by Ronald Malfi
“No!” she shouted. “I won’t!”
She felt a tension at her legs…felt one leg lift, move forward, drag her across the floor. She closed the distance between her and the injured dog by just a few inches. The dog’s growl intensified.
“Consider what I’m saying, what I want,” Simon said.
“You’re not real! You’re a dream! You’re inside my head!”
She felt her arm tense, felt the muscles tighten. In her head, she could too easily see herself bringing the claw-end of the hammer down on the dog’s head, crushing its skull, splattering blood across the wall, across her own face…
No! her mind screamed, and she felt through the channels of her brain for the handle Simon was holding. Her mind, she found, was a vast maze of corridors and entranceways, of exits and entrances and hallways and windows blocked by bars. Floors shifted or came up to meet ceilings in certain places. Shapes materialized in smoke, dissipated, reappeared. And always ahead of her: the erratic patter of the ghost-boy’s feet as he ran, just out of reach, out of sight. In her mind. She would follow him down one corridor only to find that she had taken a wrong turn and wound up at a dead end. Or her mind-fingers would graze his bony back, and just as she was about to lunge and grab him, he would vanish into smoke.
“You can’t fight me,” he said, suddenly all around her. “Your power is what gave me life, and I have access to it, have some of that power myself. You can’t fight me, Kelly. It would be like fighting yourself.”
Teeth gritted, eyes pressed shut, she could feel a pressure overtake her arm, insistent that she slam the hammer down, that she bring her arm down in one quick, arcing motion. She could still see it so clearly in her head—
Her arm trembled.
No! No, don’t! Stop! Please, stop!
“Do you feel trapped and helpless?” His voice was like a god’s, coming from every direction at once. “Do you feel alone? Good. Because now you are like me.”
“Never,” she breathed through clenched teeth. He face burned with tears. “Never like you!”
At the final moment, she realized she could not fight him and that her arm was going to come down. Yet Simon had not gone for control of her hips, of her legs, and she quickly shuffled to one side as the hammer came down. The claw-end slammed into the wall and dragged down, peeling back fleshy layers of the wall and exposing the sunlight of the outside world beyond. Then the entire wall seemed to waver, to contest its own reality, and she could see the shimmering forest on the other side and suddenly wanted to be there.
Dropping the hammer, she leapt forward and pushed herself against the wall—and passed through to the other side, her body slowing in midleap as if the wall had tried to retain its solidity while she was halfway through. Behind her, she heard the sounds of twine snapping, and then hit the ground with such force she could feel her brain rattle in her skull.
Around her, the world swam in and out of focus, the temperature seesawing from intense heat to bitter cold. Despite her pain, she wasted no time, and scuttled back on her hands and feet, her eyes locked on the house in the woods, her mind reeling nonsense—
(we almost killed)
(somewhere far away four boys find a house like this in the woods)
(blood on a jukebox)
(a hole in the ocean)
—her eyes locked on the place where the house had only stood moments before.
It had vanished.
Everything—the house and Simon. All of it, gone.
Everything seemed to slow. A rustling to her left and she saw the injured dog standing atop the embankment, staring at her. His injured paw was raised, his eyes black and muddy and trained on her. Then it turned and took off into the woods, trailing busted pieces of twine behind it.
Is it over? she wondered. Simon, are you gone? Did I cast you away?
And although he didn’t come right out and say no, she swore she could hear a faint laugh coming from all around her: the laughter of a thousand gods.
Winter and summer came and went with little fanfare. Having stayed away from the forest for some time, Kelly hardly thought of the ghost-boy called Simple Simon and the Land of Never, although she was always faintly aware of the boy’s continual presence at the back of her mind. Still there, but fading. And soon, her mind began rubbing out her time spent in the woods altogether, almost to a point where the name Simple Simon no longer meant anything to her—at least on a conscious level. Forcing herself to forget, as she’d done so long ago when she’d created a stone from nothing. And though her parents remained distant and unresponsive, Kelly found a new diversion in the presence of her younger sister and in the friendship of Gabriel Farmer. For once, these things made her feel normal and accepted. No longer did she dream of make-believe worlds ruled by kings and queens, where knights rode horses and Cheshire cats spoke from trees; such things ceased being important to her.
