Two Imaginary Boys (5/5)

"How can you tell?"

"It just sounds backwards." Jonathan paused, and swallowed hard. "I used to reverse tapes for fun. So I—uh—I can kind of tell." He smiled hesitantly. I could see his eyes moisten a little, but not enough for the tears to fall. It looked like he couldn't smile without letting his other emotions through. "One time, I reversed Elodie's tape of Carmen. She was so mad."

I laughed a little at that. "I bet Carmen sounds pretty good backwards."

Jonathan nodded and shook with silent laughter as the tears in his eyes escaped. "You wouldn't happen to know anyone with a dual cassette deck, would you? Or a tape recorder?"

"I don't think so."

"Okay. Well, I'll just have to be extra careful. Uh—did you want to listen to it again? Just in case."

I sighed. "No. I remember what he said."

I didn't like the idea of the only record I had of Leo's voice being gone forever, but it was too painful for me to hear again that day. It was bad enough that I'd turned up at the hotel red-eyed and tear-tracked. I didn't want to start compulsively cursing Leo again in front of Jonathan.

He fast-forwarded the tape to the end. "Can you check the glove compartment for a screwdriver?"

I did, and there it was, right in front.

Jonathan noticed, too. "He fucking knew."

"Maybe he had it just in case he needed it?"

"This came from the set I keep in my room," Jonathan said.

He got out of the car. I got out to follow him, into the hotel. The person at the desk gave me a pointed look, but Jonathan didn't seem to notice, and I tried to give off the same impression.

"Kept," he said once the elevator doors closed in front of us.

"What?" I asked.

"The tool set I kept in my room," he said. "They're gone now."

"Oh. Right."

The hotel room had one bed, a TV, a nightstand, and a little table in the corner with two chairs. I sat down in the one Jonathan didn't take. He had this placid, almost meditative look on his face as he undid the screws on the cassette casing. There was something weirdly soothing about the way it contrasted with his puffy eyelids and stringy hair.

His hands shook as he pried the casing open. For a moment, he stared down at the tape. "You do it," he finally muttered.

"What?" I couldn't believe him. I'd never done anything like this before. I didn't even know how. The tape looked so delicate.

"I'll tell you what to do, but—" he held up his trembling hands. "—I haven't slept much in the past week."

"Okay. If you trust me."

"It's pretty easy. You just have to be careful. So, uh, just slide the rolls of the tape off the little knobs and lay it flat on the table, exactly the way it was. Make sure you don't flip it around. Yeah, just like that. Now rotate it so the full side is on the left. And put it back in, just like that. Don't let it unspool or get loose or anything." Once I put the tape back in, Jonathan gently turned the spools a little to make sure everything was in place. "And that's all it takes. Thanks." He screwed the top side of the casing back on. "Okay. Let's go back outside and try playing it."

And then both of us practically jumped a mile because the fire alarm started going off. Jonathan's eyes filled with fear. We took the tape and headed outside.

"It's a false alarm," the clerk told him when we reached the lobby. "I'm so sorry. I don't know why this keeps happening."

Jonathan shrugged and made a failed attempt at smiling. We continued outside to the car. I took the passenger seat again and instinctively pulled out a pencil and a scrap of paper with a blank side from the glove compartment. Whatever Elodie had to say that was so secret she said it backwards, it had to be worth writing down.

"The name of the family patron is," she said, voice jerky and slurred in equal measure, then continued to recite something that sounded as nonsensical as the message had before. I wrote it down anyway to the best of my ability.

"What does she mean, 'family patron'?" I asked after hitting stop when it got to Leo's voice. I didn't want to hear it sounding like that. The very thought seemed like something that would haunt my dreams later.

Jonathan swallowed hard. A bead of sweat dribbled down his flushed face. "I don't know."

"Can you rewind that? I want to see if I wrote it down right."

Jonathan complied. By then, he was looking downright sick. I made a few minor corrections to what I'd written before, certain I'd misspelled it but satisfied with the phonetic transcription.

Before I could stop the tape, Leo's eerie backwards speech was interrupted by a roar of static I can only describe as animalistic, then garbled squealing. Then nothing. Frozen, I stared at the cassette deck.

Instead of taking it out, Jonathan gracefully got out of the car and closed the door behind him. It took me a few seconds to realize he was throwing up on the pavement outside. I closed my eyes in an attempt to give him a little dignity back.

After a few minutes, he opened the door again and hit eject on the tape deck. I was amazed at how carefully he pulled it out, but that couldn't undo the damage that had already been done. Crumpled black tape streamed behind the cassette case like intestines spilling out of a corpse ripped open at the belly by the teeth of a savage beast. Or in this case, Leo's tape player.

