by C.G. Banks
Chapter 34: Seeing is Believing
The fight was over. Though she’d lasted ten nights and lost twelve pounds in the interim, it was lost. She lay flat on her back in the bedroom, her hollow eyes staring unseeing at the ceiling. Her arms and legs like iron bars of weight screwed into a body that could no longer contain them. Her head ached like an abscessed tooth and the left side of her mouth was pulled down from the cerebral event of the night before.
Elizabeth knew none of this.
The only thing clear in her mind was the vision. The awful burning-ice knowledge of what was to come. It played over and over in her mind, like some horrible vintage reel of disaster replete in the splendor of color and texture. A tear slid out of her right eye and, unhampered, down her cheek to her chin and then to her neck. Its track like a snail’s across her skin. Oddly enough, if she’d been able to contemplate rather than just observe, she’d have noticed that, after all the years and the innumerable visitations, this last one deviated from all those before. What she was used to, the way things had always come in the long stretch of years that had been her life, was little snapshots. Still-frame pictures, almost, with a vast weight of baggage attached. But nevertheless, frozen points in time. Last night, her last night, she knew that now, had differed greatly; perhaps this very difference the pivot by which her mind had finally given way.
It had come in a weird, movie-like chronology. Playing now continuously, a first-run film of madness. First just a burst of light from complete darkness, then, a quiet dawning new day in the neighborhood, tufts of clouds just visible above the fringe of the red maple growing placidly in Patsy Standish’s front yard. She could almost hear a faint lilt of music building through the air around her, and then the man. Coming into frame. Dressed sharp for the morning, intent. Turning into the drive now, walking confidently up to the carport door to the kitchen. Then, the gun tucked snug into the small of his back, and all the while, from the depths of the vision, the irretrievable knowledge there was no chance, not even a scant opportunity, to warn the poor woman inside.
Because this had already happened.
It was no ominous portent of things to come, like those dreadful ghostly visitations of Scrooge on that long lost Christmas Eve. This was writ in stone already. Why it appeared for her now, so unlike any other vision she’d ever had in her rather substantial life, had no more right of discussion than babies dead of leukemia or genocide. It simply was.
She watched him knock on the carport door in the eerie emptiness common to silent movies and unfathomable dreams, watched as her neighbor opened the door. Saw the two talking mysteriously in the carport, the man’s hand resting at the small of his back where the gun waited. Watched as the woman pushed the screen door wide and he went inside.
Then a cut to the kitchen. Just as she remembered it. Clean in a picked-up but non-obsessive way. Patsy standing by the table, the man, this Tomas Lorca, seated. And then the discussion. A script of doom.
“You knew I’d come,” he said, his cold, dark eyes piercing.
Patsy nodded.
“I know about your little girl, I know about Terri,” and Elizabeth saw the woman flinch.
He held out his hand and motioned for Patsy to sit, to just let him talk a moment. She did so. Collected her hands on the table before her. “I knew it was you that first day in the hardware store,” he went on. “Every moment of my life has been leading up to it…to this. Everything in yours too.”
And the kitchen came suddenly alive with tension. It swirled around them like a malevolent horde of bats in a cave. “What do you want?” she said.
He smiled savagely. “You know.”
She nodded. “You can help.” It was not a question.
He smiled. “Yes…I can help you get her back,” and the words hung in the air like a red flag to a bull. He fanned out his hands on the table, regarded them a moment and looked back at the woman. “Do you believe in God?” he said. He was no longer smiling.
“I used to.”
“But not so much now…” he finished, nodding, leaving the rest unsaid. He pursed his lips. “Well I do,” he said and nodded. “But He doesn’t concern me.”
“Who does?”
“The Other.”
There was the tick of moment throughout the kitchen, a long drain of irrevocable challenge. “I’ve done many things; I know many things,” he said. She looked at him dumbly. He ran a hand across his mouth as if considering some ancient, dark secret. “This Other is the key.”
“I don’t understand.”
He smiled again, less savagely this time. “Oh, I think you do. You do. People have the mistaken want of belief that good always prevails in the natural order of things. That if you wait long enough things will turn out for the good.” He frowned, arched his eyebrows. “Pure bullshit. Not the natural order of things at all. Everything moves toward chaos according to science. Do you believe me?”
She just looked at him.
“This darkness, this chaos, contains more power than the light. I’ve seen it; I know it. This is the truth.” And still the woman said nothing. As if mindful of this he changed direction. “Nights I’ve laid alone with the visions, seeing you in this agony. I know about the girls; I’ve heard your talking in the attic.”
Patsy’s eyes flew up from the table. Her mouth a round O of grief, of madness. Lorca leaned forward, whispered. “I know she’s here…close.” Patsy tried to speak, mouthed the word how? but he fanned it away. “I know loss,” he said and began fingering an odd burn in his hand. Her eyes were drawn to it but could not make out the figure. “Do you believe me?” he repeated.
This time she nodded.
“There are certain rites that must be observed but it shouldn’t dissuade you. Nothing worthwhile is ever costless…” and she was staring off now, her mouth moving the thought across the wide gulf of her endless grief. Then she seemed to stick. She tried to speak and nothing came out. He leaned in closer, his chin mere inches from the table. She turned back to him.
“Anything,” she said.
He smiled, softly this time, or as softly as his face allowed. “I thought so,” he replied. Took the initiative to reach across the gulf and grasp her hand. It was cold to the touch and he pulled it closer. “It can be done in degrees…can you feel it?” and she nodded weakly, a dull dawning of recognition shadowing her face. “It will not be pleasant,” he said. “Not at first.”
