sunlight burned to stand in, his skin peeled easily, the doctors prescribed sunscreen along with a huge selection of lotions and body-oils with inexplicably long names. A rare skin condition, they said, that had been dormant in his genes. Vitiligo, they called it. Rashes roved across his skin like the La Crosse train. A reaction, an allergy, triggered by nothing or everything. Nobody knew. The patches, peeling like sunburns, wrapped around his wrist and thinned out down to his elbow. Today he looked almost like he had a meteor tattooed to his arm, rocketing across the sky, loose rocks flaking off in every direction. He traced the pattern.

Across the room, a sigh. A book snapping shut. "You're going to do that all day again?"

It might be pretty if it didn't hurt. "I'm willing it to stop."

A bed squeaked. Aga's tiny feet landed on the floor, her bedside drawer scraped as it pulled open. "When you're done I want you to will my cancer to stop too." Cards shuffled, clapping one over the other, "with how much time doctors spend staring at it, I thought you'd be sick of looking by now."

"Doctors aren't me." Vlad muttered. The flaming path behind the comet fragmented, specks of white skin showing up in the trail. Moving. Changing. Stop. "Doctor Kessler's creepy. I can't focus with him around; pretty sure he did his medical thesis with the Nazis, experimenting on people."

The deck hit the table. Aga split it in half. "That man has never set foot in Oświęcim. I checked."

"You did?"

"I faxed his information, nobody knows him." She pressed her lips together, straightening a row of cards.

Vlad's hands sank into his lap. His eyes a vibrant, glossy red. They watered and itched, "you did that for me?"

"You worried." She patiently shifted the wires under her shirt to hang closer to the table, and began dealing cards to two small stacks, "it's no trouble, none. Now come play, we will pass time."

Vlad looked back down at his arms. Like clouds drifting overhead, they'd moved just enough to distinguish new pictures. A snake coiled from his palm to his wrist. He moved to the edge of the bed, "you didn't need to do that."

She laughed, an odd sound. Unfamiliar. "Think nothing of it. I look into many of the antisemitics that I come across, but a lot of them are just stupid Americans these days," she frowned, "I worry for my daughter. She speaks without her heritage."

He picked up his cards, inspecting them, disappointed already in the hand he'd been dealt, "you raised her right, though?"

"I think I have learned that I only despise people who hate others based on unchangeable factors. My daughter is a changing factor, a part of a new world. We will have to see where she goes next."

"So, Doctor Kessler,"

"Not a nazi. Or not a German one," she flipped over a card from the deck, "call."

Vlad knocked on the wooden table, indicating he was still in play, and rearranging his shit cards just to make it seem like he had something good, "you have any good war stories to pass the time?"

"I could tell you about the sewers again."

Vlad made a face, "that should wait until after lunch."

She flipped another card. His luck improved, but only by a pair of nines. His monitor let off a warning beep, and he slowed his breathing to a regulated, counted breath. The monitors checked for a heart rate, pulse, changes in blood pressure, and recorded all of it. They would beep if anything changed out of an acceptable range scripted into the program. Too many beeps, and a nurse was called, and then a nurse called in a doctor. Vlad despised both of those occurrences. He brought his legs up to his knees and glared at the digital clock on the table between the beds. Maybe he could will time to move faster. "You folding yet?"

"You wish." He said, relaxing, "just watching the clock."

"Your friends will be here soon, won't they?"

"They're driving all the way down from Maddison," he replied, nodding, "they'd be leaving about now." A violent tremor raced down his spine. Vlad clenched his teeth. The monitor beeped. He counted each breath, waiting. It didn't beep again. Vlad forced himself to relax. He sank back, trembling. Everything burned. Every shiver marked another wave of hot-cold racing from his toes to his head and back down again. Like ice water dropped over his head, then reversed, then turned to fire and traced the same path. He barred his teeth. Breathe. In. Out.

Cold sweat beaded his forehead. His hair draped around him, a frayed example of how changed he was. The white roots all the way down his neck now. It faded to his natural black color near the end, a mark of the amount of time he'd spent in sleepless nights, agonized, haunted. He wanted his old hair back. He wanted his old skin back, not this burning, itching - he slammed his eyes shut.

