by Pete Kahle
There the house went again, drifting even farther away.
Dear God, what was he thinking in wanting to come here?
Hey, who was he to judge? That wasn't a rose garden out there near his backyard; it was a goddamn cemetery full of children his mother had killed. Was his life any saner than that of the awful black man and his boy?
Of course not.
Well, then, giddy-up, my good man. Time's a wastin'. You snooze, you lose. Someone else might already be on their way here to seize this wonderful "moment" out from under your nose. Then you'll have to go back to that shit house of yours and continue living that shit life you had with that shit mother. Is that what you really want?
David had no idea his inner voice could be so persuasive, but it was right. Regardless, he still needed to take some time to catch his breath, or he wasn't going to be catching anything other than a terminal nap right here on the fuckin' ground.
Catch it when you're dead! Now, vamoose!
Again, that mysterious inner voice made a sound argument. David tightened his grip on his sweaty crutches and started hobbling across the field towards what he believed was eternal enlightenment.
# # #
V
Jo dreamed. It started out as a replay of an event from their past, where she and David were in the attic and she was teaching him his ABCs, and how to make words and sentences out of them. Then the dream elements took hold. The television that was on in the background had a horrific movie playing that concerned four sisters who were fighting body-hopping demons that were raping and pillaging everyone in their home town.
Jo, who was now fourteen, reached for the television and tried to turn it off or turn it to another channel. David, who was still seven, continued to sit on the floor and write the alphabet on yellow lined paper behind her. The television wouldn't respond, and she grew more frightened at the new scenes the screen began to display, this time of a bridge, and the part human, part arachnid-like thing that lurked underneath. It acted as a watchdog to another dimension where the Devil lived. Finally, she was able to get the channel turned, but it was like lifting a hundred pound weight. To her horror, she saw her hand had been cocooned to the knob by spider silk, and there were a million little black dots crawling all over it.
She tried to yank it loose, but the silk was too strong.
Another series of images played on the screen. It was another movie, but it didn't start from the beginning. The action just kicked in and Jo had the sensation of hours passing in the blink of an eye. There was a mountain, and a young girl being chased up it by a similar creature from the first film, except this one was invisible.
As the color, the movie's pace, the facial expressions of fear on the girl, and the physical form of the beast became more extreme and more exaggerated, the reality of the film's events began to bleed into Jo's dream reality, making her terror more palpable because now she too was being chased up that mountain by the monster.
Incapable of distinguishing where she was, or why she was there, she chose to simply close her eyes. When she looked behind her, she saw an extremely attractive woman sitting in a rocker behind David, sitting stock still, hands on her lap, knees together. The dress she wore was pure black, form fitting, and stopped just above the ankles. There were moments when it wasn't a dress but part of the woman's body.
Because she wasn't allowed to look at her mother's face, Jo focused on the red high heels the woman wore, and, like the dress, it too sometimes looked like it was part of her.
When this woman abruptly left the rocker behind, and stooped next to David's ear, putting a hand up to her mouth in a move that obviously indicated she was going to confide something to him that she wasn't supposed to know, Jo already knew what she was about to say.
"…the problem with love is that you're always at its mercy…”
David was now at his present age of fourteen and the yellow paper he had been writing the alphabet on had become shit-stained toilet paper.
When the woman-mother motioned for David to stand, Jo knew he was going to be taken away, never to be seen again. She was now wavering between the age of seven and fourteen, seated on the floor with her legs splayed out, trapped in that position, trapped in the act of watching her brother accompany this familiar stranger to the attic door.
Jo cried, "Don't take him!"
The strange mother put her hands on David's shoulders. Jo saw how big they were, how long the fingers had gotten, how red her nails had turned. Growing redder and brighter by the moment until the color literally bled onto David's shoulders, then dripped down his arms and off his fingertips where it pooled quietly on the floor next to him. Yet it wasn't a complete liquid her mind perceived trailing down his body, it was more like liquid electricity, liquid lightning, a bloody electrical storm.
"Don't worry,” the mother spoke. "I'll come back for you, too."
She opened her eyes wearily, unsure as to what had just happened, or what she had just experienced. When she rolled over and felt the pain on the back of her head, she presumed she had passed out. As for that dream, which she could still recall with extreme clarity, she presumed that too had something to do with her head trauma.
Anxious to know how long she had been unconscious, Jo looked for her watch, but realized she had left it in the bathroom, hanging on the back of the door.
When she ran up to get it, and saw how dark it had gotten, she immediately thought of Martin's body. She also noticed the blinds on the bathroom window hadn't been drawn. Her mother never failed to draw the blinds in the house when it got dark. And as she ran to the secret closet, she discovered the blinds everywhere else in the house were also still up.
Very unusual, but she didn't want to think about it until after she got Martin in the ground. However, she was forced into thinking about them when she entered the closet and found the trapdoor wide open.
She made a move towards the hole.