Gingerly, Jonathan tugged at the tape, but some of it stayed stubbornly put, caught on something unseen in the maw of the front console. "I don't know if this is salvageable," he muttered.

"I'm sorry," I muttered back.

"Not your fault," Jonathan said. "Wait here."

He left again, and came back with a tooth pick, which he used to prod the rest of the tape out of the cassette player, though not without a few tears. "You wrote that down, right?"

I showed him the slip of paper I'd written on. The other side was half-covered in Leo's cursive.

"Great," he said, half-heartedly, eyelids drooping. "Why don't you hang onto that? You're the witch here."

I chuckled bitterly at that and put the paper in my pocket. "Fat lot of good it's done me."

Jonathan shook his head, then glanced at the door. "I'm out of it because I can't sleep," he explained.

"You mentioned that earlier."

He smiled ruefully. "Every time I fall asleep, I keep dreaming the hotel's on fire. And that there's someone in my room, but I can never see who it is."

"Orsina?" I asked.

He shook his head. "No. If I had to guess, I'd say maybe it's male, but I'm actually not even sure it's human. And somehow, I always know that it was what set the hotel on fire. And it wants something from me, but I'm not sure what." He paused. "Stupid, right?"

I wasn't going to dignify that last remark with an answer. "It's like that every time?"

Jonathan nodded. "And I wake up screaming every time, too. So I've been trying not to sleep. That's why I keep calling you at such ridiculous hours." He paused again. I wondered if he was about to fall asleep right then and there. Instead, he yawned. "Thanks for always picking up."

We sat in silence for a few seconds. "Hey," I finally asked. "You getting sick of this hotel?"

He looked at me hopefully and nodded.

"Let's go for a drive."

"Thanks."

Within minutes, he was dozing off in the front seat. I drove us to Philadelphia and back to give him time to sleep. When he woke up, he told me his aunt from his mom's side of the family would be flying down from Portland that weekend. And that he'd be flying back with her.

"A month ago, I would have jumped on a chance to go somewhere no one knows I'm gay and never come back. But now?" He looked out the window at nothing, then sighed. "It's not like they're here. But I still don't feel ready to leave."

"I'm here," I said, in spite of myself.

He understood instantly. "And we're the only two left that know what happened. I mean, some of the people from the party might have a clue, but even they didn't know about the ritual. Right?"

I laughed at that. "Definitely not."

"It must look awfully fishy that they planned all that and then the dorm burned down the same night," Jonathan said. "Lucky it was an electrical fire. Doesn't look like arson that way. The police don't have a clue what to think about Elodie and Leo, either. They're settling on suicide, but you can tell they don't like it."

I reached over and tapped the glove compartment. "That's probably not entirely wrong."

Jonathan let out another heavy sigh. As we pulled into the parking lot, he said, "See, you're the only person who has that kind of insight. As soon as I leave here, it'll all be in my head. Like I made it up."

The same went for me, though I hadn't thought that far. Truth be told, so much of it already felt like something I'd made up, even then. The Leo I loved wasn't the same as the brother Jonathan missed. This would become more evident to both of us over the years. It didn't change what we held in common, though.

"We can write," I told him after I parked.

"There's always that." He unbuckled his seatbelt and opened the door. "Good night, Jamie."

"Good night."

I drove Leo's car back to my parents' house, and turned my thoughts to the family patron Elodie had gone to so much trouble to tell us about. Then I started getting paranoid that I'd get pulled over and someone would think I stole the car. Or worse, the car would overheat or something, and I'd have to leave it on the side of the road. So I turned my mind over to keeping my eyes on the lit portion of the road in front of me, and not thinking at all.

Once I was in my room, I felt better. As I lay down to try and sleep, I thought of Jonathan's recurring dream, about the hotel being on fire. It was an understandable nightmare to have after what happened. But the presence he'd described made me wonder if it was something more than his own fear. I thought of getting up and trying to work it out with my tarot cards, but for once, both my body and my mind were too tired for that. I fell asleep.

And later that night, after everyone had gone to bed, I thought I was waking up. My bedroom door creaked as someone opened it. I heard footsteps coming across the carpet to the side of my bed, then a whisper of fabric. A long skirt or coat, maybe.

"Help Jonathan banish the family patron," Elodie said.

And then I woke up again. The phone was ringing. "Is everything all right?" I asked sleepily, before Jonathan could even confirm it was him. Even though it had become normal for him to call around that time.

There was no answer. "Jonathan?"

