Apparition, page 20
“Hold my hand!” she screamed.
Matthew fumbled along her arm until he managed to get a grip on her hand. His hand was warm and sweaty and normally she wouldn’t have been caught dead holding it like this but now she held it so tight it must have hurt him.
Ella touched the side of her phone with her other hand, and the phone light blinked on again. She held it in front of her, and though the screen was only bright enough to illuminate a small patch around them, it was enough. Enough to chase away the darkness for a moment. Enough to see Matthew’s hand, holding tight to hers.
Enough to see another hand, pale and small, reaching for them. A child’s hand, fingers smaller than Matthew’s reaching out, nail beds that were blue and dead at the end of them.
Ella screamed and dropped the phone. It clattered across the floor, the light from the screen spinning shadows like spider webs.
And the shadows were moving. They crawled over one another, in and through themselves, shifting and changing constantly in a dark kaleidoscope of terror.
Ella jumped to her feet, yanking Matthew along with her. He was screaming wordlessly –
(or is that me is that me screaming or is it Matthew oh please God let it be one of us and not whatever else is down here whatever thing has come)
– the sound joining the writhing darkness like another thread in a tapestry that was weaving itself around them, slowing them down, trying to stop them from leaving.
Something hit her shins, ripping the skin apart. Blood trickled down her legs. Ella screamed, sure that it was part of whatever was happening, that it was something that would destroy them. Then she realized it was the edge of the lowest step.
Ella jumped forward, stumbling and almost falling as she pulled Matthew with her up the first steps. She went down on hands and knees but didn’t stop moving, crawling up the stairs, lurching upward. Her lungs couldn’t get enough air, straining at the confines of her ribcage but still not managing to get the oxygen they needed.
Matthew screamed, and she pulled him faster. Faster, faster. But fast enough?
Then they were in the light, the bright light of the kitchen. Ella stumbled on the tile floor, trying to regain her balance. She still had Matthew’s hand in her own, fingers tangled tightly together. Matthew was crying. Snot ran out of his nose. She didn’t care. She just wanted to get away from the basement and from whatever it held.
“Come on, come on, come on!” she screamed, and yanked Matthew hard enough he cried out and his free hand flew to his shoulder. She worried for a second that she might have separated or even dislocated the kid’s shoulder, but then her mind refocused on what they were running from and she pulled him along even harder.
Then she stopped, letting go of Matthew’s hand long enough to dart back toward the basement. She saw a quick flash of her brother’s face, tears streaming down his cheeks and his eyes perfectly round and bright with terror.
“Ella, no!” he shrieked as she passed him. She ignored him, even though she wanted nothing more than to keep running. She reached into the stairwell, and knew that she was going to lose her arm, would draw back only a stump that spurted blood after being ripped off by whatever monster was down there.
She tried to throw the thought out. Focused on Matthew. Had to save Matthew. Had to protect her brother.
Ella fumbled until she found what she was looking for, her fingers brushing against and then closing around the spherical shape of a doorknob. She pulled the basement door shut convulsively, then locked it. She didn’t know if doing so would help, but it was all she could think to do to protect them.
“Come on,” she said, turning to Matthew and grabbing his arm again. He winced in pain or maybe fear, but came with her as she pulled him out of the kitchen, through the hall and into Dad’s office. She didn’t realize she was heading there at first, but as soon as they were in the room she realized that she had automatically gone to the closest place with both a lockable door and a phone.
She slammed the door shut and locked it. Matthew stood behind her, his breath coming in quick gasps that sounded far too shallow. His face looked haggard and his gaze was far away. He reminded her of a soldier just returned from some terrible war.
Ella turned from him. He didn’t seem hurt physically, and there was nothing she could do about his mental state right now.
She picked up the phone on their dad’s desk and dialed his cell number. The phone rang once, a single electronic beep that ended in mid-tone. A click, and her father’s voice came on.
“Hi –” he began.
“Dad!” she yelled. “Daddy, help us, we’re at home and we –”
“– you’ve reached Shane Wills. I’m away from the phone right now so –”
Ella didn’t hear the rest of the phone message. “Shit,” she spat, and slammed the receiver to the cradle.
“Ella,” said Matthew. His voice was strangely expressionless, like a computer rendering of his voice instead of the real thing. “Dad says not to say words like –”
His voice cut off as a sound penetrated the door. A scratching sound. Like a cat or a small dog that wanted to be let out to pee. But Ella knew that it was no such thing. The sound was not claws but nails, small and black, scraping along the thick wood of the door. A child’s hand, dead but somehow moving, pawing at the door and trying to get through to the other side.
