Arcane Dropout 4 Read online

  Arcane Dropout 4

  Edmund Hughes

  This digital book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this title with another person, please purchase an additional copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. All other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Edmund Hughes

  Kindle Edition

  Contents

  Arcane Dropout 4

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 1

  “She is my queen, and I am her subject. The woman I loved, the woman I lost. Stolen from me like the sands of a broken hourglass, the fading, forlorn beauty of my… fuck.”

  “The fading, forlorn beauty of my wretched, bleeding heart.”

  “I’m aware, it’s just a little on the nose, don’t you think?”

  “We aren’t having this argument again, Alex. Just read the goddamn line.”

  “What if we changed it to—”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “No!” The director massaged his temples. “You know what? Let’s take a fifteen-minute break, and then we’ll go back to the first scene. The one where Mauricio serenades Beatrix outside her window in Guadalajara before the swordfight.”

  That was Eldon’s cue. He looked toward Tim, the backstage manager, who gave him a small smile.

  “You mind handling the deadweight?” asked Tim.

  “Very punny,” said Eldon.

  He crouched to scoop up the training dummy they’d been using as a stand-in for Mauricio’s brother’s corpse, the secondary suitor in the complicated love-triangle plot told by the third act of Blood and Tears in Jalisco. He was the only stagehand on set during their initial rehearsals, which meant that he held the honor of doing most of the heavy lifting.

  “Can you look for the swords while you’re back there?” asked Tim. “The theater students keep shuffling our supplies around.”

  “Sure,” said Eldon. “I assume I’ll be standing in for Max again in the duel if he doesn’t show up?”

  “Most likely. He had another outbreak of whatever it is his condition is called. The skin blistering thing.”

  Eldon winced as he ducked past the curtain and into the storage area tucked away stage right. As Tim had mentioned, the swords were nowhere near where they’d been the previous day, but that was to be expected when operating out of a tiny middle-school theater. He wondered if he’d been the same way at that age but didn’t bother trying to search what little scraps of memory his injury had left him with for the answer.

  “What about Laura?” he asked. “She needs to be here for that scene too, right?”

  “She’s still adjusting to her new medication,” said Tim. “Ben didn’t see the point in having her here to read her lines until she was feeling a bit better. She’s also got a thing about the rain, on top of being bipolar.”

  “Noted,” said Eldon. He’d been flirting with Laura a bit, here and there, though it was more just him reacting to her not-so-subtle advances. Tim had warned him about her when he’d first joined the production, but at the very least, Eldon had been having fun talking with Laura, turning the idea over.

  The Broken Island Players, as the theater company was called, were composed entirely of regular patients from St. Mary’s Medical Center. The idea of joining had been somewhat forcefully suggested to Eldon by Dr. Constantine’s latest nurse practitioner stand-in.

  He’d taken to it easily enough, as much because he had nothing else to do as out of any fondness for theater. The first few days after waking up with a brain injury and almost no memories of his previous life had been understandably hard. Four weeks out and he was still struggling, still missing any defined sense of who he was – or who he’d been. He wasn’t sure if the difference mattered anymore.

  Eldon found one of the swords tucked away behind a prop treasure chest. He saw the handle of the other poking out from within the container and pulled it loose, only to discover that it had been nearly snapped in two, held together only by the thick layers of foam tape wrapped around the outside of the wooden blade to provide a small measure of safety.

  “I think an unsanctioned sword fight may have taken place here,” he said, proffering the broken weapon toward Tim.

  “Fuck it.” Tim wheeled his way over, furrowing his brow. “Just snap the broken part off. It’ll be a dagger for today, and we’ll just get the prop team to make another one.”

  Eldon nodded and slapped the flat of the wooden blade down on the corner of the floor, probably with a bit more force than what was needed. The broken section flew loose, leaving a splintered, genuinely dangerous, jagged wooden point attached to the prop weapon’s meager hilt.

  “This’ll make the duel a bit more interesting,” he said.

  “Just don’t stab anybody with it,” said Tim. “Or slash them, I guess.”

  There was more to set up. The play was still in its early, developmental stages, so Eldon and the other stagehands had been putting down rubber spot markers for each scene. He made his way by Alex, the leading man slash chemo-resistant cancer patient, and dropped a red marker stage left. It was where Mauricio would serenade his lover from below her window.

  “Set one up for where Laura will be, too,” called Ben, their director. He was like Eldon, lacking any visible reason for being a part of the hospital’s motivational theater project. He had some kind of auto-immune disease with a hard to remember name.

  “How the fuck do you expect us to set up a spot point for her?” asked Tim. “She’s going to be up in the background, behind the fake second-story window that hasn’t been built yet.”

