The Unwelcome

by Jacob Steven Mohr

  “It’s five-thirty,” she said out loud. “I’m going home. If you have any other questions, email your teacher. I’m done talking about this.”

  She waited for his anger—for the eruption, the red face, the threats, the fist thrust into the drywall. But Lutz’s smile didn’t waver.

  “All right,” he said cheerily. “Then I’ll walk you to the parking lot. It’s already dark out there, you never know what kind of nutty types are lurking around these days.”

  Jill said nothing, stunned into silence, quickly gathering the rest of her materials into her satchel before latching it and hoisting it onto her shoulder. The strap dug in across her collar bone, and right away the nerve in her shoulder blade began to complain. It wasn’t until she’d left the room and arrived at the building’s front door that she finally said, “All right. Walk me, then.”

  “Consider it done,” Lutz replied, but he didn’t walk through the door. Jill paused halfway through the heavy swinging door, light bleeding out of the English hall and into the night beyond. She looked over her shoulder—my first mistake, she thought, staring relentlessly through the slats in the closet door. I shouldn’t have looked back. I should never have even turned my head. Lutz had stooped, putting his lips to the water fountain in the hall, but when he looked up, his mouth dripping water, such peculiar terror cut through her that she couldn’t help but freeze in place, examining this strange feeling quivering inside her. Lutz stared at her, an undefinable emotion writ across his features, looking her head to toe, his eyes slow on her.

  “I don’t really need to be here, you understand,” he said to her. “That’s why this is all so frustrating. It’s a lot of trouble to go to, just to meet somebody. But I want you to know it’s been worth it. I want you to understand that I don’t regret any of it, even for a second.”

  Then he straightened and began walking toward her.

  “You know,” he said, “that’s a very pretty dress you’ve got on.”

  * * *

  Canned laughter trickled in, startling Jill from a doze. She had to nap standing upright, with her eyes open, and take her sleep where she could. She never knew when her body would begin to move, bearing her forward into the world beyond her coat closet, off to perform some arcane task while the other two forms in the apartment lurked on the periphery. She had cooked, she had vacuumed—she had cleaned herself in the shower more times than she’d eaten, always in lava-hot water, though the heat never penetrated, never truly hurt her. She could see the steam, hear the water hitting her back and shoulders, sense the pressure of it, but all she ever truly felt was a kind of swaddling warmth deep in her belly. Like a long, uncomfortable hug that never seemed to end.

  Outside the closet door, they were watching a sitcom.

  Sometimes Jill could not tell her waking from her dreaming. Sometimes the dreams would be trapped, like her body, in this dark closet, floating in the warm bath of silence. But other times, her dreams were not her own. It was as though somebody had crept into her projector room and swapped out the reels for their own strange home movies—and what movies they were! They began experimental, swooping arrays of color and shape and chameleonic form, but eventually the colors would grow subdued, the shapes settled, the forms condensed, hardening into monstrosity. Pulsating, squamous flesh arranged in mind-rending, eldritch structures and geometries, loping and tumbling across empty air, all set against a black sky that was not sky at all…

  Or perhaps she never really slept at all. Perhaps even this was denied her.

  There had never really been any doubt in her mind over what was happening to her. Once she eliminated the obvious options—drugs, hallucinations, hippie-cult brainwashing—only one possibility remained. This boy, Lutz Visgara, had total control over her body. The thought of it had terrified her only at first, but once she was made aware just how powerless she really was, her fear evolved, transforming into cold, calculating rage, something she could use. She wasted no effort or time struggling against him: her brain seemed to be operating on low-battery mode, her wattage still flowing but somehow sapped. And besides—there was nothing to struggle against. No bonds she could break, no puppet strings to sever. Lutz was in the driver’s seat, but Jill wasn’t even in the same car. She simply wasn’t there at all.

