Apparition, page 10
Matthew almost laughed at the thought, but realized that if he laughed he definitely would explode. So he clapped his palm over his mouth and took several deep breaths before he decided he was in control enough to risk moving.
He slid out from between the covers slowly, one leg at a time. It felt like everything inside him had turned to melting Jell-O: mostly holding its shape but threatening to go completely watery at any moment.
Getting out of bed took an eternity. Then he held his stomach in his hands, and walked slowly to the door. Opened it.
Darkness filled the hall. He had slept with a light on in the hall all his life, but the light had blown out earlier in the day, and Daddy couldn’t find the box that had extras, so he said Matthew would have to make do.
At first, Matthew had actually been proud of the fact that he didn’t put up a fuss. But now, with a dark hallway before him and his body threatening to unleash a Code Ten Pee Disaster in his underwear, he wished he had whined and made Daddy find the light bulbs. He couldn’t see anything, let alone the bathroom door.
His stomach rumbled. He had to move.
Matthew kept one hand to his stomach, in case his guts tried to stage an escape attempt through his belly button, but the other hand reached beside him.
Nothing there.
He moved over a step. Still nothing. Another step.
And there it was. His fingers found the hallway’s left wall, cool wood under his fingers, a vertical path he could follow to the bathroom.
Matthew stepped forward, almost trembling now with the need to pee. He wished for a second that he was still a baby and could just go in his underwear. But only for a second. He didn’t even want to think about the fun Ella would have with that.
So no going in his underwear. Failure on that level was not an option.
Matthew was walking slowly. Partially this was because he couldn’t see where he was going, and didn’t want to risk crashing into something in the darkness. Partially it was because if he moved too fast, he was pretty sure he was going to lose the battle of wills he was currently locked in with whatever part of his body was in charge of pee scheduling.
The wall finally changed, a bump that signaled a door frame rising up under his fingers. He found the doorknob in the darkness and swung open the door.
There was a small window in the bathroom, one that let in enough illumination that Matthew could see where he was going. He didn’t bother turning on the light, just closed the door softly behind him and then hobble-walked over to the toilet. He lifted up the seat, dropped his pajamas bottoms and underwear, and….
Nothing.
He remembered a show he had seen once, an old black and white show that he didn’t find very funny. It was about these three guys who were always beating up on each other. And in fact, it was not only not funny, but actually kind of upsetting since that was the sort of thing you were supposed to grow out of before getting old. Apparently these guys hadn’t heard that.
But there was one part that made him laugh. It was where all three guys had to get somewhere quick. They ran for the door and – whammo! All three got stuck. None of them could get through because they all wanted to go first. They finally backed off, and tried again, and – whammo!
That was what Matthew felt like was happening right now. Like he had so much pee inside him that it was all fighting to get out at the same time. And since there was so much of it, and since it all wanted to come out right now – whammo!
He suffered a terrible instant where he worried again that he might explode. Then an even more terrible instant where he worried he might not, but would just stay this bloated and uncomfortable forever.
Then his body relaxed. The pee-people finally decided who would get to go first, and once the stream started it came hard and strong, an army of pee, and it felt great, better than Christmas.
Sorry Jesus, thought Matthew at almost the same moment. Church was hard to sit through sometimes, but he did like it, and he was pretty sure that comparing a night-time potty break to the Savior’s birth was in the category of things he thought of as Not Right.
After something like a hundred years of pee came out of him, Matthew pulled his pajamas and underwear back up. He decided not to wash his hands. Mommy would have had a fit, but….
But Mommy wasn’t here anymore.
He felt suddenly sad. And more than a little scared. He usually didn’t think about Mommy at times like this. In the night, in the dark.
He shivered.
Sometimes he did think about Mommy, and about the night that everything had changed, the night everything went so wrong. He loved Daddy, he loved Ella (though he would never admit that even if someone tortured him horribly with hot knives and made him watch baby television like Teletubbies until he talked), but he knew that they were broken. He wanted to fix them, to mend what had been broken that night, but he could never figure out a good way to do it.
And besides, when he did think about such things, it was during the day. Thinking about Mommy was not a good thing for nighttime. Not unless he wanted to have screaming nightmares again, like he had had for the first five or six months after it all happened.
He tried not to think about Mommy, but trying not to think of her only made him think of her even more. He remembered coming out of his room, remembered seeing her in Ella’s room. He remembered her slashing down at Daddy. He remembered the blood on Daddy’s shirt. His chest that was so cut up he had to have over a hundred stitches.
He remembered his mommy’s eyes.
Matthew shivered again, and decided he had better move before he got so freaked out that he couldn’t even get to his bedroom. That would be embarrassing, too, if Ella came in to spend her usual four hours doing her hair the next morning and found him curled up on the floor of the bathroom, probably sucking his thumb or something.
