Apparition, page 26
Lights on. Hanson. Backing up, his hands held protectively in front of him as though warding something off.
Black.
Lights on. Hanson. Pressed back against the far wall of his cell.
Black. Screaming.
Lights. Hanson. Still screaming. Blood on the walls around him, outlining him like the shadow figures burnt onto the walls at Hiroshima.
Black. Ben’s screams now mingling with those of the inmate.
Lights on. Hanson. Blood pooling at his feet. Something fell out from under his shirt. Thick, red and black and brown. It fell in tangled loops and Shane realized it was the old man’s intestines.
Black again. Lights out. The screaming stopped.
Ben pulled out his keys with hands that shook. An alarm sounded somewhere. The keys tinkled in Ben’s hand, a sound that was too bright and cheery for what was happening. It was the sound of a door opening in a country shop and it didn’t belong here in the nightmare that Shane’s life had become.
Ben pushed a key into the keyhole.
Shane heard footsteps in the corridor.
The door to Hanson’s cell swung open.
Shane looked inside. The room was a nightmare. Red blood everywhere. Most of the places it was sprayed in nonsense lines, the arterial spurts of a body sliced into pieces. But one spot was virtually clean. One spot on the wall was unmarked. Or rather, it was unmarked by the thick lines of blood that painted the rest of the walls in psychotic patterns. But there was something. Words. Deep red and dripping, the words painted in blood as it pumped from the wounds that ended Hanson’s life.
Shane read them, and stepped back unconsciously. He had seen them in Kari’s cell. Words that had been written in black in the middle of a book of the dead and were now scrawled across the back wall of a murderer’s cell.
Once mine, mine forever.
Once mine, mine forever.
ONCE MINE, MINE FOREVER.
Shane ran.
***
Chapter 25:
Monster
***
Diane Downs shot her three children. Two of them survived; only one of them died. Diane cried at the trial, but I don’t think she cried because she had killed one of her children. I think she was crying because she hadn’t managed to kill the other two.
A couple of years later someone made a movie about her. It was called Small Sacrifices. I think it might have been a book first, but I didn’t read the book. The movie got an Emmy and a Golden Globe.
We worship the stories of people who kill. We wish we were all strong enough to do something like that.
Matthew thought about telling Ella that the hospital seat was uncomfortable but decided not to. It was hard and cold and seemed to have been molded especially to only fit people with three butt cheeks, but he kept his mouth shut because not only did he doubt Ella would take the complaint with much interest, but he was having trouble convincing even himself that it mattered. In a world where ghost kids played in your room, where your father asked to help you while he looked at you with murder in his eyes and a knife in his hand, hard seats just didn’t seem that important anymore.
Still, even with his new and (he thought) extremely mature outlook on life and the relative importance of plastic chairs, he couldn’t help but start squirming a few seconds after Daddy left to go wherever he was going. Matthew knew that Mom was here, somewhere, but he somehow didn’t think Daddy was going to see her. No, he was doing something else.
But what?
He squirmed a bit more, trying to get comfortable and failing miserably. He was tired and his muscles were sore for some reason and now he had to add to his list of worries the possibility of being the littlest kid ever to get hemorrhoids, which Tommy Decker had told him that his daddy had caught once from sitting on a hard seat. Of course, Tommy Decker had also told him about gay-contagious rainbows, so his word was suspect. But still, if you could get hemorrhoids, this was the kind of seat you would probably get them on.
Ella just sat beside him as he wiggled around. She didn’t say a word. That worried him almost as much as anything else that had happened. Normally she would have jumped all over him the second he started moving, calling him an ADHD-baby or a wiggle-weenie or any of a number of insulting pet names she had come up with over the years. But not now. She just stared straight ahead and seemed almost like she wasn’t even there with him.
Matthew looked at Ella, really looked at her. She was pretty, he knew, and getting prettier fast. He thought she’d be having boys sniffing around soon. Not yet, but soon. He couldn’t decide if that was a cool thing or an annoying one.
It wouldn’t matter, he realized, if they didn’t live long enough for such things to actually happen.
He looked at the desk that extended into the lobby area. The woman who sat there was a little bit chubby and had bright red hair that hung in a long braid down her back. She was the kind of person he would have expected to look jolly and nice. But she didn’t look that way at all. She looked hard. Like she’d been baked in a furnace until she was tough and a little bit brittle.
Matthew realized that Ella was looking at him. Matthew tried to smile but he could feel the grin fall apart on his face. He wasn’t a person who could hide what he was feeling very well, and right now smiling was about the last thing he could do.
Ella tried to smile, too, and he was strangely relieved when she failed at the expression as well. Like as long as Ella felt like he did, he couldn’t be going crazy. He wasn’t in the middle of a really gnarly nightmare. This was real. It was all real.
