The Unwelcome

by Jacob Steven Mohr

  Transitive affection. Equivalent exchange, like alchemy.

  The thought made Jill want to vomit.

  “I know…” Kait breathed, panting from their dance .

  Jill felt her skin crawl and scurry. Kait’s mouth was next to her neck when she spoke, and her breath tickled when it moved her hair across her skin. Her lips twitched, the beginnings of a laugh—but it wasn’t her laugh. She shuddered inwardly: she’d never considered that Lutz could feel what she felt. But it made sense: he’d carried on whole conversations as her before, watching through her eyes and hearing through her ears. Why shouldn’t his command of her body extend to all five senses? Why shouldn’t he feel Kait’s touch through her skin?

  “I know the name of the cloak-cape… girl,” Kait continued, her words thick and sludgy.

  And then she said something that turned Jill cold.

  “Her name was Jill Cicero.”

  Jill could not have moved if she wanted to, even if Lutz had loosed his hold on her. She stared into Kait’s face, her own face slack, her eyes unfocused. For a moment, Kait’s eyes searched her features, gleaming with werelight, almost seeming to glow of their own power. Then the eyes flicked away—and suddenly Jill felt herself drawn into a back-breaking embrace.

  “The girl with the cloak was Jill Cicero…” Kait repeated. “The girl with the striped hair was Jill Cicero…” Her chin was tucked into Jill’s shoulder, just under the curve of her chin, and she was shocked to feel something cold and wet trickling down her collarbone.

  “The boy with the dreadlocks was Jill Cicero,” she kept saying. “The girl with the really red lipstick… Hollow trees, all hollow, hollow, hollow…”

  Kait’s whole body shook against Jill’s, and even though Kait’s arms were locked around her, Jill couldn’t shake the peculiar feeling that she was holding Kait, not the other way round, holding her up: that she might crumple to the floor like an empty suit of clothes. The skin on Jill’s right arm began to itch, just above the wrist. The one place she couldn’t scratch. She rubbed her wrist surreptitiously against the ridge of her hip, but it only made the itch worse.

  And Kait wasn’t making any sense. She kept mumbling into Jill’s shoulder, strings of names, repeated phrases, nonsense syllables, bathing her in tears that flowed like blood. “Don’t feel a thing,” she kept saying, again and again like an omen. “You—Lutz says you don’t feel a thing. But you’d dance with me, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you, Alice?”

  Jill had not practiced for this.

  But this girl Kait was sobbing now, trembling in the grip of something powerful and strange, something that seemed to command her body as totally and effortlessly as Lutz commanded Jill’s. Trembling like she was about to tear in two, her hands knotting into Jill’s shirt, stretching the fabric, her arms steel-trap tight around her torso.

  No, Jill had not practiced for this—but still, she acted. Without thinking. Without considering the consequences. Her free right arm rose up, laying the open hand on Kait’s quaking shoulder, stroking it. She ran untrimmed fingernails through the girl’s hair, just scraping the scalp, as though she were combing her little cousin’s hair after a bath. And for a moment, just a tick of the clock or two, Kait’s tremors quieted. Her sobs died away to little gasps, and the hard, tight muscles in her shoulders seemed to relax as she pressed forward into Jill’s one-armed embrace, registering the affection, wanting more of it.

  For only a moment, their hearts beat together.

  Then Kait came alive, thrusting Jill away with outstretched arms, her eyes wide and crazy, full of horror. Jill toppled away, unable to steady herself. Her right arm beat the air, trying to slow the fall she knew was coming—she only just managed to deflect herself away from the coffee table as she crashed to earth, whirling with the force of Kait’s shove. She landed face-downward, her head cracking against the floor, and pain burst across her skull like the yolk of an egg. Everything spun and wobbled. She could feel her pulse in both temples, pounding like drums in the jungle, spinning out an alarm that sang like a scream in her veins. The carpet tasted like carpet, and she couldn’t move now, not a muscle, not even her good arm, and everything was wrong wrong wrong wrong…

  She couldn’t see Kait, but she could feel her shadow moving across her, hear her breath coming in shallow, ragged huffs.

  “You…” she said. “You…”

  Then two bare feet stepped over her, running down the hall, towards the bedroom. A silent moment passed. The door opened, closed, opened again. Then the footsteps came back, two pairs of them, Kait’s and Lutz’s. “Don’t worry about it,” he was saying, his voice booming and enormous above her. “I’m going to take care of this.”

  He said something else after that, but Jill couldn’t hear the words.

  Somewhere far across town, the plants had started to scream again.

