Entanglements Page 4

  It made sense I would have to go down to get to the underground tunnels.

  The metallic knocking I’d heard earlier sounded again, this time seeming closer. The hair on my arms stood and I felt goose bumps break out on my body. I should stop here, I thought. This is wrong.

  “She’s probably down here,” I heard Billy yell from close by. Too close.

  I pried up the grate with my fingers and quickly clambered down the ladder. At the bottom lay the old tunnel system. Barely enough room existed overhead to stand upright and some gunk I didn't care to have analyzed lay under my feet. The scurrying at my feet—No, I wasn’t going to even think about it.

  A sign affixed to the wall directly in front of me, which read “morgue”, caught my eye. An arrow pointed further down the tunnel. Shining the beam of my flashlight in that area revealed the passage was blocked with bricks.

  A creepy quiet pervaded the atmosphere. If this were a slasher movie, the killer would jump out about now.

  After extracting my phone from one pocket of my windbreaker and a purple paint can from another, I clicked a photo of the morgue sign. That would have to be enough proof for Billy. That and a photo of my tag.

  After bracing the flashlight in a broken crevice in the wall of the tunnel so that its beam lit my work area, I removed the cap from the can and stepped up to the brick wall.

  Rom’s hand seized mine. Jeeze, I hadn’t even heard him coming.

  “What in the name of Vulcan is it you do?” he asked. A furious scowl marred his handsome features.

  “What does Star Trek have to do with this?” I pulled my arm out of his grip. “This is the closest we’re going to get to the morgue tonight. So I’m signing the wall.”

  The cap of my paint can tumbled to the ground, rolled away and vanished into the shadows. I didn’t hear anyone else behind us, but I knew a BQ could appear at any moment and snatch away my victory.

  Rom stepped in front of me. “Do not—”

  Reaching around him, and with a sweep of my arm, I sprayed a counter-clockwise swirling circle: my tag.

  A booming like an overflying supersonic plane was almost immediate.

  “No!” Rom’s cry seemed far away although he stood beside me.

  What followed had to be an optical illusion. The bricks began to waver, undulate, and turn in a counter-clockwise motion. The wall didn’t disappear or break apart, but it faded. Worse, I felt it tugging at my hand as if the wall had become a giant plane engine that would suck me in.

  My hand, still holding the spray paint can, moved inexorably forward against my will no matter the strength I used to try to brace myself. Rom grasped my arm but even with his help I couldn't keep my hand from disappearing into the swirling brick wall up to the wrist.

  “Rom,” I screamed.

  His face was hard with exertion as he tried to keep the rest of my arm, and the rest of me, from disappearing too.

  Then I saw it. Another hand emerged from the wall.

  Chapter Four

  The fingers of the hand coming toward me through the wall flexed and strained mere inches from my arm. My hand was lost somewhere in the whirlpool. I still had sensation, which comforted me. But the paint can I’d been holding in that hand had long since fallen away.

  After a few seconds, I felt the canvas glove on my missing hand rip off. The newly bared skin began to burn like the time when I’d caught my wrist with the flame of the Bunsen burner at school. Slowly, painfully, and inch-by-inch my arm vanished into the wall. Finally, I was mired in the wall up to my shoulder.

  Meanwhile, the hand coming toward me had turned into a whole arm covered with coarse black hair. The dirty fingers of the grasping hand stretched as if to touch me.

  Rom’s mouth moved but I couldn’t hear his words above the rushing sound around us. I thought I read his lips say, “Touch not the hand.” As if I had a choice in what happened to me now.

  Twisting, I half faced Rom and put myself at a greater distance from the grasping hand and the wall but leaving my arm in the position of a fully extended wish bone just before it’s about to snap.

  At some point Rom had transferred his hold to my waist, his arms locked like iron bands around me. His arms bruised my midsection with their strength. His face grimaced, as he held me.

  My own legs shook, thighs burning, as I fought against the forward drag.

  Rom leaned down and shouted in my ear, “At three, pull with all force.”

  As if I had more pull in me. But I nodded anyway.

