Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity

by Andrew van Wey

  He opened the medicine cabinet, finding the Imitrex in its plastic and foil sheet next to the Motrin and Tums. Those pink little pizza slices that silenced the tornado inside his mind. Break glass in case of emergency, he thought as he popped two bitter pills, considered a third, but decided against it. The only thing worse than a migraine was a rebound migraine, when the mind grew immune to the medicine and diminishing returns kicked in. That was a road he didn’t want to go down, one that he imagined ended with Mr. Glass shouting and growing to tumorous sizes and Dan spending his day with the curtains drawn.

  Five minutes later, as he crawled into bed, the glass had withered back to a manageable size, a pea inside his skull. The sheets were cold to the touch, as if they hadn’t been warm in months. He glanced at the windows, checking to see if they were open, but there weren’t. Dust hung in the moonbeams between the glass and the floor and the HEPA cleaner hummed nearby.

  “I think our daughter needs therapy,” he said with a smile. “After today, me too.”

  He closed his eyes, rolled onto his side, and as he gave Linda’s shoulder a gentle kiss the skin on his back burst into goosebumps. Instead of being warm and soft, her shoulder was cold and had an unpleasant texture to it, a firmness that felt like the husk of a hard fruit. He wondered if he wasn’t touching the headboard.

  “Honey?” he asked, running his fingers down her shoulder to the back of her neck in the same way that always made her purr with ecstasy, but no such response came this time. And then he saw it, on her neck, and he sucked air in between his teeth as his fingers recoiled from her skin.

  A black and red tattoo was etched on her skin where her shoulder blades met the base of her neck. Linda didn’t have a single tattoo on her body.

  “Karina?” escaped his lips.

  The thing in bed rattled out a long wet response that penetrated the very bone of his head, as if it were coming from inside his skull. His vision shook as that piece of glass vibrated and he felt the migraine erupt. The rattle grew as the shape in bed rolled over, silky black hair glimmering in the moonlight.

  That thing was not his wife.

  It was an abstraction, a vague feminine form that resembled Karina in so much as a Picasso resembled a real person. Its eyes were empty black pits, as if giant thumbs had pushed them inward leaving stretched skin sockets and shadow.

  There was a moment, a brief negative space between the emergence of the thing and the comprehension and horror of what it was, where the world swam in perfect clarity. To a person behind the wheel of a car it was that silent second before glass and metal shattered and buckled. To a condemned man, that final click of the lever before the gallows dropped and the rope snapped taut.

  To Dan it was the last bit of light being swallowed by the darkness as that old trunk slammed shut.

  Then it was over and he was in his bedroom and the wet thing that lay beside him opened a painted maw. The death rattle that came from the Karina-thing raised to a crescendo. He felt himself falling backwards into darkness as it reached out for him with sticky hands.

  The impact of the floor and the rug beneath it sent a surge up his spine that snapped his mouth shut and jolted his nerves. The rug scraped against his boxers as he scurried back, away from that thing, that vague naked form he’d once found so beautiful. Its flesh was covered in shifting, shimmering tattoos that consumed each other. Its skinny hands gripped the edge of the bed like a feral animal, a tiger about to leap from the trees, to pounce on him.

  It rattled off words in a chattering voice that rose and fell in pitch. “What have you done?!” it squealed, grey breasts heaving and twitching. “What have you done?”

  Frantic, he slid back further, the fibers of the rug chaffing his thighs. To his left another shape emerged. Yellow was the first color to bleed into the world, followed by a patch of rust colored hair atop a swollen head. The girl from the painting cowered in the corner, not five feet away from him, whimpering and crying. Her hands kneaded a moist shape together. Small fingers over blue feathers where a dog collar with a brass tag dangled from the wet filth.

  “Answer me! What have you done?” the Karina-thing clacked, perching on the bed.

  “I just wanted to scare him,” the girl from the painting sobbed.

  He felt his bladder empty warmth down his leg and his fingers burned as if the skin had been peeled back and every nerve was being pulled by tweezers. Move, he thought. Run away.

  A light appeared at the doorway, then a shadow crossed before it eclipsing the warmth and safety of the hallway. A boy stood there, that very same boy from the painting. His clothes were filthy and wet, as if he’d been playing in a slaughterhouse. His eyes, if they could even be called that, were simple blots of darkness that stared straight at Dan.

  And his right arm, that twisted texture like leather or the roots of an old tree, was not an arm at all, but an obscene appendage. It was old skin pulled taut like thin rubber stretched over moving organs, a swollen umbilical cord. The skin glistened beneath the hallway light, all the way from the shoulder down to where it connected to a rectangular shape. The shape it was fused to gleamed with brass and metal.

  It was the shape of the familiar old trunk.

  The kid took another step, passing through the threshold of the door in a sudden flicker. The appendage stretched and, like a rubber band pulled taut, the tension pulled the trunk across the floor, bouncing and rattling and leaving a crimson trail in its wake.

  “Dan!” the voice called, blending between that of his wife and Karina’s and a thousand others and all he could do in that moment of madness was to cover his eyes and scream.

