My phone buzzed and I stared at Cassie’s name for a long moment. When I answered, I had no idea what to expect.
“Hello?”
The line crackled faintly.
“Oh—Babe—good, I got you.” She sounded out of breath, but in the moment, I vacillated between what I should and shouldn’t give a shit about. The important thing was that her voice tethered me back to reality.
“Are you okay, Cass?”
“Yeah, I’m just out for a jog before the bar. Are you okay?” She responded, then added, “sorry, you just sound…weird is all.”
“Um, honestly? No…I’m not okay.” I heard a waver crack the tone of my voice as I spoke. “Cassie, I don’t know where I am. I mean, I’m supposed to be somewhere, but I don’t think I am and I’m kinda freaking out and there was a guy, but now he’s—now he’s—“
I started hyperventilating as I got to the end of Bristol and turned left to see more empty street down 14th.
“It’s okay babe, just take a deep breath, alright?”
I tried, but it was like the hopeful pause between bouts of hiccups. The short breaths returned. I was alone, or worse, abandoned by the world and stuck in a sickening place I didn’t understand.
“Fuck, Cassie. There’s—there’s nothing here. I don’t know where everything is. What the fuck is happening?”
“Watson—you’re okay. Just pick a familiar spot and head for it. Ground yourself. How about Carson’s Bakery? We’ve been there. You know that place, right?”
I did. Carson’s was on 14th. Not far behind me. I turned and walked the other way, blindly following the kind of succinct directive my brain couldn’t muster on its own. I got to the corner of Aberdeen on the next block where Carson’s usually was.
“It’s not here, Cass. The windows look the same, but inside there’s just—nothing. Fuck. Fuck!”
“Babe, I want you to listen to me, okay? I know you think you’re in a—in a bad place right this second. But you’ve got to get out of your head. Take a deep breath again, close your eyes, and focus on your other senses.”
There was thick silence around me. Nothing but the sound of my overworked lungs and Cassie’s voice. But I took another deep breath. Held it. Listened. And then I heard something—faint voices in the distance.
I sprinted down Aberdeen, hoping, as the smell of dust began to give way to the human stewpot scent of the city I knew. I turned right onto 15th.. and almost slammed into a sturdy looking postman.
“Hey, Jesus! Watch where you’re fucking going, man!” he yelled.
I could’ve kissed him right on his scowling face. He wasn’t alone either. There were people, cars and lights and music blaring from rolled down windows and everything I thought I’d lost. I mumbled an apology to the postman who was already ten feet behind me and then I brought the phone back to my ear.
“Cassie. Fucksake, you’re a lifesaver. But how did you—“
“What? Talk you down from a panic attack? My sister gets them now and then.”
“A…panic attack?”
“Well, I don’t know. I assumed, babe. You’re turning twenty-five and not everyone takes it well. But anyway, are you okay now?”
I flattened myself against a building, still tense but breathing easier. My left fist clenched the crumpled paper I had found on the sidewalk.
“Cassie…”
“Yeah?”
“Have you ever heard of a club called D ‘or?”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. Finally she responded, “Yeah.”
“Have you ever been?”
“Um…yes. Yeah. I have. But I didn’t stay long. Why are you asking?”
I looked down at the paper in my hand and lied. “It’s nothing important. I heard a rumor is all.”
“Watson, if you go looking for that place, be careful, okay? It’s not what people say it is—I mean it is, it’s fun and it’s beautiful, but there’s a price for the party.”
“What do you mean? Like the cover? Because—”
“No. It’s more than that. I think. I don’t really remember, but I just left with a feeling.”
“Right. Yeah. And I’m okay—you asked. Sorry about whatever the hell this was.”
“Good. And it’s okay. You excited about tonight?”
With everything that had happened, I had kind of blanked on birthday drinks. But drinks seemed like a normal I could use.
“Excited? Yeah. Well, I will be soon anyhow. And…thanks Cass.”
“Of course.”
“Well, I’ll let you get back to your jog. See you tonight.”
“Yeah, babe. And…I got a sort of present for you.”
“Oh, you didn’t have to do that..”
