Infinite(20)

“Jumping between worlds?” I asked cynically.

“That’s right.”

“Are you saying you did this to me?”

“Exactly.”

“I would never have agreed to that.”

“In fact, you volunteered. You pushed me to try it. You said you wanted to know the truth about yourself. So we agreed that you would be my guinea pig.”

I felt as if all I could do was sputter out my protests. “Experimenting with psychotropic drugs? Is that even legal? Because it sure as hell doesn’t sound ethical.”

“You’re right. I push the boundaries. Actually, you said that was something you liked about me, that we had things in common. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. I was a drug addict for a while back in medical school and nearly got kicked out. If people found out what we did, I’d probably lose my license. That’s why I was so cautious with you tonight. Yes, I gave you hallucinogenic drugs to alter reality for you, but believe me, it was with your full consent.”

I shook my head. “Impossible. You’re making a mistake. I don’t know you.”

Eve sighed at my denials. “You’re Dylan Moran. Events manager at the LaSalle Plaza Hotel. Your father killed your mother and then killed himself right in front of you. You moved in with your grandfather, Edgar, after their deaths. You still go to the Art Institute with him every week. Your favorite painting is Hopper’s Nighthawks. Edgar likes to say that if he hadn’t accidentally bumped into the museum director when he was a boy and saved him from getting killed on State Street, that painting would be hanging in a totally different place.”

My breath left my chest. I grabbed her shoulders and hissed in her face, “How do you know all that?”

“How do you think? You told me.”

I stared at her face in the starlight and tried to make sense of this woman. She was a doctor and a psychiatrist, but she was something more, too. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but she had an enigmatic quality about her, as if she could seduce people with her mind. I felt the spell she cast pulling me into her orbit. She was beautiful, sensual, unforgettable. A magician. I could picture being with her in her office. I could hear my own voice telling her secrets about myself.

But it had never happened.

“This therapy,” I went on. “What did I experience?”

“You told me you saw other Dylans from other worlds. You interacted with them. You went into their lives.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“You believed it.”

“What did I see?”

“If you want to know that, you should go back inside your head. Try it and see for yourself.”

“No thanks.”

“Are you sure? You told me after one session that you wished you could stay in the world you found. You were tempted to take over that other Dylan’s life.”

“None of that is real,” I said.

“How do you know? Frankly, I wasn’t sure before we began, but your experience made me a believer. The Many Worlds theory is true. We really do take every road that’s open to us. In some other world, you and I never met. We’re passing each other by the lake right now like strangers. In another world, we’re having sex. In another, you’re holding me under the water and drowning me.”

I flinched at the violent image. “Drowning you? Why on earth would you say something like that?”

“Because that’s why you came to me, Dylan,” Eve said. “You said you were having visions of killing people, and yet these people were still alive. But you could give me details, dates, descriptions, methods of how you’d murdered them. You wanted my help. You were afraid you were on the verge of becoming a serial killer.”





CHAPTER 8

Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror—I mean, really looked at yourself—and wondered who you were?

What kind of person lives behind your eyes?

That was how I felt at that moment. I no longer had any idea what to believe about Dylan Moran. Eve had told me things about myself that seemed impossible, and yet they also made sense in a crazy way. If my personality had split apart, if another side of me was living a different life that I knew nothing about, then maybe my mind was projecting that second Dylan Moran into my hallucinations.

I was seeing myself. Talking to the other version of myself. Somehow, my brain was bringing my second personality to life, and what I knew about that personality scared me. When I was him, I didn’t know what I was capable of doing.

Why are you here?

To kill.

I needed something I could hold on to, some kind of driftwood in the sea that would keep me afloat. I needed Karly, or at least a reminder of her. So I took a cab north along the lakeshore toward the house where Karly’s parents lived. There were faster ways out of the city, but I asked the driver to take the slow route along Sheridan Road, and I told him I’d make it up to him in the tip. Karly and I had taken this road many times when we were visiting her parents. She liked to see the neighborhoods change, from the green fields of Lincoln Park to the academic neighborhoods of Loyola and Northwestern, and then to the lakeside mansions of Evanston, Kenilworth, and Winnetka.

Personally, I just thought she wasn’t in a hurry to see her mother.

Susannah Chance lived in a stone mansion that dated to the 1930s. It looked like a Tudor castle, with bay windows, tall austere chimneys, and sharp gables. Yes, Karly’s father lived here, too, but this was the House That Susannah Built. Karly’s father, Tom, was a published poet and high school English teacher who would have been just as happy living in a one-bedroom apartment near Wrigley Field. Susannah, however, was the force of nature behind Chance Properties, and her Wilmette estate was the ostentatious symbol of her success.