  He felt their hands. One at first, then two. Warm and strong, grabbing his own hands, and the light was so bright and behind it he heard an old voice ask: “What have you done?”

  The hands pulled at his fingers with ferocious strength and someone shouted his name again. He didn’t want to open his eyes, didn’t want to let in whatever lay in the darkness beyond, but it was overpowering, a tidal surge between the cracks of his hand. Fingers pulled at his, cold and strong, breaking through his grasp and he screamed and lashed out.

  Linda fell backwards onto the bedroom floor. Her back connected with the edge of the bed, knocking the box-spring and mattress crooked. Her nightgown was askew, hiked up above her hips from the force of the fall, her underwear exposed between splayed legs. Her face was a mask of horror.

  Tommy stood at the edge of the bed, just where that dark boy had stood, only Tommy was crying and covering his mouth. “You’re scaring us! Stop please!” he gulped again and again in run on sentences.

  Only Jessica was silent, unaffected by what Dan realized had been a nightmare. She combed the hair of her doll softly, as if ready to fall back asleep.

  “God dammit Dan,” Linda said, her words spat out with an indignant rage. “What’s the matter with you?!”

  That question lingered in his mind for the rest of the night as he tucked the kids back into bed. To his surprise Jessica had simply crawled to the top bunk and required no more attention than a simple hug. It was Tommy that, despite his outward strength, had been most affected by seeing his father caught in the grips of a waking nightmare, and Dan knew nothing he could say would erase it. The kid would carry that memory for years. The best he could do, the best he could hope for, would be to minimize the damage.

  “What were you dreaming?” Tommy asked.

  “You know, I honestly don’t remember,” Dan answered with a smile and a nod, pulling the sheet up to his son’s neck.

  “Was it scary?” he asked.

  Dan nodded.

  “I don’t understand, why do we dream?”

  “That’s a good question, but I don’t know. No one really does for sure. Some people, scientists and stuff, they think our dreams are a way to work out our problems. Kind of like thinking while we’re asleep.”

  Tommy’s eyebrows dropped and he squinted, pondering the thought. “So, if we have a nightmare, then w
e’re thinking of a really bad problem?”

  Dan smiled. “I don’t know Tommy, maybe. The important thing is, they aren’t real. They can’t hurt us.”

  Tommy nodded and smiled. Dan could see he felt reassured, and if it took lying to his son so that he could sleep that night after what he’d seen and heard, Dan thought that was an easy price to pay.

  “Yes they are,” said a flat voice from above. Dan stood up, looking at the top bunk where Jessica lay with her back to the room. He wasn’t sure if she had spoken since the accident but it was the first time she had spoken to him. Her voice lingered in the air, a hoarse echo, a shell of the sweetness it had once contained.

  “What was that honey?” he asked.

  She rolled over, looking him straight in the eyes. He felt for a moment that he was not gazing onto the face of a six year old girl, but into the eyes of something far wiser than her age. And something far more truthful.

  “They’re real,” she said again in that hoarse voice. “They can hurt us.”

  “What are sweetie? Bad dreams?”

  She shook her head and pointed a finger at the floor. Somehow Dan knew she wasn’t just pointing at the floor, but beyond it, and the only thing he knew that lay beneath the boards of the bedroom floor was the study below. But she wasn’t pointing to the room, he thought. No, she was pointing to something in the room.

  She leaned in close and whispered. “First they took the old woman. Then they took Ginger. And then the girl with the skin pictures.”

  “Skin pictures?”

  “On her back,” Jessica said and Dan felt his blood run cold.

  “Who? Who told you that?”

  “The man with the broken name,” she said as she turned over and hugged Mr. Bun. Then, as if she had answered a simple math question, she whispered: “Goodnight Daddy.”

  Linda left the lamp on his side of the bed on, perhaps, he thought, to ward away any further nightmares, no different than when the kids asked him to leave the closet light on. He turned off the light and climbed back into bed. Her skin was warm as he slid in next to her, her back spotless of ink. He shut his eyes and touched her skin and as he did he heard her voice, soft but clear and precise. Two words.

  “Who’s Karina?”

  He hesitated, fingers trembling on the skin of her back.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You said a name,” she said in a flat voice.

  “Did I?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” she said again.

  He took a deep breath, considering all the possibilities, all the ways he’d planned to broach the topic with her, one day, if he had to. But now, he thought, now wasn’t the time.

  “I don’t know. Name doesn’t ring a bell,” he said to the darkness.

  Beneath the sheets her feet moved away from his. “Liar,” she said.

  Scrying the Nether

  TAMARA AGREED TO visit that afternoon.

  He needed to get Linda out of the house. The idea, the fact that he called Tamara, embarrassed him, and he didn’t want to stack his wife’s doubt onto his own. He told her he had to go to the university and couldn’t pick up the kids from school. He also knew Tommy had soccer practice, and that Linda would have to bring Jessica along to that since he, in theory, wouldn’t be home. That left him with two hours of alone time at home, and to buy a little more he asked Linda to pick up Chinese for dinner, knowing it was over in Menlo Park. Despite her insistence they had enough leftovers, she agreed, as long as he phoned in the order before six. Then he canceled class for the second time that week.

  It had worked out perfectly.

