Book Six, Chapter 60: Till Death

Daphne didn’t suddenly get better when the cameras weren’t watching. My little poisoning trick, combined with all the damage from the explosions, really was getting to her.

I actually did feel terrible. It wasn’t something I could control or even understand, but watching her in pain was difficult, though it did remind me of what she had done to Ramona. I tried to focus on that anger I felt, to wash out all the other emotions, the fake ones.

I glared at her.

She smiled at me.

“Always thinking about the game, aren’t you?” she said, looking over at where the blackmailers had been. “That was made for me, wasn’t it?”

She started coughing.

“No, I thought you were my girlfriend, remember?” I asked. I wanted to be soft and tender with her. I wanted to apologize, but I didn’t know why.

“I could never get you to take your mind off the game. I don’t know why,” she said, tears filling her eyes. “Even from the beginning, it felt like you were just using the emotions I gave you, not feeling them. Why? That’s not how it’s supposed to be, not at first.”

Using emotions, not feeling them. That made me sound like the psycho.

“My walls are higher than your ladders are tall,” I said, feeling pretty proud of that metaphor, trying to be cool and emotionless.

Daphne nodded.

“Did you ever suspect me? I mean, before the finale? Is that why? What did I do?”

Did I suspect that something was going on? Of course. Even if my brain would not settle on the conclusion, I wasn’t an idiot. I wasn’t used to having to chase around my thoughts. I knew something was going on, but I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing how difficult it was and how blind I had been.

“My parents’ death wasn’t my fault,” I repeated from earlier. “You said something about that, and all I could think was, what the heck does she know about my parents’ death? Did she read about it in the newspaper? But then you started talking about how it was okay that I didn’t go upstairs, and I know you didn’t read that in the news… The thing is… I know that I told you… But I would never have told you about that night. But I did. I even have memories of it. We were on the roof, alone, and I opened up to you because I trusted you.”

Fake memories. Whatever memories I needed to see the truth.

“But that was a different guy. That was a guy who could just be in love. That wasn’t me. Those weren’t my memories.”

Daphne stared at me, and so did Kimberly, and neither said a thing.

“You know, I still remember the flash going off that night. The sound it made, the light being thrown around the corner, and down the stairs. Is that what made you come up with the idea for the camera trap? Did you suddenly remember me telling you about that? Of course, it’s not a real memory, I made it up, I had to have. Because the Lake County Pallbearer didn’t use flash that we know of. He did long exposures. See, he was a real serial killer, not just some greedy black widow.”

Why was I talking about this? Was I angry? I felt like she had robbed me of my secret, and I was taking it back. It was something like that. I realized I was crying, and not just pretending because of my dumb-in-love character.

The words started, and they wouldn’t stop.

“He would pose his victims after he killed them, usually on a bed or in some chairs, maybe on a couch, and take long exposures of them while he walked around in the background. The bodies were perfectly still, so the images of them were pristine. You could see every detail of his victim, but he was moving, so he just appeared like a big black spirit, like the Grim Reaper itself, watching over the dead. That’s why they called him the Pallbearer, because Psycho Nut Job must have been taken.

“But I remember walking by the stairs after my movie was over. I had been watching in the den, sneaking a scary movie on my little television, and when I got to the stairs, it suddenly occurred to me that all the lights in the house were still on, the dishes were still in the sink, and the door wasn’t locked and bolted. All of the things my parents did at night hadn’t been done.

“And suddenly the hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I knew something was wrong. But I didn’t want to believe it. I thought that if I called the cops or if I ran upstairs, that would make it real, that the thing I was fearing would become true. So I ran back to the den, and I watched another movie, until about halfway through, when I saw someone at the entrance of the den reflected in the glass of the TV. And I pretended like I didn’t notice them. I was wearing headphones, and I was just watching TV. I thought it was my dad, and I was so relieved that I was wrong about something bad happening. I fell asleep down there, and I didn’t find my parents until the next morning.”

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Why did I tell her that? Emotions were rising up in me, not completely my own. It was her husband, the real one. Some pang in his latent emotions was making me desperate and loose-lipped. He would be about to die just about now in the real story.

He would have been pleading for his life, for love.

Is that what I was doing? Pleading for love. How embarrassing.

“That’s the story I told you, right? Or that’s the story I remember telling you. Do you remember that? How hard it was for me to tell you? Do you remember telling me you loved me after? Or do you just have some factoids listed out on the script, telling you whatever it was that other version of me was willing to say?”

Daphne didn’t answer, but strangely, it did seem like my story was affecting her. I didn’t know if she felt bad for me, or if she felt bad at all, but she breathed slowly. I wanted to think that she felt something like shame for having stolen that secret from me.

“I’ve never told anyone that,” I said. “I never would, normally, especially not someone who I wanted to love me. So there was no way that I could have told you, as much as I wish there was.”

It was everything I could do not to drop to my knees, run away. God, I wanted to run away. But I had to finish a scene.

I looked past Daphne to Kimberly. She was crying.

I felt so embarrassed about everything. There was a timer on the red wallpaper, telling me I had a minute, and I was thankful for that, because I needed to get ready to end this.

I breathed deeply and prepared.

Daphne seemed to have accepted her fate. I didn’t know if she could run or if she would.

On-Screen.

The door to the roof burst open, and Andrew stumbled out, walking all on his own, working as hard as he could to stay upright. He staggered like a zombie, but he was here.

He was holding on to a radio, one of the ones that the blackmailer had. He had sent the message that distracted the blackmailers.

“Where are they?” he yelled out. “The blackmailers, they’re still alive! I don’t know how, but they were coming to the roof!” He looked all around.