Ghost Chant
Page 6
John whispered horrible things in the dark. Deadly threats and terrible, nightmarish name calling. Cherie’s chest ached and her belly churned. She fought hard to keep the dry heaves down. Silent tears rolled down her cheeks, dampening the pillowcase, but she still kept silent. That night and every night after.
Nikki became a girl full of ghosts, moving through the days with pallid skin and empty, haunted eyes with one exception: whenever the older girl’s gaze had fallen upon her sister, there was hatred there. Pure, roiling, blackest hatred.
Finally, some years later, there was suicide.
And Cherie knew it had been her fault. All of it, her fault.
18
Cherie didn’t dare open her eyes again for a long time. She lay on her side in the fetal position, not wanting to see those shadows moving in the next bed.
She couldn’t block her ears though and she dreaded hearing the whines from her sister and the low, primal grunt of her father. Pressing her lips into a hard line, she braced for those horrific sounds, waiting to endure them and then, at last, to hear her father leave the room. Nikki would cry softly, most likely doing her best not to wake her younger sister, never knowing Cherie had been awake for all of it, every single time.
But the loathsome noises didn’t come.
She waited a while longer and, after what seemed to be a lifetime, opened her eyes to discover she wasn’t in her childhood bedroom, but in her own home.
A dream then?
All of it, a dream?
Her back to the closet, she didn’t want to turn over just yet. Maybe Warren would be beside her and maybe he wouldn’t. That part wasn’t what concerned her, though she desperately hoped he would be.
The lamp on the dresser was lit and darkness still lay beyond the windows, but it seemed the black was less black than it had been. Dark gray now.
It was nearly dawn.
Cherie closed her eyes again, trying to regulate her breathing. How had the night been so truly, truly awful?
The answer was obvious though. Childhood guilt, rearing its rotten, decayed head. She clearly had never recovered from her sister’s suicide and maybe she never would but she knew she had to try. Maybe make an appointment with a therapist. Get on medication if she had to. She didn’t know what it would take but she knew she had to do something. She knew she had to heal, somehow.
With that in mind, she sighed, opened her eyes and rolled over to face the closet. The mirrored sliding door was open, just as she remembered.
The corpse of Maggie Kerr was stuffed inside, a small, crumpled heap, like a discarded, empty cigarette pack.
Cherie caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror but she wasn’t herself at all.
She was Nikki.
Dead Nikki. Dead, monstrous, blackened corpse Nikki.
The reflection’s mouth moved oddly, as if the lips had forgotten how to work, and the voice that rose up from the throat sounded as though it were birthed from dry insect husks being crunched to powder inside a merciless fist.
“Too much pain will break your brain.”
Nikki grinned, a black ooze smearing her teeth and trickling down her chin.
Cherie screamed endlessly, until she felt something in her throat break and she could scream no more.
Leaping from the bed, she charged the closet and dragged Maggie from within by her hair.
She was done.
This nightmare was ending now. She was ending it.
The body thumped down the stairs, Cherie still grasping the hair in her fist and yanking it behind her. It was like dragging a particularly awkward sack of trash.
As she passed through the kitchen, she grabbed a knife from the block on the counter, barely pausing to do so. It was big and shiny and glinting under the bright glow of the fluorescents above.
Cherie shot the deadbolt on the front door and swung the door open so hard it crashed into the wall behind it, cracking plaster.
Across the street, two squad cars were still parked, red and blue lights spinning, turning the neighborhood into a grim carnival ride.
“I have her,” Cherie tried to shout at the officers standing in the Kerr’s driveway. Her voice barely carried. “I have the little cunt!”
The cops turned to look at her, their faces first indifferent but then changing, awestruck and morphing into something else Cherie couldn’t recognize.
As she thumped the body down her porch steps by the hair, she raised the knife in her free hand and was aware of the officers reaching for their weapons, but that wasn’t what her attention was fully focused on.
No.
Just behind them, next to the shrubs along the driveway, Nikki stood, still dead, still unforgiving and still broken beyond repair.
Cherie’s feet hit the sidewalk in front of her house at the same instant she plunged the knife into her own throat, slicing hard, severing whatever was in there to sever. Red splashed up into her face and she thought that strange. The grip she had on the child released and they both fell in unison, crumpled together in the predawn.
There was distant shouting and then nothing at all.
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