Chapter 4: The Devil's Lettuce

Two years later

The government housing project on the south side of town was a far cry from the rambling house that had backed up to the Cherokee National Forest. Here, the apartments were stacked like concrete boxes, separated by thin walls that did nothing to muffle the sounds of other people's lives bleeding through. Leo's new bedroom was barely large enough for a twin bed and a dresser, with a single window that looked out onto a parking lot where broken glass glittered like fallen stars.

But it had one advantage the old house had never offered: freedom.

Mom worked double shifts at the diner now, trying to make ends meet after the divorce papers were finally signed. James had gotten his driver's license and spent most evenings at his girlfriend's house, leaving Leo alone more often than not. At sixteen, he'd learned to navigate the complex social ecosystem of the projects, where certain corners were claimed by certain groups, and the right connections could get you almost anything.

Including salvation in the form of a small plastic baggie.

"This is good shit," Danny Cortez said, holding up the marijuana like it was a sacred relic. At seventeen, Danny was the unofficial pharmaceutical distributor for their section of the complex, a skinny kid with track marks on his arms and eyes that had seen too much too young. "My cousin grows it himself, out in the mountains. All organic and shit."

Leo counted out the crumpled bills—money skimmed from his part-time job at the grocery store, carefully hoarded over weeks of brown-bag lunches and walked miles to save on bus fare. Twenty dollars might as well have been twenty thousand for the kind of peace it promised to buy.

"You sure about this, Morrison?" Danny asked, though he was already pocketing the cash. "You seem like more of a church boy type."

Leo almost laughed. If Danny only knew how many rosaries he'd worn smooth, how many prayers he'd whispered into the darkness, how many nights he'd spent on his knees begging God for protection that grew thinner with each passing month. The brown-eyed boy's visits had become more frequent, more violent. Leo's bedroom in the old house had been a fortress; here, it felt like a cell, and his jailer was getting stronger.

"Times change," Leo said, taking the baggie with hands that didn't quite shake. "People change."

That night, after Mom stumbled home exhausted from her shift and James retreated to his room with his headphones, Leo sat on his narrow bed and stared at the small collection of green buds. He'd never smoked anything stronger than the cigarette he'd stolen from James two years ago, which had left him coughing and dizzy. But desperation had taught him to try solutions he never would have considered before.

The first joint was clumsy, more paper than substance, but it served its purpose. Leo cracked his window and lit up with the kind of ceremonial gravity he'd once reserved for evening prayers. The smoke burned his throat and made his eyes water, but he persisted, drawing the bitter smoke deep into his lungs and holding it there until his chest ached.

The effect was gradual, like sinking into warm bathwater. The sharp edges of anxiety that had defined his existence for five years began to soften. The constant hypervigilance—the need to check corners and shadows, to listen for the sound of dripping water—faded into something manageable. For the first time since that day at the creek, Leo felt like he could actually relax.

Sleep came without the usual ritual of prayers and protective talismans. No rosary clutched in white-knuckled hands, no holy water sprinkled on the pillows, no crucifixes arranged like a barrier around his bed. Just Leo, floating on a cloud of artificial peace, drifting off to the most restful sleep he'd had in years.

He woke eight hours later feeling human.

No nightmares. No sleep paralysis. No brown-eyed boy standing in his doorway with creek water dripping from his clothes. Just normal, blessed, dreamless sleep, the kind that left him actually refreshed instead of feeling like he'd spent the night fighting for his life.

It was a revelation.

Within a week, Leo had established a routine. A joint before bed, carefully rationed to make his supply last, smoking out his window while the rest of the building settled into its nightly cacophony of arguments and television shows and crying babies. The marijuana didn't just help him sleep—it helped him live. Colors seemed brighter during the day, food tasted better, even his grades started improving as the constant low-level terror that had plagued his high school years finally lifted.

For the first time since the accident, Leo felt like a normal teenager. He laughed at jokes that weren't forced, talked to girls without constantly looking over his shoulder, even joined the school's creative writing club. Mrs. Henderson said he had a gift for capturing mood and atmosphere in his short stories, though she couldn't have known how much practice he'd had describing nightmare scenarios.

"You seem different," James observed one evening, lounging in Leo's doorway with that familiar big-brother smugness. At nineteen, James had grown into his lanky frame, his impossible green eyes bright with the confidence of someone who'd never been haunted by his own reflection. "Happier, I guess. Less... twitchy."

