The night terrors eventually became less frequent, but by that point I had the real-life nightmare of the accident with Annie Connors to deal with, and not long after that, the death of my parents.
* * *
—
As I was sitting there, in that diner, frozen in place in the pitch-blackness, I wondered what it would be like to live there in the in-between place forever. It felt cool and quiet, but it didn’t feel evil or scary. It was more…indifferent—like, no matter what happened to me or anybody else, the darkness was always going to be there: cold, unfeeling, and constant.
In that moment, I thought back to what my mother had said that night, how I’d be able to choose the correct path. All I had to do was make a choice.
I cleared my mind of everything but Chloe. I thought about the way her eyes lit up when she was excited, the way her lips tasted against mine, her smart-ass smile, and then I was moving, rushing past the currents.
My body soon felt like it was sinking, floating, and flying at the same time. I understood that if I didn’t make a choice soon, there was a chance I’d be stuck, lost in that endless darkness forever. So I reached down.
I felt something solid.
It was Chloe’s hand.
I pulled her up and away from the booth, and suddenly the two of us were sprinting toward the door.
“Don’t turn around,” I said as we ran, but Chloe was already looking over her shoulder.
“I think it’s okay,” she said. “There’s nothing there.”
“Swan and the twins?” I asked, as the two of us shoved open the front doors of the diner and burst out onto the sidewalk.
“Gone,” Chloe said. “I turned back and they weren’t there anymore.”
We kept running up the street and didn’t slow down until we reached Chloe’s car.
“Did you see anything…strange in the diner?” I asked as I opened the passenger-side door and slipped inside.
Chloe was shaking as she got into the car beside me and started it up. “I didn’t really see anything, but I…felt something.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Something really fucking scary.”
40
THE HORNS OF TERZOS
Chloe and I drove around for half an hour to make sure nobody was following us, and then we made our way back to her place. We walked up the steps to her building, arms around each other in comfortable but exhausted silence.
Once inside her unit, Chloe flipped on the lights and I tossed my jacket over a dining room chair.
The two of us shared a bag of slightly stale barbecue chips and an enormous can of Japanese beer while we rewatched a horror movie from 1977 called The Sentinel. Eventually, we fell asleep in each other’s arms, listening to the new album by David Bowie.
* * *
—
Half an hour later, I woke up and bolted upright in bed. “Fuck.”
“What?” Chloe said.
“I need your keys.”
Chloe held the building’s front door open as I ran out to her car and grabbed the copy of Steely Dan’s Gaucho that I’d purchased in the pop-up record shop. After the chaos at the diner I’d forgotten all about it.
We hurried back upstairs and unwrapped the album.
Chloe dug up what Baron had always referred to as her portable hipster picnic turntable, and the two of us read along with the lyrics while we listened.
There didn’t appear to be anything there, no secret message carved into the vinyl, no words hidden in between the lines.
But there was also no song called “Third World Man.”
I grabbed the cassette player we’d borrowed from the Magician’s office, and we relistened to the track that our song ID app had identified as “Third World Man.”
“It’s a different song,” I said.
“What?” Chloe asked.
“On the vinyl. It’s different.”
The song “Third World Man” wasn’t on the version of the album that we’d just purchased. In its place was another song titled “Were You Blind That Day.” The music sounded the same, but there were different lyrics.
It was a different song.
We flipped the album over and checked the track listing. The fourth song on side B was called “Were You Blind That Day,” not “Third World Man.”
Chloe jumped up and asked me to play both versions again.
“That’s so weird,” she said.
I did an online search and found something immediately.
Our audio fingerprint app had identified both songs as “Third World Man,” but it was incorrect.