That was part of how this worked.
It happened about five turns out. She held out longer than most.
Alyssa screamed and smashed her open hand into the game board. "This is useless!"
The board swept off the ledger stone, bouncing into a headstone nearby, then fluttering off like a wounded bird before coming to rest on the grass.
"I can't just sit here and –"
Ralph cut her off with an upraised hand. Then slowly dropped it as he said, "First we do the part we know – we arrange the letters we have. Then we find out what we're given…."
His fingers ended pointing at another ledger marker, the twin of the first. Probably the wife of whoever was under this marker, because it was set in a good six inches lower: the chauvinism of the past hard at work.
Some of the Scrabble tiles had fallen on that marker. Most of them were face-down, but a few had fallen face-up.
Alyssa gasped. Ralph felt about the same, but he managed to put on what he hoped was a sophisticated expression. "Awesome, huh?"
Alyssa tore her eyes away from the tiles to look at him. "'Daddy will kill you.' What does it mean?"
Ralph's attempt at urbanity faltered. "No idea."
Alyssa's eyes widened; he couldn't tell whether in surprise or anger. "Is there ever a point where you do know something?"
Ralph rolled his eyes. "Why my generation gets a bad rap as being so focused on instant gratification, I'll never understand. It's a process." He moved to the other slab of stone. Motioned for Alyssa to join him and as she did he touched the Scrabble tiles with a flat palm. He shivered as he made contact with the message they held. "And it's not important that I understand."
"Then how can we –?"
He shook his head. "Not important that I understand. Only that you do." He leaned close to her. "But you gotta know… understanding isn't always fun."
And before she could move away, he touched her forehead with his free hand.
Alyssa stiffened. Her mouth opened to scream.
No sound came. None from her.
But beyond the entrance to the graveyard, he heard a thousand voices shriek. The dead knew what he was doing. Knew, and were not pleased.
"Good luck," he whispered. "Wherever you are."
And he stayed like that, touching a woman with one hand, the message she and he had brought from God-knew-where with the other. And the terrible song of the undamned all around, trying to lull him into a forever sleep.
He thought he heard his mother among them. Singing a song, waiting with a needle to paint another picture on his back, his arms, his genitals. And this time he wouldn't be able to escape from her.
"Hurry back, Alyssa," he whispered.
FLASHES IN THE DARKNESS
The first thing she understands is that she is nowhere. She may be watching a place, but she is not in that place. She may be near a person, but she will never touch that person.
The next thing she understands is that the place she watches is one she has never seen before. And yet it is familiar, utterly known to her.
This is Mal's room, she says. And the words, spoken on lips that have no more existence than a dream, can be heard by none but her.
Mal's room, yes. But it is also not his room. She sees her child's space, with its familiar furnishings and bright colors, but over it, like one photograph superimposed over another, she sees something else. Something older and infinitely darker in every sense of the word. As she watches her son's room fades, and the dark one waxes strong. Soon it is the only one she sees.
The new place – the place that is in the same space, but wholly different in time and meaning and purpose – is the same size as her son's room. But these walls are yellow, with a rust-red strip along the top. In the corner sits a chair. Red with dark wood legs that are intricately scrolled.
She shudders, though she has no body to shiver, no muscles to twitch. She has seen that chair. She did not know it was red – she saw it in black and white, grayscale yellowed with age – but she recognizes the legs. Wood with intricate scrollwork that can be seen even beneath the dangling legs of dead children in an obscene book.
The lumpy black covering she saw in the pictures is nowhere to be seen.
Another difference between this place/time and the one she knows: there is no window. The light that she treasures whenever she helps her son clean in here, whenever she comes to wake him in the morning – it is gone. This room is made to be closed, to be dark. It is a room for hidden things.
But though enclosed, someone has taken care to illuminate it. Dozens of kerosene lanterns blaze throughout the room. Sitting on the floor, mounted on wall brackets. They flicker and make the air itself seem to writhe and dance in pain.
A clock she knows well sits in the corner opposite the chair. An equally known – equally dreadful – music box is beside it. The clock ticks its loud heartbeat, and the box is closed and silent.
The door to the room is open, and now a man enters. She knows his name though she has never seen him before. He is Matthew Hollis, Sr. Tall, with a barrel chest and a face that has seen been broken by long ago fists. He wears a dark brown vest buttoned nearly to his neck, with a watch chain hanging from one of the button holes. A bowler hat sits atop his head.
His arms are strong and they easily carry the child he brings into the room with him. It is a little boy, and though the watching woman cannot tell how he died his gray face and blue lips leave no doubt that dead he is.
Matthew Sr. swings the door shut behind him, then puts the boy down. Not on the chair, but on the floor. The watcher is surprised at this, but perhaps even more surprised at the tenderness the man displays. He moves slowly, holding the boy's body so his head does not strike the wood floor. As if he would notice a fall, as if he might suffer a bruise.
The man kisses the boy's closed eyes. It makes the woman's insides curl. She would vomit if she could.
