Apparition, page 19
He heard a tiny sound, a light scrabbling. The roach? He cast his eyes around, but saw nothing in the darkness.
The phone droned again. Another message appeared.
Jamie: U called the spirits.
Gorge rose in the back of Matthew’s throat and it was all he could do to keep from gagging on it… and on the fear that he could feel writhing through his stomach. He peeked at Ella. Her face looked deathly pale in the light of the LED screen. She swallowed, and typed something out. Matthew read the words as they appeared, and though he was old enough to read silently he read them aloud, as though by doing so he could control what was happening.
“Is… this… Jamie?” he read. He looked at Ella. “Who else would it be?” he said, though he didn’t expect her to have an answer for him.
The return message came back. And it came fast. Faster than normal, too fast for the cruddy coverage they had here.
Jamie: No.
Ella typed again. Again Matthew read the words aloud. He knew the world had gone crazy. Not only because of what was happening, but because in any other conceivable circumstance Ella would have griped him out thoroughly for reading her texts at all, let alone reading them aloud.
Now, however, she said nothing. Just sat silently as Matthew read, “Who… are… you?”
Ella pressed “send,” and Matthew grabbed Ella’s arm. Something was coming. He could feel it like a flash flood coursing toward them.
“Ella, I’m scared.”
Her chin bobbed up and then down, the motion so quick and jerky it was more a twitch than a full nod. But it was enough to tell him clearly that she was scared, too.
The phone:
Jamie: Not Jamie. Someone else. Someone not Jamie.
The need to vomit was beyond urgent now. Matthew held his hand halfway between his lap and his mouth, ready to clap it over his mouth if he spewed. The thought went through his mind that Ella would never forgive him if he chucked his breakfast all over her clothes.
Ella was typing again.
Ella: Where are u?
She pressed “send” again. The phone buzzed instantly.
Jamie: Behind u.
***
Chapter 19:
Album
***
A lot of the people who kill their children seem to do it by drowning them. At first I didn’t know why, but now I think I understand.
When you drown them, there is nothing between them and you. You can see their eyes when it happens. And the thing inside you finds their despair delicious.
Shane sat down on the bed and watched Kari for a few minutes. She gave no sign she was interested in his presence or even aware of him at all. Just kept working at whatever she had on the desk.
Shane thought about going to her, perhaps laying a hand on her shoulder. But he resisted. He had tried that a few times early on, when she had first come here. She either acted like he was trying to hurt her, which was bad, or just flat out ignored him, which was worse.
“The kids are doing great,” he said. The words came dry out of his mouth, chalky and false. He felt like he was on autopilot, flying blindly toward a destination that he didn’t know and with no thought of the future beyond just trying not to crash and burn and die.
“They miss you.” He looked at his hands, which were clenched tightly in his lap. He tried to make them relax but failed. They remained twisted up in each other, a knot of flesh and blood and bone. “Ella,” he said, and his fingers grew dark as the blood pooled in them, “Ella’s struggling. I told her that she could come see you when she’s ready but –”
The last word was barely out of his throat when it was drowned by a shriek that ripped through the small cell, bouncing off the partially sound-proofed walls and shredding his eardrums. He didn’t have time to notice the pain of the sound itself, though, because in the same instant something pushed him off the bed.
Kari. It was Kari. She had never done something like this before, but she was doing it now. She was screaming non-stop, her hands around his neck as she choked him. Her eyes roamed wildly, spittle spraying across his face.
“Keep them away from me! You hear that? Keep them away!”
The choking was ineffectual but painful. He managed to tear her fingers away from his throat, gasping both to get more air and at the pain of her nails tearing his skin. The cell door slammed open and Ben ran in. He fell on Kari and for a moment Shane bore the combined weight of his wife and the heavyset nurse. Then the weight lessened as Ben yanked Kari away. She resisted, shrieking and screaming, her nails raking the air inches in front of Shane’s face.
Shane couldn’t believe this was happening. Kari had been… if not better, at least not violent… since the day after the attempts on him and Ella and then her failed effort to commit suicide. She had withdrawn instantly into herself, barely seeming to notice the whirlwind trips from home to prison and from prison to Mount Shade. She had come out of it a bit of late, and had even been given reading materials, limited computer access, and paper and pens to write with.
But this… her face looked mad, horrifying, expressions of rage and fear he had never seen on her before. Not even the night she tried to kill him, not even then. Then, her face had been different, like she was wearing someone else’s expressions. This, though, was undeniably Kari. He saw terror and rage in her eyes, but they were her eyes.
