Eleven

Ethan.

The name seemed to echo around inside his head. Ethan, that was right. Ethan...

"Land." Penny choked out the word and clutched at her chest, wheezing heavily. "Land's End. Ethan Land's End. Christ, Ethan, what did you do?"

...But no. It wasn't right. He wasn't Ethan Land. He could not be Ethan Land. That thought rose up in his head with the strength of an abjuration. Something fundamental inside him rebelled against the thought. He was not Ethan.

"It's Hell," he heard the sprawling woman mumble. "We're in Hell. But it's your Hell. That's why they kept having me killed, because you were - were obsessed. With me. Because it hurts you. They don't even care about m-me."

He couldn't frown. The grin carved into what passed for his face didn't allow it. Instead, he shook his head. "No," he said, slowly. "That's not right."

He turned and shoved his wooden hands into the pocket of his battered coat. Outside, the noises were dimming away. Some part of him realized that the light was going with it. The moon was dimming. But, in here, he could see. Somehow. The shack seemed full of some sort of diffuse light, just enough to see in a grainy black-and-white, to make out shapes without seeing details.

"That's not right," he said again, more firmly. He took a few lurching steps inside. They were in a hallway, a cramped stretch of corridor between the two halves of the shack. On one side, a living room with a lumpy recliner and a broken television joined with a kitchen that lacked a stove. On the other, a bedroom that contained nothing but a sagging cot with torn sheets and a small cabinet that hung open to reveal stained clothes on wire hangers.

And the fourth door, shut.

There was some sort of dark stain on the floor underneath it. He crouched down to peer at it. Behind him, he heard Penny breathing laboriously, back in the five-two-five rhythm.

He slipped one hand out of a pocket and prodded the stained wood with one overlong finger. It squelched, wetly.

"What is that?"

He turned his head. Penny was getting to her feet, wearing the sharp expression she used when she was looking for something external to focus her mind on, to keep the panic at bay. He shrugged. "Don't know," he said. His voice sounded disturbingly similar to the sound his finger made as he dragged it across the wooden flooring.

He straightened up. "It's gone dark outside," he said, glancing at the door they had left hanging open. "We're moving again."

She shook her head. "There isn't anything we can do about that." Her voice was as sharp as her expression.

"Then let's do something else." He turned away again, pivoting on the longer, right leg, and strode off into the house. "I'm not Ethan Land," he added flatly, over his shoulder. Some part of him wondered which of the two of them he was trying to convince. "But this place seems to be built... around him. Tell me about him."

He ducked under one sagging doorway and into the living room. The recliner and the television were the only things there. The recliner was old, stained, and ripped open in several places. The television was older still, and the buttons had broken off. Both of them looked as if they should have been thrown out years ago.

"This was his place," he heard Penny say. She was leaning against the doorway, arms folded over her chest. But she wasn't looking around. She was staring at him so intensely that he felt as though she were attempting to drill into his head with her eyes. "But it's not, really. It's like my house, but the other way."

He looked away again and moved over towards the television. Dust kicked up from the worn carpeting under his boots and filled the air with the smell of mold. "Explain," he said.

There was a magazine on top of the television. Playboy. Ancient.

"My - the house at the top of the hill was too perfect," she said. He could feel her gaze on the back of his neck. "I never kept the place that clean. And his was never this rotten."

"Rotten to the core," he mused idly. Then he wondered why he said it.

There was a faint rustle of cloth against wood as she shrugged. "Yeah," she said. "This place is disgusting. His was bad, but never... never like this. He worked hard to make sure it stayed at least presentable."

"How did you know him?" He didn't turn to face her. Instead, he pivoted again and lurched over to the recliner. There was a sharply-defined depression in the middle, a dip where someone's body had beaten its shape into the stuffing.

She sighed, and when he finally did turn to look at her, she had tilted her head back and pulled the hat down over her eyes. "He was a vet," she muttered. "Iraq. Two tours. Came back with his left leg crippled and some of the worst PTSD we'd ever seen."

"We?" He leaned down to look at the handle to trigger the chair's reclining function. It had broken off and never been replaced.

"The hospital," she said flatly. He straightened up slightly and peered at her over the arm of the chair.

"I'm a nurse. He got brought in after a car wreck off the highway. He was the only injury. Only car. He went off the side at ninety and didn't brake. Scarred him pretty badly, physically. On the... on the face." She lifted one hand and drew a finger sharply across her mouth.

