Bellwether

by Jenny Ashford

  As he backed out of his parking space, the girl kept waving and smiling, and then cocked her hip and put her non-waving hand on it. With a start, Ivan realized she was trying to be sexy, pulling a seductive pose in her thrift store dress with its sagging, thin fabric, her misshapen arms akimbo. He really felt sorry for her then, although he still couldn’t help the cold, sick feeling in his stomach. He knew she couldn’t help it, but she was so fucking creepy.

  As he drove away, he kept checking his rearview mirror, until he could see nothing but a vague pink smudge. Despite the distance, he was pretty sure he could still see her waving.

  When he looked back one last time, she had gone back inside.

  Chapter Six

  Lily and Rose were alone for a little while. Even though Lily didn’t mind so much, Rose always seemed to be perched by the window, looking out, waiting for Mother and Father to come back. Lily didn’t know where they had gone, but she supposed that was their business. They rarely shared their plans with the girls, and Lily had learned to live with this, despite her natural curiosity.

  “It’s nice in here now, isn’t it?” Lily said, not really expecting an answer, but wanting to hear her own voice.

  “Yes.” Rose sounded vague, as though her mind were a million miles away. Lily got up and moved to one of the other chairs, just for something to do. Well, Rose could go hang. It was nice in here now, with all the neatly arranged chairs and the crisp white walls. Father had even brought a few more things to dress up the bare storefront. At the far end of the shop’s large main space, they had erected a rough semblance of an altar, with two plywood risers and some cheap card tables all pushed together and covered with a velvety purple cloth. On top of the altar was a pair of gold-painted candlesticks containing thin white tapers, and in the middle was a plaster cross, also painted gold, with colored glass jewels sparkling at even intervals along the base. More simple crosses of varying sizes hung on the freshly painted walls, plus a few religious prints in plain silver frames. Lily particularly liked the one with Jesus staring out at the viewer with big, brown, puppy-dog eyes, his hands clasped around a glowing scarlet heart. I gave up so much for you, he seemed to say. Won’t you love me back as I love you? Lily figured she would.

  After a few minutes, she got up again and moved to yet another chair. She glanced at Rose’s silent profile, outlined by the setting sun from the window. Then she thought of that man she had seen earlier, the tall one with the guitar. She hadn’t thought any man could be lovelier than the one she’d seen at the white house that day, but now she knew how wrong she’d been. This new man was like one of the fiercely beautiful angels in the pictures that now decorated their living space. When she’d seen him, he had been thin and straight and proud, with longish blond hair that swept dramatically back from his high forehead, and cheekbones as wide and angled as jutting cliffs. His lips were large for a man’s, soft and pink, and his eyes were the sharp blue of an Arctic summer. Lily smiled to herself. If it was true what Mother and Father had said, that soon they would be able to have all the friends they wanted, then this man was going to be Lily’s first and very special friend. Rose could have the man from the white house, the small one with the dark hair. He was pretty, too, but not as pretty as this new one. Rose couldn’t have the best for herself, not always, even though that was how it had been up until now. Lily felt her cheeks grow hot, whether with jealousy or anticipation she didn’t know. Maybe her luck would change after all. She would try her hardest to change it.

  Mother and Father arrived back a little while later, but Lily didn’t tell them about the man; she thought they might be angry that she hadn’t been able to persuade him inside. Their minds seemed to be elsewhere, anyway. Rose came over from the window, overjoyed, as always, to see them. Mother breezed past with no acknowledgement, pulled her shawls around herself, and disappeared into a back room, closing the door behind her. Then Rose and Lily watched as Father set a large plastic bag on their ersatz altar and proceeded to produce several stacks of brightly colored paper from it. Lily inched closer and saw that the pages were all printed with the same design, although she couldn’t understand the words; growing up among traveling circus folk assured that she’d never gone to a proper school, and her appearance (which some equated with mental deficiency) discouraged anyone from spending sufficient time with her to teach her to read. She did recognize the word printed across the top of every page as the same word as that written on the square of cardboard Father had told her to hang up in the front window.