“Keep them away!” she screamed over and over. Ben was screaming, too, a muddled mix of instructions to Kari and to Shane. A few moments later another pair of nurse/orderlies – both of them just as big as Ben but utterly lacking the warmth and humanity that characterized the personable nurse – stampeded into the room. They helped Ben pin Kari down. One of them pulled out a small syringe and stabbed it into Kari’s neck, the plunger slamming home the instant the needle broke her skin.
Shane watched it all in stunned horror. He felt like the world was ending. And not for the first time. This was almost worse, because the hope he had been nursing over the last year, the optimistic expectation that if he just hung in long enough everything could return to normal, shattered into a million pieces as his insane wife’s hands clawed at the air. It looked for a moment like she was fighting someone, an actual being who was as real as Shane though utterly unseen.
His vision doubled, then tripled as tears sprung unbidden to his eyes. He wiped them away with the back of his hand, unsure whether they were tears for Kari or for himself. He was suddenly tired, so tired. The entire reason he had uprooted the family was to be here, to be close enough that his weekly trips didn’t break the bank with travel costs, to be close enough that maybe the kids would come with him, to be close enough that he could start to repair the family.
But how was he going to repair something that was so broken? Something that was so constantly close to the edge of madness?
For a moment a thought leapt into his mind: Just end it. He suddenly saw himself holding a knife to his own throat, pulling it across his neck. Blood flowed like a warm bib across his chest before soaking into his shirt and pants in a widening cone of crimson.
Shane gasped with the strength of the thought. No, more than a thought: it was a vision, a revelation. Certainty filled his mind, an assurance so complete that the moment suddenly ceased being a product of his imagination and for a moment became reality, intimate and inevitable.
Then he snapped out of the dream. He wondered how long he had been gripped by the grisly image of his own suicide. Kari was back on the bed, her head lolling bonelessly to the side as Ben maneuvered her onto the crisp linen covers.
The nurse glanced at Shane. “You okay, Mr. Wills?”
Am I? Am I even here? Or is this Hell? Have I already killed myself?
He shook his head, clearing it of the cobwebs that had set in during his mental absence. “I’m fine.” He wasn’t. His stomach twisted in horror. And the worst thing was that it wasn’t horror at the image he had seen, it was horror brought by the fact that he missed it. Like he had seen a future that was to be earnestly desired and sought for. A future that was not grim, but joyful.
Everything ends. Even you. Even the children.
The thought made him tremble. Not with trepidation, but with anticipation. The vision came to him again, the sight of his own hand drawing a shining knife across his throat. Only this time he realized that there was more to what he was seeing. He didn’t exist in a vacuum of imagination, he was not alone.
There were two others there. Two people behind him. Not standing, but laying on a white floor that ran thick with blood like red rivers across a perfect snowy field.
Ella, her chest still oozing from the cuts that had flayed her skin back in thick sheets. Her face glistening with sweat, one cheek peeled back so it hung loosely from the skull beneath. Her mouth was moving, but no sound came out. None would: her throat had been cleanly slit, and blood from the wound bubbled around the air that pushed through her windpipe on its way to her larynx, only to find itself rerouted uselessly through the gash. Shane could see that the blood was dripping into the wound as much as spraying out of it: Ella was drowning in her own gore.
Beside her, Matthew. He was utterly motionless, a cool breeze that had been stilled by hot death. His throat was a mangled mess of blood and skin, his shirt pulled up around his chest. His stomach was a gaping maw of flesh, intestines spilled in dark coils around him.
His eyes were gone.
Shane gasped. He closed his own eyes. It was a useless gesture, but he had to do something, had to try to banish the vision somehow.
It worked. When he opened his eyes he was back in Mount Shade. Ben was still getting Kari into bed, but the quick glances he threw Shane’s way spoke loud and clear about his concern for more than just the official patient.
Shane shook his head again and pushed himself to his hands and knees. He stood slowly, blood pounding tympani in his head. Black swirls curled at the edges of his vision, and he concentrated on fighting them back. He would have welcomed oblivion right now, but what if unconsciousness brought a return of the vision? A return of the image of his children, dead at his own hand?
Worse, what if he found himself locked into a return of the sudden thrill he had experienced when seeing them so defiled? The sated sensation, as though he had just finished the most perfect meal ever prepared?
He exhaled, forcing the air out of his lungs, then pulled in a heavy draught of new air. Shane repeated the action several times before he felt control return.
The image of the dead children faded.
The feeling – that damnable, hopeful, aroused feeling – did not.
