Apparition, page 24
How had it gotten here? How had it come out of a faucet that had until a moment before been freely streaming water?
It’s happening. It’s happening again. It’s happening now.
Even as the words came into his mind, Shane was backing out of the bathroom. He didn’t want to look away from the sink, some primal part of him screaming that if he didn’t watch it the roach would emerge again. Only this time it wouldn’t be just an ugly but harmless insect. It would have transformed, changed to something huge and bloodthirsty and dangerous – the reason children are born afraid of drains, knowing that they are where dark things hide, where evil waits.
But Shane did look away. He bumped into something and yelped before he realized it was just the doorjamb, and his gaze jerked upward. To the mirror.
He opened his mouth wide to scream, to shriek and howl wildly until someone came to take him away, to take him to Mount Shade where he would spend his life in the cell beside Kari. He would scream and scream and never stop, never stop, never stop. Because leaving hadn’t helped. Running hadn’t saved them.
The children were dead.
The bedding was tangled and blood-soaked, wrapped around Ella’s and Matthew’s limbs like some beige python come to consume their bodies. Ella’s eyes stared at the ceiling, her throat cut, her mouth wide in a scream that would last until her lips decayed and the flesh sloughed off her bones. Matthew’s face was mercifully hidden under a pillow that had once been the off-white particular to motel pillowcases but was now a deep, angry red.
Shane was still inhaling, still preparing for the scream that was forcing its way up his throat. He spun around, not wanting to see his children, not wanting to look at their dead bodies bent and broken in the bed but unable to stop himself. He turned. The breath caught in his throat, the scream died unborn.
The children were alive. They were still where he had left them, where he had last seen them, with Ella curled protectively around Matthew’s small body. Arm in arm, hand in hand.
Shane turned back to the mirror. He expected to see them dead again, and half-believed he had been somehow transported into the wrong side of the reflection. The dead children would be there, he knew. They would be in the mirror and it didn’t matter what he saw in the room itself, the death was somehow real, the blood in the reflection was somehow truth.
But they weren’t there. They weren’t in the mirror. He was, but again reflection and reality did not match, for in the silvered light of the mirror he saw a him, a he that held a silver-edged knife. Shane looked down and saw his hands at his sides, clenched tight. Empty.
Back at the mirror. The other-him was smiling. It waved the knife back and forth, the grin on the mirror-thing’s face a mockery of happiness. It blew a kiss to Shane, then turned away. It turned away and walked toward the mirror-children behind it. They were alive again, alive but not for long, alive but soon to be gutted in front of him. Shane reached for the mirror, fingers splayed wide as though he could grab his own reflection and stop it, stop what was going to happen. But his fingers didn’t penetrate the invisible line between reality –
(whatever that was, whichever side of the mirror that might be)
– and its doppleganger. The mirror-Shane stood over a sleeping Ella, a snoring Matthew. The dark double raised its knife high. It tensed.
Shane turned away. Ran into the bedroom. Ella and Matthew were still asleep, still alive, but he was convinced he was about to see them butchered by an invisible presence, a dark reflection of himself that only he could see.
“No!” he shouted. He put his entire self into the word, as though if he wished it hard enough the inevitable might not come to pass. He reached for them…
… and saw something in his hand.
The knife.
“No!” he said again. This time it was no mere shout, not even a shriek. It was a wailing sob that tore out of him and left him suddenly feeling empty inside. He threw the knife away convulsively, heard it rattle as it landed on the tile floor in the bathroom.
He backed away from the bathroom, away from the mirror and its promise of blood and death. Something pressed at the small of his back. He heard a dry thud and realized it was the IKEA table at the far end of the room. Something hit the floor, clattering like bleached bones thrown by a soothsayer. He had knocked the laptop off the table.
Normal Shane, the Shane that had lived in his mind only days or even mere hours ago, would have worried about the computer breaking, worried about losing his files. But that Shane was gone. The new Shane, the now-Shane that existed in a permanent state of terror, barely noticed the sound. He kept his eyes locked on the bathroom, darting back and forth between the mirror and the knife that had appeared from nowhere and now sat on the bathroom floor like a cobra ready to strike.
Ella sat up when the laptop fell, blinking sleep away. She looked around and Shane saw fear cross her face as she saw him. He thought it was fear for him, but it may just as well have been fear of him. Fear that whatever madness had gripped him earlier had returned.
His daughter pinched Matthew. He woke up, too. Like Ella, he immediately went from a state of sleep to one of alert-eyed fear. Shane wondered dimly if his kids would ever recover from the trauma of the past days. Then he realized that question would be academic if they didn’t survive whatever dark force seemed bent on their destruction, whatever entity had transported the knife unbidden into Shane’s hand twice in the space of a few hours.
What if it was me? What if I did it? What if I’m still doing it, what if this is just the insane dream of a madman?
