by Simon Holt
“So that’s it? That’s where she lives?”
“Yep. Second floor.” Aaron pulled into an alley next to the building and clicked on his flashers as he turned off the engine. They both got out of the car. Aaron removed the duffel from the backseat and slung it over his shoulder. “Remember how we’re going to play this? She won’t be expecting you, so she probably won’t realize right away that you know what she is.”
“I know,” Reggie said, a bit testily.
“I know you know,” Aaron said. “But I just want you to be prepared. It’s going to be tough for you to see her after all this time. You have to be the scared, overwhelmed, maybe even angry teenager for a bit—”
“Trust me, it won’t be hard to pull that off.”
“But you have to stay in control,” Aaron continued. “Make her think that you trust her while I charge the blanket. Then I’ll be there to—”
“Yeah, I got it. Let’s do this.”
Reggie strode around the corner of the alley and up the front stoop, Aaron close on her heels. Reggie scanned the names on the buzzer, then let out a mirthless chuckle. Of course there was no Halloway.
“I don’t even know what she’s calling herself these days,” she said.
“It’s Stroud,” said Aaron. “Rebecca Stroud.”
Rebecca. It was her grandmother’s name. Reggie didn’t know where the Stroud came from. She pressed the appropriate button and waited.
“Maybe she’s not home yet?” she said after a few minutes of silence, but then the lilting, singsong voice that she hadn’t heard in so many, many months sounded out of the speaker.
“Hello? Who is it?”
Reggie had prepared herself for the moment when her mother opened the door to her, the moment she saw her again for the first time. But she hadn’t anticipated this, hearing the disembodied voice that sounded so much like her mother’s but had been stolen by the Vour. There was still time to run away, to jump back in the car and take off for anywhere, anywhere but here.
She felt Aaron’s fingers encircle hers. “You can do this,” he mouthed to her.
“Is someone there?” the speaker asked.
“M-Mom?” Reggie stammered. “It’s me. It’s Reggie.”
There was another long stretch of silence. Then the static of the speaker squeaked on again.
“Reggie? Is that really you?”
Reggie had to hand it to the Vour—the voice sounded teary now.
“It’s really me, Mom. Can I come up?”
“Oh my God, of course. Of course! It’s the second floor.”
A buzzer sounded, and Aaron pushed the door open. He and Reggie walked through the vestibule, past a short line of mailboxes, and up a twisty staircase lined with green carpet. They heard a door slam above them and footsteps descending, and then suddenly Reggie was in her mother’s arms, swaying back and forth as the older woman clutched her tightly.
“Oh, Reggie! I can’t believe it’s really you! Here, let me look at you.” Mom pulled away and cupped her daughter’s face in her hands.
The emotions flooded through Reggie too quickly to even register—anger, hate, wonder, grief, longing—so she just stood there and tried to stifle the primal scream she felt rising in her throat. Here was her mother; here was the Vour, just like in Henry’s fearscape. The porcelain skin, the lovely dark hair—she was the same, but for the stylish, minimalist clothing that looked much more chic than the mom clothes she used to wear. In fact, she was more beautiful than Reggie had remembered. Turning into a Vour and abandoning her family seemed to suit her.
Tears were wet on Mom’s cheeks, but Reggie knew not to trust them. Vours couldn’t cry, but they were masters of trickery: A few eyedrops in each eye would produce the same effect.
Mom drew her slender fingers down Reggie’s sunken cheeks and over her shoulders, as if trying to warm her. A spark of worry seemed to flit across her face as she examined her daughter’s sallow complexion and gaunt features. Reggie knew she looked like a heroin addict, but, in one piece of good fortune, it wasn’t like she needed to explain herself to the Vour. She could handle any fake concern it threw her way.
Mom glanced behind Reggie at Aaron, standing a few steps below.
“You remember Aaron, right, Mom?” Reggie asked. “He came with, to make sure I got here okay.”
“Of course I remember Aaron,” said Mom, beaming down at him. She extended her hand and shook his. “Now,” she continued briskly, wiping her eyes and turning back to Reggie, “you look exhausted. Come in, come in.”
