by Jim Johanson
Evelyn's Children
Copyright 2017
Jim Johanson
Published on Smashwords
JimJohanson.com
"When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest and finding none. Goeth he and taketh to him other spirits more wicked than himself, and the last state of the man is worse than the first.”
-Luke 11:24-26
Chapter One
Fumes of rapidly evaporating gasoline drifted like invisible serpents in and out of Billy Greer's sinuses, the harsh chemical vapors stinging at the lining of his nose. The burn used to bother Billy, but he had grown accustomed to it through repeated abuse. The caustic vapors had become an acquired taste. Like the burn of strong vodka down the throat of an alcoholic, the pains of huffing gasoline had simply become an acceptable gateway to the land of exalted bliss. Billy's world of dire boredom faded as he embarked on a return journey to the world of sublime immaculacy, all for the cost of a few gallons of gas and a reusable red plastic container.
Rings of blackness formed around the corners of Billy's vision as he inhaled, forcing his field of view into a blurry tunnel. Though normally a frightening phenomena, Billy no longer had any fear of the less desirable effects of gasoline inhalation intoxication.
The familiar but overwhelming sensation of dizziness began to set in. Billy found himself losing his balance. He steadied himself by pressing his shoulder against a tree. A piece of bark, sharp at the edge, dug into his shoulder. Though he knew that pain was inherently a bad thing, he was quickly losing his susceptibility to it. Pain was a man shouting desperately at the back of a crowd, drowned out by the white noise of hundreds of other voices.
Billy struggled to keep his grip on the container of gasoline, but the muscles in his hands were slumping and quivering to the point of near uselessness. His fingers felt to him like loose rubber bands, wriggling out from underneath the crude stump of his hands, made chemically vestigial.
Knowing that he wouldn't be able to hold onto the container of gas for much longer, and having been disappointed with his last experience, Billy sucked in as hard as he could, taking one final gulp of fumes into his mouth. He inhaled like a veteran cigarette smoker taking their first drag after a failed attempt at quitting, filling his lungs with the intoxicating vapors, sucking deeply from the hole in the plastic container. The fumes stung his nose and burned his throat, but Billy remained stalwart, ignoring the pain, knowing that the familiar sensation of supreme bliss and serenity was soon to come if he could just hold on a bit longer.
Then it arrived. Like a scientist finally discovering the solution to his life's work, Billy felt the sensation of a spark firing off at the base of his neck where it connected to his skull, like a firecracker in-between his vertebrae. All of his struggles evaporated and flew out on the wind with the gasoline fumes.
Haunting memories of family, unfortunate childhood experiences, responsibilities and burdens, despair at what may come in the future, all of it dissipated. As Billy's mind relaxed, so did his body. Billy felt air pushing up from behind him as he lost his balance and fell backward to the ground, dropping the can of gasoline off to his side. It landed with the nozzle facing the ground. The gas began pouring out of the container, collecting in a pool of moistened dirt nearby his legs.
The rings of blackness around Billy's vision soon turned a bizarre shade of green. The edges convulsed and protruded, turning themselves into triangles and teeth, pushing inward and taking up more of his visual space, twisting, turning and forming wondrous shapes and colors. Billy's world had become nothing more than the inward construction of his mind, represented visually as geometric kaleidoscope patterns. Time became meaningless. He became an initiate of quantum depravity, absorbed by oblivion.
Had Billy still retained any sense of who he was, he would have been proud of himself. He had outdone all of his previous efforts, having finally achieved the high he'd been looking for since he’d first begun experimenting with inhalants. For the scores of times that Billy had ventured out into the woods behind his mother’s house, down forgotten paths to the abandoned railroad tracks to set fire to aerosol containers or huff gasoline, never before had he been so dead-set on reaching a higher plateau and escaping his physical life.
Billy’s gasoline experiments had become a habit, a means of escape from the world. Now, as he lay nearly motionless in the afternoon sun, his escape from reality was teetering on the brink of permanence, his breathing rate slowing to a dangerous low. His fingers laid motionless on the dew-covered grass, his eyes glazing over with his pupils pointed blankly at the sky.