He looked back to the bathroom floor, as though to verify the reality of what was happening by making sure his children could see the knife. But the knife was gone. Gone, if it had ever existed in the first place.
New fear settled in the pit of his stomach. What would be worse: to face some monster, some ghost or demon that wanted to destroy his children; or to face the reality of his own burgeoning insanity? He had no answer.
The bare tile floor of the bathroom seemed to be laughing at him, a chuckle that rippled across the water-stained porcelain of the floor. I’m empty. No knife here. No knife anywhere. No monsters, either… other than you.
Shane looked away from the bathroom. His gaze dropped to his feet. The laptop sat beside them. It wasn’t broken, the screen was still bright, still displaying….
Shane’s features creased, his eyes narrowed as though by doing so he might see better what was on the computer screen – or be able to render it invisible.
He bent over and picked up the laptop.
“What’s going on?” Matthew said from behind him.
Shane didn’t answer. He heard the dry sound of Outs Inn’s low thread-count covers being thrown back, like a reptile shedding its skin by scraping it against a desert rock. Footsteps sounded and Ella and Matthew drew near, looking at the computer as well. Shane noticed them only peripherally. His gaze – and the bulk of his attention – was focused on the laptop.
The screen had changed. Andy Hanson’s jack-o-lantern grin was gone, and the monitor now showed another news story. Again, a picture of the house – of their house – hung in the middle of the page. But that was not what had caught his attention, not what had pulled his mind away from the knife and fixated it on a new aspect of the living nightmare he was passing through. It wasn’t the house, it wasn’t the police that formed a human barrier around it.
It was the woman in the front of the house. A small figure with black hair and eyes that spoke of Asian heritage. He knew her. He had seen her somewhere.
“That’s the lady from church,” said Ella. Her voice sounded out of place, as though they had suddenly found themselves transported from their motel room to a crypt. Shane had to fight back the urge to tell her to whisper.
Instead he said, “Who?”
“The old lady from church,” said Ella. “She was there on Sunday, and when I went to the bathroom she followed me in. She said something about me being one of….” Her face wrinkled with concentration. “She said something about me being one of the children. The children.” The way she said that last word sent shivers down Shane’s back.
“What children?” he said. “Did she hurt you?”
Ella shrugged. “I don’t know what children. But no, she didn’t hurt me.” She looked closer at the screen. “Martha Goodspeak, it says her name is. That’s a weird name for someone who looks Chinese or –” Then she realized something else. She pointed at the picture of their house. “Is that –?”
“That’s our house!” interrupted Matthew. He sounded almost gleeful, as though he had given the fastest answer in a quiz show.
Ella waved him to be silent and read quickly from the first lines of the story. “Oliver Hanson, 47, murdered his son….” Her voice drifted into silence. She kept reading for a moment, then looked at Shane. “Dad, this is our house.” Her eyes were bright, accusatory. Shane said nothing. “Did you know about this?” she said.
Shane remained silent. Matthew asked, “Daddy, what’s going on?” in a voice that was small, a tiny sound almost swallowed up by the cryptlike motel room.
“I,” began Shane. He stopped. Swallowed. It felt like he had a lump of coal stuck in his throat. He looked at his feet, at the walls. Like a child who has been caught in the act, he suddenly believed that if he could somehow avoid his accusers’ eyes, perhaps there would be leniency, even outright pardon. But when he finally looked at Ella, she was still staring at him, her eyes like windows that allowed a clear view of the questions in her mind.
Shane swallowed again. Then said, “It was the only place we could afford.” Again, he sounded guilty even to himself.
Ella frowned. Not confused, not concerned. Angry. “So you moved us into a house that’s haunted by some guy who killed his kid?” she demanded.
Again, Shane didn’t respond. He turned to the computer instead, scrolling down and trying to read the article as a way of ignoring his daughter’s question. The words on the screen seemed to fall right through wide-open cracks in his mind, disappearing from his consciousness almost as fast as he read them. Then he realized he had just seen something important. He couldn’t remember what it was, but his subconscious pricked at him until he re-read the last few lines that he had scanned. He scrolled down a bit farther, and a new photo appeared, one that yanked a gasp out of his mouth.
“It’s not the father who’s doing this,” he said.
“How do you know?” Ella demanded.
“He’s no ghost – he’s still alive.”
Ella frowned and looked at the screen, reading. “How do you know that?” she asked. “It doesn’t say that he’s alive in this.”
Shane looked at her. She was so lovely. Beautiful, young, a girl on the cusp of becoming a woman. For a moment she looked like a young version of Kari, a woman who was brave and smart and determined enough to do whatever she needed to survive.
Shane gulped, forcing the words to come. “I know because I’ve seen him.” He pointed at the picture above the words “Alleged Killer Oliver Hanson.” The photo was of a man who looked to be in his mid-thirties. His eyes were half-closed as though he was sleepy – or trying to avoid looking at the camera. Still, he was pleasant-faced and innocuous, the kind of person you would barely notice if he stood behind you in a supermarket. Indeed, the only thing that kept him from being so average in appearance as to be virtually invisible in a line-up was the red mark on his forehead. A birthmark. One that Shane had seen before, a serpentine nevus that had writhed on the face of an old man in Mount Shade.
