A Debt to be Paid

by Patrick Lacey

  “Do you want to tell me what’s going on here?” her father asked again. Meg could sense the agitation rising. He did not feel comfortable near this strange woman who had once been his loving wife.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Meg said, following her mother down the hall. “Brian will fill you in on the details. Long story short, it appears your wife isn’t all that crazy.”

  “What’s she talking about?” Meg heard her father ask Brian. Brian began to tell the story, albeit an abridged version. Then his words were too distant and she was walking upstairs, toward her old room, which was nothing more than a spare room now, with boxes and a sagging futon should Meg ever decide to visit.

  Gillian was in Meg’s father’s bedroom, the room they had once shared as husband and wife. She kneeled down and searched for something under the bed. “It’s been an awfully long time,” she said. “Do you remember if this is the same mattress from when you were a girl?”

  Meg shook her head. “I’m not sure. What does it matter?”

  Gillian ignored her, reaching a hand under the bed, pushing aside boxes, her face wrinkled in concentration until she finally gasped and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. “Same mattress,” she said.

  “What is that?”

  “This,” Gillian said, holding the paper up, “is the agreement I signed, stating I wanted an interview at night school. I had a copy made. Looking back, I never realized why until now.”

  “Mom, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  “Come on downstairs. I’d like to talk to your father.”

  Meg rolled her eyes and followed Gillian back into the hall. She was lightheaded, needed to hold on to the banister to keep steady. She could not remember the last time she’d eaten anything. She was running on coffee and adrenaline.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” her father was saying. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Gillian stepped back into the living room and leaned against the doorway. “You’d love it if all three of us were insane. Because it’s the rational choice here, isn’t it? Everything has an answer grounded in reality. That’s what you always told me back then, like you were lecturing a first grader. But tell me, Brian, does any of this sound rational to you? You’ve got three different witnesses who all claim they’ve seen them, shadows that walk around and seem hell bent on chasing after us, and I’d bet a thousand dollars you still don’t believe a word of it.”

  “Of course I don’t,” Meg’s father said. He seemed skinnier than the last time she’d seen him and maybe his hair was thinning a bit more now. Next to her mother, he looked ancient, a husk of his former self. “Now if this is some sort of joke…”

  “Cut the shit, will you?” Gillian held up the crumpled slip of paper. “See this? This is the application. You must remember me telling you about an application to a school that didn’t exist. Well, here it is. Here’s your proof that I wasn’t imagining it.” She handed it to him and he began to read.

  He said something under his breath, grabbing his glasses from the coffee table and sliding them on his nose. He read, shook his head, and took the glasses back off, rubbing his eyes and sighing. “What do you want me to say, Gillian? That I’m sorry? Do you want me to apologize?”

  “I’d say it’s a little late for that.”

  “Because I am, you know. I’m sorry for all of it. I wish I’d seen the signs earlier. Maybe we could have gotten you the help you needed. Maybe you wouldn’t have taken off with our daughter.”

  “Stop,” Meg said. No one seemed to notice.

  “Why couldn’t you ever believe me?” Her mother was shouting now, tears forming in her eyes. “That’s all I ever asked for. I just wanted you to believe me.”

  “I believe that you had some deep issues, that you believed whatever was going on in your mind was reality.”

  “You’re blind, you know that?” Gillian stepped closer to him.

  “Stop,” Meg said. “Please. Enough is enough.” She wondered if this was what her family would have turned into had her mom not been sent away.

  “Say it,” Gillian said. “Say I was telling the truth. Say it and I’ll leave right now.”

  “No way in hell.”

  “Say it.”

  “Stop,” Meg said a third time. She opened her mouth again but Brian cut her off.

  “I mean no disrespect when I say this but everybody needs to shut the fuck up because now is not the time and this is certainly not the place. We didn’t come all the way out here for this. I came because your daughter and I were in danger and I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit back and not try to fix things.”

  Meg’s parents looked at him in shock, mouths gaping.

  For a long time no one spoke.

  Then, from somewhere close by, came a sound. At first Meg thought it was a leaky ceiling or a drippy faucet, or perhaps it had started to rain. But as she listened closer she realized it wasn’t water at all, but something more solid. A tapping.

  The four of them caught each other’s eyes and then followed the direction of the sound. It was coming from outside the living room window.

  The sun was setting and the clouds seemed thicker and darker so that the outside world lacked detail. Through the thin white curtains, though, Meg saw one detail, one awful detail.

  A tall black shape with no features.

  It raised an elongated finger and tapped against the glass, softly at first but then more persistent.

  “They’re here,” Gillian said.

  Chapter Nine

  Meg’s father ran to the nearest phone and picked it up, dialing three obvious digits. “Hello?” he shouted, putting the phone against his ear. “Hello? Is anyone there? There’s an emergency at 134 Richmond Street in Hawthorne, New Hampshire. Someone is trying to break into my house. Is anyone there? Hello? Someone fucking answer me!”

