Undead and Undermined

Chapter FORTY-SIX



“Oh, you’re here!” The Marc Thing was very pleased, if the futile wriggling against the tape was an indication. “Finally! Ready to kill me?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, goody, goody, goody! I’ve been waiting soooo—” He cut himself off and peered at me. “You aren’t being a meanie, are you? You’re not teasing? You’ll do it?”

“I’m not being a meanie. I’ll absolutely kill you.”

“Hooray!”

“I just want to know why.” I crossed the room so I could get a better look at his face. His eyes. “Why did you come? Was it just to talk yourself into killing yourself? Was it so Ancient Me wouldn’t get her hooks into you?”

“You want to know why.” He seemed to ponder this for a moment, then brightened. He looked a little like his old self, and those moments, they were actually the worst. When I could see the man he had been. God, he was damaged, so damaged. But yeah, the worst was when he almost looked like my Marc. When he looked like my friend. “Because you don’t know why! Right? You don’t! I’m here so I won’t be here and you don’t know!”

I squatted in front of him. Any other time I’d be yanking on my hair trying to puzzle this out, but I was frozen inside right now. Dead, almost. I felt like I could outwait anything, even the ravings of a crazy dead guy. “Right. I don’t know. So tell me. I bet the devil fixed it so you could follow us back. Maybe you were supposed to kill me, too? Or as many of us as you could?

“See, it occurred to me that we didn’t have to stay in hell more than a few minutes. It occurred to me that maybe Satan was stalling. To give you time to work on Marc. To give you time to set up his suicide. And maybe my murder?”

“Your murder? Who’d murder you?”

“You want a list?”

“You couldn’t murder you, so you didn’t murder you.” Patience was one thing, but this was starting to make me want to find a razor and trim his ears right off his skull. “Can you try to tell me in a way that isn’t completely crazy? If it’s at all possible?”

“The devil won’t ever kill you. And her daughter won’t, either. They can’t. But you can kill you. It was you, Betsy-Wetsy.”

“You mean it was my fault because in hell I—”

He whipped his head back and forth so fast his features were a frightening blur for half a second. It was such an unnatural way for a human body to move, it was shocking to watch. I almost fell backward onto the chilly cement. Then he seemed to catch hold of himself.

“You did it. You sent me back, Betsy.”

I was glad I hadn’t fallen, because I wouldn’t have been able to get up after hearing that. “Ancient Me sent you back?”

“She didn’t remember and she asked and when I didn’t remember she sent me back. You did things and said things. In the future. You did things and the other you, the old you, the bad bad you, she didn’t remember those things happening. She saw a chance to save him. Them,” he added, like that would clarify the babble. “She sent me back to save me. Because if she didn’t let all those bad things happen to me, then bad things wouldn’t happen to her.”

I was trying to follow this. I had a vague memory of a sort of shoving match in Ancient Betsy’s office. Her surprise . . . her shock, even. So when Laura and I left, she thought about it. And talked to the Marc Thing about it. And sent him back to kill/save my Marc.

Because if I didn’t make Marc into the Marc Thing, maybe there were other awful, awful things I wouldn’t do.

Maybe such an insanely risky maneuver was all she could do. Maybe she decided it was worth the risk if it meant she might keep her soul. By saving the world from . . . well . . . her . . . she was also saving her family and friends.

I could almost see her, the older me, sitting at her icky big old desk and wondering: will I feel it when the time stream shifts? Or will I never notice it at all? Will I still be . . . me? Or will I be her? Or someone else, someone like neither one of us?

I didn’t know. That was the maddening part. I knew quite a bit now about the future, but only enough for despair. Not near enough for hope.

“I saved me,” the Marc Thing said, so softly and pleasantly he sounded a lot like the guy who’d killed himself upstairs two hours ago. “Now you have to save you.” He nodded at the chair leg stake in my hand. I hadn’t bothered to hide it. What would have been the point?

“She never,” he said. I realized he was crying a little. “She could never finish me. She couldn’t save me and then she couldn’t end it for me, so I went on and on and on and got more and more and more dead and she knew that killing me would have been killing the last smallest scrap of her humanity and she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. And I loved her and I hated her, but mostly I loved her because she was her and if you kill me you won’t ever be her. And Marc will never be me.”

I was staring at the floor. I couldn’t look at him. It was definitely the worst when he sounded almost human. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

“Happened to me?” He laughed. “You’re making it sound like I was in an earthquake. You’re sorry you did that to me. Right?”

“Right.”

“I know. That’s why I know you can kill me. Right? If you kill me, you’ll have all kinds of scraps of humanity left. Tons of scraps! Only I don’t want to see it coming. I never could stand to even get a shot if I knew when the needle was going to hit . . . isn’t that the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard?”

“No.”

“It’s why I was going to jump. The night we met, remember? I was going to jump and die, but you caught me before I fell. You caught me before I even jumped. And kept catching me and catching me and because you were so used to saving me you could never let me go. You will now, though, right?”

“Yes.”

“I liked being a doctor,” he said wistfully. “I think if I hadn’t been murdered I would have been happy doing that for the—”

I stood. Looked closely . . . yes. The Marc Thing was gone. A chair leg slammed through the chest and out the back of the chair he was trussed to would do that every time.

I’d saved him, and maybe myself.

And he hadn’t seen it coming.