Fallen Stones

by Thomas M. Malafarina

  Dwight slowly and calmly lifted the straight razor to his left arm and made several deep horizontal cuts across his wrist. Blood pumped from the wounds and streamed onto the body of his dead wife. It trickled along the length of her arm and eventually began to puddle on the floorboards. Some of the blood beaded on the surface of the floor while the rest of it seeped down into the cracks between the boards.

  A moment later, Dwight brought the bloody razor up to his throat and sliced a gaping wound from just below his left ear and continued it over across to his right. It was as though he was unable to feel the pain of the blade. With his head raised and his throat extended, the incision split open up like a cavernous fleshy mouth, exposing all of its musculature inside and allowing blood to pour down his arms and the front of his suit, drenching his dead wife’s face and torso with gore. From her point of observation, Stephanie bellowed a silent scream, as she could not stand to see any more.

  Within a split second, Stephanie found herself standing in the field behind their property. It was early in the morning on an overcast winter's day and a heavy fog seemed to enshroud everything around her. She saw a woman standing on a rectangular area of the property behind a low wall of stones. She was dressed in a long heavy black woolen coat and wore a matching dark fashionable hat and scarf.

  The area looked quite familiar to her, as if she had seen it before and not just because it was part of her property but also because she believed something significant might have happened there which she could not immediately recall. Stephanie turned to her left and saw the familiar hexagonal shape of the spa building in the distance and understood she was standing at the back of her property near the spot where her children had stood staring on the first day they had come to see the house. She wondered how she had gotten outside and why she was at the back of her land.

  She looked again at the spa building, noticing how much different it looked, realizing she was looking at the building, as it appeared when it had first been constructed ninety years earlier. Stephanie heard a sniffling sound and saw the woman, standing behind the low wall was crying. She turned slightly in Stephanie's direction and Stephanie immediately recognized the woman as Amelia Miller, Dwight's sister. From behind Amelia's legs, a small girl dressed in winter coat and hat stepped forward slightly and looked down at something on the ground behind the wall.

  Stephanie stepped closer and noticed behind the wall was a small cemetery; a family plot similar to those she had seen on occasions while driving past family farms in rural Pennsylvania. As she approached the two figures, she recognized the young girl as Sarah Livingston. Stephanie followed their gaze downward and saw two small gravestones marking what appeared to be two fresh graves. She also noticed other small gravestones scattered about the place, but their inscriptions had been weathered away by time and the elements making them illegible.

  Focusing on the two newer stones Stephanie read the inscriptions "Matthew James Livingston, June 12, 1916 - December 19, 1922" on the first and the second one said "Charles Edward Livingston July 2, 1918 - December 19 1922". She realized she was looking at the grave markers for the boys she had just seen murdered. Each of the stones also had an identical inscription below the dates. Stephanie could barely make them out through the morning fog, but looking closer, she could see they read "Taken From Us Too Soon, By The Hand Of Evil."

  Then Amelia spoke, as if addressing the dead boys, "Poor little Matthew and Charles. That miserable witch did this to you and all because of the misdeeds of my own brother. He was so very wrong in what he did and he should have been made to pay for his indiscretions. But there was no reason why you two innocents should have suffered for his mistakes, and most certainly not with your young lives. Although I couldn’t have stopped your father and his sinful ways, I was aware of what he was doing. Perhaps I too am guilty; perhaps I should have tried harder to dissuade him. But I did not and I will be sorry for the rest of my days for what happened to you." Then the woman wept openly. Little Sarah clung to her leg, but said nothing.

  "But don't you worry, boys," Amelia sobbed, "I promise you with all my heart, I will take good care of your little sister, Sarah, and will raise her as one of my own children. I can only hope you boys have found peace on the other side."

  Sarah raised her head slightly as if looking at something else in the graveyard. Stephanie followed her gaze and could see two shapes forming in the morning mist. Her breath caught in her throat as she realized what she and Sarah were seeing appear before them were the images of Matthew and Charles Livingston. Amelia did not seem to see the manifestation, as she showed no signs of reacting in any way.

  The boys stood side-by-side, still dressed in their nightclothes, holding hands looking directly at their little sister. Their pajamas appeared to be sodden. The boys were pail as milk, their skin a dusky blue-gray and their large hypnotic staring eyes were sunk deep in their heads, surrounded by dark circles. They seemed to still be covered in a thin skin of ice, which gave their mottled flesh the slightest blue glow. The little child, Sarah, looked out at them with a beatific smile and silently mouthed the word "boys".

  Stephanie suddenly flashed back to the first day they had come to the property and recalled that same expression on Sammy's face as he stood in front of what she now believed was this same plot of ground, only almost one hundred years later, wearing that very same expression and mouthing that same word, "boys". Sammy was special, both Stephanie and Jason knew that but they previously had no idea why. But now Stephanie could see her own grandmother as a two-year-old, looking like a miniature version of Marie Livingston, seeing with the same sight beyond normal sight. Now she knew where the gift had originated. Sammy was part of she and Jason, and they were both descendants of Dwight Livingston. This special sight which Sammy seemed to have must be a genetic predisposition handed down through the generations.

