You've got to stand up for yourself, son
Image by Lars Jensen
For twenty years Casey Way dreamt without sleeping. He slipped into the spaces between death and waking where his father still walked the streets and behind Casey's eyelids. It was his father that woke Casey, dreaming of David Way's face as raw meat, lips peeled from straight teeth and nostrils flayed open to the bone. He sat down beside Casey on the 3:25 cross-town bus with the squeak of plastic upholstery. From his seat, Casey watched sunlight filter dirty-gray through the sweat-filmed glass, a halo around his father's missing face. He felt nothing.
"Hey Kiddo," his father spoke with a skeletal mouth.
"Yeah, Dad?"
They were alone on the bus. It made his father's bony smile seem somehow colder.
Casey was thirty-two -years-old and staring into the cavities made of his father's eye sockets. The last time Casey had seen his father he was twelve-years-old, made of a boy's skinny geometry and freckles that faded had with time. In his mind his father still towered over him in broad shoulders and large hands, made of steel and stone beneath his Oxford shirt and tie. Strong like Casey had thought of buildings as strong, from his good posture to his straight nose, the definition of his jaw to the blue of his eyes.
"You know it wasn't your fault, right?" The bus's empty gut lurched. Flesh hanging from his father's cheekbone dangled above his collar, a dangerous pitter-patter of blood. "I would've just ruined her anyway."
"Yeah, Dad," Casey said. His hands felt sweaty against his jeans, alternately hot and cold from wanting to rip the meat from his father's skull or push it back into place, preserving the semblance of his character. "I know."
So we remember Casey Way, right?
Insomniac library cataloger mystery boy? The one who sees his dead rapist father in his dreams and is trying to keep his life from spinning out of control, even as people start dying and his boyfriend leaves him and his sister is the only one left who believes he isn't going insane? Because the hole he can't fix in himself is reaching out and sucking other people in, the way his father did to him and his sister as children, and Casey is the only person who can stop it, even if it costs him his life?
Yeah, that Casey Way.
I've been writing a novel about him, actually, since April of 2010. It's called Flesh Trap. I think I probably mentioned it. I finished the last revision in February and then started fine-tuning it through March. Then I took a break, because it felt like my brain was going to explode, to work on outlining the second book. Because I'm stupid and allergic to sleep and hobbies. Because Casey's story doesn't stop in Flesh Trap, where he's still just a boy, a man who never quite grew up, never quite got all the way there just yet. He was still angry, at himself, at his father, at his therapist (who is probably trying to kill him, as it turns out), at anybody who would hold still to take his rage.
He still has to forgive himself. Accept himself, grow up. He still has to overcome the trap that he's created for himself, the shadow of his father still hanging overhead, and get out of his private Hell alive.
That's where Flesh Trap ends and White Bull begins.
In the follow-up Casey is a little older, a little wiser, and a little more accepting of himself. He's carved a healthier relationship out with the sister he's felt responsible for his entire life, and he's living for himself and for the man he loves and has kept him sane. Marriages and families and adulthood are all staring Casey down, and maybe he's ready for it, maybe he isn't, but he's still bound to the past. He still sees these holes in the world, these scars that people leave behind when they can't fix what's wrong with them. Casey knows these people when he sees them, because he still wears the scar on his chest where the hole used to be, the hole left by his father that swallowed up people for twenty years. He still fears that he is his father's son, a destroyer that will tear his own children down with him, in a cycle that he can't break no matter how hard he tries.
At night he still hears the barking dogs that belong to a little girl named Emma. Emma, who sees Casey for what he is, who's hurt by the same forces that hurt him and his sister as children, and who's trapped by the monsters her mind conjures. And maybe, just maybe, if he can help Emma, and he can prove to himself he is not his father's son, he can be free. Maybe he can have his own family, and his own life, and live free of shadows and traps and monsters.
That's where White Bull ends, and where Nightmare Child begins. But that is another story for another day.
Just know that we'll all be seeing more of Casey Way, very soon…
