Dark Avenues

by Brian J Smith

  He was playing my parents for a couple of saps and they were buying everything he was selling just like the people who “Father” had brainwashed into believing what he’d told them. If Jared had seen what I saw in my dream, maybe he’d understand why I’d said all of those things.

  I wasn’t so sure if I could consider him my cousin anymore because this wasn’t the same Jared who always made me laugh and smile when the rest of the world didn’t. This was a doppelganger who adored a delusional star-gazing sociopath who drove all of those people into committing suicide.

  Eventually, I cried myself to sleep.

  6

  AT least my parents allowed me to eat breakfast before they decided to interrogate me the next morning.

  Instead of a piping hot breakfast, they downgraded me to a bowl of Boo-Berry and a glass of orange juice. The bags under Mom’s eyes told me that Jared had strung her along throughout a good part of the night.

  I kept my arms laced across my chest and gazed down at their reflection in the tabletop. All of the anger and guilt inside pressing me inside of its heavy wet folds, strangling my throat and sucking the air out of lungs; I would’ve watched paint dry–or anything along those lines–if I could to avoid their penetrating gaze. An uncomfortable silence permeated around the house save for the tick of the grandfather clock standing in the far left corner of the living room and the occasional shift and sip.

  Dad set his cup back onto the table and slammed his fist hard onto the surface. Mom and I flinched; a small river of coffee sloshed around inside of his cup and spilled onto the table. He didn’t bother to clean it up and he wasn’t about to ask Mom to do it either.

  “What were you thinking?” Mom sighed. “How could you say something like so spiteful like that to him?”

  “We told you all of that in secrecy,” He said, then shrugged his shoulders. “but I guess we can’t trust you to keep a secret. Can we?”

  Two days after she married Bruce Fields, Ruth called my mother and told her she had an affair with an old boyfriend she met back in college. It stirred a lot of speculation about whether or not Bruce was actually Jared’s father but we were sure that he would’ve loved him no matter what. I was told to keep quiet about it since I’d walked mistakenly walked into the living room while Mom was on the phone talking to her about it.

  After she was done talking to Aunt Ruth, they sat me down and told me and ever since then I hadn’t said anything.

  “How would you feel if someone had said that about us?”

  I wrapped my arms around my stomach and hugged myself. I sucked a cloud of air deep into my lungs and then back out to slow down the river of anxiety flooding through my veins.

  I licked my lips and sighed. Mom dabbed at her eyes with a crumpled ball of tissue, her face and eyes red from both crying. I couldn’t stand to see them mad at me any longer.

  “I didn’t mean to say that to him but I had my reasons.”

  “There’s no reason for you to act like this just to get our attention. We love each an–”

  “What the fuck are you trying to say?”

  “Watch your language.” Dad said through clenched teeth. “You’re already skating on thin ice, little lady.”

  I bit down on my bottom lip and sighed.

  “I’ve never done anything like this to vie for your attention before.” I said, giving my left shoulder a slight shrug. “Why would I do it now? Of all the times of that Jared has spent the night here, why would I do it now?”

  Mom frowned, her face creased with confusion.

  “I don’t know who the hell that is upstairs but that’s not my cousin.”

  “How could you say that?”

  “I’m telling you the truth.” I said, then realized what I said. “I’m not saying that Jared isn’t my cousin but he hasn’t been acting like it since we went over there.”

  “Where did you go?”

  Dad rose up out of his chair and planted his hands firmly against the edge of the table, his jaw tightened with anger. He sighed deeply and, his mouth set in a hard line, waited.

  “We were riding our bikes and we stopped at the to–”

  A loud terrifying scream burst from somewhere upstairs, tearing at the thick cloud of awkwardness filling the house. We flinched, bracing the arms of our chairs and glanced up at the ceiling. I leapt out of my chair and ran upstairs, ignoring my parents’ protests; his screams grated against my nerves like the sound of nails gliding down a blackboard.

  I was halfway up when I realized where it was coming from.