  Her left hand lifted, groped for the closet doorknob, twisted and pushed. Light flooded in; Jill’s eyes thankfully squinted shut against the sudden assault, but she was already moving forward, swiveling into the little kitchenette, heading for the fridge, which she already knew was full of craft beers and little else. Her hand roved among the bottles like a cursor, finally selecting a funky brown ale with a yellow wraparound label. Jill couldn’t decipher the words on the label, even though they were written in huge block letters. This imprisonment, this enslavement, this theft of Jill Cicero—it had somehow robbed her of her ability to read.

  She grabbed another bottle from the shelf, watching herself take it, bring it to the den, where hands reached out and took them from her grasp. “Thank you, Jill,” the girl, Kait, told her, and laughter pealed out. Her face and Lutz’s were half-shadowed, lit up strange by the flicker of the TV in the dark room; their heads were together, her head on his shoulder, his arm looped around her and his other hand resting on her bent knee. And yet he was also looming above them both as well, standing just out of focus, wearing Jill’s skin and watching over them with Jill’s eyes—and Jill watched him watch, as though looking through thick glass, standing in the deep, heavy warmth of his shadow, hating him.

  And she wanted to hate this Kait girl too. Kait, who knew her name. Kait, who watched her boyfriend walk around inside her, watched him steal Jill’s life one step, one breath at a time. Kait, who Lutz called Heart-Brecker—never by her name, never by any other diminutive. Kait, who stared at her like she was one of the stuffed heads mounted on Jill’s father’s wall in his new house out west. There were times, usually in the middle of the day, where Jill’s mind would go blank, and hours would pass by without her notice; she tried not to think about what happened to her and her body during those times, but she could not help imagining when there was nothing left of her but imagination. But though she tried hating this Heart-Brecker, the hate wouldn’t come. She kept thinking of the peace lily on her mother’s dining table. She wondered if this girl had ever heard something scream like a plant could scream. If perhaps she could hear Jill’s scream, if she could be made to hear. If, somehow, she was even screaming herself.

  “Do you think she’d like to watch with us?” Kait asked suddenly.

  Jill watched Lutz frown—and she could almost feel his confusion as well, bubbling over soft heat. “What do you mean, like?”

  “The show.” Kait pointed: on the screen, Kramer had just careened through the door of Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment, looking wild-eyed and birdlike. “Do you think she’d like it? Only, I suppose you’d know the answer already, wouldn’t you.”

  To Jill’s surprise, Lutz reached across both their bodies, grasped the TV remote, and flung it with all his strength at the wall on the opposite side of the room. She could hear, but not see, the battery case crack, and the remote itself clatter to the floor. Kait recoiled backward, her face pale in the TV’s hospital glow, but Lutz only pressed his palms to his forehead, knotting his fingers into his hair in frustration.

  “You still don’t really understand,” he groaned, pulling the flesh of his face down as he rubbed his eyes in grotesque fashion. “How many times will…” He paused, jumped to his feet, and marched around the coffee table to plant himself in front of Jill. Staring into his eyes was like looking in a dark mirror.

  “She can’t see me,” he was saying, waving an open hand in front of her face. “She can’t hear me.”

  “Then where did she go?” Kait asked, struggling free of the blankets to stand as well.

  “Go?” Lutz turned, blocking Jill’s view of Kait. “She didn’t go anywhere. This is all there is. We’re alone in the room. There is no Jill
Cicero.”

  The world turned around Jill as she turned on her heel, walking back around the corner to the coat closet by the front door. She could still hear Lutz and Kait’s voices behind her, but the words no longer mattered. Jill had seen the light flickering, the candle lit at the top of the dark and spiraling stairs.

  There is no Jill Cicero, he had said. She can’t see me. She can’t hear me.

  She wanted to grin, to crow to the heavens. But I can hear you, you son of a bitch, she wanted to say. I’m not supposed to be here—but here I am. I survived you. I bobbed to the surface. I came back. That means I beat you, doesn’t it? Somehow, I beat your creepy little game. And I don’t know how I did it, but I’m gonna do it again—and again and again and again until you have to let me go. Until you wish you’d never seen my face.

  She shut the door, facing backwards this time, looking into the deep recesses of the tiny closet, but now the darkness was a boon, the muffled quiet a knife slipped into her boot.

