Ex-Purgatory by Peter Clines (best book club books TXT) 📕

you were dead. He said in the dreams he’s having there’s a dead girl, but the way he says it is like … like she’s not really dead.”

Madelyn smiled. “That’s me.”

He paced in front of her for a minute. Then he realized he was pacing and stopped. “This can’t be real,” he said.

“It is.”

“It’s silly.”

“Is that why you’re here?” she asked. “You just wanted to be a jerk and come tell me this is all silly?”

“The monsters.”

She looked back at him. “What about them?”

The back of his skull pulsed. Just once. The sensation traveled forward through the bone to echo in his eye sockets. A reminder not to push it too far. “I think I’m …”

Having some kind of nervous breakdown crossed his mind.

“I think I’m seeing the things from my dreams,” he said. “While I’m awake.”

Madelyn looked around. “Seeing them here?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Do you see them now?”

He shook his head. “It comes and goes.”

Madelyn looked over at a nearby trash can. “Is there a newspaper in there?”

“What?”

“In the trash. Is there a newspaper or magazine or anything?”

He glanced in the bin and shook his head.

She rocked the wheelchair back and forth for a moment. “Can you come up to my room? You need to see something.”

The standard reaction flashed across his mind. This was serious getting-fired territory. It was also, he had to admit, crossing another line. In a way, that one scared him even more.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

George followed her into one of the dorms. They waited on an elevator, and when it came she slid inside and spun her wheelchair around so she could tap the controls. It wasn’t a large elevator. He felt crowded.

The doors opened on the third floor and Madelyn led him down the hall. She dragged her backpack around, pulled out a keychain on a black scrunchie-cord, and unlocked the door.

“Sorry,” called a voice from inside. “I didn’t expect you back.”

Madelyn pushed her way into the dorm room and tossed her backpack on the bed. Her side of the room looked empty to George, but he couldn’t figure out why. Then she spun her wheelchair around to the desk. The standard chair was missing.

Two oxygen tanks stood next to the bed. They looked like a scuba diver’s rig mounted on a small dolly. A clear tube ran off the left tank, coiled around, and hooked into a clear mask shaped to fit over the nose and mouth.

Madelyn saw him studying the tank. “I need it to sleep,” she explained. “I don’t breathe when I’m unconscious.”

The other side of the room looked like an art project. Posters and magazine pages showed Olympic gymnasts, dancers, and martial artists. It was a look George was familiar with. A month or so into the semester, as the new students finally accepted they were unsupervised, there was always an explosion of creative decorations, clothing, and relationships. Some of it stuck around. A lot of it didn’t.

The young Asian woman sitting cross-legged on the bed wore a baggy white sweatshirt with bold rainbow stripes on it. A textbook sprawled in her lap, and her long braid brushed the pages. She glanced up from her textbook as Madelyn settled in. She struck George as familiar.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Kathy.”

“George.”

She studied him for a moment. “Hey,” she said. “I know you. You’re the couch guy.”

He smiled and remembered her slouching deep into the passenger seat of the car. “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry about how my dad talked to you. He and Mom are having major separation anxiety.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“That was kind of awesome. You picked it up like it didn’t weigh anything.”

“It’s …” George glanced at Madelyn. Her fingers were brushing back and forth across her laptop’s touchpad. “It’s a balance trick,” he said. “It looks impressive, but there’s nothing to it.”

Kathy smiled and let her eyes drop back to her book. “Your friend’s kind of cute, too.”

“Sorry?”

She blushed. “With the glasses? How old is he?”

“Hey,” interrupted Madelyn, “pay attention.”

“Sorry,” said George. He glanced at Kathy, but she waved off his eyeballed apology and went back to her book.

Madelyn’s desk held nothing but her laptop. The shelf above it was packed with two dozen black composition books. Each one had a piece of paper with a set of dates taped to the spine. At the far end were a trio of what looked like pocket diaries. She glanced at him, then followed his gaze up to the notebooks. “Journals,” she said. “Well, it started out as diary, but I think I should call it a journal now.”

“You planning on writing a memoir or something?”

“Remember how I said I had memory problems for a while?”

“Yeah.”

“Writing a journal helps me remember stuff.” Her fingers slid back and forth on the computer’s track pad. “I had a lot to remember.”

There was a calendar on the wall and next to it was a list of words. They’d been printed out in large font.

Corpse Girl (ME)

St. George / Mighty Dragon

Captain Freedom

Stealth

Zzzap

Cerberus

Driver

She followed his gaze over to the list and pointed at the top. “That’s you,” she said. “You’re the Mighty Dragon. You used to be, anyway.”

He bit his lip. “Okay.”

Madelyn tapped a few keys on her laptop and brought up a web page. A news headline from that morning showed the President and First Lady at some event. George remembered seeing a notice about them being in town.

“This is what you wanted to show me?” he asked.

“When I first realized who he was,” she said, “I just thought it was part of this weird history-rewrite thing. He used to work for my dad. I think I even talked to him on the phone a couple times when I was in high school.” She pointed at the picture. “Do you know who he is?”

His headache was coming back, and his nose was starting to run, too. He sniffed and pressed on the bridge of his nose. “The President?”

She sighed. “Yeah, but past that.”

“What do you mean, past that?”

“Okay, how about this.” She grabbed a box of tissues from the corner of