"It could be a forced genetic mutation. This could be the beginning of a whole new advancement in medical science," Doctor Kessler had told him, jamming a needle in his side, "this will only take a moment."

His lips went ice cold. Hot-cold. Burning freezing. Vlad shook. The clock ticked, another minute gone by. Not fast enough. The monitor beeped. Damn it. He tried to find a place in his head that didn't hurt, a peaceful world.

A bright light. The taste of metal. The smell of burning hair. Vlad gasped. The monitor beeped twice. He clenched his teeth. Anything but that.

The lab. A stupid joke. A pointless apology.

That terrible light.

"Oi?"

"Sorry. Calling! And I'll raise the bet."

She eyed him warily, "you're deep in thought today."

"Just tired." He inspected his cards against the three now facing up on the table, "is it just me, or are the lights really bright today?"

She shrugged, "same as always."

He took a shaken breath, nodded, flinched, and clutched the cards so tightly they began to bend. "Oh, dear," Aga sighed, her voice a grating whine, "it's happening again, ah?" Bit by bit, everything from sound to touch to smell turned into liquid fire, and everything hurt; Aga set her cards aside, and pulled open the table drawer to pull out a book, "how about a distraction?" She asked, reading on as her companion became further incapacitated, "Shadow of a Doubt, by Harriet Jones." She read aloud, "Chapter one: Ties that Bind. The chains that bind us most closely are the ones we have broken…"

Stop.

He tried to form words. His jaw moved, but his the remained locked together. He forced in air, pressed it back out. Aga's voice morphed, her whisper replaced by shriek, incomprehensible in nature. Her usually soft Polish accent grated on him and try as he might there was no escape, no peaceful place to hide. The portal flashed in his mind, bright, stinging, the pain from the accident echoing in his present. The hot-cold energy rolling up and down his skin intensified. On top of it all, Aga read, roaring with the screech of a faulty microphone. A terrible howl.

Stop stop stop.

The hot cold fizzle that set his skin on fire and doused it in arctic temperatures hummed. It started in his stomach, a cool relief, a nauseating weightlessness. Pins and needles expanded from his belly up his chest and raced down his arms and legs. His toes went numb. With the strange sensation came a three-dimensional awareness. He knew where his head lay on the pillow, where his hands wrapped in the sheets, where the monitor hummed on the wall above him, and where Aga sat on the bed beside him. Her voice continued to rattle, agonizing. He couldn't see Aga but he could feel her, could sense where she was, the slope of her shoulders, and sensed the vibration of her throat. Vlad shifted. He thought of reaching out, of telling her enough was enough. To go to sleep. He imagined her throat pausing between breaths and staying paused.

The noise ended. Aga lowered her head. Vlad imagined she went back to bed.

Bit by bit, Vlad relaxed. Tingling with pins and needles and numbness, the awareness of where he was in relation to the physical world bearable in comparison to burning alive. He sighed.

The neighboring monitor went off.

Vlad jerked, clapping his hands over his ears, "stop!" he commanded, and as if the machines could listen, they did. Their warnings and chitterlings cut off mid-howl. Finally, silence blessed him, and he began to relax, bit by bit.

And then the phone rang. He flinched, but it did not pierce so horribly, and he was starting to feel better, so he answered, "Room 214, this is Vladimir."

"Vladdy!"

He felt a swell of relief and released the smallest of smiles, "Jack. You're on your way?"

Maddie's voice slipped into the receiver, "hey!" and then vanished, Jack taking it back over, "look, we're really, really sorry,"

His lips trembled, "about what?"

"We have to take a trip out to Lake Eerie."

"Why?"

"It's incredible," Jack said with his usual fervence, "there's some kind of huge ectoplasmic event happening over there, we think it's another thing like what happened over at Algernon's two summers ago,"

"Algernon's?" Vlad rubbed his head. The time felt like decades. Oh, his camera! Lost that same horrible weekend. He took a shallow breath to avoid sounding bitter, "sounds like a real mystery."

