Apparition, page 17
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Chapter 17:
Birthmark
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Thinking about Abraham again. Rembrandt painted a picture that I love. An old man, white beard and balding head. Below the old man lies a young boy, whose skin is white and pure. The boy wears nothing but a white garment around his hips. His hands look like they’ve been tied behind his back.
There is a knife. It hangs in midair, suspended forever in the single, eternal instant of the painting.
In the painting, another figure holds Abraham’s arm back like he has just stopped him from killing the boy by knocking the knife from the old man’s hand. According to the Bible, this figure must be an angel. But in the painting he doesn’t look like an angel. He is shadowed. Dark. No halo circles his head, and his (its?) wings are gray.
I wonder if the thing isn’t an angel come to stop Abraham at the last second, but something else. Something come to berate him for losing his nerve. Something hungry for the death of the child.
The drive was quiet and uneventful. The tires crackled over a roughly paved road, then hummed as they rolled across a smooth freeway, and then crackled again as Shane turned off the freeway and was soon on a long road that to all appearances led to absolutely nowhere.
Quiet. Uneventful. Like his life had been until a year ago. Like he wanted his life to be again.
But that wouldn’t happen. He could still feel the scar on his chest, a thick line of keloided tissue that scraped against his undershirt every so often as though to remind him that some wounds could never be healed.
A sign suddenly presented itself on the side of the road. As always, it seemed to spring up from bare earth, a darkly magical appearance that never failed to give Shane’s heart a slight flutter. Whether that was because the sign seemed to pop up out of absolutely nowhere – invisible one moment, then starkly apparent in the next – or simply because of what it represented, he couldn’t say.
“Mount Shade – 2 mi.” the sign read.
Shane’s eyes fluttered closed for a moment. Not long enough to risk wrecking the car, but long enough that he could think about doing so. Then his kids’ faces loomed. Matthew and Ella, smiling behind his eyes and giving him his best – and maybe last – reason to keep living.
The two miles to Mount Shade passed quickly, and soon he could see the place in the distance. It was a squat structure, low and long. A concrete centipede that always appeared trapped by the short wall that surrounded most of it. The trees and other flora in the area had been carefully cultivated to lend an air of openness and freedom, but Shane had been coming here long enough to know the truth.
Nothing escaped Mount Shade.
He pulled up to the gate, and a bored-looking guard whose name was Elijah waved him through after only the most cursory look at him. That was fine by Shane. Elijah had a startlingly limited vocabulary that seemed only to extend to nasty words and nastier jokes that inevitably included a sexual punchline. After the first few months, tired and anxious about his visit to Mount Shade, Shane had snapped. He let Elijah know in the clearest terms possible that not only were his jokes not appreciated, the next time Elijah spoke to Shane about anything other than where to park, there would be blood.
Elijah – whose mouth was by far the biggest thing about him – never spoke much again. Which didn’t do much to dull the throbbing anxiety that pumped through Shane every time he approached the place.
Once through the gate, he pulled into a parking space that was a hundred feet or so from the main – and only – entrance to Mount Shade. There were other open parking spots closer to the place, but Shane never took the closest ones. He always told himself that was because he wanted to leave spots for people who couldn’t walk as well as him. Why steal a close parking spot from someone who needed it more?
He always told himself that.
He always lied like that.
In truth, he was buying himself a few extra moments before going in. A last breath of fresh air before the doors closed behind him and the breeze was replaced by artificial ventilation that he assumed was meant to keep the place smelling clean but only managed to convey antiseptic sterility.
“Get it over with,” he muttered to himself. That, of course, sent him into an immediate guilt-spiral. But this time instead of wallowing in it, staying in the car and gripping the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles went white and his palms ached, he got out and threw the door closed behind him.
Maybe that was a good sign.
Maybe it wasn’t.
He went through the two doors that opened for him. They were automatic from this side. From the other side, you had to wait for someone to touch a button that would allow you to exit. They didn’t mind visitors here, but they were very careful about letting people leave.
The doors swished open, then shut behind him. He felt like he was in an airlock. The reception area had no windows – there were very few windows at all here, and none on the first floor.
“Hello, Mr. Wills.”
The voice was bright. He knew who it belonged to, but couldn’t think of her name at the moment. Jan? Fran? He looked up, and Jan/Fran was smiling at him from behind her desk, a hand already extended to take the driver’s license that she looked at every time, even though she knew exactly who he was.
It was protocol.
Apparently his body didn’t need any kind of mental permission to follow protocol, either, because he realized with a start that he had already pulled out his wallet and was even now handing over the identification.
