by Alan Seeger
After graduation, she decided that college wasn’t such a bad option; her little sister Sarah, who had inherited their mother’s genes for auburn-red hair, green eyes and a razor-sharp mind, planned to go to Oberlin College. Julia figured that if she buckled down, she could at least go to one of the state colleges; maybe become a teacher. She wound up at Kent State and graduated with an education degree six grueling years later, accepting a teaching position in her home town of Wapakoneta. Her brainy little sister had graduated from Oberlin the year before and was working on her master’s at Ohio State, but Julia had no plans to follow in little sister’s footsteps just yet; she had met a brainy beanstalk named Adam McMahon and knew he was the man for her.
They dated for nearly five years before Adam finally got around to popping the question. Their families both insisted on an elaborate wedding, so they picked a date in the late spring two years later and Julia continued to teach. She didn’t mind; she found it very rewarding. Soon Adam had a firm offer for a better job in Colorado; they continued their relationship on a long distance basis, and after the wedding, Julia finished the semester, resigned her teaching position and moved into the cabin in the mountains.
Now Julia wished there was someone here with her, because she felt very alone and very vulnerable. She went into the kitchen, retrieved her cell phone from its charger and dialed Adam’s number again, but once again the call went straight to voice mail.
She decided to try her sister. Sarah had landed a job with a research laboratory in St. Louis that was studying the nature of time, and despite the fact that she was a cute redhead that attracted lots of looks from the guys, Julia knew that she didn’t go out much. She dialed her number. We’re sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again. Hmmm. She redialed but got the same recording. She had the impulse to call her mother, but her parents were in their 60s and she didn’t want to worry them. She put the phone back on the charger and walked into the bedroom.
What she saw made her stop and stare.
The little 13-inch bedroom TV was on, and was showing the first scene of Bride of the Vampire where the Count was trying to seduce the girl.
The problem was that a) that part of the movie had been over more than an hour ago, and wasn’t on the schedule to be repeated, and b) she hadn’t turned on the bedroom television.
Julia reached out to turn off the little TV just as the vampire looked into the camera and whispered, “I’m coming for you, my dear…”
She clicked the television off and jumped back as if she’d received an electrical shock. It’s all right, Julia; it’s only a movie, she thought. But how had the little TV turned itself on, and why was it showing a scene that was early in a film that had been shown two hours ago and was not scheduled to be repeated anytime soon?
She shrugged and walked over to her dresser. She dropped the towel, standing and enjoying the feeling of the cool air on her bare skin. She pulled one of her husband’s tee shirts and a lacy pair of panties out of the drawers and slipped them on. She reassured herself that Adam would be home soon. It couldn’t be too much longer.
Julia’s stomach rumbled a bit, and she decided to get another slice of pizza before she lay down to read for a while. She walked into the kitchen, plopped a slice on a paper plate and put the rest into the fridge. When she turned from the refrigerator and started to walk back out of the tiny kitchen into the living room, the TV was on again. What’s more, there was a familiar image on the screen, yet it was not one she’d seen before.
She walked into the living room and stood, transfixed, watching the television.
It was the Count, the vampire from the movie, but he wasn’t acting out any of the scenes that she had seen when she was watching it earlier. All that was visible on the screen was his face, and he seemed to be watching Julia very closely.
As she gazed at the image, the vampire on the screen suddenly winked at her, said, “Knock, knock!” tossed back his head and let out a hearty laugh.
That broke the seeming spell that had been cast on Julia. She snatched up the remote from the coffee table and thumbed the power button. The screen went dark.
Julia was breathing heavily, as if she’d just finished running a 100-yard dash. Her heart was pounding. She realized, much to her annoyance, that she was genuinely frightened — scared out of her wits was more like it.
Behind her, she heard a voice from the bedroom. It was saying her name. It sounded so familiar, so loving… Adam? Had he sneaked in while she was in the shower?
She walked into the little bedroom, only to see that the little TV was on again, and the vampire’s face was there, mocking her. He seemed to look at her and said, in Adam’s voice: “Hey, sweetheart.”
Julia froze for a moment, then whirled around and grabbed the nearest heavy object she saw, a large stoneware pot that she and Adam had purchased at a gift shop at Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico while they were on their honeymoon. Before she had time to think otherwise, she had hurled the pot toward the grinning image of the vampire; there was a crash and a sizzle of dying electrical parts and the television and shards of pottery went crashing to the floor.
She immediately ran to the living room and saw that the television there was flickering to life; she yanked the power cord out of the wall, then stood there, savoring the silence for a moment.
A moment was all it lasted.
The little radio she kept on the kitchen counter, the stereo in the living room and her cell phone all lit up simultaneously, blasting the same spooky music that had been the background for the film.
Adam’s voice blared out as well, overriding the music: “Juuuuu-lia,” it called in a teasing tone.
Julia screamed.
SosweetthefearisSOSWEETittastessogooditmakesthisonestrongmakemorefearmakemorefearMAKEMOREFEARNOW!
