Apparition, page 14
She took a deep breath, then let it out. She turned to face the office door. It was still closed. Her dad was in there. Just Dad, nothing else.
The burgeoning terror that had gripped her in its icy fingers dissipated. In a moment she felt better. In the next, she didn’t even remember feeling scared.
A part of her, a very small part of her in the back of her mind, worried about how fast she had gone from fine to scared and back again. But then even that part of her was quiet.
“One!” she shouted. “Two!”
The house seemed to swallow her voice. There was no echo. Like all the walls had been covered in foam rubber that muffled her words. But that was impossible, she knew. She kept counting, kept pretending that everything was fine, that she was just playing a game of hide and seek with her brother on a rainy day.
“Ten! Eleven! Twelve!”
She started moving before she reached twenty, which was technically cheating but she didn’t care. She had to move in order to shake the strange feelings clawing at her. By the time she reached twenty and stopped counting aloud she was already in the living room, looking around to see if Matthew was hiding in there. Boxes, the couch, an end table: they were all big enough for her brother to hide behind, but he wasn’t crouched behind any of them.
Ella glanced around to make sure there was nowhere else he could have secreted himself, and as she did her gaze fell on a picture on the fireplace mantel.
The picture was of the family. They were at Disneyland, a vacation they had taken together two years ago. One year before everything had changed. They all wore Mickey Mouse ears. They looked stupid and happy. Ella reached out and traced the outline of her mother in the photo.
Everything was different now. Worse.
She pulled her hand back, and shouted, “Ready or not, here I come!” Then she fairly ran from the living room. From the picture, from the past that did nothing but remind her how wrong things were in the present.
Ella found herself in the kitchen. She tried to ignore the burning behind her eyes, the knot in her throat that was making it suddenly hard to swallow. She looked under the table, behind a large box in the corner, even opened up the cabinet under the sink to see if he was hiding there.
No Matthew.
She turned to the basement door and opened it. She knew she was trying to bury her thoughts in the game, in the search for her brother, and that eventually she would have to face her own thoughts and actually deal with what had happened with Mom –
(and what’s happening now, what’s happening again)
– but for now she pushed all that to the back of her mind. She stepped forward, and found herself instantly immersed in the darkness that hung over the basement like curtains at a funeral home. She paused. She reached for the light switch, but for some reason couldn’t find it. As though it had magically – impossibly – disappeared or moved.
It was pitch black in the basement. And as badly as she wanted to find Matthew, as badly as she wanted to think of anything but what she was thinking of now –
(a family, we used to be a family)
– Ella found herself unwilling to go any farther into the basement.
She stepped back into the kitchen. She didn’t turn around to do it, just moved backward as though afraid to take her eyes off the black hole of the basement. She was afraid of it.
Something bad happened there.
That’s stupid.
Not stupid.
Just find Matthew. Don’t be dumb.
Don’t go down there.
She closed the door to the basement. I’ll look there last, she thought. If I need to.
Don’t go down there.
She left the kitchen, and was almost able to convince herself she wasn’t scared as she walked into the hall. The downstairs bathroom was open. She glanced in but there was really nowhere for Matthew to hide so she kept going and walked up the stairs. And of course he wouldn’t be in Dad’s office, since that was where they’d just been banished from.
At the top of the stairs everything seemed gray and washed out. The storm had converted everything to twilight. She could see well enough, but still flicked the wall switch that would turn on the hall light.
The light stayed out.
“Great,” she muttered. Her voice sounded tight and irritated, which was not only fine but purposeful: you can’t be irritated and afraid at the same time. She cocked her head and peered into the gloom of the hallway. “You up here, dweeb?” she called out.
There was no answer.
She walked slowly down the hall until she was standing between her room and Matthew’s. She went into her room, and knew the instant she stepped across the threshold that she had made the right choice: there was no way Matthew was going to hide in his own room; not when he had the game providing him a rare excuse to invade his sister’s private space.
Sure enough, she saw his feet the instant she came in the room. The drapes that covered her window were floor-length blackout curtains she had brought from their last house. But as thick as they were, they didn’t completely mask the telltale bulge behind them. Or the feet that peeped out below their bottom hem.
“Seriously?” she said under her breath, and had to stifle a laugh. She almost yelled “Gotcha!” but stifled the call at the last second. A sly grin crawled across her face. Why announce she had found Matthew when she could scare the ever-loving crapola out of the kid instead?