Jan/Fran took it. Her fingers brushed against his and he remembered how Kari used to touch him like that, just a light dance of fingertips across skin, when she was interested in making love. He shivered.
“Cold?” said the receptionist.
“I guess so, Fran,” said Shane. The name popped out – again without conscious thought – and he must have gotten it right, because she didn’t bat an eye. She just copied his card, looked at him as though he might have changed in the days since he last came here, and then smiled.
“If you’ll just wait for a minute, Mr. Wills, I’ve paged someone to take you in.”
He hadn’t seen her move, so she must have paged someone before he even made it through the door. The thought that he had grown to be so predictable made unease spread through him, a dark oil slick over the usually calm waters of his mind. He didn’t want to be a part of this place.
A low klaxon sounded, and the one door that led out of the reception area into the main portion of Mount Shade opened.
Fran’s hand went below the desk as the door opened. Every time the door opened, whoever was manning the front desk put a hand below the desk. Shane wondered what was there; what would happen if the wrong person stepped through.
The hand quickly returned to sight as Ben stepped through. The nurse wore a smile that split his face neatly, large white teeth that always reminded Shane of Chiclets flashing in the understated lighting of the reception area. If it weren’t for the subtle worry-lines at the corners of his eyes and the nightstick that he held casually in one hand, the nurse would have looked like he was genuinely enjoying himself.
Ben waved at Shane, then beckoned for him to come on in. Shane glanced at Fran as though to ask final permission, but she was already working on something at her desk, head down and pen scratching as she wrote on a thick pile of paperwork.
Shane passed through the door before it shut. It swung closed behind him, and another klaxon sounded as it did so. He heard a heavy thunk and knew the door had bolted shut.
Ben started walking. He was a thick man, broad-chested and with arms that looked capable of doing origami with sheet metal. His legs were too short for the rest of him, but as always Shane found himself hurrying to keep up with the nurse.
Their shoes clacked along the tile floor, echoing weirdly through the halls and making it sound like horses were moving through instead of people. The two horsemen of the apocalypse, walking through this land of the almost-living.
“How are the wife and kids?” Shane asked, as much to cover up the echoing sound of his own gait as anything.
Ben’s smile grew broader, a feat that Shane would have guessed impossible for anyone else. “Wife’s fat and happy, like me.”
“And the kids?”
Another inch of smile appeared. “They’re just glad to be on summer break.”
“Yeah,” said Shane, as though he knew what Ben was talking about. Was it summer already?
Of course it is. That’s how you timed the move.
Shane nodded to himself, chiding himself silently for losing control so quickly. Mount Shade always disoriented him, always made him forget what was happening in the rest of the world.
When you were in here, Mount Shade was the rest of the world. There was nothing and nowhere else.
A loud rattling noise startled Shane, and he looked over at the door they had just passed. There was a small window set into the door. Shane knew that the glass was over an inch thick, with almost-invisible steel wires threading through it and making it virtually indestructible. Even so, he shrunk back from the face that was at the window. It was an old man, a long and unkempt gray beard trailing down his chest below the level of the window. A few wispy hairs clung tenaciously to an otherwise bare scalp.
A large red birthmark ran down his cheek, a trailing port-wine stain that spread from the corner of the old man’s left eye down to his jawline. It was shaped vaguely like a serpent, crawling down his face in quest of some dark object. The illusion of movement increased as the man jerked his head about and slammed his hands against the glass.
The man crashed his hands against the door, and the rattling noise came again.
“She’ll get you, you know!” screamed the man. His words were muffled through the thick glass and thicker door, but still clear. Spittle flew from his lips and spattered on the glass. “You can’t escape! She’ll cut you and gut you, and you won’t remember a thing! You won’t –”
There was a loud crack, almost like a gunshot, as Ben snapped his nightstick against the cell window.
“Shut it, Ollie!” hollered Ben.
The old man with the birthmark stopped speaking instantly. He stared at Shane for another moment, then slowly backed away. The cell behind him was dark, and the man was soon lost to the gloom of the small space. His birthmark was the last to disappear, the long red splash of color turning gray and then merging with the darkness as well.
“Sorry about that, Mr. Wills,” said Ben. Then, “You okay?”
“Fine,” said Shane. But he realized he was shaking visibly, tremors dancing along his hands as though he had suffered an instantaneous onset of palsy.
“You sure?” said Ben. His smile didn’t completely disappear, but the brightness of it dialed down like the nurse had some kind of dental rheostat in his pocket. “Maybe we should get you some juice.”
