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  UNREAL CITY

  Copyright © 2014 A.R. Meyering

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by

  INNISFREE PRESS

  Print edition ISBNs

  ISBN-13: 978-0692313688

  ISBN-10: 0692313680

  THE DAWN MIRROR CHRONICLES

  BOOK 1

  THE ANGEL OF ELYDRIA

  NOW AVAILABLE

  BOOK 2

  EDEN UNDONE

  RELEASING 2015

  BOOK 3

  NELVIRNA SLEEPS

  RELEASING 2015

  OTHER NOVELS

  THE RESURRECTIONIST

  RELEASING 2015

  MULTI-AUTHOR COLLECTIONS

  IN CREEPS THE NIGHT

  FEATURING THE STORY THE DANDELION CHILD

  TO MY BROTHER,

  FOR SHOWING ME THE WAY

  “That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

  Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

  Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?”

  ~ Eliot, The Waste Land ~

  FOR THE REST of my life, no matter how I tried, I could not erase the image of that bed from my memory. There was nothing so terrible about the bed itself; the sheets were clean and neatly tucked under the sides of the mattress, and God knows I went on to see things that would haunt even the most hardened of souls, but it was that bed that always disturbed me the most. To me, the first time I opened the door to reveal it waiting in the gray confines of what was to become my dorm room, it represented everything I had lost. It was the space Lea had left behind after she died.

  I dropped my suitcase when I saw it. I could almost hear her voice as I touched the fabric, a lump rising in my throat.

  “I want the bottom bunk, Sarah. It’ll be a pain to climb down every morning. Please?”

  “Of course,” I mumbled, talking to her even now, months after she’d faded from the world. Dutifully I made the choice that I would never sleep there. That I could never sleep there.

  It was move in day on campus. The sound of excited college freshman, their voices shrill with nerves, roused me from my grief-induced stupor. Peering back, I received careful glances, weak smiles, and looks of panic hidden behind veils of composure. I knew it was just my imagination, but I couldn’t find a single approachable face among all of them. I shut the door and hid.

  In the space of a few hours I transformed the room. A homey touch here, a memory posted there. My familiar possessions were re-arranged into uncanny patterns, and by the time the cloud-shielded sun had sunk low behind the silhouettes of the pines, I was home—or inside some semblance of it. Yet even in the patchwork comfort that was my dorm room, the empty bed nagged at me. It was like Lea had been sitting there watching me unpack the whole time, quiet and smiling.

  Looking around the filled-in living space, I took in my new territory. There were two desks pushed against opposite walls, one bare and one with a photograph of Lea and me with our parents beside my laptop. I straightened it, examining the image of our family before it had been fractured by death. My sister’s face had been the mirror image of mine, our hair the exact same shade of pale blonde. In the photo my hair was its usual mess, hanging around my shoulders in unkempt waves, while Lea’s was thick, straightened, and reached down almost to her waist. We had the same fair complexion, the same blue eyes—round and almost too big for our faces. Our noses matched perfectly, sharp and pointed above a square jaw. We had so obviously been twins. Even now, when I catch a quick glimpse of myself in a reflective surface, I think I’m seeing her.

  A knock at the door disturbed me from my musing. I opened it to see another freshman girl with frizzy brown hair tied back into a ponytail and thick-framed black glasses staring at me. She flashed that same timorous smile we all wore.

  “Hey,” she greeted me. “We’re having a little party. Just getting to know some of the people on our floor. You can—you can come if you like. I’m Kelly, by the way, um, what’s—”

  “Sarah.” I anticipated her question and faced her blankly for a moment, deliberating whether I wanted to go and meet the other kids on my floor. It was an opportunity which seemed as harrowing as it did imperative. And I was afraid. I didn’t like meeting new people on principle. I don’t trust myself around them—I’m never sure what might slip out of my mouth.

  Moving into college alone had seemed like a risk today, especially in light of what it had meant to Lea and I. But since the theme of the day seemed to be taking risks, I decided this was a promising idea. “Sure,” I said. “Sounds like fun.”

  “Good! This way. We’re over here…I think.” Kelly led me uncertainly down the hall and into a room.

  The college I had been placed in was called Merrill, one of many that made up the vast campus. According to the website they’re a “close-knit bunch.” As we stepped into the smoky dorm room to see it packed full of strangers getting better acquainted with one another, I knew the website was spot-on. I saw all the usual suspects: three boys with shaggy hair passing around a pipe that was choking the room with a heady, skunk-like odor, a girl with short-cropped hair engaged in vigorous conversation about her strict vegan diet, a pockmarked young man joking loudly about obscene subjects for a girl’s attention. They all looked over as Kelly and I entered the room. Some of them put up their hands in a half-hearted wave. Names were exchanged, and I only caught a few of them. Jason, Samantha, Claire, Dean.

  We recycled the same tired topics. Favorite bands. Hometowns. What made us special. I tried to relax as I made conversation, still watching myself closely, keeping my answers safe. After only an hour we were all laughing together like old buddies. The loud boy—Dean—actually had a pretty sharp sense of humor underneath his token vulgarities, and I suppose I inhaled enough of the smoke floating around in the air to make even those seem hysterical.

