“What? What are you talking about? A fertility fetish? And it has a name?” Alison gave a maniacal laugh. “Are you kidding me, Dennis?”
“No,” he said quietly. “It was a joke...I thought. Wes gave it to me on the plane as a joke. To sort of lighten my spirit. He knows everything we’ve been through trying to have a baby. He just thought it could be, I don’t know, like a good luck charm or something harmless.” He looked down at the thing in his hands. It had suddenly taken on a whole new dimension for him, and he handled it now like a scorpion. “I didn’t think too much about it. It was just a souvenir. I just thought it was a joke...” he trailed off.
“Get rid of it,” she said. “Crush it, throw it away, burn it. Just get rid of the god damn thing and get rid of it now!”
“How do we know this is what caused—”
“Dennis.” She looked at him sternly. “You just put two and two together yourself. Look at the thing! It’s evil!”
He nodded. “I’ll get rid of it. Right now.”
15.
Dennis took the stone fetish Kokumuo into the garage and smashed it to hell with the sledgehammer. Bits and pieces flew to each corner of the room, and every time he impacted with the thing, he could feel ripping pain in his groin. Still, the anger and fear at what had happened to them drove him to do the only thing he like he could at this point, and that was to destroy it.
When he was finished, he swept the pieces into a paper bag, threw the paper bag in the car and drove down the road a ways. He emptied the contents of the bag along the side of the road and then returned home.
He gingerly stepped from the car and went inside through the garage.
“Honey?” he called. “Ali?”
Silence.
He closed the garage door behind him and took a few limping steps inside.
He stopped. She still hadn’t answered him, and he couldn’t hear anything. He listened for a rustle, the shuffle of footsteps, anything that would suggest another person was in the house, but he heard nothing.
The hallway that led from the garage into the house was the same hallway that passed through the entire floor. In the middle was the main entryway, but then it continued on the other side down to his den. That end was in shadow. Did he remember turning off the lights in there?
He listened closely to the sounds of the inner house for some sign of Ali’s presence.
Any presence.
Dennis walked through the main entry way into the living room and kitchen area. All the lights were turned off in the kitchen, and a small lamp in the living room with orange glass like a faux torch was on in the corner. It cast everything in a feral hue.
He heard a thump. His heart skipped. Another smaller thump. Hissing in the walls...water through the pipes.
She’s taking a shower, he realized.
Relief washed over him, and yet he still didn’t feel entirely at ease in the house. What if destroying the fetish hadn’t made any difference? What if the thing was here to stay? What if by bringing it into the house he had released some sort of diabolical entity that would latch on and not let go? What did it want? What was it after?
Maybe, he thought, it already got what it came for.
That idea had been lurking in the back of his mind for the past hour.
If that thing really was the cause of their encounters, then maybe he could find some information on what exactly had happened to them. He needed to do some research. He needed to know where Wes got the fetish and what exactly, if anything, Wes knew about it. All Wes had told him was a name. Kokumuo. That was a start. He’d Google it on the net and see what came up.
But first he needed to see for himself that Alison was okay.
He could hear the shower running in the master bathroom. She’d left the bedroom and bathroom doors open. The shower door was frosted, so from where he stood he could see her dark silhouette beyond the glass. She was standing still, head bowed beneath the water, arms braced against the tiled wall. Her shoulders trembled.
Dennis walked carefully into the bedroom, taking light steps.
He could hear her. She was crying.
Dennis reached the doorway of the bathroom. He leaned against the frame of the door as if he suddenly became a thousand pounds heavier and couldn’t support himself any longer. He looked through the frosted glass at her. She finally moved her hands to her face to wipe away tears. She looked up and sniffed.
“Alison?”
She sniffed again. “I’m okay.”
A moment went by. The water from the shower ran but neither one of them said anything.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It doesn’t feel that way. I brought that goddamn thing into the house. I kept it. It is my fault.”
Alison turned off the water. The door latch clicked and she stepped from the stall. Her lovely body was a patchwork of bruises. There were bite marks on her nipples, claw marks on her arms. She toweled off quickly, as if she didn’t want him to see. She pulled her robe from its hook, wrapping it around her, avoiding his eyes as she pushed by him in the doorway and walked into the bedroom.
“Ali, we really need to clean those...bites.”
She sat on the far side of the bed, with her back to him. He could see her shoulders tremble and he went to her and pulled her close. They sat like that for a while. He sort of hunched painfully in front of her and her face was buried in his shoulder. He stroked her hair.
When she finally calmed down she wiped the tears away and sniffled. The look in her eyes almost killed him. Suddenly, she smiled, and with teary eyes, gave a little laugh. “You have to admit,” she said. “That was a pretty bad joke. Really stupid name, too.”
Dennis gave her a blank look.
“The fetish thing. I suppose Wes figured that was funny.”
Dennis gave a chuckle. “Uh. He came off like he was doing us a real favor.”
They smiled together.
“This has been hard for me,” she said.
“I know.”
“Not just this—what happened today—but all of this. The pressure to have a baby. Wanting to have a baby. It’s like I’ve got this albatross around my neck and it’s Alexandra and it’s Caleb, and I just feel how much you miss him...I want so much to give this to you. For us.”