Something touched her and she twitched, her panic-tightened muscles ready for flight, but it was only Matthew grabbing her hand.
“What do we do?” he whispered.
Ella moved away from the door. She ran to the window. She pulled her hand out of Matthew’s grasp – she had to practically break his fingers to do so – and grabbed at the smooth wood of the sash. Her fingers pressed against it the window, friction holding them to the wood as she pulled up.
For an awful moment she thought the window wouldn’t open. It was going to stick, it was going to trap them in here with only a thin sheet of wood between them and whatever thing had come for them.
Then the moment ended and the window slid upward. She didn’t throw it all the way open, just far enough that she could slide through the gap.
Matthew pawed at her leg. “Wait for me!” he said, and now the emotion was back in his voice, raw panic strangling the words as they emerged.
She pulled him with her, the two of them tumbling out of the window and falling together. The ground below was thankfully soft, but Matthew landed on top of her and that was enough to send the breath whooshing out of her.
Ella pushed her brother off, then stood and helped him up. He started running immediately, pulling her along. She didn’t resist. She wanted to get away, too. But in the back of her mind she wondered where they could go. The house was remote – purposefully so, their dad had wanted to get them away from city hubbub when they moved closer to Mom – so there weren’t any neighbors for miles. Just forest and backwoods roads.
But that didn’t matter. All that mattered for now was getting away from the house. From the thing inside it.
She looked over her shoulder a moment later, just a quick look at the house. The office window was open. She could see inside it.
Something was in there.
She turned away quickly, eyes forward so she didn’t slip and fall like any of the silly bimbos in so many B-grade horror movies. But she couldn’t erase the sight of the office from her mind. Couldn’t erase the vision of the open window, the curtains fluttering like frightened butterflies… and the small shape that stood behind them. She ran.
She just hoped they would be able to run far enough.
***
Chapter 21:
Change
***
In prison interviews, many women who have killed their children still call themselves “good mothers.” People scratch their heads at that. They don’t understand.
Is it because the women are insane? Maybe.
Of course, there’s another possibility: they’re right. Maybe they still are good mothers. Because what happened wasn’t their fault.
But if not their fault, then whose?
Or what’s?
Shane barely noticed anything about the drive back from Mount Shade. He had been lost for the entire drive. Not lost physically – his body knew the route and drove it automatically, almost without any conscious thought on his part – but adrift in a sea of thought so deep and fast-moving it was almost a physical presence. Questions pounded at him. What was he going to do about Kari’s apparent backsliding? What should he tell the kids? What did the album mean, if anything? What about those words, “Once mine, mine forever”?
And through it all, under and above and around the thoughts, images of his children kept flashing through his mind. He didn’t want them there, he rejected them as soon as they came, the mental pictures of Ella dying, of Matthew with his eyes and stomach ripped apart. But as fast as he tossed them out, they came again.
Ella, her mouth moving but no sound coming out.
No, don’t think about it.
Matthew, coils of intestine piled around him.
No. It hasn’t happened.
The two children, their blood mingling in a dark flood around them.
No, goddammit, no!
The blood reaching out for him like a living creature.
No, please, no.
Yes.
Yes.
Shane could feel himself becoming aroused, and felt at once excited and nauseous.
He loved his children. He wanted only the best for them. Only the best for all of them.
Sometimes dying is the best thing.
He shook his head, so upset at the thought that he had to physically demonstrate that he didn’t agree with it, even if the only person to see was himself.
But that couldn’t be true, could it? He couldn’t disagree with the idea. Not completely. Because the thought had come from him – had sounded like his own voice in his mind. So he had to agree with it, didn’t he? At least a little.
Dying is the best thing.
No.
New images came unbidden: children living without love in orphanages, abused in foster homes. Babies born with defects so severe they were barely alive. Children of addiction, crack addicts and meth-heads from the womb. Kids who lived in cramped mobile homes, children whose parents packed them into the family car each night because that was all they could afford for shelter.
Wouldn’t they be better off?
The sick feeling in his stomach spread out, battling with the excitement that heated his groin and sent sweat pouring from his skin.
This isn’t me.
Then who is it?
Something appeared in his headlights. Shane was so deep in thought he almost didn’t realize what it was, but when he did he was glad for it, because it pulled his mind away from the alien thoughts that seemed to be taking over.
His foot came off the accelerator and jammed down on the brake and the car lurched almost instantly to a halt. He hadn’t been going very fast so he barely felt the seatbelt bite into his neck as the car shuddered to a stop. Even if he had been going a hundred miles an hour, though, and had slammed into the side of the Empire State Building, he doubted he would have felt it.