Suddenly, somehow, Julia felt something… it was a presence, as if someone was standing directly in front of her, leaning in close and staring into her eyes, so close that it seemed that she could feel the person’s breath on her mouth like a lover, yet no one was there.
She closed her eyes and realized that she felt this presence not only in front of her, but all around her. It filled the house, like the sound of the music and the voice. It enveloped her like a whirlwind, like she was being swept up in a tornado of malevolent hate that was… feeding on her, somehow. After a moment she realized that as she began to seek to understand it, its effect on her seemed to diminish, despite the music that continued to play and the disembodied voice that continued to croon her name as if it were some sort of magic word, beginning with Adam’s lone voice and gradually adding more voices until there was a virtual choir of voices chanting her name: “Knock, knock. Juliaaa. JUUUUUUUUULIAAAAAA!”
Julia was determined to break free of the fear. She sat down lightly on the sofa and began to speak to herself, first in a low voice, then gradually louder and bolder: “I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of you. I AM NOT AFRAID OF YOU!” She leapt to her feet as she screamed it the last time.
She felt a sort of hesitation, an uncertainty in the unseen force, and she pressed on, pushing, prodding, searching for this — this thing’s weaknesses, trying to break through whatever defenses it had.
“You can’t touch me, can you? You’re so big and bad and goddamn scary, you think you can just freak me the fuck right out and feed off my fear, but it’s not working, because I’m not afraid of you any more!”
Suddenly, the music and the voices fell utterly silent.
Julia stopped short. The house seemed to echo with faint repercussions of the chaotic maelstrom of sound that had assaulted her before. She began to feel the tension that had knotted her neck and shoulders begin to gradually loosen. It’s finally over, she thought.
Then all hell broke loose.
Every electronic device in the house — including the unplugged living room television and the shattered remains of the bedroom TV — began to scream an
electronic noise that resembled nothing so much as the tormented wailing of a damned soul, and somehow, in that instant, Julia knew that that was precisely what it was. The fear came roaring back with a vengeance, stabbing her through the heart with a knife blade which had been forged from pure, unadulterated despair, tempered in the flames of fright.
Julia screamed as well, a shrill born of fright like she had never known in her life. She had known fear a number of times in her life; once, at the age of seven, she’d been asleep in her parents’ bed when her mother had woken up screaming that she was being attacked by a man with a knife; in her confusion upon waking as well as her childhood innocence, Julia had come out of her own sleep gibbering and wailing, certain that she as well as her mother were about to be murdered in cold blood. It had taken her father five minutes to calm her mother, but more than an hour to convince Julia that there was no one attacking her mother.
That event had always been the high water mark of fear for her; in the years since, nothing had ever really been able to scare her. As a teenager, she’d ridden the most frightening roller coasters and seen movies that promised to scare her out of her skin. In college, she’d gone bungee jumping, scuba diving, sky diving and cliff diving. She and Adam had been white water rafting, hang gliding, and driving on the streets of Paris.
None of those experiences could compare to the mind-searing fear that arced through her now as though she had put her hand on a high tension power line. She felt her bowels turning to water as the maniacal laughter reverberated around her, no longer seeming to come from the speakers at all, but from her own lips as whatever malevolent entity was producing it seized control of her mind and she felt — almost heard — its thoughts:
OhyesthefearsodelicateyetsoBOLDandsosweetsosweetSOVERYSWEETittastessogoodYOUTASTESOGOODmydearsospicyandsojuicyohyesohyesohyes…
Julia shuddered, feeling violated, yet there was a strange tingling between her legs, as if her very nervous system was betraying her. She shook with incipient arousal, fighting the feelings, fighting against what this thing was forcing upon her.
Whatever it was, a ghost, a spirit, a demon, or something else, it was forcing itself upon her just the same as if it was a man who had broken in to the house and raped her physically, but where a physical rapist could not force her to feel pleasure, this thing seemed to be hijacking the parts of her mind that dealt with sexual arousal and jumpstarting them, hotwiring them like a car thief bypassing an automobile’s starter.
“NO!” she shouted, furious at the invasion of her mind. “No! Get the fuck out of my brain, whatever you are!” She felt the fear seem to melt like frost in the heat of her anger.
“Julia,” her husband’s voice called softly. “Why are you angry with me? Don’t you love me anymore, honey?” Despite the fact that she knew that this voice was not coming from her husband’s lips, she shuddered and sighed and longed for him to wrap her in his arms. Then she realized what was happening and pulled herself together.
Just then, there was a bang on the front door, as if someone were attempting to break it down. The next moment, there was the sound of someone rapping on the back door, then the bedroom window. The pattern went on for what seemed like several minutes. Julia ran to the small fireplace in the living room to grab the most efficient weapon she could think of, the fireplace poker.
It wasn’t there.
She looked around frantically, desperately seeking the heavy iron tool, but it was nowhere to be found. When was the last time they’d used it? March or April, perhaps? She wasn’t sure. Certainly not any time recently, in the heat of summer.
Another silence fell. She sat crouched by the fireplace, waiting for whatever would come next.