When she was fourteen, a crushing snowstorm came to Spires in early November. For days, snow piled up outside the house while sleet and freezing rain pelted the windows and ceilings. At one point the furnace in the cellar seized up, and her father’s newly-appointed house-man, a fellow named DeVonn Rotley, spent several hours downstairs in the freezing gloom until the furnace sputtered back to life.
One night during this storm, Kelly was forced awake by a blinding cold. She pushed herself up in bed, her skin hardened into goose-bumps, her teeth rattling in her head, and saw that someone had opened her bedroom window. A crest of snow and ice hung over the lip of the sill, and the carpet beneath the window was wet and frozen. The curtains billowed out like twin phantoms.
For a long time, she didn’t move. It was too cold…and something in the back of her mind had suddenly started to speak up, to warn her. She felt herself struggling for old memories, but the strength of her mind would not allow it.
She pulled herself out of bed and stepped across the room to the window, her body wracking against the freezing air. The carpet was soaking wet and freezing beneath her feet; the coldness stimulated her bladder. Halfway to the window, she stepped on what she thought was a chunk of ice. It cracked beneath her foot and she hopped off it, looked down.
It was a broken plastic fork. All but one of its prongs were missing.
She felt something stir inside her brain, something desperate to be released, but it was down too deep to excavate. Instead, she kicked the fork aside and went to the window, reached up, grabbed the sill, tried to pull the window down. The weather had frozen it stuck. Lightly, she began hammering her fist against the frame, but she feared it was making too much noise and stopped.
Looked out the window.
Froze.
A misshapen white form stood out in the snow against the side of the house, between the house and the steep incline that dipped down into the dark forest. The figure looked up at her, and although she couldn’t make out any details from such a height, she knew the figure was grinning at her.
Around her, a dull blue light began to glow, to fill the room, radiating from her own flesh. A voice boomed in her head: You can’t get away from me, Kellerella.
There was something thick and sturdy and secure at the back of her mind that shattered in that instant into a billion crystallized pixie-dust fragments; with her mind’s eye, she watched the fragments disperse through the air, watched them flutter in impossible directions, watched them slowly waft to the ground and coat her mind in a fine, sparkling mist.
Glenda found her the following morning curled in a ball on her floor beneath her open window, her knees pulled up against her chest, her eyes wide and staring. Frantic, Glenda dropped to her knees and attempted to wake Kelly from her daze. Kelly did not wake up. Soon, Glenda began shouting, her hands on Kelly’s shoulders, shaking her. DeVonn Rotley appeared in the doorway. Gordon Kellow and his wife appeared. Becky, who’d just recently celebrated her fifth birthday, also came to the door, her eyes wide and frightened.
DeVonn Rotley picked Kelly up in his arms. Her body was
small and nearly lifeless, her eyes staring and unfocused, and carried her downstairs while Glenda rushed to a telephone. The doctor would not make it up to the house that day because of the storm. Nor the next. Nor the next. And by the time he did reach the house, young Kelly Kellow had retreated so far into her mind that the flustered pediatrician was at a loss.
“She needs a good psychiatrist, I think,” was the only advice he could offer.
Afraid to touch her, to be near her, Kelly’s parents remained in the hallway outside her bedroom, peering in at their daughter as she lay lifeless in bed. At one point, Gordon Kellow turned to his wife as if to say something…then appeared to change his mind at the last minute.
Several times Gabriel stopped by, but he was too frightened and confused to stay long. Kelly never even knew he came.
Nights, Glenda would remain at the foot of Kelly’s bed and read from her favorite storybooks—storybooks that had long since been packed away in boxes in the basement, but had been retrieved at Glenda’s insistence—or sing her the occasional song:
Little Baby Roundabout,
Someone let the Baby out,
And now, Sweet Babe, it’s time for bed,
So close your eyes and rest your head.
