Exit Light

by Megan Hart

  The lady’s voice stayed calm. “I’m not afraid of dogs.”

  “You would be,” the witchwoman said, “if one bit you.”

  The fear surrounding them shifted and dipped. It became fury, instead, and it pushed away the advancing dogman. The stone wall behind the dogman shimmered again. One at a time, glowing red letters appeared. EXIT. A sign, and beneath it a doorway in the stone. The woman pushed off with both feet, launched herself in a smooth, whirling circle of limbs over his head, and shot through it. She disappeared.

  She’d left him behind.

  He ran out of the shadows, out of the dungeon, out into the world beyond, but he couldn’t find her.

  “I told you,” said the witchwoman and turned to face the boy. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  The dogman snarled and slashed the air with his sharp teeth.

  And no matter how the boy tried, he couldn’t push them hard enough to keep them away.

  Tovah had too many papers to sign. Multiple copies of the same forms, reports, affidavits. Medical release forms, HIPAA information. It was never-ending. Her pen would run out of ink before she was through. Her fingers would fall off. Why couldn’t she just rubber-stamp everything, or better yet, push a button and have it all sucked into outer space?

  But no, this was the waking world, where she had to actually deal with crap like this. She sighed, scribbling on the last set of papers her lawyer had pushed across the desk toward her. Then her pen, indeed, ran out of ink.

  He had another. “Here, use mine.”

  Tovah smiled a little, taking it. “You must go through dozens every week. Well. Not like this one, I guess. This is gorgeous.”

  The pen in her hands was solid, smooth, an expensive Mont Blanc inscribed with his name. Reginald Perry. It probably cost as much as she’d spend on a month’s groceries.

  Mr. Perry’s laugh was as large and solid as his mahogany desk. “If we finally get this settlement, you’ll be able to get one of your own.”

  She didn’t have the heart to tell him she’d rather spend her money on something more worthwhile than a fancy pen. “I just want all this settled so I can get on with my life. It’s been three years since the accident. More than two since the separation. I’m ready to move on.”

  “Of course. Of course.” His look of sympathy was well practiced and probably mostly sincere.

  Tovah liked Mr. Perry, who knew his work and had made the process of suing the insurance company as easy as possible. She trusted Mr. Perry, but she was ready to be finished with this. It no longer even mattered about the money.

  “It’s a matter of being fair,” she said aloud.

  If Mr. Perry found her comment to be a non sequitur, he didn’t look confused. “Absolutely. That’s what we’re working for here.”

  She nodded and returned his pen, then stood to shake his hand. His grip was firm. She liked that he shook her hand without holding back, even though he was the sort to insist on opening doors and pulling out chairs for women. He was respectful, not condescending.

  “Thank you, Mr. Perry.”

  Mr. Perry smiled. “I believe in being fair.”

  He also believed in vacationing in the tropics, but though the first two lawyers Tovah’d spoken to had urged her to go after the throat of the insurance company and seek blood, Mr. Perry had been reasonable about what damages she should seek. Enough to cover her medical costs and compensate for future medical care. His fee might buy him airfare and a few weeks’ worth of drinks, but he hadn’t made this all about the money. He’d made it about justice.

  “I know you do,” Tovah said. “Thanks again.”

  The appointment had taken less time than she’d expected, but even so she faced rush-hour traffic, and on a Friday. TGIF. Most of the single people she knew would be heading out to the bars and clubs tonight, but Tovah relished Friday nights for the specific reason that she never went anywhere but home.

  It had been easier, during their marriage, to say her own prayers on Fridays and go to the movies or out to dinner, like “the rest of our friends,” as Kevin had said. In December Kevin put up a tree and she lit a menorah. They’d never discussed what would happen when they had kids, though she’d thought about it more frequently as the years passed.

  Now on her own, Tovah had returned to the customs of her childhood. She hadn’t seen the face of God or anything like that, and she didn’t consider herself particularly religious, but she looked forward to Friday nights, the lighting of the candles, the simple traditional words over bread and wine. If she ever regretted staying home, it was because preparing dinner only for herself sometimes seemed a waste of effort when cereal was easier and filled her stomach as well.

