Narrator: Andrew

​

I woke up on the ground with someone in my arms. I opened my eyes- “oh right,” I grunted. 

Jack stirred. 

He seemed older now with some distance between him and.. well everything that happened.  He seemed close to my age. I moved my arm and Jack promptly pulled it back around himself.

“Hey, c’mon now,” I chuckled. 

He turned in my arms and looked at me. “You’re still here,” he said. 

“Of course I’m still here.  I wouldn’t just leave you—“

Jack looked like he might cry for a split second before he kissed me. His fingers clung tight to the front of my sweater and he pressed himself into me. I was startled but not really surprised.

I told him no before because he wasn’t old enough, but I still felt conflicted about it. Jack seemed fragile. 

“Hey,” I said as I tried to pull away from him. “Hey, slow down. Jack. Jack!”

“What?!” 

I sat up and straightened my cloths. “I just wanna fuckin’ check in with you, man,” I said.

“I’m fine. I’m cool. Everything’s.. dope?  Are people saying that again?”

“No, Jack, listen.”  I adjusted my position to look directly at him.  There were tears still wet on his cheeks.  “You *just* told me that Marcy assaulted you.  So I want you to *really* think about whether this,” I motioned between us, “is actually going to make you feel any better.”

“As long as you don’t just abandon me alone in a fucking room after!”  Jack shouted and fresh tears spilled down his cheeks. 

“Ok!  Ok, come here,” I said and reached for him. 

I didn’t remember Jack as a fully formed person, I remembered him as an impression, but I felt like I knew him pretty well.  It seemed like denying him right now might just feel like abandonment.  That was the word he chose, after all. 

I pressed my lips to the corner of his jaw, and I felt his breath steady.  Jack became like an extension of myself. I could feel what he wanted.  I could feel his loneliness. 

In my head I heard echoes that could only be coming from Jack.  It was Marcy’s voice, repeating and overlapping and screaming. She was angry about so many things.  And so confused about them. I couldn’t put all the pieces together as they spilled into me, but I felt frightened, and ashamed. 

No, that was Jack. Jack felt frightened and ashamed.  The only thing holding him together was my touch.  Whenever Marcy’s voice got too loud he couldn’t feel me anymore, and he began to shake beneath my hands. 

“Shh, it’s ok,” I murmured. “I’m here. I’m right here. Look at me.”

“Don’t stop,” Jack said, “don’t let go.”

“I’m not.  I won’t.” I answered quickly. 

When it was over I held him tight in my arms. He cried, and shook, and gasped for breath.  We stayed there like that for a long time.  Just breathing each other. 

I didn’t want to move until Jack was ready, but I felt something.. lurking. I lifted my head and looked down the hall the way we’d come.  A shadow moved in the distance and I bristled. 

“Jack,” I whispered, “Jack, we should go.  Now. There’s something down there.”

“Are you sure?” Jack followed my gaze. 

“No. I’m paranoid. I see shit that isn’t there.” I said. “But.. I guess *some* of the weird shit I see is real?  Like.. you climbing through my bathroom mirror and his crazy fuckin hallway?  Assuming that *any* of this is even happening right now.”  I sat up without taking my eyes away from where the shadow had been. 

“Hey.”  Jack touched my face. “Look at me.”  I tore my attention away and struggled to focus on Jack. “This is real. We’re both real. If you think we should leave, then let’s go.”

I glanced between Jack and the distant shadows. 

“Alright, come on,” I said as I climbed to my feet. 

Jack held my hand as we walked. I looked over my shoulder too often. I was sure there was something right behind us, but I could never see it when I looked. 

So maybe it was nothing?

But if seeing something didn’t make it real, then not seeing something didn’t make it not real. 

“Do any of these doors look familiar to you,” I asked Jack. I wanted to get out of this hallway, but after the last door I wasn’t too sure about just opening them at random. 

Did they all open on memories from Marcy’s life?  Did they only go to moments that Jack or I were present for?  Obviously the only way to find out was to open more doors, but..

I was already on edge. 

I could probably still talk Jack off the ledge if we wound up somewhere unpleasant.  But what if *I* needed to be talked down?  I could melt down with the best of them. What if I lost touch with reality— well, *this* reality. Or.. *His*? Reality??  

There were so many layers.

I needed to focus. 

“Uuum,” Jack hummed at the doors we passed. “Not really..  I mean, a lot of them look sort of the same.”

“Well.. a door is a door is a door...” I remarked. 

I looked over my shoulder again. 

“Let’s just.. pick one,” Jack said, and stopped by the door we were about to pass.  He pulled it open and we peered inside. 