  “Let’s go together, Father.” A familiar voice bellowed behind my bedroom door. “Take me ha-ahh take my hand so we can cross toge-ahh!”

  As I cleared the top step, my heart thudding with shock, a thick haze of licorice stung my nostrils. I braced myself and rammed my shoulder against my door; it flew open with a splintery wooden crack. The knob struck, sending a pair of picture frames sliding down the wall and onto the floor.

  When Dad and I stepped inside first, we filled the doorway, blocking Mom’s view. We gasped, our faces twisted by both terror and surprise.

  Jared sat Indian-style in the middle of my blood-soaked bed and bellowed a loud cry, one that spoke of pain and pleasure. He held his left foot in his left hand, his hair stuck to the reflective sheen of sweat glinting off of his brows. His deep-set brown eyes, now wide with horror, beamed with the same zealous release I’d seen on the faces of the ghosts that haunted my dreams.

  He grunted, tugging at his foot. He raised his fist, wielding a bloody toenail pinched between the blocky jagged teeth of a rusty old pair of pliers and laughed at the ceiling. When I heard the soft squish of loose flesh, my heart skipped a beat and a fresh carpet of gooseflesh tickled my arms.

  Laughing, he stretched his arm over the left side of my bed and dropped the freshly-plucked toenail onto a small pile of other toenails stacked on the floor; the first four toes on his left foot resembled tiny mushrooms of bright pink flesh. Mom’s eyes widened with horror as she snatched her breath and clamped her hand across her mouth to stifle the next.

  “We’re almost there, Father.” Jared said in a booming voice.

  Dad hurried across the room toward the other side of my bed and screamed Jared’s first and last name in a strict authoritative voice. Mom pulled me back into the hallway, screams of fear still erupting from our mouths in a continuous string of sporadic alien dialogue.

  When Jared clamped the pilers onto the big toe on his right foot, Dad knelt onto the bed beside of him, wrenched the pilers from his grip and pinned him onto the bed; the pilers made a drunken descent toward the floor and slid over beside of my dresser on the right side of the room. Jared thrashed to free himself from Dad’s grasp and snapped his teeth at the air between their faces. A deep animalistic growl issuing from deep inside of his throat, he nipped and missed Dad’s left cheek by three inches.

  Dad drew his hand back and slapped Jared across the face, the sound whipping across the house like a gunshot in an empty parking lot. Mom leaned her head against my chest and watched through wet blurry eyes as Jared flung back onto the bed in an unconscious stupor. Dad released his grip from Jared’s wrists and backed away from the bed, his face creased under a mask of fear and confusion. His chest heaving, he raked a hand through his sweaty dark hair and shuffled past us out of the room. He stopped in the middle of the hallway and, pivoting on his heels, spun back around to face us.

  A large red smear was painted along the bottoms of his knees. His lips quivering, he jabbed his finger at me.

  “Stay here with your mother.” He said to me, then to Mom. “Call Ruth and Bruce and tell them to meet me at the hospital.”

  Her cheeks blotchy and wet, Mom ran back downstairs and into the kitchen. I stood beside of the railing, my heart thudding and peered at my cousin lying motionless across the middle of my blood-soaked bed. In the glare of the light pouring through my bedroom window, his skin had taken on an inner glow I hadn’t seen since the night of
his birth when Ruth called me into her hospital room and Mom had situated me just so rightly inside one of the brown leather chairs sitting beside of her hospital bed and set him gently in my arms and beamed at how cute we’d looked sitting there (Mom had said we reminded her of a knickknack her grandmother used to own) and now I’d have given anything to have that same little boy back.

  A few moments later, Dad waited for Mom at the head of the stairs and whispered in her ear. They snuck furtive little glances at me between words, then looked away from me when they realized I might’ve been listening. She nodded and kissed him on the cheek, her eyes red and glistening.