  Neither she, nor her daughter Cindy had never shown signs of having such a gift and to the best of her knowledge neither had Jason or Jeremy. It must have taken the combining of their similar, but different genetic makeup to allow some recessive gene, which controlled such a sight to come forward in Sammy. Then Stephanie was distracted suddenly hearing Amelia's voice in her head.

  Amelia was looking off in the distance to the far left, unaware of the two ghosts watching her. , "Over there is where we put the bodies of your parents.” She was silently speaking in her mind to the two boys buried beneath her feat. “I am sorry that I forced you to lie in the same ground with strangers, but I could not allow those two heathens to be buried on the same hallowed ground where you now rest. To bury them here would be a blasphemy to God and an injustice to you both as well. You are better off finding your way to paradise together without your parents” Then speaking to herself she said, “I sincerely doubt they will ever be joining the boys in Heaven. I suspect they will be spending their eternity subjected to the tortures of Hell, at least that is my personal wish for them."

  Then the two boys turned slowly together and looked directly at Stephanie. Their dead eyes, now gray with the film of lifelessness seemed to stare a hole in her. The larger of the boys, Matthew on the left raised his hand and pointed in a direction away from their present location and opened his mouth as if to shout. Stephanie felt a vibration building inside of her head and a howl steadily increasing in volume. It seemed to build as if reaching a crescendo and Stephanie feared her eardrums might shatter from the unearthly cry. The banshee shriek was unlike anything she had ever heard uttered from any living creature. Then again, she knew these two entities floating before here were anything but alive. Matthew's gaping maw surrounded by purple-blue colored lips continued to howl until Stephanie thought she might lose her mind.

  Then suddenly the noise stopped and Stephanie was no longer standing in the family graveyard but was in another plot of unmarked ground where she could see two other fresh graves with carved headstones. She looked back in the direction where she assumed she had come from. The spa building was
now off to her right in the distance and she could no longer see the small graveyard with its low stone wall as it had been engulfed by the morning fog. Fortunately she could likewise neither see nor hear the two dead boys. Then Stephanie's concentration was interrupted by more of Amelia’s thoughts.

  "I ordered special gravestones for them," Amelia thought. Stephanie was surprised to find that not only had she been transported miraculously to this new location, but so had Amelia and Sarah. Amelia was rambling and apparently speaking to no one in particular. "I have to admit I was a bit generous with Dwight's inscription by having it say 'Devoted Husband, Loving Father, Tragically Taken In The Prime Of Life'. I know he was anything but a devoted husband; however he was a loving father and was also my brother so I chose to be kind and forgiving on his final message.

  "But in the case of that murdering witch, Marie's grave, I wanted to make sure the world would know exactly what type of horrid creature she was. That's why I had her inscription read, ‘May Her Wretched Soul Rot In The Bowels Of Hell For Eternity’

  "And believe me, I pray by all that is holy, to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, that Marie's soul does just that. In fact if I could have but one wish it would be that both Marie and Dwight Livingston are forced to share eternity in damnation together, miserable in each other's company until the end of time. I would ask that Dwight be given dominion over her and she would spend her time as his slave. I know that's not the Christian thing to wish but those two lovely little boys are dead because of the sins of both of their parents. They deserve some type of retribution for their suffering."

  Looking down at the graves, Stephanie saw something she couldn't at first quite comprehend. Something appeared to be slowly rising up from each of the freshly dug graves. She looked over at Sarah and saw she too was staring down at the earth, mouth agape with a look of terror on her face. As before, Amelia did not seem to see anything.

  Before their shocked eyes, images of Dwight and Marie Livingston slowly began to rise up from the mounds of dirt covering the graves. They were dressed exactly as they had been on the night of the murder-suicide, Marie with her blood stained white night gown and Dwight with his rumpled business suit soaked with gore. Marie held her head at an odd angle as if something was not quite right with her neck and the front of Dwight's dress shirt was saturated with blood which seemed to still occasionally trickle from the gaping wound in his neck.

  Stephanie was so shocked by what she had just seen and heard she suddenly found herself once again awake in her loft workspace, feeling as if she had just risen from a disturbing dream. Although she could not recall all of the details of what she had just experienced, she remembered the majority of what she learned. Dwight Livingston had fathered a child out of wedlock, a child that would grow up to be Jason's grandmother. Marie had learned of Dwight's indiscretion and had lost her mind, killing her two sons, but for some reason sending her daughter, Stephanie's grandmother away in order that she could survive. Then Dwight had killed Marie and in a fit of anger and then had taken his own life. And it was quite possible the family had actually been buried somewhere on her property.

  This was her family's tragic secret and their shame. And she realized this past was not just her family's history but Jason's as well. Both of their families had directly or indirectly played a part in this tragedy. It was a shared disgrace, a shared transgression. And now almost a century later, she and Jason, had come together, both the products of dishonored families; related families. When they met, they had believed themselves to be strangers but that had not exactly been the case. True, they had not known each other and had been strangers in that sense of the word, but they did share a common ancestry. And perhaps at the base level, the primitive animal level, it was possible this shared DNA may have allowed them to feel comfortable with each other from the beginning and might have been what brought them together.