Ella looked away, her eyes swimming back out of focus as she stared at whatever it was that hung invisibly in the air before them. Matthew looked at his hands. His arm tingled about six inches above his wrist and he knew it was the spot the ghost boy in the basement had been trying to grab. Like his arm knew how close it had come to the touch of the dead and remembered it with chills.
He swallowed reflexively. It was almost a gulp, a cartoon convulsion as he swallowed his fear. He looked away from his arm as though fearful that staring at it might draw forth that strange, bloodless child once more.
Matthew looked over at the desk where the red-head was sitting.
It was empty.
His heart fluttered for a moment before he was able to remind himself that even grown-ups had to pee sometimes. She was probably just on a bathroom break or something.
But how did she get there? There’s only one way out, other than the front doors. And she didn’t go through the door behind the desk, I’m sure of it.
He was sure, but he still managed to convince himself that she must have slipped out when he was thinking about other things. Yeah, that was it. No big mystery, no big anything. She was just peeing in some hospital-staff-only restroom, and she’d be right back. That sounded right. Sensible.
And yet he knew that wasn’t going to happen. She was gone. He looked at Ella and was about to ask her if she’d seen the receptionist leave – even though he already knew the answer – when the lights flickered.
They went out.
“Matthew,” Ella’s voice was a harsh whisper, rough with panic. “Matthew, where are you?”
Matthew couldn’t see his own body. He knew it was there, but it was so relentlessly dark that his eyes insisted the universe had ceased to exist. Something touched him and he almost jumped off the bench before he realized that if he fled in this darkness he might not be able to find his way back – to the bench or to Ella.
The thing that was touching him now grabbed him tightly around the wrist. Matthew tried to wrench his arm free, but stopped when Ella screamed, “It’s me, Matthew! It’s just me!”
He stopped moving. He reached out with his free hand and covered Ella’s hand with his own. He wondered for a moment if this was a trick. Could the hand he was holding be that of the ghost boy?
He rejected the thought immediately. Ghosts were cold, everyone knew that. And the hand below his own was warm and slightly sticky from half-dried sweat. Ella’s, for sure.
The lights flicked on suddenly. Then off. On again. Then off then on then off on off-on off-on-off-on-off on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off and then it was a strobe, making everything jumpy and strange. He looked over and screamed because even though he knew he was holding Ella’s hand he couldn’t see it. His own arm disappeared as though it had been cut off a few inches past the elbow.
A fraction of an instant later Ella screamed as well, and he knew she was seeing the same thing he was. There was something in the way, something superimposing itself over their arms, making them impossible to see.
It was the boy. The ghost Matthew had seen in the basement and then under his bed, the ghost of Andrew “Andy” Hanson, murdered by his father years ago in the same house in which they now lived. The boy’s throat gaped, sliced wide by a long-gone knife. He twisted his head to look at Matthew and thick black ichor welled out of the wound. Matthew wanted to scream.
It was almost as though the specter sensed his intent. Because the instant Matthew drew in air to cry out, to scream for help from God and Jesus and even (if things were really bad) his daddy, Andy moved. The ghost brought a blood-drained finger to his dead, blue lips.
“Shhhh,” said the ghost. Then his finger left his lips as he reached toward the nearby reception desk. Matthew followed the course of the little boy’s – the ghost’s? – pointing finger, and saw something that made his heart feel suddenly like a cold piece of coal in his stomach. Something worse even than the appearance of a murdered boy sitting between him and Ella.
The desk was gone. The reception desk that the redheaded nurse had been sitting at had disappeared in a cloud of darkness so deep that it made the black Matthew had just been sitting in a moment before seem like a summer day in the tropics. The darkness was like God had ripped a hole in the universe, a drain for everything to slowly leak out of and be swallowed in emptiness.
Then the darkness moved. Matthew knew it was impossible – what kind of motion could anyone make out in a place so dark? – but he could not deny what he had seen. It was a feeling as much as a visual cue, a sense of something evil and ancient and serpentine that made the darkness its home. He knew immediately that the thing inside it was something immeasurably old and evil on a level he had never previously suspected to exist.
He looked back at the bloodless child between him and Ella. The spirit of a boy murdered by his own father. Andy’s finger was still resting on his lips. “Shhh,” he repeated. “You don’t want it to come for you.” Then the dead child drew back, his lips peeling away from his teeth as he grimaced in terror. “Too late,” he whispered.
“Too late for what?” Ella said, and though she was whispering too, her voice sounded far too loud in the otherworld silence of this place.
A sound came from the black pit nearby. A low keening that was wordless but at the same time seemed to speak of hunger and need. Shadows oozed out of the darkness, seeming almost to infect the air around them.
“It’s too late,” said Andy again. “Too late… it’s coming for you now.”