  A minute later, he carried Jared’s body out of my bedroom and took the stairs two at a time without even looking at me. After he backed out of the garage and headed down the road, Mom sauntered into my room, came out with a stack of clothes and pointed to the bathroom. I was afraid to speak because the tension had risen to a level of stress that even Homeland Security didn’t have a color for.

  When I was finished, I found her bunching my blood-soaked bed linens into a ball and setting it inside of my bedroom doorway. She wiped a river of tears from her cheeks with the back of her left hand, emptied my pillow cases and tossed them into a pile in front of my dresser.

  I stood on my tiptoes for a second, peered over her left shoulder and into the room. The pile of toenails Jared collected were gone; I didn’t know whether she dumped them into a trashcan or kept them back just in case.

  Her quiet but diligent demeanor told me I shouldn’t bother her but I didn’t anyway.

  “Do you want–”

  “Go downstairs, Mollie.” She hissed. “I don’t want to hear one more word out of you until your father gets home.”

  Mom’s words stung me deeply. I couldn’t stand to see her like this but I understood why she was angry and maybe because she was still trying to wrap her mind around the fact that her little nephew had just plucked out his toenails one by one. I did as she asked and sat there in silence, listening to the parade of soft footsteps drumming along the ceiling.

  The longer I sat there, the more she continued to ignore me. The silence that my parents deemed worthy of me to face had stretched on for what seemed like days when it was only a few hours; I could tell them that I’d learned my lesson but I knew it wouldn’t be enough. This was a side of my parents and the world I never knew existed and, for as long as I lived, I would never visit it again.

  When she came back down, I buried my face in my hands and sobbed. She sat down beside of me and brushed strands of hair away from my weeping face as I confessed.

  7

  “WHY didn’t you tell us the truth?”

  The pained expression on her face only heightened the intensity of my guilt. When it was all said and done, the whole prospect of being grounded didn’t seem so bad.

  “I kept wondering why you’d asked about that place.” She sighed. “I thought you were going to use it for one of those stories you wrote inside of your journals.”

  “I tried to keep him away from that place but he wouldn’t listen.” I pleaded.

  “I know you did.”

  We were sitting at the kitchen table, sipping hot cocoa from tiny ceramic mugs that looked like plump orange pumpkins. In a way, I felt relieved now that I’d said everything.

  “We’ve told you time and time again not to go near that place and you did it anyway.” She shook her head. “What if you’d gotten hurt? What if someone had come out of the house and raped you or killed you or God knows what?”

  She took another sip from her mug and swiped a skim of chocolate from her lips with her tongue. Tiny wrinkles of confusion were etched across her face as if she were at odds with her emotions; she didn’t know whether to feel mad at me for going near it or feel glad that the truth had finally come out about why I was acting so strange.

  “But we weren’t.”

  “That’s not the fucking point, Mollie. We asked you to follow one simple rule and this is what we get.”

  A few seconds of silence floated by before she asked, “Did you go inside?”

  “I told you I didn’t.”

  “I just want to make sure you’re not lying to me about that, too.”

  I sighed and rolled my eyes. There was no sense in rubbing salt on an open wound.

  “I don’t know what he saw but he hasn’t been the same since.”

  “In what way?”

  When I told her about my nightmares, she slumped back into her seat, leaned over the edge of the table and clamped her hand across her mouth; fear carved tiny creases across her face. She reached across the table to retrieve her mug, her forefinger hooking toward the handle but then decided not to. She rested her left hand on the edge of the table and, her cheeks flushing, swiped her right hand across her tear-soaked eyes.

  “There was no reason for you to hide this from us, Mollie.”

  “I thought that if he saw that it was empty,” I shrugged. “he would just walk away but he wouldn’t listen. I tried to get him away from the house but he wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “It’s a little too late for that now, don’t you think?”

  An hour later, Dad’s car pulled into the garage. Mom rose out of her seat like she’d just seen The Second Coming; the hairs along the back of my neck went stiff. When he stomped into the house, his footsteps matching the rhythm of my beating heart, the angry look on his face sent tears of cold sweat sliding down my back.