I heard something that could have been his voice, but it was too garbled and staticky to be sure. Then the line clicked and I was left with the dial tone. Unable to shake the notion that something had gone horribly wrong, I got in Leo's car and headed back for the hotel.

A crowd of people, most in pajamas, milled around the edges of the parking lot. I couldn't find Jonathan anywhere, so I headed for the front doors.

"Miss? Miss! There's been a gas leak," said someone dressed like the clerk from earlier that day. "You can't go in there."

I went around to the side as soon as they weren't looking. The door must have been unlocked, because I was able to get in. Before I knew it, I was coming up to Jonathan's door. Was he still in there? Asleep, maybe?

I banged on the door. "Jonathan!"

"Jamie?" I heard his voice, muffled but panicked, from the other side of the door. "Jamie, you have to get out. It's not safe."

"There's a gas leak! Come out here, we have to go outside."

"Just go! He won't hurt me!"

I noticed myself getting woozy. Was it the gas? "I'll go when you go," I said, struggling for air. Then I blacked out.

And then I was in my bed again. But was I awake? It looked like my room. When I pinched my arm, it hurt, but that didn't feel like it couldn't have been a dream either. I tried putting my fingers through my hand. Didn't work. But maybe that was just because I didn't expect it to work.

Finally, I tried looking at the clock, looking away, and looking back. Twice over. Three times over. The numbers stayed the same. And they were real numbers, too, not weird symbols I was just interpreting as numbers.

Just when I was sure I was actually awake, the phone rang again. This time, I had to throw off the covers and put effort into running lightly over the floor as I dashed into the living room. I got it at the beginning of the third ring. "Hello?"

"Jamie? Uh. Strange question, I know, but were you asleep, just now?"

"You had another nightmare, didn't you." This was the first time I was able to confirm a shared dream experience with anyone. I should have been excited. Exhilarated, maybe. Instead, I quaked with terror.

"There was a gas leak. You were in the hall, trying to get me to come out of my room."

"What did you mean, he wouldn't hurt you?"

"I don't know, Jamie, but—whatever you did, don't do it again, okay?"

And then he hung up. I called him right back, but he wasn't answering.

I went back to my room and pulled every book from my shelf that might have a scrap of information I could use. Protection spells. Fairy tales. Banishing rituals. I even looked through my family's bible. The sun was coming up before I knew it. I took a quick break to down some coffee, then went right back to work.

If Jonathan left for Portland with that demon in tow, I wouldn't be able to help him. And he'd end up just like Orsina and Glauco. I was sure of it.

I started with a fairly standard banishing ritual. It was for when you heard weird noises in your house, or found things missing. Or had weird dreams. Then I started beefing it up. When things didn't fit together, I made them fit, scouring the bible and William Blake for helpful turns of phrase. I made a list of every ritual action I could actually do to the letter, then discarded most of it. At one point, I wrapped a throw blanket around my shoulders while I read, then pretended Leo had done it for me once I was sitting back down. It helped.

The biggest question I had by the time the daylight started fading was: to bind or banish? I was pretty sure Elodie had said "banish," but what if that wasn't enough?

The clock struck eight far before I felt ready. But I didn't know if I could afford to push things off any further than I already had. I called Jonathan again to let him know I was coming, but he hung up without a word as soon as he heard my voice. I got in Leo's car anyway and went to the hotel.

"Miss?" I decided the clerk wasn't talking to me and all but ran for the elevator. "Miss! Get back here!"

She was, in fact, talking to me. And she caught up to me before the elevator came. "Miss, I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

"Can you just check on Jonathan for me? I'm worried about him," I said.

"He was just down here a few minutes ago, and he specifically told me to watch for you and not allow you past the lobby. It's time for you to leave. I haven't called the police yet."

And then I wondered if I hadn't misunderstood everything after all. Maybe Jonathan had gotten sick of me the other day but been polite about it. Maybe I dreamed the last phone conversation with him, too.

Maybe I was, in fact, still dreaming. Maybe if I just made a break for it and ran up the stairwell, everything would work out fine.

"Miss." The clerk grabbed my arm, as if she could sense my thoughts.

"Fine." I yanked my arm away and strode back out to Leo's car. Part of me wanted to drive away before the police could show up and decide I must have stolen it. Instead, I got in the passenger side and closed my eyes.

A moment later, I heard someone get into the driver's seat. If it was a dream, I didn't want it to end, so I kept my eyes closed. The driver turned on the radio—no, the tape deck. It was one of the Abba albums Leo always listened to.