"Suicide attempt," he said flatly.

She nodded, and opened one eye to peer at him from under the brim of her hat. "I was one of the nurses assigned to him after the surgery," she said. "He... he got scary. Kept showing up at my house after he was released. Stalked me for weeks. I had to have a restraining order put out."

"And he sent you flowers," he said, standing up again. "And you threw them out."

She shrugged, then closed her eye again and nodded.

He straightened up and stared at her for almost a full minute. Then, abruptly, he said, "I'm not him."

She lowered her head again and opened her eyes. One eyebrow was slightly raised, expectantly.

"I'm not," he repeated. His hands opened and closed on their own, fingers scraping across the palms as if he were trying to gouge the wood. "I don't know who I am, but I'm not Ethan Land. Even if the name sounds so damn familiar. But I'm going to find out where he is, and how he got us here, and who I really am, and then I'm going to get us out."

The eyebrow stayed raised for several long moments. Then, very quietly, Penny said, "He used to do that as well. With the hands."

Then she unfolded her arms, turned, and walked back into the hallway.

Ten

The streets were alive.

There were sounds on all sides: cars, doors, footsteps, shouts. Other, less distinct ones. The distant wailing of police sirens.

Only... it wasn't distant, really. It didn't have a location. It was so far away and yet... and yet it was right there, inside her head, closer than it should have been possible.

The vertigo welled up inside her again. This time she couldn't fight it. She couldn't fight anything, not even the grip on her wrist. The scarecrow-thing had locked its fingers around her flesh in the exact same spot as before. The gashes felt like liquid fire.

But even that wasn't real. It seemed, like the sirens, to be very close and very far away at the same time.

Mister Sticks had killed the kid...

She blinked once, twice, owlishly. She had fallen to one knee. When had that happened? There was the sound of something crackling wetly, a yelp. A gunshot. Even that didn't seem real, despite the sudden deafness in her right ear and the ringing noise joining the rest of the cacophony.

She wanted to stand and run, to get as far away from everything as possible. To get away from Mister Sticks.

It had done it so casually...

The memory rose up in her mind, replayed itself over her eyes. The kid, moving like a puppet, not wanting to do what he was doing, a victim as much as anyone. The scarecrow, with that jagged grin like the edge of a rusty saw. The blood.

The vision vanished as she felt all the wind knocked from her lungs. She was up again, moving, but not under her own power. She felt something clamped around her waist, felt the arrhythmic lurching, and realized that Mister Sticks had her slung over one shoulder, as if she weighed nothing at all.

The moonlight illuminated the house they had just left. Some part of her recognized that she was looking at the back door, that the scarecrow was taking her down the hill where there were fewer houses and they might be able to avoid notice.

Most of her was too busy trying to get a grip on her whirling thoughts to think anything coherent.
 
The shack at the bottom of the hill. She had recognized it. Not when she had first seen it, but now, now that she wasn't thinking so lucidly. It was Ethan's. The location was all wrong and the place was even more of a stinking pit than she remembered, but it was Ethan's. It was too close to the hill and too broken-down and it couldn't be but it was, she knew it.

It was his shack. The shack he hated so much with all of its peeling paint and shattered windows and all the little errors that no one saw but-

 - but himself, and Penny Columbine, whom he loved so much but who lived so far away, up at the top of the hill in a house worth more money than he'd make in the entirety of his miserable existence.

Penny Columbine, who had thrown out the flowers he had sent her.

She felt her stomach lurch sickeningly, but her body was too battered and oxygen-starved to even get up the energy to vomit.

There was the sound of a door being forced open, and the moonlight vanished, replaced with the musty, rank smell of the shack. A moment later, she felt herself being lowered onto the rotten wood of the floor.

She gasped, choking for air, for almost a full minute. She couldn't see anything but the tips of the mud-stained boots the scarecrow wore.

She recognized them, now. They were familiar boots, but... viewed through different eyes. Ethan had worn those boots. They were fourth-hand and battered, but they had never been this disgusting to look at.

Neither had the coat, or the pants, or the undershirt. But perhaps he had always thought of them this way.

Slowly, she sat up, propping herself upright on her arms, and looked up at the jack-o'-lantern face.

It seemed to be waiting for something.

She swallowed hard. "I know," she rasped, her voice no stronger than a whisper, "where we are now, Ethan."