Excerpt: A World of Two Halves

A shadowy figure. His face is blurred. Hands held out…
“Watch me!”
The leaves fall, blasted black and into many pieces like snow, and fall, and fall,
until
all is black

Brian woke with a start, blinking at the ceiling. Its many cracks and discolorations formed strange symbols that swam in and out of sight through a dim, reddish haze. For a moment Brian failed to truly see what he was seeing. His body was already upright in a tangle of sheets before his mind awoke with it and began screaming.
There was blood on the white of his blankets and blood on his hands when he pressed them to his face and brought them away. Brian fought to unravel the knot of sheets around himself as he stumbled across the floor, warm with the dawn’s kiss against his bare feet. He pushed himself against the door to the toilet and almost fell when the unfastened door gave way before him.
Jeff was inside, razor to his face. He was looking at Brian in wide-eyed surprise and growing horror. For a long instant they locked stares, lost in a process of comprehension that slowly flowered into unwilling understanding.
“Oh my god,” Jeff whispered. The razor hit the floor at his feet. He looked as frightened as Brian himself, his face paper white against the reddening cut on his chin. “Brian…”
Brian pushed him aside and looked into the mirror. Blood was dripping from his left eye, the eye that had always plagued him—the eye that was now monstrously swollen, webbed with veins and welled with red tears. Brian put a finger to it and immediately yanked his hand away. The eye was burning hot, and as Brian watched dazed it rolled to the side by itself to fix Jeff’s reflection with an unblinking stare. His father flinched, and that single gesture hurt Brian more than any simple words could.
“Don’t call them,” Brian said. He had no idea where the words came from; they seemed to flow naturally from his mouth, distant from himself. “That’s all I ask. Let me get away.”
His father winced. “Brian,” he said, “Do you really think so little of me?”
Brian bowed his head and did not answer.
Color was returning to Jeff’s face along with his composure. He seized hold of Brian’s shoulder. “Brian, don’t be a fool. You’re my son, damnit. I’d never give you up.” Brian’s lack of reply seemed to anger him, and with a sudden passion Jeff shook him hard. “D’you hear me? I’ll never give you up!”
“Ha!” The words were still pouring forth, unbidden, born from an irrational rage that came from nowhere to consume him. “Then what about him?”
He flung the last at his father like a poisoned dagger. Jeff looked startled, then guarded. His eyes slid to the side. “Him who?”
Brian blinked. His anger ebbed away, leaving confusion in its wake. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I was talking about.” He was suddenly sure that Jeff knew, with a conviction that bordered on psychic. The suspicion left an ugly taste in his mouth.
Don’t trust anybody…
In any case, it was too late now. One look at Jeff’s blank face told him that no answers would be forthcoming from that quarter. Brian had to grip hold of the table edge to steady himself in a world unexpectedly fluid and gray-hued, its comforting certainties gone. Brian longed to believe in Jeff. He had no choice but to believe in him.”
He took a deep breath. “What are we going to do?” he said, his voice shaking.
“Hide,” Jeff said curtly, kneeling down to retrieve his razor. “If the blood doesn’t stop plead sick for today, Fortunately you already have an established reason for keeping your eye concealed.”
Brian gaped at him, taken aback at the sheer simplicity of the plan. “If I go out…won’t I get caught?”
“Better than staying in here like a rat in a barrel,” Jeff said over his shoulder as he tore off a thick wad of toilet paper and began dabbing at the rust-red drops on the linoleum. Brian bent down, but Jeff waved him off. “You’ll only make a bigger mess. Take this and put it to your face. I’ll guess your eye is going through some severe molecular changes right now, and the blood is coming from the discarded cells. It’ll probably stop soon.”
Brian obeyed, leaning quietly against the table while his father worked. When Jeff was done, he flushed the blood-soaked tissues down the toilet bowl and washed his hands thoroughly. “How is it?” he asked without looking at his son.
Brian pried the second handful of toilet paper from his eye. “It’s slowing down.”
“Good. You’ll be a little late this morning, but the trouble you’ll get into is nothing if you don’t get to school and let them see you.” He spoke as if distracted, eyes fixed overhead. “We can’t afford to take any risks.”
Brian’s eyes grew wider with every word. “Dad? What’s going on?”
Jeff turned and favored him with an obviously forced smile. “Let me think, kiddo. Everything’s fine. Your artifact is in the final stage of completion. You’ll get some powers out of it, but it won’t kill you. Not at first, anyway.”
Brian swore, something he rarely did, and leapt to his feet. “I want some answers, Dad, and I want them now. Who’s ‘they’? And how do you know so much about…” He paused and darted his eyes around as though there were spies lurking in the shadows. “…the M word?”
Jeff sighed and leaned his forehead against the door. He looked very old, with the brightening sunlight picking out the white in his hair and deepening the shadows under his eyes. “…I used to work for the government once. In the Ministry of Science and Research.” He stared at his son. “I wasn’t directly involved…but I know. I know what happens to people like you.”
Brian shrank away from his father’s intense gaze. “You…” He couldn’t speak. He could only look back, through the golden-tinted days of his childhood, and try to remember…some hint, some sign, that his father had been as he had said.
Jeff interrupted his musings. “This is no time for talk, but for action,” he said, eyeing Brian meaningfully. “Get tidied up. You are going to school as usual. It’ll take too long to explain, but suffice it to say that there’re probably people watching you.” With a trace of his former manner, he clapped his hands. “Chop-chop!”
If it was meant to reassure him, it worked to some degree. Brian combed his hair, brushed his teeth and in short performed his ordinary morning routine while Jeff made breakfast. It was surreal to see his blood-streaked face in the mirror and smell burning bacon in the air—to experience both the abnormal and the normal and realize that things could so easily be the same as they always were.