Part 3 to this story posted previously (here)
The events of the previous evening far from his mind, Mark pulled into the apartment complex’s lot around five forty-five. It was raining again, a slow, misty drizzle that wasn’t falling so much as permeating the air. He dashed into the building and took the elevator up, and only when the doors closed did he really remember what the previous night’s little road trip had wrought. Five hours, he remembered the book saying. Well, five hours starting then, he realized, was wide open - why not see what it was that Carrie had for him next? Given the weather, he certainly didn’t have any particular desire to go out again.
His apartment looked as it had when he’d left that morning, with Carrie’s notebook laying closed on the countertop. Mark locked the door, and after heating up a can of soup in the microwave, he turned to page seven.
First, Mark, turn on a TV or a radio and find a station with nothing but static. There’s nothing special about the static, but you’ll need the white noise. It doesn’t need to be particularly loud, just audible. Let it run for a minute or so, then you can go on to the next page.
White noise? Mark read the paragraph, the only one on the page, again to be sure. Not really seeing the harm in white noise, Mark flipped on his countertop radio, tuned it to a dead band, and dialed it up to a reasonable volume. The hissing sounded no different from any other static, but why should it? Even Carrie’s book had said there’s nothing special about it. Mark counted to sixty, then read the next page, the hissing sound already part of the background, beyond notice.
Now turn out all the lights in your place and close the blinds. If you’re getting white noise from a radio, I suggest a flashlight - you’re going to need to read the next page with the lights off.
Mark, still trying to figure out what this was for, nevertheless finished his soup, then set about doing what she asked, using his cell phone’s screen as a flashlight after all the lights were out and the blinds were closed against the evening’s damp gray light. Besides the shifting triangles of light that seeped between the still-shifting blinds at the window, everything else was swallowed in the sudden gloom. Holding his cellular light source close to Caroline’s little book, Mark turned to the next page.
Before he could read a word of it, though, a tiny noise behind him made Mark whirl on the stool chair, peering into the darkness beyond which the apartment’s bathroom lay. He saw nothing there, though - only shadows. The musings of the previous night’s drive came to mind - what, Mark supposed, if he wasn’t alone in his apartment? What if some mysterious, ghostly being had been the purpose of the bizarre antics Carrie had proscribed, and that entity was now invisibly lurking in the darkness?
Expecting that unsettling cold feeling Mark had known on and off all his life to come back, Mark stepped out of the chair and toward the bathroom, cell phone held ahead of his face to light the way. By the time he got to the bathroom doorway, though, the feeling had not struck him - perhaps the sound was just the building settling, or came from the apartment below?
Shaking his head, Mark went back to the counter and to Carrie’s book.
Mark, imagine that that static isn’t the radio, it’s something else. Something you remember from years ago.
The two sentences were alone at the top of the page, and below that Carrie had drawn a little curved arrow. Mark took the arrow to be an instruction to turn the page again, and did so.
Don’t think, just imagine, and read. It’s not static, it’s the hiss of a fountain. After that, another “next page” arrow.
Mark stopped. A fountain? What was Carrie doing? He sat back on the stool. What could be the purpose of these pages? He wondered what these “instructions” were intended to accomplish.
Unless, Mark realized, Carrie was trying to lead him to something, something he already knew. But what was the point in that when the same goal would be achieved by simply reminding him?
With a sigh, Mark bent over the book and read the page again.
Don’t think, just imagine, and read. It’s not static, it’s the hiss of a fountain.
Mark turned the page, trying to picture a fountain.
The whole family is there on the lawn, in white plastic chairs and nice clothes. The grass is almost too green to be real, but you aren’t paying attention to it.
Flip. Mark’s mind pictured green, tended grass, chairs. A wedding? No. Mark had never been to an outdoor wedding. The only outdoor ceremony he’d been to was -
They gave you a seat in the front row, right between Mom and me, and everyone can see you crying but you can’t help it. You don’t want to be crying, why are you crying? You have to be strong.
