Authors: Beth Saulnier
Ecstasy
Reliable Sources
Distemper
The Fourth Wall
Bad Seed
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2003 by Beth Saulnier
All rights reserved.
Originally published in hardcover by Mysterious Press
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
The Grand Central Publishing name and logo are registered trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56601-8
Dedicated to the memory
of
Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl,
a fellow alumnus of the
North Adams Transcript
who died in the line of duty
Contents
With many thanks to: Sara Ann Freed, my beloved editor
Jimmy Vines, agent extraordinaire
Miss C. A. Carlson, weaver of diabolical plots
Seth Adelson and Jackie Cerretani for “Melting Rock” insights
Susan Bloom for coming up with the title
Mark Anbinder, iMac wrangler and man-about-town
&
special thanks, as always, to David Bloom for being himself
I
still wonder what it was like for him in those last minutes—lying there alone, the nylon walls close against him in the dark,
the only light coming from the kaleidoscope in his own head. I wonder if he was scared; did he know what was happening to
him was the
end,
or was he just too out of it to realize? And if he did know, did he kick himself for it?
His death, after all, can in great measure be chalked up to his own stupidity. You can argue all you want about the fundamental
nature of justice, you can point out that the punishment didn’t really fit the crime, but the bottom line is that although
other people were obviously responsible for his death, he damn well helped; somehow, this clueless seventeen-year-old boy
managed to be both victim and accomplice.
I barely knew him, so it’s probably nuts even to speculate, but at the moment I can’t seem to stop. Maybe that’s because lately
I’ve come across so many kids just like him, or because I’ve spent so many hours trying to walk in his patched-up Birkenstocks.
Either way, right now his last hour or so on earth is incredibly vivid in my imagination. And I’ll tell you the truth: I really,
really wish it weren’t.
But it is. And I picture it like this:
He crawls into the tent, strips down to the childish white underpants they’ll find him in. He’s full, probably uncomfortably
so; the coroner will find a gigantic amount of food in his stomach—falafel and veggie chili and peanut butter cups he put
away a couple of hours before, probably in an attack of the munchies from all the grass he smoked that afternoon.
A different sort of guy might want company, but later his friends will say that wasn’t his style. He likes to be by himself,
savor the moment—open his mind to new realities, I suppose he’d say. He prefers to lie by himself in the dark and wait for
the universe to open up and swallow him, to take him on some dopey journey of the imagination; the next morning (or more likely
afternoon) he’ll tell his friends all about it over a whole wheat bagel with extra honey.
So he pins a sign to the tent that says—no kidding—
TRIPPING, DO NOT DISTURB
. He zips up the flap and lies on top of his sleeping bag mostly naked, since the late-August heat is all but unbearable,
even if you’re in your right mind. He pulls his long corkscrew curls out of their usual ponytail and wraps the elastic around
his flashlight. He lights the candle on the milk crate beside him, but only long enough to let the scent of sage waft over
to him. He blows it out after a minute or so, not only because he craves the dark but because he knows you’re never supposed
to have an open flame inside a tent; later, when his friends are called upon to eulogize, they’ll say he was a kick-ass camper.
He’s happy, at least that’s the way I imagine it. He’s utterly in his element, a skinny little fish gliding in his favorite
pond. Within a few hundred yards are most of the people on the planet who really matter to him—guys he’s been skateboarding
with since he was ten, girls he’s danced with and gotten high with and screwed, and no hard feelings afterward.
The night feels alive around him; it’s loud with laughter and bits of conversations, all of them important—some pondering
the next band on the playlist, others the fundamental meaning of the universe. There’s music everywhere, coming from so many
sources and directions it’s impossible to separate them, innumerable voices and bass lines and drum beats going
thump-thump-thump
inside his chest.
He closes his eyes, because even before the candle goes out there’s no need for vision. His other senses are on overload,
and he likes it. If he’s feeling this much even before the drug really kicks in, he knows he’s in for one hell of a ride.
This is the moment he likes best, when it’s just starting and he’s not quite sure which world he’s in. At first, the sensations
are slow, sneaky, subtle—fictions masquerading as fact. The beginning of a trip is like crossing a river, he’s always said;
you can try to stay on the rocks of reality, but the closer you get to the other side, the wetter you’re going to get.
I have no idea how long he balances in the netherworld between here and elsewhere; for his sake, I hope it’s a while. But
eventually, he segues into something infinitely wilder—and since my personal experience with mind-expanding drugs is essentially
nil (my head being kooky enough without the addition of psychotropics), I have a hard time imagining it. When I ponder the
usual stereotypes—shooting stars and melting walls and talking rhinos and such—it just seems pathetic, and I know he didn’t
see it that way. To him it was something profound, something worth stretching yourself, maybe even scaring yourself, just
for the sake of the experience.
