314 Book 2 (Widowsfield Trilogy)

by A. R. Wise

  “Why are you hiding from me?” asked the winged creature that had been temporarily lost.

  “Come on, Ben!” Michael Harper’s voice shook the house. “Wake up, buddy. Wake up.”

  “Pour the water in, Alma, before it’s too late,” said The Skeleton Man as he tried to hold his face together.

  “Look what you’ve done!” Aubrey cried out from the tub and Alma screamed as she looked back down at the young girl.

  Fingers protruded from Aubrey’s gaping mouth and the young bartender’s body writhed in the thick fluid that filled the tub. Alma let go of the pot, and it teetered on the curled edge before falling forward, pouring its contents over Aubrey.

  Terry and Aubrey cried out at the same moment, and then rose from the tub with flailing arms in an attempt to grab ahold of the girl. The women were a myriad of flashing moments, and Aubrey was all but lost amid the glimpses of time. It was like trying to make sense of the rapidly changing pictures on the television downstairs as it flicked through images. Alma backed up until she hit the threshold of the bathroom, and then reached into her pocket to get the keys. She would use them to defend herself, like she had against her father, if she needed to.

  “No,” said The Skeleton Man as he rushed to the bathroom. He grabbed Alma’s shoulder and pulled her back, sending her violently to the floor. “She was supposed to grab you. It’s my turn for this.”

  He turned and thrust the knife into the shifting image of the woman that was crawling out of the tub. “I’m coming, Daddy!”

  Terry wrapped her arms around The Skeleton Man and the two of them spun as they fought, appearing almost like a couple dancing before they fell to the floor in the bedroom. The butcher knife was stuck in the nude woman’s belly.

  “What have you done?” asked the creature in the walls. Suddenly the room began to twist as wires became visible in the walls. They ground against one another and then sprung forth to lash at The Skeleton Man, but the wicked creature just laughed, his teeth still chattering as the tentacles that reached out from the walls tore him apart. The wires tried to grip him, but his bones cracked at the merest pressure, turning to dust and falling to the floor.

  “The Watcher in the Walls can’t see me anymore,” said The Skeleton Man as his body crumbled.

  “You lied to me!” When the Watcher screamed, the world shook.

  The wires thickened again, becoming the black tentacles that they’d been before. The Watcher in the Walls had discovered the deception of his brood, and was desperate to repair the damage. The Skeleton Man had been hiding his intention. The Watcher had hoped to draw Alma in so that he could keep both of Michael’s children, but The Skeleton Man knew that he could use her to escape. She was a sacrifice, and he’d carefully crafted a lie that the Watcher would be forced to adhere to. Alma took Ben’s place in Widowsfield, and the Watcher would be forced to accept it or risk undermining his entire web of reality.

  Alma held the keys in her hand and backed away from Terry’s still breathing body. She heard tiny footsteps on the stairs, and the familiar bark of Terry’s dog. A crowd of young boys had come into the cabin and were watching from the hallway. They were all crying as the sound of Killer’s barking got louder. Fog swelled at their feet and then ballooned up to envelop the children just before the dog found them. Alma heard their shrill cries as Killer attacked.

  Before she could even consider helping, the fog dissipated and the children were gone. That’s when she heard the sickeningly unique sound of a blade slicing flesh.

  Michael Harper straddled the body of his lover, and had pulled the butcher knife out of her stomach. He was about to stab it back in when Alma felt the hot blood on her hands. She glanced down at them, and saw that she was a child again, but knew this wasn’t a dream anymore. She wasn’t a child, and the blood wasn’t on her hands. Instead, she was holding her keys, with the teddy bear keychain in the center of her palm and the keys sticking out between her fingers.

  Alma Harper suddenly remembered everything that happened on March 14th, 1996. She remembered her brother carrying the bottles of cleaners up the stairs, and then coming back down for the boiling water. She remembered Terry’s screams, and the sight of Ben sitting on the bed with the towel over his severely burned face. The poor boy’s teeth were chattering as he took the towel off and stared at his horrified little sister, all while the dog continued to bark downstairs, seemingly aware of what was happening to his owner.