She crept across her room, intending to leap across the last foot or two and grab Matthew while screaming bloody murder at the top of her lungs. The image of him jumping out of his skin and possibly even being the youngest heart attack victim ever recorded made her grin widely. The image was dashed, however, when she kicked something in the quasi-night of the room. Perhaps a toy, something of Matthew’s that he had brought in here. Whatever it was, it went bouncing across the room with a plastic clatter.
Her eyes tracked the sound across the floor, and she saw that it wasn’t a toy that she had kicked, but rather one of her own hairbrushes. She must have left it there last night or something. That was irritating: not only was she not going to be able to sneak up on Matthew, she couldn’t even blame him for her failure to do so.
“Dammit,” she said, and turned back to the curtains, expecting to see Matthew’s form writhing around behind the fabric as he tried not to laugh like he always did when she was close to finding him. But he was showing unusual self-control today. No laughing. He wasn’t even moving.
“Fine,” she said aloud, her annoyance with her own clumsiness morphing into a general dislike of the game. “I found you. Come on out.”
Matthew remained motionless, his outline absolutely still behind the curtains.
“You gotta find a better spot, Matthew.” She moved forward slowly, not wanting to break anything else of hers she might have left on the floor. “Matthew?” she said. “I found you already. You can come out now.”
She was still moving toward him, but as she said the words she slowed and then stopped. It was dark in the room, the rain clouds combining with the drawn curtains to pull a thick wall between her bedroom and any available light. Even so, she could make out the toes of the shoes that stuck out under the curtains. They were bright white, a dull gleam in the darkness.
Hadn’t Matthew been wearing his Spider-Man shoes? The red and black ones?
Ella didn’t remember for sure, but no sooner did the thought enter her mind than she chided herself silently. Of course he wasn’t wearing the Spider-Man shoes, she thought. He must have been wearing other shoes because why would he change his footwear in the middle of the game and waste precious hiding time?
But in the same moment, she realized it didn’t matter if Matthew had changed his shoes or not. Her brother owned exactly three pairs of shoes: his Spider-Man shoes, a pair of church shoes, and a pair of cheap Nike knock-offs that Dad had bought at the same time as he bought the church shoes because Payless Shoes had been having a two-for-one sale.
And none of those shoes – none of Matthew’s shoes – were white.
Ella’s fingers and toes suddenly began to tingle. Tendrils of fear wrapped around her extremities, cinching tightly around her arms and legs and rendering them suddenly heavy. She felt as though she was walking at the bottom of the ocean, treading in a place so dark and deep that the pressure would crush her if she made a wrong move.
She heard something nearby. A sound, soft but urgent, and she turned toward it. Her body dragged, moving slowly, leadenly, and it seemed like it took far too long to simply shift her body to the side. She took her eyes off the shoes for a moment as she spun, flicking her gaze to where the other sound had come from.
The closet. It was open, the doors askew and allowing her to see inside the space. Half her clothing was hanging up on the wooden dowel that stretched across the closet.
Beside them, Matthew crouched in the corner of the closet.
Ella’s arms and legs were no longer lead. They were something heavier, something that would drag her down through the house and into the ground below, burying her alive in terror.
Matthew grinned. “You found me!” he said, but even though his eyes were excited, he was whispering, as though subconsciously aware that something here was very wrong; that what had begun as a game had turned into something different, something dangerous.
Ella couldn’t respond. She couldn’t make her mouth work, like she was having a stroke. She exerted herself to the utmost and turned back to the drapes. She reached for them, though she didn’t know how she managed to lift her arm high enough to do so. Her hand trembled as she pulled the drapes back.
The gray half-light of the stormy sky outside drifted into the room as the window was revealed.
There was no one behind the drapes.
Ella looked down, even though she knew what she would see. And what she wouldn’t see.
The shoes were gone. If they had ever been there.
Something touched her back and Ella jumped. The heaviness that had infected her fled as terror adrenalized her system. She whipped around so fast the room was a blur, screaming as she did so.
Matthew. It was Matthew. He pulled back in fear as she spun toward him, and she saw in his eyes that he had no idea what she had seen, no clue what had been in her room.
And what was in my room?
She had no answer for that.
She glanced back at the floor, at the still-bare spot where she had seen the shoes.
But had she seen them? Had she really?
Maybe not, she thought. Maybe it was just shadows.
She knew that was a lie. But it was a pleasant lie, a lie that she could cling to right now, a lie that would anchor her to reality and keep her from doing what she wanted to do, which was run and run and never stop until she dropped dead of exhaustion.
A buzzing sound invaded Ella’s thoughts, a mosquito in her mind, and she gradually realized that it was Matthew talking. She used the sound as another anchor point, another stake that would help her cling to a reality that suddenly seemed far too tenuous.