  You’re going to wish it was true, she said to herself. You’re going to wish there was no such thing as Jill Cicero.

  She said this twice over, and then twice over again, repeating it like a prayer. Then she shut her mind to the world, constructing inside herself a desperate scheme ordered toward freedom—and somewhere just beyond the closet door, she thought she heard the sound of rustling leaves.

  Chapter 11

  Glasspowder

  And then, sudden as a heart attack, it was dawn.

  Kait woke gasping for air. She sat upright—a throw blanket wrapped tight tendrils around her arms and shoulders, dragging her to earth, but she shoved it off, her breathing labored and dry, trying to shake the nightmare out of her head. She was on the red leather couch in the den now, and the whole room was awash in yellow light. Sun streamed in through the wide back window, disorientingly bright, momentarily just as blinding as darkness.

  There was somebody knocking against the front door of the cabin.

  “Kaity?” Alice’s plaintive voice floated in. “Kaity, it’s me—or, I think it’s me? You said we shouldn’t sleep past ten, and it’s ten-twelve now.”

  Memories crushed in. The night prior flashed once in her mind in its entirety, like heat lightning in the guts of a cloud. The blanket had felt like hands on her, strong hands everywhere, clinging, sliding, feeling, their touch rough and their grip like jaws. She pitched forward, striking her fists against her knees; her breath caught like a bone in her throat.

  I’m going to show you how reasonable I can be.

  The room flexed inward around her, to smother, to suppress, but Alice’s voice beat it back into shape, though now her knocking drove long spikes into Kait’s skull. She massaged her temples, struggling to keep one throbbing eye open, and the pain diminished, fading into a far-away rat-ta-tap behind her pupil.

  “Kaity?” Alice called out again from the porch. “Are you all right in there?”

  I’m going to make a project out of you, Ben Alden.

  “Peachy fucking keen,” she groaned softly, to herself—then louder for the benefit of her friend: “I’m fine, Alice.”

  “Okay…” There was a pause—Kait could almost see Alice wringing her fingers, shifting from one foot to the other on the front mat. “Then can you let me inside? It’s got really cold out here, and Ben took the cabin key off his keyring…”

  After a final groan, Kait heaved to her feet and shuffled towards the door, scrubbing sleep out of her eyes with the heel of her hand. As she skirted the sofa, the Model 94, now leaning against the couch’s backside, swung suddenly into view, and the sight of it shocked her fatigue away like a blast of cold water. She shivered, looking at it, afraid of its power for the first time.

  Last night, the dream had changed.

  In the dream, her shot had only wounded Lutz, and the tear in his flesh would not spill blood. Instead, she held him by the hair and slit his throat open with a long knife, or perhaps a straight razor—she had not been able to look as she sawed away at his skin. His flesh had made horrible ripping sounds, like tearing burlap, and only then did he bleed: what came out was warm and thin and bubbling and redder than anything she’d ever seen, and Lutz had only laughed at her, laughed as she cried over the blood spilling onto the ground and pooling at his feet and soaking into her trembling hands.

  Kait crept forward, but when Alice knocked impatiently, she froze, looking back at the gleaming rifle. She had been careful—hadn’t she? She chewed her knuckles, almost breaking skin. Her instructions to the others had been rigorously exacting: Nobody sleeps in the same room. Nobody leaves their bedrooms until dawn, and not until everybody is awake and able to defend themselves. Bedroom doors stay locked at all times—and since there were only the two bedrooms in the little cabin, somebody would have to spend the night in the station wagon while she, Kait, would sleep in the den to enforce curfew. And while nobody seemed willing to say it out loud, the deadly implication stood: anybody caught out-of-doors during the night could only be under Lutz’s control and should be considered an immediate threat to everybody else in the cabin—and dealt with accordingly.