  “Lily. Rose.” They hurried to Father’s side at his summons, Lily’s heart thumping with trepidation and pride. She knew they were to be given a mission, and she felt her body surging with an inner glow. She was helping; she was important; she was needed.

  Father handed Lily a portion of the paper stack, and then handed an equal-sized stack to Rose. Both girls accepted them reverently, and Lily in particular was delighted by the rainbow bands the different colored papers made from the side. The pages were warm from Father’s meaty hands. “Take these out and give them to everyone you see,” he instructed, the bulk of his body accentuated by the pale blue sport coat he wore. “Besides that, leave them on park benches, tape them on windows and mailboxes, put them on car windshields. Don’t come back until they’re all gone. Then tomorrow you can take another pile.” He paused, seemingly to catch his breath after such an expensive outlay of verbiage. “Do you understand?”

  Both girls nodded vigorously. Lily was so excited by the prospect of getting out, of meeting people, that she thought she might explode. This must be the start of what Father had said, about all the friends they’d have. She felt a twinge of regret that she couldn’t have given a flyer to the guitar man, the blond angel, but he would be back, she reckoned, and she would be waiting for him then.

  Father crossed his massive arms and glowered down at them. “Don’t let us down,” he grumbled, his black eyes flashing with something that might have been malice. Lily lowered her gaze and nodded solemnly. She was afraid of Father; he was very large and strong, and his booming voice and dour demeanor wordlessly implied dire consequences for any transgression or failure to carry out his wishes. His words also had the imprimatur of Mother’s command behind them, and Mother’s command was non-negotiable.

  Lily nodded again, hugging the stack of papers to her chest with one hand and clasping Rose’s with the other. They would not disappoint Mother and Father. Mother and Father were there for them when they had nothing, when they were nothing but an orphaned pair of illiterate circus freaks living in a stinking trailer with no one but flea-bitten animals and boozy carnies for company. Anything Mother and Father wished them to do, they would do. Come what may, forever and ever.

  Setting her jaw, Lily tucked the stack of flyers under her arm and marched out of the shop, Rose coming close on her heels.

  Chapter Seven

  The dreams continued—not every night, but most nights now. They weren’t scary, exactly—well, that was a lie; Martin had to admit they were a little unsettling—but they usually woke him up, and he usually took a while getting back to sleep afterwards.

  The course of the dream had remained fairly consistent, though a few new wrinkles were added. The knocking on the outside of the house seemed louder now, so loud that Martin was always surprised that the sound didn’t transcend his mind and manifest in the outside world. Besides that, near the end of the dream, as Martin was crouched near the wall on the landing, sometimes he would feel a presence standing beside him, just a vague feeling of someone looking down at him, though he would always wake up before he saw anyone. He still awakened to that same sound, the faraway tinkling of the bell.

  One early morning, Martin found Ivan in the kitchen again, and asked if his dreams, too, had continued. Ivan just nodded, and then went on to describe the exact same changes in his dreams that Martin had already noted. Then the two sat in silence until
it was time for Ivan to leave for work.

  Martin had not asked Chloe or Olivia if they were having the same experiences. He had noticed them looking unusually tired and harried, but that could have been simply the result of all the work they’d been putting in running the place, so he decided not to jump to the obvious conclusion, namely that everyone in the house was having the same dream. It was bad enough he’d had to accept Ivan having it, he wasn’t ready for the inevitable extension to mass hysteria.

  He felt bad, though, that he hadn’t said any more to Chloe about it. He hated keeping things from her, especially something as important as this situation had the potential to be, but he told himself he wanted to sort through things alone, without adding to her already onerous burden. Maybe it was nothing, maybe he was more stressed than he realized—maybe the dreams would stop once things had calmed down a bit, and he and Ivan would be laughing about it a few months from now. He knew it was bullshit, but the fact was if he told Chloe, she would worry, she would make him see a doctor, and Martin didn’t want that. She had actually asked him if he was still having the dreams. While he hadn’t outright lied and said no, he clumsily avoided the question by telling her he couldn’t remember his dreams. She looked at him with narrowed eyes and he felt like a dick, but she hadn’t pressed the issue. At least not yet.