He straightened up as far as he could, sticking his chest out like an army man, and stepped into the hall before he could change his mind.
Now that he was fully awake, he could see a bit better. He could make out the doorway to his room, and across the hall the closed door to his sister’s room. He looked the other direction, and saw into Daddy’s room. His daddy in bed, sound asleep.
Or was he asleep? For a terrifying moment, Matthew was sure that his daddy wasn’t sleeping, but dead. He almost cried out, and didn’t even care if Ella heard him because what if Daddy was dead; what would they do then with both parents gone?
Then Matthew relaxed as his daddy snorted and rolled over. Matthew smiled a little. Daddy wasn’t dead, what had he been thinking?
It’s happening again.
Matthew wasn’t sure where that thought came from. But he heard it loud as one of Ella’s rock bands in his head. It’s happening again.
He was starting to get spooked. He wished Daddy would snore or something, because he figured that as long as Daddy was snoring and snuffling like a tiger with a bad cold things were more or less normal. But Daddy didn’t snore. He just lay there motionless in his bed.
Bed. That sounded good. Safe. Matthew wanted to get back to bed. To pull his covers up and go back to sleep and not dream or anything, just disappear until morning came and the sun rose again.
He turned toward his room, but it was hard. Like something didn’t want him to go there and was pushing against him. He stepped forward, and it felt like he was walking through honey or syrup. The next step was even harder.
Creeeeeaaaaak.
The sound was super-quiet, and if it had been anything other than the quietest part of the night, Matthew probably wouldn’t even have heard it. But it was the quietest part of the night, and he did hear it.
He turned toward the noise. Just in time to see the door to his daddy’s room click shut.
Daddy must have shut the door, he thought. But he knew that wasn’t true. Daddy was asleep in his bed. He couldn’t have closed the door without getting out of bed, and if he had gotten out of bed, he would have seen Matthew and said something.
Which meant that someone else had shut the door.
Matthew didn’t know who might have done that. And in the dark, in the hallway that was suddenly cold and lonely as a moss-covered cemetery on Halloween night, he didn’t want to know.
He turned and ran lightly to his bedroom. He closed the door behind him. He got into bed.
He pulled his covers up to his eyes, and watched the door, waiting for it to open. Waiting for someone – or something – to come in. To come for him.
He watched the door a long time.
Eventually he slept, but he dreamed of doors that opened and closed for no reason at all, and of eyes like his mother had had on the night she tried to kill Ella, eyes that looked human but also looked like snake eyes, unblinking and alien. He dreamed of a knife, and of blood. He dreamed his own voice, saying three words over and over, and each time he dreamed the words he cried out in his sleep and tears tracked down his cheeks.
It’s happening again.
***
Chapter 12:
Church
***
I remember living at Mount Shade when I was younger. After what happened to the little boy they made me stay there for a while. Once a fight broke out in the common room. Two men whose names I don’t know argued over whether to watch Mary Tyler Moore or The Dick Van Dyke Show. It was foolish, because we couldn’t even change the channel of the television in the common room. And I don’t think either those shows were even on the air at the time.
One of the men was big, and one was little. The big one punched the little one and then the little one jumped up and looked like he was crawling up the big one and when he got high enough he started chewing on the big one’s neck with his teeth and the big one died.
The orderlies came in and took everyone out of the room and when we came to dinner later in the day the big one was there again, but he wasn’t eating anything and I realized after a little while that I was the only one who could see him.
He smiled at me, and said he was happy to be dead because he could play with all the children.
I went to my room after dinner and didn’t read any stories in the Bible.
“Hurry up, kids!” Dad yelled from downstairs. “We don’t want to be late!”
Ella looked at herself in the mirror and adjusted her hair one more time. She didn’t know why she bothered. There was never anyone worth trying to impress when they went to church near their old house, and she doubted it would be any different here. But at the same time, she knew that if she didn’t look good then that would be the one day that some absolute hottie would show up and she’d be so embarrassed she’d just die on the spot.
“Good enough,” she finally said. She wasn’t a major beauty or anything – hair too limp, chest too flat, shoulders a bit too wide – but she figured she wouldn’t make anyone gag, and some days that was all a girl could hope for.
She went into the hall and almost collided with Matthew, who was dressed in his little suit that Dad had bought him a few months ago. He actually looked really cute in it, but no way was she going to tell him that. Instead she said, “Watch out, dwarf!”
Matthew stuck his tongue out at her and raced down the stairs. Ella sighed.
Kids, she thought. She didn’t know where they got all that energy.
She took her time walking downstairs, so Dad and Matthew were already halfway to the car by the time she closed the front door behind her. She locked it and jiggled the handle to be sure the latch had caught.