  “One. Two. Three,” Rom shouted.

  My eyes tightly scrunched shut, I exerted every ounce of my strength as Rom wrenched me almost in half. But the effort worked! I had my arm back...at least to the elbow.

  “Repeat,” Rom shouted. “One. Two. Three.”

  On three we strained again. “Aghhhhhhhh,” I groaned. This time my forearm escaped.

  Rom released his right arm from around my waist and I slipped forward to the elbow again.

  What the freak was he doing?

  Rom reached into a pocket, removed a paint can and snapped off the cap with one deft move. Lifting the can he sprayed black paint in hash marks starting at the top of the spinning wall. The bricks, where he marked, slowed, ceased moving altogether, and then solidified.

  Would the whole thing become solid and cut off my hand?

  “Heave,” Rom shouted as he tugged me back with another violent motion.

  The hand reaching through to us twitched with agitation. As my arm re-appeared, the arm in the wall sank back to its wrist. At that point, claws popped from the nail beds of the twitching hand just as I’d seen happen with our family cat. The claws of this hand weren’t attached to a being quite so tame as our lazy tabby. As it disappeared, the hand’s claws scored my forearm leaving a long angry cut.

  I screamed and was ashamed at its high girly pitch.

  Abruptly, my hand broke free of the wall. As if a rope we’d been holding in a tug of war had been cut, Rom and I tumbled back and landed in a heap in the muck on the ground. At the same time, the clawing hand slipped away and vanished. The last small area of the moving wall then solidified.

  Even though the muck was, well, mucky, neither of us moved for perhaps a minute or two. Dragging a long breath in and then blowing out again, my heartbeat calmed. I felt as if I’d just finished a marathon and had no energy to stand.

  “What was that?” I asked, not expecting him to have an answer.

  “Tongue lacks words.” Rom rose and offered me a helping hand up, which I took. “Let us depart.”

  I walked on autopilot all the way back to the ladder. Climbing up and going through the grate, passed without me noticing. But I couldn’t ignore coming face-to-face with Billy and Quinn in the basement corridor.

  “Ah ha,” Billy said. “Did you two get scared and give up?”

  “We found the morgue,” I said.

  “Yeah, sure,” Billy mocked.

  “Come.” Rom took my hand and pushed past the bullies.

  “Squares!” Quinn jeered. Their laughter followed us back to the staircase.

  Rom climbed up the undamaged treads and boosted me over the broken ones before hopping over and up. Back on the main floor, I spotted Petra and Chase locked in an embrace with mouths devouring each other. Fantastic.

  I started to comment but a flash of blue lights off the walls interrupted me.

  “Police,” one of the BQs yelled from the main room. “They’re coming in after us.”

  Petra and Chase broke apart.

  “Damn," Petra said. "I’ll never get an iPod now.”

  To the accompaniment of shouting, scuffling and running noises in the main room, Rom, his hand still holding mine, headed for the staircase to the floor above. I stumbled after him. Petra and Chase followed at my heels. We ran up the stairs, around the corner and up another flight.

  When we reached the next level of the building, Rom dragged me to the window. He released my hand to pry off the plywood board
cover. He lifted the sash. Rom ducked through the opening onto the fire escape beyond. He stuck his head back in and motioned to us.

  “The way is here,” he said.

  I exited the window first, followed by Petra and Chase. No police officers were below us, only the patrol car. The officers must have been inside.

  We began to run down the fire escape and the metal stairs shook and swayed. The possibility the whole contraption would break away from the wall and collapse to the ground exceeded fifty-fifty in my opinion. Still we powered down as fast as we could, hearts pounding with every step.

  I hopped over the last four steps and landed with both feet on the ground next to Rom. He took me by the hand again and loped toward the gate of the hospital property. It stood open now. Petra and Chase ran across the street and dashed south along the park while Rom dragged me north. We didn’t stop until we arrived at my street corner.

  For a few seconds we stared at each other unspeaking, each of us with breath chugging in and out. When I noticed my fingers still intertwined with his, I dropped them as if they’d given me an electric shock. Turning on my heel, I walked away, toward home.