  When he entered the kitchen and saw me sitting at the table, he tossed his car keys on the table hard enough to make me flinch. He shrugged out of his dark-blue flannel button-down, tossed it over the back of his chair, fell down into the chair at the head of the table and slumped down into his chair at the head of the table.

  Mom leaned back against the kitchen countertop and dabbed at her tear-soaked eyes with a ball of spent tissue. She tossed the tissue into the kitchen trash can, poured Dad a fresh cup of coffee and set it down in front of him. Although he hadn’t yelled at me, every move he made made me feel even more uncomfortable.

  “There anything you’d like to add?”

  After he took his first sip, I repeated everything to him that I’d said to Mom between sips of hot chocolate. I was halfway through when he cocked his head toward the floor, closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He perched his right arm on the edge of the table, bunched his hand into a clammy white-knuckled fist, pressed it against his mouth and took two deep breaths.

  When I was finished, he clamped his hand over his mouth and sighed. He gazed at me, his eyes burning with mix of betrayal and grief, and rose out of his chair. He slid his hand down the front of his chin, glanced down at the table, sat in the chair beside of me and sighed.

  I said in a dismal voice. “I want to call Aunt Ruth and Uncle Bruce and apologize.”

  “There’s nothing you can do for them, right now.” He hissed, brushing the subject off the table with a dismissive wave. “If it hadn’t been for your Uncle Bruce, your aunt would’ve taken my head clean off my shoulders.”

  “What did the doctors say?”

  “They had to sedate him because he tried to eat his fingers.”

  “Oh God.” Mom said, pressing a concerned hand against her chest.

  He made me recant the moment when the front door opened. He took a long swig of his coffee and whether it was because he was thirsty or because it kept him from slapping me, I wasn’t about to find out.

  “What did you see when the front door opened?”

  “I didn’t see anything from where I was standing.” I repeated. “Jared was the only one who looked inside the house the entire time. All I could smell was something that smelled like licorice.”

  He and Mom shared an awkward glance and sat back down. I swept my eyes across the table at them, my mind buzzing with curiosity. There was that uneasy feeling you get when someone was hiding the truth and it was becoming too much for them to bear.

 
He took Mom’s hand, squeezed it a few times and stared deep into her eyes. She squeezed it back, nodded and sighed.

  “Are you sure about this?” She asked.

  “She might as well learn now.”

  She stood up from her chair, poured him a refill and returned to her seat. She placed her arms across the edge of the table and clasped her hands together.

  “Jared wasn’t the only person that house has claimed.” Mom said, then choked back a sob and said. “There’s something strange about that house but yet no one can quite put their finger on it.” “Does anyone know who built it?”

  “No.” Dad said. “but I don’t think it would change anything.”

  They let that sink in for a moment. I swallowed so hard my throat clicked. He tapped something into his cell phone, cupped it in his left hand and then took another sip.

  He set cup back onto the table, slid his cell phone across the table and nodded. I picked it up and then wished that I hadn’t. My eyes widened with fear and disbelief as I stared down at my father’s cell phone and saw the picture of the man who haunted my dreams.

  “Are you okay, honey?”

  I nodded and slid the cell phone back across the table.

  “That’s the man from my dreams.”

  “Dreams?”

  Mom told him about the two dreams. He sighed, killed the picture and tucked his cell phone back into his front pocket.

  “His name is Noah Larson. He and his wife arrived in Salter Creek during the seventies when everyone was all peace and love and not war and flower power shit.” He said in a sardonic voice. “He opened a new-age massage parlor in the mall while she sold vegetables at a kiosk next to that gas station beside of Wendy’s.”

  “Kisor’s?”

  “Yeah.” He said, then sighed. “They were having a swinger’s party one night when the house possessed them, too.”

  “Swingers?”

  They glanced at each other and grinned. Mom took a sip of her hot cocoa and set the mug back down on the table. After they told me what that meant, I took a giant swig from my mug, hoping it was hot enough to burn that image out of my head.