“And your head? What about the CAT scan?”
Her eyes darken. “Like we thought. He, uh . . . he took out part of my brain.”
“What does that mean? I mean, is it going to affect you? Memory, coordination, stuff like that?”
“No. The doctors think it’s an unused section of brain tissue. I think it has to be like a filter, you know? To keep the spirits out. Like a lock on the door to our minds. Without it, they can come in and possess you any time. Or at least during sleep. And it also makes the voices easier to hear, I think.”
“I’m sorry,” says Caleb again.
“It’s okay. That’s how it had to be, I guess.”
Caleb looks at her. “That’s what your sister kept saying.”
She looks at the stuffed monkey absently.
He clears his throat. “They still pulling bodies out of the Dream Center?”
She nods. “Forty-seven now, I think, but they said there are more in there. I stopped watching.”
“We should probably leave soon. Morle—my dad—had a lot of friends who might be pretty pissed off right now. Like that doctor. I keep thinking he’s going to walk in here. It’s creeping me out. I think we should take off soon, just get as far away as we can.”
“Yeah,” she says to the monkey, “but there’s one thing we need to do first.”
Trees shoot past outside the car windows.
“We gotta make it fast. This might not be safe for us at all.”
As they pull in the driveway even the air feels different. The Dream Center is gone, and sunlight now shines on the front lawn where its shadow would have fallen. But there’s something else, Christine thinks. Even with the sun shining right on them, it still seems a little . . . dim.
They park beside a Channel 13 news van and get out. Christine glances at Caleb. His brow is furrowed; his eyes are fixed on nothing.
He’s been like that for most of the trip.
“Penny for your thoughts,” she says.
He smiles halfheartedly over the roof of the car.
“Nothing,” he says.
“Okay, two dollars.”
“You drive a hard bargain,” he says. “But really, it’s nothing.”
“Thirty million dollars!” she jokes, and pounds her fist on the car roof.
He sighs. “I’m just thinking that . . . I have the blood of a psychopath in my veins, you know? The thought that my dad was somebody capable of . . . what he was capable of is . . . It scares me.”
She nods. “Hey, if genetics are any indicator, we’re both screwed,” she says. “But they’re not. Caleb, the world is still here. You didn’t end it. You did what you had to do. What can I say? You’re not your father: you’re you. And, well, you’re hot.”
Caleb laughs.
“So turn that frown upside down, sweet cakes,” she says. “You and me are going to drive away from here together and start again.”
“I know. I can’t wait for that,” Caleb says. “But I still can’t help feeling like . . . I don’t know . . . like something’s wrong.”
“Shush!” she says.
And he does. He comes around to her side of the car and takes her hand.
The smell of smoke still hangs faintly in the air.
The old asylum is nothing now but a field of black ash and shattered glass. A few twisted steel girders jut up like lightning-struck trees, but aside from that the place is leveled.
They walk slowly toward the wreckage, watching for anything dangerous. Caleb feels the cold steel of the gun in the waistband of his pants, concealed by his T-shirt, and he’s glad they brought it.
“Hey, where you guys going?”
It’s a tall guy with a red goatee. A camera hangs around his neck.
“Just wanted to drop some flowers by,” Christine says. She holds up the bouquet in her hand. “It’s so horrible what happened.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” says the guy. “Smoke?” He shakes one loose from his pack and holds it out to them, while lighting his own.
They shake their heads.
“You know,” the guy says, “you aren’t supposed to be around here. Only search and rescue and press are allowed. And the cops, naturally. I’m taking some pictures for the Miami Herald, then getting the hell out of here and going to Waffle House. I’m freakin’ starving.”
He takes a big drag off his cigarette, squinting at them.
“You’re just here to drop some flowers by?” he asks.
They nod earnestly.
He looks around. “Alright. I’ll take you guys in, but only because this one is such a hottie.”
He nods toward Christine, who blushes, embarrassed.
“I have a press pass; they won’t question it. Just don’t get me in trouble. Come on.”
Caleb wonders where the hell the Miami Herald was when all the kids started going missing, but Christine catches his eye and smiles at him, cheering him up.
The photographer leads them through a chain-link fence and flashes his press pass to the cop posted there. Caleb and Christine walk quickly behind him.
The photographer talks without taking the cigarette out of his mouth while simultaneously fiddling with his camera.
“The death toll of this thing is ridiculous. Eighty-one barbecued bodies in the place so far. That doesn’t even count the ones who got incinerated completely. . . . ”
A wave of nausea comes over Caleb. He did that. He killed those people. But he reminds himself it was all for the good.
The guy continues talking as they round the corner and come into sight of the pond. Still swollen from the rain, its waters reach almost all the way up to the ruined Dream Center’s foundation. “You want to hear something really messed up, though? They haven’t even broken this story yet; it airs tonight and won’t make the papers until tomorrow.”
Caleb looks up. He sees a diver in the water, pulling something behind him.