Again, nothing.
“You have felt me during the nights, my presence in the rooms with you. I’ve stalked the spirits railing about you though you’ve been blind. What you’ve seen I’ve let you.” He stood up from the chair, still holding her hand, and rounded the corner. She was a lost girl before him. “You want her back,” he repeated, such things necessary to move events forward.
She looked up at him. “How?” she murmured.
He ran his hand through her hair, pretending she didn’t shudder. “Stand up,” he said. She did and he took her by the shoulders and turned her facing away. “Put your hands on the table,” he directed and gently pressed her shoulders forward, bending her at the waist. She said nothing though her lips moved. When he reached around and unbuttoned her jeans she did not resist. He grabbed the waistline with both hands and slid them to the floor, along with her panties. Then he bent over her, fumbling with his own pants now, stripping them down to his knees. “Nothing comes without sacrifice. You know this don’t you?” but his voice had dried to a rasp and she made no move of acknowledgement. “It has to be this way the first time,” he said and spread her cheeks apart, aiming his throbbing penis at the round pinkness of her anus. Then he righted himself and began pressing it home, slow at first, then with more urgency. She gripped the table and tried not to scream. When he unloaded minutes later he was in all the way to the hilt.
And with this came the end of the film-like reel. The room spun away to a million shards of glass-like light, its principals coming to pieces along with it. There seemed an endless
chill of death around her until suddenly the light began to reassert itself amid the fathomless emptiness, and Elizabeth saw the neighborhood again, from a vantage point high up in the sky. Darkness, but not that of night, only of emptiness, regret, loneliness.
The old woman on the bed cried freely from both eyes now, the dollops of moisture edging out on the pillow on both sides of her head, expanding and expanding. From high up here she saw the land burn, fledgling brushfires and conflagrations consuming trees, houses, people. Blackened forms stalking the land leaving trails of blood and gore, animals howling into the heat. And in the midst of it all, a lone figure, a man she now knew as one Tomas Lorca, early of this place, arms outstretched and head back in supplication to whatever demons had spawned him. Laughing as the flames built and fed upon themselves and the forms they consumed. She saw the ghosts of the many-murdered rising sluggishly from their forgotten graves, trailing up like leaves of acidic smoke, her neighbors in their misery becoming incorporeal. Gas and water lines bursting from internal pressures and infernal heat, spewing steam and torrents of gas heavenward; and within this maelstrom the wavering, stumbling form of her neighbor, Patsy Standish, moving through it all, the screams sucked out of her throat as she clutched her stomach and lurched forward aimlessly trying to escape the clutch of evil that had so suddenly and completely expunged everything she’d known.
And then there was nothing. The cessation of all being, all goodness. Lost.
In the thin sheet of her awareness she felt a presence. The vision was gone, sucked back to whatever foul hell it’d come from, but what was here now was infinitely worse. This was no figment, no figure from the dying works of her mind. This was real.
She opened her eyes and fought the waves of nausea to focus. The ceiling wavered in and out of existence but she fought hard and finally found the compunction to steady her sight. She considered for a mad second that her body had deserted her already, leaving the husk of her thoughts in whatever purgatory had been set aside to swallow her whole. As it was, she wasn’t far wrong.
She still couldn’t move. She tried to cry for her ruin but could find no more tears.
Then she heard the voice. “Lizzy, Lizzy, Lizzy,” it said and the blood in her veins froze into crystal-shards of ice. A shadow cast across her face and she blinked hard trying to steady her vision. She thought herself already dead and descended not into purgatory but some unspecified hell of which there could be no hope of redemption. Her heart broke at the implication.
Then she saw his face.
Tomas Lorca was standing above her, smiling his ghastly smile, at the foot of her bed. So strange to be lost in such familiarity. “Can you see me Lizzy?” the man asked and moved his head from side to side as if to frame her acuity.
She began to cry in earnest, her tears once more found.
He left the foot of the bed and circled around to stand beside her. She felt his weight press the bed covers as he sat down next to her. Took her hand in his and a knifey edge of galactic cold slid seductively into her body. She managed to turn her head ever so slightly in his direction. He was looking at her, still smiling, patting her brittle bones through the paper-thin texture of her flesh. “Lizzy, I’m here for you,” he said and laughed. “Here we’ve been neighbors all this time and I never knew you had the Sight.” He tsk, tsked far down in his throat. “You just never know, do you?” he said. “Well, we can put all that behind us now. I know you’re sick and fixing to step off and it would be such a shame, such a rude thing, to go alone on this last ride.” He put his lips together and shook his head sadly. Patted her hand so that shocks coursed through her body. “No. We couldn’t have that.” He leaned toward her face and the smile was gone, replaced by something inhuman, nearer to its real self. “Too late to warn her now, old woman.” He laughed again. “Not that it’d do any goddamn good, but I did want to be here to see you away.” He stopped and looked around the room. “I guess you’re wondering what I’m doing here, how I got in. I can do just about anything now.” Her mouth opened and closed like a beached fish but only gurgles escaped her. “There comes a time for everything and now it’s mine,” he said and stood up once more. Leaned over so that his face was inches from her own. “Yes,” he said. “I can see the darkness.” Her body began to shake. He nodded and backed away. “Yes, I can see it.”
She watched in horror as his hand came down to touch her face, and when it did she was gone as if existence had always been merely a fragile dream that ever waited on the edge of the moment to cease.