Becca Fitzpatrick: Crescendo

We pushed on, and I felt the eerie sensation that we were being followed. I spun back, but the darkness was consuming. If someone was back there, I couldn’t see.

“Do you think Scott could have followed us?” I asked Rixon, keeping my voice low.

Rixon stopped, turned back. Listened. After a moment, he said with certainty, “There’s no one there.”

We were continuing our hurried pace toward the mechanical room, when I once again felt a presence behind me. My scalp tingled, and I cut a look over my shoulder. This time, the outline of a face materialized through the darkness. I almost cried out, and then the outline solidified into a distinct and familiar face.

My dad.

His blond hair was bright against the darkness, his eyes shining, yet sad. I love you.

“Dad?” I whispered. But I took a cautionary step back. I reminded myself of the last times. He was a trick. A lie.

I’m sorry I had to leave you and your mom.

I willed him to disappear. He wasn’t real. He was a threat. He wanted to hurt me. I remembered the way he’d yanked my arm through the townhouse window and tried to cut me. I remembered how he’d chased me through the library.

But his voice was the same gentle coaxing he’d used that very first time at the townhouse. Not the stern, sharp voice that had replaced it. It was his voice.

I love you, Nora. Whatever happens, promise me you’ll remember that. I don’t care how or why you came into my life, only that you did. I don’t remember all the things I did wrong. I remember what I did right. I remember you. You made my life meaningful. You made my life special.

I shook my head, trying to sweep out his voice, wondering why Rixon wasn’t saying anything—couldn’t he see my dad? Wasn’t there anything we could do to make him go away? But the truth of the matter was, I didn’t want his voice to stop. I didn’t want him to leave. I wanted him to be real. I needed him to wrap his arms around me and tell me everything was going to be all right. Most of all, I longed for him to come home.

Promise you’ll remember.

Tears dripped down my cheeks. I promise, I thought back, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me.

An angel of death helped me come here to see you. She’s holding time still for us, Nora. She’s helping me speak to your mind. There’s something important I need to tell you, but I don’t have much time. I have to go back soon, and I need you to listen carefully.

“No,” I choked, my voice coming out strangled. “I’m going with you. Don’t leave me here. I’m going with you! You can’t leave me again! ”

I can’t stay, baby. I belong somewhere else now.

“Please don’t go,” I sobbed, clutching my fists against my chest as if I could stop my heart from swelling. A certain desperate panic seized me when I thought of him leaving again. My sheer sense of abandonment outweighed everything else. He was going to leave me here. In the fun house. In the dark, with no one to help me but Rixon. “Why are you leaving me all over again? I need you!”

Touch Rixon’s scars. The truth is there.

My dad’s face receded into the darkness. I reached out to stop him, but his face turned into a ribbon of fog at my touch. The silvery white threads dissolved into the darkness.

“Nora?”

I started at the sound of Rixon’s voice. “We have to hurry,” he said, as if no more than a ripple of time had passed. “We don’t want to meet up with Scott in the outer ring of the tunnels, where all the entrances feed.”

My dad was gone. For reasons I couldn’t explain, I knew I’d seen him for the last time. The pain and loss was unbearable. At the moment when I needed him most, when I was heading into the tunnels, scared and lost, he’d left me to face this alone.

“I can’t see where I’m going,” I gasped, swatting my eyes dry, struggling through the frustrating process of trying to focus my thoughts on one specific goal: getting to the tunnels and meeting Vee on the other side. “I need something to hold.”

Rixon impatiently thrust the hem of his shirt out to me. “Hold the back of my shirt and follow me. Keep up. We haven’t got a lot of time.”

I squeezed the worn cotton between my fingers, my heart beating stronger. Inches away was the bare skin of his back. My dad had told me to touch his scars; it would be so easy now. All I had to do was slide my hand …

Succumb to the dark suction that would swallow me whole …

I thought back to the times I’d touched Patch’s scars, and how I’d been briefly transported inside his memory. Without a shred of doubt, I knew touching Rixon’s scars would do the same thing.

I didn’t want to go. I wanted to keep my feet under me, get to the tunnels, and get out of Delphic.

But my dad had come back to tell me where to find the truth. Whatever I’d see in Rixon’s past, it had to be important. As much as it hurt to know my dad had left me here, I had to trust him. I had to trust he’d risked everything to tell me.

I slid my hand up the back of Rixon’s shirt. I felt smooth skin … then a bumpy ridge of scar tissue. I splayed my hand against the scar, waiting to be ripped into a strange, foreign world.

The street was quiet, dark. The houses framing both sides of it were derelict, ramshackle. Yards were small and fenced. Windows were boarded or barred. A heavy frost sank its teeth into my skin.

Two loud explosions ruptured the silence. I swung to face the house across the street. Gunshots? I thought in a panic. I immediately searched through my pockets for my cell phone, meaning to call 911, when I remembered I was trapped in Rixon’s memory. Everything I was seeing had happened in the past. I couldn’t change anything now.

The sound of running footsteps rang through the night, and I watched in shock as my dad let himself through the gate of the house across the street and disappeared around the side yard. Without waiting, I took off after him.

“Dad!” I screamed, unable to help myself. “Don’t go back there!” He was wearing the same clothes he’d gone out in the night he’d been killed. I pushed through the gate and met him at the back corner of the house. Sobbing, I threw my arms around him. “We have to go back. We have to get out of here. Something horrible is going to happen.”

My dad walked right through my arms, crossing to a small stone wall that ran alongside the property. He inched down the wall in a crouch, eyes trained on the back door of the house. I leaned into the siding, bowed my head against my arms, and cried. I didn’t want to see this. Why had my dad told me to touch Rixon’s scars? I didn’t want this. Didn’t he know how much pain I’d already suffered?

“Last chance.” The words were spoken from inside the house, drifting out through the open back door.

“Go to hell.”

Another explosion, and I slumped to my knees, pressing myself against the siding, willing the memory to end.

“Where is she?” The question was asked so quietly, so calmly, I almost couldn’t hear it over my soft crying.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my dad move. He crept across the yard, moving toward the door. A gun was in his hand, and he raised it, taking aim. I ran at him, grabbing at his hands, trying to wrestle the gun away from him, trying to push him back into the shadows. But it was like moving a ghost—my hands passed right through him.

My dad pulled the trigger. The shot cut open the night, ripping the silence in half. Again and again he fired. Even though no part of me wanted to, I faced the house, seeing the lean build of the young man my dad was shooting from behind. Just beyond him, another man sat slumped on the floor, his back propped up by the sofa. He was bleeding, and his expression was twisted in agony and fear.