“I’ll make something to eat,” Seth says. “It won’t be much. But while I do, you have to tell me what you know.”
“All right,” Regine says. “But first you have to tell us something.”
“And what’s that?” Seth says, heading toward the kitchen.
And he hears her ask, “How did you die?”
34
“What did you say?”
“I think you heard the question just fine,” Regine says, looking at him firmly, as if setting him a challenge. A test he has to pass.
“How did I die?” Seth repeats, looking back and forth between her and Tomasz. “So you’re saying . . . You’re saying this place really is –”
“I’m not saying anything,” Regine says. “I’m just asking how you died. And your reaction tells me you know exactly what I mean.”
“I got struck by lightning!” Tomasz volunteers.
Regine makes a loud scoffing sound. “You did not.”
“You do not know,” Tomasz says. “You were not there.”
“Nobody actually gets struck by lightning. Not even in Poland.”
Tomasz’s eyes widen in indignation. “I was not in Poland! How many times I have to say? Mother came over for better working and –”
“I drowned,” Seth says, so quietly he thinks they may not have heard him.
But they stop bickering immediately.
“Drowned?” Regine says. “Where?”
Seth furrows his brow. “Halfmarket. It’s a little town on the coast of –”
“No, I mean, where? The bathtub? A swimming pool –?”
“The ocean.”
She nods, as if this makes sense. “Did you hit your head?”
“Did I hit my –?” Seth says, and then stops. He touches the back of his skull where it smashed into the rocks. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I . . .” Regine starts, then looks down at the freshly swept floor Seth left behind this morning. “I fell down a flight of stairs. Cracked my head on a step on the way down.”
“And you woke up here?”
She nods.
“It was the lightning for me!” Tomasz says happily. “It is like getting punched on your entire body all at one time!”
“You did not get struck by lightning,” Regine says.
“Then you did not fall down stairs!” Tomasz says, upset bending his voice, a tone Seth recognizes from a hundred and one fights with Owen.
“So you both . . . ?” Seth doesn’t finish the sentence.
“Died,” Regine says. “In a way that caused a specific injury.”
Seth feels the back of his head again, where he hit it on the rocks. He remembers the horrible finality of that collision, could swear he still feels the bones breaking, in a way from which there was no return.
Until he woke up here.
There are no broken bones now, of course, that was another place, another him, and all he can feel is the still-brutal shortness of his hair, something that Regine and Tomasz have clearly been here long enough to outgrow. There’s nothing else unusual, just the inward curve of his neck leading up to the outward curve of his skull.
Regine looks at Tomasz. “Show him,” she says.
Tomasz leaps up from the settee. “Lean down, please,” he says. Seth stoops to one knee and allows Tomasz to take his hand. He splays Seth’s fingers so the first two are a particular distance apart. Tomasz sticks out a little nubbin of tongue as he concentrates, and once more, he reminds Seth so much of Owen, Seth feels his chest contract.
“Here,” Tomasz says, placing Seth’s fingers on a particular stretch of bone just behind his left ear. “Can you feel that?”
“Feel what?” Seth says. It’s exactly where his head struck the rock, but there’s nothing unusual there, nothing but a stretch of –
There’s something. A rise in the bone so slight as to almost not be present, so slight he didn’t feel it seconds ago when pressing in exactly the same place.
A rise in the bone.
Leading to a narrow notch in that same bone.
“What?” Seth whispers. “How . . . ?”
He swears it wasn’t there before. But there it is now, subtle but clear, the rise and the notch almost like a completely natural extension of his skull.
Almost.
“That’s where you hit your head?” Regine asks.
“Yes,” Seth answers. “You?”
Regine nods.
“And that is where the lightning punched me!” Tomasz says.
“Or whatever happened,” Regine mumbles.
“What is it?” Seth asks, feeling around on the same spot on his right side to see if there’s another one. There isn’t.
“We think it is a kind of connection,” Tomasz says.
“Connection to what?”
Neither of them answers.
“Connection to what?” Seth says again.
“What have your dreams been like?” Regine says.
Seth frowns at her. Then he has to look away, feeling the vividness of his dreams in a way that causes his skin to flush.
“The dreamings,” Tomasz says, patting Seth’s back sympathetically. “They are not easy.”
“Like you’re not just seeing it all again,” Regine says. “Like you’re actually there, back in time somehow, reliving it.”
Seth is surprised to find his eyes filling, his throat choking. “What is it? Why does it happen?”
She glances at Tomasz, then back at Seth. “We’re not sure,” she says carefully.
“But you have an idea.”
She nods. “The things you dream. They’re important?”
“Yes,” Seth says. “More than I want them to be.”
“Some of it is good,” Tomasz says. “But good in painful way.”
Seth nods.
“But that, all that –” Regine makes a gesture in the air, capturing in a single twist of her fingers all the dreams he’s had –“all that is not your whole life.”
“What?”
“There’s more. There’s much, much more.” She gets a grim set to her mouth. “And you’ve forgotten it.”
For some reason Seth can’t quite put a finger on, this makes him angry. “Don’t tell me I’ve forgotten,” he says, fierce enough to surprise everyone, even himself. “I remember too much, is the problem. If I could forget some of these things, then . . .”