“You don’t have to lock it, hon!” Dad shouted. “We’re not in the city anymore!”
She ignored that. She knew they weren’t in the city. Her cell reception was spotty, the internet hadn’t been connected yet, and the only things around them were trees and bugs. The closest mall was forty minutes away. But just because they were in the boonies didn’t mean bad things couldn’t happen. Maybe they wouldn’t get rolled by a gangbanger, but she didn’t want to get eaten by some cannibal hillbilly, either.
The country wasn’t safe. Nowhere was safe.
Not even your own room.
For a moment an image of her mother’s face punched its way through mental walls she had erected almost a year before. A red mouth, twisted and cruel. A knife in her hand.
Her mother’s eyes.
Ella shivered. Those eyes hadn’t been her mother’s. That was the only thing that allowed her to ever sleep again. They weren’t her mother’s eyes. They looked like her mother’s eyes, but where Kari Wills had always had eyes that smiled on her with love, the fever-bright eyes that had looked down at her that night were the dark pits of a king cobra about to strike. Reptilian, cold. And utterly alien.
“Ellll-aaaa!” shouted Matthew. The sound of her name, turned from a simple two-syllable word into a lilting sing-song of impatience, would have annoyed her normally. Now, however, she was glad to hear it. It gave her something else to focus on. Something that wasn’t a pair of glinting eyes that only expressed a desire to kill.
She jiggled the handle once more, then turned to Dad and Matthew.
She got in the backseat. She usually drove in front, but her dad was looking at her with his “I’m-worried-about-you” eyes, and she didn’t want to deal with that right now.
The drive to church was fine. Bumpier than she liked, but she survived with only mild whiplash. She tried to put her earbuds in halfway there, hoping Dad wouldn’t notice. He did, though. He didn’t say anything, just raised his eyebrows as if to say, “Even on Sunday?”
She sighed and put the iPod down next to her. Matthew immediately reached for it. The kid was like some kind of hyperactive bird sometimes. The merest glimpse of something shiny was enough to grab his attention. She snatched the iPod off the seat before he could get to it, and glared at him.
He was grinning at her, and she realized she had been baited. Twerp. She smiled back at him. Couldn’t help it. The kid was too lovable for her to be mad at sometimes, no matter how badly she wanted to gripe him out.
He made a tickling motion with his fingers.
“Touch me and die,” she whispered. His grin grew wider, but he resisted trying to tickle her ribs or pull her sleeves or any of the other things he did.
Twerp.
She smiled at him again and then looked out the window.
Tree… tree… tree… tree….
Trees everywhere.
She sighed.
I’m in Hell, she thought.
Eventually, though, the trees thinned out a bit. Houses started to take their place. Individual homesteads at first, some of them with tractors – honest to God tractors – behind them. Then small knots of homes, and then they were finally in what passed for “the city” around here. On to the main street, and then they were in the church parking lot.
Matthew sprung the seat belt and popped out of his car seat before the car had even fully stopped. “Matthew,” Dad said warningly, but Matthew probably didn’t even hear him since he was moving faster than the speed of sound, jumping out of the car and rushing to the door of the church.
Ella took her time, so the opening hymn was playing by the time she sat down on a pew in the middle of the chapel. She was glad to hear that this congregation was a bit more traditional as far as music. She’d been to some churches where they played what she called “Jesus rock” and it always grated. It wasn’t like she listened to hymns in her spare time or anything, so she didn’t completely understand why it bothered her, but having some guy on the stand sounding like Curt Cobain’s less-talented uncle while singing about Heaven and angels just weirded her out.
Prayers and sermon started, and she pretty much tuned out. She didn’t even know why they came. Mom had been the one who was really Methodist. Dad didn’t have any religion – he’d been Mormon when he was a kid, but didn’t talk about it much anymore – but once Mom was gone he started taking Ella and Matthew every week.
She asked him about it once. About why he went. Why he dragged them. He didn’t answer. Not like he didn’t talk to her, but rather like his words were empty. Like he didn’t know himself. She didn’t dig too hard.
Some things were better left buried.
Halfway through the sermon, she glanced around. Just to get a look at the other people there. It was the usual group of moms and dads, kids and old people. Most of them looked fairly happy to be there, a few of the younger kids were getting antsy and she saw more than one parent cramming Cheerios in their children’s mouths in an attempt to maintain silence.
Then Ella saw the old lady.
She was a bit out of place in the predominantly WASPy chapel. Ella couldn’t be sure if she was Asian – maybe from the Philippines? – but she certainly wasn’t white. Dark eyes, and skin that looked overly yellow in the soft chapel lighting. Very wrinkled.
