Jeffry Lindsay - Darkly dreaming Dexter

I tried to look surprised and unhappy, and I suppose I managed a reasonable facsimile, because she watched me and then nodded. “Okay,” she repeated, and turned down the first row of stacked shipping containers.

Then I was alone with my shy interior friend. And now what? Now that I had tricked LaGuerta into leaving me the right-hand path, what did I do with it? After all, I had no reason to think it was any better than the left-hand, or for that matter, better than standing by the fence and juggling coconuts. There was only my sibilant internal clamor to direct me, and was that really enough? When you are an icy tower of pure reason as I have always been, you naturally look for logical hints to direct your course of action. Just as naturally, you ignore the nonobjective irrational screeching of loud musical voices from the bottom floor of your brain that try to send you reeling along the path, no matter how urgent they have become in the rippling light of the moon.

And as to the rest, the particulars of where I should go now-I looked around, down the long irregular rows of containers. Off to the side where LaGuerta had gone spike-heeling along, there were several rows of brightly colored truck trailers. And in front of me, stretching off to the right, were the shipping containers.

Suddenly, I was very uncertain. I didn't like the feeling. I closed my eyes. The moment I did, the whispering became a cloud of sound and without knowing why I found myself moving toward a clutter of shipping containers down near the water. I had no conscious notion that these particular containers were any different or better or that this direction was more proper or rewarding. My feet simply jerked into motion and I followed them. It was as if they were tracing some path only the toes could see, or as if some compelling pattern was being sung by the whisper-wail of my internal chorus, and my feet translated and dragged me along.

As they moved the sound grew inside me, a muted hilarious roar, pulling me faster than my feet, yanking me clumsily down the crooked path between boxes with powerful invisible jerks. And yet at the same time a new voice, small and reasonable, was pushing me backward, telling me I did not want to be here of all places, yammering at me to run, go home, get away from this place, and it made no more sense than any of the other voices. I was pulled forward and pushed back at the same time so powerfully that I could not make my legs work properly and I stumbled and fell flat-faced onto the hard rocky ground. I rose to my knees, mouth dry and heart pounding, and paused to finger a rip in my beautiful Dacron bowling shirt. I pushed my fingertip through the hole and wiggled it at myself. Hello, Dexter, where are you going? Hello, Mr. Finger. I don't know, but I'm almost there. I hear my friends calling.

And so I climbed to suddenly unsteady feet and listened. I heard it clearly now, even with my eyes open, and felt it so strongly I could not even walk. I stood for a moment, leaning against one of the containers. A very sobering thought, as if I needed one. Something nameless was born in this place, something that lived in the darkest hidey-hole of the thing that was Dexter, and for the first time that I could remember I was scared. I did not want to be here where horrible things lurked. Yet I had to be here to find Deborah. I was being ripped in half by an invisible tug-of-war. I felt like Sigmund Freud's poster child, and I wanted to go home and go to bed.

But the moon roared in the dark sky above me, the water howled along Government Cut, and the mild night breeze shrieked over me like a convention of banshees, forcing my feet forward. And the singing swelled within me like some kind of gigantic mechanical choir, urging me on, reminding me of how to move my feet, pushing me lock-kneed down the rows of boxes. My heart hammered and yammered, my short gasps of breath were much too loud, and for the first time I could remember I felt weak, woozy, and stupid-like a human being, like a very small and helpless human being.

I staggered along the strangely familiar path on borrowed feet until I could stagger no more and once again I put an arm out to lean against a box, a box with an air-conditioning compressor attached, pounding away at the back and mixing with the shriek of the night, all thumping in my head so loudly now that I could hardly see. And as I leaned against the box the door swung open.

The inside of the box was lit by a pair of battery-powered hurricane lamps. Against the back wall there was a temporary operating table made of packing crates.

And held unmoving in place on the table was my dear sister Deborah.

FOR A FEW SECONDS IT DIDN'T REALLY SEEM necessary to breathe. I just looked. Long, slick strands of duct tape wrapped around my sister's arms and legs. She wore gold lamé hot pants and a skimpy silk blouse tied above her navel. Her hair was pulled back tight, her eyes were unnaturally wide, and she breathed rapidly through her nose, since her mouth, too, was held closed by a strip of duct tape that went across her lips and down to the table to hold her head still.

I tried to think of something to say, but realized my mouth was too dry to say it and so I just looked. Deborah looked back. There were many things in her eyes, but the plainest was fear, and that held me there in the doorway. I had never seen that look on her before and I was not sure what to think about it. I took half a step toward Deborah and she flinched against the duct tape. Afraid? Of course-but afraid of me? I was here to rescue her, most likely. Why should she be afraid of me? Unless-

Had I done this?

During my little “nap” earlier this evening what if Deborah had arrived at my apartment, as scheduled, and found my Dark Passenger behind the wheel of the Dexter-mobile? And unknown to me I had brought her here and taped her so tantalizingly to the table without consciously realizing it-which made absolutely no sense, naturally. Had I raced home and left myself the Barbie doll, then gone upstairs and flopped on the bed and woke up as “me” again, like I was running some kind of homicidal relay race? Impossible: but…

How else had I known to come here?

I shook my head; there was no way I could have picked this one cold box out of all the places in Miami, unless I already knew where it was. And I did. The only way that could be possible was if I had been here before. And if not tonight with Deb, then when and with whom?

“I was almost sure this was the right spot,” a voice said, a voice so very like my own that for a moment I thought I had said it, and I wondered what I meant by that.

The hair went up on the back of my neck and I took another half step toward Deborah-and he came forward out of the shadow. The soft light of the lanterns lit him up and our eyes met; for a moment the room spun back and forth and I did not quite know where I was. My sight shifted between me at the door and him at the small makeshift worktable, and I saw me seeing him, then I saw him seeing me. In a blinding flash I saw me on the floor, sitting still and unmoving, and I did not know what that vision meant. Very unsettling-and then I was myself again, although I was somewhat uncertain what that meant.

“Almost sure,” he said again, a soft and happy voice like Mr. Rogers's troubled child. “But now here you are, so this must be the right place. Don't you think?”

There is no pretty way for me to say this, but the truth is, I stared at him with my mouth hanging open. I am quite sure I was almost drooling. I just stared. It was him. There was no question about it. Here was the man in the pictures we had found on the webcam, the man both Deb and I had thought might very well be me.

This close I could see that he was not, in fact, me; not quite, and I felt a small wave of gratitude at that realization. Hurray-I was someone else. I was not completely crazy yet. Seriously antisocial, of course, and somewhat sporadically homicidal, nothing wrong with that. But not crazy. There was somebody else, and he was not me. Three cheers for Dexter's brain.