Flip. Mark’s eyes burned with remembered tears as the memory played just as Carrie described it. His mind had caught hold of the scene.
The casket behind the man at the podium is closed. Mom hadn’t wanted to have an open casket, you know. She’s in the same state you are, but it’s expected that she cries.
Dad’s funeral, Mark thought vaguely as he flipped to the next page. It was a memory he didn’t like to recall, why was Carrie dredging it up? Their father had died when Mark was a teenager.
He could see the fountain now. It was the kind where the water spills down evenly over an artificial cataract, not the kind with water jets spraying into the air. That kind was too lively for a cemetery - the one they had was quiet, soothing. Peaceful. It was background noise for the solemn goings-on that surrounded it. Mark had forgotten the fountain until now.
Jack Lynch, Dad’s old friend, is speaking. You remember him from years ago, when he was fit and lively, but he’s pale and thin now, wasting away, but you can’t see him through the tears and your mind puts the old “Uncle Jack” in his place.
Mark might have wondered how Carrie knew all this, but he was beyond that now, fully caught up in a memory both painful and compelling.
You wouldn’t look at me, you didn’t want me to see your grief. You wanted to be the strong older brother you thought I needed. So you kept your face turned to the podium and concentrated on Jack’s retelling of some of his best memories of his buddy.
Mom had been squeezing Mark’s hand so hard that he wondered if he’d have broken fingers lately, but at the time he hadn’t minded. His father was dead, and he would have gladly sacrificed all of his almost-fourteen-year-old fingers to have his old man back.
He wondered how Carrie was holding up, in that abstracted part of his mind where he could think clearly despite his emotional state. He couldn’t hear her, but Carrie had always been one to cry silently, not to weep openly, so there were not as many eyes on her.
That part of Mark’s mind was acutely aware of the eyes on him. He was the man of the house now, right? Sure, the twins were technically older, but they lived in different states. How could they look after Mom and Carrie from that distance? He felt their eyes on him head the most heavily, from their seats on the other side of Mom. And what was he doing? He was crying like an infant in front of over a hundred people.
Jack finishes. It looked like he was going to say more, but he choked up and surrendered the stage, and another man came up. You vaguely recognized him, but that’s all - maybe a man Dad worked with.
Mark clenched his free hand to try to get control of himself, to try to stop crying. Everyone else here had the luxury of mourning openly, so why was he the only one who couldn’t help but do so when he was the one who needed to be strong? Was he the only person there (besides his mother, that was) that felt the need to weep as the realization that George Farner was dead set in?
Mark wished hard to stop crying. He wished that his father wasn’t dead. He even tried wishing he wasn’t there, at the funeral.
You did something then, you’ve never done before. You put all your mind and all your heart into something impossible, and with all the willpower you could muster, you pushed against the world.
Mark latched onto the wish that he wasn’t at the funeral. He bent his head down and clenched the fist that wasn’t being crushed by Lauren Farner’s grief-stricken grip, and he squeezed his eyes shut, and he tried to will himself away, to somewhere he could grieve for his father alone. To anywhere else. Anywhere but there, in that hard plastic chair on the lawn of a cemetery in May. He put all his mind into it, and then more he didn’t know he had, all of it into the same thing, imagining himself farther from the place he was.
I saw you do it, Mark. You did it. You pushed hard enough, in that moment, and you got through just a little. Mom didn’t notice, she couldn’t. But someone besides me did.
Mark opened his eyes, and the grass between his well-dressed knees was still there. Nothing had changed, despite all his best efforts he was still weeping his eyes out in front of his extended family and pretty much every family friend his parents had in a cemetery, twenty feet from the casket containing his father’s lifeless body.