Billy, unfortunately under-educated, never had any warning that inhaling enough gasoline would cause his breathing rate to slow to zero, that his lungs would simply stop hungering for oxygen, in turn causing the oxygen levels in his blood to plummet dramatically. Neural synapses and entire regions of oxygen-deprived white matter in Billy's brain began to turn black with decay. Billy was approaching the verge of cerebral vegetation, though his heart was still pumping intensely, his whole body enveloped in a paradoxical state of living and dying.
He was still conscious and his eyes were open, but all he could see were two green dots, dancing around and crashing into each other in concentric circles. When the dots struck each other, they split into halves and rejoined in an endless spiral. From Billy's perspective, he was nothing but another odd green dot stationed outside of the realm of existence, watching the other two dots react with each other as though they were two of his oldest friends.
The dots amused Billy. They had the demeanor of two tiny kittens stumbling around, trying not to fall over as they fumbled into one another, knocking each other off balance. The dots seemed innocent, devoid of negativity, just existing for the sake of existing.
Empty tins of lighter fluid, spray paint cans with burst shells charred black, stolen automotive cleaners, and all other manner of emptied containers of flammable liquid lay littered about the area, evidence of Billy’s previous pyromantic excursions. This time, prior to huffing gas, he'd stolen a can of cheap spray deodorant from his sister Mary’s bedroom and tossed it into a burning pile of twigs, smiling when as watched it explode in a miniature mushroom cloud. Unbeknownst to Billy, some stray embers had fallen onto the ground where he’d begun his gasoline huffing. The gasoline dripping from the container snaked downward into dirt, eventually finding its way to a burning ember while Billy lay paralyzed in the throes of intoxication. A fire crept upward from the point of ignition, following the pathway back to the gasoline can and setting Billy’s jeans alight. As the fibers burned, Billy’s flesh turned red and began to blister. Ash from his jeans melted into his leg.
Billy’s burning flesh tried desperately to send a message of emergency to his muddled brain. A jolt of adrenaline shot through his system at the sensation of pain. His lungs reanimated, struggling for air. Even with his body now aroused and pulling itself out of the gasoline-induced delirium, he’d already suffered significant hypoxic damage to his brain.
Billy screamed and thrashed around in the dirt, instinctively trying to protect his body from the pain, not yet capable of understanding what the pain was or what was causing it. Still high on gasoline, Billy suffered immense disorientation, barely able to remember who or where he was.
Heat. Flames. Woods. Water.
Though his vision was still black and wrought with hallucinations brought on by gasoline vapors, Billy managed to drag himself toward the nearby pond. His legs were enfeebled and unresponsive, so he clawed and dragged himself toward the water, breaking a fingernail in the process. Managing to get his head into the water, he let gravity pull the rest of his body into the pond.
The fire was out. Billy'
s leg sizzled in the murky water. His jeans stuck to what remained of his skin as if ironed onto his body. The worst area of burn had gone deep into his calf muscle, permanently destroying flesh and very nearly heating his bone marrow beyond repair.
Now quenched by the waters of the pond, Billy faced a new struggle. His mouth and throat filled with fluid. He gulped and swallowed, forcing dirty water rife with bacteria into his lungs and stomach. Still intoxicated, Billy could hardly tell which direction was up.
Need air.
Billy thrashed his arms and legs. His feet kicked up against the dirt at the side of the pond. With a struggle, he found some footing on the muddy incline below the surface of the water by the shore. With a determinant thrust of his foot against the bank, he propelled his head above the water and sucked deeply the life-sustaining air above the surface, a boy forever changed by fume and flame.
Chapter Two
Mary Greer, sister of Billy and daughter of Evelyn Greer, let her bike drift onto the rocky shoulder of the road as a car passed on her left. It was rare to see many cars traveling down her street aside from parents picking up their kids after school. The thin front tire on Mary's bike wobbled as it struck rocks on the road's shoulder despite her efforts to avoid them. As the car passed, she pressed down on her bike pedals to push herself back onto the road.