  They’d fought her, of course. On every point, for every inch. Alice, scared as she was, clung stubbornly to the notion that Lutz was after Kait and Kait alone, while Riley insisted she couldn’t possibly be “a Lutz”, though by that point in the night Kait was too fried to wrap her head around the logic of this enough to really protest. But Ben, out of a clear blue sky, had agreed to each of her demands in turn, and even asked that he be the one to sleep in the car. He hadn’t looked her in the eyes when he said this—he almost seemed scared to speak, chewing his words, tasting something bitter on them. And while in the end he had looked so unsteady on his feet that Alice insisted she take his place outside, for a moment Kait had seen another face behind his glasses, and her guilt burned against her like a hot brand.

  Now Ben’s and Riley’s bedrooms were closed, but she could see lines of light under both doors; she guessed they’d each been awake for some time now. She wondered if their phones had signal, and if they were talking to each other.

  If they were talking about her.

  “Get back from the door,” Kait called out. “I’m going to let you inside now.”

  “Do you have the gun?”

  Kait paused, her hand centimeters from the latch. “It’s here,” she said.

  “I mean, do you have it in your hands?”

  “No?” Kait searched the door for a peephole and, finding none, pulled aside the gauzy curtain and put a cheek to the side transom to peer through. She could see the vague shape of Alice’s curved back, shifting nervously on the front porch, and beyond that, fitful snatches of Ben’s station wagon, visible through a scrub of evergreen. “Alice, I’m not—”

  I’m not going to shoot you, she wanted to say. But the words stuck sideways in her, wedged tight. That had been the insinuation, hadn’t it? That she was prepared to defend herself—and the others in the cabin—with force? She’d pulled the damned thing off the wall, hadn’t she? Loaded it, cocked it, shoved the barrel down Ben’s throat… So why did the sight of it churn her guts like this now? What had changed inside her while she slept?

  Don’t worry, purred a soft voice from the back of her mental theater. When the time comes, pulling the trigger is easy. It has to be, right? You’ve done it before. You were good.

  “I don’t need it,” she forced herself to say, out loud. “Not for you.”

  I hope they run, when the moment comes, whispered the voice. Like ducks, breaking away over the pond. You remember how to hit a moving target, don’t you?

  “Shut up,” Kait hissed.

  You need to lead them into the shot.

  “Kaity?”

  “I said—”

  You’ve got this, Heart-Brecker.

  “You’d better get the gun.”

  The record skipped. Kait’s cheek, cold on the window glass, went suddenly numb.

  “What?” she asked,
followed by, “Why?”

  At first there was only an animal sound, low, a moan of anguish. Then at last:

  “Because I think we messed up. Because I think I messed up.”

  Kait’s hand found the latch, and before she knew it, she’d flung open the door and brushed past Alice, stumbling out barefoot onto the cold gravel lot beside the road. She followed Alice’s gaze—for a moment, nothing drew her eye.

  Then she was choking on her scream.

  The hood of Ben’s station wagon was propped up, and a pine branch jutted straight up out of the tangled guts of the engine, impaling a deflated volleyball on its sharpened point. The branch itself was shorn of all tributary branches and stripped of its bark, while the ball was filthy, smeared with dirt and red paint—no. Not paint. The head, the maniacally grinning face drawn onto the surface of the ball, had eyes that oozed and ran like egg yolk, dripping down the cheeks; there was no nose, and its teeth were huge and square and crowding out of the cartoonish, dripping jaws.

  It was rendered in what could only be fresh and gleaming blood.

  Kait turned her head; she tried to drag her gaze away. She couldn’t. The face’s eyes were only smotches of dribbling red, but she could feel them, like a painting’s eyes, tracking her around a gallery. Alice was still standing on the porch, listing to one side and shivering in the cold, her eyes wide and staring and unfocused. A hundred questions whirled in Kait’s head, but all she managed to say was:

  “When.”

  “I don’t know.” The reply was barely a rough whisper, carried on the wind. “I woke up, it was cold, the engine had stopped running, and—”

  “No. God, no.”

  The words were tiny, barely gone from her lips before Kait turned like a wobbling top and stumbled back to the car. As she drew closer, she had to force herself to lean into the gaping mouth of the station wagon’s open hood, avoiding the cockeyed gaze of the grisly effigy impaled just above her head. She looked down. She looked for a long time.