Apparition, page 6
And she couldn’t talk about it, even if she wanted to. How did you talk about what had happened? How could you chat up your dad about the fact that your mom tried to cut your head off? She just couldn’t picture that conversation. Her mind rebelled from it, like it wasn’t merely difficult, but somehow blasphemous. As though she had gone to church one Sunday and found the pastor peeing on the cross. You couldn’t talk about something like that. Someone could come take the pastor away, someone else would probably clean up the mess – which was stupid, but people always held on to things too long, even after they’d been ruined. The next Sunday everyone would know what had happened.
But no one would talk about it.
You just didn’t talk about some things.
She waited a while. Thought about Matthew’s comment about picking his room. She got out of the car then. She knew why she was here, knew why Dad had chosen this location, and nothing was going to make her happy about the situation.
But miserable or not, she didn’t intend to let Matthew get the best bedroom.
***
Chapter 5:
Mirror
***
A woman covered her baby boy’s mouth and body in duct tape and then threw him in the trash.
It happened toward the end of the millennium. People talked about the horrible murder for a little while, but then quickly turned to the (to them) much more serious problem of the Y2K bug.
To the world, the idea of computers failing to start is a far greater nightmare than the pervasive fact of filicide as a foundational underpinning of human reality.
Shane headed into the kitchen, trying not to groan under the weight of the single box he was holding.
The movers – three of them, though all looked so similar he had trouble telling them apart – were moving around the house, placing the larger items where he told them to and freeing paintings and portraits from their straitjackets of bubble tape. All three of the men looked about his age, but none of them looked as tired as he suspected he did.
Why? he thought. I’m not old, I’m not out of shape. So why am I so damn tired?
He knew the answer to that, of course. But knowing something doesn’t always make us stop asking about it.
Shane glanced again at the box he held. “TOOLS – BASEM.” was written on it. But he had no idea what tools he had in there, or why he had decided they belonged in the basement, rather than the garage or even the small shed that sat behind the house. He stood still in the kitchen for a moment, trying to remember what he was holding, but drew a blank. Not too surprising. The last year had been a blur, start to finish. Going from their old home to the rental to here seemed almost like a dream. And not even his dream. Rather, it seemed like a dream he was hearing about from someone else, a story of a dream that he would never understand, even though the dream was about him.
He shook himself free of his thoughts. Work to be done.
He walked through the kitchen. The pantry was at the far end of the kitchen, a pleasant space with enough room to keep as many half-consumed boxes of cereal and slightly stale potato and corn chips on hand as any family could possibly wish for. Next to the pantry was another door. This one was closed. It led down to the basement.
Shane had seen the basement before, on his visit with Cole the realtor/grizzly bear. But he hadn’t been in it long, just a few moments to verify that it didn’t look rotten or unsafe. Still, that few moments had been enough.
He didn’t like the basement.
He wasn’t sure what it was about the space that bothered him. During the tour of the house, he convinced himself it was what Cole had told him about the place’s history. But that was malarkey. What had happened here years ago had nothing to do with anything now. Past was past.
But even as he thought it, an image of red-stained walls, a picture of his wife’s lifeblood pumping out of her rose up in his mind and he knew that he was telling himself a lie. The past is never past. It reaches forward to color our future, to stain our present. It’s always here as much as it is there.
So maybe it was what Cole had told him about the house that was giving him the willies now. Or maybe it was just some perverse part of his mind that was trying to convince him he didn’t deserve any of this. Didn’t deserve the nice house, didn’t deserve the wonderful kids.
Just like, apparently, God had determined that he didn’t deserve to have his wife any longer.
Shane’s jaw clenched as that thought came to him. He forced his mind away from its dead-end avenue of hopelessness. He was here. His children were here.
As for Kari… he could think about that to his heart’s content. But not now. Later. After the move.
He hefted the box a little higher in his hands, then balanced it in the crook of his left arm long enough for his right hand to dart out and push the basement door open.
It was dark down there.
He again balanced the box, this time using his left hand to stab quickly at the light switch that stood just inside the open basement door.
The basement light turned on. And though Shane never would have admitted it to anyone, he was extremely grateful when the basement light illuminated. He would have reached farther into the blank darkness of the basement if he had to, he knew. Would have reached into an inky void and felt blindly for the switch. But he still felt a strange sense of relief when he only had to feel in the quasi-darkness that marked the shared frontier of kitchen and basement.
He supposed it was foolish for an adult to harbor a sense of unease about reaching into a dark basement, but he’d felt that way his entire life. As a child he had been absolutely sure that there was a monster in his parents’ basement, one that was just waiting for the right little boy to reach in, searching with a blindly crawling hand for a light switch that would never be found.