  Linda had pulled out of the driveway just before three. Not thirty minutes later Tamara pulled in, driving an old Buick that belched out smog as it settled in the driveway. Dan caught a glimpse of Marty, peering over the fence like a kid watching the circus come to town.

  He didn’t know what he had expected from Tamara, perhaps some grand arrival, a flock of ravens unfolding to reveal her form, or a hearse with tinted windows and a pentacle for a hood ornament. He found himself disappointed. In the light of the day she looked no different than anyone else he’d come across at one of the local organic grocery stores or DMVs, going about their daily chores and paying their bills. The peninsula was filled with enough odd people and, compared to some of the students he’d seen around campus, Tamara wasn’t that outrageous.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said, reaching out to shake her hand. She gave him a gentle shake but didn’t answer. Instead, she studied the house, her eyes tracing its form like an architect surveying a construction site. She nodded, not at him, but at the task ahead.

  “I don’t mean to rush, you but my wife comes home in a few hours. I don’t think she’ll be too happy about this.”

  “Say no more,” she said, smiling and removing a worn leather bag that clattered as she lifted it from the trunk. “Now, about the fee we discussed. I feel uncomfortable asking for payment up front,” she said, letting it hang in the air.

  “Don’t,” he said, opening his wallet and removing eight crisp fifties. She had agreed to come down, in part she said, because she wanted to see first hand what Old Mabel had created. However, business was business, and she required a full day’s fee, quoted at four hundred dollars.

  “Just be honest, okay? That’s all I ask.”

  “Of course hon,” she smiled, taking the money and tucking it into the pocket of her old coat. Then she clapped her hands and said: “Now, let’s get down to business.”

  She paused before crossing the threshold into the house. He noticed that same small set of prayer beads clutched in her hands. They were dark, made from some soft wood and adorned with symbols he didn’t recognize. They could just as well be some prop from Harry Potter, but he suspected they weren’t. She thumbed over thirteen then nodded and stepped inside as he closed the door.

  “I can definitely feel a presence,” she said in a slow voice as her eyes traced the contours of the entry way, same as she had outside.

  “Sure it’s not the wind?” he asked. She gave him a glance that lasted only a second but said it all: his humor wasn’t welcome while she was working.

  “Whatever it is, it’s old. And it’s angry.”

  She walked over to the window, staring at a small crack that had formed around the crown molding. She reached a finger out to touch it, then paused, thinking against it.

  “Tell me about the child, your daughter.”

  On the phone he had told her about Jessica and her words that had chilled him. He had left out the details of the nightmare and the shifting woman with the ‘skin pictures’, as his daughter had called them. Hallucinating a painting was one thing. Hallucinating a missing woman he had an affair with was a whole new problem.

  “What do you want to know about her?”

  “Well, how old is she?”

  “Six. She’s in kindergarten.”

  “Was she an orphan? Adopted?”

  “No,” Dan said. “Why do you ask?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead she nodded, as if some private curiosity had been satisfied. She walked into the living room, giving slow, thoughtful glances at the couches and the stitching that ran down the backs and pillows of them. Her lips moved in faint whispers.

  “Your son, he doesn’t believe in Santa Claus does he?”

  Dan laughed. “Tommy? No, he believes in sports. Soccer, basketball in the winter, baseball in the spring, video games in between.”

  “But your daughter does. She has imaginary friends I’m guessing.”

  “She’s six. Of course she does.”

  Tamara bent down by the fireplace and reached her hand over the decorative logs. A second later she pulled away, as if burnt by an invisible flame. A good actress indeed, he thought.

  “So what, you think she’s being haunted by the ghost of Saint Nick?” he asked.

  “Did I say that?”

  “No, but, come on. What kind of question is that?”

  “Remembe
r the tea, Dan? Children, sometimes the elderly, sometimes even people of great faith, they act like conduits. Why? ‘Cause they believe. Much easier to pass through a door that’s open than one that’s locked.”

  “What if someone doesn’t believe?”

  “There’s always more than one way into a house. And more than one--”

  Tamara snapped her head back to the foyer. Her eyes scanned the stairs, as if something silent and unseen had just run down them and into the hallway. He felt a chill pass behind him.

  “The painting,” she said, reaching out an arthritic finger that pointed past Dan, to the door at the end of the hallway. “It’s there, isn’t it?”

  Dan entered the study first and turned on the light. Again, Tamara paused before the threshold, thumbing another thirteen beads before entering. Her eyes bulged as they fell upon the painting at the other end of the room.

  “Heavens!” she said. “It’s like Ol’ Mabel described.”

  Tamara studied it, a small smile crossing her lips as if she were seeing a photo of a long dead friend. Then the smile faded and she pulled her hand away from the painting.

  “Something’s wrong. Something’s missing.”

  “What?” he asked. “What’s missing?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s unfinished. Like something’s just a bit--”

  “Off balance?”

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding. “That’s the word.”

  She squatted on the floor, placing the duffel bag down and running her fingers along the floorboards.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Shh,” she quieted him and put her ear to the floor like a child listening for a distant train, ear to a rail. Then, she stood up. “It’s everywhere.”