Apparition, page 30
Andy didn’t blink. Another thing he never did. Just stared at her. But in his unwavering stare she thought she saw a hint of something pleading. Begging her to save the children who sat on either side of him.
The sky grew suddenly dark, as though a thick thunderhead had passed in front of the sun. Martha flicked her eyes up. The sky was empty. Not a cloud present.
Her eyes returned to Andy, and she realized why the sky had darkened – at least to her.
Standing in the distance behind dead boy on the swing, she thought she could make out dark shadows. They were formless blobs at first, but as they drew closer she could make them out. Small shadows. Faces atop bodies that would never grow taller. Limbs broken and burnt, bodies cut and poisoned and drowned and beaten.
The Lamia’s victims.
Martha put a hand to her mouth. She didn’t want to scream. She feared that such a scream would continue forever, would never stop until it dragged her into a place where the screams lasted through eternity. To the home of the damned.
She tore her eyes away from the scene, from the dozens/hundreds/thousands of dead children who walked and hobbled and crawled toward the park. Or rather, she tried to. Because everywhere she looked, she saw them. Saw the ones she hadn’t been able to save, the ones the Lamia had taken, the souls that would now walk the earth forever in bondage to the demon.
Martha closed her eyes. “All right,” she finally mumbled, and wasn’t sure whether she was talking to Shane or to God or to the ghosts. “I’ll help you.”
She opened her eyes. Shane was nodding.
The dead children were gone. Even Andy had disappeared from his perch atop the swing. Only Matthew and Ella remained. But Martha knew that they would not remain alone for long. If they were going to act, it had to be now.
“We’ll need help,” she finally said.
Shane nodded. Then went to his children. Martha felt like falling to the hard ground below. She probably would have done so, too, if she weren’t so afraid of seeing the dead children again.
The murdered children were near. Which meant the Lamia was, too. Near, and swiftly coming closer.
***
Chapter 28:
Time
***
Women who kill their children are likely to be unmarried. I wonder why? It can’t be merely because the Lamia (and that’s it’s name – her name – I know that now) more readily takes possession of women – if that were the case it wouldn’t matter if the women it marked were married or not.
So the presence of a father has something to do with keeping the children safe?
I must think on this.
Relief coursed through Shane when Martha agreed to help them. Not that he knew what she could do, but he knew that he was in over his head, and he needed help. Perhaps putting his faith in her was just grasping at straws, but even straws were better than nothing, better than the frayed despair that was starting to settle in.
Then the old woman hurried back and told him to meet her at the house at sunset. Shane asked her why, and what she was going to do, but she refused to answer. She just repeated her instructions and hurried away. Shane didn’t know if she was going back to her home, though he thought not. Something had changed in her in the final moments of their talk. He thought the terrified recluse who secreted herself in a panic room protected by crosses and religious art was gone – at least for the moment. Martha was moving like she had a purpose.
But what it was, he could only guess at.
He stared at her as long as she remained in sight… and kept staring even after she was gone. He realized a moment later that he was still holding her book, her journal of sorts. He thought about opening it and looking to see if the book might hold any clues as to what she was going to attempt, but the idea of reading through graphic accounts of child murders was repellant to him.
And yet, it wasn’t.
There was a part of him, though he didn’t want to admit it, that wanted to look. Not to know the enemy, not in order to plan some defense, but just to bathe in the words and images. To wash himself in death and be renewed.
He hungered for the information in the book. He hungered to read of blood and fire and water that all led to death. He glanced at Ella and Matthew. Matthew smiled.
The smile pulled him back from the place he had been, from the edge of the bottomless chasm into which he had nearly tripped. Shane smiled back.
He walked to the children. Ella avoided his gaze. “What did the old bag say?” she asked.
Shane almost reprimanded her for speaking like that. But at the same moment he wondered if he was angry at her language or just seeking an excuse to start a fight. And from there….
He shoved thoughts of what would happen then into the back of his mind. He forced a smile on his face. “She said she was going to help us.”
Matthew hooted and pumped a fist in the air with an expression that showed he thought they’d already won. Ella remained taciturn. “How?” was all she said.
Shane’s smile sagged. “I don’t know,” he said. “We’re supposed to meet her there tonight. At suns –”
“Meet her where?” Ella said.
“At home.”
Ella almost erupted off the swing and was already ten feet away before Shane even realized she was moving. “Hey!” he called. She kept walking, giving no indication that she had heard him. “Ella, what’re you doing?”
“What am I doing?” She spun to face him, and Shane was taken aback by the intensity of her fury. “What are you doing? You want to take us back to that place? Are you insane?”
