by C.G. Banks
*
Right before dawn he left having sated himself. They’d never left the kitchen floor and now Patsy was a reek of pain, her back, shoulders, her thighs. Her sex. Everything had been plowed under. And when he was finished that had been that. He’d pulled himself free and stood up, groaning in the darkness. Looked down at her lying there and turned to the kitchen door, leaving like a wraith having scourged a village. Through the street-facing kitchen window where she’d crawled, Patsy watched his naked form move effortlessly, unabashed, down the street toward his house. She wondered for a moment if there were any others left awake and alert in this hideous hour as witness. She wondered then, also, if hers was the only house he’d visited. When he finally passed full into the darkness she fell away from the window and sobbed against the refrigerator door. She could feel the man’s rancid semen lubricating her thighs and was suddenly afraid she’d be sick. For the life of her, she seemed in a dream, a nightmare of the worst fabrication, because surely she had not gone so far, truly, to abide such things in the middle of the night? She thought of her lost husband, her mind refusing to pull his name into focus.
The stickiness razed her mind with guilt. For all things now and the terrible lost things she’d never realize again, only pine after them until her dying day.
She stumbled off the floor to her feet, steadying herself on the kitchen island while an assault of nausea rocked her frame. Little white stars bloomed and popped before her eyes and the room pitched and rolled. The bathroom! She had to get it out! Using both hands to help her along, she fought past the few obstacles in the kitchen, a chair, the corner of the table, finally making it to the bathroom door. The darkness here proved too tomb-like for willing entrance and she fumbled along the wall for the light switch. The sudden blast of white caused her to reel back against the wall, throwing both arms before her eyes. She ducked her head and started forward like a penitent bowed before an overworked god. She was thankful now she was naked and sat down on the toilet, one hand on both walls of the nook. Then she forced out what she could and wiped away the rest. Or at least the rest she could get at.
She began to feel better, her mind to clear.
In another couple of minutes she was able to rise and stand without the support of her hands. She closed her eyes and counted slowly to thirty. Opened them and stared straight ahead at the cabinet facing her. A towel. Yes. She gingerly took it off the rack and unfolded it, expecting anything, and finding only what she desired. A small sigh escaped her. “Wash your hands,” she murmured like someone’s parent, and likewise she moved two feet over and turned on the taps in the sink. She kept her eyes to the bowl as the water heated, not wanting to see what wild beast from some roasting hell she now resembled. Shortly, steam began to rise and she took one end of the towel and wet it, rubbing in a little soap, all the while keeping her eyes fixed to the job. She washed her face, neck, resoaped for her chest and privates. Worked to undo the unthinkable and was almost pleased with the results.
Again, she was almost human.
Her bedraggled hair hung down to shield her eyes and she raised her hands to part it. Decided the moment was right to regard her handiwork and looked into the mirror.
The sight almost stopped her heart.
The mirror looked upon some other dimension now. Everything a broken and smoking ruin. No architectural line could be ascertained in the rubble, which seemed far more encompassing than any World War II atrocity she remembered from high school. She could practically feel the heat pressing up against her naked body from behind. But these things didn’t hold her. In fact this phantasmagoria paled before the truth of her sight.
Terri stood alone in the rubble.
Her clothes were in tatters, blood-smeared, along with her face, the hair burned from one side of her head. One eye seemed cool and lifeless, confused.
“Terri!” Patsy screamed, spinning around to pluck her daughter from the madness of the vision, but finding only the shower door awaiting her attack. She ripped it open, scrabbled inside the plastic cubicle and tore at its surface until the futility hit her and she spun back round again.
The scene was much the same as before except now Terri held her little arms out in mute supplication. Her mouth moved but she was too far away, the mirror now more like a television screen, all grainy and shot through, and Patsy could see nothing of her own shape or form in the glass. Only Terri. And her entreaties.
