Apparition, page 16
Daddy’s muscles were big enough, though. Big enough to throw Matthew in the air sometimes and always catch him when he came down. Big enough to pin him down and tickle him until he couldn’t breathe.
Big enough to hold a knife?
Matthew walked a little slower, falling back so that he was closer to Ella than to the suddenly strange-seeming man who led them through the hall.
They all went down the stairs, and Daddy grabbed the car keys off a little table by the front door. He stood in front of the door for a couple seconds, facing it like he was studying it or something. Then he took a big deep breath and Matthew knew that Daddy didn’t want to go today. But he would go. Because it was something that Needed Doing. And Daddy always did those things. No matter what.
Daddy turned to them. He had a smile on his face, but it looked like a smile you might see on one of those paper cut-out masks that came with some kids meals in restaurants: just an outline of a smile, but empty because you poked out the middle of it. A smile that was there but not real because behind it was another face and that face – the real face – might be sad or angry or anything.
“Okay,” said Daddy. “I’ve got my cell phone.” He looked at Ella. “You’ve got yours?”
Ella rolled her eyes and Matthew almost did too even though he hated when people rolled their eyes because asking Ella if she had her cell phone was about the same as asking if she’d remembered to bring her legs with her.
But Ella pulled her cell phone from her back pocket and waved it and nodded and Daddy actually looked a little relieved, like he had been worried Ella might not have it.
He was worried, Matthew knew. But he didn’t want to tell them what was worrying him, so he was acting like it was whether Ella had her cell phone. Grown-ups – even teenagers like Ella – could be so weird sometimes. They didn’t talk about what they meant, they talked about everything but that and you had to figure out what they really wanted to say on your own. It was stupid and Matthew was never going to be like that.
Daddy looked at him. “Ella’s in charge,” he said.
Matthew nodded and gave his sister a look. Usually when Daddy said that she got this Queen-For-A-Day expression that was totally obnoxious. Unless it was during one of Daddy’s trips like this. Then – now – she didn’t have any expression at all, and to Matthew that look of emptiness was even worse than her looking like she thought she farted pixie dust.
Daddy kissed Matthew on top of his head, and then hugged Ella. Her arms went up a few inches like she was going to hug him back, then dropped to her sides again.
“Love you guys,” said Daddy, and then he left. Ella locked the door after him.
They stayed there for a little while, long enough that Matthew felt like they were waiting for something, or like Ella was hoping the internet guy would come back and visit them. He almost said something about it – even though he knew she’d bite his head off if he mentioned the internet guy or the way she looked at him every time he pulled something out of his tool belt – but Ella suddenly turned around and walked down the hall.
“Where’re we going?” Matthew asked as she walked past, but by the time he said the last word she was already turning the doorknob to Daddy’s office.
Matthew’s conscience twinged as he followed Ella into the room. Daddy was usually pretty cool about them going into his office, but he didn’t like them doing it when he was gone.
Ella hated that, and complained non-stop about how it was unfair because Daddy had the only internet connection in the house and why should she have to live like she was in an Amish jail every time he went somewhere without her, but she usually didn’t break the rule. At least, not when Matthew was home, too.
She told him she couldn’t because he would tell on her since he was such a “straight-arrow butt-kissing dweeb,” but he thought sometimes that she was glad to have an excuse not to break the rule, like it was part of being a teenager to break rules but she didn’t really like to do that, so she was happy he was there to keep her from having to be bad.
That made no sense, of course, but that was just one more thing on a long list of things that made no sense about Ella.
He loved her. He loved her so intensely he worried sometimes what would happen if she died and he didn’t have her around. But even though he loved her so fully, so strongly, he didn’t always understand her. She was older, and also a girl, so she was like an alien in a lot of ways.
“You coming in or what?” said Ella, and Matthew realized he had stopped in the doorway. His sister was already sitting in Daddy’s chair and had the computer on and an internet web browser on the screen.
Matthew hesitated the barest fraction of a second. He intuited that Ella wasn’t just going to look up some band or researching ways to spend even more time in the bathroom. This was Something Serious. He stepped the rest of the way into the room.
Ella turned back to the computer and started typing.
“Thank goodness we finally have the internet,” she muttered.
“What are we looking for?” asked Matthew. He was a pretty good reader, but Ella typed way too fast for him to follow.
“Ghosts, dummy.”
Ghosts. The word sent a shaky feeling down his legs and made his tummy writhe. Was that what was happening here? Ghosts? Were they in a house that was haunted?
He didn’t think so. Or at least, something in him cried out that that wasn’t all that was going on around them. It might be a small part of it, but there was more. Much more.