  “Get off her!” Alma rushed to Terry’s aid and slammed her fist into her father’s side. He fell back and into the wall of twisting cords. For a moment he looked angry, but then his flesh caught in the grinding wire. He screamed out as the wires pierced him, their sharps ends stabbing out like hooks and drawing him in. Then the vision of Michael Harper shifted back into the little boy with the buzzcut. The child dropped his bloody spoon and screamed in pain, but his cries lasted only seconds before his body was being sewn into the thread that wound throughout the room, carrying his flesh into the machine, sucking his blood and bones into the maelstrom.

  “Do you see what you did?” asked Terry.

  Alma realized that the red-haired phantom that haunted Widowsfield had been Terry all along. Her soul was trapped in this awful place, and her torture had lasted for what should’ve been sixteen years, but was a near eternity in this hellish dimension.

  “I see,” said Alma as she attended to the dying woman.

  Terry’s face blistered as Alma watched, and white foam leaked from the corners of her mouth. She convulsed, and a spurt of blood colored the foam over her toothless gums.

  “You killed me.”

  “I’m so sorry, Terry.” One of Alma’s tears fell, but didn’t strike Terry’s face. Instead, the tear hit the wood floor beneath the fading image of the dying woman.

  “I remember now,” said Alma as Terry’s body sank into the floor, leaving behind only blood and the white foam that had marred the woman’s lips. “I won’t forget again.”

  “To give a thing a name,” said the creature in the walls. “Such a waste of good fear.”

  Alma bounded to her feet, her teddy bear keychain still gripped in her palm. “You have a name too.”

  “Do I?” the creature asked as if amused. “Do tell.” He was still composed of wires, but they continued to thicken as she watched.

  “The Watcher in the Walls,” said Alma. “That’s what they call you.”

  The walls stopped moving, and the wires faded, revealing the dirty, peeling wallpaper that existed in this room in 2012. The ceiling seemed to rise up several feet and then faded into a grey mist. Before Alma could react, she saw the fog swoop in, covering the entire room as green electricity zapped from deep within it. The lightning reflected off the twisting form of massive tentacles that were hidden in the fog. Black wires began to descend from the mist and reached out to Alma like the groping limbs of a jellyfish.

  “You’ll be disappointed to know that I have no name,” said The Watcher. “I have no fear of being tamed, little thing. You’ll learn that as we tear apart the souls of Widowsfield together, my dark princess. I’ll twist you into a new monster for them to fear, and we’ll mourn your brother’s loss together. We’ll begin again, as just a simple, billowing mist, but every time we start over we’ll add a new horror. We’ll add the lightning and fire, the devils and demons. We’ll build this hell with your nightmares this time.”

  “I won’t do it,” said Alma.

  The Watcher laughed. “That’s what Ben said once, too, but look how malicious he became. I’ll miss him. I wish I could witness the horrors he’ll unleash now that he’s free.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh Alma,” said The Watcher as if delighting in her ignorance. “I am nothing if not Ben’s malice. The hell he suffered, as the chemicals burned his eyes and boiled away his skin. Nothing is as sweet as the first torture of a child. The way their world shatters as they first glimpse hell, an innocence burned away with pain and terror. I watc
hed from the walls as he suffered, as he screamed, as his flesh peeled from his bones. I saw it all, and then took his pain away so that we could give it to others, over and over, always in search of those beautiful moments of utter anguish.”

  The thickening wires began to wrap around one another and slowly form the creature that had greeted Alma when she first entered the room. A single cord stretched down and others wrapped around it, snaking around the first before more came to join the mass. That first cord became the creature’s right leg, and another descended to begin the transformation into its left.

  “I wonder if Ben will kill children now, or just the daddies.”

