“There’s no lock on the door. You can stay here. Anybody can stay here, help themselves to anything in the apartment. What does it matter?”
Her finger touched my chin, turned my face.
“Nobody else is welcome.”
She kissed me.
We pushed the door shut to make sure it would at least stay closed, if not locked. We pulled out the houndstooth couch, made up the bed. We crawled in together and held each other, kissed each other, listened to the rain and the rumble of the El and kissed each other some more. We kissed until we faded into each other and it was hard to tell where I stopped and where she began and vice versa.
It was everything I’d wanted, but assumed I would never get.
At some point we fell asleep and then I woke up and gently touched the side of her face, just to feel her skin beneath my three good fingertips.
And then a harsh voice said:
“Hello, Mickey.”
I could see nothing in the room. Just the streetlights, filtered through the front windows. Who was speaking?
Then, by my right ear: “Sorry I didn’t come to the window. But I was sleeping. They make me sleep so much. But I woke up when I heard your voice. I’ve been waiting years to hear your voice.”
I jolted and sat up in bed, looked around. And then I felt hands grab the sides of my head and pull me out of bed.
I’ll admit it: I screamed.
Meghan woke up a nanosecond later, pushing herself up from the mattress. But something pushed her back down, violently. The springs of the couch strained beneath her.
“Stay out of this. This is family business, whore.”
Then I saw him. He was a complete stranger, but I recognized the voice. It was older. It had deepened. But it was still the same voice.
Billy Allen Derace.
“Can you see me, Mickey?”
Yeah, I could see him.
But not quickly enough.
His fist smashed into my face quickly followed by his knee to my balls, which I swear came heaving out of nowhere. The lower half of my body exploded in white hot pain. My legs trembled for a second before giving out on me, and my knees slammed into the hardwood floor. Gravity wasn’t working like it should. My internal compass was off—way, way off.
I crawled forward a few feet, the tips of my three good fingers clutching at the uneven spaces between the floorboards. My lip was throbbing and my balls felt like they were the size of cantaloupes. I crawled on a single elbow and both knees toward the bathroom. Anywhere.
Derace laughed at me. Walked toward me, ready to drag me back into the living room for more fun and games.
“Where you going, Mickey?”
Away from you.
“Would you rather me spend time with your girlfriend here? I like playing with the girls. Wig wam bam, gonna make you understand…”
Meghan screamed. I turned to see her lash out at the air. Her eyes popped open as something grabbed her throat. No.
“STAY AWAY FROM HER!”
I spun myself around and crawled back toward the couch.
“Wig wam bam, gonna getchoo if I can…”
Meghan cried out again but her voice was a weak rasp.
“But I think I’ll save her for later. After I deal with you.”
Something hard slammed into the side of my head. I think by chance I’d moved at the right moment, otherwise I would have been kicked in the face. I saw a white flash and collapsed to the ground, rolled over onto my back. I reached out with my three good fingers and tried to find the bathroom doorway so I could pull myself up.
Fingers tore at the back of my neck, then found the back of my head. There was a tug at the back of my waist…and then I was vertical again.
And then I was hurtling into the cherrywood desk. My face slammed against the back panel. My useless hand fumbled for the edge of the desk to anchor myself, but Derace was right behind me.
The next thing I knew the side of my face and my dead right shoulder slammed against the desk again, tilting onto two legs. Drawers opened, files gushed out.
Then he lifted me up and spun me around.
There was Billy Allen Derace. Nearly fifty years old. Wild red hair shaved down to nothing. Eyes sallow. Teary. Breath hot and stinking. I could feel him. I could smell him. He was standing behind me. This was no hallucination.
“Such a handsome face. That’s not how I remember you. You had some scars. Nasty red-looking things. Maybe I’m supposed to give them to you.”
“What do you want?”
“I was young when I killed your father. I was just starting out with the pills, figuring it all out. I thought the old man up here had some money I could steal, buy my own pills. But then I saw he had his own stash. And it was goooooooood shit he had. Shit nobody else had. Shit that made me a superhero.”
“You asshole—you killed my father.”
“I was confused back then, you see. I thought he was you. I killed him because I thought he was you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Now I get what I want. Finally.”
Then the hands released me.
“Hey. No. No no no no no no not yet…”
Billy was gone.
But I still heard his voice.
“DON’T YOU BASTARDS STICK THAT IN ME I’LL COME FOR ALL OF YOU IN YOUR SLEEP AND CUT YOU AND YOUR PRETTY LITTLE CHILDREN TO DEATH…”
My eyes may have been playing tricks. But for a flicker of a moment I saw the shape of Derace above me, and it was like he was wrestling with unseen forces, trying to lift his curled fists up, but he couldn’t, because the man had invisible restraints around his wrists…
And then he vanished.
In the mid-1960s a professor at the University of Virginia ran a series of experiments on an advertising executive named Robert Monroe who claimed to have experienced numerous “out of body” (OBE) experiences. Monroe agreed to eight sessions in which he was placed in a locked room and asked to project himself. In two of those sessions Monroe was able to accurately describe the contents of another room in the facility in vivid detail.
In the late 1960s the Pentagon began a series of experiments aimed to control “remote viewing”—essentially, using psychics as spies to peer behind the Iron Curtain. Reportedly, the other side was engaged in similar experiments, resulting in a top secret, low-key “brain race” similar to the arms race and the moon race.
And in 1971, Dr. Mitchell DeMeo was given a government grant to find a way to induce an out-of-body experience using pharmaceuticals, which he’d developed over a period of twenty years.
DeMeo was affiliated with the prestigious Adams Institute. But he ran his experiments offsite; the board of directors at the Adams Institute thought it would be better that way. He used the address of the Papiro Center, at the time an empty building on the hospital’s grounds that was sometimes used by the government, sometimes not. When it was not, unruly patients and “special cases” were housed in the center.
But DeMeo had actually set up shop in an abandoned apartment building on Frankford Avenue. They advertised in local papers for volunteers.
They accepted my father.
Dr. DeMeo hired a cleaning woman named Erna Derace to tidy up his office as well as the other apartments in the building. Payment was very modest, but in exchange, Erna was allowed to keep an apartment downstairs.
She had a boy named Billy. And he was instructed to be quiet at all times. In fact, their stay in the apartment was contingent on Billy “behaving.”
No one cared about the experiments now, because the experiments were seen as a failure.
And the story had gone untold.
The story was all here in the papers, which had been buried in drawers of the cherrywood desk. Meghan had found the motherlode when she righted the desk after Billy Derace had tried to smash my head through it. Everything was in there. Grandpop Henry had clearly been through it all, and kept the relevant stuff neatly organized in the desk drawers. The boxes and crates were essentially leftovers. Trash he hadn’t gotten around to bringing outside. We’d been looking in the wrong place this whole time.