“I’ll hurt you if I have to.”
“Jesus, Sarah, he’s in his thirties—it’s statutory rape!”
His hand found the transition into the staircase. The Tether in Steve’s hand buzzed and emitted a creaking sound, a notification from something called Edison’s Spirit Phone.
Sarah froze.
A voice, crooning, lilting and familiar, began to sing from the phone.
Sleep my child and peace attend thee
All through the night.
“Janice?” Steve said, opening up the app. “Hello?”
Sarah lunged.
She clawed at Steve’s face, trying to rake away the Tether, getting a piece of his cheek instead.
Steve cried out and stumbled, catching himself on the rail down the staircase.
Sarah kept coming, shrieking and swinging wildly, forcing him back. Nails bit and scraped into Steve’s arm as he shielded his face. His foot scrambled for the next step down.
Grabbing both ends of his forearm, Sarah pulled herself up and sank her teeth into the meat, shaking her head back and forth like a dog, like the dog that had splashed the blood all over her dress—Janice’s dress. Now bright red droplets of Steve’s blood fell onto the bodice.
The wig had slipped down so that only Sarah’s teeth showed under all that stained, tangled hair. Her teeth, and one wild eye. Steve fell back against the opposite wall of the staircase. The railing dug into his back, and Sarah kept worrying at his arm.
He almost hit her, almost kicked her away, nearly head-butted his own daughter in the face. He waggled the Tether in front of her instead, making sure she saw it, making sure that her one rabid eye locked onto it and that her teeth let go before he launched it off the staircase as hard as he could.
Sarah whipped her head around, slinging blood, watching like a dog playing fetch as the phone sailed over the front room, over the couch, and down toward the fireplace. There was a second where Steve was certain it would fly right into the flames. Then the Tether hit the screen covering the fireplace and fell to the hearth.
Steve almost expected Sarah to get down on all fours as she ran for her phone. She pushed away from him.
And tripped over Steve’s foot.
Sarah tumbled downstairs, end over end, long legs flipping over her head. The back of her knees landed on the banister as she went, her body thudding against all the stairs, shoulders, back, knees, head.
She hit the bottom in a sprawl of white skirts, and Steve just stood there, looking down at how small his daughter looked while the staircase appeared to grow longer, steeper, higher below him, and her body shrank.
“Sarah!” he said, hurrying down, nearly falling down the stairs himself. He bent over her to check her head and saw just a second too late her eye, that one wild, bloodshot eye, gleaming up at him.
Fu— he thought, but then everything was knocked out of him as her foot came up into his nuts.
Rigid, frozen, his belly heavy with pain, too heavy to lift, Steve collapsed on top of his daughter. She struggled to get out from under him.
He managed to hold her down, pin her down, then hold her by the leg long enough for the weight in his belly to lessen. She pulled away from him, and he got up, too, vaulting over the back of the couch as she ran around it.
Steve landed wrong in the cushions, rolled an ankle and fell, glad he’d gotten rid of the glass coffee table, the table that both Sarah and JJ had busted their heads on when they were young.
Sarah pounded around the arm of the couch, completely bald now, her bare feet in ripped stockings.
The Tether lay in front of Steve, at the foot of the flagstone hearth. Behind the metal screen, the fire glowed, hissed, and popped.
Steve thrust his hand over the carpet, seized the phone, and–Sarah ground his hand beneath her heel.
“Stop!” Steve said, yanking his mangled fingers out from under her foot, cradling them against his chest. “I’m your father, for chrissakes!”
Sarah, bald, bloody-toothed, and laughing, leaned down and snatched up her Tether. The look on her face, like a greedy, gleeful child, almost drooling from ear to ear, terrified Steve more than anything else, more than Graham taking control of his car or moving the earth; maybe even more than the time shift to Halloween.
That hideous leer, whatever it was underneath, stretching out his daughter’s flesh as it broke it in. For once, Steve was seeing the true face of The Phone Company.
Roaring, throwing himself at his daughter, Steve slapped the phone out of her hands. Sarah’s face fell from a carven “U” to a terrible “O.”
Picking up the Tether, Steve lumbered to his feet, grabbed the hot metal screen with one hand, pulled it back, and shot the Tether slam-dunk into the flames.
“Mom!” Sarah screamed, pushing him aside. “No, no, no, no!” Sarah threw the metal screen out of the way, and part of it folded, crashing into Steve.
He heard the hiss as Sarah thrust her hands into the fireplace, screaming for her mom.
Steve grabbed her by the arm, trying to get her hand out of the fire, but Sarah wrenched away and reached in again.
“Oh my God—Mom! Oh my God, you killed her!”
Steve wrapped himself around Sarah from behind, locking his hands below her breasts so that her arms were trapped at her sides, and he pulled her back, leaning with all his weight away from the stove as she lunged toward it, bucking against him to break his grip.