"Isn't it!"

He said nothing.

"I'm telling you, this could be a once-in-a-lifetime chance."

"Nothing else mysterious happening around you, right? To anyone around you?"

"This even hit out local monitors! From all the way across the lakes! It's the answer to the mystery!" Maddie's voice crackled over static, "this could be the readings we need to finish calibrating the portal."

"We?" Vlad repeated, feeling desperate.

"A huge surge, we think echoing maybe thousands of years, and – this is so exciting – we think a vortex is opening over Lake Eerie right now! A real, live, natural portal to the other side!"

"Exciting" he repeated in a dull monotone, "so, you're not coming?"

"Don't be so glum," Maddie said, "we'll swing by after we finish the observation!"

All over again, the burning-freezing started in his feet and began to itch up his legs. He trembled, "but now I'll be further out of your way."

"You'll be so excited about all the discoveries," Maddie said, "I've been compiling all of our work into a grant proposal. I think we could really get some government funding for the research here soon, isn't that great?"

All of this 'we' talk and Vlad never felt more alone. He opened his eyes and stared at the paneled ceiling, "wow. Amazing. Awesome."

"Are you okay?"

"Peachy." Vlad sighed, "just give me another call when you're done, will you? I feel like I'm about to die of boredom over here."

Usually this is where Aga chimed in with a jab about her companionship, but she remained silent and Vlad was thankful for it. He finished exchanging pleasantries in an empty voice, and hung up as soon as possible. Felling ill, he turned over to look at Aga, who appeared to have fallen asleep with her book still clutched in her tiny hands. "Can you believe that? They're not coming." She slumped. He frowned, "Agatha?" Drool bubbled from her lower lip.

No, she's fine. He thought, reaching over and touching her shoulder, "hey, you still awake?"

A strangeness sparked beside his heart, a skipped beat and a flush of cold that Vlad mistook for panic. A weightlessness raced down his veins, replacing pins and needles with a warm pooling substance. He tasted salt, and metal, and smelled burning hair in a distant memory. The dark room jumped into stark focus, shapes clear and distinguished. The hospital room smelled like orange floor cleaner and faint, stale cigarettes. Vlad halted, touching his chest, trying to understand the oddness that sung in tune to his beating heart.

Aga stirred. She wiggled, pushing herself upright. Her old eyes blinked, she wiped her mouth - in some way, her face was wrong. Empty. She blinked at the table, then at the floor, eyebrows knit in confusion.

"Aga?"

She met his gaze, a lazy smile spread on her lips. "Vladek."

Vlad shook. He touched her warm shoulder, afraid of – something, but not sure what. She's fine. Obviously. "Are you okay?"

"I must have dozed." She pushed his hand away, "don't you go calling Jacub." She warned, waggling her finger at him, "I'm in no mood for nurse." Her face went blank, her skin slack.

"You sure you're okay?"

She rubbed her head, "I..I think I'll go back to bed now," sighed, "are you feeling better?" Vlad watched her move, mouth dry. He nodded. She smiled and pulled back blankets, "don't you worry about me, now. I'm dazed, synu, just dazed."

"...Yeah." Vlad swallowed the lump in his throat and offered a false smile. "Sure."

He sat on his bed, a tempest raging inside of him, hot-cold, and a headache formed at the base of his temple. He rubbed his eyes, and picked up the book Aga had dropped, then opened it to the first page, reading.

Everything's fine, he thought, a bitterness still in his heart, peachy.

The Mystery Trio had split in two, and now there was only one: one mystery, one boy, one uncertain thought after another. He believed his path already stone-set, he just didn't know what it meant yet. All the while, Death's shadow lingered beneath his bed.

(((Hej czesz.))) This guy will look your gift-horse in the mouth. He'll send it back, too.

-Catalyst

Up next:

Finite

(the end is nigh)

ps. shout out to Shadow of a Doubt by Haiju, and to AnneriaWings for her mad scientist oc.