  The more he thought about it, the more he felt sure he and Ivan were going to have to do something about this before they were both driven batshit, or before they drove the girls batshit with their worsening insomnia. So as soon as Ivan came home from work that afternoon, Martin cornered him. “We need to talk, alone.”

  Ivan understood right away, his icy blue eyes darting right and left like a spy’s before settling on Martin. “Say when.”

  “I need to run to the store before we open, pick up some coffee and a couple other things Chloe forgot. Come with me, we can talk in the car.”

  Ivan nodded wordlessly and went upstairs to put his guitar away.

  A short time later, they were headed up the road in Martin’s battered old Corolla. He’d left a note for Chloe on the kitchen table; she shouldn’t find it odd that Ivan had accompanied him to the store, or so he hoped.

  Ivan rolled down the car window and lit a cigarette, puffing in silence for a few minutes, seemingly reluctant to start the conversation.

  Martin wasn’t thrilled about having to start it either, but he decided the best approach was the direct one. “I think maybe we should knock a hole in that wall,” he said.

  Ivan didn’t look at him, didn’t act surprised, and didn’t ask which wall. He simply smirked without humor, dragging on his cigarette. “Yeah, the girls’ll love that. After the thousands we’ve spent on renovations.”

  Martin was gratified that Ivan hadn’t laughed at him, but part of him still felt disturbed. In some twisted way, he might have felt better if Ivan had called him crazy instead of simply accepting the idea, without question, as a valid one. “You want to know, though, don’t you?”

  Ivan shifted in his seat. “If you’re asking whether I think these dreams are trying to tell us something, then…yes, I guess I do.” He flicked his spent butt out the window and huffed air hard through his nose. “Dammit, I hate this X-Files shit. There are no ghosts and there are no psychics and there’s none of that bullshit, I know all that, but…” He sighed, staring out at the scenery rushing by. “Yeah, I would like to know what’s going on behind that wall. Behind all the walls, actually.”

  Martin looked straight ahead out the windshield, his hands gripping the steering wheel tight enough to make white marks on his knuckles. “I wonder why the girls haven’t had the dreams, too,” he mused aloud. His voice sounded as taut as piano wire.

  “Who says they haven’t? Maybe they just didn’t say anything about it.”

  “Chloe would tell me, especially if the dreams were the same as mine,” he said.

  Ivan shrugged. “You haven’t told her you’re still having them, have you?”

  Martin scowled. “No.”

  “Well, then.” Ivan slid another cigarette out of the crumpled pack. His hand shook, just a little. “Maybe Chloe’s had them and maybe Olivia’s had them, and maybe they haven’t said anything to us because they’re scared that if they do tell us, then the whole thing becomes more than a question of whether we’re nuts or stressed out or whatever. It becomes one big, weird problem. When it’s just the two of us, maybe it can be explained away, but three or four…” He waved his cigarette hand vaguely, finishing his sentence with smoke.

  Martin nodded. He’d been trying to tell himself the same thing, that maybe if it was just he and Ivan having the dreams, then it could all still be a coincidence. When you got right down to it, two people having similar dreams about the house they both lived in wasn’t exactly irrefutable proof of supernatural phenomena. Martin had seen those flakes on TV who were so sure they’d seen ghosts or been abducted by aliens, and he remembered thinking how sad it was to be that deluded, to be so sure of something that was clearly not real. Martin had to admit that now he understood how those people could have been so misguided, though he was not so sure of what was real and what wasn’t anymore. If he had been sure, he’d have taken a pickaxe to that landing wall weeks ago. “So what do we do?” he asked now. “If the girls are having the dreams, too, then we should find out what’s at the bottom of this. Don’t you think?”

