From Twisted Roots

by Tobias Wade

  “Are you ok?” I asked. “Did he do anything to you?”

  “I can’t live like this!” she cried.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. We can move. We don’t have to stay here.”

  “It wouldn’t matter!”

  “A change might be good for us!”

  “No!” She stood up and grabbed me by my shoulders. “She’ll follow, Caleb. She won’t stop. I hear her crying all the time! She wants to go home and she can’t and I can’t help her!”

  I tried to make sense of what she was saying, all while very aware of the fire still burning on my doorstep.

  “Who, Mom?”

  “Leona! Don’t you hear her? I try to talk to her, but she doesn’t stop. All day, all night, she cries and asks why I let him hurt her. She asks why I won’t let her go home!”

  “Whoa, no, Mom, no, she’s not. She’s not here.” I tried to hug her, but she shoved me back.

  “Don’t patronize me!”

  “I’m not! I know you’re having a hard time, I am too—”

  “She blames me, Caleb, and I think she’s right. I knew Arthur had some trouble. I tried to get him to talk to me, but he wouldn’t. I should have done more, Leona knows that. I know that!”

  “Listen to yourself! It’s guilt, not Leona, Mom. I feel it too, ok? I should have been around more after Dad died. I should have helped more.”

  “She hurts so much. She hurts and it’s my fault.”

  “No, Mom—damnit, I need to put that out. Just wait a minute.”

  I ran past her to the kitchen for the extinguisher, leaving her standing there looking like a lost child.

  “I tried my best with both of you,” she called after me. “I love you both so much.”

  “I know, Mom.” I shouted over my shoulder while I read the instructions on the canister. “Love you too.”

  I hurried back to the front door and aimed the extinguisher’s nozzle at the base of the flames. I squeezed the lever, showering it in a burst of white, until the fire had died. I looked down at the mess in disgust and turned back to Mom, only to find the entryway empty.

  “Mom?” I said.

  Bang!

  Thud.

  The silence that followed rang in my ears. I walked slowly to the bottom of the stairs and looked up, but I couldn’t make myself go up to the second floor.

  I sat on the bottom step, staring out my open door at the burnt bag of shit: an apt metaphor for what my life had become. I tried my best to ignore the smell of iron drifting down from my bedroom. I was still sitting there when the police came, no doubt called after someone heard the gunshot. I stayed there after telling them what had happened and where to find my mother.

  Curious neighbors were standing in my yard, craning their necks to see inside. I got up, sickened by the gawkers, sick for my mom, furious with my brother, and kicked the door shut. There would not be any more shows from the Graham family for them to watch.

  I didn’t watch them take Mom out in the same kind of black body bag they’d brought Leona out in. I didn’t watch them load her in the ambulance and drive her away. I barely spoke to the cops, who were mercifully understanding.

  I just sat on my living room couch, drinking from a bottle of scotch. I was trying to figure out if I could really hear the sound of a young girl crying, or whether it was just my grief and my guilt playing tricks on me.

  The Gift That Keeps On Giving

  Most little girls don’t dream of growing up and spending their days surrounded by human blood.

  My sister was not most little girls.

  When we were young, our dolls spent as much time in quarantine with terrible illnesses as they did at tea parties. She enjoyed dissecting our stuffed animals and labelling their bits of fluff as if they were body parts. I suppose that our parents could have been worried about their youngest child and her unusual fascinations, but where some saw “Future Serial Killer” burning in neon colors above Leah’s little head, they saw “Scientist”. As far as they were concerned, she wasn’t hurting anything. She was just trying to learn, and there was certainly nothing wrong with that.

  While we both enjoyed more conventional hobbies, like gaming together or taking trips to the beach, Leah never wavered from her more morbid interests. We frequently visited the science museum, especially if there was an exhibit on anything having to do with the human body. She had me watching all kinds of true crime and medical shows.

  Nothing, however, captivated her like blood. Its properties, its functions, what it contained; it drew her in the same as a good novel did me. If it weren’t for Leah, I might never have even known my own blood type, much less what kinds of diseases or genetic traits could potentially be floating through my veins.

  It never failed to amuse me when new people heard her talking about various biological functions and fluids with such passion. Most quiet, pretty girls didn’t care for those things, their polite, slightly uncomfortable smiles said.

  Like I said, my sister was not most girls.

  It came as no surprise to us, then, when she went to college to study biology with a special focus on genetics and hematology, the study of blood. It was even less of a surprise when she landed a lab job running blood tests shortly after graduating. The only crux was that it was over a thousand miles away in a small New England town. We’d never been more than a couple hours away from one another.

  “Don’t worry about it, Jackie,” she told me when I started getting emotional over the distance. “You can visit whenever you want!”

  I took her up on that offer barely a month after she left when we both had an extended holiday weekend. She’d always been my best friend, and it was hard adjusting to the fact that she was no longer within driving distance. She took my clinginess in good cheer and welcomed me into her apartment with a pizza, a daiquiri, and an air mattress on her living room floor.