Matthew wondered for a moment how he could be so certain of that fact. How he could know that ghosts weren’t the only thing they had to worry about. And in that instant, he felt as though a thick blanket had been lifted up from before his eyes. The blanket was one that he had been wearing for most of his life, though he hadn’t been aware of it until now. But now that it was gone, he could see… everything.
The realization of what they were facing – what was really happening – slammed down on him hard, left him as breathless as if he’d been karate-kicked in the tummy. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t inhale or exhale or even live. Because life couldn’t exist next to what he was seeing, next to the monstrous evil he was looking at, the evil that had come for them.
For a moment he saw it. For a moment he knew what it was and what it wanted.
Then the moment passed. The blanket dropped down over his eyes again, and it was as though he had been re-born somehow. And like any newborn, he knew nothing of the place he had just come from.
Matthew tried to remember what he had just seen, tried to recapture the fleeting knowledge he had just held. But it was gone.
He heard something, a dry sound that made him think of an accident he saw once. He was playing in the front yard of their old house, before… before everything had changed. Playing, and then he heard something. A car screeched, then there was a dry thud and another screech.
Matthew looked up in time to see Early Riser get hit by a car. Early was a huge dog, a Great Dane that the neighbors owned. Usually he was kept in their house, or in their backyard, but he guessed Mr. Aryanpur must have left the side gate open because Early had jumped into the street directly in the path of an oncoming car. The car was going too fast to stop, and so it smashed into and through Early. The dog hit the front grill, and the metal folded around it like a pillow, holding the dog fast.
The screeching ended. The car was only about twenty feet away from Matthew. He could have gone to it in seconds. But he didn’t. He was rooted to the spot by the sight of Early’s head, twisted strangely against its haunches, spun around and looking at him with eyes that were already cloudy and empty.
There was something strange about the dog’s mouth. About the slack way it hung open. At first Matthew couldn’t figure what it was.
Then he heard the sound.
Tic… tic-tic-tic-click….
He looked at the source of the noise, and for a moment he thought that it was hailing. Which was crazy because it was summer in a place that rarely did more than rain even in the dead of winter. Then he realized what the white things he saw bouncing against the pavement were, and what had been wrong with Early’s dead mouth.
The white things were the dog’s teeth. Knocked into the air by the impact with the car, and now bouncing down in ones and twos and threes. Clicking softly against the sun-scorched pavement on a perfect summer day.
Tic… tic-tic… tic-tic-tic-ti-click….
Matthew blinked, and the memory fled, just as had his momentary awareness of the reality that was hiding just beyond the edges of the nightmare they were living in had fled. The sound wasn’t teeth hitting the ground, gruesome in their mixture of white and red, it was just Ella. She was typing on Dad’s computer, the keys making that sound that had catapulted him back into an instant better left forgotten.
Matthew wondered how long he had been standing here, how long he had been lost in the memory of that faraway day that was the first time he ever saw something die. Minutes, perhaps more.
Ella’s right hand shifted off the keyboard and she clicked the mouse. Images flashed onto the monitor. Most of them were boring, just words on some obviously home-made webpages. But some were slicker, and many carried pictures.
The pictures, like the pages themselves, ranged in quality. A lot of them just showed people in a variety of locations and activities, from bedrooms to forests to beaches to cemeteries. But the pictures all had one thing in common: all had a blur on them, a bright blob of white that sat in the background like an uninvited guest.
Matthew read the caption under one of the pictures: “Fact or fiction? Ghost or just dust on the lens?”
He looked at Ella and was going to ask what she was looking at – and looking for – but changed his mind when he saw how engrossed she was in her project.
She clicked again, and a new set of pages appeared on the screen. These held more pictures. Scarier this time, the images – mostly old photos, featuring men and women glaring instead of smiling at the camera – all had something deeply wrong about them. In one, the woman staring at the camera seemed to have an extra hand coming out of her dress. In another, the man holding a rifle in the foreground had eyes that were hidden in deep black pits, as though they had been scooped out of his head before the picture was taken. In another – the most disquieting of them – a boy was screaming.
Only no, Matthew realized he wasn’t really screaming, he just had his mouth open so wide it looked like he was screaming. When he looked closer Matthew realized the boy was opening his mouth wide not in order to let sound out, but to allow something else to escape. He squinted as he looked closer at the computer screen, and then drew back in disgust as he realized that there were fingers in the boy’s mouth. Not disembodied stumps, either, like the boy had bitten off someone else’s fingers and was now swallowing them. No, the fingers seemed to be pulling themselves toward the front of the boy’s mouth, as though there was someone else inside the boy: someone who was clawing his way up and out; someone who wanted desperately to be free.