  The tree I would climb to get to my bedroom hadn’t changed in the two hours I’d been gone, but I felt changed forever. I glanced back to the end of the block. Rom remained standing where I’d left him. Unmoving. Staring. All his attention was directed on me.

  * * * * *

  “Kathleen Elizabeth Taylor,” I heard my mother scream from the bottom of the stairs. “If I have to call you to get up one more time, I’ll throw your breakfast onto the lawn.” Mom knew the way to get my attention.

  Groaning, I flopped from stomach to back on my bed. I pried open my lids and stretched. A swivel of my head and the clock became visible. When I saw the time, I leaped up. Ten minutes to get ready.

  Naturally, Juliette occupied the bathroom we shared and was already dressed in her cheerleader’s uniform as she weilded a curling iron on her long blond hair. I went directly to work brushing my teeth.

  “I’m not your enemy, Kizzy.” Her eyes met mine in the mirror.

  I bent and spat into the sink. After washing my mouth out, I spat again.

  “I don’t know why we can’t be friends,” Juliette said.

  She was too perfect. Too sweet. Too perfectly sweet. A girl could get diabetes just being in the same room with Juliette.

  “You should like me. Everyone does,” she said in a half-joking tone.

  Everyone did like Juliette. She excelled as a student. She was on the cheerleading squad. She had a boyfriend others would envy. What wasn't to like?

  But to me Juliette beamed brightly as a shining reminder light of how ordinary my life used to be. Even my mom treated Juliette like a real teen. Me Mom eyed like I might go insane any minute. Mom was probably thinking like father like daughter.

  “No offense Juliette. But just piss off.” I examined a possible zit on my chin.

  “If you’re angry about Billy, I’m sorry.” Her wide-eyed expression, as she fingered Billy Broadrick’s class ring hanging on a chain around her neck, was innocent and sincere. “He does stuff I can’t control sometimes.”

  “Your boyfriend acting like a jerk never surprises me.” I turned and walked out of the room.

  Naturally, Mom couldn’t drive me to school, and since I was major league late I couldn’t walk, so Juliette came to the rescue with her sweet yellow VW Beetle. “I don’t mind, Mom,” she had replied sweetly to my mother’s request, making my teeth grind. Needless to say, the silence of the ride rendered it more than a bit uncomfortable. When she stopped the car I didn’t even wait for her to turn it off before hopping out.

  A grinning Petra waited on the sidewalk outside the school.

  “I might as well be living in Iran,” Petra said as I joined her.

  “Good morning to you too.”

  “I’m grounded. Dad caught me sneaking into the house last night.”

  “Yeah, grounded is totally like living in Iran,” I drawled.

  “Right.” Petra seemed to take my words as seriously meant. “My dad is so Ayatollah. But last night was completely worth it. So totally sick.”

  “Sick is the word I’d use too,” I said.

  Somewhere between three a.m. and four a.m. I’d decided there must have been some kind of gas seeping into the tunnel that had caused me to hallucinate. The wall couldn’t have moved like that. But between four a.m. and five a.m. I’d decided I’d actually seen the hand. Delusion couldn’t extend that far. Besides the scratches on my arm were real.

  “Chase and I are like totally together again,” Petra gushed.

  “I could tell. Your tongue jammed down his throat was my first clue.”

  “Just wait until you have your own cute throat to jam your tongue down, then you’ll see how I feel. Oh and here comes a potential candidate now.” Petra inclined her head to the left and I glanced over my shoulder.

  Rom walked with a long and easy stride as he approached us. For a moment he didn’t seem quite real. He had on the same uniform he’d worn yesterday, except today he carried the jacket over his arm and he had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. Rom was quite simply mouthwatering. The fabric of the ordinary white shirt molded to his wide shoulders and broad chest like a second skin. Through the branches of the trees lining the sidewalk, rays of sunshine shone down over Rom’s head as if nature itself spotlighted him saying: look at this magnificent creature.