  Unfortunately we arrived at the unavoidable question: “So what’s everyone’s major?”

  Though my smile didn’t fade, I felt my heart sink. I was still undecided. Hell, most freshmen are, but something about admitting it always made me uncomfortable. Undefined. The world expects direction from us at this age, I suppose. Pressure always made it hard for me to commit to anything. I lied and said photojournalism, which was something I was a part of in high school. I knew enough to bullshit about it. Tennis and photography were what had consumed most of my life in my last year of high school. I’d made a bunch of close friends through those activities. Before summer, anyway. The only friend I had left now—and to call her that was stretching it—had driven me here today on her way up to San Francisco. She’d left me in front of my dorm with a dispassionate farewell, as if we were only acquaintances. Best friends forever. It never ceases to amaze me how fragile those forevers turn out to be.

  We were all starting to get caught up in the haze of the night, nobody really wanting to stay but nobody strong enough yet to be alone in this new place. The smoke was getting heavier and I decided to share a few puffs. Even after Lea’s death I’d never fallen far into the world of responsible substance abuse, though I regarded it with curious neutrality. If it’s there, why not? When she was still around, it was a different story. But as my head grew foggier, I became quiet with the heaviness of memories, something that Dean noticed as I became more absent from
the conversation.

  “What’s-a-matter with you, Sarah? Miss your mom already?” There was a desperation in his humorous tone; he wanted me to admit it so that everyone else could have permission to break down too. However, my guard went up. I wouldn’t allow him the pleasure at my expense.

  “Not really,” I snapped.

  “What’s up, then? You seem kinda off all of a sudden.”

  “Nothing. I’m tired. Move in day, and all.” My hand flitted to the pendant that always hung around my neck, an unconscious motion of protection. He shrugged and they went back to their revelry, but my sense of ease had been disrupted.

  Jason grabbed Dean’s guitar from the corner of the room and started fiddling around on it and swaying to the music. Dean’s eyes glowed with proud ownership of the instrument and he launched into the details of the fine piece of workmanship. In his own world, Jason started hammering out a Nirvana song and singing loudly over him. The other kids joined in. Goaded by their enthusiasm, Jason swung around the guitar like he was onstage at a rock concert. The neck came close to the corner of the desk, and Dean stood up to seize it.

  “Dude, watch out. If you break that thing, I’ll murder you and hide your body in the woods.”

  I was on my feet before I realized what I was doing, my cheeks hot with rage. “That’s not fucking funny, asshole. Murder is not a joke,” I shouted, my finger extended in an accusatory gesture. I hated myself for being unable to stop this emotional reaction. “Someone back me up here!”

  The atmosphere turned uncomfortable as all eyes fixed on me and then I was charging out of the room with my tail between my legs. Their faces had been confused, hurt, and even concerned, but I still felt as if I were under attack. Making a great reputation for myself from day one was my specialty.

  Aching with shame and furious at myself, I rushed back to my room and sat down at my desk in a huff. I had become the person that my friends and I used to mock. The ones who we were polite to when they were around, but constructed cruel inside jokes about when they were not.

  I tried to get my mind off it, but social media offered no distraction and I closed the browser almost as soon as I opened it. I stared blankly at the desktop—another photo of Lea and me, this time on the boardwalk at home, in Monterey. We used to walk there after school sometimes. It had been one of those hazy, late afternoons and the sun backed us, the shadow making it difficult to tell who was who. I gazed at the photo for a long time, then took my computer to bed with me, clicked into a folder containing different shots I had taken over the years, and fell into the slideshow. The good times illuminated the screen and faded away, each one bringing a bittersweet feeling in my chest.

  Photography interests me for different reasons than why I think most people get into it. A lot of them do it for the art of the process and result. I do it for the nostalgia. There’s something supremely safe about a frozen moment. Something that ensures it never truly disappears. I like to collect such moments, keep them preserved, and enjoy them again and again. It’s almost proof that the love shared between the people in the photo was real, at least for an instant.

  And that was the comfort I sought on my first night. I revisited Lea, her entire story already told in eighteen short years of life. Memories of trips to Disneyland came back. Nights of silliness when she, her boyfriend, and I had talked until three in the morning. Our sixteenth birthday party. Halloween when we were little girls—Lea dressed in the likeness of a fairy and me as a rabbit. Lea kissing Fenris, our old gnarled Husky dog, on the side of the head. Every time I got sleepy and closed my eyes for a bit, they would flutter open just to make sure the photos hadn’t gone away.

  I fell asleep with little trouble, as I always do, though that night the rarity that was a dream came to me. I hardly ever remember my dreams, and when I do it’s usually vague, colorless images or general feelings. But that night I dreamt I was standing at the edge of a pier, high above the water. Dark, mammoth shapes were circling the pier and disturbing the already choppy waves. I had a feeling that they would jump up toward me soon, but just as I saw a rising body of slick, leathery flesh, I woke, disoriented and confused about where I was.