Patsy lurched from the shower and fell hard against the cabinet that held the sink. Terri now only mere inches away from her frantic eyes but separated (oh God! no, please no!) by the immensity of this fugue. Her hands flew to the glass and she began to plead with it, but Terri, heedless, continued to gesture, the grieving love in her eyes bringing Patsy soon to silence. She moaned and put her head in her hands, pulled disconsolately at her hair. But then, unexpectedly, she heard a whispering. Just a sibilant murmur far back in her mind, but if she concentrated, words slowly began to form in its puddle. “Terri?” she whispered back, her head still in her hands as the dawning came on. Yes! Yes! Surely! Her eyes flashed back to the mirror. Terri was still there, beckoning, her lips moving, and suddenly Patsy could understand what she was saying. “Quiet, Momma, quiet. I’m here,” over and over again. Patsy slumped to her knees on the tile floor, her elbows barely keeping her eye-level with the counter. Terri looked her straight in the eyes, seemingly terrified of the tenuousness of the moment. Every once in a while the image would flicker and fade like a bad signal wiffing out on the radio.
“What is it baby?” Patsy heard herself say.
Again the murmur coalescing into coherence. “No, no, don’t,” the voice said. Terri’s voice.
“Baby,” Patsy moaned. Her heart pounded, waiting until some final moment to explode into shards of death. And it was for this that Patsy prayed, to be struck down from this pentacle of want, to flow softly into whatever shadowy world her daughter now inhabited.
“Momma,” she heard again and the sob stopped up tight in her throat. Terri had stepped through the rubble and was now standing in the clear, her hands straight out as if pressed against the opposite side of the glass which held them apart. Patsy put up a finger to the center of her child’s hand and the look on the girl’s face softened. “Don’t Momma,” she said. “Quit looking for me. Don’t do it.”
“Terri, please, please…”
The child squatted down, her figure so close but foreshortened to no more than six inches. Patsy could have covered her whole form with the palm of one hand and shivered violently at the thought. “It’s all lies, Momma. It’s evil. This place is evil,” and even as she said it Patsy knew she was not referring to the cataclysm on the other side of the mirror. Her blood began to run cold.
“Tell me,” she whispered.
The voice was louder in her head now, just as if Terri had her lips pressed fast to her ear, relaying some imperative secret the mother had overlooked. “You’ve got to get away,” the child was saying. “This is not right. I was afraid of the light and followed you. I know it wasn’t right but everything was so confusing…” and her voice bore the maturity of one who’d seen beyond the curtain of earthly reality. The true beat of immensity, finality.
“But I want you, Terri…I’ll do anything, baby…anything…”
“I know, Momma, but it’s not right. It’s a trick, a fugue (again the maturity of expression), a lie. I’m gone. I know that now, and I’m afraid for you…”
Patsy looked at the tiny figure in the mirror and felt her heart tear a little more. “I can’t Terri…I can’t let you go…”
The tiny face was inches from her finger. “I know, Momma, but you have to. This is all just an echo. Everything here nothing but a dead echo,” and Patsy could not ascertain whether she meant the place behind the glass or the world itself. Maybe she was not listening acutely enough, not searching for the clarity of the prophecy. Her daughter said “everything” and perhaps at this moment she should throw off ideas of puzzles and m
ysteries. Accept the word as gospel.
She began to cry.
“Don’t Momma,” she heard but couldn’t. The cruelty of the universe mashing her flat. “Listen to me,” the little voice continued. “They’re using me to get to you but it won’t work. “There are…” and this time her voice filed down another register as if in mind of interlopers, “evil things here. There have always been, and they look for weakness. These tricks are not what they—“ and suddenly the voice was knifed from her head. Patsy dashed the tears from her eyes and tried to fix on the tortured figure squatting in the glass before her. Terri was crouched down lower to the ground, casting frantic glances over both shoulders. In the back of her mind Patsy heard a small, terrifying bell of laughter ring out. Its source unmistakable.
Terri turned back to her mother. Actually pressed her face up against the pane of reality that separated the two. “Please, Momma, do something. Get away! They won’t leave me alone!” and with this the laughter mushroomed, broke into two distinct registers.
In the far right corner of the mirror the girls from the attic rounded a broken wall and stopped side-by-side. One of them pointed in Terri’s direction and the other laughed for the third time. The scene began to go grainy again, distorted as if a wash of water were trilling down the mirror’s length. Terri turned to her mother one last time. “Momma! Do it! Get away!” and then she was off and running through the murky, scrambled backdrop of doom and ruin.
Patsy lurched forward, mindless, her hands in claws and her teeth bared, plunging ahead, striking the glass with such force to break it from the wall. She felt more than heard the tinkling crash of glass breaking, a warm coat of heat painting her forehead, and then she felt nothing at all.