  By the time she got home, she was more than ready for a glass of wine and some time alone. Traffic had been horrible, the grocery store crowded. Everyone seemed frantic to be someplace else, and she was even happier to be going home to her dog, a good meal and maybe a funny movie. She’d developed a much lower tolerance for humanity’s rudeness since discovering the Ephemeros, where nothing had to be inconvenient.

  Someone was looking at the house next door. This wasn’t unusual. It had been on the market for a few months, the last occupants moving out to follow the husband’s promotion. The Realtor always had a faintly desperate smile now when she waved at Tovah as she led prospective buyers to the front door.

  Tovah glanced at the small knot of people on the front porch as she shouldered her bag and reached for the paper sack of groceries in her trunk. A man, a woman, a teenage boy and two smaller boys clustered around the Realtor, who seemed to be having trouble with the lockbox. The sound of their voices dismantling the neighborhood, the landscaping, the school system, drifted to her on the late September air. The mother thought the houses were set too close to the street. The children wanted to know if they could bring their jungle gym. The father and the teenager gave each other challenging, sullen glares, broken at last when, with an “eep” of triumph, the Realtor got the key and opened the front door.

  Tovah caught sight of the family a half hour later as she scrubbed the final stubborn feathers from the chicken she intended to cook for Shabbat dinner. They marched out of the sliding glass doors to the back deck, looked around en masse, then trooped away and out of sight to the front of the house. They hadn’t looked excited. Seasoning the chicken and putting it inside a large roasting pan along with a few small red potatoes, Tovah couldn’t blame them, really. The neighborhood was old, the houses not much like the new, fancy developments springing up all over. The houses were inexpensive by comparison to be sure, but you got what you paid for.

  “What do you think, Max? Think they’ll buy it?”

  Max perked up one floppy ear and rolled on his back for a belly scratch. Tovah rubbed his soft tawny fur. The dog grinned, tongue lolling.

  “Me neither. C’mon. Let’s get you dinner.”

  Dinner. Max was all about dinner. He leaped to his feet, tail wagging hard enough to whap Tovah’s legs as she filled his bowl. In his eagerness to get to the food, Max stepped all over her feet, his nails digging in.

  “Ouch, Max!” She limped out of the way, but the damage wasn’t permanent. He hadn’t even scratched her. “Crazy mutt, watch what you’re doing.”

  Tovah couldn’t compete with food. Stepping around the dog, she took from the freezer one of the challahs she baked eight or ten at a time and laid it out to thaw. She was just getting ready to head upstairs for a quick shower when the doorbell rang.

  It was the Realtor from next door. She smiled brightly when Tovah cracked open the door. She looked tired, despite the wide grin. “Ms. Connelly?”

  “Yes?” It shouldn’t be a surprise she knew Tovah’s name. Realtors made it their business to know neighborhoods. Still, Tovah was wary.

  “Beth Richards.” The Realtor held out a hand that Tovah reached to take automatically.

  Max nudged open the door and tried to make an escape, but Tovah grabbed his collar. Max, spotting fr
eedom, pulled. She braced herself against his weight. The rubber-backed mat beneath her moved. She stepped down, hard, and had to reach for the doorframe to catch herself before she could trip. The whole debacle took only a few seconds, but it felt like forever until she could say, “Can I help you with something?”

  Beth Richards handed Tovah a card with her picture and information on it. “I’m the agent for the house next door.”

  Tovah smiled politely. Max wouldn’t be deterred. She released his collar to let him into the yard. He wouldn’t run past the invisible fence. With a yelp, he surged past the Realtor, almost knocking her over, too.

  “Sorry,” Tovah said. “He’s a big puppy.”

  Beth Richards blinked. “Yes. St. Bernard?”

  “Yep.” Tovah looked at the card in her hand. “The Smiths moved out three months ago. I guess you’re having some trouble?”

  “It’s only a matter of finding the right family for the property, that’s all.” The Realtor sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than anyone.