Suddenly she heard Adam’s voice again, but this time it sounded distant, as if he were out in the front yard. “Thanks for the lift, man,” she heard him say. Thank God! He was finally home!
She ran to the door and fumbled with the lock. She felt an odd moan welling up from inside her, the kind of sound you heard coming from people who were completely overwhelmed and on the verge of breaking down in tears. She managed to get the doorknob and the deadbolt unlocked and threw the door open, eager to greet her lover and equally eager for this emotional nightmare to end.
But it was just beginning.
On the front porch, a nightmarish sight greeted her; Adam seemed to be standing there, almost as if he were a door-to-door salesman who had rung the bell and was waiting for her to answer.
From his mouth protruded the dull black handle of a fireplace poker. The rest of the poker exited his skull in the back and the angled part of the business end of the tool was hooked on the edge of a board that ran along the inside of the porch’s roofline. The shaft of the poker was coated in blood and grey brain matter. Adam’s dead eyes seemed to stare accusingly at Julia.
Her eyes grew wide, and her mouth gaped in a silent scream.
She turned and ran to the bathroom, where she threw up the pizza and the wine, managing to get most of it in the toilet bowl. She stood up, bawling, and went to the sink to wash the vomit off her mouth and chin. She looked in the mirror and suddenly realized that her reflection was staring back at her with its arms crossed accusingly.
“Wha—”
“Julia, Julia, oh, Julia,” her reflection said in Adam’s voice. “You poor, dear thing. How could you do that to your husband?”
That was the last thing she remembered before she woke up on the floor in the grey early morning light.
~~~
Julia walked out of the vomit-spattered bathroom to see that the bedroom television was still shattered. She walked into the living room, quite certain that by now a passing neighbor would have seen Adam’s body suspended from the porch roof and called 911.
The door was standing open, but Adam’s body was not there.
She glanced toward the fireplace. The poker was in its place on the tool set, where it should have been. No blood, no brains, nothing. She looked outside; nothing seemed amiss or out of place.
She looked toward the kitchen and saw that the message light on her phone was blinking. She picked it up and pressed the voice mail icon. “You have two new messages.” She pressed 1 to play the first one. It was dated three days prior.
“Mrs. McMahon, this is Robert Lockwood at Adam’s office. I’ve been trying to get a hold of him for hours; he didn’t show up this morning for the flight to Chicago. He’s not answering his cell, and I just ran across your number in his contact information. Please ask him to contact me ASAP. Hope everything’s all right. Thanks.”
A wave of confusion swept over her. Not knowing what else to do, she proceeded to the next message.
“Honey, why won’t you pick up the phone? I have to talk to you. You have to believe me… I love you. She doesn’t mean a damned thing to me. It was a one-time thing, I swear. Please. I’ll be home in half an hour.” Adam sounded frantic.
Suddenly, a whole set of memories came flooding back, as if she was remembering them for the first time.
Julia had only a vague recollection of hauling Adam’s body out to the car and loading it into the passenger seat. It took quite a bit of effort, but she’d managed. Then a quick drive up into the mountains, thirty minutes away, onto a deserted side road; moving the body to the driver’s seat, putting the car in gear and letting it go over the side of a cliff.
If a car goes crashing off a mountain road into a deeply forested canyon, but there’s no one around who gives a shit, does it make a sound?
It had taken her nearly ten hours to walk home, but she didn’t mind; it was well worth it, and she couldn’t afford to be seen hitchhiking.
Then there was the experience she’d had last night; Adam’s voice, coming from the television sets, from the stereo, the phone. Real? Or just the product of her evidently deranged mind? After all, if she was able to do away with her husband and then conveniently sweep the memory under her mental rug…
Now to finish up.
She wen
t to the fireplace and picked up the poker, walked out the front door and down the street to one of the neighboring houses. The one that belonged to that bitch named Cheryl, the divorcee that had run around in cutoffs and a bikini top all summer long, getting looks from all the men, including Adam.
Knock, knock.
EMERALD GLOW
Charles Simpson looked up from his work grinding grain at the mill, wondering when his daughter would arrive with the canvas sack containing the hunk of dark bread and tough meager
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Science-fiction author and editor Alan Seeger was born in 1959 in San Francisco and grew up in Oklahoma. A writer for as long as he can remember, he spent much of his childhood filling spiral notebooks with his stories. In his teens, he began making music, which became his focus for the next thirty years or so. But writing was never far from his heart, and in 2013, he published a collection of short stories entitled Lucid Dreaming as well as his debut novel, Pinball, the first book in his Gatespace trilogy. In December of 2013, he released the second book in the Gatespace series, Replay. The conclusion, Tilt, was published in November 2014.
He also edits several short story anthologies each year, including the 13 Bites series, published annually in October.
Seeger currently resides on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Readers can learn more about him and his works at www.alanseeger.net.
ABOUT FIVE59
Once upon a time, getting one's work published took a combination of luck, perseverance, and maybe even a little bit of prayer. Today, with the advent of online blogs, websites, and relatively simple book publishing through e-pub resources such as Amazon Kindle, anybody can be an author. Anybody.
