Apparition, page 5
“Wellwellwell,” said Cole again, and this time was close enough when he said it that he grabbed Shane’s hand in both of his own and pumped them quickly up and down with each spoken syllable.
Shane felt like his hand was being swallowed by a lion. He wondered if he would get it back at the end of the powerful handshake.
He did. And found that he was smiling. His cheeks tightened at the upturned ends of his lips and he realized how rarely he smiled these days. Only for the children, and even then his smiles were usually forced: smiling because he should smile, rather than because he wanted to do so.
But Cole’s own grin – a smile that highlighted three silver teeth that stood proudly front-and-center – was not merely warm and genuine, it was deeply contagious.
“Howdy,” said Shane.
Howdy? When did I jump into an Andy Griffith repeat?
But Cole’s grin just widened a bit further when Shane said that. Like he had just passed some kind of test.
“Well,” said Cole, and turned. “Let’s show ‘er to ya.” Or rather, he said, “Wellletsshowertya,” but Shane was interpreting what he already thought of as “Coletalk” into normal English in his mind, so he was not surprised when the giant walked into the house. He just followed.
Cole took Shane quickly through the house. Based on the price and the fact that the house had apparently been on the market for some time, Shane expected to see problems that were both obvious and numerous.
He saw neither. The kitchen was a bit old-fashioned seeming – no high-tech stainless steel appliances, and the counter was a clean though inexpensive-looking laminate – but everything functioned. The living room was large and open, with windows that provided sweeping views of the trees that surrounded the land. The downstairs den – what would be his office – was neither cavernous nor cramped, but pleasantly cozy.
It was then, when he realized he was thinking of it as his office – that he realized how close he was to making a decision.
Still, there was the price. Why was it so low?
He listened to Cole speak in that rapid pitter-patter of his, paying close attention to the details of the house and looking for flaws.
He couldn’t see any.
That worried him.
Shane followed Cole up the stairs that led to the second floor.
“… and upstairs, we have the bedrooms, and another bath.”
“It’s very nice,” said Shane, more because he felt a response was appropriate and expected that because he wanted to contribute to the conversation.
Still, Cole nodded his huge head up and down like a bell in a cathedral tower. “It is that, it is that,” he agreed, and threw another quick smile over his shoulder.
Cole’s enormous bulk took up almost the entire stairwell, effectively blocking everything beyond it from Shane’s sight. So Shane had no warning of what was going to happen next. No way to prepare himself.
Cole got to the top step and moved off the stairs. Shane followed him, and could at last see the second floor. The breath rushed from his lungs. Not explosively, not as though he had been crushed under something heavy. It was, instead, the gentle breath of air that is the last sigh of a dead man.
There was a sound, a deep thrumming in his mind, that only gradually congealed into coherency. “Yokay?” someone was saying. “YokayMr.Wills?” It took a moment for Shane to realize that the strange buzzing sound was simply Cole talking; another moment to parse the slammed-together syllables into individual words.
“You okay, Mr. Wills?”
Shane nodded. But he knew Cole didn’t believe it. And how could he? How could he know what Shane was seeing?
The layout to the second floor was the same as it had been in the old place. The other place. The place where his life had ended.
Not similar.
Not close-to.
The layout was exactly the same. As though some strangely dedicated practical joker had lifted the second floor from his old house and just sat it down atop this one.
(and he remembered the halls the wailing the silence and the screaming and the red blood so much blood too much BLOOD)
“Yokay?” said Cole again.
Shane forced himself back to the present moment. So the house had a similar – not the same, he insisted to himself – upstairs. So what? There were only so many ways that a person could stick three rooms and two bathrooms together in this amount of space.
He pushed his face into a smile that he meant to reassure Cole. But he could see that it didn’t. If anything the look of worry on the giant’s face just grew.
“I’m fine,” said Shane. He repeated it. “I’m fine.” The second time he managed to put enough force behind the words that Cole nodded a little, as though to say he didn’t exactly believe Shane, but was willing to go along with the potential buyer’s preferred fiction.
“You looked like a ghost danced on your grave,” said Cole.
“Something like that,” said Shane. He didn’t explain. Cole didn’t ask for explanation.
Shane pushed himself into the second floor hallway and walked from one end to the other, glancing into each of the bedrooms and bathrooms as he passed.
Same layout.
No. Similar. That happens. Don’t worry about it.
Cole watched him as he perused the rooms, arms crossed across his tank-sized chest. He didn’t speak, though Shane didn’t know whether it was because Shane’s reaction to the house had spooked him or because he simply was one of those rarest of creatures: a realtor who knew how to shut up when his input wasn’t necessary.