The monster never did take him. But that didn’t mean it had left him unscathed. It didn’t kill him, but came to visit him instead, came into his house in the dead of night to steal away the life he had had, and leave it dead on a blood-spattered bathroom floor.
He stepped into the basement stairwell. The box was big enough that it obscured most of what lay below from view, so he stepped slowly and carefully. The stairs were solid and must have been well-built, for not the slightest squeaking accompanied him on his descent.
Halfway down, the light snapped off.
Whether it was a fuse blowing or the light bulb just choosing an inopportune time to stop working Shane couldn’t say. Either way he was suddenly standing in the dark, with no way to turn on the light.
The box was rapidly growing heavier in his arms, and he knew that if he didn’t put it down fairly soon, fatigue would drive the thing from his grasp. He thought about going back to the kitchen, but found the stairwell too narrow to let him turn around while maintaining his hold on the box.
Okay, he thought. Down we go.
The door to the kitchen was still open above him, and enough light filtered through there to allow him to operate in mere darkness, as opposed to the impenetrable black that probably settled in the basement whenever the door was closed. He couldn’t make out much detail, but it was enough illumination to get him to the bottom of the stairs without breaking his neck.
At the bottom of the stairs he turned right. He could make out the dim outline of some shelving along the wall on that side. Nothing fancy, just plywood planks nailed to vertical two-by-two boards, but he remembered it as feeling sturdy when he had been down here before.
He levered the box up onto one of the shelves. Something ground against the wood as he did it. Sounded like metal. Maybe a screwdriver or some other errant tool that had been left behind by the previous owner. Bits of detritus not deemed worth the time to either discard or take along.
Shane felt a sudden pang at that thought. He understood what that must feel like. Not so much destroyed as disregarded. Left behind. Just a husk that served to remind people of what had once been, rather than what now was.
Something moved in the darkness. Shane froze automatically. He didn’t know what he had glimpsed: it was moving so furtively that he couldn’t see it anymore, and had no idea what it had been. Then a sound came from under the lowest shelf Shane was standing beside. He backed slowly away from the shelves, then heard something new: a loud bzZZzzzzZZZzzz.
The noise got close and closer, and something struck Shane’s face. He instantly reached up to bat it away, his body not needing to wait for instructions before it acted.
Whatever the thing was, it was too fast for Shane. He slapped air.
The buzzing suddenly increased in volume. And, Shane thought, it sounded angry.
Whatever it was hit his cheek again. This time it didn’t flee instantly, but instead scuttled across Shane’s face, toward his mouth and nose. He screamed wordlessly, a garbled noise that nevertheless communicated the feelings of fear and disgust he was experiencing in this moment.
As before, his body was reacting to the threat even before Shane had had a chance to process the information. His hand rose of its own accord. It brushed against his cheek. Then, a surprise: rather than simply batting away the attacker, his hand curled around it.
He could feel it. Could feel it running and skittering around in the closely confined cage of Shane’s hand. The feel was almost enough to force his hand open, though he knew eventually he was going to have to let the thing go – either to throw it out of the house or to squash it right here; he could hardly consign himself to permanently holding onto a very large bug.
He looked around the nearby shelves, trying to spot something in the near-darkness – something with which to kill the thing.
Nothing. Nothing that looked useful, anyway. Some things might have done the job, but not well – not without leaving a large mess in his hand.
Finally, Shane sighed and decided to let the thing go. What was it going to do? Besides, where there was one large ugly bug, there would probably be others, so he might as well just get used to its presence until he could determine whether or not to hire an exterminator – not that he even had the money for such a thing.
Shane suddenly became aware that the insect in his hand was no longer moving. Had he suffocated it?
He cracked open his loose fist. Not far. Just a bit.
And saw nothing.
No movement, no dark reflections on a chitinous carapace held fast between his fingers and his palm.
Shane relaxed his grip a shade more, then flung open his hand, laying it out flat in front of him, and turning it over to make sure the bug hadn’t climbed up somewhere to hide.
Damn roach, he thought.
The thought startled him. He hadn’t ever experienced flying roaches before, and the idea of such a nasty creature taking to the air for regular bombing runs on people’s faces was not one he wanted to think about. But more than that, Shane realized at the point when he heard himself curse the insect, he had not yet seen it.
So how did he know it was a roach at all?
But he did know. Some kind of giant flying roach, a hugely sized and horrifically aggressive monster from the carboniferous era some three-hundred and fifty million years ago.
