Teary. Breath hot and stinking. I could feel him. I could smell him. He was standing behind me. This was no hallucination.
“Such a handsome face. That’s not how I remember you. You had some scars. Nasty red-looking things. Maybe I’m supposed to give them to you.”
“What do you want?”
“I was young when I killed your father. I was just starting out with the pills, figuring it all out. I thought the old man up here had some money I could steal, buy my own pills. But then I saw he had his own stash. And it was goooooooood shit he had. Shit nobody else had. Shit that made me a superhero.”
“You asshole—you killed my father.”
“I was confused back then, you see. I thought he was you. I killed him because I thought he was you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Now I get what I want. Finally.”
Then the hands released me.
“Hey. No. No no no no no no not yet…”
Billy was gone.
But I still heard his voice.
“DON’T YOU BASTARDS STICK THAT IN ME I’LL COME FOR ALL OF YOU IN YOUR SLEEP AND CUT YOU AND YOUR PRETTY LITTLE CHILDREN TO DEATH…”
My eyes may have been playing tricks. But for a flicker of a moment I saw the shape of Derace above me, and it was like he was wrestling with unseen forces, trying to lift his curled fists up, but he couldn’t, because the man had invisible restraints around his wrists…
And then he vanished.
In the mid-1960s a professor at the University of Virginia ran a series of experiments on an advertising executive named Robert Monroe who claimed to have experienced numerous “out of body” (OBE) experiences. Monroe agreed to eight sessions in which he was placed in a locked room and asked to project himself. In two of those sessions Monroe was able to accurately describe the contents of another room in the facility in vivid detail.
In the late 1960s the Pentagon began a series of experiments aimed to control “remote viewing”—essentially, using psychics as spies to peer behind the Iron Curtain. Reportedly, the other side was engaged in similar experiments, resulting in a top secret, low-key “brain race” similar to the arms race and the moon race.
And in 1971, Dr. Mitchell DeMeo was given a government grant to find a way to induce an out-of-body experience using pharmaceuticals, which he’d developed over a period of twenty years.
DeMeo was affiliated with the prestigious Adams Institute. But he ran his experiments offsite; the board of directors at the Adams Institute thought it would be better that way. He used the address of the Papiro Center, at the time an empty building on the hospital’s grounds that was sometimes used by the government, sometimes not. When it was not, unruly patients and “special cases” were housed in the center.
But DeMeo had actually set up shop in an abandoned apartment building on Frankford Avenue. They advertised in local papers for volunteers.
They accepted my father.
Dr. DeMeo hired a cleaning woman named Erna Derace to tidy up his office as well as the other apartments in the building. Payment was very modest, but in exchange, Erna was allowed to keep an apartment downstairs.
She had a boy named Billy. And he was instructed to be quiet at all times. In fact, their stay in the apartment was contingent on Billy “behaving.”
No one cared about the experiments now, because the experiments were seen as a failure.
And the story had gone untold.
The story was all here in the papers, which had been buried in drawers of the cherrywood desk. Meghan had found the motherlode when she righted the desk after Billy Derace had tried to smash my head through it. Everything was in there. Grandpop Henry had clearly been through it all, and kept the relevant stuff neatly organized in the desk drawers. The boxes and crates were essentially leftovers. Trash he hadn’t gotten around to bringing outside. We’d been looking in the wrong place this whole time.
Meghan flipped through DeMeo’s experiment notes, all of which were neatly typewritten and separated into three categories: positive, negative and “questionable.” The negative files were thick, and had taken up most of the drawer. The questionables were comparatively slim. And the positives were thinner still.
We more or less read in silence, as if we were both engrossed in the same 500,000-page novel that had gushed itself out of the desk. Only, we were on wildly different chapters, trying to piece together the story out of order. At one point Meghan looked up at me.
“Okay, so Dr. DeMeo was researching out-of-body experiences. As far as we know, Billy Derace is still locked up, under heavy sedation at the Adams Institute. So this means the Derace we saw last night was what…an astral projection?”
“Which will make it very interesting to explain to the police.”
“True.”
Then I thought this through a bit more.
“Wait wait wait—that doesn’t make sense. Say he has the same pills I do. And let’s say he can do the same things I can do. Does this mean he’s come back from some future year just to mess with me now?”
“Maybe the whole going back in time thing is specific to you. According to these papers here, it was all about astral projection. Harnessing it. Making it predictable. Finding people who were predisposed to it. Maybe you, and maybe your father, could only project into the past.”
“What makes you say that?”
Meghan held up the positive folder.
“Because in this folder is Dr. DeMeo’s one proven success. And his name is Billy Allen Derace.”
“You’re kidding. He ran drug experiments on a twelve-year-old boy? The son of the woman he was banging?”
Meghan opened the folder, handed it to me.
“I don’t think he was twelve. These notes are dated from early 1980. That would make Derace, what, eighteen years old then?”
I skimmed the notes. Meghan was right. Derace had been an unqualified success. Able to walk around outside his body and identify objects in other rooms with ease. DeMeo was practically gushing. He also noted that his success was “no doubt linked to the extreme dosage administered to subject over a short period of time.”
In short: Derace had been pumped full of these pills in order to make the out-of-body experience work.
But why do this to Billy? Had he volunteered? Had Erna coerced her son to do it to stay in the good graces of that fat pill-pusher?
Meghan found my father’s page after a short while. He had been in the “questionable” folder, and it seemed that the pills had the same effect on the father as they did the son. He was hurled back in time, too, only to his birth year—1949. DeMeo’s notes were snide, dismissive. My father insisted what he was seeing was real, and asked for more time to prove it. DeMeo let him have a few more sessions, then abruptly bounced him from the experiment. “Subject W. clearly wanted to milk the system for more money.”
I shook my head.
“DeMeo didn’t believe him. But my father was telling the truth.”
Oh hell—my father.
Billy.
“What?”
The pallet full of cinder blocks that had been dangling over me finally broke free and smashed down on my head. I scrambled across the room, nearly tripping, and pulled out the death scrapbook Grandpop had made.
“Mickey, what is it?”