"Just growing up," Leo said, not looking up from his homework. The lie came easily now. Everything came easier with the marijuana smoothing his rough edges, dulling the hypervigilance that had defined his teenage years.

"Good," James said, and there was genuine relief in his voice. "You had me worried there for a while. All that religious stuff, the way you used to wake up screaming... I thought maybe you were having some kind of breakdown."

Leo's pen stopped moving across the page. "I never woke up screaming."

"Are you kidding? Every night for like two years. Mom was ready to take you to a specialist." James frowned, his green eyes reflecting something that might have been concern. "You really don't remember?"

The truth was, Leo remembered fragments. Waking up with his throat raw, Mom's worried face hovering over him, the taste of creek water lingering in his mouth. But the marijuana had filed down even those memories, turning sharp recollections into something manageable, distant.

"Bad dreams," Leo said finally. "They stopped."

"Well, whatever you're doing, keep it up. It's good to have my little brother back."

After James left, Leo sat staring at his homework without seeing it. The brown-eyed boy hadn't visited in over a month now—the longest gap since the attacks began. Maybe the thing had finally given up. Maybe it had found some other poor soul to torment. Or maybe the marijuana was doing more than just helping Leo sleep; maybe it was actually protecting him, creating some kind of chemical barrier that his doppelganger couldn't cross.

He lit up that night with something approaching celebration, blowing smoke rings toward his cracked ceiling and marveling at how simple the solution had been. All those years of prayers and holy water and religious hysteria, when salvation had been growing wild in the mountains of his home state all along.

The weeks turned into months, and Leo's new life took on a comfortable rhythm. He graduated high school with decent grades and a scholarship to the community college. He got a better job at a local garage, working on cars and learning skills that felt solid and real under his hands. He even started dating Sarah Hutchins, the girl who'd smiled at him in that hallway years ago, though he never brought her back to his apartment. Some habits from his haunted years were too ingrained to break.

The marijuana supply was his lifeline, carefully managed and religiously maintained. Danny had graduated to harder drugs and disappeared into the system, but Leo had found other connections. The projects were full of entrepreneurs willing to trade peace of mind for folded bills, and Leo was a reliable customer who never caused trouble or asked too many questions.

His tolerance built gradually, requiring larger amounts to achieve the same effect, but that was a manageable problem. What mattered was the dreamless sleep, the quiet mind, the ability to walk through his days without constantly checking shadows for things that shouldn't exist.

On his eighteenth birthday, Leo celebrated by rolling the biggest joint he'd ever attempted, using the last of his current supply. Tomorrow he'd re-up with his newest dealer, a college kid named Marcus who grew his own stuff in a closet operation that rivaled anything Danny's cousin had produced. But tonight was about marking the milestone, about acknowledging that he'd not only survived his teenage years but had actually managed to build something resembling a normal life.

The joint burned smooth and clean, filling his small room with sweet smoke that seemed to wrap around him like a protective blanket. Leo felt weightless, untouchable, finally free from the supernatural stalker that had defined his adolescence. Whatever cosmic joke had been played on him at that creek, whatever parallel universe nonsense had landed him in a world where his eyes were green and his nightmares had brown eyes, he'd beaten it through nothing more sophisticated than regular drug use.

Sleep came like a warm tide, pulling him under into depths that were blessedly, completely empty.

When Leo woke sixteen hours later, it was to the sound of his phone buzzing with increasingly frantic texts. Marcus had been arrested in a campus drug raid. His grow operation was toast, his customer list confiscated, his supply chain completely destroyed.

Leo stared at the messages with growing horror, calculating and recalculating the small amount of marijuana left in his stash. Maybe a week's worth if he was careful. Two weeks if he rationed it down to almost nothing.

But finding a new dealer would take time, and time was the one thing Leo Morrison no longer had.

The brown-eyed boy had been waiting patiently in whatever dark corner of reality he called home, and very soon, Leo's chemical shield would crumble like everything else he'd tried to use for protection.

The war wasn't over. It had just been on temporary ceasefire, and Leo was about to discover that his enemy had spent the quiet months growing stronger, hungrier, and infinitely more creative in his methods of psychological torture.

The devil's lettuce had granted him two years of borrowed peace.

Now it was time to pay the bill.