  The long weekend flew by much faster than I thought possible. During the final afternoon of my trip, I was feeling sentimental all over again. Before I had to leave, I insisted that we stop somewhere so I could get her a gift to commemorate my first visit.

  “Fine,” Leah conceded after I’d spent our entire lunch nagging her about it. “But don’t get carried away, ok? It’s really not a big deal.”

  I made a face at her. “It is to me. I don’t know when I’ll see you again.”

  “Uh, next time we video chat? Probably right after you get home tomorrow?”

  “Just shut up and let me buy you something, ok?”

  She rolled eyes. I rolled mine right back, and then we looked up where the nearest thrift shop was. We both liked wandering through second hand stores; you could find some real buried treasures if you just dug around enough. Whatever we ended up finding wouldn’t be too expensive, which would keep Leah happy.

  I hadn’t really expected much when we first walked through the shop doors. It was a small place and a lot of what they had was tacky or simply not Leah’s very particular “Hint of Goth” style. On a whim, I left my sister flipping through a rack of t-shirts and wandered over to the jewelry case. Inside the dimly lit glass box, they had some rather gaudy rings, a few bracelets, and a couple of necklaces lined up on a display board.

  It only took one, brief look to know exactly what I was going to get my sister.

  I called over the bored looking cashier and pointed to the necklace in the middle. She unlocked the case and scooped the piece up to lay it across the top of the glass in front of me. It was perfect for Leah: a silver pendant, long and slender, ending in a red, teardrop shaped gem which hung from a thin chain. It reminded me of blood on the end of a needle.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “$50, and you’ll get a little certificate of authenticity and stuff to go with it,” the cashier said.

  “Certificate?”

  “Yeah, it’s historical or something, donated by a local family.”

  After I paid, she put the necklace int
o a small cardboard jewelry box and dug the certificate out of one of the drawers beneath the display case. Both went into a plastic bag that was handed to me. With the present in hand, I tracked Leah down and waved the box enticingly in front of her face.

  “We can go; I found your gift.”

  I made her wait until we were back in the car before letting her open up the box. The moment she saw it, her eyes went wide as I had hoped. A genuine, thrilled smile spread across her lips.

  “It looks like a blood drop!” she exclaimed with more excitement than most would have gotten from such a comparison.

  While she worked on getting it latched around her neck, I grabbed the certificate, which she’d let fall on her lap along with the bag.

  “It’s supposedly an antique,” I said. “According to this, it belonged to an herbalist who ‘practiced healing arts’ back in the mid-eighteenth century and was passed down in her family from then until now.”

  “Sounds like a load of bull,” Leah scoffed while she studied her reflection in the visor mirror.

  I blocked her view with the paper and waved it around until she took it from me. “But look, it’s got an official looking seal and signature and everything!”

  “I’m sure a beloved family heirloom, certificate of authenticity and all, is really going to end up at Andy’s Secondhand Goods instead of in some safety deposit box. It’s probably not even real.”

  “You never know,” I said, grinning. “So what do you think? You like it?”

  “I guess I’ll keep it,” Leah replied with an exaggerated, put-upon sigh.

  She gave herself one last look in the mirror, and flipped it up. We headed back to her apartment to enjoy one last night of sisterly bonding over cheesy 90s sitcoms and margaritas.

  I left the next evening with promises of another visit sometime soon, reminding her to text or call whenever I landed. I told her she was sounding more like our mom every day, and she flipped me off all the way to the security gate. My flight home was noisy and crowded. I was all too happy to bid it and all of my fellow passengers a not-so-fond farewell when we finally touched down a half hour past our scheduled arrival time.

  It took me another two hours to get home and, by then, it was well past my bedtime. I sent Leah and our parents a text to let everyone know I’d made it and stumbled into the shower for a quick rinse before flopping into bed. It took no time at all to fall asleep, and I stayed that way until well into the next morning. Travel never really did agree with me.

  After I’d rubbed the sleep from my eyes, I groped along my nightstand for my phone. New text notifications filled my screen.

  Mom had sent a couple hearts back. Dad gave me a thumbs up. Leah, though, had sent me a string of short messages back to back.

  K glad you’re home, she’d sent the night before.

  Earlier that morning, she’d sent more. Had such a weird dream last night about Gary, the jackass shift lead I’ve told you about.

  We were talking in the lab, and this huge black spider crawled out of his mouth mid-sentence. I tried to tell him because he hadn’t even flinched, but he just got louder and louder until I stopped.

  More spiders started coming out of his nose and ears and he had a couple legs poking out from behind one eye.

  I mean, it was kind of cool, but also creepy.

  I snorted in amusement and shot back, Only you.

  Once I could finally bring myself to leave the comfort of bed, I spent the majority of my day playing catch up on all the laundry and cleaning I’d not done before I’d gone up to visit Leah. Not exactly the ideal last day of vacation before heading back to work, but it had to get done. My sister helped break up the monotony with more texts and silly pictures from the lab. She even managed to snap a stealthy one of Gary, a middle aged man with a paunchy belly and receding hairline, so I could better imagine what she’d seen in her dream.

  Don’t be a creeper taking pictures of people without them knowing :p, I sent.

