by Jeff Vrolyks
“And boys?”
“No, not boys. They’re the last thing I need right now.”
“I could swear I saw you with a guy somewhere,” Ali mused. “But it’s not like you were attacking him in the Jacuzzi or anything.” Holly flipped her off. “You have a funny way of not wanting boys.”
Holly admitted to losing control and going a little overboard. She got off the bed and paced around. “I can’t believe I kissed him like that. I just met him yesterday! I’ve never been sexual with a guy I just met.”
“No kidding, you make guys wait forever. I don’t understand how you could date a guy for six months without having sex. That reminds me, what happened with Seth? Did you tell him you’re seeing someone else?”
“Yep, when I got home from the Down Under.”
“Hay-Zeus Crispo! You don’t waste any time!”
“Ali,” Holly said thoughtfully, “I told him to take his clothes off and he wouldn’t, said it didn’t feel right. Didn’t feel right. Have you ever heard such a thing?”
“Maybe he’s gay.” Alison waved a silly hand gesture.
“He’s not gay. I’ve never been kissed like that. He… he’s unlike anyone I’ve ever known. His restraint alone turned me on. I was putty in his hands. I’ve never melted for a guy. Never. I had to hold myself back.” Alison smiled at her. “I was on his lap kissing him. Impure thoughts, Alison. Impure thoughts.” Alison giggled. “I’m telling you, he’s dangerous for me.”
“Well of course you felt like that. He’s a gentleman. A cute gentleman.”
“You know I haven’t had sex in well over a year? And I only regret that it hasn’t been longer. Stupid-ass Andrew.”
“What did I say about mentioning Andrew,” Ali scorned. “I don’t want to hear that asshole’s name.”
“I know, I’m sorry. Did I ever mention that he never gave me an orgasm? Not once in a year and a half. I was halfway there just kissing Kevin. It’s a nice change having a boyfriend who wants me to feel good instead of just him. He’s such a sweetheart. I didn’t know guys like him existed. I guess I was wrong about military guys.”
“If only someone had told you sooner.”
“You be quiet, smarty pants.”
“Did you mean it when you called him your boyfriend?”
“I never called him my boyfriend.”
Alison repeated what Holly had said. Holly remembered it differently. Holly went to the dresser and mindlessly poked around the lingerie. “It’s way too soon to call him my boyfriend. Isn’t it? I just met him yesterday. Feels like I’ve known him forever, though. Isn’t that strange? I guess when you click with someone that’s how it goes. Does it? I hope so. I really think it’s possible. Probable, even. You’ll think I’m nuts, Alison, but I had a premonition when I first saw him, of him and I. We were much older, sitting on a porch swing, my head on his shoulder while he played the guitar for me. I didn’t know he played the guitar, either. I know it was a stupid thing to think about, but it just popped in my head. A minute later when we actually met I pictured us having sex, and it was the best sex I’ve ever had.”
“Hi, Kevin,” Ali said. “You were prettier in pink.” She was referring to me changing out of the robe into my clothes. Holly rounded on her heels, gaped at me in the doorway. She was embarrassed, though not nearly as much as me. I could feel the redness in my cheeks and ears.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I thought you said to come in when I was done. I should have knocked, but the door wasn’t closed all the way.”
“No need to apologize,” Holly said. “I did say come in. Now…” Holly stepped to me. “What exactly did you hear me say, hun?”
“You had a premonition of me playing the guitar for you. I didn’t hear anything before that. I swear.”
“Okay, so we have that cleared up. You didn’t hear anything before that. What did you hear after that?” Alison laughed in her hand. Holly’s face was pink.
“Um, something about… picturing us, or something, and the best you’ve ever had, or something like that. I don’t remember.”
“Something like that, huh? Are you always this easy to read when you’re lying?” I nodded. “Well this is embarrassing,” Holly said inwardly.
I took her hand and pulled us together. I waited for her eyes to meet mine before kissing her, a soft passionate kiss. “It’s not embarrassing, you know why?” I asked. Holly shrugged. “Because I feel the same way about you. You are the sexiest woman I’ve ever seen, by a landslide. No offense, Alison.”