But was it something worth dying for? That much I seriously doubt. But there’s no arguing with the fact that that’s precisely
what happened.
At some point, quite when I don’t know, things start to go wrong. His mouth goes dry. He gets a raging headache. Maybe his
stomach starts to hurt; then it starts to hurt
bad.
He can barely breathe. Eventually, he can’t breathe at all.
I wonder if he thinks it’s all just part of the experience—that he’s taking some dark spirit journey to the edge of his own
demise. (And, okay, I know that sounds like your typical druggie-hippie crap; it just goes to show you how much time I’ve
been spending with these people.) How nasty a surprise must it have been to realize that it wasn’t a fantasy version of death,
but the real thing?
But there’s another possibility—one that’s even more unpleasant, if such a thing is possible. From what I’ve been told, physical
well-being is essential to the enjoyment of your average acid trip. The symptoms he must have experienced, then, could very
well have sent him spiraling into the same mental purgatory that keeps cowards like me limited to gin, Marlboro Lights, and
the (very) occasional joint.
This seventeen-year-old boy, in other words, may not have died in just physical agony; he may have died in mental agony as
well.
Serious
mental agony. Through the magic of chemistry, his was an anguish not necessarily bounded by the normal limits of the human
mind. It’s a horrible thing to contemplate, to tell you the truth. There’s plenty of pain in the conscious world, after all;
how much must there be when the pit is well and truly bottomless?
When they finally found him, he was in the fetal position—curled up tight, knees against his chest, stringy arms wrapped around
each other. The doctors say this doesn’t necessarily mean anything about his last moments, but frankly, I don’t buy it. As
far as I’m concerned, it means he didn’t go peacefully.
Because, after all, neither did any of the others.
1
A
ugust in a college town is its own special brand of torture. The living is easy, the weather is still gorgeous, and the students
have been gone so long you have a hard time remembering what the place is really like nine months out of the year. You have
these vaguely distasteful images of crowded restaurants and SUV-driving frat boys and gaggles of tummy-shirted coeds, but
none of it seems real. You soak up the delicious moments—when you get a parking place right smack in front of the multiplex,
say, or you go out for a drink without having some postadolescent moron comment on your cleavage—and you fantasize that maybe,
just maybe, they’re never coming back. Maybe the leaves will stay on the trees forever, and the streets will always be open
and empty, and the new semester will never come.
But deep down, you know it will. Damn it all, it will—and it always does.
It used to be that October made me feel wistful, what with impending winter and the smell of decay in the air and the knowledge
that you weren’t going to get to wear shorts again for a very long time. But since I moved to Gabriel five or so years ago,
my wistfulness threshold has been pushed back a good two months. Maybe it’s just because people around here are too smart
to ever really be happy, but we townies tend to start feeling blue three weeks before Labor Day, and we don’t really shake
it until graduation.
I mention all this by way of explaining that although late summer/ early fall in this ZIP code can be a tough pill to swallow,
by all that’s holy, last August should’ve been comparatively jolly. I was, after all, celebrating the fact that I had recently
avoided being killed on three separate occasions within a matter of weeks—rather a nifty accomplishment, if you ask me. The
newspaper where I work was, for the first time in recent memory, fully staffed. And—here’s the cherry on the sundae—my boyfriend,
who I’d been fearing was about to move away and break my little heart, showed every sign of staying put. Even the imminent
return of fifteen thousand undergraduates couldn’t put the kibosh on my good mood.
If I tried to put my finger on when everything went to hell, well…it wouldn’t be too hard. That would be when I walked into
the newsroom around eleven on a Wednesday morning in mid-August. I’d walked out of there precisely ten hours earlier, after
covering a particularly pissy county board meeting that went until nearly midnight, then scrambling to slap together three
(mercifully short) stories by my one
A.M
. deadline. Then I’d gone home to hold the crying towel for my roommate, Melissa, whose boyfriend had recently—you guessed
it—moved away and broken her little heart.
So it was without a whole lot of sleep that I went back to work, toting a bagel with diet olive cream cheese and blissfully
unaware of how much my life was about to suck. I poured some coffee into my big Gabriel Police Department mug, one of several
recent gifts my aforementioned boyfriend had proffered to celebrate the fact of me not being dead. Then I sat down at my desk
and tried to figure out which of the county board stories was going to need a follow-up for the next day’s paper.
I’m not sure how long it took me to figure out something weird was up. I do recall that my first clue was that I was the only
reporter on the cityside desk; come to think of it, I was the only reporter in the entire newsroom. It was way too early for
the sports guys, but there should’ve at least been someone else around
somewhere;
as it was, though, the owner of every single
Gabriel Monitor
byline was nowhere to be found.