Dennis tried to swallow. He couldn’t. Pain had gathered in his throat at the thought of Caleb, and the sudden realization of just how much pressure Alison really was under. He’d never thought about how his alienation from Alexandra and Caleb’s subsequent absence must have increased her burden this past year. How many times they’d tried and failed. How empty it left both of them feeling after every time they did the test and it came up negative.
“Look,” Dennis said. “Let’s get out of the house tonight.”
Alison laughed and wiped away the vestiges of tears. “I’m all for that.”
“Let me help you get your wounds cleaned and bandaged. Then we can get dressed and get the hell out of here.”
“Okay.”
16.
They stayed at the Westin Park North because Dennis had free Starwood points from traveling so they didn’t have to pay anything for the best room in the place. It had a living room, big screen television, wet bar, luxurious two-person bath with Jacuzzi jets, and best of all, the king size Heavenly Bed. They’d brought a bottle of wine for the evening and lay on the bed most of the night with glasses in their hands, commenting on the various television shows there were to choose from. It wasn’t too obvious that they were trying to take a break from it all and just forget about everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. They managed to have an easy time of it until they went to bed, and then both of them were lying in the darkness, feeling the ebb of their wounds.
Alison whispered to him around one o’clock in the morning. “You awake?”
Dennis stared at the dark ceiling. “Yes.”
“Honey,” she said. “
What are we going to do about the house?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, like, should we call a priest or something?”
“A priest?”
“To come and bless the place. Dispel the spirits. Splash holy water...I don’t know. What do they do about something like this?”
They were both silent for a minute, soaking it in.
“I don’t know,” Dennis said. “It couldn’t hurt.”
“I’m not going to be able to sleep in that room again. You know that. And after what happened to you in the den...”
“No, I agree. We need to do something.”
They were quiet again for a while. He felt her arm drape across him, and her hand slid across his chest as she turned to curl against him.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too.”
“We’ll call a priest in the morning.”
She hummed an answer sleepily into his chest and drifted off to sleep.
Dennis stared into the darkness, visions of the black-scaled woman haunting him.
17.
He awoke to the sound of Alison vomiting. She retched as though her guts were coming up through her throat.
“Ali!” he yelled. He forgot for the moment that he was maimed and tried to leap out of bed with the result of terrible ripping pain in his groin. “Ahhhh!” He screamed and fell onto his ass on the floor next to the bed, which gave birth to more pain.
“Den—aaaaaaagh.…” She got only the first syllable of his name out before the gagging started again and he heard the wet splash of vomit in the toilet.
He went into the bathroom and found her curled around the toilet basin; eyes bloodshot, face patchy and wan. Black fluid thick with coagulated lumps dripped from her chin, and the basin was full of it—a soupy black ichor that smelled foul as hell.
“God!” Dennis gasped. His own stomach clinched and he backed away from the sight at first until it sunk in that this was his wife, his dear Alison, and holy Christ what was that coming out of her mouth?
She retched again and he stood in the doorway watching her as a stream of more black fluid jetted from her mouth into the toilet, giving rise to a stench he’d never smelled before. Alison cried and wretched some more until she got to the point of dry heaves and collapsed against the side of the tub. Dennis grabbed a towel, moistened it in the sink and then rushed to her side to wipe the sweat and vomit from her face.
“You’ve got to go to the hospital.” Dennis said.
“Oh, it hurts!”
“I’m calling an ambulance.”
“Dennis!” She clutched her stomach and writhed in pain. “Oh God, it hurtsssss!”
“Okay, baby, hang on!”
Dennis crashed through the sitting room and knocked the phone off the table in his haste to dial the operator. He put the receiver to his ear and looked back through the doorway of the bathroom where he could see Alison’s feet.
“Front desk,” said the voice on the line.
“I need an ambulance!”
“What?”
“Hurry, it’s an emergency!”
“Okay, sir!” The line clicked and then he only heard the dial tone.
18.
Exactly twelve minutes later, by Dennis’s watch, the EMT’s arrived and rushed into the room where they found Dennis cradling Alison, now unconscious, in his arms next to a toilet full of evil-looking murk that had splashed over the side in black speckles and lumps of bloody mucous onto the white tile floor.
They asked Dennis a lot of questions on their way down in the elevator and then on the way to the hospital in the back of the ambulance. They took her directly into the E.R. and made sure she was okay before leaving them alone for several hours during which Dennis grew agitated and started asking questions.
His questions earned him more irritation. A nurse with a clipboard appeared, looked Alison over, and noted her cuts, scrapes, and abrasions on the official-looking medical form. She asked a lot of questions that Dennis didn’t have plausible answers for. On the spur of the moment, he said they’d been hiking a day earlier and she’d fallen down an embankment into some brush, nothing related to this vomiting incident. Had she gone to a doctor? No, but she was here now, so that issue was irrelevant now. The nurse shrugged, wrote it all down, and sauntered away, leaving Dennis and Alison in the same condition in which she had found them.