If her song reached Kelly, Glenda did not know.
One morning in the fall, Kelly appeared in the doorway of her father’s thinking room. The room had long since been cleaned out of the animal heads, and now resembled the farthest corner of a musty library. Seated in his leather chair with a book propped open on his lap, Gordon Kellow looked up at the sight of his daughter standing in the doorway and found his throat dry, his mind blank.
“Kelly,” he said, his hands beginning to shake. “Well…you’ve come back to us. That’s…” He smiled at her, his lips quivering. He looked nervous and afraid. “That’s good.”
She only stared in silence.
“Your mother will—she’ll be happy to see you’re…well…”
Nothing.
“You know, you had us both worried. We didn’t know what—we called so many doctors—it was…”
She stood there, unmoving—more a memory of herself than an actual person.
The smile faded from her father’s face. “Say something,” he told her. “Damn it, Kelly, say something. Don’t just stand there like that.”
“You’re lucky I stopped when I did,” she said, turned, and continued down the hallway.
Gordon Kellow watched his daughter leave, his heart trip-hammering in his chest. The book in his lap—Travis Glasgow’s Silent River—slowly fell closed and slid down his pant leg to the floor, where it struck with a muted thump.
Doctors came and went but said little. She remained in her room most of the time, refusing to speak with anyone, including Gabriel. And soon Gabriel stopped coming around. And then so did the doctors. One evening, when Glenda asked her if she felt all right, asked her what had happened to her to set her off in such a fashion, Kelly only stared blankly at the woman without saying a word. And there was nothing left in her eyes—anyone who looked at Kelly could tell. They were cold and withdrawn.
Several times during the night Kelly would find herself creeping out of bed to stand before her bedroom window and peer out over the magnificent blanket of forestry that unraveled below. She did this without understanding why. And when she prodded her brain to fill in the missing pieces—and there were many—her brain simply shut down and refused to cooperate.
Following Kelly’s fifteenth birthday, the Kellows took their daughter to the Coopersville Female Institution where they met with several different people—doctors and nurses and specialists and even a dietitian. Kelly felt like a deck of cards, continuously picked up by strange hands and shuffled. Afterwards, on the quiet car ride back to Spires, her father asked her what she thought about the institution—though he didn’t call it an “institution,” he called it a “home.”
Without facing her parents, Kelly said, “I’m setting fire to my room when I get home.”
Her parents exchanged silent glances as the car passed through the quaint, little town. A week later and Kelly was admitted to the “home.”
Cards, she thought, stacked with their faces down, their secrets hidden, their stories untold and forgotten. Hidden books. Storybooks.
“You’ll get better here,” her mother told her and she stood beside her father in the doorway of Kelly’s new bedroom: white walls, bars on the windows, crisp white sheets that felt like construction paper.
“Yes,” agreed her father. “These people will know what to do with you.”
Kelly smiled at them both, causing them to take an unconscious step back toward the hallway. There was no humor in that smile. Her eyes looked dead. “You’re both just afraid of me,” she said, not sure why. “Both of you. See me here?” Her voice remained toneless and flat. “Remember this. And be thankful it ended this easy.”
Visibly shaken, her parents filed out into the hallway and never came back.
Little Baby Roundabout, Kelly thought, eyes wandering around the white room. Someone let the Baby out.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jarred awake by the sound of shattering glass, Josh opened his eyes. It took him a moment to understand where he was. Not at home: there was an odor here of citrus. And then it hit him—Nellie’s apartment—and he rolled forward off the tiny sofa, barking his shin on the coffee table in the dark.
Is she dying? It was the first thing that crossed his mind. And almost selfishly on the heels of that: Then what about Kelly?
He tore down the hallway and threw open Nellie’s bedroom door. The shattering sound had been Nellie’s bedroom window exploding. Spear-like shards of glass remained like loose teeth in the frame, while triangles of windowpane were now scattered along the carpet and across the length of Nellie’s bed. The sheer curtains that hung at the window now twisted in the wind.