The stench that wafted up made her think twice about going down. This odor was different from all those other foul odors she had grown accustomed to over the years. To put it bluntly, this new stench smelled like death, and not the kind of death she was used to smelling either. This one brought to mind images of bloodletting. When that happened, Jo finally understood what had occurred down there, why her mother had attacked her so viciously with the pail, and, if she hadn't been unconscious for too long, what was probably occurring at this very moment, in her mother's bedroom.
So, David had been right all along. She wasn't sick. She was evil. Without any warning, her train of thought shifted into a mode that was more geared towards revenge than the self-preservation she always envisioned herself falling into once circumstances within the household finally reached their peak.
Two things occurred to her—David, and whether he was still alive, and the gun she had buried in the graveyard, when they first moved in. She raced out of the closet, grabbed the flashlight from the drawer in the kitchen, and raced out to the graveyard. She went to the mound with the rock that had the name Glock on it, and dug furiously in the cold, hard earth with her hands until she discovered a plastic bag that was taped up so tight, it had conformed to the shape of the object in it. And that object looked exactly like a handgun. As she held it for that brief second before she tore the bag apart, the image of her hand webbed up in spider silk bloomed unexpectedly in her mind. It grew stronger as the remnants of the taped bag refused to leave her fingertips.
"Don't worry. I'll come back for you, too."
"Yeah? The fuck you will," she muttered as she violently discarded the sticky remnants into the air behind her with one sweeping whip of her hand. The gun she now held was a Glock. At least, that's what her boyfriend at the time had called it when he gave it to her a few years ago, before her mother's domination of her worsened and she was taken out of the school system.
His name was Davis, and he was the only boyfriend she had ever had. Surprisingly, he wasn't abusive, but he lied a lot, and she never k
new if what he told her about his father being in the military and how he had gotten hold of the Glock was ever true. Still, she liked the word, and that's what she continued to call it. He had even showed her how to fire it, how to pop the magazine out, and how to load bullets into the magazine.
She didn't like guns, never wanted it in the first place, and never thought a time would come where she would need to use it, but Davis had insisted it made for good protection, and in her household that meant something. So, every place they moved she brought the Glock along, always stashing it in the one place her mother would never find it, which was anywhere outdoors. The instant she was given her mother's duties, she knew just where she could hide it from now on where it would never be found.
After marching up the stairs and coming across the open door to the attic, she lifted the safety on the Glock. While creeping past, she peered into the darkness above, hoping to see some sign that David was well. She almost whispered his name, but decided not to. Maintaining the upper hand in this situation was just slightly more important. She crept to her mother's room and placed an ear to the closed door.
She cracked the door and kicked it open. Her mother was lying on the bed, pillow propped up behind her head, eyes closed, with a half empty bottle of booze languishing at her hip.
A bottle of pills sat on her night stand.
But Jo wasn't transfixed by any of these developments. She was instead held in a state of fascination by her mother's face. A face she hadn't really seen in a long, long time and to her surprise the woman wasn't as ugly as she had always pictured. She was actually quite attractive, which didn't make any sense. How could someone who looked this pretty be so cruel?
The magnitude of such a question made her head swim. It was still swimming when an image floated through her peripheral vision. She glanced at the stairs leading to the attic, thought of David, and then hollered his name at the top of her lungs. If there wasn't any response from him after that, it was a sure bet he was no longer alive.
Nothing but mind-numbing silence.
Jo stared angrily at her mother, at the vodka next to her, and finally at the pills on the night stand.
"YOU FUCKIN' BITCH!" she yelled. "YOU GODDAMN FUCKIN' ASSHOLE!!"
Her suicide had cheated her out of retribution. Jo raised the gun, pointed it at her face anyway. What good would that do killing a dead body? She dropped her arm and rubbed at the tears falling down her cheeks.
The phone next to the pills rang.
Jo didn't make any move to answer it. She had always been taught not to answer any phone in the house if it rang. Eventually, her mother stopped installing them, but always kept one in her room in case she ever needed to use it.
When it rang a second time, she noticed it had been placed on the corner of a neatly folded piece of paper. Printed in big, bold, red letters was, 'To My Dearest Daughter.'
As the phone rang for a third, and final time, the supposed dead body of her mother groaned. She fixed her disgusted glare on her mother's face, then her chest, and was able to notice an almost imperceptible rhythm of breathing.
Jo grabbed the note off the end table, scrunched it in her hand, then pointed the Glock steadily at the side of her mother’s head, and pulled the trigger. She twitched, then the muscles in her face relaxed. She gazed at her mother’s bloated belly, sickeningly aware of what the immediate consequences would be for the unborn she was carrying. If she had just taken a minute to think things through…
Too late now, though.
In the long run, killing it was the best thing that could have happened to it. Odds were she probably saved it from a life full of abuse and deformity.