The lights were still flashing. On and off, too fast to count the interspersed periods of dark and light. They went out again, and when the lights turned one once more Andy was gone. Fled to wherever he had come from. All Matthew could see was Ella, staring at him and looking as terrified as he felt.
He looked back at the darkness. Bits of it broke off and rolled across the floor, sprouting legs and running around in all directions as they ceased being formless dark and became roaches – large as Daddy’s thumbs and somehow more menacing than insects should be.
The questing tentacles of darkness reached out, mingling with the rest of the darkness as they reached for Matthew and Ella. He wanted to run, wanted to get up and flee this place, but he found himself frozen. Besides, he realized abstractly, there was nowhere to go. He wasn’t even sure they were alive anymore. Perhaps they had died. Maybe this was Hell, or someplace worse. A place populated only by darkness and monsters and the spirits of murdered children.
The beast at the center of the darkness seemed closer. Matthew couldn’t see it but he could feel it, feel it pushing toward him and Ella, toward the world that it wanted to infect but never quite could. A questing tendril reached out, a black pseudopod that marred the darkness like a dark flaw in obsidian. It reached out and for a terrible moment Matthew thought it was reaching for him. Then it moved and it wasn’t reaching for him at all. It was reaching for something much worse, something that made Matthew’s heart jump into his throat and begin beating wildly like a mad dog in a cage.
The thing was reaching for Ella.
Ella’s face was white as snow, her breath coming in quick gasps. Matthew wanted to scream at her, to yell at her to run, but his voice was locked away somewhere deep inside him. Ella didn’t move, just stared straight ahead at the thing that reached for her. Her breath came faster and faster, so fast she didn’t sound human any more. She sounded like a rabbit or some other small animal in the last instant before it was devoured by a hunter. Matthew tried to reach for her, or even to throw himself between her and the… thing… that had come for her. He couldn’t let it take her, he couldn’t.
But he discovered that what he really couldn’t do was move. It was as though he had been superglued to the plastic chair. He had no bones, no muscles. He was just a skin-bag full of nothing but fear. He couldn’t move, not even to save Ella.
All he could do was watch. Watch as the tendril-thing pushed its way into the darkness, reaching out inch by inch, coming ever closer to Ella.
At the end, Matthew closed his eyes. He couldn’t move, but he would prefer to die a thousand times rather than see Ella taken from him. He shut his eyes, and the black nothingness behind his eyelids insinuated itself between him and the thing he would not – could not – watch.
“Ella. Ella!”
Matthew heard the voice calling for her. Then it shifted tones. “Matthew!” He kept his eyes closed, still refusing to watch his sister taken from him. The voice spoke again. “Matthew!”
The second time the voice spoke, Matthew recognized it. He opened his eyes – slowly – and saw his daddy.
Daddy looked away the instant Matthew opened his eyes. He was shaking Ella, who was still breathing that wheezing, gasping, panting way that scared him so badly. She wasn’t looking at anything, just staring straight ahead at nothing, and Matthew was worried that she had been taken after all. Not physically perhaps, but her mind stolen by that thing in the black. And if Ella’s mind was gone – if she wasn’t there to talk to him, to needle him and make fun of him and love him – then the rest of her was just an empty shell. Matthew almost started crying. Then Ella blinked and said “Wha…?” and Matthew did start crying. He cried because of the fear that ran out of him now that the darkness was gone, and because of the shame that came with the knowledge that he hadn’t moved to save his sister, his best friend.
“Get up,” Daddy said. He put his hands under Ella’s arms and lifted her out of the chair. Ella looked like she was going to fall over at first, then her legs seemed to lock under her and she was steady. Daddy snaked a hand out and grabbed Matthew’s shirt, pulling him out of the chair as well. “Come on,” Daddy said.
Matthew looked over at the lobby desk. He expected it to be gone, sucked up by the black hole that had taken its place. But it was back, sitting only a few feet away as if it had never gone at all, and the brittle-faced nurse was on the phone, shouting at someone about an emergency. The door that led into the main part of the hospital was wide open. Somehow that scared Matthew almost as much as anything else he had seen.
“We have to go,” Daddy said, and propelled them out the door. A moment later they were in the backseat of the car. Matthew held Ella’s hand as soon as they were in the car, even before Daddy started the engine. Ella’s hand was limp in his. He was still crying, and the tears came harder when he felt how loose she was, how absent.
Then her hand pulled free from his. She lifted her hand and touched his face, wiping away the tears. He cried harder.
“It’s okay,” Ella whispered. That made him cry even more, because it wasn’t okay. Evil had come for them again, not in the shape of a mother who wanted to kill them, but in a worse shape. A thing of darkness, ancient and angry. A thing that he knew wanted nothing less than to destroy them. And he hadn’t been able to save Ella. Hadn’t even been able to move.