Kari was in her bed. Her jaw hung slack, ropy strands of drool making their way down her cheek. Ben pulled a handkerchief out from his pocket and dabbed at her. He was still looking at Shane with concern.
Shane turned away from Ben’s (to him) accusing stare. He moved to the desk Kari had been sitting at before this particular episode of My Shitty Life had started.
An album sat on the desk. It had a simple, unadorned cover of brown leather. He had never seen it before.
He opened it.
And immediately wished he hadn’t.
It was mostly drawings. Page after page of hand-drawn sketches and collages made of pictures that must have been raggedly torn from whatever magazines Kari could get her hands on.
The book assaulted his eyes, colors and pictures and drawings placed seemingly at random on every page. The only thing every page seemed to have in common was its subject: children. And not just children, but dead children. Hand-drawn pictures of small bodies floating in blood, images from magazines that showed the cadavers of infants being lain out side by side, others that showed dead children being pushed into mass graves in what was surely some war-torn nation that most people in the United States hadn’t even heard of.
Shane’s stomach twisted nauseatingly. What was this? How had she gotten these images, and why hadn’t her doctors put a stop to this strange passion project? The idea of things returning to normal receded still further from the realm of possibility as he turned page after page.
A new baby, strangled by its own umbilicus.
A young boy sitting at a Christmas tree, his head hanging loose and limp above a slit neck.
A teenage girl on the couch with her boyfriend, holding hands with him, arms around shoulders, eyes stabbed out.
He turned another page. This one was almost a relief, as there were no images on it. Only a few words, scrawled in thick black writing:
Once mine, mine forever.
Once mine, mine forever.
ONCE MINE, MINE FOREVER.
And though at first it was a welcome change, to see words instead of images of death come too early, Shane’s relief quickly faded. There was something wrong about the words. Something disturbing.
And familiar.
He frowned and suddenly wanted to call his children. He pulled his cell phone out and was halfway to dialing when he realized that the screen said “Emergency Service Only.” No bars.
He put the phone back, and a strange sense of understanding swept through him. He suddenly realized that, in the back of his mind, he hadn’t been calling to hear his children’s voices. Hadn’t been calling to make sure they were okay.
He had been calling to see if they were dead.
And he had been hoping that they were.
***
Chapter 20:
Hands
***
It cuts across socio-economic lines. Race does not seem to be the issue. There are no easy explanations that the scientists have been able to find, though I did find one pattern: more mothers kill children under five than fathers do.
Why? Are mothers are more desperate? More malleable? Do they hate their children more, just like they also (so people believe) love them more?
I don’t think so. I think it’s because the urge that drives them to kill is a uniquely feminine one. Unlike schizophrenia, or a brain tumor, this thing that drives us to kill our children has a gender. It does not merely appeal to women, it is WOMAN.
At first Ella just wanted to throw up. Now the nausea was gone, but she felt like someone had rammed an icicle between her shoulders, destroying her spine and piercing her heart.
She turned her head. Slowly. Like she was moving to face a wild and unstable animal. Matthew was doing the same, and for a moment their gazes met. His eyes glimmered in the light of the cell phone, twin stars that shone in the night sky of his face. She wondered if she looked as scared as he did. Probably. Maybe more so.
Their heads kept turning, rotating on their necks in unison as though controlled by a single remote. Soon Matthew was looking over his shoulder. Ella was doing the same. Both looking behind them.
There was nothing there. Only black. Only darkness so thick she couldn’t pierce it.
Nothing’s there. Nothing’s there nothing can be there nothing’s there because this isn’t real it isn’t real and nothing’s there.
Ella held her cell phone high. The display light shimmied back and forth as her hand shook so hard she was surprised she didn’t drop it. She turned the phone around so the glowing screen faced behind them, and swung it in a slow half-circle.
The screen only illuminated a few feet behind them, a cotton ball of light trying to absorb an ocean of inky blackness. There was nothing there. Nothing visible, anyway.
Ella moved the phone back and forth a few times in a tight arc.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
And then the last time. She swung the light to the side, and something was there and it was a face and it was small and pale like the blood had been drained from it and it had black eyes so black they seemed to pull the light into them and not let go and then she was screaming and the cell phone light turned off and she was still screaming and clutching at Matthew and he was grabbing her too and they were screaming each other’s names.
“Ella!”
“Matthew!”
“Ella, help!”
“I’m here, I’m here, I’m here!”
His hands grabbed her arms.
Something thudded behind them. Something heavy. Solid. She heard something creak, then thought she heard the dry whisper of something moving across the concrete floor.
