18.98: An ONC 2023 Thriller

Chapter 16

ONE YEAR AGO

For nearly two years, Liv worked at her day job and went home at five PM, her overactive brain choosing between two trains of thought to wallow in for the evening: contemplating her mission, Gene, and the ghost frequency or following the plotline of reality television, an avoidance technique that worked better if it was paired with a whiskey and beer chaser. She changed her phone's pin to 1898 so that even during periods of forced forgetfulness, a stubbornly persistent wedge would lodge in her mind.

She pursued her mission in fits and starts. During her fits, the ghost frequency was an IMAX movie, all her senses inundated. Supernatural surround sound. Her vision became one of a raging fire, always wanting to consume while she stood in its wake, on the verge of being incinerated. There was a peace to this violence; whenever she was focused, her existence contingent on an uncontrollable fire, the cloud never appeared in her room. The ghost realm ceased its haunting, as though her attempts and ambitions were enough to call a temporary truce.

It wanted her to do this. She followed the right path. The righteous one.

Even in her frenzied state, having such thoughts frightened her. She existed as both kindling and match. The right path could not be walked upon without her going up in flames.

After a few weeks of relentlessness in which she drank more than she ate, Liv would put the match away, let it sit unstruck, red phosphorus untouched, tucked away in a corner of her mind. She'd give herself over to environmental data analysis, to casual drinking with work colleagues, to sleeping with random people, and to going about the act of forgetting—forgetting meaningless hook-ups and Helina and frequencies and all that mattered to her.

In the middle of forgetting, the hauntings would resume, a whole realm invading Liv's reality to reassert its dominion over her, to remind her she was meant to do these terrible things, no matter the consequences for her.

After all, the voices would chide, it's what you want.

Monsters, clawed fingers, journeys in a shadow world, blood drawn and lines between right and wrong erased. The fear she felt for her ghostly visitors, the reason she shuddered at the thought of traversing their world more than the mental terror they relished in, was that these creatures, this foreign realm, had begun to feel familiar. Were they the enemy if they were helping her? Weren't they enabling her to do what she most wanted?

Kin, they told her, but Liv would not accept this.

"You killed my sister," she'd say to the cloud swirling around her bedroom. "She was my family. You are not what you think you are to me."

This is how we are. This is how you are. They'd laugh and take her from her world again, make her journey through their homeland, a thousand images of horror pressed into her memory like lead type pieces onto paper before they allowed her to return home. She'd look around her normal bedroom, brightly lit by a harsh western sun, and wonder why this place felt no more real to her than where she'd just been.

"There's no coming back." Allen Chen's last message lay in the bottom of a cedar box on top of her dresser. Over the note, she'd placed dried daisies plucked from the fields near the wind turbine that had been the site of her sister's murder. That little box and its contents served as a memorial to him as well as to Penelope. It glowed warm now, its own little furnace, its presence a gateway between the realms that Liv had foolishly failed to acknowledge she'd been harboring. A peace offering from those who could not understand the concept.

That evening, she took the cedar box downstairs and around back to the cement patio where her landlord had built a stone firepit two summers previous. There, Liv took out the match from where she'd stowed it away in her mind and built with it a roaring fire. She barely felt its heat after the years she'd spent living in her own personal hell.