  “And…is there something I can help you with?” Tovah looked past her to the yard, where Max had flopped happily into the grass and was woofing at a squirrel. “If it’s about the dog, he stays in my yard. I know he can be intimidating, but—”

  “Oh, no. The dog’s fine.” Richards smoothed a hank of fur off her skirt. “Really. It’s just that I was wondering if you’d mind keeping my card handy. In case you meet someone who’s in the market for a house like the property next door.”

  “Oh, sure. Of course.” Tovah hadn’t expected that. “I don’t know anyone looking right now, but of course I’ll keep you in mind.”

  “Thanks.” Richards had pasted her smile back on. She glanced over Tovah’s shoulder, down the hall. “You’ve done some nice things to your place.”

  “Thanks. A matter of necessity, really.”

  The Realtor looked at the wheelchair ramp on the side of the front porch. “Ah. The door was replaced to accommodate a chair?”

  She was good. Tovah could practically hear the gears turning inside her head as she assessed the “upgrades.” “Yes.”

  “Did you do extensive work inside, too? Properties with accommodations for the disabled are quite valuable.” Richards nodded firmly. “If you’re ever looking to sell—”

  “I’ll keep you in mind.” Tovah’s smile wasn’t as bright as Richards’s. “But I don’t plan on moving any time soon. Really.”

  “Right. Of course.” The Realtor backed up, looking at the new doorframe, which, with its glass side panels, was much nicer than the original had been. “Well, thanks for keeping me in mind. If you come across anyone looking, please pass my card along.”

  “I’ll do that. Max!” Tovah gestured. “Come inside!”

  Max lumbered to his feet and up the ramp. Both women moved aside to let him pass. The Realtor scraped another palmful of hair off her skirt but seemed unsure what to do with it. Tovah held out her hand for the fur. Maybe someday she’d be able to stuff a mattress with it.

  “Take care,” said Richards with a little wave. “See you.”

  Inside, Tovah tacked the Realtor’s card on the bulletin board with everything else. “Wonder how long it will take me to lose that?”

  Max woofed. She laughed. “Yeah, yeah. I know. Queen of Disorganization. That’s me.”

  She stuck another pin into the card to make sure it didn’t fall, but it would be covered in a day by something else, she was sure of it. The bulletin board was her repository for anything that didn’t fit in her junk drawer.

  “Don’t give me that look,” she told the dog, and waited for an answer.

  But of course, since this was the waking world, there was none.

  Chapter Three

  The boy had been listening to the sound of screams for a long time. When they stopped this time, he cocked his head to listen for more. And, in a moment, fresh cries echoed around him from the walls.

  He didn’t know how he’d arrived here, or how long ago, or why. He knew days passed like a string of beads, each the same and without end. He knew he was safe only from moment to moment, but he’d stopped worrying about being the next to scream.

  After a while, even terror must fade.

  Still, he was only a boy, and when he heard the sound of footsteps on the stone floor outside his door, he stood. Waited. When the shadow fell across the threshold, he shrank away from it. Away from the stink and the sound of panting, that short, sharp snorting of the dogman.

  “Go away!”

  Growling laughter greeted that command, but the dogman didn’t enter the room. The boy watched the shadow grow, stretching across the floor toward him. He took another step back, his hands flung out as though to thrust away the shadow. But he couldn’t, could he? Shove away something like that? Hadn’t he learned that already?

  “You know what you have to do,” said the witchwoman in the doorway. She wore dark denim jeans and a blue T-shirt. Her gray-streaked hair fell over her shoulders in messy waves. Her long nails clicked against each other.

  His mother had long hair, but she was not his mother. This was…someone else, someone he knew but wished he didn’t. She detached herself from her own patch of darkness and looked out into the hall.

  “Go ahead,” she urged. “Try it. See what happens.”

  The boy shook his head. Bad things happened when he tried to keep the witchwoman and the dogman away. Bad things happened to other people. “No.”