“They found bodies in the water too. And these didn’t die from the fire, no way. They were put down there. Anchored to the bottom. I talked to the coroner; he said he’s pretty sure some of them were drowned alive. And I’m not talking about just a few of them either. A lot of them were preserved because the water’s almost freezing from the spring down below. The divers said there’s a huge cave system down there too.”
Christine has stopped. She stares at the photographer with eyes that suddenly look haunted.
“How many bodies?” she asks.
“Sixty . . . something . . .” and the guy digs a note pad out of the pocket of his denim shorts and flips a couple of pages. “Sixty . . . five. Hey, you alright, honey? You look like you’re gonna puke.”
“They’ve counted all the bodies?” she asks.
“Yeah, they scoured the bottom. The official report said they pulled up sixty-five bodies.”
Caleb grabs the guy’s arm. “Listen, this is really important. Are you sure there were only sixty-five? Not sixty-six?”
“Yeah,” the guy says. “I got a quote from the head diver. He said they checked the whole spring, cleaned it out, and found sixty-five. Why? Are you kids on drugs or what? You look completely tweaked out.”
Caleb and Christine exchange a look.
“I think we’re going to be alright,” Caleb says to the reporter, to Christine, to himself. And he laughs hard, releasing some of the tension that had knotted in his stomach.
Christine laughs too and hugs him.
“Damn,” mutters the photographer around his cigarette. “I want some of whatever you kids got.”
He walks away, snapping pictures of the diver as he emerges from the pond.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come back sooner and help you. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. I’m sorry my father did all this. I’m sorry I had to kill all those kids. I’m so sorry,” Caleb says.
Christine smiles, tears welling in her eyes.
“You did your best,” she says, “and it was more than good enough. It was amazing.”
She kisses him.
For an instant he holds back, thinking of his life back home, his direction, his plan, and he throws them all out and kisses her back, hard.
Maybe she is crazy, but he’s a mass murderer.
And if this is what it’s like living in insanity, he wouldn’t mind doing it forever.
“Are either of you guys with the Red Cross?” asks somebody.
Caleb and Christine turn to find a tall, beautiful black girl of about fifteen years old. She’s wearing a muddy, white nightgown with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders.
“They’re supposed to take me back to their office so we can try and get a hold of my folks,” she says.
“No,” says Christine, “I don’t know where they are. Are you alright? What happened?”
She shakes her head. “All I can say is this,” she says, “it’s too much of an ordeal to go into all of it. I was locked up in there since just about as long as I can remember, and I didn’t belong there, ’cause wasn’t nothing wrong with me. I don’t even remember how I got there, that’s how long it was. And they did bad stuff in that place, too, let me tell you. And then last night I wake up and I’m in that pond over there and I got a weight around my neck.” You can tell she’s fighting the urge to cry. “Don’t even know how I got there. I wake up and I’m in the water, and I grab the edge of this boat that must’ve turned over.
Somebody put a rope with a weight on the end of it around my neck, but I was able to get out of it, praise God, otherwise I’d have drowned.”
“She’d have been the sixty-sixth,” whispers Christine.
“I’m sorry you had to go through all that,” says Caleb. “But thank God you made it.”
“Yeah,” she says, “I just kept prayin’ like my daddy always taught me, and everything was okay.” A tear sneaks out and she quickly flicks it away with one finger.
“I’m Caleb,” he says, reaching to shake her hand.
“And I’m Christine.”
An inhuman scream pierces the quiet. They all turn.
From the darkness of the woods, a figure approaches. Gray tangles of hair fall over unblinking eyes. A tattered skirt hangs to her feet. Blood, like war paint, adorns her cheeks. It’s the witch.
She’s gotten inside the police perimeter somehow and is cursing at an officer who tries to subdue her and get her out of the area.
“Ma’am, please,” he says. “Ma’am . . .”
“TICK, TICK, TICK,” she says. “YOU’RE ALL BLACKBIRDS! You’re all baking! You’re all BURNING, BURNING, BURNING, BURNING!”
The police officer grabs her and begins dragging her away as gently as he can.
“Look at the sun!” she says. “Already wilting, already dying! The morning of darkness is coming! The trumpet of silence is blowing! Johnny Morle got his wish!”
Then she looks over at Christine and Caleb. Her gaze seems to clamp on them like an invisible vice. She will not turn her head away.
Christine looks for a place to hide, panicked, but it’s too late.
Suddenly the witch lashes out.
It happens so fast, it hardly even registers in anyone’s mind when the officer falls, unmoving. Stabbed into his eye: a knife.
The witch runs with inhuman speed. Before Caleb and Christine can react she’s there. She grabs Christine by the hair, pulling her face-to-face.
Whispering, singing: “Johnny Morle got his wish, Johnny Morle got his wish, Johnny Morle got his wish!”
“No, he didn’t,” says Caleb, pushing himself between the mother and daughter. “I killed him.”
The witch still ignores him, whispering instead to Christine.
“Dying was his wish, it was. That’s the end of the world for him. And dying would never work for him unless his son would do him in!”