  “Seems like it.” Ivan finished his second cigarette and tossed it out the window with unnecessary force.

  “Do you think we should ask them?”

  “I guess we have to, if we want to tear that wall down.”

  Martin managed a small grin in Ivan’s direction. “You don’t want to ask them, do you?”

  Ivan smiled. “Nope.”

  Martin pulled the car into a parking space in front of the sprawling supermarket, then killed the engine. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, turning to Ivan. “We’ll hold off for another week, see if the dreams keep coming or get worse or whatever. If they stop, great, we’ll forget the whole thing ever happened. If not, well, then we’ll have to talk to the girls, and if they agree, then we’ll punch a hole in that wall and see what we can see. Okay?”

  Ivan chuckled. “What if there’s a dead body back there?”

  “I wouldn’t even joke about that,” Martin said, although he laughed, too. “Deal?”

  “Yeah, sounds like a plan.”

  “Good.”

  After they’d gone inside and picked up the few items they needed, they carried the bags back out to the car. Before he slid into the driver’s seat, Martin noticed a lime green piece of paper wedged under his windshield wiper. He pulled it out and glanced at it, then, seeing it was advertising some type of church, crumpled it into a ball and tossed it into the back seat.

  Chapter Eight

  Chloe pulled up in front of the house and paused for a moment before driving around back. It was mid-afternoon, and the shadows were beginning to lengthen; the front door was nearly invisible beneath the portico. She shivered despite the warmth. The beautiful white stucco house, which she had been instrumental in picking out, which the small inheritance from her dead parents had helped pay for, now seemed alien to her, like a person she had once loved whose personality had changed dramatically and unexpectedly. This shift in sentiment made her resentful, though of what or whom she couldn’t articulate. She stared at the house a moment longer, defiantly meeting the gaze of its somehow knowing windows, then eased her foot off the brake and steered toward the back lot.

  As soon as she unlocked the back door and stepped into the kitchen, she knew the house was empty; there was a kind of sub-audible hum in the air, as though it were a machine—turned on and awaiting input. She set the messenger bag she’d been carrying down on the table and saw the note from Martin. She scanned it and frowned a little. While she was glad that he was help
ing her out with the shopping, she still would have felt better if he or Ivan was here. The emptiness of the house seemed huge around her, a silence pressing into her ears with the insistence of a scream.

  Trying to shake off the prickly feeling, she began digging through her bag, removing several books of stamps she’d bought, the checkbook, the boxes of business cards and flyers she’d ordered. Several times, she had an overwhelming urge to look over her shoulder, but she fought against it. She hated being this jumpy in her own house, and it was all because of those fucking dreams.

  She finally gave up on sorting out her things, and turned to the coffeepot. Yes, she had the dreams, too, although she hadn’t told Martin. Hers started about a week after he first told her about his, and they were identical in every detail. She knew he was still having them, too; she could see it in the drawn paleness of his skin, the deep furtiveness behind his eyes. She hadn’t told him about hers because… Well, she wasn’t sure why. Maybe she was trying to protect him from even more stress, or maybe she thought if they all just ignored the problem, it would go away. It was stupid, she knew, and out of character for her to bury a problem rather than confront it, but dammit, they had all worked so hard to get this place up and running; Crandall’s meant so much to them, and she didn’t want anything to spoil that. She poured herself a cup of coffee, sloshing a large amount over the rim of the mug. She swore, loudly, her shuddery voice almost scaring her in the waiting silence.

  Jesus, what’s wrong with me? She cleaned up the spill, her teeth clenched. This whole thing was silly. They were all freaking themselves out and losing sleep over what amounted to a bunch of meaningless nightmares. When she raised her head again, she was face-to-face with the dark-haired magician gazing out of the poster mounted on the wall. “What’s the deal, Crandall?” she said under her breath, not feeling as stupid as she would have liked to. “Are you still here someplace, creeping around the halls and giving us bad dreams?”