He looked up, and the vaguely-familiar man at the podium was stepping down. Beyond him, Mark saw a girl of about his age who he did not recognize standing beside the casket, her hand resting on the side of the wooden box. Mark was stunned - who was this girl who had wandered into a private funeral? His first instinct was to be angry. Why was no-one doing anything about her?
She was dressed in black, and her head was turned toward the casket, bent low as if in mourning. She had an unruly mess of straight but mussed and tangled red hair, and she was built like Carrie - thin, giving the impression of frailty that Mark knew was only an illusion in Carrie’s case.
As Mark sat wondering why none of the grown-ups about had moved to guide the girl away and debating if he should say something, she turned to look in his direction, and their gazes locked. From where Mark was sitting, her eyes looked green - not the standard eye-color green, but a color so bright and vibrantly green that in comparison to it the lawn, itself far too green, looked pale and brown. He knew immediately that there was something not right about those eyes.
At first she didn’t believe you saw her, just as you couldn’t believe someone would let their kid just wander up to a stranger’s funeral and get right up to the casket. She had had fleeting moments several times before where she thought you might have glimpsed her, but this time she knew it.
The girl bowed her head and dashed around behind the bier, and still no-one went after her. By the time the next speaker got up to the podium, she had not come back out. She was probably still hiding there, Mark realized - maybe he’d been the only one to see her, but how was that possible, that is, unless everyone had been staring at him rather than at the podium or the casket?
Carrie nudged her brother in the ribs then, and he turned to look at her. He almost jumped out of his seat when he turned and saw her eyes lit up with the same vibrant green as the mystery girl’s -
But that must have been a trick of the light. No, he realized, with a settling feeling, they were their normal grayish color.
Carrie gave a wincing, reassuring smile, and patted Mark’s arm, saying without words that they’d get through this. Together.
The phone’s screen had gone out, and Mark didn’t know how long it had been out. He became immediately conscious of the static playing in the radio - no longer gently cascading water, it was merely static again. Mark’s cheeks were tight from drying tears, a sensation he hadn’t felt in a decade. He’d gone that long without thinking of that day for a reason - it was the most painful day of his life to date. At George Farner’s death, Mark’s childhood had ended abruptly, and at his funeral, the rest of Mark’s life had begun on a very undignified note.
Mark tapped his phone’s “power” button so the screen came back on, and re-read the page it was open to. Who was “she”? Presumably, the young girl with the intense green eyes and the red hair.
He set the phone down, screen-up, and as he did the shadow of something darted back from the counter at his side as the light spread. Mark scrambled to pick it back up and point it in that direction, but the phone’s pale illumination revealed nothing there.
Mark sighed shakily and mentally chalked his jumpiness up to the fact that he was just prodded into remembering with near-perfect clarity some of the worst minutes of his life. Underneath that last paragraph, presumably about the green-eyed girl, there was another turn-the-page arrow, this time near the bottom of the page rather than right below the text.
He hesitated, though, before turning the page, wondering if the rest of Carrie’s steps would be as... powerful. Mark had always had a good memory of events, but for reading a few words to bring up old memories like that was without precedent.
With a shrug, he flipped the page, at least wanting to see what came next. He’d by this point lost count of the pages he’d gone through, and decided that it didn’t matter - Caroline hadn’t numbered them.
While what you did then is fresh in your mind, do it again. I can’t really say more than that. Do it in front of a mirror, if one’s handy, and you’ll begin to see where all this is leading. You’ll know when you’ve succeeded, and then come back and turn the page.
Mark read the short paragraph carefully. What he’d done, that must mean the wishing - Carrie’s text had focused on it specifically. But he hadn’t gone anywhere - the wishing had been an abject failure of a childish hope then, and there was precious little chance of that being any different now. Mark, after all, was a grown man now, and was hardly going to expect that sort of childish wishing to change reality.
\
But it was in the instruction book, and Mark was still curious, if now a bit annoyed with Caroline for making him remember Dad’s funeral like that.