She clasped Reggie’s hand and led her up to a doorway on the second floor, Aaron following behind.
“Let me hang up your coats,” said Mom, opening a closet just inside the front door. Reggie and Aaron obediently handed over their jackets, and Mom set them on hangers, but Aaron politely declined to turn over his duffel. Mom then ushered them into a large living room. Reggie stared around her; the apartment was open and light-filled, with white walls and stained hardwood floors. The furnishings were simple but tasteful, with minimal knickknacks disturbing the dust-free surfaces. Framed posters of old movies and mid-century art hung on the walls, but there were no photographs around that Reggie could see.
So this was the life her mother had been leading since she’d left. No, Reggie reminded herself, not her mother, the Vour. It was the life the Vour had chosen. Reggie had to admit it looked better than the messy, cluttered version back in Cutter’s Wedge. Once Reggie had actually saved her mother, would she even want to come back when her existence here was so much cleaner, so much simpler, so much more Vogue-worthy? She forced such thoughts out of her head.
“Come sit down, you two,” Mom said, crossing over to the plush white sofa. Reggie sat down gingerly, as if she was afraid she would stain it. She did not feel comfortable in this home. It was too sterile, like the hospital she’d just escaped from. She tried to calm her racing nerves.
Mom sat in a high-backed wing chair next to the couch, but Aaron remained standing awkwardly in the doorway.
“You guys have stuff to talk about,” he said. “I’ll just amuse myself in the kitchen or something.”
“Oh, of course,” said Mom, and she pointed to another doorway leading off from the living room. “In there. Help yourself to whatever you like. Reggie, are you hungry? Do you want anything? Water? Soda?”
A reset button that will give me a new life where my mother isn’t a monster from a hell dimension? Is that really too much to ask?
Reggie shook her head.
“I’m fine.”
Aaron disappeared, still holding the duffel bag, and Reggie and her mother stared quietly at each other for a few minutes, neither knowing what to say. Finally Mom broke the silence.
“Reggie, you must have so many questions,” she began. “I don’t know if I can give you answers, but I’ll try.”
“Well, if you’re in a sharing mood, let’s start with why. Why did you leave? Why didn’t you try to contact us? Why did you just disappear?” Reggie didn’t mean for the bitterness to seethe out so, but there was no stopping it.
“Oh, Reggie, that’s the most difficult answer, and I don’t know if you’ll understand.”
“Try me.”
Mom drew a throw pillow onto her lap and began fingering the fringe border. It was a nervous habit Reggie remembered. This Vour was very good.
“Life was getting… tough… for me,” Mom stammered.
“Life is tough for everybody,” said Reggie. “Life was pretty damn tough for me after you left. But I guess you didn’t think about that.”
“I left because I didn’t want things to be hard for you. I honestly thought it would be better—things between your father and me were getting to such a point that I was worried how it would affect you and… and Henry.” Her voice broke a little as she said her son’s name.
“There’s this thing called divorce, where you end a marriage in a legal fashion and can continue to be a part of your children’s lives. It
’s all the rage these days.”
“I deserve all of your anger, Reggie. I know I do. But it wasn’t just your father. I was feeling, I don’t know, trapped, like I was locked underground, suffocating in my life. Being a wife, being a mother, I felt like I was in prison.”
This is it, thought Reggie. The wiliness of the Vour beginning to show itself. Preying on Reggie’s private fears that she was the reason her mother had left, that her mother didn’t love her, that it was all her fault. But she wasn’t going to let it wreck her. She kept her gaze steady.
“Go on.”
“So I left before I broke, before I did something that I couldn’t take back.”
Mom knelt down in front of Reggie and took her hand. She stared pleadingly up into her daughter’s eyes.
“I want you to be able to forgive me,” she said.
Reggie saw movement in the doorway behind her mother.
“Can you? Can you ever forgive me?”
Reggie took Mom’s hands in her own, pressing her thumbs against her wrists.
“I love you, Reggie.”