  “Shut up,” said Alma. “Ben would never hurt a soul.”

  The Watcher laughed. “You’re wrong about that, Alma Harper. I’ve known Ben far longer than you, and I’ve never met a more twisted creature. I treasure his hate, but I’m sure we can find that same thing in you; after we peel off your skin and go looking for it.”

  The strands of black swelled as The Watcher reached out for Alma. She backed away as the monster’s hand came at her, the wires looping in and out of his arm like a mass of worms writhing inside a cup. He was growing in size, and as he did the fog was pulled into him, causing him to swell but the rest of the room to become visible as the grey mist receded. A window was revealed, and Alma wasted no time as she dashed towards it.

  She blindly leapt, and felt the window shatter around her. Her stomach lurched as she fell, just as it had when she was driven over the hill on the road that led into Widowsfield. The sensation was short-lived, and she pounded down in the weeds that covered the lawn.

  Alma had the wind knocked out of her and the scenery changed. It was no longer night, but the middle of the day, and Amanda Harper’s car was parked in the street.

  “Hurry up,” said Amanda as she walked through the weeds, ignoring the woman that had just plummeted from the second story window.

  Then Alma saw what looked like a ten-year-old version of herself, but was slightly different. The girl’s hair was longer than Alma’s had been, and she was wearing a soaking wet, white dress. The little girl looked at Alma and waved for her to follow.

  “Come on, quick,” said the little girl. “We’re going to the reservoir.”

  “Who are you talking to?” asked Amanda as she opened her car door.

  “No one, Momma,” said Alma’s younger self.

  Alma wheezed as she got up. She knew that her arms had been sliced by the glass when she broke through the window, and it had felt like the landing broke a few ribs, but there was no sign of the injuries now. She felt fine, and when she looked up at the window it was still intact.

  Alma watched as Amanda Harper drove away. The young girl was sitting in the passenger seat.

  Alma knew this wasn’t how it happened. She remembered coming to the cabin with her mother. Amanda Harper never let Alma sit in the front seat, and she had been crying when they left the cabin.

  The Watcher in the Walls was searching for Alma, but her escape had taken her to a different point in time. She understood that the creature would traverse the breadth of time to find her. The Watcher and the fog held on to all the souls of Widowsfield, and toyed with them as it recreated a series of nightmares. Alma had managed to break free of the Watcher’s constraint, and she knew that it had something to do with the keychain that she still clung to.

  “Paul,” said Alma as she touched her thumb to the soft teddy bear that she had never taken off her keychain.

  She recalled a familiar voice telling her, “No matter how many times you break my heart, you’re still my girl, for as long as you want to be.” As much as she longed to know more about the man named Paul, he was still a mystery to her.

  Alma knew she had to get away from the cabin, but she’d been trapped in Widowsfield for what felt like an eternity now. Hundreds of awful nightmares of this place swam through her mind, and she couldn’t distinguish between truth and fiction anymore.

  Was the little, soaking wet girl a fiction? It was supposed to be a vision of Alma at that age, but it was a lie. Alma remembered everything about the awful day that she had been forced to stare at the symbol for pi on the kitchen floor, and she knew that she wasn’t soaking wet and smiling when she got back in her mother’s car.

  Alma Harper knew what she had to do, as much as she hated the idea. Ever since it happened, she’d done everything possible to avoid remembering the day her mother committed suicide.

  Some memories are better left forgotten.

  Some memories torture you if you let them.

  Yet Alma had to return to the Jackson Reservoir to watch her mother die. It was the only place in Widowsfield where she could be certain of what was true and what was a lie.

  She heard a sound like two large stones grinding against one another. It was cacophonous, filling all of Widowsfield as if the moon itself had fallen to Earth and was scraping along the surface. The ground began to shake, but when Alma blinked the sound was gone.

  Jacker was driving the van and Alma was sitting in the back seat with Rachel and Aubrey.