“Maybe not. But here—I’ll give you a hint before I go. This isn’t all of it, but—“ My phone buzzed against my face. “Happy Birthday, Watson.”
The call ended. I looked at my phone. She had texted me a picture. I opened it—a mirror selfie of Cassie wearing a red garter belt and stockings. And nothing else. Shit. She was stunning, clever, sexy…nearly perfect. I held my thumb over her face and sighed. But she wasn’t her.
I would yet love my Amaria more.
I thought of her and felt shitty about myself. And I deserved it. Cassie deserved better than me. She’d see that soon enough.
My birthday night came and went by quickly. After my adventure into the lost path to D ‘or, I drank with purpose, trying to erase the memory of the empty streets. I had hidden the paper with the QR code I had found in my closet. Cassie had mentioned days before that her sister was staying with her, so I assumed she would come over to mine after the bar. I’d ask her about her name sometime, but I didn’t have the mental bandwidth for additional mystery that night. Several drinks in, I was beginning to forget.
“What’s this one to?” Someone inserted through the thump of a bassline and the muddled din of the crowded bar.
“To the best night of our lives!” Another voice shouted, bleeding together with the rest. Fuck. It might have been my voice.
“And to Wats for being such an old fuck!” Amaria sang.
I licked salt from my hand, threw back the now comfortable burn of tequila and bit into the tart flesh of yet another lime. Then lips were on mine—soft lips with the sticky cling of lip gloss. I felt a tongue in my mouth and a hand on my crotch and my head spun as another round of shots tapped together on the table.
“—and you can fuck me in the ass tonight, if you want,” Cassie’s voice whispered in my ear as a hand crept across my chest. Amaria was looking at me. I looked away and back at the table.
Salt. Shot. Lime.
“—actually comes from the Latin for beauty, although—“
Another vagrant chunk of conversation.
Clink. Shot.
“Here—take this, babe.”
I swallowed a tiny pill. I wasn’t going to remember any of this, was I? I drank too quickly, too early. Another shot. Cloying this time. A buttery nipple maybe. I slammed the glass down. I blew out a candle on a cupcake.
“Make a wish!”
I probably did. I don’t remember what it was though.
“Oh my god, finally! Uber’s here.”
The lights in the bar were bright. Last call? Then there was a song playing in the car. I felt lips on my neck. A press-on fingernail beneath my nostril. I held the other nostril shut and inhaled. My heart was pounding. My belt buckle clanked as it hit the floor. I was pulling a red g-string toward me and it caught on the back of a stiletto.
“Yeah..nice and slow. And play with my—“
I was in bed as the room spun in repeating half rotations.
“—been waiting so long, babe.“
The edge of a rolled dollar bill scraped against my chest, as hair that was so similar to Amaria’s tickled my bare skin.
“Just lie back.”
Easy enough. My heart jostled the inside of my rib cage in warbling beats. I closed my eyes.
Then I was awake.
An unconscious Cassie sprawled naked in the bed beside me, as late morning light streamed through an open window. Her arm laid across my neck, and I wondered if the best night of your life is the kind of thing you would even remember. Then I remembered my walk. The liquor had erased it in the moment, but now, the memory began to seep back in. And then I began to remember our first drinks the night before.
I had stayed silent about my trial run toward D ‘or. And in my silence, we had agreed to go through with it. Me, Amaria, Kit and Cassie. I hadn’t told them then about what I went through, and now we were going back. Amaria and Kit seemed excited. Cassie did too. I just felt like like getting black out drunk. Mission accomplished, I guess.
Cassie stayed until the early afternoon. She playfully refused to put on clothes and we ended up fucking again. As she was getting dressed, she tied her g-string around my wrist like a morning after corsage and I wanted so badly for her to be enough. But she wasn’t. So I let her kiss me as I lay in bed and she let herself out. As soon as I heard the door close, I called Amaria.
“Afternoon, sunshine,” she said. “You were in rare form last night.”
“Fuck… I’m sure. Hey, I didn’t say anything weird did I? I think I blacked out—or—I know I did, but I don’t remember when.”