“NOW!” Reggie shouted.
Aaron burst through into the room and threw the blanket over Mom’s head, wrapping her tightly in it.
“What the—?” Mom yelled, but stopped as the charges began to lick her skin. Then her yells turned to wails. “Ow! Ow, help! Get this off of me! Oh, it hurts!”
“You’re not going to torment my family any longer, you soul-sucking bitch,” said Reggie, squeezing the Vour’s pulse. Its arms were twitching violently from the pain of the cold shocks. Reggie shut her eyes and waited for the blackness to close in.
But it didn’t. The Vour kept seizing, kept shouting and thrashing against Aaron, who tried to keep the blanket touching its skin.
“Help me! I’m being attacked! Reggie, please, make it stop! Make it stop!”
Reggie opened her eyes and looked at Aaron, horrified.
“It’s not working,” she said.
“I gathered,” said Aaron through gritted teeth. “The blanket must be malfunctioning, or I didn’t charge it long enough—”
The Vour screamed in agony.
“Let her go,” Reggie shouted above the shrieks. “She’s weak at least. We’ll tie her up and figure out something else.”
Aaron loosened his grip, and the Vour whipped off the blanket, then lay huddled on the floor, wailing and continuing to twitch periodically. Reggie had expected the shocks to leave black marks, but the Vour’s skin was covered in red welts. Tears streamed from its eyes, across its face, into its hair. Real tears.
“Oh, no.” Reggie cupped her hand over her mouth. Her brain was like mush—she couldn’t be seeing this. This couldn’t be true. “No, it’s not possible….”
“What? What is it?” Aaron rose and followed Reggie’s gaze. He caught her meaning immediately.
“Reggie, I—”
“She’s not a Vour. She wasn’t taken.”
“Reggie, maybe you should sit down.” Aaron reached for Reggie’s arm but she shook him off.
“I was so stupid. I wanted to believe that she… but she’s not…”
“Reggie, please.”
“She’s human.”
12
Reggie continued to stare at her shaking mother, and Aaron continued to stare at Reggie. They remained like that for a long time, until Mom’s spasms and her breathing relaxed. Slowly she pushed herself up into a sitting position, using the couch for support. Her eyes were bleary with tears and smudged makeup, and she looked at her daughter with a mixture of horror, fear, and repulsion.
“What did you do to me?” she gasped. “Did you try to electrocute me? Did you come here to kill me?”
Reggie couldn’t reply. She gaped at her mother, the comprehension of reality still working its way through her mind.
“Answer me!” her mother screamed, and she burst into a fresh round of tears. Aaron knelt by her side.
“No, we weren’t trying to kill you. We thought you were a—” But his explanation was cut short as Mom shoved him away with such ferocity he nearly smacked his head on the coffee table.
“Get away from me!” She scrambled up onto the couch and folded herself into its farthest corner.
Finally Reggie seemed to snap to attention.
“I’m sorry, Mom. We made a mistake. We thought you were something else.”
“You thought I was something else? What does that mean, Reggie?”
“It means, we thought you were a monster, or possessed by one anyway… a demon. I’ll explain, but—”
Mom stared incredulously at her daughter.
“Are you on drugs, Regina?”
Reggie couldn’t help exhaling a laugh.
“You know, sometimes I wish I were.”
“It’s true, Mrs. Halloway… er, Stroud,” Aaron cautioned. “Some pretty crazy stuff has gone down since you left.”
“That I can see. Reggie, did your father put you up to this? Has he done something to you?”
Reggie sank back down onto the sofa.
“No, this isn’t about Dad. And I’m not crazy, or high, I promise.” She turned to Aaron. “But something’s wrong—if it’s not Mom, who’s the Vour?”
“Quinn could have been wrong,” Aaron offered.
“Maybe. But I think we should get out of here. I have a bad feeling.”
“You’re not going anywhere, young lady, until you tell me what the hell is going on.”
Reggie wheeled on her mother.
“Don’t you dare ‘young lady’ me. Clearly my emotional maturity level is higher than yours.”