The thought of a roach in this house worried him. He had a memory of opening Ella’s door in the old house they had lived in before everything fell apart –
(no don’t do that don’t think of the bathroom don’t think of that nigh there’s nothing to be earned by doing that)
– and a roach – a huge roach, maybe just as big as this one had seemed – had scuttled across his feet. He shivered as he watched the memory in his mind. But even as grotesque as the image was, he was more than a little glad to think of it. Because as long as he was thinking thoughts of scary insects, he could maintain the illusion that he wasn’t really thinking about Kari. About what had happened to her.
About her absence, and the terrible gap it had left in his life.
“Move, dammit,” Shane finally said. He meant to sound like a drill sergeant, meant to push himself out of his funk and get back to work. He turned around, intending to go back up the stairs and grab another box, or maybe see what Matthew was up to. But before he completed the turn he saw something that made him freeze in place.
Something was staring at him. Eyes glittering dully in the dim of the basement. Shane thought for a moment that it must be a stray cat or some other animal that had stolen into the basement and made itself at home. But the idea fled as fast as it had come. He didn’t remember there being anything in that corner that a cat – or any other animal – could stand on, but the eyes that stared at him were still high up. High enough that they could only belong to a man.
He didn’t know whether to move or to stay still, so instead of doing either he spoke. “Who’s there?” he said.
There was no answer.
The eyes continued staring at him.
Then, without warning or apparent reason, the basement light came back on with an audible snap and Shane could clearly see the owner of the staring eyes.
He started to laugh.
It was a free-standing mirror. He had been looking at his own reflection in the paranoia-inducing darkness of the basement. He shook his head and muttered, “Get a grip, Wills.”
He turned back to the stairs, then spun around suddenly. He wasn’t sure why, but he had to look at that mirror again. Had it been there when he came through the basement with Cole? He didn’t remember if it had been or not. Either way, something about the mirror suddenly caused the small hairs at the base of his neck to rise to attention. A breeze seemed to tickle his temples, though where such a breeze could come from he had no idea.
He stared at the mirror for what felt like a full minute. A long time to be standing silent and alone in a basement. Finally, he turned away again.
And was able to convince himself that it was just a case of nerves when he saw out of the corner of his eye that when his reflection turned away as well, it didn’t seem to turn quite as quickly as he did.
As though it had lingered a bit too long. Watched a bit harder than he himself had done.
Shane fairly ran up the steps. Running not from a reflection that refused to match reality – that was crazy – but just because there was still a lot of unpacking to do.
Even so, he decided he’d let the movers put away anything else that needed to go down here.
***
Chapter 6:
Dog
***
I wonder if Cain didn’t really kill Abel. Maybe Eve did it. Or Adam. Probably Adam, since he was in charge of the family history and so his version would be the one most likely passed on.
But whether Adam killed Abel, or whether it was later that the first parent killed a child, it’s clear to me now that there is something not just wrong about such murder, but inherently anathematic to human existence.
So how does it work? We cringe away from child-murder stories on the news. But at the same time, they’re everywhere. WHAT DRIVES THEM? WHAT DRIVES ME?
He knew it was irrational, but when he came out of the basement, Shane not only closed the door behind him, he locked it and then hustled through the kitchen and dining room and into the living room. He didn’t want to be any closer to the basement than necessary. So he walked through the archway between kitchen and dining area, then circled the table that the movers had already set up, and walked into the living room.
As he did so, he cast a quick glance behind him, almost surprised when he saw no monster bashing through the basement door and coming for him. He was sweating, thick rivers of salt-water coursing down his forehead, prickling at the corners of his eyes. His shirt was soaked.
Still looking back in the direction of the basement door – though he could no longer see it – he mopped at his sopping forehead with the back of an equally soaked forearm, then turned around.
A dog was standing before him.
It was a black dog; for the most part so darkly colored that it took a moment for Shane to make out discern any identifying details on the pooch. Eventually he was able to make out that it was a black Labrador, probably middle-aged since there was a light frosting of gray around its nose, but it looked healthy and alert.
It wasn’t moving.
The Lab’s silence and utter lack of motion made Shane a bit nervous. Here he was, tromping into the living room, walking quickly and sweating of work and fear… and the dog just stood there. It didn’t whine with concern, or bark with fear or rage. No chuffing or puffing on this hot day.
Shane looked around quickly, as though he might see some obvious way the culprit had gained entrance, but saw nothing. The movers and kids had been moving in and out of the house with boxes and personal belongings, but had been pretty good about closing doors behind them. He certainly didn’t see any open doors from where he stood.
