by Keith Knapp
“And this is how you repaid him,” he said. “By lyin’ to his face and tellin’ him you had pulled double duty at Chili’s. Sorry honey, but this don’t look like no Chili’s.”
“Jack, what’s going on?”
“You know exactly what’s going on.”
Sophia “Cherry Pie” Baker walked across the stage and-
-then she was in their bedroom. The dresser lay on the floor. The bed was a mess.
It’s time to pay.
The voice came from all around. The walls, the dresser, inside her head—it was all-encompassing.
The door opened and in walked a clearly distressed Jack Welling. Tears were streaming down his face and he had a gun in his hand.
40.
Pay for what? Mike asked Alison.
Your sins. He shows you your sins and weaknesses. He gets stronger from them. His version of Hell, she thought at him. But that doesn’t matter right now. What matters is Jody and Sophia.
I don’t understand, how can you know-
But he knew exactly how Alison could know about Jody and Sophia. She was in his head, or he was in hers, and like one computer talking to another, she was downloading and uploading terabytes of information to and from him in mere seconds.
Now is not their time, she thought. Get them to the center of town. At the end of the block is a mansion, a dark mansion. It’s the source of his power and the only place he can be hurt. You must destroy this place, baby, and we’ll take care of the rest.
We?
There are others here, Mike. Just get Sophia and Jody to-
They’re already in the center of town. We all were. Then this smoke came and-
It took them, too? Alison sounded worried. Troubled. No, not sounded. Felt.
I don’t know, Mike shot back.
We may be too late.
Then she was quiet, both inside and out. Her eyes were closed—and so was her mind. She was listening for something. Then:
He has them. But what’s happening to them isn’t real, Mike. Some of them can sense it, but he’s strong. You have to convince them that whatever’s happening isn’t real. You have to guide them out.
Ali, I-
He’s coming. When he takes you, remember: none of this is real. He doesn’t like you in particular, Mike. He’s threatened by you. He doesn’t like what you and I have.
What? I have no idea what you’re talking about.
What we have goes on forever, Mikey. He doesn’t understand that. He can’t. It’s how I’ve been able to hide from him for so long, by visiting places in my head he can’t see. Like here, or Sal’s Pizza. But once he gets a whiff of what’s going on, he’ll be able to see me. And that’s okay, because I can help. I can-
She stopped and listened again. Mike listened, too, but all he heard (felt) was static.
We don’t have much time, she thought-said. Clear your mind.
I don’t understand.
You’re about to.
And with that she grabbed either side of his head and thought at him. Images and words of the Bug Man, his hounds, the town, what was wanted of them and Alison’s plan was uploaded into Mike’s brain within just a few seconds. It wasn’t an intimate moment, in fact it was quite the contrary. She was pushing at him violently, forcing him to understand. He could feel her mind ripping apart at his, moving bits and pieces away to make space for these very important new nuggets of info.
She suddenly stopped and her hands fell to her side.
He’s here, she thought at him.
Wait. I don’t think I got it all. I need-
Remember: it will seem real, but it’s not.
There was a knock on the front door. A big, banging LET-ME-THE-FUCK-IN-NOW knock.
“I know you’re in there!” came a voice from outside. “Couldn’t hide forever, ya know!”
Alison closed her eyes. When she opened them again she was different. She wasn’t Alison anymore, not even the Alison-ghost.
“Nice try,” she (it) said.
Mike moved to get off the bed but the Alison-thing grabbed his arm and held him in place. Jesus she was strong. It. It was strong.
“You’re a tough one, Mike. Yes sirree bob, a real tough cookie to crack. You and the missus have quite the connection. But I got in. I always get in.”
A cockroach rolled across its forehead.
“You let her die. You knew there was still a chance, as small as it may have been, but you didn’t wait. I mean, shit brother, you basically killed her.”
The cockroach ran down its neck and into its shirt.