“But that’s it,” says Caleb. “It’s over now. The world isn’t ending.
Right?”
The girl wrapped in the blanket is looking on in disbelief. “This is freaking me out. What is going on?”
Christine just stares at her mother intensely.
“Christine was always the bad one,” says the witch, “but my sweet Anna would always help me and Johnny.”
“I killed John Morle,” Caleb says firmly. “The world isn’t ending.”
The witch smiles. “Six and sixty souls,” she says, “drowned in the dark.”
“There are only sixty-five, Mother.”
“Count again, my daughter dear. The devil is awake.”
And the witch lets Christine go, and as fast as she had come, she is gone, running away like a puma, melting into the shadows of the woods and disappearing.
The police haven’t even noticed their comrade yet, lying dead amongst the weeds at the edge of the forest.
“She’s crazy,” Caleb says. “She can’t be right.”
“That was your mom?” the girl in the blanket says. “Dang. . . .”
Caleb is looking all around, noticing what he had somehow missed before. Things look fake, fragile, wrong. The sun is hollow.
He can stare right at it.
“My name’s Keisha,” says the girl. She puts a comforting arm around Christine, who still stares at the place where her mother disappeared into the forest. “Look, honey, it’s going to be alright.”
“Wait,” Christine says. “Your name is Keisha? Keisha Bent?”
“Whoa. How did you know my last name?”
The reporter with the red goatee is walking back by, taking the last drag of his cigarette and looking at the ground. He rolls the burning filter between his fingers. As he approaches, Caleb notices something over his shoulder sticking out of the surface of the water.
“Hey,” Caleb says, stopping him. The guy looks up. “What’s that in the water? That stake?”
The reporter turns around, shading his eyes, “Uhhh . . . oh, that’s where they found another body. Foul play for sure. That one got whacked in the face with an axe or something. They think he mighta fallen off the roof.”
Caleb’s face is very still. His mouth barely moves. His voice is barely even a whisper. “And he landed there, in the water?”
“Yep,” says the reporter.
“Is he one of the sixty-five you were talking about earlier?”
“Ah, no. Those were the ones in the deep part of the water with the ropes around their necks. If you count that poor bastard with the axe in his head as one of the pond bodies, that makes . . . uh,” he glances at his notepad, “ . . . sixty-six.”
Christine looks at Caleb. Neither of them can breathe.
At that moment Caleb feels closer to her than he ever has to another human being.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he says.
Christine nods frantically.
“Can y’all give me a ride?” asks Keisha. “I’m sick of waitin.’”
“Yeah,” says Christine. “Definitely.”
“Look,” says Keisha, “I don’t know what y’all are freaking out about, but my daddy was a great man, and he always said no matter what you believe, whether you worship Allah or Buddha or Jesus or whatever, if you surrender to God can’t nobody stop you. So whatever’s goin’ on, y’all are gonna overcome it.”
“I hope he was right,” says Christine.
“’Course he’s right. My daddy’s a great man.”
“We know,” says Caleb.
“What do you mean? Y’all know my dad?” asks Keisha, following them toward the car. “Is that how you know my name? Why are y’all walking so fast?”
Caleb glances back over his shoulder. A few large bubbles break on the surface of the pond. It’s probably just a diver bringing up another body . . . Probably.
“Everything will be explained,” says Caleb, “sooner or later.”
That answer seems to satisfy Keisha, and she doesn’t speak again for a while.
As the three of them walk up the driveway, leaving the old asylum for the last time, Caleb tries to pretend he’s confronted all his old, silly childhood fears and w
on. He imagines waking up and realizing this was all just another dream, the random firing of neurons, the stuff of campfire stories. He almost succeeds.
The wind through the trees is eerily steady. There are no gusts. The air is just moving, slow and heavy, bending the tall pines with its weight.
The clouds are moving a little too fast.
The birds are all flying away.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” Keisha says, maybe to herself, maybe not.
They all get into the car, shut their doors, and lock them.
After Caleb turns on the car, Christine takes one of his shaking hands.
“Look,” she says, “whatever this means, whatever happens . . . I just want to thank you for coming back for me. I know you had other plans.”
“I’m glad I broke them for you,” he says.
He leans close. Sitting here, in the forbidden place of their childhood, he kisses her long-lost lips.
He puts the car in drive. As what’s left of the Dream Center falls out of sight for the last time, Caleb turns north and floors it.
“Everything’s gonna be fine,” says Keisha again from the backseat.
“Yeah,” says Caleb, smiling.
“Yeah, it is,” says Christine, and she squeezes Caleb’s hand.
But it sure is dark for noon on a cloudless day.
About the Author
Photo by Vai Yu Law Photography
J GABRIEL GATES is a Michigan native and a graduate of Florida State University. He has worked as a professional actor, written several Hollywood screenplays, and is the coauthor of Dark Territory and Ghost Crown, Books One and Two in the teen fantasy series The Tracks.
Visit www.jgabrielgates.com.
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