He got out of the car and hurried to what he had seen. To the twin figures holding each other on the side of the road.
“Ella?” he said. “Matthew?”
The kids didn’t answer. They just shivered and then let go of each other and ran to him and grabbed him around his legs and waist. For a horrible second Shane was worried that they would feel the physical evidence of the excitement that had been throbbing through him only a moment before. But then that worry fled, replaced by a more welcome concern for the kids.
“What’s going on?” he said.
Matthew started talking first, but Shane couldn’t make much sense of it. The words were English, but disjointed and spoken in a hitching voice that seemed to be constantly on the edge of tears. He heard the words “ghost” and “dead boy” and “cell phone.” That was when he turned to Ella – when he heard about the cell phone. Cell phones were her territory.
“What’s he talking about?” Shane demanded. He knelt down and hugged Matthew tightly to him. The images of his children dead and dying were gone now, banished by the urgency of the moment. He was glad. Even though something bad had clearly happened, whatever it had been was worth it if it meant he would stop thinking about… about….
Ella. Bloody throat. Mouth moving.
Stop it!
He forced his thoughts back into the present and realized that Ella was speaking. How long had she been talking? he wondered, and realized it could have been a long time. Minutes, perhaps. He felt strange. Disconnected, like he was drunk or high on something, a wall of opaque plastic between him and his children.
Focus. Focus.
Their bodies, the blood –
“… and that’s when we climbed out of the window.” Ella paused, looking almost breathless, as though she hadn’t been telling what happened but running wind-sprints.
Shane tried to think backwards, to coax her story out of whatever part of him had not been fantasizing about his children’s deaths. Some of it came to the surface of his thoughts, but it still made no sense. The kids had looked for ghosts? Had gone into the basement and seen a specter of some kind? With the cell phone?
Cell phone. There were those words again.
Shane’s jaw clenched as he rocked Matthew back and forth in his arms. He glared at Ella. “Were you playing some kind of a joke on your brother? Because if you were it wasn’t a very funny one.”
“No, I wasn’t, I –”
“I mean… Geez, Ella, I know you don’t like it here, but do you have to scare the life out of your brother to make your point?” Anger welled up in him, bubbling through confusion and creating a thick mélange of emotions that pulled him in too many different directions to count.
Ella blinked and Shane realized she was trying not to cry. He wanted to reach out and hold her, too. He wanted to grab her and pull her to him and to Matthew and hold them tight and never let them go, just keep them there forever, frozen in a moment where they were all safe.
But he didn’t. Partly because he had his hands full with Matthew. And partly because he wanted to watch Ella crying. The thought was almost…
Delicious.
He shook his head again, then stood. He held Matthew tight to him as he rose, his little boy’s face buried in his chest. The scar on his chest twinged as it grew warm from tears that quickly saturated his shirt.
What’s happening to me?
But he knew nothing was happening to him. Nothing could be happening to him, because if it was, then what would Matthew and Ella have left? Their grandparents were all dead, they had no other family but him. So he was fine. He had to be. This was all something he could fix. He just had to figure out how to do it.
Ella, drowning in her blood. Matthew, eyes gouged out.
Shane did his best to throw the thoughts away, to cast them out of his mind, but they wouldn’t go. Desperate, he focused on what he knew about what was happening. The kids were standing in the middle of the road miles away from the house. Matthew was terrified. Ella –
It’s her fault.
“Dammit, Ella,” he said. It was all he could muster as the fear and confusion that bubbled through him now combined to form a new element: anger. He stalked away from her and went back to the car, Matthew dangling from his arms like a newborn.
Ella didn’t say anything, but he heard her tennis shoes crunching over pebbles and dirt behind him. He got in the car, still holding Matthew in his arms. His back spasmed as he maneuvered himself into the front seat. His son was getting too heavy for something like this. Too big to hold. Too big to shield from the dangerous world outside.
Shane sat in the car for a moment, just holding his quietly crying son in his arms. He suddenly felt like a new father again, holding his second child in his arms, loving him and hating him and hoping for the future and worried that the baby would never grow up and learn how to sleep through the night. His fingers curled his son’s downy hair in the memory of then, and in the reality of now he did the same, running fingers through Matthew’s wavy locks.
Only gradually did he return to himself again, and realized that Matthew was asleep in his arms. He wondered what time it was. The dashboard clock said it was after eight, but could that be right? Could it be so late, could he have lost so much time today?
The car was still running. He shifted Matthew into the crook of his arm and put the car in gear with his free hand. He drove the last miles home like that, his sleeping son in his arm and his silent daughter in the back of the car.