Matthew shuddered and drew away from the screen. His mouth twisted in disgust. Ella clicked again, and this time the images on the screen featured men and women in agony, writhing and contorted. Most of them were on beds, many of their limbs were being held tightly by others. They looks on the screamers’ faces were terrifying, as though they were staring right down into Hell.
At the top of the webpage: “Evidences of Possession.”
Matthew gulped. “I don’t like this,” he said.
Ella barely glanced at him. “Relax,” she said, and she clicked another webpage into life. “It’s daytime, dummy.”
The website now onscreen displayed dead-eyed men and women with strange cuts and slashes on their faces. The wounds had to hurt them, because most of them were severely bleeding, but all of the people had blank expressions. Like their minds had abandoned them. Something about this was even worse than the last pictures of the men and women who were clearly terrified: whatever had happened to these most recent victims had been so terrible that they had been driven mad by it.
Matthew flashed on another face he had seen like that, another face with an expression blanker than a new piece of paper. Red on the walls, red in a pool that stained everything it touched, and above it all a white face, staring into nothing and whispering, “My children.”
Matthew looked away from the screen. He didn’t want to see any more. Ella kept typing, and from time to time went, “Huh,” as though she had just seen something interesting or important. But he didn’t look. He didn’t want to know.
He thought about leaving. Why stay here in the office and listen to Ella type, why stay this close to the computer when doing so pushed him into memories he would rather leave behind? But then he realized that anywhere else he went, he would have to go alone. And that was worse. He didn’t want to be alone in this place ever again.
“Ella,” he whispered. He realized there was no real reason to whisper; it wasn’t like they were at church or something. But he couldn’t bring himself to raise his voice. Ella was researching ghosts. She was reading about the dead. So whispering now felt appropriate, just as it would be appropriate at a funeral.
“Huh?” she said.
“Let’s leave.”
“Not done yet.”
“Please.”
“Not done yet.”
“Please,” he said again. His voice was high and warbling, his throat tight. He wanted out of here. Now.
An electronic chirp sounded. The sound was dry and bright and terribly out of place in this room where his sister was reading about death. He realized that it was only Ella’s phone. He thought maybe Dad was calling, like he somehow realized even when he was away that his space was being invaded, that Ella was doing something she shouldn’t. Matthew would have welcomed that, even would have welcomed the inevitable lecture about boundaries and the importance of respecting others’ property, if it got him and Ella out of here. But then he realized that the sound wasn’t the one Ella’s phone made when someone was calling. It was the alert for an incoming text message. Which ruled Dad out, since he never texted – didn’t even know how, as far as Matthew could see.
Ella pulled her phone from her pocket and glanced at it.
“Who is it?” asked Matthew.
“Jamie,” said Ella. She looked back at the computer screen but didn’t put the phone away. Instead, she popped open the concealed keyboard and began punching away at it without looking at it once. She was a texting Jedi who talked more via text than she did with her mouth, and Matthew knew she wouldn’t make a single error in her message to Jamie. Jamie was Ella’s best friend in spite of the fact that they hadn’t seen each other in almost a year. Matthew didn’t understand that. Nor did he understand how Ella could spend so much time talking on the phone or IM’ing people or texting and then get so annoyed when he asked her for any kind of attention.
“Say hi for me,” he mumbled, and kept looking at what he was looking at – which was everything and anything that wasn’t the computer monitor.
Ella grunted again. He heard the low click of her sliding the phone keyboard back into place, and the shuffle of her clothes as she slipped the phone into her pocket.
A moment later, the printer hummed. It was a high-end laser printer that could do anything from printing simple text to full color images to custom items like brochures or mailing labels. In only a few seconds several sheets rolled out of the printer’s mouth. Matthew reached for them but Ella snatched them away before he could touch them.
“What did you print?” asked Matthew. He looked at the computer screen, but it was blank and empty: a colorless eye staring darkly into the office. The thought made goosebumps rise up all over his arms, made the base of his spine prickle and tighten. What if it was watching them somehow? He knew that was silly, sillier than watching Thomas the Tank Engine or even Teletubbies, the Guinness Book of World Records of silliness. Because monitors were for looking at, they never looked at you.
But then, houses were supposed to be quiet at night.
Things should stay where they were put when no one was touching them.
Mothers weren’t supposed to try and kill their kids.
So maybe – just maybe – the idea of a computer watching him wasn’t so very far out.
He turned away from the computer screen, and saw that he was alone. A chill ran through him, traveling from his head to his toes and back again, a quick round-trip that left him almost shaky with fear.
Where had Ella gone? Had she disappeared? Had the house (and he gulped at the thought) eaten her?
The thought almost made him scream in terror. Then he did scream as his sister’s disembodied head came floating around the corner of the office doorway.