  Chapter 17

  Nobody’s First Choice

  Alice’s shriek threatened to burst the windows, but to Ben, the noise of it seemed to come from a long way off, somewhere deep under the earth. The world had stopped moving, or had slowed to a honey-crawl, drifting somewhere between heartbeats. All he could really hear was the echo of rifle-fire, ringing in chorus in his ears, and the smell… Ben knew there should not be an odor already, but it tickled in his nose anyhow: the smell of cordite mixing in his nostrils with the terrible imagined stink of flesh and rot.

  And all he could see was the pool of crimson spreading across the faded wooden floorboards where Riley’s body had collapsed to the floor.

  He yanked his gaze away, forcing himself to look above that ruined face, the head hanging askew on the neck, limp, like a half-inflated balloon. She had fallen on her backside, propped against the wooden column like a child’s doll. One leg was splayed out and the other curled beneath her, the arms lying in her lap like they had been posed there. The curtain of her long blonde hair dangled in front of her face, and though he could not see beyond it, he could feel her eyes following him from beyond that veil—one glassy and lifeless, the other a dark, wet, oozing socket where the bullet had struck home.

  So he forced his eyes upward, his gaze dragging up the red-streaked post, its white paint chipped away to reveal a dull damp brown beneath. Up past the globules of fresh blood snaking slowly down the corner of the wood, racing each other in a slow dash to the floor. He focused on the hole—mere millimeters across, surrounded by a ring of tiny red-and-pink splinters, like the labor of a carpenter bee in a back porch. All around this hole there was blood and matted hair and chunks of something unspeakable that clung to the wood like wet breakfast grits.

  It was a bullet hole. Kait’s shot had gone clean through.

  Ben wheeled and bent double, and a long string of vomit spattered across the rug and down the back of the red leather couch. His stomach heaved again and again—the room spun, and dancing spots of black swarmed at the corners of his vision. Somewhere off beside him, Alice’s cries had died away to small gibbering whimpers. She kept saying the dead girl’s name over and over, insistently, like it would call her back, like it could summon her to life again. The syllables ran together like mud and sand as they bubbled from her lips.

  Kait Brecker had not said a word.

  Ben picked himself up from his knees, turning slowly as he rose, careful not to look at Riley’s… Her form, he thought hurriedly to himself, but the word body jumped up anyway, larger than life, blown up full-screen before he could will it away. Her body. Her corpse. His stomach jerked again, squeezing like a fist, so he let himself drift, his eyes sliding over Alice’s trembling shape to find Kait by the little breakfast table, one folding chair turned on its side just beside her, her body crouched in a tight ball with her heels off the floor. The rifle lay at her feet, and she was staring at it, her face the color of the pale belly of a leaf, as though she wasn’t sure the weapon was really there at all.

  Snow swirled through the open doorway, dusting the fallen wooden door, collecting in the divots in the carve
d panels, silent and pure and cold.

  He tried to think, but his head seemed to be stuffed with the same soft cotton-fluff that filled his heart and his limbs. He felt cold all over, bone-cold that penetrated every cubic inch of his mass. He could not take his eyes off Kait. He waited for the hatred to rise up inside him—the acid rage that had consumed him not two hours before. But that part of him seemed to switch off, to short-circuit with a fizzling pop. There was a second image beginning to form before his eyes. The specter of Riley’s limp-marionette’s body hovered just above Kait’s own hunched form, overlapping, like double-exposed film. And the face on the corpse was changing, changing—from Riley to Alice, to Cormac, to Kait, to Ben himself. But the wounds were always the same. They were open and weeping and raw, and redder than anything else he’d ever seen.

  He forced himself again to look at Riley, to truly study the wounds on her face. The sound of her head striking the post played back in his head again and again—the dull wet thud of impact made his stomach cinch up. He tried not to imagine the pain, but the feeling overtook him nonetheless. He imagined what it had to be like: to be a prisoner in a body that was self-destructing, driven by the mind of a monster speaking in riddles while the blood flowed down his face and neck and his fingers dug into the splintering wood.

  Yes—he would have begged for death, he thought. He would have prayed for it.

  He would have prayed for Kait Brecker.

  And so he looked back at her, the part of him that hated her lying dead and stinking in his chest. She had come to save them, he realized, and guilt like barbed wire twisted in his guts. Even after everything we’ve done to her. Even after everything I’ve done. Twice he tried to speak to her, but his throat was closed tight, squeezed off like a spigot, until at last he heard himself say, “What do we do?” His voice shook with dread—dread, and something else he couldn’t name. “Kait... What can we do?”

  But Kait didn’t look up, only her head bobbed downward and her shoulders slumped a fraction of an inch, the only indication she’d heard him at all. “We have to call the police,” she murmured. Ben opened his mouth to reply, but shut it again when she suddenly rose from the floor, continuing to stare at the rifle as though it were a venomous snake.

