The Novella Life of Illuscia Nester Himawari

I could see fear and anger in Rachel’s face as she stepped in front of me, her body tensed as she brought her hand up. Something flashed there—a scalpel, golden in the glowing air and still smudged with my blood from the doctor’s surgery. I gently put my hand on her shoulder, giving it a small squeeze. “Rachel, it’s okay. Everything is okay.” She turned slightly, giving me a frowning side-glance as she kept her eyes on the man she’d once known as Phil and then as Justin. “How is this okay? We need to get you out. To a hospital.” She cut her eyes back to Justin and punctuated her words with a stab at the air. “And now this fucker is hiding out to ambush us in this fucking place.” She turned more towards the other man. “And to be clear, you aren’t the first motherfucker we’ve had to kill today. If you try anything, I have no problem with leaving you here to rot…or become fertilizer or whatever.” Rachel glanced around the heart room. “Fucking t

    Thomas didn’t stir as we approached, and I felt my stomach lurch at the growing pool of blood on and around his stomach. He was still breathing, but in the harsh glow of the phone’s light he looked faded and pale. The man named Patrick stepped past me, using his own flashlight to highlight Thomas as he checked him with a calm efficiency that was both comforting and maddening. He had to hurry. Had to help him. Had to… “Get your light over here. Shine it on his stomach.” I jumped slightly and stepped around to get a better angle with the light. I could barely breathe as I pushed out the question I’d been wanting to ask since the man started checking him. “H-how is he?” Patrick didn’t pause in his examination of the stab wounds in Thomas’ stomach. “Not good. His pulse is off and he’s losing too much blood. He’s not in hemorrhagic shock yet, but he’s heading that way. I need to work on him now, but not down here.” He paused and lo

    “…last man standing.” I hear the voice as though in a dream—familiar and yet not, comforting and terrifying at the same time. Why? It’s Thomas, talking about something I don’t understand and my head is killing me and if only he could stop sounding so wrong and… Oh God. I had a flicker of memory. Not Thomas. Someone that looked like him. Taking me back to the house, to the Tree, and me arguing with him, trying to convince him that he shouldn’t do this while looking for an opening to attack or escape. But he’d either sensed my growing rebellion or decided it was time to shut me up for whatever he had planned, and as soon as we reached the bottom of the basement stairs he’d been on me, holding a cloth to my face while wrapping his other arm tightly around my waist. I tried to break free, but it was no use. Thomas or not, he was big and strong enough to keep the cloth in place until the world slipped away. I open my eyes, recoil

  I called Rachel’s number for the tenth time as I rounded the hill and our place came into view. I just got voicemail again, and the sound of that past version of her speaking made my guts clench as I pulled into the driveway and braked hard enough to make the tires squeal slightly as they came to rest. That voice, her but not her, there but not there, was like the voice from a memory. A piece of something lost. A ghost. Gritting my teeth, I jumped out of the car and started looking around for signs of anything out of place as I ran toward the house. Outside everything looked fine. I tried to tell myself that I was overreacting. Or maybe I had gotten so sick that it had warped my thinking. Made me paranoid. Maybe I really did need to… Inside was chaos. Furniture was tipped over, several things lay broken on the floor, and a general path of destruction led from the front of the house to the side door I’d just entered. There’d been a fight

    “Open up, damn you.” I stared at the brick wall, as though my concentrated gaze could bore past the barrier through sheer will alone. I’d run my hand over the dark outline of the man a dozen times now, feeling for a questing root or yielding bit of stone. Something that would allow me to push back into those strange tunnels once again. But no. For awhile I’d felt certain the tree wasn’t done with me—why else was I compelled to return again and again?—but it had no use for me at the moment either. It had moved on…with my help, even…and I knew enough to know it was a fruitless exercise to make demands upon it now. And why did I want to enter the tunnels again? To try and kill it? To reason with it? To threaten and cajole it until it gave me what I wanted? Or perhaps there was another reason. The guilt that nestled in my belly like a restless seed. Roiling my insides and making my new life—a life free of all the terrible thing

    “You need to push the green button or the red button.” I jumped slightly as I brought my eyes up. The guy was younger than me, and I felt some sympathy at his expression of tired boredom. “Sorry. I guess I spaced out.” He shrugged and gave a small laugh. “No problem, man. Reality’s overrated.” Nodding, I poked the green “Accept” button on the debit card machine. “Definitely some are.” I felt a slight thrill of nervousness as I heard the register start printing the receipt. This was my first time using a card, or anything with my name on it, in almost a year, and even though the last name was made up and unconnected to my past life, it made me feel exposed. I’d been using cash for months now, and when Rachel first brought up the idea of me getting a driver’s license and a bank account, I resisted. The people that I’d run from, the people that had imprisoned and killed that other version of her, they were worlds away. That gave me