  Gillian backed away from the window slowly. “It’s no use,” she said.

  Meg’s father wrinkled his brows, trying to make sense of something on the other end of the line now that he’d stopped shouting. It was a familiar look on his face, one Meg herself had worn when she’d answered the phone at the bank not long ago.

  She walked over and took the phone from her father.

  “What’re you doing?” he said. “We need to call someone. I think there’s something wrong with the connection.”

  Meg put the phone to her ear and shut her eyes. For a moment there was silence, sweet and ignorant silence. She managed to block out her father and her mother and Brian, who was keeping a watch at the living room window. For that moment she was far away, on an island somewhere, on a beach with sand so heated from the sun it burned her feet and she smiled and listened to lapping waves and birds and there was nothing wrong in her life, not in her past and not in her present.

  And then the silence became something more. It was a sound she recognized immediately, a soft but harsh whisper that she couldn’t quite make out, though she knew it wasn’t saying anything good. Behind the whisper, far in the background, was the sound of scuttling, what had at first reminded her of rodents but as time passed she knew it was the sound of long skeletal toes dragging across the floor. Their toes.

  It came to her with absolute certainty that on the other end of the line was another place, a shadowy place where they lived and operated, a place where they wanted to take Meg and everyone else in the living room. It was a realization so clear that she covered her mouth and blocked a scream.

  Gillian met her eyes and without saying anything, she confirmed Meg’s suspicion. The things were here to take them away.

  “Guys, we need to get upstairs. Now.” It was Brian. Sweet Brian who had been so patient and forgiving, who she’d dragged with her straight into this hell. She wished he’d told her to fuck off that ni
ght at the bar. It would have saved his life.

  They all looked at the thing just outside the glass.

  It was no longer alone.

  There were dozens more like it on their street, all of them watching through the window, tilting featureless heads and observing, perhaps planning their next move.

  Gillian grabbed Meg’s arms and pulled her upstairs. Brian followed. Meg’s father remained downstairs, watching the shadows like he was dreaming. Eventually, when it sounded as though all of the shadows were scraping fingers along the glass, he followed them upstairs.

  At the top, Gillian let go of Meg and tried to reach the dangling string of the attic door. She jumped twice and couldn’t make contact. She turned to Brian. “Dear, would you do the honor?”

  He nodded and reached for the string, pulling it down. The door opened and the pull-down latter fell, nearly knocking him over. Dust particles flew every which way. Meg couldn’t remember the last time she’d been up there. It seemed dark and damp and cold but right now it was better than the living room.

  Her mother didn’t need to say anything else. She stood aside and ushered them up the steps, pulling the latter up behind her, sealing them off from the rest of the house.

  There were two small windows on either side of the attic. They didn’t offer much light, the sky still muted with gray clouds, but it was enough to see each other and how scared they looked, especially Meg’s father now.

  He was biting his lip and shaking his head back and forth. He looked like someone who should have been at Gillian’s facility. “It’s not possible,” he said. “Some kind of shared hallucination or maybe there’s been some kind of invasion. Turn on the television and I’m sure there’ll be a breaking news story about World War III. That’s got to be it because otherwise…otherwise, I’ll lose my mind.”

  “I know the feeling,” Gillian said, walking to the nearest window and scanning the street.

  “How’s it look out there?” Brian asked.

  “Not good, dear. Not good at all. We’re completely surrounded.”

  Meg didn’t believe her mother at first. She walked over, looked outside and gasped when she saw them, hundreds now, maybe thousands. They all stood perfectly still, tall forms with nothing but blackness covering their stick-like bodies. “What do they want?” Meg already knew the answer of course.

  “Us,” Gillian said. “They want us. But more so they want me. I’ve been evading them for twenty years and they’ll be damned if they leave here today without me. I kept them away from me at the facility somehow. They would visit me nightly and stand outside in the courtyard. I got to thinking. If my condition drew them to me, maybe one of the other patients had the opposite effect. Maybe their condition created a barrier. Maybe people with not-so-average brains can pick them up, like an antenna tuned to a secret radio station. There are different kinds of crazy and I think mine is the inviting kind.”

  Gillian turned around and smiled at Meg. She reached out and brushed aside Meg’s bangs, exposing the scar. “I’m so sorry about that, dear. I never meant to involve you but I was your mother and I didn’t feel safe in my own home. I thought that if I brought you with me, I could keep them away. I failed you.” Gillian rubbed the scarred flesh. It came alive, every nerve ending in Meg’s body sending chills to that one sliver of skin. “I saw one of them in our home that night, the night we came back. Your father was restraining me, the cops were on the way, and I saw one of them standing just behind you. I tried to stop them but I missed. I died that day, the day I hurt you.”