“She’ll get you,” the man had screamed, and Shane could see him clearly in his mind, his hands slamming into the window set into his cell door, spittle spattering the air around him. “You can’t escape!”
He had said more, but that was what stood out. “You can’t escape.”
Shane looked back at the bathroom, at the blank spot where he had thrown the knife a moment before.
“You can’t escape,” he murmured.
“What?” said Matthew.
Shane looked at his son. He looked so small. So fragile. As though a stiff wind might blow him away, or even dash him to pieces like glass cast out of a high tower onto stony ground far below.
Shane reached out for his son. Touched his cheek. He cupped Matthew’s face in his hands. Held him softly for a moment. Then his grip dropped and tightened around his son’s neck. Matthew didn’t even have time to gasp. Shane raised him up as high as he could, then threw his son down with all his strength. There was a brittle crunch as the sudden change in direction snapped Matthew’s neck in mid-flight, and his son’s eyes were blank when his head hit the floor with a wet crack, dead before the blood jetted out of the crater that opened up in his head, before the carpet ran red below his body.
Ella didn’t scream. He thought that was strange, and turned to look at her curiously, almost as intent on seeing her reaction to Matthew’s death as he was on killing her as well. But Ella wasn’t even looking at him. She was staring at the laptop, her expression blank as though she didn’t care about her father murdering her only brother. Shane glanced back at Matthew and his son’s lifeless body was gone, the blood was gone. His boy was alive and whole and still staring up at him.
Terror made Shane shake. It wasn’t just because of the power of the vision he had just seen, or the fact that he knew he was losing control of himself. No, he was not terrified by those things but rather at the fact that when he saw his son alive again, when he saw Matthew staring up at him he felt not relief but a profound disappointment.
His son was not dead. His boy was alive. Alive, and Shane wanted to cry because of it.
He was losing control; losing himself.
How long? he wondered. How long before I can’t stop… whatever it is that’s trying to get inside me?
Matthew – beautiful, wonderful, horribly alive Matthew – was still staring at him. Waiting. Trusting in his daddy to fix this, to bring them out of the waking dream that had captured them.
“Let’s go,” he said. He hugged Matthew, forced himself to hug his son like everything was all right and he didn’t want to kill him. Matthew hugged him back.
“Where are we going?” said Ella.
Shane grinned. The smile felt stretched and false. “You’ll see,” was all he said.
Ella shivered, and a thrill ran through him as he saw her terror, an electric current that warmed him and made him feel somehow hungry. As though he had been starving, but had just taken his first taste of food – not enough to satiate him but instead just enough to make his hunger grow sharper.
“You’ll see,” he said again.
***
Chapter 24:
Visit
***
I read about a woman who was accused of trying to inject a young boy with a syringe full of bleach. The newspaper didn’t say whether or not the boy was her son.
But it was, of course. It would have to be. Only a mother would try to cleanse the world of her own child that way.
They sat in the car for hours, just sitting in the empty parking lot until the sun came up and then continuing to sit until the dashboard clock read 8:00 a.m.
Shane glanced in the rearview mirror as they waited, flicking his gaze back whip-fast every couple of minutes or so. Matthew was usually looking out the window or staring at his hands – even sleeping a few of the times.
Ella was doing the same exact thing every time: watching Shane. Not most of the time, not almost all the time, but every single time. If his eyes went to the mirror, he could be sure that hers would already be there, looking at him – staring at him – with an intensity that was unnerving.
At first he understood. She was worried about him: worried for him and scared of him. He was acting strangely and she was old enough to know it and perceptive enough to understand that the strangeness wasn’t just oddity but a dangerous kind of madness. Shame burned his cheeks and his forehead. His daughter was afraid of him. And she had reason to be.
Over time, though, as the minutes crawled by and the sky gradually lightened around them, the shame disappeared. It was replaced by a stunning headache, and then the headache metamorphosed into a throbbing anger, a rage that marched through him to the beat of his own pulse. Every heartbeat pounded the anger deeper into him and by the time it was fully light he was in its thrall.
He glanced at her again. Still staring. Waiting.
Bitch. Little bitch doesn’t trust me. Me, her own father.
He thought of her face, torn and bleeding, and a smile crawled across his own features. His hands hurt, but the pain was distant and dim, barely enough to draw his gaze away from that of his daughter. When he finally did look away from her, his hands were clenched into fists so tight they almost glowed in the early morning light. He forced his fingers to open – a command that they followed only reluctantly – and saw blood on the palms where his fingernails had bitten into the meat. Red crescents, four on each hand, bled freely. He wiped his hands on his pants and wondered again what was happening to him.