Mary coasted into the garage of her family’s house. She set the bike next to the glass-block window and hopped off, taking care to avoid cobwebs. She always made sure not to park her bike too closely to the old red truck that spent most of its time waiting in the garage, only ever used for trips to the grocery store. Mother’s disability check didn't pay for much in the way of gasoline.
Mary slid her key into the rusted doorknob. She thought back to the morning when she locked the door leave. It felt like an episode of déjà vu. Mary took a deep breath and held it until the feeling faded. She took extra care not to make any noise in opening the door. Having already had a stressful day at school, the last thing she wanted was for her mother to wake up.
Mary pushed the door open. A waft of putridity brushed her in the face as the cold air of the house pushed outward into the garage. Something in the kitchen garbage had gone bad. It was Billy's turn to take out the trash this week, but he had apparently been neglectful, again.
"Dammit Billy," she cursed under her breath.
Billy usually got home before her, but it seemed like the house was still as empty as it could be, except for her mostly bedridden mother who never left home.
"One thing to do, one responsibility, and you just leave the garbage sitting there, stinking up the whole house..."
Mary set down her backpack by the door and reached over to pull the garbage bag from the can. The stench intensified, blasting into her face as she closed the bag.
Being extremely careful at reopening the door to the garage to minimize any sound, Mary went back outside and put the garbage bag into an old, steel garbage can. She'd have to drag them out to the street herself at some point if Billy didn't come home.
Back in the kitchen, Mary pulled out a chair from the dinner table and sat down, setting her elbows on the table and letting her forehead fall into her palms. She tried to clear her head of thoughts, breathing methodically.
Her calm was broken when a strange and unwelcome memory of her father sitting at the head of the dinner table across from where she sat presently burst into her mind. In the memory, Billy sat to her right and Mother to her left. Mother looked sad and wasn’t eating, her eyes fixated on her plate of overcooked chicken, green beans and off-brand barbeque sauce. Billy was ravenously scooping up every bit of his food, and Dad was guzzling his third or fourth can of beer, yammering on and on about politics, nodding like he assumed everyone agreed with him, though no one else at the table was even sure what he was talking about, or if any of it even made sense. About halfway through a rant, he noticed that Evelyn wasn’t looking up at him. Something about the look on her face set him off. He didn’t like being ignored.
Dad swigged the last of his beer can and stood up from the table. There was a small gap between Evelyn’s chair and the wall, blocking the way to the refrigerator.
“How many times I told you about pulling your chair in when I’m walking through. Do I gotta ask every single time? You see me stand up, you know where I’m going, and you sit right there like you don’t give a rat’s ass about nothin!”
Dad grabbed Evelyn’s chair by the top post and dragged it out of the way, nearly toppling Evelyn. She remained quiet, knowing that apologizing could just make things worse. Dad moved around the table and opened the fridge, got out another beer and swigged from it, drafting his next outburst.
“Now, you see this?” He pointed to Billy’s chair.
“Look at that. Sitting right up to the table like a gentleman. Now, I can’t say that about you¸ Eve, and look, like mother like daughter.”
Dad kicked at the base of Mary’s chair. With her legs too short to fully reach the ground, she couldn’t stop herself from lurching forward. Her mouth caught the edge of the table, knocking loose two of her baby teeth. Blood dripped out of her mouth, down her chin and onto her dress as she wailed in pain.
Mary shook her head to rid herself of the memory and got up from the table. Her house was sometimes not a comfortable place for her to be alone. Even with Mother in the house, Mary felt more alone than she would have if she were truly by herself.
Evelyn Greer, Mary and Billy's mother, usually woke up around seven in the evening if her children weren't careless enough to wake her accidentally. At seven ‘o’clock Mary would prepare dinner for Mother and Billy. She'd offered to teach Billy how to cook, but Billy had no interest and never stayed around the dinner table long enough to hold a conversation.