Shane felt the fury rise up in him again, felt the sudden urge to win this argument. Permanently.
But the anger wasn’t as hot or all-encompassing this time. Maybe it was because they were away from the house, maybe it was Martha’s influence. Either way, he was able to put a lid on the anger before it boiled over.
“Ella,” he said, and was surprised at how calm he managed to sound. “We have to do this. We have to go back.”
“Why? Why do we have to go back?”
Shane paused. And it wasn’t just because he didn’t know himself what Martha planned to do. It was more than that. How was he supposed to talk about mortgages and bankruptcy and losing his last chance at a career that had been dying off with a daughter barely in her teens? Ella was more mature than most kids her age, but she wasn’t ready to have that kind of a talk, he was sure. More than that, Shane wasn’t sure he was ready to have that kind of a talk. To face the reality that had been chasing them ever since the night Kari tried to kill Ella.
The reality of a family that was badly broken. And might never find the means to be healed.
Matthew came to Shane’s aid. Shane was trying to figure out what to say when his son came forward and curled his small hand around Shane’s. “Don’t you get it, Ella?” he said. “We have to face the monster where it’s strongest. Because that’s where it can be hurt. When we’re running, it can’t hurt us as bad, maybe, but we also won’t be able to stop it. It’ll just wear us down. It’ll just follow us until we make a mistake, and that will be the last mistake we ever make.”
Matthew’s mouth curled in that half-smile that Shane loved so much. And he knew his son was right. This was their chance. Maybe their only chance.
Ella stared at Matthew for a few un-measurable moments. Then her face, too, wore a grin – though not as bright a one as Matthew’s. Fear hid behind her smile.
“Know-it-all,” she said.
“Yeah, well at least I don’t write ‘Gabriel Jordan loves me’ all over my three ring binder.”
That surprised Shane. He knew Gabriel Jordan – he was one of the kids in Ella’s school a year ago, before… before everything. But he had no idea she was interested in the boy. And yet there was no arguing against the truth of Matthew’s accusation, for Ella flushed a deep red and instantly waded into an argument with her brother that mostly centered on who was least fit to go to a school that didn’t cater exclusively to “special needs” kids.
Shane would have stopped them in any other circumstance, but this time he let them yell at each other. It was a small taste of normalcy returned to their suddenly skewed lives. He longed for the days when his biggest concern had been keeping the kids from screaming at each other about every little thing. Now his biggest concern was keeping them alive.
Not just that. It’s keeping from murdering them myself.
“Come on, guys,” he said, gently stepping between them. “Let’s not do this now.” Ella and Matthew instantly fell silent – a good omen and something of a miracle in itself. They looked at him expectantly. “What?” he said.
“Well,” said Matthew, “what are we supposed to do?”
Shane looked around, as though by doing so he might find someone waiting nearby with a piece of paper that held answers to all his children’s questions. But there was no one. Just him. Just the dad.
He suddenly missed Kari. Missed her as he hadn’t done in months. He felt like he had in the first days, alternating between being overwhelmed by the reality of his new life and feeling completely numb. The only thing that had always been steady for him was Kari. Before she went insane she was his rock, something solid he could tie himself to in any storm. And after that night, she was still there in his mind and heart. But now she was a memory, and then the memory of a memory – all her imperfections gone, all her idiosyncrasies revamped until she resembled an angel more than the living, breathing person he remembered and loved.
That was almost the worst: not that Kari had gone mad, not that the family had been shattered with the drop of a knife, but the reality that he no longer mourned for his wife. The grief for something real had been replaced by a pining for something that had never really existed in the first place, by a memory that was so good and perfect it never could have existed. He had forgotten Kari. He visited her all the time, yes, but he had forgotten what she was really like. He had forgotten what made her her, and could only remember a pleasant version of his wife, someone so perfect that it could only be a lie, and so could not be truly loved.
“You okay?” said Matthew. Shane looked at his son and realized that both kids were staring at him with concern.
“Yeah,” he said. His voice came out wet and thick, as though he’d been crying. He coughed and cleared his throat and repeated the word, a bit stronger this time: “Yeah.”
He held out a hand and drew his daughter close. He pulled Matthew in as well, and the three of them held each other in the middle of the park.
“Tonight,” he said. “We go when the sun sets, and we’ll all be okay.”
They continued to hold each other until Matthew – always the one least able to keep still – drew back and said, “I’m hungry.”
“Hungry?” Ella demanded incredulously. “How can you be hungry right now?”
Matthew stuck his tongue out at her. “Sorry, not everyone is trying to fit into a bikini for Gabriel Jordan.”
That was enough to set the kids off again.