“No,” Shane said. He exhaled sharply, and focused on his hands. They stopped moving, hanging now limply at his sides. “I’m okay.”
Ben stared at him for a second or two, a short time in the real world but interminably long in the different time continuum that held sway at Mount Shade. Finally he nodded and kept walking.
They went through turn after turn, hall after hall. The corridors were all identical: white, featureless. Tile on the floor that continued part way up the walls, which were white expanses broken every fifteen feet by a single door with a single window.
Occasionally Shane would catch a glimpse of movement in the rooms they passed. The glimpses were fleeting, mere hints he caught out of the corners of his eyes. He never looked at them directly.
He kept seeing the old man’s face, the birthmark like a bloodstain dripping lividly down his cheek.
“She’ll get you, you know! You can’t escape! She’ll cut you and gut you, and you won’t remember a thing!”
Nothing about the words was comfortable or right, but for some reason the part that disconcerted him the most was the look in the man’s eyes when he said that last. “You won’t remember a thing.” His eyes had been almost pleading, lost and childlike. Shane felt like the old man had been speaking directly – specifically – to him. Like there was a message in the words that only Shane could understand.
Like a warning that only Shane would need.
Ben drew up suddenly and Shane realized that they had arrived. This hall was no different than the others, there were no visible features to differentiate it from any of the other places they had passed by, but Shane could tell instantly where they were. He had memorized this space completely, to the point that he suspected he could draw the individual atomic particles that joined together to make the floor, walls, ceiling.
And the door they stood in front of.
“You know the drill,” said Ben. He was no longer smiling.
Shane nodded. Ben glanced through the window, was satisfied with what he saw, and pulled out an electronic card. He ran it along the wall beside the door. To Shane’s eyes this part of the wall looked no different than the rest of the blank white plane, but there was – as there always was – a subtle beep and then a dull click as the door unlocked.
Ben pulled the door open and gestured for Shane to go through. Ben did not follow him.
Shane stepped into the cell. The door closed behind him.
There was a bed in one corner. A utilitarian white toilet in another. A sink. No soap.
A desk sat at the back of the room.
Kari – his wife, the woman he loved, the woman who had tried to murder her family – sat at the desk.
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Chapter 18:
Text
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Most people who choose to kill others do not choose to kill themselves. Unless the person they have killed is their own child. Then a lot of parent-murderers try to die as well.
Because they have been driven mad by what they have done? To be with the child? Or is it something else? Something darker?
It wasn’t a big scream, more of a yip than anything, but it was enough to make his big sister’s lip curl and her eyes roll.
“Get a grip,” Ella said, and Matthew realized that her head was still attached to her body. She was just leaning around the doorframe from her place in the hall. She must have left the office while he was staring at the computer screen.
She waved a handful of paper at him – the mysterious sheets that she had printed a few seconds ago. “You coming?” she said.
Another thrill went up and down Matthew’s small body. “No,” he almost said. Because he knew that whatever Ella had in mind was not going to help at all. What could possibly help?
But he didn’t say no. He nodded and hurried after her as she padded down the hall and into the kitchen. She opened a few drawers, pulling out some things so quickly that he couldn’t really see what she was grabbing, then marched toward the basement door and hurled it open.
Matthew thought she hesitated for the barest bit of a second – not long enough to even be sure, and certainly (unfortunately) not long enough for him to call her on it – but then she started down into the darkness.
Matthew stared at her as Ella disappeared into the black pit of the basement. He wondered again whether he would be better off just not following her this one time. But he knew even as he thought it that he would follow her; that he would go down into the basement with her, even if there were ghosts and ghouls and zombies or anything else.
She was his sister.
His legs were already moving, pushing him toward the open door. He walked down the stairs, almost hit something, almost cried out, but realized that it was just Ella and bit back the shout before it was fully formed.
She was stopped dead (he shivered at the word, but couldn’t help thinking it) on the steps, staring into the darkness of the basement.
“Shouldn’t we turn on the lights?” he whispered. Even the low sound of his voice scraped at nerves that felt raw and exposed.
“It’s better this way,” said Ella. But then she went quickly back up the steps and flicked the switch that turned on the basement light before returning to his side and then continuing down the stairs.
The light was dim, a single low-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling. It didn’t so much illuminate the space as create a complex pattern of shadows on shadows. Matthew glanced up the stairs. The kitchen door remained open above them, a thin shaft of light pushing through the door and painting the top few steps with brightness. Matthew said a quick prayer asking God to keep the door open, and then continued after Ella.