“I’m your daughter! I’m your fucking—”
Sarah’s body went rigid in Steve’s arms, and she began to convulse and gurgle and buckle at the knees.
Trick, Steve thought, squeezing harder and holding her up. Another trick. But then her weight became too much to bear, and Steve eased her to the floor as best he could, still hugging her, moving his face so she didn’t head-butt him with the back of her skull.
From there, he didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what was wrong with her or how to fix it. Her body writhed so violently against him Steve couldn’t tell the difference between her spasms and his own sobs.
Finally, the seizure began to subside, but still Steve hugged her, panting, choking on the smell of burning plastic. Sarah muttered something one last time before passing out to the gentle popping of the fire. Steve barely heard her. But then he did.
“You killed, you fucking . . .”
CHAPTER 43
“Sir, she’s going to need a new Tether,” the ambulance dispatcher said.
Steve stared through his bedroom door to the king-sized bed, where his daughter looked like nothing more than empty blankets. His back still hurt from carrying her away from the fireplace. She looked skinny but weighed almost more than he could bear. Thank God he hadn’t tried hauling her upstairs to her own bed.
“A new Tether would—”
“I’m hanging up,” Steve said.
“Please, sir, we’re sending some—”
“No, thanks.”
Steve ended the call and stared at the lump of blankets. When Sarah was young, he used to sneak to her crib at night and stare at her until he could see the rise and fall of her gentle breathing. Sometimes the room was too dark and he couldn’t see her well enough, so he’d lean over the railing until he could hear the whir of air between her lips. He felt the same sort of relief now when he saw the blankets moving.
Still alive.
The burns on Sarah’s hands weren’t terrible, mostly superficial second-degree blisters. He had wrapped them with cool compresses and kept a bottle of pain medication rattling around in his pocket for when she woke up. The burns weren’t what worried him.
Whatever had happened to Sarah when Steve had incinerated her Tether. . . . He wanted to believe it was a normal seizure, like JJ’s, or something related to her tumble down the stairs. He feared it was something worse, though. Far worse.
I almost killed her, he thought.
And now what?
Standing at his bedroom door, Steve could see through the vaulted window to t
he meadow outside. A light rain had started to fall, leaving delicate drops on the glass. He didn’t like how dark it was out there, how vast and unknowable, this space that isolated him from everything else. His daughter needed help and he could do nothing about it.
Bill.
Try Bill.
Steve dialed the number. While it rang, he put on his jacket, needing to go out and grab some firewood.
“Damn it,” he said after the fourth ring. He was hitting disconnect when he heard Bill pick up.
“Steve?”
“Oh, thank God.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s Sarah,” Steve said. “I burned her Tether, and she, uh, she fell down the stairs, Bill.”
“Jesus.”
“She’s out cold, she needs help.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Thank you, thanks,” Steve said, but Bill had already hung up. Steve went out and got more firewood. After tending the fire, he started to pace, glancing toward his room.
This, he thought.
This was what his terrible parenting had amounted to. His kids spent more time at school and at their friends’ houses than they did at their own home. Other people influenced them way more than their parent.
Intellectually, and in practical terms, Steve knew—ever since seeing his kids playing with other kids at playgrounds and birthdays and things, watching the way kids ran around with reckless disregard for each other’s safety—that outside influences would be a formidable factor in his children’s lives. But as he’d learned from his relationship with his own mom and dad, parents usually maintained some influence, a powerful if often ignored one.
Except now, both Steve’s kids had been ripped away from him. JJ, gone to who knows where, doing God knows what. Sarah, now mentally vacant. Outside influences had been allowed to strip them away, PCo had been allowed to scrape them away, and all because Steve hadn’t exerted enough good influence in their lives. All because he was afraid to make real connections.
And it wasn’t just because he might lose them, although that concern was dominant now. It was because connected hearts tended to suffer the same severed strings. Steve could barely manage the screwed up, broken rhythms of his own heart.
Someone knocked at the front door.
Bill? Steve thought, holding his breath and listening, hearing nothing but the hiss of dead air. Already?
He hadn’t heard a car pull in. He would have heard a car. He would’ve seen its lights in the meadow.
Knock-knock-knock.
Steve peeked around the corner toward the front door. Through the skylights, he could see a child standing outside, wearing black clothing and a round yellow smiley face for a mask. The boy held a bag behind his back.
Knock-knock—
“Sorry,” Steve said, opening the door. In his pocket, his phone began to ring. “I don’t have any—”
“No treats this year, mister,” the kid said, and Steve almost recognized the voice, if not for the muffling effect of the mask.
“Hold on, just . . .” Steve held up a finger to the kid and answered the call. “Hello?”
“Yes, Mr. Gregory? This is Deputy Caruthers. I regret to inform you we found your son.”
“Regret,” Steve said.
“He’s dead, Mr. Gregory. He drowned.”