  The dogman growled again. The shadow stretched. Once, a long time ago, the boy had seen a movie about a vampire whose shadow moved when it did not. Gnarled, clutching fingers had sought to throttle a victim and pulled back before they could reach. But one day, he thought, stepping back, pushing the shadow away with his will, the dogman wouldn’t pull back.

  “He’s never going to stop or go away.” The witchwoman said this matter-of-factly.

  His teacher had spoken that way about homework and tests. But this woman wasn’t his teacher, Mrs. Bellestead, who’d kept him after class to work on multiplication, reciting the numbers over and over until at last they’d clicked. This woman moved toward him and he put out a hand to keep her at bay, too, though this effort made his arms tremble with the effort.

  “You stop,” he told her. “You stop.”

  She shook her head. Light crossed her face. Dark eyes. Red smear of a mouth. She’d been eating berries or jam. Something sticky and red. It coated her lips and teeth when she grinned.

  “I can’t stop. Neither can he. And we don’t want to.”

  “No!” cried the boy. “That’s not fair!”

  “It might not be fair,” the witchwoman said. “But it’s the truth, and you know it. So do it. Do it now! He’s coming. And he will bite you this time. I will let him bite you!”

  Her voice got high and excited. Her eyes went wide and she danced back from the doorway, hands clutched to the center of her blue T-shirt and denting the fabric. The shadow in the doorway grew. Stretched. The growling got louder.

  And the boy closed his eyes, flung out his hands and pushed.

  He pushed hard.

  He pushed for a long time, until his stomach got sick and he had to bend over to gag and choke. He fell to hands and knees on soft black sand. No more walls around him. No screams, not even his own. He wept fat, hot tears that sizzled when they hit the ground.

  “Very nice,” the woman purred. “Do it again.”

  And though it hurt him deep inside, the boy did.

  Henry Tuckens wasn’t doing any better, at least not according to the chart at the foot of his bed. Tovah wasn’t supposed to be reading the thick sheaf of papers clipped to the splintered clipboard, but after two years of visiting Henry in the same room at Sisters of Mercy Hospital, she no longer bothered with protocol.

  Catatonic schizophrenia. Whatever that meant. The doctors couldn’t seem to figure out what was going on with Henry, who swung between the extremes of mania and depression with regularity—an
d ever-lengthening bouts of catatonia in between.

  Tovah set the book she’d brought him on the nightstand. “Hey, Spider. I brought you something special. Maybe you’ll wake up and check it out.”

  Henry stared straight ahead, eyes wide but unseeing. Tovah knew he could hear her, maybe even see her, but he was locked inside his head. She tucked the blankets around him more firmly, noting the places where his limbs felt thinner. His face looked more wasted, too, the cheeks hollow and lips pale. His hair had receded, leaving his forehead high and bare and vulnerable.

  “C’mon, buddy. You can’t sleep your life away. You need to get up, get out of bed.” She took his hand, feeling the warmth there that told her he was alive, despite all appearances to the contrary. “Stop living in your dreams.”

  She turned at the sound of the scrape of soft-soled shoes in the doorway. Ava, Henry’s favorite nurse, stood with a needle in her hand.

  “Does he really need that?” Tovah asked, knowing the answer was inevitably yes. “I mean, look at him.”

  Ava grunted and moved toward the bed. She was smaller than Tovah’s five feet six inches but wiry with muscle. She could take down a patient twice her size without blinking. Tovah had seen her do it.

  “You weren’t here the last time he woke up.” Ava’s no-nonsense tone brooked no argument. “He took out three interns and broke the TV before we could wrestle him down. The interns I couldn’t give a shit about, but the TV was bitching hard to replace.”

  Tovah looked down at the man in the bed. “He doesn’t mean to. He just gets confused.”

  Ava swabbed the patch of skin on the back of Henry’s hand and slipped the drug into his veins. He barely twitched. Ava pulled the sheets tighter around him and turned to Tovah. “You staying for a while?”

  “I thought I would.”

  “We’ve got bingo going on in the rec room in about twenty minutes, if you want to join us.”

  “Thanks.” Tovah smiled. “I think I’ll pass.”