  Meg’s throat closed and it was a struggle to breathe. Tears clouded her vision. It felt like a panic attack and an allergic reaction rolled into one. It felt like twenty years worth of pain and sadness and isolation came to a head and poured out of her. She sobbed like the girl she’d once been while her mother consoled her, assured her that everything was going to be okay. And all the while she thought back to that night and the black thing that had watched her through the living room window.

  Gillian pointed to Brian. “You seem like a nice boy, the kind of boy who would take care of a girl like Meg. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Good. Because if you ever hurt my daughter, I’ll come back and I’ll find you. I’m very patient, you know.”

  “Come back?” Meg said. “What do you mean ‘come back’?”

  Gillian pulled the slip of paper from her pocket and ripped it in half, then ripped it again and again until there were a dozen or so pieces. She tossed them into the air. They floated for a while then drifted down like feathers.

  She turned toward Meg’s father and Meg knew he would apologize then. It was in his eyes, two decades in the making. He finally believed her.

  But before either one could speak, the attic door crashed opened, the stairs toppling down. It sounded like a stampede, like a thunderstorm had formed inside the house. A shadow climbed the steps and then another, until there was an army of them, mixing with the darkness of the attic.

  Meg’s father grabbed Gillian and threw her behind him. “Get away from my family,” he said to them. “You’ve no right to be here. You’ve no right to exist in the first place. Go back to whatever awful place you came from.”

  The things did not obey him. They walked toward Gillian and Meg’s father. Gillian whispered something into his ear, perhaps goodbye, though Meg was too far away to hear, struggling against Brian’s grip as he held her back. Then, smiling once more at her daughter, winking and sending some psychic reassurance Meg couldn’t hear with her ears, Gillian tossed her husband aside and walked toward the shadows.

  Meg screamed, tried to break free from Brian’s grip. She reached a hand toward them. They were across the attic but she willed her hand too stretch impossibly far so that she could grab one of them and squeeze the life from their ugly body.

  The shadows surrounded her mother, formed a circle. They began to change shape, losing what little features they had, becoming less solid so that they melded with one another, forming a large sphere, growing larger with each moment. Bits of mist broke off and multiplied. The smoke grew, spreading through the attic, blurring their vision, blocking out all traces of light. It was pure darkness for a while, the blackest thing Meg had ever known.

  She called for her mother, wiping her eyes but still seeing nothing.

  Then, in the midst of her screaming and struggling, the smoke cleared.

  The attic was empty aside from Meg, Brian and her father.

  Outside the clouds broke away and a few rays of light shone through the window. They cast three huddled shadows onto the floor.

  Chapter Ten

  The woman studied the piece of paper once more. It must have been the tenth time she’d read through the words. She’d even called the toll free number at the bottom and asked for more information, just to get a sense if it were a scam or not. The man on the other end of the line assured her it was completely legitimate, that the school, located just twelve miles north of her home, had over two thousand students already, mostly parents like herself who wanted to continue their education.

  It sounded too good to be true but maybe some things just worked out in the end.

  The price was beyond reasonable. She had a nice chunk of money in her savings and she could probably get some federal aid, maybe a low interest loan or two.

  Her hand held the pen close to the page. All that was left was to sign her name and slide the paper into the envelope.

  Her vision became blurry for a moment, her head heavier. Her mouth felt dry and her ears began to ring. It was a strange sensation, as if her body was trying to warn her, but there was nothing dangerous about applying to night school to finish up her degree. She was being silly.

  Not to mention it was time for her medication.

  She put the piece of paper down and walked into the kitchen. She poured herself a
glass of water and took three different pills, all designed to keep her sickness at bay, to keep the delusions and hallucinations in check. The side effects were numerous, enough to drive you mad on their own, but she would keep taking them so long as it meant she could live a somewhat normal life.

  She watched the girl through the windows, playing with some invisible friend outside, making her dolls jump with joy, running in endless circles.

  What the woman wouldn’t give to feel that sensation again, the wonder of childhood, when the world was alive with possibilities.

  Because now the world felt alive in a different way, as if there was another layer just beyond her reach, constantly threatening to expose itself.

  It came with the territory, she supposed. Schizophrenia was an awful condition, often severely impairing. But her therapists and doctors told her she was doing fine. It was a mild case and if she followed their directions closely, everything would work out. Brian was proud of her, he’d said. Proud that she was taking responsibility for her issues.

  As if she’d asked for them, opened some door somewhere and invited them in.

  She waited a few moments for her medicine to kick in, then finished the rest of her water. It was getting to be lunchtime and she wanted to bring the girl in and make her a grilled cheese, maybe some soup to warm her up. The woman also wanted to run outside and pick her daughter up, spin her around until they were both dizzy and breathless from laughing so hard.

  But first thing was first.

  She went back to the coffee table and signed her name onto the dotted line. She folded the slip of paper up, slid it into an envelope, and stuck on a single stamp. Now she could mail it and look forward to finishing her degree.

  The woman stood to grab her jacket and froze in place.

  She had heard a sound, something like a door slowly opening, creaking with age.