Thicker Than Blood - the Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy - Blake Crouch [254]
"Well, he told his mother, and she went right along with it. Just like I was his fucking imaginary friend or something. She’d set a place for me at dinner. She’d buy presents for me at Christmas. Jeanette was always a little weird."
"But you still didn’t have control over Andy’s body?" Goldston asked.
"No. Not until he was twelve. I can’t explain to you how I did it, but he was sleeping one night, and I moved his arm. I just thought about doing it, and it happened. I realized that when he was unconscious or asleep I could use his body. So I started going out when he fell asleep, and he never knew it. I did this for several years.
"As Andy got older, through high school and college, I think he started to realize I shouldn’t be there. Started feeling weird about me. We were close, and then in college he tried to ignore me. Tried to pretend I didn’t exist."
"Did that make you mad?"
"Don’t fuck with me." Orson glared at Goldston. "Anyhow, you gotta remember I’m telling this from my point of view. I knew what the fuck was going on. I knew I was inside of him. He didn’t know that. I'm not sure how, but he saw me. He physically saw me. Only thing I can guess is his mind created these hallucinations to compensate for what it heard. I don’t know. I’ve looked at psychology texts and there isn’t a damn thing on this sort of condition."
"I’ve never heard of anything like it," Goldston said. "What happened in college?"
"I was twenty-one. I didn’t like the prospect of spending my life sharing someone else’s body, watching them live. So I turned Andy off."
"What do you mean?"
"How can I explain it to you? I had an edge on him. I just turned him off. I could suggest things to him, by thinking into him. It’s impossible to explain. I told him to sleep, to dream. Told him he was in paradise, and he slept for seven years. He vividly dreamed that part of his life so when he woke up, he had a past that wasn’t mine."
"What do you remember, Andy?" Goldston asked.
"Why do you wanna talk to him?" Orson said.
"I’d like to hear what he dreamed, what he remembers."
"I remember the Caribbean," I said. "A long time ago. It’s very vague, like childhood."
"You didn’t think that was strange?" Goldston asked. "That your memory was fuzzy?"
"What did I have to compare it to?" I said. I wanted to cry but I didn’t.
"What’d you do during that time, Orson?" Goldston asked. "While he was asleep."
"I left Appalachian. Went to New York and was homeless there for awhile. Practically lived in the library. I read constantly, gave myself the best education you could imagine. Then I went to a school in Vermont called Middlebury. I made up this flawless resume. It said I got my Ph.D. in history at this college in Arizona which didn’t even exist. I made up all the credentials. It was ingenious. I taught in Vermont for a year until this prick named David Parker, a professor in the history department, too, found out that Baxter College didn’t exist. I was fired."
"Is this when you started killing?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I could. And there were people who deserved it. But I'm not saying anything else about it. I won't sit here and let you put me in one of your categories. I killed. End of story."
"When did Andy come back?"
"When I started killing. I'd bought this cabin in Wyoming. I could feel Andy starting to move again, especially when I’d wake up in the morning. Sometimes he’d have control of his body. He didn’t know where the fuck he was. I told him he was in the Bahamas. I talked to him constantly without him knowing it was me. Still do. It's really just subtle suggestion. Sort of like hypnosis. That’s when I found out how much control I really had. He thinks he only killed once, but he killed whenever I told him to. He was pretty good