After completing his self-tour of the upstairs, Shane met Cole in the center of the hall. Part of him wanted – needed – to go downstairs to talk. He forced himself to ignore that urge. If he was going to live here, he couldn’t very well expect that every conversation would happen on the first floor or in the unfinished basement he had glanced into before touring the kitchen.
“So,” he said, and crossed his own arms. “What’s the catch?”
Cole looked surprised. “Catch?” he said. The big man’s arms remained crossed as well, and Shane felt more than a little like an ant about to get into a pissing contest with an elephant. He forced his hands to his sides.
Relax. Jesus Christ, just relax.
Shane gestured around. “It’s nice. It’s big, got a great view, it’s well-kept, and you’ve assured me that it gets satellite TV just fine and hardly ever is attacked by Indians or by roving bands of angry bears.” Cole’s eyebrows rose, but just a fraction of an inch, as though to say, “And…?”
Shane obliged the unspoken request. “So why is it so cheap?”
For a moment, Cole’s pleasant façade disappeared. It wasn’t long, just a brief flash of an expression that Shane couldn’t quite pin down or name. Then Cole’s face lapsed back into its wide smile and pleasant lines. “Well, no use hiding it. I have to tell you about it by law, anyway, so I was going to let you know before you left.”
“Let me know what?”
“Nothing bad,” said Cole hastily. Then, in a more subdued tone, “At least, nothing bad from a structural perspective; from a real perspective.”
Shane liked Cole. He sensed the big man was a genuinely good guy, the kind of person he’d love to sit down and have a cold drink with. But in that instant he hated the realtor. Because he knew that whatever the man was going to say, it would do nothing but make life worse than it already was.
And he also knew that no matter the secret Cole was about to divulge, it wouldn’t matter. Shane would take the house.
He had to. It was all he could do.
***
Chapter 4:
Blasphemy
***
Dena Schlosser. 3 kids. Loving mother. She cut off her baby girl’s arms with a knife and watched her bleed to death in the crib.
It made me sick to read that. I opened my Bible. It didn’t help.
Has anyone else realized that the entire Bible is just a long history of a god’s machinations to kill his favorite son?
Is that why we do it? Because we, too, want to be gods?
Dena was singing church songs when the police found her covered in her baby girl’s blood.
Ella had known it was bad when she saw her dad’s face. Knew it was bad because his smile was so wide. The width of a grown-up’s smile was inversely proportional to the amount of shit they were about to rain on you. Always.
“We’re moving!” he said brightly. He even threw his arms in the air, threw his arms right damn up in the damn air, like he was pitching confetti at her or showering them in Chuck E. Cheese tickets or something.
Ella didn’t say anything. Matthew did. He always said stuff. If you put him in a vacuum sealed room with a limited oxygen supply and told him his only hope at survival was to use as little air as possible and speak not at all, the first thing he would do would probably be to say, “Cool, how did you make this place?” and go on from there. Silence was not an option. Dad once said that Matthew had been vaccinated with a phonograph needle. And once he explained to Ella what a phonograph even was, and what the needle did, she thought that was pretty funny. And totally true. Matthew had two settings: asleep and talking.
Still, he was cool enough. For a kid.
“Well, what do you think?” Dad asked, and Ella just shrugged. She put her earbuds in. There was no music playing on her iPod, but Dad didn’t know that, so maybe he’d get the clue.
He looked like he was going to start a fight with her for a second. Then his shoulders slumped a little and he pinched the top of his nose between thumb and forefinger. He looked tired.
He always looked tired now. Like that one particular night of interrupted sleep had not merely wakened them all to the harsh realities of life, but also stolen Dad’s ability to ever feel well-rested again.
Then he straightened his shoulders. He blinked twice, and with the second blink came the smile he had been using since Mom… since Mom did what she did. The smile that he pasted on like a mask over his real face, but which never quite made its way to his eyes.
His eyes still looked tired.
And they continued to look tired all the rest of the day. They looked tired during the following weeks as they boxed up their things and moved out of the rental they’d been staying in for the last year.
They looked tired now, as he flicked his eyes up and caught hers staring at him in the rearview mirror.
She averted her gaze quickly. Her earbuds were in again – indeed, she rarely took them off anymore. She couldn’t remember the name of the guy who was singing, or the name of the song. It was a loud song. That was all that mattered.
Not that it was loud enough. Nothing was. No noise could cover up the sound she heard every minute of every day: the recurrent sound of arterial blood splashing against white tile, white porcelain, white walls.
Music all sounded the same. But if it was loud enough, it almost muffled the sound of the nightmare night.