Shane let them argue, let them verbally claw at one another’s throats. Because as long as they were arguing about who was the biggest blabber-mouth, and who belonged in a home for kids who never managed to learn how to dress themselves, and who should be hung on a flagpole for crows to pick at – as long as they were doing those things, they were still a family.
As long as they were doing that, they were still alive.
Eventually, Matthew ran out of things to say. “Whatevs,” he muttered, which was enough of a concession of defeat for Ella to yell out a victorious “Ha!”
That might have started the whole cycle again, but Shane interrupted the next argument before it could begin. “I’m hungry, too,” he said. “How about we go out and get some….” He checked his watch. “Some lunch? We could go to a restaurant.”
Both kids nodded, and Matthew even gave out a small whoop of delight. Ella smiled, but Shane thought he could see reserve in her eyes. Like she knew that lunch was only something to do before the real problem was faced. Before life was once again threatened.
Shane touched Ella’s shoulder lightly. She didn’t pull away. And that almost made everything else worth it. They might be passing through the last day of their lives. They might be going to a doom beyond imagining.
But for now, at least, his daughter was his daughter again. He smiled at her. She smiled back. And this time there was no sense of holding back. The smile was real. The family was, for a moment at least, a family again.
Then Shane thought of going back to the house. Of facing what had hunted them down not once, but twice.
His smile faded, and in its place was a simple conviction, five words that rang through his mind over and over:
We’re all going to die.
***
Chapter 29:
Ritual
***
Most homicides are committed with weapons that allow for distance; that allow the killer to look away at the moment of death, or to be in another place when it happens.
A gun. Poison.
I used to think that there was something in parents who murder children that makes them have to watch. But it’s more than that.
It’s not just the death, it’s the dying itself that the Lamia feeds on.
Shane pulled the car up nearly to the edge of the porch steps before stopping. Another vehicle was already there, parked in front of the house. It was a minivan, which Shane thought a bit strange. He didn’t know why it should – there wasn’t an official vehicle for dealing with child-killing demons – but it did. He would have expected a truck, perhaps, or a full cargo van or even a hearse. Something more fitting to the events to come than a soccer-mom’s transport of choice.
Three people stood on the stairs in front of the house. Shane recognized Martha, though it seemed as though she had aged terribly in the few hours since they had spoken. She was more bent than he remembered. Her hair, previously gray and disheveled, was now carefully braided. It also seemed lighter than it had before – as though she had gone from gray to silver to almost white in less than a day.
Is that even possible? he wondered. But of course it had to be possible – the proof was standing at his front door and looking at him with hollow eyes.
The other people standing with Martha were strangers. One was a tall, ascetic-looking man with a thin nose and lips pressed so tightly together that his mouth seemed like a bloodless slit in the flesh of his face. The other person was short and stout and wore a dark pea coat that seemed much too heavy for the warm summer night.
Shane stared at them. He felt as though he should wait for them to say something, or beckon to him. They did nothing. Waited.
“Dad, should we get out?” said Matthew from the seat behind him. The sound startled Shane. Lunch had been all right, almost normal-seeming, but the atmosphere within the family had become tense in the last hour, like a helical spring being slowly pressed under great weight.
“Yeah, sure,” he mumbled. No one moved. He realized that the kids were both looking at him in the rearview mirror. Waiting for him to go first.
Why should I have to go first? It’s not me the goddam Lamia wants to kill. Screw them. Screw the little bastards.
The thought jumped into Shane’s mind with such force and suddenness that he almost growled in fury. He barely caught the sound before it could escape his throat. Where had that come from? he wondered. He answered his own thought almost instantly: the Lamia. The thing that had stalked his children for years, starting with Kari and then infecting him when she failed to do what it wanted.
Martha had said that the thing was drawn to certain places. Now that he knew that, he could actually feel it. It was as though a dark cloud had taken up residence directly above the house: everything near it seemed somehow dimmer; out of focus. Even his own thoughts seemed far away and somehow less real.
He exhaled slowly. Forced himself to think of holding Ella for the first time after she was born. To think of Matthew learning to ride a bike. The kids watching a movie on the floor in front of the television, a sheet spread out below them so that they could be as messy as they wanted.
He thought of Kari. Not as she now was, but as she had been before the Lamia stole her from him.
That last did it. Anger roiled in his gut, but it wasn’t the dark, sooty rage he felt so often recently. It was a clean anger, a purifying fire that could be directed at the thing that had tried so hard to steal Shane’s family away.
He got out and strode to Martha and the other two men. Without preamble, Martha gestured to the tall man on her left. “This is Calvin Jankowitz.” The tall man nodded and extended his hand. Shane shook it.