Steve didn’t say anything. For some reason, maybe because everything Graham had said about smoking and breaking covenants, Steve thought of his newborn son, his tiny premature baby in a bubble. He remembered the cold emptiness he’d felt that night, pleading up at the stars.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gregory. We found him facedown in Ricki Lake.”
The kid in the smiley mask started snickering.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Steve said.
The kid’s hand came out from behind his back, holding, not a bag of treats, but a Tether open to some kind of app, something called Crank Prank.
Deputy Caruthers said, “He also suffered antemortem wounds from Britney Spear—”
Steve hung up, and the kid dashed away down the drive, howling with laughter and singing, “Trick or treat! Smell my sheit!” while ripping a fart.
Steve slammed the door and threw the deadbolt. He watched the kid disappear into the darkness except for his yellow smiley face, which floated, disembodied, like some sickly moon.
He heard a siren, an ambulance. Lights flashed across the little boy’s costume, making his smiley face blink on and off as the ambulance pulled to a stop at the mouth of the drive.
The kid aimed his Tether at the ambulance and tapped at his screen. The engine revved up to a whine.
The kid stepped aside, and the emergency vehicle nosed into the driveway, skidding for a second in the gravel before catching traction and picking up speed, rocketing toward Steve’s house while the kid cheered and bounced up and down.
“You little sh—” Steve said, jumping back from the sidelight. Metal and glass detonated out front, louder than a clap of lightning. The ambulance had rear-ended his car at school-crossing speeds.
One of the EMTs, obviously breaking the seatbelt law, had burst through the windshield, lodging at the shoulders, his face now cut and bleeding while he laughed and laughed like some demented hood ornament.
The engine chortled and stopped, and the siren cut off. The lights still flashed, gleaming in the EMT’s drool and blood. Except this man wasn’t an EMT. He wasn’t even dressed like one. In fact, the guy would’ve been wearing a smiley-face mask if the windshield hadn’t scraped it off.
The driver, also not an EMT, stumbled out with a big knot on his forehead. He helped pull his cohort out of the windshield, and then, leaning on each other for support, Deputy Caruthers and Deputy Goff, both in black clothing, limped toward Steve’s front door, grinning wider than the masks they’d left behind.
Staying out of view of the skylights, Steve backed into the kitchen toward the knives.
Goff breathed against the skylight, fogging up the wet glass as he looked in.
Steve slid a chef’s knife out of the block. Nearly every member of his family had been sliced by this eight-inch blade of gleaming, high-carbon steel. Janice had lost the pad of her fingertip to it one Thanksgiving.
A hand reached up and slapped the window over the kitchen sink. Steve nearly screamed, brandishing the knife at the glass. He jumped again when someone else knocked on the big vaulted window in the front room. He looked out the kitchen window, across his side lawn.
More and more people surrounded his house, each wearing the same dark clothing and smiley face, grinning as they hammered at the glass or knocked on the exterior walls and the supports for the deck, growing louder and louder as their Tethers began to talk. People were even running around and knocking on his roof.
Knock.
Knock-knock.
Knock-knock-knock!
KNOCK!
The faces.
All the smiling faces, all the same.
Steve thought he recognized a few of the people, their builds. That one, the pear-shaped kid, looked a lot
like the Dick. And that one over there, the skinny woman with the giant chest, carried herself exactly like Deb Disney; the older lady looked like Mrs. McLean, but what did any of those differences matter? There were so many of them now, the whole town turned Pitchfork Mafia.
If they wanted in, it wouldn’t take much. They could break a window from their combined weight alone.
So why weren’t they breaking in?
The lights in the house began to flicker. Not like a power outage. More like someone flicking them on and off at the switch.
Steve ducked behind the kitchen island, afraid someone had made it into the house. But, no, even the kitchen lights were blinking, and he could see the wall switch.
In the living room, the TV turned on. Some newscast, blaring something about what someone had said on Follow (as if that were some source of news). The segment was all about how cool the new Tether was. An ad, basically. Masquerading as journalism.
The TV began to channel surf, pausing here and there on snippets of weird reality shows and vlogs, all shot on phones, except for a show called Police State, which was like Cops, recorded using Dragnet glasses. All of TV had become YouTube.
Mostly the channels revolved around beauty tips or FAIL bloopers, people falling, slipping, crashing, or getting hit in the face or the balls; cats doing funny things, like scratching up babies’ faces; people doing video confessionals about being abused as children, about abusing their own child.
In the bedroom, something shattered.
“Sarah?”
Strobing, phasing, passing through the phantasmagoria of the blinking lights, Steve ran from the kitchen, gripping the knife.
Steve burst into the bedroom to find an empty bed and shattered glass glittering all over the floor. A moist wind, not cold but strangely warm, blew in through the broken window, making the drapes come alive.
A few smiley faces withdrew into the dark, leaving the view of the night unobstructed. They didn’t really want in. They were just a distraction, so Sarah could escape. Steve looked out and saw Janice’s white dress fading to black.
The Phone Company Page 41