Matthew snorted and shifted next to her. The kid had been asleep since their last gas stop. He must have crashed hard, too, because a half-finished Snickers bar still sat in his lap, melting into a puddle of nougat and peanuts and smearing chocolate that was slowly soaking into his cargo shorts. Not like Matthew to let a candy bar die such an ignominious death. Instantaneous inhalation was his usual way of ensuring that sweets met a rapid and fairly painless end.
The car jounced again, and this time Matthew tilted completely over, his head coming to rest on her shoulder.
“Ew.” She twitched her shoulder like a horse trying to convince a persistent fly to move on. “Get off.”
Matthew sat up immediately, blinking and looking around confusedly. “I’m in Wonderland,” he said.
Ella heard a quick chuff from the front seat: the closest Dad came to laughing anymore. She had to hold back a laugh of her own. Matthew usually awoke with a less than clear head, and often blurted out streams of nonsense until he got himself together. She had heard such gems of wisdom as “Clowns got no hair,” “I like pee-wees,” and (her current favorite), “Don’t shower the Jell-o.”
Matthew looked out the window on his side of the car. “We there yet?”
“Almost, bud,” Dad said.
She caught him looking at her in the rearview mirror again. He wanted her to talk, to say something, she could tell.
She dropped her gaze to the iPod and turned the volume control to max.
Blood was in the room.
She shook her head. Didn’t want to think about that. The music wasn’t helping drown it out, either. Sometimes that happened. Sometimes all she could see was red, all she could hear was the wet splat of spurting blood.
She yanked the cord of her earbuds and they fell free from her ears. Matthew was in the middle of saying something about “the cool trees and look at that is that a stream or a river or something can I swim in it but no maybe I shouldn’t ‘cause I don’t want to get drowned and I don’t know how to swim yet so could you teach me Daddy and then I won’t get drowned and –”
“Easy, easy!” said Dad. Ella smiled a little. Dad actually sounded like he was happy. Or at least sort of happy. “We’re just about here.”
“How close is just about? Like a minute?” said Matthew.
“Closer,” said Dad. He twisted the wheel to the left, and the car jounced around a sharp curve on the dirt road….
And there it was.
The house didn’t just rise up before them, it seemed to appear out of nothing, an act of creatio ex nihilo (which she remembered from social studies class because it sounded like a cool name for a rock band) in the forest. One moment there was nothing but trees anywhere, and the next moment… the house. There was a moving truck in front of it, but her eyes almost slid away from the truck. Like the house itself was drawing her attention.
The place was nice enough to look at, she supposed. White wood, light blue trim. It looked like a country house, but not the kind where hillbillies were likely to come in one night and eat you in your bed. More like the kind some old woman who was a mystery sleuth by night (and probably a library volunteer by day or something like that) would live in. Tea cozies undoubtedly came as basic furnishings for the house.
The image brought a trace of a smile to her face, but it fled as soon as she thought of why they were here in the first place. Of what had happened, and what was still happening.
Matthew was jabbering away again. She wasn’t concentrating on any of it, but it must have been a request to get out of the car and explore, because Dad said, “Sure. But don’t go into the forest.”
“What’s a forest?”
Ella rolled her eyes. The kid was six and didn’t know what a forest was? No one was that stupid.
Apparently Matthew’s mind was just short-circuiting under the pressure of the current excitement, because before anyone could answer, he hit his own forehead with the palm of his hand and said, “Du-uh! The trees.”
Then he was out of his car seat and then out of the car and then running toward the house. “I get first picks on rooms!” he screamed.
Dad watched Matthew for a second, then turned to Ella. He tried to smile, but it was that forced-smile thing again and she didn’t feel like trying to return it. She looked down at her hands, which were folded around the iPod and sat in her lap.
Her jeans were black. So was her shirt. And shoes. She’d even dyed her hair jet black a few weeks before the move.
“You wanna check the place out, Elvira?” he said.
Ella kept her gaze low, but couldn’t help rolling her eyes. Did he really think he was going to jolly her into a series of skips and cartwheels?
She shrugged. Teen-speak that even the slowest and dullest adult would correctly interpret as the universal symbol for “Whatever.”
Dad sighed, but apparently today was going to be one of his “I’m not giving up on you” days because he didn’t just get out of the car and leave her alone.
“You know,” he finally said, “I’m always here. To talk. If you want to.”
Ella repeated her “Whatever” shrug.
Dad got out of the car, and walked away. He muttered something under his breath, and Ella thought it was something like, “Why do you hate me?” though she couldn’t be sure.
She almost got out. Almost went after him. He didn’t understand. She didn’t hate him. She loved him. Loved Matthew, too.
But everything was still wrong. Contrary to what most music – even loud rock music – said, love wasn’t enough to fix things sometimes. Almost never.