  Then I remembered and my head returned to my pillow. I stared at the shapes of the trees through the cracks in the blinds as I drifted back to sleep, and thought I saw a shadow slink past the dim blueness of the hours before dawn. It stirred me for a moment, but I reminded myself that the campus was built in the middle of a redwood forest. The animals had been here first. They hadn’t up and left just because humans planted a school there. I had already seen two deer on my walk to the Merrill dorm. Since I was on the ground floor, I knew I’d probably have to get used to seeing a parade of fauna pass by my window every night.

  Now that I look back on it, I probably should have had the good sense to be more afraid. If I had been even a bit more alert, I might have taken more notice of a weird, atonal tune whining through the wind. But I was a different person then, unassuming of dark things, blissfully unaware, even secure in the belief that the worst that could ever happen to me had already come and gone, leaving behind a hell of an aftermath to sort through.

  But maybe that’s also why I like photos. You can see the innocence in people’s faces and look back on them in melancholy hindsight. They never have any idea of what’s coming for them, do they?

  MOST OF THE time before I went down into the Caves is a blur to me now. School started and we were force-fed a more-than-healthy portion of rules and regulations. I rushed around the massive campus desperately trying to catch buses, but mostly getting lost in the miles of forest.

  I remember a sense of wonder at the campus itself. Mists curling in and out of the massive redwoods and sprawling ferns could be seen almost everywhere during early mornings and late evenings, and sometimes they rolled in during the day. Getting stuck in the middle of one of those walls of fog while on the way to class felt like being in a different world. Sometimes I’d pass another lonely student in the grayness, make eye contact for a mere moment, and glance back to see them disappear into the mist as if they were the last person I was ever going to see. Dew-beaded webs decorated every clearing and spiders, fat and bright green, hung heavy on their surfaces like bulbs on a Christmas tree.

  I got a sense of everything growing around me, of plants moving in and consuming the buildings that invaders had dared to construct. I stumbled across many wonderful and enchanting places on my first weeks while hiking in the September heat that so easily transformed into rain. I don’t know how I found it, but there was a lovely little garden tucked away somewhere that I happened upon once and couldn’t relocate, no matter how long I searched.

  The thing that interested me most, and that I actively sought, was something the other students called the Wishing Tree. They said that if you wrote your wish down on a paper and left it on the tree, it was sure to come true. Something about that stirred my numbed heart, and the first weekend I took the time to go on a little journey to see it for myself. Sure enough, it was already covered in rain-bleared wishes, but instead of exciting me the way I had hoped it would, my heart ached at the sight of it. My eyes fell on the dreams of my classmates: “Please get Jordan to ask me out”, “Let me do well this quarter”, “I wish for people to stop hating one another”. I felt like an intruder. I’d brought paper with me and tried to think of a wish on the way through the meadow, but after standing there for a minute I just folded it up, stowed it in my bag, and stared at the branches.

  “I wish I could go back to being me,” I told the tree, then shoved my hands into my pockets and turned back for Merrill College.

  The first warning that things were not right came one evening as I was on the way back from my Intro to Sociology class. It was after nightfall, and the day had gone from T-shirt weather to a wind so biting I wished I’d thought of bringing a coat. I was crossing one of the long, wooden bridges built at an uncomfortable height above chasms brimming with plant life, and my mind was fixed
on how much I did not want to go through with the group project my class had been assigned.

  Suddenly, I saw what looked like a face staring at me from the gulch. I stopped walking and leaned forward to get a closer look. The bushes shivered and the ghost-green flash of an animal’s eyes glinted as the black, shaggy shape of what looked like a bobcat leapt out and skittered away. Seeing so many animals on campus was still unusual for me.

  When I arrived back at the dorm, my phone buzzed and I answered it to hear the voice of my mother. It made me want to cry; I was homesick despite my constant denials.

  “Sarah! How are things? We hardly hear from you—I wanted to give you your space, but Dad and I are getting curious and—”

  “Mom, it’s good to hear from you. Things are—well, they’re really good, actually.” I caught myself smiling as I tossed my bag aside and plopped into the desk chair, the feeling of eeriness I’d gotten from seeing the bobcat already washed away. “Though I have to admit it’s getting a bit lonely. I miss you guys. How’re things back at the homestead?”

  “Oh, nothing’s changed.” I couldn’t help but notice Mom sounded really tired. “Things are busy, busy, busy. Book club, sewing circle, painting, keeping up with friends—oh, and I started taking a Wine Studies class! We’re both college kids now, isn’t that funny?”

  I faked a laugh.

  Ever since the day we’d gotten the call about Lea, my mother had refused to sit still for a minute. She arranged the funeral and dealt with all the finances alone while Dad and I tried to hold ourselves together. It disturbed me how frantic she was about filling her life with activity, because I knew how terrified she was of being alone. But she still wept. We all did, only she would do it when she thought no one could hear her, and it broke my heart again and again to see the way she’d hastily wipe tears away, stifle wails, and force the ugliest smile I’ve ever seen when I came to check on her.