  And as such, their union now completed the family circle of blood. But for what reason had they come to meet and eventually become married? Had it truly been by chance or had it somehow been orchestrated? Had whatever unnamed force of the universe, which had caused so many coincidences over the past months, also been responsible for bringing them together.

  And why had they been brought to this home? This was the very same home where everything apparently had started. She suddenly believed more than ever, there was some force, some unseen element, which was directing her destiny. And she believed she could do nothing to stop it.

  Stephanie had felt from the beginning something was wrong with all of what seemed like apparent good fortune. She always had to work hard for anything she had ever gotten in her life. She should have realized if something seemed too good to be true, it probably was. And now her family members were all here together, forced to live on the very same property where her great-grandparents and family had died so violently.

  She had to go and wait for Jason to come home. She had to let him know what she had discovered. She had no idea what they would do next but she knew the bodies of her ancestors were buried somewhere on the property and she needed to find out where. She was sure when Jason learned the whole story, he would think of some way to deal with it. He always had been able to think of some solution in the past; she only hoped he could now.

  Stephanie finally began to feel as if she was returning to normal, as if she had awoken from some strange dream or hypnosis. However, she was not actually as normal as she had believed. She took the blank sheet of typing paper in her hands but she nonetheless still saw the hand-written letter from Marie. Likewise, the newspaper article from a recent local newspaper also looked to Stephanie to be the aged story from the Ashton Daily News. Stephanie placed them both back into what to her, appeared to be an old and tattered envelope. Then she tucked the envelope delicately under her arm and walked over to where Sammy sat staring at the blank television screen. Apparently, the DVD had run out some time earlier, but Sammy didn't seem to notice.

  Stephanie bent down and picked up her son and began cleaning him up in preparation for heading back to the main house. As she did so, she caught a glimpse of Sammy in the wall mirror and was shocked at just how much he was beginning to look just like Jason, as he grew older. He always had looked like his father, but now as he was beginning to lose his baby looks and take on more of a "big boy" appearance, the resemblance to Jason was becoming more obvious and more pronounced. Although Stephanie could not recall the two boys from her earlier daydream, she thought about the picture of the two Livingston boys she had found earlier and decided to check sometime to see just how closely they might actually resemble her little Sammy. She suspected the similarity would be amazing.

  "Oh, Sammy," she said with an odd tone, not quite sounding like herself and as if noticing Sammy's resemblance to Jason for the first time, "You are so much like your father." Then she walked back toward the main part of the house.

  Inside the mirror, there was a hideous rumble of merriment as the creatures from the world of the damned, cheered over what they had accomplished; understanding their time of being trapped between worlds would soon end. They would finally find their way out, and in their place, Stephanie and Jason Wright would remain to serve out their sentence.

  Chapter 33

  Jason looked at Stephanie as if he were trying to make sense of the ramblings of a crazy woman. He had just returned home from work and was hanging up his jacket in the foyer closet seeing the kids playing in the family room. He gave them his customary greeting and could see Connie Franks in the kitchen preparing dinner.

  He assumed Stephanie was still in her loft working on her infernal project as usual, but was surprised to see her sitting at the dining room table, paging through a thin document, which she held in trembling hands. She fidgeted in her seat, looking as if she was unable to get comfortable, like she was extremely anxious. She briefly looked up from her page and catching his eye, she frantically signaled him with her gesturing hand to come into the dining room. He sat on t
he chair next to her, which she had pulled out for him and he could see by her disheveled condition and her less than desirable aroma that yet another day had passed without her benefiting from proper hygiene.

  "Jason! Jason!" she said in a whispered voice fraught with agitation, much more so than he had ever seen her before. "Jason! You have to see this... it's unbelievable! ... Just wait 'till you see this!" Her eyes were bulging wide with excitement, perhaps appearing worse by her gaunt and haggard looking face. She seemed to have aged five or more years, the sight of her made Jason think of photos he had seen of World War II death camp survivors. This entire situation was getting way out of control and he knew he would have to take some drastic action very soon.

  Several months ago, Jason might have become caught up in her excitement. In fact, he had been very supportive and enthusiastic in the beginning, before things got so strange. But after seeing her in her current mental and physical condition, he was far too concerned about her health and well-being to share in her fervor.

  "Steph?" he asked with apprehension. "What in the world is going on with you? Didn't you get a shower again today? You look as if you didn't bother to clean up in days. What's wrong, Steph? Please tell me. I want to help you."

  "Nothing's wrong, yet in a way everything's wrong. Don't you see, Jason?" Stephanie replied with a frantic dismissive quality to her voice. "I don't need any help. Not from you. Not from anybody. You don't have to worry about me. I'm fine. In fact, I am better than I have been in a long time. But that doesn't matter...all that matters is this...look...look at this."

  Stephanie showed Jason the printed copy of the family tree she had developed. Jason had to lean back a bit to escape the rank smell of Stephanie's foul breath. He wondered with great displeasure when she had last brushed her teeth. Trying desperately to maintain his focus, he reluctantly looked at the document she passed to him.