The back of my neck and shoulders prickled and I fought the urge to look again.  Through the door was a scene I didn’t recognize. Angie and Marcy sat at a dark bar. The counter was cluttered with boxes of things labeled in a language I couldn’t read. 

Spanish, probably. For some reason I knew we were in California. San Francisco. 

I was picking up a lot of random, ambient knowledge. This room was humming with it.  After seeing one room, I felt acclimated to the sensation. Before a lot of the information felt like static. Now I could see it (or hear it?  Feel it?) more clearly.  

It wasn’t Marcy sitting at the bar, it was Jack in Marcy’s body.  He looked into the mirror behind the bar and I met his eyes. 

The room changed. Jack, in his own body, was laying in bed. He looked ill. He looked young, still, no more than twenty, but this definitely felt like a death-bed situation. Jack coughed and there was blood on his lips. 

I noticed someone standing by the bed. He was tall and blond, and I felt Jack’s affection for him.  Cold realization washed over me— over Jack. He blinked in the mirror and we were back in the bar. 

Jack sat up, startled, and told Angie he wanted to leave. Angie tried to make him tell her what was wrong, but he wouldn’t say anything until they were outside. 

The sun was bright and I squinted. 

“I just remembered dying,” he said with Marcy’s mouth. “And you were there. You were.. you were my best friend, and I was on my death bed. I had.. t-tuberculosis? I think we called it something.. else.. I think I might have professed my undying love to you.. and you.. you were very English about it.  Appropriately scandalized, especially since you felt the same way.”

Angie smiled.

Jack lit a cigarette. 

I closed the door and took a breath. I noticed that Jack was squeezing my hand. He looked like an adult again, but he still seemed fragile like before. 

I glanced down the hall. A shadow quickly pressed itself flat to the wall so I couldn’t see it. 

When I looked at Jack again there were tears running down his face. I still felt like I was older than him, even though his body was mature now and I was still a teen.  I wrapped my arms around him. I could feel his emotional turbulence. 

He was lamenting the moments when he thought Angie loved him. When he thought she saw him as his own person.  I felt echoes of the night before. 

Anger. 

Betrayal. 

Doubt. 

*You aren’t real. You’re existence is a lie. A joke, even! You were stupid to think you meant anything to anyone!*

I scowled and looked over my shoulder. 

There he was. 

Mr. Black. 

“Jack!  Can you hear that?  Don’t listen to him!”

Jack opened his eyes and recoiled.

“It’s ok Jack, just don’t listen to his words,” I said. 

“Hello Andrew,” Mr. Black hissed, “I told you I wasn’t a hallucination. Guess I’m not the liar you made me out to be.”

“Go back to Hell,” I spat. 

“I wonder if I was right about other things?”

“You can’t fuck with me, Shitlord!” I shouted. 

“Past experience tells me I *can*,” the thing purred. 

“I dunno what you are, and I don’t really care because nothing you say matters!  You only told me you weren’t a hallucination because you knew it’d fuck with my head.  It’s a fun coincidence that it also happened to be true. So you can just float off now and screw with somebody else because I’m not gonna fall for your tedious bullshit.”

“But I *was* ‘screwing with somebody else’,” he cackled and looked over my shoulder. 

I scowled. “Don’t fucking look at him!”

“Why?”  The permanent grin on his face widened. “Is he important to you?”

Jack flung the door open suddenly and pulled me through it. I looked back and it was gone. There was no seeable way back to the hallway.  And this wasn’t the same room as before!  Where the fuck were we?

It was dark, and my eyes adjusted slowly. 

We were standing in my bedroom. The lights were off. I felt.. uneasy. Jack was still holding my hand. 

My bedroom door opened and there I was, probably a year or two ago— oh no I remembered this. I looked into the dark room warily. There was a darkness in my gaze that told me things were *bad*.

I squeezed Jack’s hand. “I dunno what this’ll feel like to you.  Just remember it’s not real.”

I watched myself slowly reach a hand into the room, searching for the light switch.  I saw what I’d seen then. The walls were coated with insects, and they swarmed up my arm, around my shoulders, and encased my whole body. 

I felt it on my skin, and Jack’s fingernails dug into my hand. 

I watched myself panic, and flail, then surrender in a ball on the floor until it passed. I heard Jack take a breath. 

“Ok,” I said, “let’s get out of here.”

I dragged Jack behind me as I sped out of the room. I headed for the front door, and I gasped when I pulled it open. 

 Cold wind rushed past me. It was snowing so hard I couldn’t see anything. It looked and sounded like static.  I shut the door and turned around. 