“You were actually relieved, weren’t ya? Ya couldn’t wait, ya’d waited long enough ya thought, then ya were relieved when it was all over. Go on, Mikey, I’m Mr. Truth and you can always tell me the truth.”
Mike got off the bed. The Alison-thing put an arm out to push him back down again, but he managed to shove the cold skinny hand away. “I oughta clock ya right here, whoever you are.”
“Don’t deny it. You were happy it was over. Shit, I’m on your side. I’d’ve been happy, too. Oh yes sirree.”
Reeling back a fist, Mike didn’t care if this person looked like his wife or not. Although he knew this wasn’t really a person at all. It was something else, something more. It and the town were connected. Whatever this thing was, it was about to get the beating of a lifetime.
His fingers dug into his palm, drawing blood. His fist shook. Then he slowly relaxed his hand and stretched out his fingers.
Whether or not this thing in front of him looked like Alison was beside the point. The point was that this thing was right. He had killed his own wife.
It waved a hand and Mike flung back to the bed. His hands involuntarily went under his legs and he soon discovered he couldn’t move at all.
A beeping sound. Faint at first, as if coming from a great distance. It gradually grew louder, beepbeep-beepbeep. Coming from the next room. Louder still. BEEPBEEP-BEEPBEEP. Inside the room.
A heart monitor replaced the dresser across from him. The steady green line bounced up and down in a medium tempo on its screen. The door to the master bedroom’s bathroom disappeared, a blank white wall taking its place. Soon all the walls in the room were that same pale eggshell-white of a hospital. A window formed above the heart monitor, framing a hallway outside. People—doctors, nurses, patients, worried family members—walked this way and that out there, going about whatever business they had.
Mike’s eyes returned to the heart monitor which was keeping the steady rhythm of Alison’s life. Alison herself was now below the monitor on a very uncomfortable looking bed, tubes and wires sticking out of her comatose body, her broken-beyond-belief hands dangling in front of her. He stopped breathing as the room around him completed its transformation from their bedroom to Alison’s hospital room.
Whatever force had been keeping him immobile was gone—he could move again. Mike stood up from his bed (which was no longer a bed but a very painful hospital-issued chair) and walked over to Alison.
“Hey baby,” he said as he knelt next to hair, being extra careful not to bump the rod and metal wires holding her right hand in place.
Alison’s eyes sprang open, pupils fully dilated, whites bloodshot, and she turned to face him. As she opened her mouth to speak, Mike saw just how skinny she had gotten. Her cheeks had sunk in and the bags under her eyes went deeper than they should. She must’ve lost twenty pounds since the accident.
“Doc!” Mike screamed.
The heart monitor raced to keep up with Alison’s heartbeat as it throttled into high gear. She lifted her head, again trying to speak. The tube going down her throat prevented this and confusion came to her eyes.
“Baby, you’re in a hospital, stay calm, don’t try to talk, you have a thing down your throat,” he said.
Where the hell was the damn doctor?
Alison gargled a word. Her hands shook
“Don’t talk,” he said. Then to the door: “DOCTOR!”
Her
left hand pointed to the mirror on the wall across from the bed. Mike could hear the bones and tendons inside crack and pop as she did he best to hold her hand steady.
The mirror steamed up like someone had left a hot shower on for too long with the bathroom door shut. An invisible finger started writing:
NIITMAR
KNOTTE
REEEL
Not only was he witnessing something that was impossible, it also didn’t make any sense. Those weren’t words. Well, maybe they were, but they were spelled all wrong and-
-he suddenly knew he wasn’t really in the hospital. He had seen words mis-spelled like that before in Sophia’s journal.
The town.
He was still in the Goddamn town.
An invisible hand wiped the words away. The mirror fogged up again. It had more to say. A finger wrote
JODEE
and then directly beneath that
SOFFEIA
and then the words were gone, again erased by an unseen hand.
