Dead Echo

by C.G. Banks

  *

  He’d seen worse, but it hardly mattered now.

  The fight had started here; the bed was a mess, one leg broken and tilting to that side, the covers lying in a pile near the bureau. A scattering of broken glass all over the floor. And blood. Not a lot, but there were some sizeable pools like the one he’d stepped in over by the door. His eyes landed on a bloody coathanger by the closet door. He’d tracked the blood across the room to the bed, a perfect half boot print. Compromising a crime scene like some amateur asshole.

  Worse, the room was empty. No Patsy Standish.

  He slumped against the wall, his mind rattling to all zeros. And at this nadir he heard the sound of a child’s laughter. A little girl’s probably. Coming from somewhere toward the front of the house. Then a voice, “Mister, what are you doing back there?”

  Another tittering of laughter, this time another child. Another girl.

  “Mister?” the speaker said again, high-pitched and mocking. “Are you all right?” This time both exploded into true laughter.

  The sound was like a knife run along a chalkboard. There was something so menacing in the ruefully playful tone of the unseen children that for just a moment he looked for a way out. Then he realized what he was doing and shook his head, tried to convince himself it was still just a little of the whiskey. Fogging up his instincts. That was all it was. What else could it be?

  He stepped out of the room and into the hall, being careful to clear the puddle of blood by the door, the second time though it hardly mattered now. The hallway was doubly ominous. There were no further sallies, the laughter (if there had ever in fact been any) had died away. James Arnold stood in the hallway and looked down its short length to the living room. Everything a shade, mere slippery outlines in a terrible darkness. He’d left the light on in the bedroom and its glow directed him to another set of switches set just off to the wall to his left. He flipped the switch into the ON position and the hallway was suddenly aglow. It made the living room come into better contrast, but there was no one there. Just as deserted as before unless someone (something! his mind kept saying) was laying for him. He tried to shake off the thought by moving up a few steps. The laughter almost stopped him again. Almost.

  “What is this shit?” he said, aggravation suddenly overcoming fear. He moved into the living room. Saw an elongated shadow from the kitchen disappear against the door jamb. He crouched down and flowed toward it, clearing the door and laying the barrel of the gun down. When he did he saw the girls. Two dirty little children, so familiar they could have been sisters. They were standing by the carport door. Smiling as if a great secret lay before them. He dropped the gun down by his side, tossing aside what Skate had told him.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  The girls looked at each other and giggled again. Then their eyes found him and he hadn’t been wrong about the hint of malice. His hand felt like a rock against the pistol grip of the Colt.

  “We live here,” the taller of the two said, the voice of the one he’d heard from the bedroom. She held out her hands as if to envelope the room and Arnold saw the caked-in filth. The familiar smell from the neighbor’s backyard crawled across the floor to his feet. He backed up a step into the deeper gloom of the living room.

  Tried hard to keep his voice steady amid a rising knot of hysteria.

  “Where’s Mrs. Standish?” he said. “What happened here?”

  Both girls laughed again but the sound was the grating scrape of tomb doors. He saw their teeth were blindingly white, out of place amid the dirt and torn clothing.

  “Gone,” the one who’d been silent up until now replied.

  “Gone,” Arnold repeated. “Where did she go?”

  “Oh, you’ll see,” the same girl said and they began to move toward him. He, involuntarily, stepped back until his thighs pressed against the couch. Stupidly, he watched as the gun came up in front of him again, pointed at the children. It ticked as if it held a will of its own.

  The girls laughed again and slowed, moved past him to the left. Back toward the hallway, toward the bedroom with the blood.

  “Hey!” he said and they both stopped. Grinned horribly, expectantly, in his direction.

  “Sir?” the bigger one said, sarcasm dripping from her lips. It was then he also noticed the thin trill of drool cascading a red line down her chin, soaking the shoulder of the cerements she wore.

  “I said, ‘where’s Mrs. Standish?’”

  They stood in the entrance to the hallway and for a twisted moment Arnold felt he could see through them, the floor uninterrupted where it should have been. It stopped him coming any closer and this time he felt his finger twitching on the trigger. Only a gigantic effort of will kept him from pulling it.

  “She was naughty and they’ve taken her away,” the quiet one said. This time no laughter followed and the four eyes pointed his direction hardened to black diamonds.

  “Who?” Arnold managed. The air was suddenly much too thick, the girls’ images wavering before him like vapor.

  “Why, everybody!” the taller girl said and both turned as one and scrabbled down the hall, disappearing into the bedroom on the right before Arnold had so much as a moment to think. One second they were there, the next…gone. Leaving him alone with the cryptic comment, pointing the Colt down an empty hallway where the girls had been.

