Chapter 15
Aaron was lost in his own consciousness, feeling more at home in dreams than reality. What is happening? How did I get here? Was the catamaran real? Was the explosion, the flirtation with death…
Was all of this Aaron’s true dimension? He was alone in a hospital where confusion seemed to reign supreme; where it seemed like everyone was speaking in low tones of a language he didn’t understand.
Aaron mashed the button for help above his hospital bed, maxing out his strength on the first try. It felt, internally, as if someone had detached all his organs—snipped his veins and capillaries—and rearranged them somehow. He felt all stirred up inside, like his brain was jostled into pieces and scattered all throughout his frame. His heart was no longer in his chest, but somewhere else, somewhere frozen and untouched by light. Aaron felt intrinsically and thoroughly as though he were, for the first time in his life, someone else.
No one answered his call for help. No one came to answer his questions. All he could hear were the shrieking beeps of machines, stoic and unchanging in their monotony. Every now and then, a rustle of hospital scrubs or sneakers squeaking across the linoleum would permeate the sound waves around him, but Aaron felt as though he were slipping deeper and deeper into a comatose state, a trance of quiet bewilderment that fogged over his mind and muddled his tenacity.
In his final grips of consciousness, Aaron pulsed his brain—whirring in the turbulence of disorientation—trying to remember. He found himself lunging toward the final shreds of his reality before everything unraveled, thinking back to the last real, tangible picture his mind could paint: Vanessa. She was with him, rocking softly across the ecstasy in the same rhythm as he was, in the same frequency. Just the thought of her blanketed his body with serenity, calmness radiating through him now just as she’d sent electric spikes through him the night before.
Where is she? Is she in danger? Could she be as close to me as the other side of this wall? Was she waking up from a gripping nightmare as well, chained to a hospital bed with no answers? Aaron’s mind felt overheated with a fiery internal dialogue. He began to shout, but the sound of his voice was lost in the ether, disappearing into an invisible vortex as soon as it left his mouth. He was trapped in some kind of vacuum, menacing in its ordinary stillness.
Physically paralyzed and clutched by mental turbulence, Aaron began to harness all the emotion within him. Like a battery on a charging station, he pulsated internally, rearing back in preparation only to burst forward, out of the prison inside of which he’d awoken. A deluge of physical strength surged through him and his muscles began to pump with energy, emboldening his biceps and quads until finally, his entire body was rippling with newfound expansion. With a simple jerk of his forearm, Aaron snapped the now-flimsy chain of the handcuff that had previously held him prisoner to the hospital bed.
Aaron raced out of the hospital room with unmeasured bemusement. His field of vision was doubling, tripling, warping and folding on itself. It was as if the rage bubbling up inside him served as his only fuel, that without it, he’d still be comatose and trapped within the cage of a nightmare. He could see people, but their faces were scratched away, vague and utterly lacking distinction. Every time he looked in a new direction to solve the mystery of where he was, what he was doing there, and what happened to him, more of the same confusion was revealed.
Eventually, as less and less was making sense around him, Aaron made the decision to simply run away. His muscles were still vibrating with a sort of electrical current that had seemingly been turned to full blast by his own will to escape. And yet, running wild through unmarked hallways that twisted and turned in his limited vision, Aaron caught sight of himself in a pane of glass. Fear overtook him. What he saw wasn’t a man, wasn’t himself, wasn’t the person he knew himself to be. He screamed again into the void.
What Aaron saw when he looked at what he believed to be his own reflection ripped through him, singeing away at his sense of security cell by cell. Looking into the monstrous red eyes glaring back at him, seeing the way the saliva dripped from rows of jagged fangs, taking in the view of the talons he’d sprouted from his knuckles, Aaron wanted to collapse in terror. This was no mortal man, and for a moment, Aaron believed that he was looking at a screen, a picture, some kind of film designed to horrify him. It wasn’t reality. It simply couldn’t be.
And then, sinking under the weight of the realization, everything began to make sense. All the pieces to the mysteries of the past few weeks were clicking together, connecting in Aaron’s overrun mind. His father’s sudden illness. His own unfounded seizures. The feeling of untapped energy bubbling up within him, coercing him to morph into something he doesn’t recognize. The urge to protect. The craving for hedonism. The kiss of sybaritic temperament.
Nothing was as it seemed. And yet, beneath the gray veil of the surface, all the clues fit together. He was poisoned. Someone did this to him; someone infused his bloodstream with some sort of toxin. Suddenly, Aaron’s board room seizure rippled into his mind under a new lens of clarity. The wound in his leg throbbed before his episode; just after he’d drifted off on the sofa in his office. She came to wake him up, the remind him of the meeting, to see if he needed anything. She did this to him. She made this monster.
“Desiree,” Aaron growled, his voice finally rumbling out toward the air in front of him.
It had to be Desiree. She was the only one close enough to both Aaron and his father to be able to harm them. The fog was being wiped away in Aaron’s mind, and he couldn’t believe that he’d been so blind before. Of course his father had been suddenly harmed. Though he was reaching his elderly stages of life, Charlie was always known for his go-get-’em attitude, his utter defiance of the takeover of time. Aaron felt the stupidity billowing up in his mind for not being able to see it before. Poison was the only answer to this equation. Poison, given slowly and succinctly, perhaps over a long period of time. It could have been a few drops in a cup of coffee each day. It could have been an abrupt dosage, meant for lethal effect. Whatever it was, she had done it, slowly and surely, to both of them.
Was it her intention to create a beast? Was it Desiree’s intention to transform Aaron into the mythical, otherworldly creature that stared back at him? Was she as conniving as she seemed now, illuminated in Aaron’s memory with such malignant intentions? With memories of her bleeding back through his brain—the flirting, the cleavage, the disgustingly sweet banter—was it all a grand distraction? Was she really edging her way closer to him, to Charlie, to the seat of power?
Aaron could feel his heartbeat normalizing, simmering down after broiling under the weight of his transformation. The fangs that hung threateningly over his teeth began to incarcerate themselves inside his gums once again. The tufts of fur that had blossomed all over his body began to hibernate inside his pores. His muscles had folded over on themselves, compacting his body into its usual frame. The hospital gown no longer felt taut and stretched across his mutated body but now fluttered in the wind of people walking by. The faces normalized, and Aaron could now make out the features of every nurse scurrying past, every doctor ambling along.
Mr. Lee turned the corner of the hallway and nearly dropped his cup of cafeteria coffee. “Aaron,” he croaked. “What are you doing out here in the hallway? And… how did you break your arm restraint?”
Aaron stared down at his right arm, encased not by a busted metal handcuff, but the unraveled strips of standard rope confinement. He knew—with every synapse firing—that he was handcuffed. That spurred his initial feeling of terror: the illusion that someone had a hold on him. How could he have been wrong? How could he have imagined something so concrete, so undeniable?
“I…” Aaron began, dizziness now buzzing through him. “I… don’t know. I don’t know… anything.”
“Let’s get you back in bed,” Mr. Lee said in a voice streaked with concern as he took Aaron by the elbow and led him back down the hallway to his room.