Page 5 of Killer of the Bells
I’d gone back multiple times, but the worst thing I found was a pixie orgy in full swing, and I noped myself right out of that situation. Pixies aren’t dangerous, just disgusting, so I had no reason to stick around.
I’d begun to think I’d imagined the whole thing until the Bethany incident.
One day, I showed up at my office to discover the TA I shared the space with was gone. Her desk was empty and covered with dust, and no one knew who she was when I tried to find her. It was like she never existed.
She was no one special to me. Just another fake person in a fake reality I was trapped inside. If I hadn’t remembered her telling me the day before about her afternoon plans, she would have become nothing more than a curious footnote in the long string of experiences of my life.
Not even an overly curious one. The town I live in is seriously fucking weird, so something has to really stand out to hold on to my attention.
Interestingly enough, I seem to be one of the few people here who notice any of the weirdness. The weekly late-night light shows on the edges of campus? I only get weird looks for pointing them out. The tiny, flying bird horses that openly steal people’s food? No one sees them even when it’s happening right in front of them. They also don’t notice the pixies or the groundskeeper, who always looks slightly different every time I see him. Not in a,Hey, did you get a new haircut?kind of way, but more of aWasn’t that mole currently on your cheek on your chin yesterday? kind of way.
So, after remembering that Bethany had planned to take a hike at the reservoir right before going missing, I knew I hadn’t imagined Lyle’s death.
So, there I was, only a handful of days after the Bethany incident, wandering around the reservoir, pretending that it was perfectly normal for me to be hiking at night in the freezing cold with no gear and highly impractical shoes.
Eventually, I sat down on a rock ledge overlooking the vast body of water I’d chosen to be my potential final resting site. I was tired, and I wanted to be well rested in case I had to give up and go home once more.
I was deeply regretting not bringing any cigarettes. It happened every time I came to the reservoir. I decided not to bring them because smoking in the woods is a huge no-no, and I didn’t want to have a forest fire on my conscience when I reached the great beyond.
No, I don’t believe there’s someone in the afterlife judging us. I believe we get to judge ourselves. Who better to know what we’ve done? Whatever our moral code is, we’re the ones we have to justify our actions to, and I believe some higher partof ourselves decides what we should do next. And since I don’t want my higher self to force me to take yet another spin on the wheel just to learn about fire safety, I’m going to be careful in the woods.
Because the longer I spend reincarnating, the longer it’ll be before I can see my family again.
I lost them, you see. Every last one of them. My bio-family was lost to a car accident on Christmas when I was in my single digits. I don’t know why I was the only one to survive, but I do know that it sucks beyond telling. The only things I remember about my family are warm, cozy Christmas mornings and absolutely stellar summer vacations. And laughter. So much laughter.
I got lucky—if you can call it that—and found an amazing foster family, Rob and Evan. They took me in and treated me like one of their own. They were an older couple who’d had a hell of a time adopting, so when they finally got their hands on me, they treated me like I was more precious than gold.
It was hard for me to come to terms with the loss of my bio-family. My mom, dad, and baby brother… losing them was more than I could bear, and I became an unresponsive, reclusive child for a long time. Rob and Evan never gave up on me and made sure to find me all the help I needed.
It took me years to heal from the loss of my family, but eventually I came to love Evan and Rob as much as I loved my bio-family. Then, when I was away at a high school skiing trip over Christmas break, they were victims of a home invasion gone wrong.
I’d come home on Christmas Day to find their bodies. I went catatonic and sat with them for a long time before someone found us.
I didn’t remember much after that. I didn’t remember much of anything from that time. I was little more than a cavernoushole that echoed back whatever people said, and it earned me the nickname Echo. I didn’t remember who gave it to me, but I didn’t fight it because it suited me. Why not run with it?
There was very little I could say on my own, though with extreme effort, I could add a few new words to the conversation to get my point across. It was exhausting, though, and I didn’t like doing it. The more words of my own I had to add, the more I craved my bed.
It was a bitch to get through college like that. It took a ton of occupational therapy and extreme intervention from my angel of a social worker, Miranda, to get me to my current post-grad student status and my job as a TA to the best archeology professor on the eastern seaboard.
After dozens of meetings (courtesy of the university DEI department breathing down everyone’s necks.) and compromises with the school, my advisor, and my professor, I’d managed to settle into a stable, if exhausting, life.
I worked on my thesis. I graded homework and gave lectures my professor didn’t want to give, each one fully memorized, because it was a nifty workaround for my verbal disability. I went home alone and climbed into bed to sleep until I had to start the process all over again.
That was it. Other than occasionally doing something reckless, I plodded along through life, doing exactly what I was supposed to do. Nothing more. Nothing less.
So, I didn’t think of much as I sat on the rock, watching the water. I stayed long after the moon came up, and my ass and feet went numb from the cold.
Just as I decided to give up, go home, and crawl into my warm bed, I heard a dark, silky voice next to my ear say, “Little idiot. Why would you come here again?”
I’d heard nothing, and yet the man had gotten so close that I could feel his warm breath on my neck. I gave a relieved sigh and relaxed.
Completely unprompted, I whispered, “Finally,” and tilted my head to give the monster better access.
Chapter
Three
VALE