  His paralysis broke a second later.

  He ran back down the hallway to the bedroom, almost slipping in the coagulating blood, fanning the room with the gun, not sure if he could keep himself from pulling the trigger this time.

  But there was no one.

  The room was empty.

  He barged into the adjoining bathroom. Nothing. Then, quickly to the closet with like results. He went to his knees, flung the skirt of the broken bed up, and looked frantically underneath it but there was nothing but dust and broken wood.

  Vanished.

  So this was crazy. He could actually feel his mind slipping toward some immense hole from which there was no escaping. On his knees on the floor he wiped his free hand across his forehead and remembered the mask. Flung it off and watched it fall to the bed. He stood up, trance-like with no further ideas, and left the bedroom. Made his way drunkenly down the hall to the kitchen entrance. The carport door was still open, flung wide to the counter. A penetrating darkness held fast outside. He moved through the kitchen. Stepped outside to the carport.

  Sounds drifting in the stillness. The same, faint sibilant rustling of voices in his mind.

  There were shapes moving in the night now and he squatted down by the side of the Impala. Checked his eye to the Colt to make sure it was still there. Then he crept down the passenger side of the car, keeping his head down. Yes, people moving freely in the street now, but the voices seemed to come from somewhere else. Directly across the street from the driveway a front door opened and a wraith appeared, the shape of a naked woman, shuffling zombie-like from her home, wandering down the walk from her door to the street. No one seemed to take any heed of her, naked or not. They simply filtered out to the street and moved in tandem away toward the back of the neighborhood.

  Arnold watched until they all passed down the street.

  He moved around the Impala to the shadow underneath the porch awning. Skirted the rail to where it opened on the front yard. Fifteen feet ahead to the right he pulled up close to the maple that shaded the porch. Scanned the street with jumping eyes. Back behind the houses on this side an orange glow flickered in the night sky. From the looks, a bonfire, and a big one at that. The last of the stragglers were just now rounding the corner in that direction. Arnold remembered what the girl inside had said and began ghosting through the yards, picking up cover where he could in bushes and beside trees, staying clear of the houses in case some late-comers ventured out to the darkness.

  It took him about a minute to reach the house on the corner. Pitch black like the rest. Crouching down in an azalea bed ringed with a thick
mat of monkey grass, he peeked around the corner and saw the conflagration. Just at the end of the street that ran perpendicular to Standish’s. A large clearing had been cut in the underbrush across the ditch which ended the road. Moving shadows bobbed and lurched among the tongues of flame. The voices were louder here, chanting. Some grotesque cadence of sound that made the ear sick just to listen to it.

  Standish, he thought. With a fatal certitude, he knew the woman had been brought here. The nightmarish scene chilled him and, again, he wished he could pray, this far out on his lonely limb. The rest of the world seemed very far away, unreal. His life had been a countdown to this moment. The thought came as real as the flames that spiraled up into the night-black sky.

  The woman was in trouble; if he didn’t do something she would die, if she wasn’t dead already.

  He eased around the house and started in the direction of the bonfire, keeping in the long shadows oozing out from the fences. There were no other random shadows bobbing about; whatever had drawn the ghostly disciples was building to some kind of crescendo in the clearing. He took this as gospel.

  The last house before the clearing offered no obvious dangers. The chanting was louder now (though no more intelligible than before) and Arnold was not immune to the idea that other sentries had been placed. In fact, he could not be sure that the ones conducting whatever was going on were not already aware of his presence. There had been the two on the trail, the little girls in Standish’s house. Surely, he had to assume all these incidents were related. Regardless…

  The high grass started at the end of the fence row, little spindly trees beginning to make a comeback after the assault from the bulldozers that had leveled the land. He wished he had the mask but saw in his mind’s eye it resting on the bed in the bloody bedroom. So many mistakes…. He wondered how many more he’d be allowed this night because he’d never been one for luck. He took the measure. If he cut through here and jogged right through the narrow drainage canal, outlined as a deeper murk in the general black, he could push through to the clearing and get an idea what was going on. Or, at least, that was the plan.

  A cruel ten minutes later, lying flat-stomached on the ground, his face a mass of scratches and his clothes ribboned from the push, he was no more than thirty feet from the center of the clearing, just outside its tangled extremity. But what he saw had no definition in the world he’d come to know. Too much a thing of ancient nightmare to clarify fully in his mind. But his eyes didn’t deceive him.

  Just off center of the bonfire, tied naked to an inverted cross, hung the nude and bloody body of a women he knew had to be Patsy Standish.