With a resigned sigh, Mark flipped on the overhead light and went into the bathroom, leaning his palms against the sink. His reflection in the mirror was a sorry sight, but that wasn’t what he was here to see. Why wishing oneself away would have a visible effect in a mirror Mark could not even guess, but he discovered a curious thing: he no longer felt the desire to question Carrie’s little book. Deciding that he had used up all his energy for questioning suffering through the recollection of his father’s funeral, Mark closed his eyes, dropped his head, and devoted every shred of his mind and will to wishing that he was not in his apartment, that he was somewhere else. Anywhere else. He held that in his mind for a long moment, but didn’t feel any different.
Opening his eyes, Mart saw nothing had changed - it hadn’t worked, whatever it was supposed to do. Nothing was different - he was still leaning on his bathroom sink, looking haggard, in his work shirt.
Mark gripped the edge of the counter and lowered his head in frustration. Carrie had been wrong. Whatever it was she wanted him to do, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t just close his eyes and leave his drab, lonely apartment at will.
All of a sudden, Mark realized how much he very much he’d wanted this whole thing to be going somewhere. A part of him had, upon asking himself if the whole thing was ridiculous, hoped beyond hope that there was more to it than a joke, or the product of a crazy sibling gone off the meds. Carrie had for years been simultaneously Mark’s closest companion and the greatest enigma he knew, and this from the beginning had implied to him that completing the book’s instructions might teach something about Carrie herself. Something to prove what Mark had believed since childhood - that Carrie was not insane, or incomprehensible.
If the book’s instructions were nothing but memory prompts, tricks, and meaningless dictates, Mark realized, he could no longer believe that Carrie was sane. He could no longer defend her to his mother. He couldn’t even defend his sister’s sanity in his own mind.
Mark wanted very much to be somewhere else, if only to prove that there was something coherent in the head of his younger sister, the person who’d been his childhood companion and closest friend. He wanted to find the secret that proved Carrie sane, to himself if to no-one else. For a second time, he wished, put all his mind and heart into wishing, that he was anywhere else, or barring that, that he could see the world like Carrie saw it.
Something in Mark’s mind clicked, like a tumbler siding into place, but Mark didn’t feel any different after. The feeling, though, was alien and unmistakable. His heart leaped - had he done it?
When he opened his eyes, Mark was still standing in his bathroom, looking down into the sink. Deciding that he had imagined the feeling of something happening, Mark raised his eyes to his own reflection with a resigned sigh, and jumped back in shock.
In his reflected face, Mark’s usually clear, dark-brown irises glowed a neon green, impossibly bright. As he watched, the glow flickered and faded, and his eyes returned to normal. Not that Mark felt anything - without the mirror, he wouldn’t have noticed anything different.
Remembering what the book had said, Mark dutifully went back to the counter and flipped to the next page.
What you more than likely just saw is not a transformation of you or anything else, but a translation - a movement along an axis you cannot perceive. It probably only lasted a second or two before stopping - think of it as analogous to a step. You have to learn to take steps effortlessly before I can teach you to run or dance, so right now just concentrate on practice.
I’ll explain what the translation does later, but for now, trigger as many as you can. Each will become successively harder, but it’s like doing pushups, Mark - you can do more with practice. When you can see the title on this book’s cover, turn to the next page.
Vague as always, Mark mentally remarked about his sister’s instructions. Maybe he’d get his wish after all, to see the world the way Caroline did. The alternative, that Caroline had managed to unmoor Mark from sanity, briefly crossed his mind as he returned to the mirror, but he discarded the possibility.
Marking his page and closing the book, Mark examined the cover. It was soft false leather, with no brand name, and no title - probably a journal Carrie had gotten at a bookstore. Mark didn’t see any depressions where there’d be letters or words, but Carrie said that he’d be able to see a title with enough of the green-eye-flash trick. Not thinking about it too hard (he was certain that there would be no benefit in doing so), Mark returned to the mirror and attempted Carrie’s little exercise again.
