On the video feed, Diogee remained calm as Amy closed the door behind her. Mikey didn’t take particular interest in the dog, just glanced at it as it came in. Diogee sniffed around, but it was clearly because he was trying to trace the origin of the hot dog scents.
Mikey looked away from the dog, shook his head, and said, “Pathetic. Packs of wolves used to own this land, all this. Thousands of years pass and we bred them down to that little yapping thing. Bred them to catch rats, gave them those tiny little legs. There’s a place where the Nephilim did that to the people.” Mikey had pulled the straw out of his soda, and was slowly screwing it into the end of his skinned hot dog, skewering it. “They took over, bred us so we’d have no teeth so they wouldn’t get in the way when they wanted us to suck ’em off, gave us short little legs so we couldn’t run. Only where we bred dogs so their brains would be addicted to our affection, the Nephilim bred us to be addicted to their semen.”
Amy nervously said, “Diogee, why don’t you go see Mikey over there?” She led the dog over, but it continued to show complete indifference.
I looked up from the phone and said to John, “I’m thinking your dog might be useless.”
“You’re assuming this is even the same deal here. That Mikey and Nymph are the same thing.”
On the screen, Mikey said, “You don’t think I’m the real Mikey, do you?”
Chastity shot an alarmed look at Amy, then at the phone, meaning us. She said, “Why would you say that, honey?”
“Maybe the real Mikey is still at Joy Park. Maybe you should check.”
Amy said, “Where is Joy Park?”
“You know where. Unless you’re talking about the girl with them titties.”
Chastity said, “We’ll be right back.”
Chastity and Amy both stood up to excuse themselves, and it was here that Diogee first showed a reaction. Not to Mikey—he went nuts at the prospect of leaving the room. He barked and snarled at Amy, and even nipped at her when she tried to grab the leash. But when she backed off, he became perfectly calm. She wound up just leaving Diogee in the room. If Mikey tried to attack him or something, I guessed we’d have to go rushing in to the dog’s rescue, even if it had turned out that he was shitty at his one job.
A moment later, Chastity and Amy slid into the Jeep and Chastity said, “See what I mean?”
I said, “Let’s say it’s an imposter. To me, the big news is that your son is still out there, and if he’s really at Mine’s Eye then I don’t know where to…”
Chastity was shaking her head. “No.”
“I know it’s hard to wrap your mind around it, but we’ve seen—”
“No, it’s deeper than that. All of this is.”
I said, “If you’ve got a theory, please share.”
Chastity stared out the windshield at the row of hotel doors, each painted a different primary color. It was probably supposed to be festive but the effect was more sad, abandoned circus.
She said, “One time, I read about this parasite, a tiny little roundworm. It spreads itself by getting inside birds, then the bird’s droppings are full of its eggs. Well, the parasite’s first problem is getting inside the bird in the first place, you see. So here’s what it does. It infects an ant. Then it makes the ant swell up big and red, so that it looks just like a berry. Then it takes over the ant’s brain and convinces it to go climb up a tree and stand there among the other berries. Bird comes along, eats the ant, thinking it’s a berry.”
I said, “I don’t get it.”
Chastity was staring hard at the hotel room window, nothing visible behind the closed curtain.
“When Mikey got taken, the first thing I thought of was two years ago, on Mikey’s sixth birthday, I took him to Pizza Circus. And I remember he got scared by those fiberglass clowns they got on the wall and we had to leave early. Took him home and made him a grilled cheese instead. That’s his favorite. We sat on the sofa and watched a movie, that cartoon where Chris Rock plays a zebra, and they’re all zoo animals, tryin’ to escape. I think I laughed more than he did.”
She stopped talking, staring at that window. We waited for her to finish the story, but she just stared. I thought I saw the curtain twitch, like maybe Mikey was sneaking a peek out at us.
It was Amy who finally said, “Two years ago? That’s not right, Pizza Circus got trashed during the last round of craziness, with the looting. Never opened back up.”
Chastity just nodded.
“I don’t have a son. I never did.”
13. WAIT, WHAT THE FUCK?
I said, “That can’t be … no. You absolutely thought you had a son as of like, an hour ago.”
She nodded, absently. “And I got memories. Going back eight years. But they don’t make sense, if you think about ’em hard enough. It’s all bent and twisted. He don’t got a room of his own at the trailer, supposedly on account of losing my last place in a fire. But he don’t got clothes, or toys, neither.”
“But … how would you not notice that? Like, instantly?”
She shook her head. “You seen them TV shows about the hoarders, people got garbage piled up so high that they can’t even walk from one room to the next? Family tries to intervene, but those people literally can’t see the garbage, can’t be convinced anything’s wrong. Your mind, it gets these blind spots to the most basic things. I got a cousin who weighs six hundred pounds, but all thought of that goes out the window next mealtime rolls around. And then I got to thinking about that parasite. All that little worm is doing is convincing the ant that it’s always been there, inside it, and that walkin’ up the tree to where the berries are is its favorite thing. Even though everything inside it should know it’s suicide.”
I said, “But humans aren’t ants. You’re saying this thing showed up, and convinced you that you had already had a son, complete with thousands of memories going back years. How would that even work?”
Amy said, “Your memories are physical structures in your brain. It would be the exact same process as the ant, just a little more complicated.”
John said, “The fuckroach, we could all feel it trying to worm its way into our history. Not just looking like a cell phone, but making us remember that it was one. Making it just plausible enough.”
Amy said, “What’s worse, it looks like the dog can’t detect these things after all. If we’re now sure ‘Mikey’ in there is one of them…”
John said, “Eh, it’s not the first time he’s been wrong. He totally whiffed on that possessed stuffed bear I won at the Fall Festival. Just kept humping it.”
Amy said, “What are you talking about?”
“You don’t remember the thing with the bear? It was when I still lived in that apartment on—”
Amy clutched her hair with her one hand and said, “Oh my god. You think you’ve always owned that dog.”
I said, “Uh … what?”
Amy threw herself back in the car seat. “I’ve never seen that dog before today. I thought John was just dog sitting or something.”
I stared at the motel room door. “No. Just … no. That’s Diogee. He and Molly never got along? Chewed up one of your sandals one time?”
“I have never lost a shoe to a dog.”
Behind the motel room window, the curtain twitched again.
John said to her, “No, this is … they’re scrambling your brain here. This is you, not us. I remember everything. This used to be Marcy’s dog, he stayed with me when we broke up, her roommate was allergic. Years ago, same year as we had that bad winter and … all the stuff happened.”