Jo started to retreat from the room, backing up slowly at first, trying not to let the death of her unborn sibling affect her. She got as far as the doorway when the grief became too heavy to bear. She slid to the floor and wept.
The phone rang again.
Maybe this was a sign. Maybe she was supposed to answer it. Maybe this was the time when she was supposed to let in the outside world. Maybe this was her moment.
Jo reluctantly stood herself up, went over to the phone and answered it. But before she had a chance to say anything, she heard static and a voice trying to break through. " . . Jo . . . I'm . . .”
"David?"
“. . . love . . . you . . .”
"My God, where are you?!"
“. . . house . . . don't . . . co . . . s-s-s-st . . . away . . .”
"I can't hear you," she said aloud.
The line went dead.
"David? David?"
The dial tone returned.
Immensely confused now, she took the phone away from her ear and stared at it. That couldn't have been him. Well, then he couldn't be lying dead in the attic, could he? Where the hell did he find a phone? She raced out of the room and into the attic. It was empty; and with no signs of a struggle, and without a single trace of blood, she had to assume he must’ve gotten away. But where the hell did he go? Some place with a phone, obviously.
The suicide note was still in her hand. She didn't consciously realize it until she unconsciously tightened her fist around it. Never was she going to read it. In fact, to make sure she didn't, she marched down to the kitchen, stuffed it into the garbage disposal, and ground it up into tiny bits.
She was starting to become very tired again. With all the adrenaline coursing through her system, she knew this sluggishness wasn't normal. By now she suspected her head injury was more serious than she had first thought. She needed to find David. She needed to check the secret cellar. She needed to go look outside. There was too much that needed to be done for her to fall unconscious again.
"Goddammit!"
Her head swam, more vigorously this time. She knew what was coming, and quickly laid down on the floor. Right after the world around her went dark, she felt someone shaking her shoulder. When she opened her eyes and rolled over, a boy was kneeling next to her. She knew it was David, but couldn't understand why he looked so normal now.
"Jo, I know you're gonna hate to hear this, but I'm dead."
"Dead?! What are you talkin' about? You're right here in front of me."
He then peered in horror over her shoulder. Jo cocked her head just a little bit, and was able to see how the rest of kitchen had disappeared, its landscape replaced with night, swaying trees, a long drive that snaked up a steep hill, and a huge, ominous house that seemed to be literally constructed out of darkness.
"Don't look!" David snapped.
She had no intention to. She was too horrified. At least, that was what she told herself, but the reality of the situation said she was going to look, and that she was going to like what she saw.
David placed his hands on her face, turned her head towards him. The connection was immediately terminated, but when she dared one last desperate glance, a maneuver David was too late in countering by sliding his hands up so her peripheral vision was completely cut off, the house showed her where it was, and the route she could take to reach it.
"Jesus Christ, what was that?!"
When his lips moved, the static she heard over the phone poured out. He seemed unaware of the bizarre effect, and continued to speak. When she saw the awareness of what was happening finally dawn on him, he gripped her cheeks harder and started to mouth something else, and the more he made her concentrate on his lips, the more discernable his words became, but they still didn't make any sense. “. . . stay away . . . stay away . . . stay away . . .”
# # #
VI
Jo awoke with a clear memory of what she had been dreaming, but only where the house was concerned.
All the lights were blinking when she opened her eyes, but they soon stopped once she was fully conscious again. A quick glance at the clock on the wall, above the sink, told her it was midnight already. She should be dead tired, but she wasn’t, and that was mainly due to the overpowering desire she had to pay a visit to that house from her dreams. Understanding now th
at it was a real place only a half mile from where she currently was made it even harder to resist. And resist she tried. She had never felt so overwhelmed with wanting to do something before in her life. That scared her. She wondered if this was what addiction felt like. Jo continued resisting, first by ignoring it, when that didn’t work she then decided to try distraction. She cooked herself a late supper, sat down at the table and ate it, trying to keep her mind blank. When that began to fail, she tried to replace the unnatural emotion with more intense concerns, ones born from her own mind rather than an outside one; like, now, that she didn’t have a mother, who was going to take care of her? Where would she live? How would she live? Unfortunately, every answer she came up with wasn’t hers, it was the house’s, and it kept insisting everything would be fine if she would just come to it.
She would need a flashlight.
What about the gun?
Jo made for the front door, but the telephone in her mother's room started ringing, and the lights all over the house started blinking again.
All these weird, petty distractions were starting to grate on her nerves.
"Goddammit!"
As she stomped through the kitchen on her way to end that phone's life, she came across the Glock on the counter. She couldn't remember putting it there, but there it was. In fact, she had sort of lost track of it after shooting her mother. She snatched it as she walked by and stuffed it in her back pocket. She couldn't just leave a loaded weapon sitting around the house, now, could she? What if someone broke in, or the cops showed up?
She strode into her mother’s room again and grabbed the phone, but when she went to jerk its cord out of the wall, there was no resistance. It had already been cut.