No, not an invisible hand. Alison’s hand. She was trying to tell him something. To remind him that this wasn’t real, and something about Jody and Sophia.
The heart monitor flat-lined behind him. Her pointing arm went limp.
“Ali,” he said. Then he aimed his words not at Alison but at the room itself. “Why are you doing this? WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?!”
Mike crumpled to the floor and beat his fists against his head, attempting to wake up, wake up, WAKE UP from this nightmare. Tears came and his whole body shook with grief and sorrow as Alison died again. There was nothing he could do for her.
None of this is real. You can guide them out.
Fine. But who would guide him out?
Think, Mike. THINK.
If this wasn’t real, maybe this wasn’t how Alison had died. He knew her death was still a truth, but he also knew there was something slightly off about the details he was witnessing. Go that route—maybe that was the way out of this mind-fuck.
She had been in a coma. She hadn’t woken up startled like he’d just seen, but slowly over the course of a few hours. And then she had looked up at him but there was nothing behind her eyes. They were vacant.
When she had closed her eyes again, the doctor had said: “There’s very little we can do.”
Mike was no longer on the ground. He was standing, staring into the eyes of Dr. Miller, the man who had been overseeing Alison’s care since the accident. His hands were in his pockets, relaxed and laid-back—the stance of a friend, not a physician. He held no clipboard, no stethoscope; the only thing that identified him as a man of health was his long white coat and the impression that he’d said what he was about to say dozens, maybe hundreds of times.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Randal, but it’s your call,” Dr. Miller said with melancholy.
Alison’s living will stated she didn’t want to be in a vegetative state, that if she was and there was no hope of recovery, to let her go.
Her hands would never heal properly, and the old joke of asking the doctor if she’d ever play piano again didn’t fly at the moment. She’d be lucky to pick up a spoon again, let alone play a piano. She wouldn’t want that. Not at all. He had to let her go.
Just let her go.
So he had. It was his call, like Dr. Miller said, but it had really been Alison’s call. This was what she had wanted. He had no decision to make, it had already been made for him. The person who looked like his wife had been right: the feeling he had at this moment was one of relief.
And he was shocked to discover that the relief he felt for himself far outweighed the relief he felt for Alison.
That was six years ago, though. He had come to terms with that. Shit, he had talked to shrinks far and wide about the guilt he felt over that sense of relief. And all those doctors had agreed that it was a perfectly natural reaction. He wasn’t crazy, he wasn’t unemotional, he wasn’t an asshole: he was human. Alison had been going through hell, but so had Mike Randal. He hadn’t killed her. Far from it. He had simply let her go.
But all that was in the past. The more that time went on, the more that his relief went from being for himself to being for Alison.
I didn’t kill her, he told himself. She was dead the moment she got in the car that morning.
“None of this is real,” he said to Dr. Miller.
“Pardon me?”
He brushed past the doctor and ran out into the adjoining hallway.
None of this is real. I didn’t kill her and none of this is real.
Shoving doctors and nurses out of his way, Mike ran down the corridor. A patient in a wheelchair headed right for him. Mike didn’t care. He pushed the old man to the side, the wheelchair banging into the wall with a metallic thump. The old man yelled obscenities.
None of this is real.
Mike came to the elevators. They were too slow for his taste. He needed to get out of this building now.
Thrusting an orderly out of the way (more obscenities were thrown at Mike), he came to a door leading to the stairs. He barged through it and took the stairs down two at a time. He almost lost his balance, but his will to not fall on his ass won out.
None of this is real.
Now on the ground floor, he hung a right toward the exit.
Outside was not the parking lot but the dirty, dusty streets of the town.
Roscoe the ever-faithful dog lifted his head up and aimed his ears in Mike’s direction. The dog cocked his head, asking Mike what he was doing back so soon. And by the way, where was everyone else?
41.