Ten “translations” in, Mark was able to make his reflection’s eyes green without an emotion-soaked force of all his will, but it still took a good deal of effort and required him to close his eyes for several seconds. It was only then that he wondered fleetingly how one “un-translated” - but given that none of the supposed “movements on axes” had seemed to do anything, Mark tossed the thought aside, expecting it to be answered in a subsequent step in the book once he needed it.
At number thirteen, he encountered the resistance first. It was strange, like something dragging his thoughts back from that thing so near a wish that triggered Carrie’s “translation” effect. But he beat it. Fourteen was harder still, but Mark managed - barely - to complete the trick - with about the same amount of effort as his first few translations had taken. At fifteen, he gripped the counter with white-knuckled hands, gritting his teeth and forcing his thoughts and emotional energy to go where he wanted them, struggling against inexplicable forces. Eventually, he yielded to the resisting force, and nearly collapsed in shock at the sensation of settling, at the impression that the air around him wavered slightly. He knew without the book telling him that failing the trick had put him all the way back to square one, and knew with a bit of mild satisfaction that that meant he knew how to reverse the trick in a pinch - by taking it as far as he could go and letting it “snap back”.
Two hours of on-and-off practice later, Mark, with increasing ease and decreasing discomfort at the alien green glow, turned in for the night. It was steadily getting easier both to “translate” (Carrie’s term for the bizarre glowing-eyes trick, which Mark had adopted), but each push still took several seconds, and his best count all night was seventeen - the second to last set.
As he got into bed, Mark wondered what the little trick, Carrie’s “translation”, was really for. In itself, it was something novel, but maybe, just maybe, Mark hoped, it was a bit of what made Carrie who she was. A dozen conversations or more between pre-teen Carrie and Mark’s own teenaged self would have made a lot more sense in light of this development, he realized - but he failed to determine the logical conclusion of this context before he drifted off to sleep.
Mark’s alarm went off the next morning, and he grudgingly rolled out of bed to deactivate it. The previous night’s discovery seemed far off to his morning-hazed mind, replaced by the concerns of work. As he went through his routine, he even wondered if the whole bit had been a dream, if he would slowly come to remember that as sleep became a more remote prospect in his mind
As he left the apartment, though, that had not yet happened, so he determined that he had indeed learned a new trick from Carrie’s book. Still not satisfied, Mark went into the office bathroom as soon as he got to work to perform the “translation” trick. He half-expected it not to work, but work it did - Mark looked up to see the green glow he remembered lighting his irises, and did not leave the bathroom until it had faded.
After that, Mark coasted through the day as much as he was able, the book that still sat on his apartment countertop being foremost in his mind. Mark had spent all his early life trying to see the world like his little sister did, and had years ago given up hoping that one day he might learn how she worked. The book could only be her way of beginning to show him - why now, Mark wondered? What had changed? And Why had Carrie not elected to do this in person?
Despite not having enough information, Mark tried out, and discarded, several theories over the course of his day. His work suffered - the only thing he managed to get done was the monthly network security report - but not so much, he suspected, that his boss would be able to tell that something was up. Mark felt an irrational desire to keep Carrie’s book and its contents secret - he thought it was irrational, anyway. He knew that Carrie hadn’t told him in the book to keep anything secret, but that didn’t stop him from feeling reflexively that it should be.
After seemingly the longest work-day in months, Mark was relieved to return home and again tackle the mystery in the notebook, remembering only belatedly to stop on the way to get something to eat. When you can see the title on this book’s cover, turn to the next page. Mark read again, as he distractedly ate his Chinese take-out. How many translations would it take to do that? He remembered doing fourteen successfully, but he hadn’t checked to see if that was enough - but he doubted it would be.
As soon as he was done disposing of the empty styrofoam cartons that had contained his meal, Mark returned to the bathroom mirror, and started doing more translations.
Story continues in part 5 (here).
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