The man draws back and she sees he has only three fingers on his right hand. The other two are missing. She cannot tell if it is a birth defect or the result of an accident. But the sight makes her again twitch her bodiless shiver, and she remembers the sight of her husband in the hotel, his hand bound up in the sheets, looking similarly malformed.
She closes her eyes, aware that to do so is folly: she has no eyelids. She cannot shield her sight from evil.
Still, when she closes and then opens her eyes-not-eyes, things have changed. The child no longer lays on the floor. Now he sits on the chair, which has been covered with that lumpy, almost grotesque sheet.
Though dead, the boy sits erect. His eyes are open, and she cannot see if they have been glued or sewn or something worse. She is glad not to know.
The wicks of the kerosene lamps have all been trimmed so they are at highest flame. The room is now bright, and she sees why it must be: a camera sits across from the boy. Old and boxy, a jutting cylinder of a lens at the front and an accordion-like structure in the middle.
A flash mechanism sits beside it. More light for what will be the best possible picture.
And the music box plays. It plays, and for some reason the sound is more frightening than it has ever been before. Because what kind of dance can there be when the only dancer present is dead?
The flash flares with a loud POP, brightening the room. She didn't see Matthew Sr. come in to trigger the flash or take the picture. But she was looking at the dead boy. She is not surprised she missed it.
What else did she miss? She can't miss things. If she does, she senses her family will pay. Will suffer.
Will die.
She has to watch. Has to attend. Has to know.
When the flash dims Matthew Sr. is bringing another child into the room. He wears a different vest, a forest green jacket covering it. No hat.
He holds another dead child. Another boy. Another lifeless body.
The pop sounds, the flash pulses, and again the woman cannot see all that happened. Again when it dims the man enters with an
other burden, holds another child, places another little death on the floor, closing the door behind him each time so none can see his most private moment.
POP… a boy on the chair, ten and lovely even in death….
POP … a girl this time, a cleft pallet marring her face, the cheeks still red and flushed with once-life….
POP … a baby, dressed in a christening gown, too young to sit upright, laying across the black covering, eyes closed as though too innocent to witness this moment even in death….
POP ….
POP ….
POP ….
Child after child after child.
And then another child. A last child. A girl. Larger than the others, nearly a woman. Matthew Sr. spends more time with her, pulling her into his lair, laying her on the floor.
He does not notice the whistling. Or that it comes through the door he has, for the first time, neglected to close.
The Camptown ladies, sing this song, Doo-da, doo-da….
The whistled tune is jaunty, light. It pushes into this dark place as an unwelcome guest.
The Camptown racetrack's five miles long, Oh, dee-do-da-day….
But Matthew Sr. still does not notice. He is kissing the girl's eyes. Another kiss for her cherry lips.
Goin' to run all night, Goin' to run all day….
The song cuts off suddenly. And this silence is what finally alerts Matthew Sr. Not music, but absence. He turns slowly, even as another sound pushes into the room.
"Daddy?"
Even as she knew that this man was Matthew Hollis, Sr., so the watching woman knows that this is his son. The boy is beautiful, even in the writhing light of the lamps. Even with the black eye –
(the size of a father's fist)
– and the finger marks –
(large fingers, strong fingers)
– that ring his neck. His eyes widen. "What are you doing?" asks the boy. He looks at the girl on the floor. "That's Missus Tate's girl. She was missing… wasn't…?"
He looks at his father. And just as the watcher knows, so does he.
He runs.
Matthew Sr., who was holding the girl's head as he kissed her, lets it fall. It knocks against the floor as father runs after son.
A moment later the woman finds herself in a new space. A space even darker than the one she was just in. Not just the spiritual darkness of death too soon, but an actual blackness that clings to all. Impossible to see, though she has a sense of what is here. What is near.
There is someone with her. This place is little more than a hole. A tunnel, a crawlspace. So small that even Matthew Jr., as small as he is, has to work to flee through it. Barely enough room for him to crawl, and no hope at all for him to stand. Which is the way his father wishes it. He is on hands and knees, crying and bleeding.
He is not the only thing that crawls down here. Many-legged creatures writhe over his hands, into his clothes, through his hair. He can feel them touch his skin, feel them bite his flesh. Centipedes.
His clothes are a torn mess, shreds with bloody edges. Blood drips from the boy's nose and mouth as well. From the new cuts on his face, the ones on forehead, cheek, above his blue, blue eyes. The blood splashes on his hands, rolls into the hungry soil below.
He crawls forward. Whispering, whispering. So low that even the watching woman – who is right beside him in this impossible place – cannot hear him. It is just a murmur of terror.
Then whispers turn to screams as the wood above the boy's head shatters. The three-fingered hand punches into view. They fumble for a moment, then grab the boy's thick, blond hair. Yank him through the wood planking above. Through a hole too small for his skull, but one that the hand pulls him through nonetheless.
The screams end. Though the blood still flows from above.
The woman follows the boy. Up through the floorboards, to the room where the dead are caught on film. She realizes that the place he is pulled forth – from one grave to another – is the exact spot her son will one day sleep. Where the centipedes will burst forth.
