Chapter Two: Resurfaced

Adrian pulled a cinnamon bun out of the microwave and dug into it with a fork. He took his food and a cup of chocolate milk and sat down at a small table in the kitchen and began to eat silently, the look on his face, still one of burden.

'Who would want my brother for? And who the hell is Sam? I know I've heard that name before..'

Two loud bangings on the front door later, Adrian's thoughts were halted. He slowly rose from his seat and eyed the door suspiciously, eyes narrowed.

"..Cain?" He paused and gave it a thought before he nodded his head. "Has to be... who else would knock on my door at midnight?"

He slowly headed for the door, but he had to cross through the dark living room, which was only illuminated by the television that was still playing a replay of the baseball game he was watching. He headed through and over to the door and grabbed the doorknob. He slowly turned it counter-clockwise and got on his tip toes to peek out to the other side of the door via the small pane of glass near the top of the door. All he could see was darkness.

Cautiously turning the doorknob, he swung the door open and peered outside. Nobody. No sign of anybody anywhere in sight.

'I'm hearing things.... no. Someone was knocking. I'm sure of it.'

He looked around, when something snapped his attention to his side. His mailbox slammed shut. Sighing, he opened it up and peeked in. He slowly stuck his hand inside and pulled out not a letter, but a rosary. A rosary Adrian noted to be the one he gave to Cain last year for his birthday. A rosary that had a warm red liquid dripping from it.

Slowly shaking his head, he backed himself into the house, holding the rosary out in front of him. He coughed and covered his mouth, before he dropped it in the doorway and ran back into the kitchen over to the sink, presumably to cough up the midnight snack he was eating.

Adrian laid in bed about ten minutes later on the late Sunday night, or early Monday evening, however you look at it. He laid back thinking. The bloody rosary from his mailbox hung harmlessly from the doorknob to his room, swaying back and forth without tempo- but his attention wasn't on that. Rather, it was on seeing Maria again. It was a long time indeed that they hadn't seen eachother, and although he wasn't eager on kissing her ass like he did throughout their quick relationship, something about her voice kept her a shady person.

Things had their ways of changing, indeed, but someone doesn't become an overcautious woman after being a fearless bitch in a span of four months. Granted, he had a feeling of change after he went from aspiring rock star to brooding in a cabin up in Massachusetts. It wasn't the actions of a sane person, but the more he thought about it, Adrian wasn't very sane. Afterall, when you lose most of your family, your perfect world can tumble in a heartbeat.

He could hardly remember what he had for breakfast, was unable to point the unfamiliar faces of fans that claimed to have chatted with the man in person backstage, and so much as disregarded the scar on his stomach as a figment of his imagination. And when you cannot produce short term memory, boom. It's not just the big things, but the little things that you can't just put your finger on that make you start to lose your marbles. A song from you and your wife's first date from which you can't remember the lyrics. The favorite restaurant you had when you were a child. The teacher you had a crush on in fourth grade. And even though he didn't have it long, it was still there nevertheless. What was worse, whenever he tried to think of where he got it from, things would get cloudy.

He would practically black out at the mere attempt of remembering something with little value. But something told him the scar he carried was much more than a deep cut most get after having surgery and just forget about months after. The crescent shaped scar on his stomach meant something, and it meant more than what was being let on. And something in the back of his mind hinted, ever so subtly at it.

'Watch out for Sam Nordiana.'

He was unable to pin down what it meant, and that was more than enough for him to go crazy right at that moment. It was a shame that his uncle's murder didn't get more of a reaction from him. He could bring himself to shed a tear on the situation, given the time needed to dwell on it. But not being able to remember the little things is something that can make your mind spin if you try hard enough to remember. Trying so hard can give someone some bad headaches, have people broken to whimpering children, or simply have people spitting out cuss words over and over again until they begin to get that feeling where they wonder where those curses were made up from.

For Adrian it isn't only a mix of all of those symptoms, but he could also feel a sense of disorder. He could remember his psychiatrist sessions from a couple years ago, although why he had those sessions he could not remember, other than the fact that they were before the Maria days. Before him and his band One Hundred Drops Of Kerosene's days. All he could remember other than that was the explanation he gave his doctor, but only because he'd wrote it down on a piece of paper and memorized it.