I soon lost track of where we were, but it didn't matter. I could hear Leo humming along to the music, even singing some of the choruses under his breath. I never wanted it to end, but eventually, we came to a stop. And when I opened my eyes, we were back at the hotel.

I was the only one in the car. It was a miracle no one had called the cops on me. I got out and walked around the hood to the driver's side, then closed myself in again. Jonathan clearly didn't need my help, and if he didn't want it, he could make sure he didn't get it. There was nothing else I could do.

But my key wouldn't fit in the ignition.

Fear pooled in my stomach. Instead of giving in to it, I took a deep breath. Then I looked at the key.

It had the name of the hotel on it. Slowly, a grin spread across my face. I got out again and headed for the side door. It was locked, but the key opened it. Not a soul stopped me in the hallway. No one even seemed to be there. I headed up the stairs to Jonathan's room. And I let myself in.

I won't describe the person I saw sitting at the table with him. Not even now. It isn't important, and it isn't worth the risk, to you or me. All you need to know was he was holding out his hand. And Jonathan was holding a glistening red string that was coming out of his own opened wrist, with both thumbs and forefingers, like he was about to tie a bow with it. Around the demon's wrist.

He sighed heavily when he saw me. "Jamie, you have to let me do this. He won't hurt me. And I don't want to lose you, too."

I couldn't remember the ritual I'd written, so I just recited the names of every potentially sympathetic deity I could think of. Every one I thought might help. Couldn't get enough help, I thought.

The demon stood up. He came towards me. The names did nothing. I stopped midway through the list and went straight to his name as he drew closer.

Miraculously, I got all the way through it, speaking so fast I could hardly feel my tongue. "I banish thee from our presence. Thou hast no power over us. Thou wilt leave our lives forever."

He slowed. I repeated myself, staring him in the eye all the while. All of a sudden, I was out of air. He smiled. I repeated myself anyway.

"Stop!" Jonathan cried. "Both of you, stop it!"

The demon curled its fingers around my neck, ignoring Jonathan's cries. I thought for sure I was about to die.

And then I was in the passenger seat again, spluttering. Someone came and opened the door. That was the last fucking thing I needed. I still couldn't breathe. Then I saw Jonathan's face.

"Jamie, I'm going to call an ambulance, okay? Stay right there." He began to turn around.

And somehow, I was able to pull enough air into me to rasp out the demon's name and my impromptu banishing spell again. And again. Jonathan stopped. Stared.

Then, grave-faced, he recited the demon's name with me. "I banish thee from our presence," he intoned, voice sonorous and radiant. "Thou hast no power over us. Thou wilt leave our lives forever. Begone."

I coughed and sucked air into my lungs. Everything felt infinitely lighter. The cold December wind soothed me. The moonlight glowed in the snowbanks. Jonathan stared over the roof of the car.

"Thank you," he whispered. I could tell he wasn't only talking to me.

<<>>

"It's a sign," I told Jonathan. It was June. By then, he definitely had a few inches on me. His hair had also grown. He'd gotten in the habit of putting it in a knotted half-ponytail, anchored with a pencil. It was nice to be able to see his eyes so easily.

I'd driven Leo's car (Jonathan made sure to transfer the ownership to me properly before he left Pennsylvania) all the way out to Portland, by myself. Technically past Portland, to his aunt and uncle's house in the suburbs. He wasn't allowed in the city on his own, but they let him go with me since I was twenty by then. We'd parked it a few blocks away from a Greek place he insisted we go to for lunch.

"Uh, yeah. A sign. Bookstores tend to have those," Jonathan told me.

I ignored his feigned ignorance. "Aphroditus Books. We have to go in." I was planning on doing more than just going in even then.

"Okay? Sure." He glanced nervously around. I'm not sure who he thought would see him. Surely not any of his new classmates. Not in the neighborhood we were in.

The inside of the store was a maze of towering bookshelves, with ornate rugs piled on the floor. A white cat with several brown-striped patches crossed our path when we came in. The only person in sight was a towering old woman with chunky facial features and grey hair down to the middle of her back.

"Excuse me," I asked her as soon as she noticed us. "Are you hiring?"

Jonathan fled down a pseudo-corridor of books.

"No," she told me in a booming, gravelly voice. "What's your name?"

I told her, and she told me her name, and before I knew it, we were getting on like a house on fire.

"You know, I'm not getting any younger," she said, just as Jonathan was circling back to check on me for the fifth time. He had a new book in hand, so I didn't feel bad for him. "You got any sales experience? Can you lift a fifty-pound box?"

"Sure can. And I've got over a year's experience working in an antique store."

"When can you start?"