Apparition, page 8
“But Dad,” Ella said. Actually, she said it “Da-ad” like two syllables so that her voice went up high enough in the middle that it could kill small animals from ten feet away. “It’s to Jamie!”
“I don’t care if it’s to the Pope!” said Daddy. “No texting at the table.”
Ella made a big show of putting her phone in one pocket, her iPod in another. Then she looked at Daddy with her “Okay, are you happy now?” look, which could kill small animals at a range of thirty feet.
Daddy nodded seriously, then speared some lasagna and brought it to his lips.
“Wait!” shouted Matthew.
“What?” said Daddy, clearly startled.
“Jesus Christ!” shouted Ella, clearly even more startled.
“What about prayer?” said Matthew.
Ella immediately looked at her lap. She looked like she was texting again. Matthew looked across the table and saw a bunch of weird expressions roll over his daddy’s face. He couldn’t figure all of them out, but most of them were sad. Hopeless.
“Sure,” said Daddy finally. His throat sounded dry. “Sure.” He bowed his head. Matthew did, too. He snitched a look at Ella. She didn’t bow her head.
“Our Father,” began Daddy.
“Daddy,” said Matthew. “Ella’s not praying.”
Daddy got that weird look on his face again. Like he wanted to say a million things, but none of them would come out of his mouth. Finally he just shrugged and bowed his head again. Matthew did, too, and Daddy finished the prayer.
Ella didn’t bow her head. Didn’t say “amen,” either.
They ate quietly for a minute, then Daddy put on a smile that looked pretty fake to Matthew and said, “So, what do you think of the place?”
Matthew’s smile was not fake. “It’s awesome! I love my new room!”
Daddy’s smile grew a bit wider and actually started to look real. He looked at Ella. “El?” he said.
She picked at her lasagna and shrugged. “Are we gonna have cable?”
“No,” said Daddy. “No cable, no internet, and all our messages will be taken via carrier pigeon.”
The look of bored discontent disappeared from Ella’s face faster than Superman could change his clothes when Daddy said that.
“Are you serious?” she demanded.
Daddy laughed. “No, of course not.” He stuck some lasagna in his mouth, then winked at Matthew and said, “They don’t have carrier pigeons up here. It’s all about smoke signals.”
Matthew laughed. Ella made a sound like “Eaghwa!” or something, and that made Matthew laugh even harder.
Daddy was laughing too. Not much, but not much was better than he usually did anymore. “Of course we’ll have cable,” he said. “Day after tomorrow. And internet. And Xbox Live. Maybe even hot and cold running water!”
“Hooray!” said Matthew, throwing his hands in the air.
“Hooray!” echoed Daddy, and gave him a high-five, and for a moment, just a second, it was like they were a real family again.
Then Daddy’s serious face returned. Matthew looked over at what Daddy was watching and saw Ella, who looked like she was about to cry or something.
“What is it, Ella?” said Daddy. “El? What’s going on?”
“I just…. I don’t like it here.”
Daddy sighed. Matthew couldn’t blame him for sounding tired of this. They’d been having this argument forever, ever since Daddy announced they were leaving.
Well, no, Matthew thought. Actually, it’s been going on ever since Daddy told us the reason we were moving. Ella would have been okay moving – she would have loved it, I think. But not for the reason Daddy gave.
Silence for another moment, then Daddy said, “I know you didn’t want to leave your old school. But it’s summer anyway, and tomorrow’s church, so maybe you’ll make some new friends there.”
“Maybe,” said Ella. But she said it in the same voice that someone might use if asked what time they would prefer to be shot by firing squad.
Matthew had an image of Ella in front of a firing squad. Handkerchief (black, of course), over her eyes. And then someone giving her a cigarette. At which point all heck would really break loose, because Daddy would storm out and ground her for smoking and no she couldn’t get out of it even by firing squad. Matthew almost laughed.
Almost.
But he didn’t. Instead, he screamed.
He had been looking out the kitchen window, the one behind Daddy. And he had seen something. No features, but whatever it was, it moved fast. And it was big.
Daddy grabbed his hand instantly, and Matthew tore his eyes away from the window long enough to see how worried his daddy was. “What is it?” said Daddy.
For a moment, Matthew said nothing. Not because he couldn’t speak, but because he couldn’t figure out a way to say what he had seen.
“I saw something,” he finally settled for. He pointed at the window. “Out there.”
Daddy got up and looked through the window. At the same time, something touched Matthew and he almost peed his pants. He looked over and saw that it was just Ella. She was holding his hand, which she never did anymore. It felt good. His fingers closed around hers.
Daddy turned back around. He shook his head. “I didn’t see anything.”