The back door of the stock room had to lead outside. Outside to where, exactly, Rachel didn’t know, nor did she care. It ended up not mattering as it was locked. She didn’t dare try the other door, the one led back to the convenience store. The crazy clerk, the Frank-thing, could still be out there. Forget that jazz.
There was plenty of food in the stock room to keep her alive for days, maybe weeks if she rationed. Potato chips, canned foods, bottled water, gum, that bag of dog food. She may be trapped, she may even get the runs, but she wouldn’t starve for quite some time. She just had to make sure to check the expiration dates on everything.
On either side of the back door were cheap metallic shelves that grew all the way to the ceiling lined with the various odds and ends that kept a small store running: spare light bulbs, cleaning supplies, several tool boxes. On the shelf furthest from her, all the way at the back of the room and on the top, one lone candle sat ablaze, a tiny plume of smoke coming from the tip of the flame. That’s when she noticed the faint scent of lilac, the smell they had decided was the Downloading Scent. She couldn’t feel it, but she knew someone, maybe the Frank-thing, was forging around in her brain at that very moment.
Suddenly she found herself on the floor whimpering, her head between her legs. This was all too much. She didn’t want to, but she looked over at Brett. Poor, poor Brett. After all this, after all that they had been through, this was what he got. He didn’t deserve this. He was just the wheelman, just, you know, rolling. Helping out his brother and his girlfriend.
Yeah, helping them do something illegal which resulted in the murder of an innocent man.
She had to get out of here. She had a feeling if she sat here and waited, the Frank-thing would come back and she’d end up with the same fate as Brett. She began to ponder once again how she got into the convenience store, how the clerk had miraculously come back to life to give her a (very deserving) tongue lashing, how Brett had gotten into the back room with her, and Jesus, what had happened to him?
The time wasn’t right to fit all the pieces together. The anxiety she felt in her chest told her it was time to act, not philosophize with herself on the subject of being transported from one place to another like on Star Trek or the possibilities of life after death.
Rachel returned to the back door. She pushed and pulled at it again, making sure it was still locked, which it was, then leaned closer for a better look.
The handle was one of those cheap metal door pulls, the kind usually found inside public restrooms, too small for adult hands. It was fastened to a plain silver plate that didn’t match the handle—clearly a make-shift job if there ever was one. There was no keyhole for her to pick. The locking mechanism had to be on the other side. That was, of course, if it was locked in the traditional sense. For all she knew the door had been super-glued shut or was nothing more than a prop of the town.
Four screws positioned at each corner held the plate in place. If she could get those off maybe she could get into the lock itself and work it free. She’d need a Phillips-head screwdriver.
Rachel grabbed one of the four tool boxes from the shelf to her right and placed it on the ground, flipping open the two latches. There were no tools of any sort inside, but rather a small supply of Army issue rations. One of the packets had split open and a family of ants were having their way with some freeze dried apples and something that at one point in time may have been crackers.
The ants began to climb out to see what all the ruckus was about, so she closed the box and shoved it to the side. Their world distraught, the ants that had made it out crawled around the box and onto the floor in a bustle of confusion. They made haste for the door like they had just been waiting for Rachel to come along and set them free, easily fitting underneath the crack. Lucky bastards.
A second toolbox, found behind a box of 100 watt light bulbs, proved to be more helpful. Two pairs of pliers, five wrenches and a small plastic envelope of screwdrivers. She unbuttoned the envelope and pulled out a Phillips-head.
Rachel shoved the business end of the tool into one of the four screws and gave it a turn. She heard a petite crack come from the plate but the screw itself didn’t move. She then grabbed the screwdriver’s plastic blue handle with both hands, repositioned herself for maximum torque, and gave it another go.
Cuh-cri-crack!
The screw came loose. She quickly twisted it out the rest of the way and let it drop to the floor. Three more to go.
* * *
The smoke hovered in the intersection. It wasn’t menacing this time, there weren’t arms shooting out of it this way and that. In fact, the smoke wasn’t doing much of anything. It was just sitting there.