“… to hide,” he was saying.
Ella stared at him dully for a moment, trying to sort out what he had been saying and coming up blank. “What?” she finally managed.
“Your turn to hide,” Matthew said with an exaggerated roll of his eyes that let her know he had already said this. When she didn’t respond, his expression changed from playful irritation to concern. “Ella?” he said. “You okay?” She still didn’t respond. She couldn’t. The world had suddenly begun spinning around like a drunken Tilt-a-whirl under her feet, and it was taking all her concentration to keep from simply flying off the face of the earth. “You wanna hide?” Matthew asked, and his voice was plaintive, like he was holding out a peace offering.
Ella wondered why he was acting as though he hadn’t heard her saying she found him, hadn’t seen her moving toward the curtain, hadn’t known what was there.
And what was there? Was there really anything at all? Or was it just imagination? Just the fever-dreams of a girl who went crazy the night her mother tried to murder her?
Ella found her voice. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t want to hide.” She looked at the floor below the window again. She might never be able to look away.
“Ella,” Matthew whispered, and she could hear her brother’s concern being edged out by fear, “what are you looking at?”
Ella said the only thing she could think to say. “Nothing.”
She didn’t add the words, “not anymore.”
But she wanted to. Because no matter how much her mind might wish that nothing had been there, she knew different.
Something had been there. Someone.
But who?
And how?
***
Chapter 15:
It
***
The first laws against killing one’s children that I’ve been able to find came in the 16th and 17th centuries. France and England passed laws that made filicide a crime punishable by death.
Which was stupid. Because what parent, having killed their own child, wouldn’t welcome death – not as a just punishment, but as a merciful rest from the biting teeth of memory? From the madness that must follow what they had done?
The music was playing, but no matter how loud Ella blasted it, it refused to chase away the fear.
She closed her eyes but found no help in the darkness behind her eyelids. Instead she saw a white room with red swaths of blood across every surface.
“Mom,” she whispered, and she didn’t know if she was whispering it here and now, in the house she lived in with Dad and Matthew, or if she was whispering it in the past, on the night she had seen her mother’s body, drenched in blood and laying in a deepening pool of the dark liquid.
“Remember,” said her mother, her voice bubbling and burbling like she was speaking half-underwater. “Remember, I did it for you. I love you.”
Ella opened her eyes again, thinking that anything – anything – would be better to think about. But when she opened her eyes all she saw was her own room, and that was no comfort at all.
She glanced over to the window. The curtains no longer covered the window: she had gotten up on a chair and pulled the curtain rod off its supports and tossed the whole thing in the corner of the room. The storm had finally passed, and moonlight slashed through the room’s shadows, bright as the edge of a razor in the aftermath of the rain.
Ella looked at the floor under the window. She half-expected to see them there. To see the shoes again. And this time, perhaps, to see the person who had been in them.
She knew she had seen them. Even though they had disappeared, even though Matthew hadn’t been aware of anything strange about her room, she knew she had seen the shoes.
Either that or she was going crazy.
She shivered and pulled the blankets up closer to her chin. A stupid little-kid thing to do, but she couldn’t help it. She remembered thinking – knowing – that her blanket would protect her from monsters. But that had all stopped the night the monster came into her room and tried to kill her. The night she realized that monsters didn’t live under the bed or in the closet, but in the room down the hall.
She turned away from the closet, and one of her earbuds came out. She snatched it up and plugged it back in before she could be assaulted by the sound of silence all around her. She didn’t like silence. Silence was where the memories all too often came from.
She stared at the walls, at the closed bedroom door. She blinked, and suddenly everything was dripping with red. And it wasn’t just a memory, she wasn’t simply back in the bathroom in her mind. These were her walls, her door, her current room with bright red patches splashed across every surface like a madman with a paintbrush had danced through her room.
She closed her eyes, closed them so tight that her entire face felt like it was collapsing in on itself, like the center of her body had shifted. Her pulse quickened in her temples, and a headache pressed at the backs of her eyes like a silent assassin attacking her.
She opened her eyes again.
The blood was still there. Streaking down the walls, pooling on the floorboards below.
“God, Jesus, please save me,” she whispered, but she didn’t hear her voice. It wasn’t because of the earbuds: she couldn’t hear the music, either. She was in another place, another time, a somewhere and somewhen that had intruded into the here and now, that had punched a hole in reality and flooded through in crimson swathes.
“It’s not real,” she whispered. She closed her eyes again, and suddenly the music was back. She opened her eyes, but before she did so she already knew that the blood would be gone.