  Chapter 23– Every Little Detail

  I’ve been staying in Branson for the past couple nights.

  It’s a nice town, but I much prefer the country. After what happened in Widowsfield, I decided it would be best if I disappeared entirely, which is how I ended up living in central Indiana, tucked away in the middle of a sea of cornfields. For most people it would seem like a boring life, but it suits me just fine. I got all the excitement I needed in life out of my short time as Oliver’s lackey.

  In fact, it took me several months after Widowsfield before I ever felt comfortable drawing again. I considered drawing nature scenes, but then I was struck by the fact that I was giving permanence to something that had been fleeting. After learning that the walls around us cling to the past, it seemed somewhat gross to take a living thing and duplicate it on a dead piece of parchment.

  I eventually got over my trepidation, and now I wile away my days painting and drawing as much as possible. In fact, I brought along a duffle bag full of art supplies on this trip. They’re sitting right beside my guns, ready for my annual trip back to Widowsfield.

  Widowsfield

  February 23rd, 2007

  “I need to speak with you, Nia,” said Oliver.

  It was Friday morning, and she had been headed to a bathroom on the third floor to shower when the young scientist caught her. He looked more dour than usual, and was fidgeting with his watch when he stopped her in the hall.

  “What’s up?” She was in a bathrobe and slippers, with a towel over her shoulder. Mindy and Nia had become rather comfortable with the facility in their time there. It felt like a dorm that only they inhabited, except for the comings and goings of a couple nice women, Helen and Rachel, who worked downstairs and kept to themselves.

  “We’re going to need to go to the house on Sycamore today.”

  Nia’s smile faded fast.

  “I know you don’t want to, but we’re running out of time. You see, I might’ve overstepped my bounds here a little. I was, well,” he stammered. “To put it bluntly, I’m in deep shit with the higher ups at the moment.”

  “Why?” asked Nia.

  Oliver rubbed his index finger and thumb together. “What else? Money. This is a corporation after all, and they’re beholden to the all-mighty dollar, just like anyone else.”

  “What about all that talk about the importance of science and all that good stuff?”

  “Come on, Nia, you’ve been around long enough to know how the world really works. I stand by what I said, and that this is an important project we’re working on here, but that doesn’t mean it’s immune to the accounting department’s ever-watchful eye. We’re under review at the moment because I might’ve gone a tad bit over budget.”

  “That’s never good,” said Nia.

  Oliver raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Especially not when a ‘tad bit’ is code for twenty-two mi
llion.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Those construction crews don’t come cheap.”

  “And I imagine my pay isn’t helping,” said Nia.

  Oliver shrugged and nodded. “I was supposed to have you focus on the cabin from the beginning. Lee and I came up with the theory about a larger radius of polarimetry.”

  “Of what?” asked Nia.

  “It’s the idea about how objects in a given space affect energy. You see, everything we’re doing here is based on the effect energy has on physical objects. You know what I mean more than most, what with your gift and all. Our theory is that the objects around us can record everything we do. Almost like how a laser can imprint music onto a disc, other vibrations are imprinting themselves on the world around us.” He set his open palm on the wall. “And that particularly intense moments can resonate for years, maybe even centuries.”

  “I can guarantee that’s true,” said Nia.

  Oliver grinned knowingly and continued, “Right, people with your talent have known it forever, but this is a new theory for the scientific community, and the ramifications are staggering.”

  “How so?”

  Oliver looked uncomfortable for a moment, but then sighed and relaxed. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but you’ve been such an integral part of this already. I can’t really go into too many details, but let’s just say that what we’re working on here could change the world in a million ways. Just imagine if your gift was something that could be tapped into scientifically. Think about how that would change things like crime investigation, or even how we view history. If we could accurately recall memories from the inanimate objects around us…” He smiled and shook his head. “The opportunities are staggering.”

  “And were you experimenting on this idea back in ’96? Is that what caused the accident?” asked Nia. “Is that what happened to the people in Widowsfield.”