“Is that what this is about? You want revenge because I left? You are on something, aren’t you? I didn’t want to say anything when I first saw you, but your appearance…”
“I told you, we thought—”
“Yes, I heard you. You thought I was a demon.”
“Possessed by a demon,” Aaron corrected. “But, uh, that’s really neither here nor there….”
“You’re both insane.” Mom looked from Reggie to Aaron and back. “I don’t know what’s going on. I think I should call a doctor. Or the police.”
“Mom, I will tell you everything you want to know, but we need to get out of here.”
“I’m certainly not leaving this house with you.”
“Is everything all right, darling?”
Reggie and Aaron whirled around to see a tall, well-dressed Indian man in the entranceway. He hung his overcoat in the hall closet and strode into the living room. Reggie didn’t know how long he had been standing there.
“Oh, Avi, thank God you’re here.” Mom stood and ran around the side of the couch into the man’s arms. He kissed her warmly on the lips, at first ignoring the two teenagers standing there. He wore a trim three-piece gray suit and silk silver tie; next to Reggie’s pencil-skirted mother, he was like the other half of a salt- and pepper-shaker set, and the apartment around them was the tastefully set table.
Mom was still visibly shaken, and the man regarded her uneasily.
“You’ve been crying, Rebecca. And your face is all red. What’s the matter?” His voice was velvety and had just a twinge of a British accent. He pulled a handkerchief from his inner jacket pocket and wiped the tears from Mom’s cheeks. It was a tender, intimate gesture, Reggie noted, and not one she could ever recall having passed between her two parents. Some of Mom’s tension seemed to ebb away at the man’s touch. So, Mom had a boyfriend.
He now turned to Reggie and Aaron, looking them up and down suspiciously. Reggie felt a prickle at the back of her skull under his cold gaze.
“Avi, this is my daughter, Reggie,” Mom said. “She—she found me.”
“Oh, I know who she is.” Avi gave Reggie a twisted smile. She and Aaron began to back away.
“What? How can you know that?” Mom asked.
“The resemblance, of course.” His answer was easy, but his voice had lost its creaminess, instead now sounding cold and malevolent. He f
olded his arms close around Mom’s waist, keeping her firmly between Reggie and himself. The prickle intensified: Reggie was sure this was a threat, even if her mother didn’t realize it.
“Avi, listen, something has happened. My daughter is very sick—I think I need to get her to a hospital.”
“Yes, I know the perfect place to take her. It’s a bit of a drive, though.”
Reggie felt the familiar sensation of fear and adrenaline pulsing within her, and she knew Aaron was feeling it, too. When Quinn had shown up here a few weeks earlier, it hadn’t been Mom that he had sensed; there had been someone else in the apartment. Someone who, perhaps, had been keeping tabs on her mother. Someone who was possessed by a demon.
“So you’ve been holding her here this whole time?” Reggie asked.
Avi laughed at her, a thin, weaselly chuckle.
“Hardly. She’s stayed of her own volition. I mean, who wouldn’t? Great apartment, great city, great boyfriend, great life. Certainly much better than the one she had before.”
“What are you talking about, Avi?” Mom asked.
“But why?” Reggie continued. “Why bother? Surely Vours have better things to do than play house with desperate, middle-aged women.”
“Reggie!” Mom exclaimed. She tried to disengage herself from Avi’s arms, but he kept hold of her. Still, she seemed unaware of the danger she was in.
“You know, we were afraid it was going to be hard to find you again,” Avi replied. “It was so considerate of you to deliver yourself right to us.”
“Would someone please tell me what’s going on?” Mom demanded. “Ow, Avi, you’re hurting me.”
“Let her go,” Reggie said.
“Sure. If you come quietly, I’ll let them both go.” Avi’s eyes flicked toward Aaron.
Aaron tensed, but said nothing. Mom sputtered more questions, but Reggie saw the confusion and fear begin to register in her face as she struggled against Avi’s strong embrace. Reggie had no doubt he would kill her mother if it came to it, but for right now he still needed her as leverage.