“I did,” said Matthew quietly.
“I believe you, bud. Maybe it was the dog I saw.”
“Dog?” said Matthew.
“I saw – I thought I saw – a dog earlier today. Maybe that’s what you saw outside. Some stray running around our house hoping for a handout.”
“Maybe,” said Matthew. But he didn’t think so. He had never seen a dog that was tall as a person. Or one that felt so… evil.
He shivered.
***
Chapter 8:
Footsteps
***
I can’t stop reading the Bible story about Abraham. How he waited so long for a son. Then finally got one in his old age, and named him Isaac.
Then God tells him to kill his son. And Abraham gets ready to do it, because he loves God and if you love God you do what he says even if he tells you to murder your baby.
Maybe especially if he tells you to murder your baby.
So Abraham ties up his boy and raises his knife to kill his son and then at the last second an angel comes and stops him.
That’s what gets me. That’s what keeps me reading it over and over in wonder.
Whoever wrote the Bible has no idea how to write a good story that reads true. Angels never stop parents from killing their kids, so when that happens so early on in the story how am I supposed to enjoy the rest of it?
Bundles of wire lay everywhere, strewn about the room like coils of discarded bowels in a slaughterhouse. Only instead of food and feces, these coils carried information and electricity. They were the lifeblood of the computer hardware that Shane had brought with him, of the business he hoped to make here.
He unpacked what seemed like the thousandth coil of wire, and like the previous nine-hundred-ninety-nine, it had somehow managed to slip free of the careful packing and taping in which Shane had secured it in order to bond at a molecular level with one of the other cords. It boggled him how a group of cords could go into a box separately marked and twisted in tight loops, then come out of the same box as an orgiastic mass of gnarled knots.
Bunnies have got nothing on computer cords, he thought. Horniest things ever created.
He started untwisting the coital knots.
Screw actually surviving here, he thought. Forget making money, I might not even make it to a point where I can turn my computers on at all.
But he knew that was just fatigue talking. He would keep at it until everything was in its proper place. Not only because he had to. Not only because his clients – the ones who had agreed to let him keep doing their books for them remotely when he moved – expected him to start working for them again on Monday. Not only because he needed to keep living. No, in reality he was doing this because it gave him something to do. Something that required just enough attention that he could focus on it, instead of focusing on the many other problems that dogged him every day.
Ella. What was he going to do about her? What was with the funeral outfits and the hateful music? Actually, those were the wrong questions. He knew the answers to them. The better question – the one he hadn’t figured out yet – was how to make her stop? How to bring back the wonderful girl he used to know? The girl who dressed in frilly skirts and whose favorite color was pink?
That was a mystery.
How about Matthew? He seemed to have adjusted well enough to everything that had gone on in the last year. But that worried Shane as well. Because shouldn’t the kid have had more of a reaction? Started wetting the bed, or getting in fights, or something? But he seemed as sweet and funny and well-adjusted as ever.
Shane finally separated the two amorous LAN cords he had been working on and threw them in separate corners of the room. Picked up another group of cords – this one no mere one-night stand between hardware peripheries, but appearing to be a truly frenzied orgy involving no fewer than ten discrete units – and started working on them.
Hell, he thought. No wonder so many parents go crazy. If your kids turn out wrong, you wonder how to fix it and what you did to screw them up. If they turn out right, you wonder why they aren’t acting like everyone else and what you must be doing wrong that’s going to bite you in the ass later. Lose-lose.
Muffled thuds came from overhead as small feet tore down the hall. Shane smiled. Some things were constants in the universe, like the laws of thermodynamics. And the fact that his son would try to go to the bathroom after being put to bed in order to cheat a few extra moments of wakefulness into his day.
“Matthew!” shouted Shane.
The footsteps stopped. Then a voice, muffled through the intervening ceiling/floor but still clear enough to be understood, responded, “I gotta go to the bathroom!”
“You already went!” shouted Shane.
There was a moment of silence, and Shane could almost hear his son thinking if there was any loophole he could exploit, any precedent that might permit him to get around his father’s implicit instruction to return to bed.
Apparently he came up with zilch, because a moment later the footsteps reversed and ran back down the hall. The muffled thud of a door shutting shook the house ever-so-slightly.
Shane smiled. Matthew seemed to run everywhere. Whether it was urgent or not, a trip to the bathroom or to the library, if the kid was moving he was really moving.