'It's almost like I don't want to remember some things. Some things I force to the back of my mind so I make sure I can't think of them anymore. But sometimes I lose control of my thoughts and things get mixed up. I can tell you when me and my girlfriend started going out. I can tell you how I got started in singing. But I can't remember the lyrics of half the songs I sing, nor can I remember when or why me and my girlfriend broke up. I can't tell you things I don't want to remember or feel the need to remember. But sometimes they resurface, all I need is an image that I remotely recall, and bingo. Things get jumbled up. It's tough knowing that I can remember my first crush in the eighth grade, forget it without a trace, and then remember it a day after. I feel like someone up there is toying with me.'

It was silly and he knew it. Adrian never prided himself as a Bible fanatic. His parents believed in letting Adrian decide for himself what to believe. And there came the ways of the atheist. Where the times of SSDD came and never left. And when those days came, he only believed in one thing, and that was himself. That was one thing he never forgot.

'I need to stop thinking about this or I'll eat myself away.'

He drifted off to sleep without another thought on the night.

That would however, be before something would drive him to wake up an hour later. A vision of something horrible. So horrible that he threw himself up into a sitting position in his bed as he saw his own face staring back at him, with a bullet hole right between the eyes. It was so cryptic and so foreshadowing, that tacked on to what had been going down earlier; The phone call, the scar, the puking in the kitchen, and of course the rosary, seeing something like that could have scared him right out the front door of his home. But no, it wasn't that at all. Rather, it was the figure that sat over the edge of the bed next to him that did it.

He had caught his breath and leaned back to let the back of his head greet the soft pillows underneath him, shrugging off the nightmarish image to be nothing more than 'taking things too far out of proportion'. But then the figure, shrouded in complete darkness save for the street light down the road that shined through Adrian's window blinds to create a eerie dark red filter around half of the room, no less, had popped up seemingly out of thin air. And the moment Adrian turned his head to regard it, it screamed. A scream so inhuman that it had to have dropped Adrian's blood temperature a few points. But of course, the first thing Adrian could say was nothing more than...

"FUCK ME FREDDY!"

He immediately jumped out of his bed, boxers and all, and ran out of his bedroom. The sound of the rattling collar from his dog which he had just awoken was heard in the guest room just next to him, but was no match for Adrian's mouth that stuttered swears a mile a minute as he bolted downstairs and opened the front door and threw it open. He then stood outside a good two minutes, freezing his ass off in his mere white tee shirt and matching white cotton boxers until he dumbfoundedly mumbled, "shit.." and turned back to the halfway open front door of his cabin. He peered upstairs and waited there. In nothing but darkness. Alone.

He would have ran until his feet bled if he knew Howler would be right behind him, but the sound of his collar did not return to Adrian's ears. It was that, that caused him to run into the kitchen, turn on the light, and grab a butcher knife from his cutlery set before heading back into the living room where he turned on the lamp in there as well.

He peered upstairs and stood there a long time before he had finally made his way up the stairs, flicking on the second floor hallway light switch that he passed halfway up the stairs on his left, and then looked into his bedroom. His still dark bedroom.

Shaking his head, he raised his knife, poised to strike as he ran into the room and stared as the figure that he saw before was still there, in the same position as it was when he ran out of the room like a bitch in heat. It was almost like staring at a wasp resting completely still on your bedroom window pane and staring at it for the longest time, without neither of you moving an inch. Except the bug in question at that moment was a hell of a lot bigger.

"Stand up," Adrian mumbled shakily. His voice had the impact of a fly smacked dead by a windshield. That of course meant the figure wasn't moving anywhere, although it probably wouldn't have moved no matter who was doing the threatening. "Stand up now or I'm stabbing the shit out of you..." he said, a bit more firmness in his voice, although one could tell that he didn't mean a word of what he was saying. But that was set to change as the figure still refused to move, or even mutter a single sound. He raised the knife slowly and moved forward, when something stopped him.

'At least turn on the lights, Adrian,' he thought to himself, 'just turn on the lights...'

He did just that. He turned his head, flicked the lights on, and turned back. The figure was gone. Adrian stood there with a lump in his throat and a knife still in his hand, that was, until he dropped it to the wood floor in jawdropping awe. He fell to his knees before he glanced down at the knife next to him and immediately slid it across the floor and to the other side of the room. "What the fuck is wrong with me?"

Adrian shook his head while it was stil buried in his hands. That was right before his dog had trotted its way into the room by Adrian's side. Adrian looked up at his pet and smiled weakly, reaching over to pet him and scratch behind his ears. "You don't think I'm crazy. Do you?"