“None taken. She is the sexiest woman I’ve ever seen, too, since we’re all being honest.”
“Stop. Please. That’s sweet of you both, but you’re embarrassing me.”
Alison’s face lit up triumphantly. She sprang off the bed and pointed at Holly. “Five years of being your best friend and I’m unable to embarrass you, huh? Keep on trying if I please, huh? Looks like someone finally got embarrassed, sucker!” Alison danced; Holly deflated. She hung her head and nodded, mumbled something I didn’t quite catch.
Alison’s attitude changed abruptly. “I’m so sorry, honey. I didn’t mean it. I don’t know why I said that.” Alison shook her head and muttered, “Damnit, I don’t think sometimes.” Holly looked up at her. They spoke in earnest not with their mouths but with their eyes. I didn’t understand what the big deal was, but I was intrigued by how connected they were.
Holly snapped out of it at once, went to Alison and, mimicking Bugs Bunny, planted a big closed-mouth kiss on Elmer Fudd. Hands still on Alison’s face, Holly turned to me and asked what Greg had said.
“I’ll put the rest of the beer in the fridge,” Alison said. “You guys want another?”
We didn’t and Alison left the room.
Chapter 14
Down the hallway and through the kitchen Alison made her way to the sliding glass door. Did I forget to close the door? She wondered. She stuck her head out and investigated. Nothing seemed out of place or unusual, though it was hard to tell. Due to the new moon and the backyard lights being turned off, it was darker than hell—Holly must have turned off the Jacuzzi light. Her night eyes were tainted from the surreal brightness of the house.
She stepped outside and reached for the twelve-pack. No sooner than she touched the box she felt a chill run down her spine, and let go of it. In her peripherals was a discrepancy. She stood erect, looked around, but found nothing but an increased heart-rate.
“Hello? Is someone out there?”
She grabbed the Corona box, tucked it under an arm and looked off into the night once again. She sensed being watched, vaguely at first, but the sensation intensified by the moment. Her attention was drawn to the shadowy shed, which was a big black shapeless mass; and as nonsensical as it was, it overwhelmed her both physically and emotionally. Her heart was at a gallop staring at it. She remained static and honed her senses, stubborn night-eyes refusing to cooperate. A humid breath of air tingled the nape of her neck. The contradiction in temperatures startled her; terrifying her was the putrid stench attached to it, like rotten meat.
A knee-buckling jolt of fear rattled her to the core. She dropped the box of beer, which crashed on the concrete patio loudly. The tortured wail of the Corona’s masked a sound, she was sure of it. Something like a snicker. Instinctively she ducked and turned, expecting to encounter someone. Or something.
Nothing. Impossible.
After spinning around frantically and finding more of the same empty darkness, she dashed inside and closed the door, this time locking it. She peered into the void, reasoning with herself to dismiss what she had perceived, what she had heard, what she had felt. The beer continued hissing on the patio. She decided against retrieving them.
She wondered if she was being watched. “Nah,” she said. But her gut disagreed. The tangle of nerves writhing in her belly guessed that it that it wasn’t just a single set of eyes on her, either. And somehow she felt its gaze. It wasn’t just in her mind. Concentrated warmth drifted acros
s her skin like an invisible beam of molesting heat, gliding down her neck and slowing near her breasts. Reflexively she crossed her arms over her chest. Against her wrist was a rapid heartbeat. The warmth then drifted down her abdomen and toward her loins.
Alison dashed into the kitchen, sweeping a hand across her torso for traces of heat or anything material that contributed to her sensation of being fondled. At the fridge she checked back, expecting to find someone, aware of how absurd that seemed.
My mind is playing tricks on me, that’s all it is.
But it wasn’t her mind toiling, it was that damned tangle of nerves in her stomach. The first hint of a panic attack stole over her like the hungry and perverted gaze that incited it. Her lungs constricted, breaths shallow and starved. She was getting dizzy and feared losing consciousness.