“Jesus!” He rushed to the bed, his bare feet crunching over the broken glass but hardly noticing. Nellie was pitched forward off her pillow, the woman’s eyes bugging out, her good hand hooked into a talon and clawing at her throat. “Jesus Christ, can you breathe?”
Nellie could not see nor hear him. Mere inches from her face, and the old woman’s eyes ran right through to the back of his head. Half her face radiated with the reflection of the neon city, and Josh watched helplessly as her mouth worked but no words came out, and as her hand tore at her neck.
“Nellie!”
He tried to ease her down onto the bed but she refused to be moved. He tried again—yet this time he quickly recoiled, shocked and terrified by the sudden sensation of collapse inside him…as if two invisible hands had grabbed his heart and started to squeeze.
Nellie, his mind stammered, was that you? Reaching out for me?
Scared, he pushed back through the room, feeling the cuts on his feet now, feeling the freezing wind coming through the shattered window, and dashed into the hallway, through the small sitting room, into the kitchen. He’d pasted Carlos Mendes’s beeper number to the telephone. He grabbed the slip of paper now, his heart pumping so loudly he could hear it in his ears, and fumbled with the phone. He attempted to dial the numbers but he fingers were too big. After three failed attempts, he took a deep breath and dialed the number once more.
Paging Doctor Mendes, he thought. Doctor Mendes, you have a patient going into telekinetic fits in the next room. Please report to the emergency room STAT.
And what could Mendes do, anyway?
He waited for the prompt, then punched in Nellie’s number, hit the pound key. Three short beeps rang out over the line.
Jesus, hurry!
From behind him there came a sound like fingernails being dragged along a chalkboard. He turned and saw a hairline crack weaving along the windowpane above the sink. He watched it with numb detachment.
Is that you, Nellie? Is that you? What happened, what did you see? What did you see that’s making your mind tear down this apartment?
The window began rattling in its frame. Josh hung up the phone and began backing out of the kitchen, not taking his eyes from the window. He was mesmerized by it, powerless to look away. He could see his own reflection in the glass, facing him, also retreating, growing smaller…only the reflected Josh had been decapitated by the lengthening crack, his features a jumble of maundering jigsaw pieces.
Nellie—
The window burst from the pane, shooting spears of glass at him and the opposite wall. Bringing up his arms, elbows out, he felt the glass pelt him, felt a sudden stink followed by warm wetness on the side of his right hand. Beside him, he could hear the glass shattering against the kitchen wall. One piece struck a pot on the stove and was deflected with a distinct cling!
Stumbling into the sitting room, Josh scrambled for the light switch but could not locate it. A sharp winter wind struck his back from the kitchen. He pushed around the sofa just as he heard that same fingers-on-a-chalkboard grind. Looking up, he could see the row of windows covered by curtains, lights from the city glowing behind the curtains’ sheer fabric. They looked like flesh…like spread batwings before a blinding light. And he could clearly make out the spider-web fissures progressing rigidly along the faces of the windowpanes.
They’re all going to implode, he told himself. They’re all going to smash open and pepper this place in glass.
And he was in the wrong goddamn spot.
To his left, the old phonograph snapped to life, the sounds of Duke Ellington starting off slow, distorted…then gathering momentum. It was like a nightmare fun-house. And what about Nellie? Was she dead? Dying? In all the commotion, it seemed like he’d run frantic out of her bedroom no less than an hour ago. But surely it hadn’t been more than a minute or two.
The sharp stink of citron stung his nose again, caused his nostrils to flare. And understanding what that meant just mere seconds before the row of windows imploded, Josh dropped to the carpet, his hands laced over the back of his head, and pushed himself up against the foot of the sofa. A second later and he felt the floor rattle, heard a solid crash, and was aware of blades of glass whizzing inches above his head. A blast of freezing air accosted him.