More time crept by. He looked at his watch, anger mounting. What the hell did someone need to have happening in order to get some attention around this place? A nurse walked by. “Uh, Miss? Ma’am?” he asked, trying to bite off the edge in his voice.
She smiled and stopped. “Can I help you?”
“Yeah, we, my wife, has been waiting for at least two hours to see the doctor. She came in with profuse vomiting. I brought a sample with me. The EMT guys thought it would be a good idea.” He held up the specimen jar for the nurse to see.
She grimaced and instinctively flinched. “That’s her vomit?” She grabbed the jar and peered into the clear plastic at the tarry substance that oozed from side to side inside.
“Yeah.”
“Hold on. Let me see what I can do. How is she now?” the nurse asked and looked past him at Alison who was sleeping restlessly, exhausted. She handed the specimen jar back to Dennis.
“She’s sleeping.”
“No more vomiting?”
“She felt like she needed to a while ago, but then passed out. She said her stomach hurt really bad.”
The nurse looked very concerned and nodded. “I’ll be right back.”
She left, her rubber soles squeaking on the gray linoleum floor as she went towards the doctor’s station. Dennis stood there, the plastic jar of black poison clutched in his sweaty hand.
Alison stirred slightly. He was quick to put his hand on her shoulder, to let her know he was there. “It’s okay, sweetie. The nurse went to get a doctor. Keep sleeping.” He sat on the hard brown and chrome chair next to Alison and sighed. He didn’t know what else to do and deep, cleansing sighs felt good. Helped clear his head, steady his racing heart.
He watched vigilantly for the nurse to return or for the approach of a doctor. At least Ali was sleeping again. How he was going to explain any of this was a question that tortured him. It wasn’t like he had any answers to give anyone. He just hoped the doctors could find something that could be explained. Both he and Alison had enough of the unexplained in the last couple days to last for a lifetime.
A doctor with wire-rim glasses, came down the hall. He had a deep frown etched on his face and approached, his hand extended as he neared Dennis. They shook hands. “Hello, doctor. I’m Dennis, this is my wife, Alison.”
“Hello. I’m Doctor Holt. I understand your wife has been vomiting?” He rustled through the two papers on the clipboard with brief scrawled notes from the EMT’s and from the ER admittance nurse.
Dennis held the specimen jar out in front of the doctor. “Yes, sir, and this is a sample of what she has been vomiting.”
The doctor took the jar and looked at it, amazement and dismay flooding his face. “This is the vomit?”
“Yes.”
The doctor turned the jar back and forth. “I’m going to send this to the lab. Let’s see what they can tell us.” He reached over and pushed the intercom button on the wall and called for another nurse, who appeared almost immediately. “I need this to go to the lab, and let’s put a rush on it. I want to know what it is.”
The nurse took the jar. “Last name?”
Dennis hesitated for a moment, lost in thought. “Oh, uh, Walker.”
She smiled and wrote the name on the outside of the jar. “And first name?”
“Alison.”
“Thank you, Mr. Walker.” The nurse left with the jar.
“Okay, let’s take a look at Alison,” Dr. Holt said with a reassuring smile. “It says here she fell in a hiking mishap?”
“Yes, nothing serious. A few scrapes, abrasions. S
he’s bruised up. Looks worse than she is.”
The doctor’s eyebrows arched, but he nodded, as if everything that Dennis had said was acceptable. “Has she been sleeping like this since you arrived?”
“On and off. She’s very restless.”
“No doubt her stomach is hurting.”
“Yeah, she complained of that, and then she was dizzy and passed out again.” Dennis held onto Alison’s hand.
The doctor used a light to look into both of Alison’s eyes and then down her nose and throat, and into her ears. He listened to her heart and stomach with his stethoscope. “Has she ever had kidney stones, kidney problems of any sort?”
“No. No, nothing like that.”
“What has she eaten lately? Anything unusual, prepared in a way other than she normally would eat?”
“No, nothing that I know of. She’s always pretty concerned about food poisoning and stuff like that because one of her cousins ate a bad sandwich or something as a kid and ended up in the hospital. She goes on and on about it.” Dennis laughed nervously.
The doctor continued to prod on Alison’s stomach. “Any history of ulcers? Gastritis?”
“No. She’s very healthy.”
“Is there a possibility that she could be pregnant? What form of birth control does she use? Or does she use any?”
Dennis smiled. “We’ve been trying to have a baby for a long time. Nothing has worked so far. I don’t think she’s pregnant.”
“Don’t think means you don’t know,” the doctor said and wrote something on the paper on the clipboard.
“Do you think that could be it? Morning sickness could produce that tar she vomited?” Dennis was incredulous.
“We’re going to find out, Mr. Walker.” The doctor wrote something on the paper and looked back at Dennis. “I’m going to order some blood tests, a CBC, also, I’d like to send her for a gynecological/obstetrical sonogram and a urine test, too.”
“The full work-up, huh?” Dennis asked.
“We’re going to find out what’s wrong with your wife, Mr. Walker.” Dr. Holt smiled warmly. “Let me get these orders processed and we’ll send someone to get Alison.”
Then Comes the Child Page 4