The boy bleeds, his skin peeled free. But he finds his voice again. "Please, Pa, don't hit me again. I'll never tell. I promise!"
"I know, son. I know you won't. Just like your ma never did."
And POP ….
One more child on a shrouded chair. One more picture to go in a book. The blood has been cleaned from his face, the bruises covered with makeup. But the throat, slit in rage, is clear to see.
The clock ticks. The music box plays.
Then one final moment. One final understanding.
Matthew Sr. comes in again. Shuts the door one last time. This time, though, he bears no child in his arms. This time he is the one bleeding. His face wounded, his clothing ripped.
He locks the door. It begins shaking, the wood pounding at his back and voices slamming through with the same violence.
"Open up, Hollis!"
"Open up, baby killer"
"Monster!"
"We'll kill you!"
"You took my baby!"
The door rattles harder, harder. Matthew Sr. looks for a place to go, a place to run. But there is nowhere. Not in this most private place. This most secret place.
Until he spies the hole. The broken spot where he pulled his own son forth in a mockery of birth, only to send him to his death.
The man rushes to the hole. Pulls it open a bit wider. Wide enough?
He looks at the door. It is splintering. Falling apart. Fingers reaching through.
He pushes himself into the floor. Scraping his way in, his own skin flaying from his flesh just as did his son's. Crawling to earth like the vermin he is. Has always been.
The watching woman follows him down. Down, down, down. Forever down as he crawls. Crawls forever, but not long enough. Crawls so far, but not nearly far enough to escape the vengeance of those behind.
Something crashes at his feet. It shatters, and wetness touches his legs.
Then another crash.
Another.
The third tinkling object – the third lamp – is still ablaze.
Matthew Sr. screams. And burns in his hole until only singed meat and black lengths of bone are left.
The woman watches. She does not burn, and she has no flesh to char. But she screams silent screams as well. And looks in a dead man's eyes until they pop and ooze out of a skull that no longer houses thought, no longer houses life, and never housed a soul at all.
Then the woman leaves. She is gone from this house, this time, and returns to herself and weeps in the arms of a man-child who whispers that all is well though both he and she know it is a lie.
ALONE IN THE DARK
Alyssa was gone a long time, and all Ralph could do was watch. Sometimes that seemed like all he could ever do.
He watched all those times his mother hurt him.
He watched when the televisions showed her plane had gone down – in the middle of the Atlantic, no less, so there was going to be nothing but an empty casket to bury.
He watched the dead and didn't have any way to stop them save one by one. And that would have been futile, because more would have taken their places.
Even on rare occasions when he saw people whose futures were going to be destroyed by some terrible event – adultery of a spouse, death of a child, an accident for themselves – he had learned long ago that most warnings just got him strange looks at best and suspicion by the police at worst.
He just watched.
At least this time he was helping someone find their way to answers. He hoped. He didn't know for sure. Couldn't, he suspected. He was just a conduit. Alyssa was the focus of whatever was happening, so she would be the focus of greatest understanding.
Alyssa twitched.
Then shuddered.
Then she screamed. Perhaps a word came out of her mouth. If it was anything, it was, "Burrrrrrniiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnng!"
She fell into him. Shivering and sobbing. He held her and didn't know what to s
ay because he didn't know what she had seen. He just rubbed her back, stroked her hair and told her it would be all right, would be okay. Hoping that was the right thing to do because it was the only thing he could think of.
She spoke at last. He didn't know how long had passed. "His daddy killed him. Killed all those children, and now he's going to kill mine." Alyssa looked up at Ralph, her eyes shimmering, face glistening with tears, snail tracks of snot running down her chin.
Now Ralph got a little shot of what she'd seen. Not full force, just an echo. It was enough. He almost started screaming himself.
No wonder the dead were out in such force. No wonder so many of them – all of them – were so malevolent. Something deeply evil, completely twisted, was alive after a long, long time.
Not alive. Worse. Far worse.
"How do I stop him?" asked Alyssa.
Ralph saw an empty casket in his mind. Felt the terror he felt every night when he went to sleep and feared who he might see when he woke up. The fear that he might see her, because the one person he most wanted to forever rid himself of was one of the few who was truly beyond his reach.
"You stop ghosts by putting them to rest. Giving them a proper burial. Priest. Real mourners. Loving family, if there is any. A proper grave."
"There isn't time for that."
"Then you destroy the remains. If you can find them."
If they aren't in the bottom of the ocean, under tons of water and whatever hasn't been eaten by sharks mixed with four hundred other sets of bones.
"How?"
The word didn't register. Didn't make it through six hundred feet of water that he carried with him all the day, every day. "What?"
"How do I destroy them?"
"Fire."
"Like, toss the bones in a fireplace?"
"No, the remains have to be turned to ash."
Alyssa nodded. She swiped an arm across her eyes, then stood and walked toward the entrance of the graveyard. She wasn't aware of the ghosts gathered there, didn't hear them sigh and a few of them reach hungry arms for her. But Ralph saw. He felt it must be an omen, and knew she was going to die. Maybe tonight.
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