  “I’ll leave you two alone,” Petra said, her grin widening. She’d obviously seen me practically panting for the guy.

  “Shut up."

  She chuckled and bounced off into the building.

  Rom stopped on the sidewalk in front of me. “Greetings of the morning, Kizzy.”

  “Greetings,” I said, adopting his strange phraseology. Where the heck had he learned English?

  “Are you in good health?”

  “Yes, but I couldn’t sleep at all. That wall. That hand. What was all that?”

  Rom stood silent.

  “I mean the wall was moving and that hand tried to grab me. You saw it right?”

  “Kizzy, I know not of what you speak,” he said.

  “The hand with claws. It was there.”

  Rom shook his head. “I saw no hand in the wall but your own.”

  “Then how did I get this scratch?” Holding out my arm, I pointed to bandage.

  “Your arm caught in a hole in the brick as you tagged the wall. You suffered injury against the sharp surface when I assisted in a pull to freedom.”

  “You must think I’m crazy,” I mumbled.

  I shook my head. The thought of the gas fumes again offered an explanation. The gas explanation was preferable to drooling lunacy.

  Rom had been speaking and I’d missed some of it while wrapped in my own thoughts. I tuned in for the last bit. "...If you would break bread with me this evening.”

  “You want to go on a date? Have dinner? Eat?” I tried to keep total shock out of my tone.

  He nodded.

  “With me?” I asked.

  “Of who else would I speak?” He glanced around us.

  “But we should talk about what happened in the tunnel.”

  “I prefer discourse regarding our dinner together.”

  “If you think I’m crazy, why would you want to date me?”

  Rom’s smiled with that cutie pie smirk I used to think of as an arrogant lip curl.

  “Your features delight my senses,” he said in his low baritone.

  I could think of nothing to say to this. The guy could really deliver a compliment.

  “Would seven p.m. be customary?”

  Nod Kizzy, I told myself and I managed to do it. Just.

  “That would be okay, I guess.” I kept my answer to a nonchalant monotone.

  Franky, his red hair appearing to be on fire in the light of the sun, appeared at my side.

  “Is this guy bothering you Kizzy?” He glared up at Rom as he spoke.
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  “No.”

  “Because I can take care of him if he is,” Franky threatened.

  As if he’d stand a chance in a hand-to-hand with Rom. Franky turned his gaze on me and in his eyes was something I didn’t want to see.

  “We don’t need him in our mc² crew do we?” he asked.

  Omigod, Franky blue eyes had turned a metaphorical green. Franky had some kind of crush. On me of all people!

  “It’s cool, Franky. I’m fine with Rom being on the crew.” I said. “I was just being a bitch yesterday.”

  Rom snickered and I had a feeling my defense of him gave him the idea I liked him or something. Bad news. Liking someone meant total loss of leverage in the relationship, particularly if they knew you liked them.

  “I gotta go or I’ll be late for homeroom.” Turning I said, “later,” and left the two of them standing in front of the school.

  I ran into the building and straight into Billy Broadrick.

  “If it isn’t one of the losers.” Billy chuckled. “Looks like the BQs reign supreme.”

  “We didn’t lose.” I corrected him. “Rom and I got to the morgue long before you and Quinn came anywhere near the basement.”

  “Prove it,” Billy challenged.

  Extracting the phone from my pocket and touch flipping through my photo file, I came upon the morgue sign.

  “There. See?” I held out the phone’s face toward him to display the pic.

  “I don’t see any proof here.” Billy waved it away with a huff.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I see a sign with an arrow, not the actual morgue. Plus, there’s no tag.”

  He had me there.

  “Okay. Where is your proof you and Quinn were there?”

  “I said so. That’s proof enough.” Billy’s face twisted into a grimace.

  “Yeah, sure,” I mocked. “And pigs fly. Oh no they don’t since you’re still on the ground.”

  “The crews will just have to settle this tonight.” Turning on a heel, Billy spoke over his shoulder. “Tell Senji 8 p.m. at the hospital.”

  “You’re on,” I said before I remembered the clawing hand and more importantly my date. Damn.