  “Just do it,” said Ben.

  There was a certain symmetry in the relationship between the director and his stage manager that reminded Eldon of the play’s key characters, Mauricio and his wayward brother, mixing like oil and water. Tim muttered a few choice expletives under his breath and gestured in the direction of one of the backstage step ladders.

  “I guess we could hang up a glowstick?” Tim suggested. “I did buy a couple the last time we were at the dollar store. Figured they could add a bit of ambience to the scene with the ghost.”

  Eldon felt an odd flutter of emotions as he nodded. He followed Tim over to one of the company’s various supply boxes and reached into it.


  “This one would suit Laura, I think,” said Tim, passing him a pink glowstick. “Just don’t tell her I said that. Really not in the mood for another long-winded speech on feminism and gender roles. The part of my body she holds responsible for her oppression doesn’t even work on command.”

  Eldon wasn’t listening. The pink glowstick felt heavy against his palm, like it was trying to sink down through his hand and into the floor. The feeling of déjà-vu was overpowering, and he let himself drift amidst the vague, nameless sense of recognition. It was like trying to remember a catchy but long-forgotten song, clinging to muffled echoes of a scattered melody.

  “Eldon?” said Tim. “You okay? You do this like, five times per rehearsal, so I’m going to assume you are.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just… weird.”

  “If by it, you mean you, then yes.”

  “Suck my symbol of female oppression,” said Eldon.

  “You better hope to god Laura doesn’t ever hear you say that,” said Tim.

  Eldon fetched the step ladder, and over the next few minutes, he hung the glowstick from a string connected to an overhead curtain rod. It felt a little unnecessary, but his thoughts on what would be the best use of his time as a stagehand were entirely secondary compared to his long-simmering frustration.

  He needed to remember something, but he didn’t know what. He couldn’t remember what. It was annoying on a deep, fundamental level, like a scavenger hunt full of promise with an indecipherable first clue.

  The thought passed. Eldon climbed down from the step ladder and put it back into storage. He wasn’t unhappy. The past four weeks had been a slow, steady recovery by any reasonable measure. He was enjoying his time with the Broken Island Players. His mind was still intact, despite having been seemingly wiped clean, and his condition seemed mild compared to the circumstances of many of his new friends.

  “Hey,” said Tim. “Some of us were thinking about drinking tonight. You interested?”

  He thought about it.

  “No,” said Eldon. “Thanks, though. I think I’ll just get some rest.”

  “Still coming to the Christmas party on Friday though, right?”

  Eldon stared at the stupid pink glowstick in a state of unnecessary, unwanted vexation.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Eldon’s walk home was a dreary trek through fog and rain, which suited his mood quite nicely. The outskirts of Seattle were a sprawling mess of dirty roads and suburban neighborhoods interspersed with the occasional breathtaking view of the coast. He didn’t pay any of it much more than a glance as he pulled his hood up.

  He’d asked Dr. Constantine about his recovery during his initial stay at the hospital, back when the physician had still been active on his case. He’d wanted to know what, if anything, he could do to try to kick-start the return of his memory. He still remembered the nature of the smile his doctor had flashed in return. Like there was a joke that he, unfortunately, just wasn’t in on.

  That, as one of the nurse practitioners had later explained to him, was just another aspect of his condition. Paranoia, anxiety, a fluctuating sense of impending cataclysm. They were tricks of his mind, different aspects of the way the lingering effects of his traumatic brain injury manifested.

  He reminded himself of that fact for the fifteen thousandth time as the image of that damned glowstick continued to cycle on repeat. He’d left rehearsal as soon as Tim had been willing to let him sneak off, though being out of proximity of his apparent trigger hadn’t been enough to shift his state. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to shift his state.

  Bryan’s car was parked on the street outside the small, two-bedroom apartment the two of them shared. That was a surprise. Bryan was rarely around, only popping in for a night or two per week, always vague about where he was going and when he’d be back.

  Eldon hadn’t been sure what to make of his brother’s odd schedule, lacking any real reference for what would have been Bryan’s “default” behavior. The apartment was well-stocked with food and distractions, so he’d managed all right mostly on his own. He made his way inside and took his shoes off next to the doormat.

  “Oh, hey!” called Bryan from the living room. “Good timing. I just got back myself.”

  Bryan was tall and broad-shouldered, with green eyes, red hair, and a rather ruddy complexion. He grinned and immediately pulled Eldon into a hug as he approached. Gregarious and warm, sometimes unnecessarily so—that was Bryan.

  “I left rehearsal a little early,” said Eldon. “Felt a bit off.”

