Dead Echo

by C.G. Banks

  *

  Samantha Toney (Kit to her friends, though they were in fact very far from her thoughts at the moment) crouched behind the sofa, staring outside through a slit she’d been courageous (or stupid, another voice suggested) enough to pull in the curtain. She would not have done so if the small stand of four spindly pine trees didn’t block that direction from the street, but she wanted to see.

  Because this was really something different. Much more so than what she’d been expecting. Hell, granted it had been over a month since she last ventured out at dark, but now this was happening right in broad daylight. People pouring around the corner with shovels and garden rakes in their hands. She’d tried not to look at the knives. But there was that; sure there was that. These people weren’t gardeners; they were just fucking lunatics.

  Up until now she’d thought she was the one going mad. After all, nothing else fit. Seeing ghosts of the dead, hearing them at night, sometimes all night? The creeping sensations under the skin, the random bounces of thought? Because this wasn’t the first time. No sir indeed. She could still recall the institution from her teens like a living virus in her bloodstream. Schizophrenia, the doctor’s had called it. She still took her medication for it everyday, but it had been years since…that time. She’d started hearing voices, seeing shit that wasn’t there. Terrible things: screaming faces, humiliating accusations. All this she’d managed to hide from her parents until the suicide attempt. Her eyes dropped down to her wrists, to the worm-like thread of scars across them.

  She wasn’t married and was glad of it. Anyone else here with her would have known by now that she was seeing things again. Hearing them too, but that wasn’t always as bad. Sometimes…but not always. At first she’d pretended not to. Her imagination had always been top-notch and she tried to write it off as that, but more and more often, the malaise from her early teens had reasserted itself. Or so she had believed.

  She supported herself with clerical work down at the hospital a few miles south on Highway 12. The irony that it was a “mental” hospital was not lost on her, in fact, she’d pretended to appreciate its proximity over the years. Here was a direct realization of what her life could have been had the disease gotten any more severe. Lifetime confinement in the nuthatch. Yeah, she liked to think the very proximity to such illnesses helped frame her mind to avoid them.

  Until today she’d been sure she was descending into madness again. After keeping her head above those turbulent waters for so long, she’d eventually sprung a leak and was sinking. She continued to stare out the window. People (somehow she couldn’t bring herself to consider them as neighbors), were just walking aimlessly around in Mrs…., what the hell was it? She snapped her fingers trying to remember but nothing came. The couple’s faces were as real as a picture in her mind, and even though she’d talked to them off and on for the past three years, she couldn’t for the life of her remember their first or last names. She wondered now that it didn’t matter anyway.

  She’d thought she was going crazy. But now…. All she had to do was stare across the street at the rapidly disintegrating mob and that was no longer a foregone conclusion. What if all this shit was real? Everything, even down to the woman limping back to her house in the T-shirt and panties with the goddamn machete. Kit let go the curtain and stared around wildly, realizing this possibility. Because insanity couldn’t hurt you, not unless you did something to yourself, but people with shovels and machetes? Well they could damn well do a lot worse. She’d watched the bleeding woman stumble across the street and inside her own house. Then, this mob.

  She knew the woman in the car was dead.

  She’d been killed.

  Now the comfort of insanity seemed almost preferable to this unspeakable reality. Because if the milling mob outside was not from some depthless chasm in her mind, then maybe, just maybe, all the other things she’d seen and heard for the past few months belonged in the same reality. She shivered violently in the thin light leaking in through the curtain.

  And it was at this moment the two identical little girls strolled out of her hallway and fixed their apocalyptic eyes upon her. Laughed at her, crouched there in the corner. Kit saw, horribly, the long metal kebob skewers they were holding in both hands.

  Then they came on and her screams went unheard for the better part of the next hour.