He laughed to himself as he remembered the first few years of Matthew’s potty training. The potty training itself came fairly easily: Matthew actually walked in one day and said, “Wanna potty in big potty.” They showed him how, and three days later he was completely potty trained. Or at least, he never had any “accidents” after that. But there were countless times that Matthew would be so involved in one project or another that he would wait until the last possible moment to head to the bathroom. So last second would it be that he would start pulling his pants and underwear down as he ran. It became a not-uncommon sight: Matthew running down the hall, his legs queerly hobbled by the underwear and shorts that banded tightly around his ankles, his cute little bottom bouncing as he ran/skipped/hopped to the bathroom. It always made Shane laugh. It made Ella laugh.
It made Kari laugh.
How long has it been since I was like that? Shane wondered. How long since I ran, not because I had to, but because I was so in love with existence that I needed to run from thing to thing, so I wouldn’t miss anything?
He had no answer to that.
He returned to his work, trying to drive all thought from his mind with the numbing power of repetitive activity. He thought he heard someone walking around upstairs again at one point, but he was deeply engrossed in setting up his computer systems by then, and paid it no mind, even though a small part of him pointed out that the footsteps didn’t sound like Matthew’s or Ella’s.
Too light to be Ella’s. To slow to be Matthew’s.
Shane managed to glance up at the ceiling, but by then the sounds had stopped and he was easily able to convince himself he hadn’t heard anything at all.
***
Chapter 9:
Eyes
***
I went to the market today. The checkers know me. They usually chat. No one chatted with me today.
Finally got one of them to say something. Wilhelmina. Wilhelmina said that one of employees’ children had been hit by a car and died.
I asked if the child’s parent was the one driving the car.
Wilhelmina looked horrified. Even though I simply asked what seemed like the most logical question given what I know. If a child dies, the first people the cops look at are the parents.
Police get it. Or at least, they get that PART of it.
Matthew was dreaming.
He knew it was a dream, because it had to be a dream. Some things shouldn’t be real, so because they shouldn’t be real they must not be real, and that left… it had to be a dream.
In his dream, Matthew was asleep. Which was weird, because he’d never been asleep in a dream before. But he was asleep in this one, so it must happen sometimes.
Even though his eyes were closed, he knew where he was. He was in his new room. His new room reminded him a lot of his old room. Not the room he’d been living in for the last few months, ever since… ever since the night when everything changed. Daddy had sold that house fast and they moved away quickly. Daddy and Ella seemed happy to get away, but Matthew wasn’t. Even with what had happened, he missed his room from that house.
When he mentioned that once to Ella she pushed him and said of course he missed his room; no one had tried to cut his face off in his room. Matthew started to cry and Ella gave him a hug and he knew she didn’t mean to make him sad or scared. She was a good big sister. Just “dealing with stuff,” as she put it.
He never again mentioned to her how much he missed his room. Nor did he tell her how much this new place reminded him of home – their real home, their home when Mom had been with them. When Mom had been… Mom.
Something made a screeeek, scrrrrak sound, and because it was a dream and Daddy always said nothing could hurt you in your dreams Matthew opened his eyes even though the sound was scary.
He opened his dream-eyes and looked around. He didn’t sit up or get out from under the warm blankets, just rolled his eyes around, trying to figure out what was making the noise.
Sccccrik-crak.
He saw it then. Tree branches silhouetted against the glass of his bedroom window. They waved in the darkness outside. With no leaves on the branches, they looked like the fingers of a cursed witch. Even though it was just a dream and even though he knew Ella would call him a weenie if he ever told her about this (which he never would because he didn’t like being called a weenie), he pulled his dream-covers up higher, so they were just under his eyes.
After a second, though, the branches hadn’t changed into anything freaky like bats or the girl in his last school who had more earrings than Matthew thought a person could have without dying of ear-bleeding.
Plus, it was getting hot and stuffy with his nose under the blanket.
He lowered the blanket a bit.
The branches were just branches.
Then, slowly, something appeared at the window.
Or rather, not at the window. Not like it was something behind the glass. Instead, it almost seemed like something was happening in the glass.
Matthew’s fingers curled around his blanket, ready to yank it over his head if need be. Ella told him once that real monsters wouldn’t stop just because you pulled a blanket over your head. But Matthew figured she wasn’t really talking about real monsters – she was talking about Mom. But Ella probably didn’t know the first thing about real monsters. Matthew figured that if crosses could stop Dracula, and silver bullets could stop werewolves, then a good solid blanket had as much chance against a dream monster as anything.
And it is just a dream.
The window grew opaque. Like it was the bathroom mirror after Ella had taken one of her “short” two hour showers. The branches of the trees disappeared behind a cloud of solid gray.
Then, slowly, the gray moved. Not like the window opened or something, but more like when a car passes through fog and the mist curls behind it. That was happening in the window.