She laughed. “Weird? Hmm, I mean confessing to a very detailed sex dream about Kit—is that weird?”
“Your jokes were probably actually funny when I was shitfaced.”
“Booo! My jokes are hilarious always. And anyway, you were too busy almost fucking Cassie at the table to notice them.”
“I do remember having a tongue in my mouth. I think she was chewing cinnamon gum.”
“My god Watson! A clue!”
I laughed and then we were laughing together. “I do what I can, Ms. Holmes. But seriously, anything weird?”
“Umm..you were kinda grilling your PDA princess about her name at one point. Asking if she had family nearby, which—by the way—is definitely something you should’ve probably talked about by date two or so.”
I sighed guiltily. “…And?”
“She said her sister was staying with her for a while and—I don’t know—she said her last name was Italian for beautiful or something. Kinda seemed like a low key flex, but if I’m being completely honest, I mean, I’d probably go for her. Kind of a doppelbang, but..”
“Uhh..you’re both pretty, but you don’t really look alike. Only kinda.”
“Uh-huh.” She lilted.
Fuck. They did look alike. I felt slimy all of the sudden. But then, Cassie and I just sort of happened; I hadn’t intentionally sought her out. So, I tried to cling to that comfortable defense as I redirected the conversation to something less pathologically revealing.
“So anyway, I might have, maybe tried the D ‘or thing last night. Before the bar.”
“What the fuck, dude! Without me?”
“I was curious. And I think I just wanted to see.”
“But you came to the bar, so—so I guess it’s not real then?” She sighed. “Damnit. I thought for sure there was something more than a story.”
She sounded deflated. She wanted this place to be real for some reason, but I had never sensed the urgency in her interest before.
“Mar…I think it might be. Real, I mean.”
“Wait, what? So you did find it?”
“No, but I found the chalk. And I found the bald man.”
“Shit, Wats. Did you…”
“No. I couldn’t. I brought the knife, but…he got away. I couldn’t do it.”
She was quiet. Thinking. I could almost hear her asking herself the question—could I do it? Could I stab a stranger for a great night?
“Mar, the bald man isn’t normal. I don’t think he’s human. But if you’re going, then I’m going. I’ll do it. I won’t hesitate this time.”
“Okay,” she sighed. “Not human?”
“I know that sounds weird, but there’s more. I don’t know if this place is good. I mean maybe it is. But there’s something dark there too. It’s not just me that thinks so either. Cassie’s been. She also said there was something off about the place…”
Amaria had questions and I tried to answer them. I told her about getting lost in the emptiness, but as we discussed, we always returned to Kit. He had had a great time at D ‘or. He had done the path to the club correctly. And when he had said ‘best night of my damn life,’ I believed him.
Amaria also seemed to have a strange fascination with the lifeless version of our city I had wandered. It wasn’t like her to belabor a memory of despair. But she did. It brought a question to my mind.
“Why do you wanna go? Really.” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’ve searched for this place, tried to find it, and a few minutes ago when you thought I had only found a story, you seemed—I don’t know—not okay with that.”
She didn’t answer right away. More thinking.
“I want to have a good time, Watson.”
It was a lie. I knew it was. But I let the lie fester in silence.
“Fuck,” she breathed finally. “I didn’t want to ever have to tell you this. I wanted to find a way to fix it and be done with it. It’s about Mira and something Kit mentioned about D ‘or and about Mira’s fucked little gifts. Watson—she didn’t just send them to you.”
My stomach lurched.
Mira had been a chapter of my life I had tried to forget. We had gone on a few dates while I was trying to make up for a night that complicated my relationship with Amaria. Mira had slept over after our third date. She said that she was leaving while I was in the shower the morning after, but she didn’t. She hid under my bed. She stayed there for days, sneaking out while I was asleep to look for food. She took pictures of my feet from beneath the bed, recordings of me singing in the shower, but she stayed so quiet.
I only found her because Amaria had misplaced a sweater and thought she might have left it with me. I had checked underneath my bed for it. Mira was there, grinning and clutching a torn photo of Amaria and me. Before I had a chance to react, her grin fell abruptly and she whispered, “I want you more.“
And then in the coming months, the mason jars began to show up. Her fucked little gifts.