Sometimes Mother would come out to the dinner table, though most of the time she stayed confined to her bed. She had a hard time seeing, and her joints caused her so much pain that walking was often too much to bare.
Mary let herself rest in bed for a while. The warmth of the sunlight coming in through her window felt good on her skin. There wasn't much in her room to speak of, but everything inside of it was hers, and most often no one bothered her when she was in her room.
Mary pulled the comforter of her bed over her shoulder and faced toward the wall. She remembered how as a child she had liked to look at the patterns in the wall, imagining the creases in the plaster to be waves of the ocean or lines of a mountain range that she had never seen in person.
Her peace was always short-lived. Every time she laid down, a timer set itself in the back of her head, in knowing that Billy would soon cause some sort of trouble, or that her mother would have some new crisis to which Mary would need to attend. Every moment that her mother slept, and every moment that her brother was away, was sublime respite.
Mary awoke abruptly at the sound of a crashing noise coming from somewhere in the house, so loud that Mary heard it even through her closed bedroom door. A tinge of fear shot through her. It was unlikely that the noise was a burglar breaking in, for the Greers had nothing of value to steal. Mary had much less fear of a burglar than she did of her mother being wakened. As she hopped out of bed and flung open her bedroom door, already she could hear the wailing cry of her mother. The shrieking tore Mary from pleasant sleepiness back into the suffering of waking life.
"Mary Elizabeth!" screamed Evelyn.
Mary held back tears as she forced herself into the living room to find the source of the noise, hoping that it wasn’t a burglar. Even with no means to defend herself, the sense of responsibility forced on her by her need to care for a decrepit mother was enough to put her into action.
Equally shocked and relieved at the same time, Mary was surprised to see her brother stumbling around in the kitchen. He bent himself over the kitchen table, his black hooded sweatshirt drooping down around the post of a wooden chair.
"Billy, what are you doing? What’s the matter with you, are you drunk? You woke her
up."
Billy let out a scream in response like no sound Mary had ever heard a human make. His unearthly, guttural expression of pain reminded her of the sound of pigs taken to slaughter.
Billy flung his arms out wildly as if in a freefall, attempting in vain to grab hold of the chair before he fell to the ground. Mary sprinted toward him, paused and caught herself, then took a step back in fear. She held her arms out in front of her as if bracing for an impact.
"B...Billy, what..."
It was then that she saw the blood pouring from Billy’s leg. He’d torn open part of his freshly burned wounds on the chair when he fell. Blood gushed outward onto the white tile floor, leaving bright red smears as he thrashed on the ground.
Mother screamed incoherently from the bedroom, amplifying the discomfort of the situation. Confronting her fear, Mary knelt down and grabbed her brother's arm.
"Billy, what happened? Are you okay? You’re bleeding!"
His eyes met hers for a silent moment. They held a puzzling, unfamiliar expression. His pupils shook, portraying an immense sense of turgid fear. He seemed to be trying to communicate something to her through his eyes, but without success, his eyes glazed over and rolled back.
He began spinning himself wildly on the floor, clawing at the carpet. Blood continued pouring from his leg. His mouth found the carpet and closed on it. Like an injured soldier biting on a piece of wood before an amputation, he forced his jaws tightly together with the carpet acting as a bite block. A muffled scream resonated into the floor before Billy lurched his head backward, taking a piece of the carpet away with him in his mouth.
"What are you doing to my son, you whore!" screamed Mother from her bedroom. Her shouts were every bit as agonized as Billy's.
"The Devil take you if you harm him, Mary! You are just like your father! Demons and Jezebels!"
For the first time since the commotion started, Mary saw fully the damage done to Billy's leg by the fire. She gasped inaudibly in stark horror. Her terror was so great that even the languished cries of her mother seemed like diminished background noise. Without a phone and unable to call for emergency, Mary sprang barefoot through the garage door and outside, panting as she ran toward the nearest neighbor's house.