We checked the other doors in the house. The door to my parents’ room opened to Marcy’s parent’s room. A sense of foreboding settled in my gut. We weren’t allowed in there. A red dot of light stared at me from under the nightstand on our father’s side. I could see that it was part of something electronic, but I still felt like the light was looking at me. I closed the door. 

The bathroom door opened to Marcy’s childhood home as well. So did the back door. 

I went back to the front entrance and opened the door again. Static. 

“I think we need to go this way,” I said and looked at Jack. “Are you ready?  Are you ok?”

Jack nodded silently, staring into the static. 

It was cold. I couldn’t see where we were going, but I was pretty sure that didn’t matter. I knew, somehow, that if we just kept walking we’d come to something. Eventually.

The wind was too loud to talk over, so Jack and I walked in silence. I could feel something watching us from every angle. Like a horde of shadows pressing in around us.  I looked at Jack frequently to make sure he was still with me.

I tried to ignore a thought that itched in the back of my brain, that in a place like this anything could make itself *look* like Jack.  It was the kind of thing Mr. Black would say. And I would argue that I have been in physical contact with Jack this entire time so there’s no way—

This entire time?  You didn’t let go of him *once* inside the house?  And I realized I couldn’t remember.  We walked through the whole house looking at all the doors.. was he with me the whole time?  

“Stop!  Shut-up!  Shut-up!”  I stopped walking and pressed the heel of my hand hard against my head. 

Jack squeezed my hand. He tried to shout over the wind but I couldn’t really hear him. The sound of wind and static was overwhelming. 

I touched his face and looked into his eyes. This was Jack. This had to be Jack. He was with me the whole time, I was.. like 90 percent sure he was with me the whole time. And if he was with me, he was holding my hand, because this kid was clingy as hell. Oh, he was my age again. 

If this wasn’t really Jack, then the real Jack was just.. lost somewhere, and I wasn’t looking for him. 

No, stop it!  Fucking stop it!  That’s not useful!!

I tried to focus. I was still looking into Jack’s eyes and I was... 85 percent sure this was still him. Mr. Black fucked with my head. I knew it, and I had to just move on.

Jack kissed me, which honestly seemed like the sort of thing Jack would do if you looked into his eyes for a long time. 

Ok. This was him. I was being paranoid, and we needed to keep moving. 

I looked ahead into the storm. There was a point of light in the distanced now.  As we got closer I could make out that it was a convenience store. It had big glass doors and glass walls on one side. The inside looked normal, until we opened the door. 

Now the inside looked like a hospital, with white speckled floors and ceilings and dingy white paint on the walls.  I wanted to look around, but Jack squeezed my hand and planted himself by the door. 

“What?” I asked. 

“What happened out there? What was that?”

“Oh,” I said. “Just a stupid little paranoid moment. Wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I’m fine.”  I turned to look around again but Jack pulled my hand. 

“Tell me what happened!”

“I just..” I hesitated. “I just thought for a second that you might have been replaced with an exact replica. But that’s, like, a textbook delusion, and I *know* that so it’s fine.”

Jack tugged me close and hugged me. “You looked so scared,” he murmured. 

“I’m ok,” I said, “I’ve moved past it.”

I convinced Jack I was fine (because I was), and we began to explore the hospital. The doors here seemed normal . They just opened to other rooms in the hospital. The hospital, however, appeared to be completely empty. Not even a skeleton crew on night shift. 

That is until we got to the second floor. 

It was the middle of the day and there were patients sort of meandering about. 

“Oh come on!  Really!?”  An orderly and a patient rounded the corner at the end of the hall. The patient was tall, almost freakishly so, and he was trying to get back something that had been confiscated. 

“You know the rules Tegan. You could hurt yourself or somebody else.”

“So I have to walk around lookin’ like the goddamn mountain man??  I should be in charge of what grows out of my own fuckin’ face!”

The orderly opened a door and paused to look at Tegan. “If you don’t want to be sedated, you should watch your tone, and your language.  You can have a shave on Sunday like everyone else.”  The orderly slipped inside and closed the door. Tegan groaned, and sighed, and stood in his frustration for a moment before he noticed us. 

“You guys new here?”

“Uuuh.. what kind of hospital is this?” I asked slowly, sensing that I wouldn’t like the answer. 

Tegan laughed, then quickly composed himself. “Oh you’re serious. Dude this is a mental hospital.”  He furrowed his brow and studied us. “Are you visiting someone?  I don’t think today is—“

“No, I’m definitely crazy,” I said. 

“You guys seem... familiar. Somehow.”

At that moment a new door appeared in the wall and opened.  There was some guy in a black t-shirt, maybe in his early 20’s, standing there looking at me. 

“Oh shit,” he said, “it worked.”