“What the fuck?! Amaria—are you fucking serious?! What the fuck did she send you?! And how did you not tell me?! Jesus!”
“I didn’t want you to worry about me. You would have—“
“You’re damn right!”
“Watson! Chill! Please.. I’m not a porcelain doll that needs to be handled, okay? But…you were back then. You were paranoid. Checking closets and cupboards. You weren’t sleeping and when we talked you were always stoned out of your mind or a thousand miles away and it fucking gutted me. …Because it was my fault.”
“What? Mar—“
“I said we should try and then I pulled away from it. That was on me. I did that.”
“Amaria, you’re gay. You didn’t do that, you just are that. And I wanted there to be an exception to that long before that night—“
“I did too!”
“I know. I know you did and you tried. For me. For us. And I don’t blame you for that and neither should you.”
“But I did. I do. We got weird and you texted ‘Sherlock’ and I didn’t text back for weeks because I was fucking scared of what you’d say. And then you went out for dinner with her.”
“Mar, Mira was a psychopath. She had been following me for months before that dinner. She got into my Google account for Christ’s sake. She was waiting for her moment because she’s a fucking predator.”
“I know,” Amaria said, suddenly sounding so small. “But I feel like I gave her that moment.”
“That’s not true. You know it’s not.”
I heard Amaria crying. I felt a sting in my eyes too.
“Mar?”
“I love you, Watson. I really fucking love you.”
“I love you too.”
We shared a silence that felt cheapened by the phones between us, but eventually the sound of crying sniffled to an end. Amaria laughed weakly.
“I’m glad you can’t see me right now. I’m a fucking mess.”
“I don’t know. I like you when you’re gross. It’s… humanizing.”
She laughed more and I let it ring little reverberations of warmth through me. I wanted that moment to stay. I wanted her to keep laughing. But I needed to know.
“Mar, what does D ‘or have to do with Mira?”
She paused again.
“When I talked to Kit about it initially, he told me that some people go to D ‘or and don’t come back. It was a rumor. A warning, kinda. But then, you got lost, so I thought, maybe..”
“That’s…creepy, but what does it—”
“Mira sent me a mason jar maybe a month ago. It was stuffed with a dead squirrel.”
“Uhh—”
“Lemme finish. There was a matchbook wrapped in plastic inside of the squirrel. She had hollowed out its belly and I could see it through the glass. Then I was with Kit later on in the day and I was fiddling with the matches and he asked me if I had finally found my way to the club. He said he recognized the logo on them. Anyway, inside of the matchbook she wrote something: ‘come find me or—or I’ll come find you.’”
“What the fuck. What the—Amaria! You got that a month ago?”
“She sent you worse…”
She had. Doll hands stuffed with rotting meat, a live mouse stuck to a glue trap, a pair of wedding rings with a bloody razor blade. Each of her little mason jars had been disturbing in its own right, but
“That’s not the point. Fuck. She’s probably been following you.”
“I know Wats. I know. But I didn’t want this—what you’re doing right now. Worrying about me and freaking out about her.”
She was right. I felt my face prickling and my heart pounding. But then I remembered Cassie’s advice from the night before. I took a deep breath, held it, shut my eyes and focused on the distant sound of a passing train.
“Watson?”
I exhaled. “I’m fine. Ish.” Another slow breath and my mind slowed with it. “Do you think she’s there? At D ‘or?”
“Maybe. I mean, if not, why the matchbook? Why that matchbook? You used to talk about her games and how she’d toy with you.”
I felt goosebumps rise on my arms and my mind returned to the empty streets. The vacant windows and the silence. A quiet place to watch unseen. I shivered thinking of the staring eyes I might have missed, but I was damn glad to have missed them if they were there.
“I will say, the lost path seems like Mira. That makes sense for her. But D ‘or is supposed to be—I don’t know—like, sexy wild fun, right? Why would she go there?”
“Because we would.”
The notion was disconcerting. Uneasy like a spider hiding in a flower to catch a bug. But Mira wanted to catch Amaria, apparently. I want you more. Amaria was an obstacle to Mira’s obsession. It wasn’t safe for her.