The panic attack was in full bore now. It felt like a three-hundred-pound man was sitting on her chest. She tilted her head back to better breathe. Like a fish out of water she gasped desperately for air. She faltered back against the cluttered fridge door, displacing a picture, Pooh magnet, and several magnetic letters.
Among other cutesy doodads, Holly had a magnetic alphabet on the fridge (outliving its novelty days after purchase). She last arranged the tiles upon returning from a god-awful date, spelling GUYS SUCK. It remained for weeks. Holly grew tired of being reminded of the unsavory date and rearranged them to read POOH LOVES YOU. Since then, the magnetic alphabet hadn’t been touched. Until now.
Alison crouched to pick up the Polaroid of Kloss—arm affectionately around Holly—as well as the Pooh magnet that held it up. Her hand was trembling. She concentrated on her lungs, willing them to relax, envisioning them opening and closing, air in, air out. She pondered telling Holly of the incident (which felt a lot more real than it would sound), while searching for tangible evidence to substantiate her paranoia. Other than her panic attack, there was none.
An uneventful moment passed and her fear was waning, panic-attack subsiding, lung fetters loosening. Before returning to Holly’s room she would check the backyard—safely behind a locked door, of course—and maybe turn on the flood light to get a better look. Persevering would put this behind her.
She returned to the door, taking comfort in it being locked. She located the flood-light switch. She transferred the Polaroid from left hand to right and touched over the switch, returned focus to the backyard. She immediately withdrew from the light-switch. Something was unquestionably out there. Something real. And no way in hell did she want a better look at it. Her only thought was that she needed to tell Holly.
She strode through the kitchen. Still holding the magnet and photo, she had a sudden and irrational urge to take the second to re-hang it. So she did. The photo returned as the fridge’s centerpiece, below POOH LOVES YOU and above the remaining lettered tiles, and she continued on. The first barefooted step of her stride rooted firmly to the wooden floor. The irrational urge returned, a fucking compulsion. It pervaded her, controlled her, a beckoning to return the alphabet magnets on the floor to the fridge. She hated herself for it and tried ejecting it from her mind. Her foot trembled forward and re-rooted. She had never before been obsessive-compulsive, but damned if she wasn’t suffering from it right now.
She cursed herself and turned around, knelt to the sonofabitch magnets on the floor. Five magnetic letters were strewn in a sort of line. The farthest was magnet-side up, ominously black and secretive, like the backyard had been before it had been perverted by reflective yellow eyes staring at her. She scooped up four tiles, stopping short of the fifth and last. With her pinky-nail she flipped over the unknown tile.
Someone once theorized that a myriad of monkeys could type the entire works of Shakespeare given enough time; that is to say, coincidences do happen. Alison kept that in mind when she read what the five letters spelled.
Chapter 15
I sat beside Holly at the edge of her bed, hand in hand. Before I told her what Greg had said, I kissed her cheek. She responded with a kiss of her own. A lingering one. We then embraced. Had I really just met this girl yesterday? It seemed impossible.
“I don’t know what to make of it,” I began, “but it isn’t as bad as I expected. It was about a stupid board game, of all things.” Her face soured. Our fun was cut short because of a kid’s game? It said. “A couple of kids were playing with a Ouija Board and it wasn’t doing much. Yes and no responses to their questions, some gibberish here and there.”
“Well yeah, it’s a friggin’ Ouija Board, what did they expect? Your friend called for that?”
“Greg’s step son said it eventually began working. Actually, he said it worked very well. The indicator moved fast, stopping directly on top of specific letters. The kid told Greg, so Greg watched for himself. No big deal, he thought. I left the house to meet the tow-truck driver at Mike’s Hyundai. The kid claimed it stopped working when I left. Still not a big deal.”
She shook her head and sighed, then suggested we go back to where we left off in the Jacuzzi. I liked the idea but wasn’t done with the story. “Hold on, there’s more. It gets a little weird.”
* * *
Alison moved swiftly into the long and narrow hallway with its glossy white marble floor gleaming blinding white light. Short bloodwood stands topped with black granite countertops lined the inner wall, positioned directly in front of each bedroom door. Delft pottery and antiques topped them. A gold-framed Victorian mirror hung above each of the five stands. At the far end of the hallway was her reflection from the largest of the gold-framed gaudy mirrors, showing herself to be twice the actual distance; she was a teensy smudge of a reflection in a never ending reflecting hallway.