  “Is that so?” Bryan’s smile faded. “Well, you should get some rest, then. I’m only stopping by. I’m technically still on the clock right now.”

  Eldon had asked his brother about his job on more than one occasion, and he’d never gotten a satisfactory answer from him. Bryan made occasional references to running various vague odd jobs, tying up loose ends, and traveling. Never once had he said anything definitive about what he did, or how much money he made, or even the general field that he worked in.

  “Are you staying for dinner?” asked Eldon. “I ordered pizza earlier. I was just going to eat leftovers.”

  “Can’t,” said Bryan. “I just wanted to stop by and make sure that you were still, you know, holding up okay. Anything I should know about?”

  Eldon shrugged. “I might go to a party this weekend.”

  “Is the girl that keeps hitting on you going to be there?” Bryan’s grin returned, and he poked Eldon in the side with an elbow. “You’re welcome to bring her back here, you know.”

  “I’m aware,” said Eldon. “She’s a bit, uh, open when it comes to this sort of thing. Not sure if she’s really my type.”

  “You say that now, but you never really know,” said Bryan. “It might be a good way to get your mind off things.”

  He shrugged, and Eldon felt a bit like he had when he’d talked to Dr. Constantine about his recovery. His brother had been so willing to make accommodations for him when it came to getting his life back on track and falling into a routine. It made the contrast against how evasive Bryan always was whenever he asked specific questions about his old life chafe that much more.

  “Yeah, we’ll see,” said Eldon.

  “Cool. Anyway, I left money on the counter for food for the week. I suggest buying stuff to cook, won’t last that long if you order out. You can also eat at the hospital, since you’re still part of the TBI program there.”

  “You’re leaving already?”

  “Yeah. You know how it is.”

  Eldon didn’t, but he kept that to himself. So many of his conversations with Bryan went like this, the two of them exchanging words without really talking. He wondered if it was another side-effect of his memory loss, if perhaps there was some factor or aspect of their relationship that he’d forgotten that made their interactions this way. It was tempting to blame himself, and he had to actively fight the impulse.

  Something was off about Bryan. He trusted himself enough to know that.

  “Well, I guess I’ll see you later,” said Eldon. “Care to give an estimate on when you’ll next grace the apartment with your presence?”

  Bryan shook his head. “I have no idea. Depends on how busy I am at work. See you later, little bro.”

  He left, and that was that. Eldon took the money off the counter and put it in his wallet, though it felt a little like accepting a bribe for good behavior and minimal questions. The living room wasn’t exactly spacious, but it had all the bachelor essentials: a large flat-screen TV, a PlayStation, and a couch.

  He made himself a frozen pizza for dinner and indulged in one of the beers Bryan bought and never drank. He’d never gotten a clear answer from Dr. Constantine’s nurses about whether it was safe for him to drink alcohol in the wake of his injury, but it didn’t give him headaches or raise any alarms within his body.

  Eldon settled down on the couch and spent the better part of the evenin
g whiling away his time playing online video games. He had a few slices of pizza when it was ready, which were sufficiently tasty. The night arrived in all its silent insistence, and he relaxed.

  It was a little after nine when he heard the noise and saw the shape. A soft, scraping sound came from outside the balcony’s sliding door. He might have ignored it had he not been looking in that same direction.

  There was enough light within the apartment to obscure his view outside through the interior reflections, but Eldon was still sure that he’d seen movement. Movement from a shape larger than a bird, or a raccoon, or any of the likely suspects. His initial response was to freeze, but he was still looking at the glass of the sliding door, staring right at whatever it was.

  He got up, and this time it was more obvious. Two heavy footsteps across the balcony, followed by the groan of the railing as something vaulted over.

  He hesitated, wondering if he should just check the doors, make sure they were locked, and move on with his night.

  Eldon put his shoes on and made his way outside. He doubted he’d be able to find whatever it was he’d just seen, if it really had been anything. He was surprised and a little unsure of what to do when he slipped out into the post-rain fog in time to hear a set of departing footsteps that matched with what he’d just heard upstairs.

  He didn’t feel scared. There was a certain familiarity, a confidence to what he was doing. His hands felt restless, but it was more of an itch for some sort of weapon rather than fear-induced trembling.

  Eldon made his way forward at a jog, following a vague shape through the darkness that lurked in between the streetlights. It shot to the side, dodging into an alleyway. It was a place between buildings that would have made a good shortcut, had a chain-link fence not divided it in half.

  He sped up, even though he knew that closing the distance in such an obvious way would only force a confrontation. Which was what he wanted, for some reason. The thought should have been chilling, but instead, it made him smile. It made him feel like himself, whoever the hell that was.