“Then I’ll go, Amaria. Alone. If she’s there I’ll find her. She won’t hurt me.”
“You will-fucking-not, Watson. And you don’t know what she’ll do. But if people disappear there, if people go and don’t come back, then I want to try to end this. I don’t want her coming back.”
I heard the conviction in her voice, but this—Amaria running into some secret place outside of reality—it’s what Mira wanted. She’d be waiting, hiding.
“I don’t want to lose you, Mar. If we’re going and she’s there, we need to be fucking careful, okay?”
“You won’t. And we will.”
I tried to think of positive outcomes and not of Mira lying in wait. But then I remembered the paper I had found on the lost path to D ‘or. It was still tucked away in my closet. Hand written. Pulchritudo D ‘or. I told Amaria about it.
“Is that why you were asking Cassie about her name?”
“I don’t know. Maybe? Do you think it’s something from Mira?”
“Fuck, Wats, possibly. Why don’t you check it? Use that old phone you have with the cracked screen, just in case it’s something…virus-y.”
“Yeah. Right. Smart.”
She sighed. “And also, I know what Cassie is to you. I see the way you look at the girls you date. I know you tell them that you’re not up for serious and think that lets you off the hook. But I don’t know if Mira would know that. Cassie deserves to know if she’s in danger.”
Real talk Amaria was a side of her that I needed even though sometimes it did make me feel like shit.
“Do you think I’m a bad person, Mar?”
“You’re a person who says I love you. And I’m a person who knows you mean it. If you’re bad, then we’re bad. But I love you too.”
I kindled the guilt obscuring warmth of those words and found myself smiling in spite of everything else.
“I’ll let you know what I find with that QR code. And Amaria…Sherlock.”
“Doctor. Always.”
Waiting for my old phone to charge felt like babysitting the button for a bomb. I paced around my bedroom and thought about Friday night. It was only a day away. So little time to prepare for something beyond another night of easy drunken revelry. If Mira had left the paper, that meant she knew things about the pathway to D ‘or that we didn’t. It meant that she knew I was there and that she found me when I couldn’t even find me. We’d have to be careful, vigilant. Because whether we were or not, she would be.
The screen lit up a minute or so later and I sat, phone in hand, with a scanning square aimed at the white of the page. I inhaled a long breath and finally thought, Fuck it.
The code opened a website with a background like dark, pitted concrete. In the center of the screen was a line drawing of what looked like part of a butterfly wing emerging from the stitched seam of a cocoon. Below it was a familiar line of text:
For Sale: Birthday Suit, Worn Once
Below that was a button icon marked:
BUY
My thumb hovered as I searched and researched the webpage for anything else, but I knew that was it. ‘Buy’ with no price and a meaningless picture and a reference to a Hemingway story about a miscarriage. My thumb had hovered long enough though.
I clicked. Nothing happened. I waited, clicked again. As soon as I did, the screen went black. I barely had time to be frustrated when there was a knock at the door to my apartment.
I jumped at the sound—three solid raps followed by silence. I got to the door quickly enough, but I hesitated when it came to looking through the peephole. I imagined Mira’s grinning face or possibly worse, a mason jar in the hallway to open an old wound. My pulse quickened as I brought my eye to the tiny circular window. Somehow, I hadn’t considered how much worse seeing nothing would be.
The hallway was empty. I watched for the movement of shadows, but the space stood in suddenly eerie stasis. I had heard a knock, right? I thought I had. I’m sure I had. Hadn’t I? The chain was fastened on the door. I convinced myself it was enough as my hand touched the deadbolt, twisted and then turned the knob below it.
I winced. But there was nothing. Nothing happened. So I looked through the cracked door. And saw a brown cardboard delivery box.
I went and got a knife from the kitchen before I took off the chain. But I did take it off. No Mira. Just a box. On top of which was a single word:
WATSON
Written in red chalk. In my handwriting. The same ‘Watson’ I had written on the sidewalk, inside a circle, on a lonesome walk toward D ‘or.
r/decogent