She padded briskly down the hall.
The smudge of Alison, moving with the same urgency in the opposing direction, grew steadily, still too distant to appreciate, but close enough that she now saw a second smudge, and this one was much larger and black. She squinted her eyes nearly shut, dreading what she’d see if she didn’t. Her panic attack had returned in full. Blood was draining out of her head. She grew dizzy, escalating with each step of her long stride. Her lips, ears, and extremities were falling into a blood-deprived sleep as she became crippled with terror.
* * *
“When I returned to Greg’s later, the Ouija Board started right back up. Greg observed it doing exactly that. It went from not working, to working, to not working, to working, synchronized with my arrivals and departures from the house.”
Hurried footsteps down the hallway entered my awareness.
“Hmm, did he say what it was spelling?”
“Yeah, that’s why I’m not too worried about it. Half of it was gibberish, repeating the same five letters.” Alison reached the open bedroom door, gripping both sides of the door jamb. She was pale, wide-eyed, and gasping for breath. She looked down the empty corridor with two perfectly round eyes. We sensed her but were oblivious of the urgency. “It did however spell REED, my last name.”
Holly looked to the doorway as she asked, “What letters were they? The five.”
“E-A-T and H-D. Eat and H-D. Mean anything to you?”
“Death! It spelled death!” Alison cried.
The Ouija Board spelled the same word over and over again: EATHD, EATHD. DEATH, DEATH, DEATH.
What sounded like a single syllable word was being repeated in a raspy bass-heavy tone. Possibly the word Best. “Accept a collect call from, Best… Best… Best... Best. Accept a collect call from, Death… Death…Death…Death.”
It had been death all along.
Alison gasped so profoundly, so dreadfully sharp that it tore me from my nightmare and plunged me into hers. Her face had warped and contorted with the expectation of being killed. She attempted to point a finger at the window behind us but fell short as she lost consciousness.
Falling backward from the doorway as if someone had removed batteries from her, she hit her head smack dead on the marble floor, shattering the silence with a nasty skull-
splintering crack.
Chapter 16
What a gorgeous sunset, Kloss thought as he sipped coffee on the terrace. Better enjoy it while it lasts: two weeks until the big tour begins.
Kloss was accustomed to traveling, but that didn’t mean he liked it. His heart was in Sacramento and he’d always prefer the comforts of routine he developed at home. But when he’d step on stage and feel the energy of ten thousand screaming fans, it always reminded him of why he got in the business to begin with. He had planned on taking the summer off from touring to write new material for his third album, but his little sister negotiated a lucrative contract, and somebody had to pay the staggering bills for his new home and lifestyle.
As far as Holly goes, Kloss’s only regret is that he didn’t integrate her into the band sooner. Lately he began worrying she would pursue other interests, and God knows she’s bright enough to achieve success in just about any endeavor. As VonFurenz’ popularity grew, so did Holly’s workload. It became that Holly worked seven days a week, sunrise till sunset (and then some). Something had to give. In came Alison, a godsend. He saw Ali as the glue that held everything together. If he or a band member took issue with Holly’s management, they could go to Alison and she always found a way to sugarcoat it before packaging it just right for Holly. Somewhat of a liaison she had become, between the band and everyone else.
Holly was Kloss’s only living relative in the United States. Until she became a woman, Kloss was her brother in the literal sense only. Being six years Holly’s senior, he had his hands full being her father and mother (their grandma was basically the appropriations committee and occasionally the supreme court). Kloss fielded all questions motherly. There’s nothing pleasant about having your sister ask questions like, How are babies made? and Am I really going to be bleeding down there? and Kloss, what’s a dike? (a beloved insult from every kid who learns you’re Dutch). But when a girl has no parents, no real friends (due to frequent moves), and a senile grandmother, what alternative was there? He alone was her family. He raised her, and loved her as both his sister and daughter.