  Just imagine spiders on his face. Do iiiit!

  No thanks. That’s more your thing than mine.

  You’re no fun.

  Yeah I know, I replied, giggling at myself. It was 2pm and I was sitting in my living room in pajamas, folding socks.

  No fun indeed.

  Both Leah and I were used to her weird nightmares, something she’d experienced regularly since she was a little girl. I barely gave this latest one any thought that day, or even the next, until she mentioned having another, similar dream. This time the spiders were more aggressive, biting Gary and leaving bloody fang marks across his face and down his neck before disappearing into his shirt. The third day, when she sent me a photo of herself, asking if she’d managed to successfully conceal the dark circles under her eyes, I started to get a little concerned.

  What’s up? I asked between steps in my own makeup routine.

  Another dream.

  When she didn’t elaborate, which was unusual for her, I prodded until she gave me a brief synopsis.

  Gary again, more spiders. They’d eaten half his face and throat. Didn’t sleep well, gonna grab a coffee before work.

  I frowned at the screen. Leah didn’t often lose sleep over her dreams; she actually enjoyed them most of the time, but this recurring one seemed to be getting to her. I scrolled back to her photo and clicked to enlarge.

  She was pale beneath her makeup, even by her normal ivory standards. Her eyes had a slightly sunken look. She’d done a good job bringing some color back to her cheeks, but if you knew her well enough, it was obviously just one tiny degree off from natural. She looked exhausted.

  The pendant I gave her gleamed from her throat.

  My gaze was drawn unconsciously from my sister’s unsmiling face to the spot over her shoulder. There was something about the dark apartment behind her, a murkiness, that seemed out of place somehow. I chalked it up to it still being early and her not having turned many lights on. I set my phone aside in favor of a mascara wand.

  As I often did when Leah was feeling down, I flooded her phone with cute pictures of kittens and puppies, plus the occasional deceptively adorable cartoon with a morbid caption. When I didn’t receive any response, I blamed her job for actually making her do work and headed out to start my own day.

  By the time I could check my phone again during my lunch hour, Leah had sent me a number of replies.

  Something’s wrong with Gary. He came in this morning and half his face was a little puffy, like he slept on it all night. Now it’s looking really red and swollen.

  A half hour later, she followed up with, He just got a really bad nose bleed all over my station.

  Then another, a little while after that. omg Jackie it’s like he’s got golf balls under his skin on his face! They just started appearing and keep growing! Wtf!!!

  The last text in the series just said, Gary had a seizure. Doesn’t look good.

  Leah didn’t freak out easily. This was the same girl who cheerfully shared stories from her internships over the dinner table about finding body parts along railroad tracks. To be able to actually read the panic in her texts was enough to get my heart rate up. I stepped out of my office break room to call her.

  “What’s going on?” I asked as soon as she answered.

  “We don’t know; an ambulance came and took him away,” she said. There was an unsettled quietness to her voice.

  “You ok?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I think. It’s just so weird.”

  “It sounds like it.”

  “Not just what happened, Jackie. Where, too. On his face, I mean. It was...it was where I saw the spiders in my dreams. Everywhere they ate away, that’s where the welts or whatever appeared.”

  “Coincidence,” I said quickly, before she could start overthinking it in her already agitated state. “Maybe you noticed something different about him without realizing it, and your subconscious was trying to tell you.”

  “That’s
bull and you know it,” she replied with a strained, short laugh.

  “Maybe not.”

  We sat in silence for a while, both of us unsure what to say next.

  “I gotta go,” she said at last. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Take it easy, ok? Call if you need anything.”

  “Ok, Mom.”

  It was unfortunate and frightening what happened to Gary. The lab thought he might have come into contact with something and had a severe allergic reaction, but nobody really believed that. Nobody knew what to believe, least of all Leah, who spent the next few days dwelling on the spider-filled dreams that ceased as suddenly as they began.

  Gary passed away three nights later with an official diagnosis of chordoma, a rare type of bone cancer that occurs in the skull. It was rumored that the autopsy showed evidence that the cancer had been brewing for a while, but there was no accounting for its freak, aggressive nature or the rapid onset of symptoms. Most were still satisfied just to have some kind of answer.

  Leah might have been, too, if the dreams had stopped.

  I had a nightmare about Carlotta last night, she texted me early one morning before my alarm had gone off.

  In this one she’d heard a loud buzzing coming from the other lab tech’s head while they worked side by side.

  In the nights that followed, the buzzing continued, and a bloody, ragged hole began to form in the side of Carlotta’s head, just above her ear. It continued to grow, chewed away from the inside out, until dozens of red wasps poured from the gaping wound and filled the lab with their incessant, rumbling buzzing.

  Leah tried to say that it wasn’t bothering her, but I could see how tired and tense she was in her photos. I also couldn’t help but notice how, no matter how well lit the area was, there seemed to be a shadowy haze across the background; it was like some kind of strange filter. The only thing that stood out against it was the red jewel of her necklace.

  I didn’t bring it up to Leah, though; she had enough on her mind without having to worry that her phone camera might be on the fritz.