  “That’s what comes next,” she continued in a very soft voice. “I can make the call, but you’ll have to tell them what happened in your own words, sooner or later…”

  Riley’s words. Something turned over in Ben’s stomach. Riley’s words in her mouth—beat for beat, line for line. Like she was reading off the script. Like it was Riley’s very own voice, floating up from a stinking grave.

  “You should talk it through first, you and Alice,” Kait said. She turned her head towards him at last, but her eyes looked right through him. “Get your story straight between you. Make sure they know what… what happened here. What I’ve done.”

  “What you’ve done,” Ben parroted. A split had appeared in his lower lip from the cold, and he flexed his jaw, stretching it out experimentally. “Kait, what’re you saying?”

  “You need to wipe your mouth.”

  Unconsciously, his hand rose, wiped dribble from his chin, then wiped it on the knee of his khaki pants. Still her eyes stared straight through him, wide and dry and haunted.

  “And you need to know…” she continued. “You need to understand… Alice was wrong. Lutz never controlled me. Not once. He wouldn’t, or couldn’t…” Her voice quavered, and the end of each word sounded hacked off, as if from a blow from an axe. “No, I was never one of his hollow trees,” she said. “But he got me, just the same. And now look what he made me do…”

  With the toe of her sneaker, she nudged the rifle towards Ben. The whole weapon rotated on the floor like a game of spin-the-bottle until the barrel pointed straight at Kait.

  “Take it,” she said. “Before I…”

  “Before you what?”

  The words came out in a shuddering sigh: “You need to get her somewhere safe.”

  There could be no question who she meant.

  Ben’s eyes flicked over to his girlfriend: Alice didn’t seem to be hearing a word they said. She was tucked up in a tight ball like Kait had been, staring through splayed fingers across the room at Riley’s body, her breath coming in wet huffs like sobs, her cloud of hair wobbling like gelatin atop her head. He had never seen her like this, never in their four months together. “I can’t.” The words jumped out before he could stop them, but once they hit air, he accepted them as gospel. “Not without you.”

  “You have to,” Kait barked hoarsely, her eyes flashing firelight. “Listen. Think about it—it’s my prints on the gun. They’ll find powder burns on my hands. They’ll lock me up, and Lutz won’t be able to get me. He’ll leave you alone. You’ll be safe, finally safe.”

  “You don’t know that,” he insisted. He took a halting step towards her, careful not to tread on the hunting rifle. “Safe?” he asked. “Safe from him? Where’s that? Where could I take her that’s safe from him now?” He took another step forward, and Kait’s mouth twitched, ready to bolt. “If you’re so confident in my ability to protect her, give me an address—anyplace on this fucking planet where he won’t touch her.”

  One more step forward. They were close now, only the length of the rifle separated them.

  “I can remember it now,” he said. “When he had control of me. I could feel what he felt—I don’t think I was meant to, but it kept… slipping through, somehow. He hates her, Kait. More than me, more than Riley. More than you. He’s got plans for her. And if he ever gets inside of me again, he’ll…”

  “What do you want me to do about it?” Kait hissed, twisting away from him, rage flashing across her features. Then her face went slack. “I can’t help you,” she said. One hand rose up, gesturing limply in Riley’s direction. “I tried. And look what happens when I try.”

  “I’m not afraid of you, Kait.”

  An ineffable expression crossed Kait’s face. She glanced at the gun at her feet, then at Riley’s crumpled body, then finally her eyes returned to Ben, focusing on a point just above his left eyebrow. Her expression barely changed—the log on the fire popped, filling the silence.

  “It’s too late for that now,” she said, almost kindly, though there was no light in her eyes. They didn’t even reflect the firelight now. “And besides—it’s a lie.”

  She took one swift step forward, maneuvering neatly around the rifle on the floor, and Ben flinched backwards, his heartbeat suddenly up and racing. Kait rocked back on her heel, looking up at him with a sad smile.

  “You see?” she uttered. “Look at you—and you were so brave this morning. But I bet if I was holding the gun, you couldn’t even touch me now.” She raised one hand, and Ben flinched back again, hating it, hating himself for it. The hand snapped into a finger-gun, aimed between his eyes. “Not even if your life depended on it.”

  Ben stared down the “barrel” of her pointed finger, suddenly lost in memory—remembering that cold night when the gun had been real. Remembering the feeling of the cold steel pressed against his forehead, the warm trickle of his own blood falling in his eyes. Remembering the horror in Alice’s eyes, the rage on Kait’s face. The fear in his own shuddering heart. He began to shake all over, suddenly, uncontrollably.

  He was afraid then, and he was afraid now. That was the terrible, runaway truth of it.

  For as long as he’d known her—he’d always been afraid of Kait Brecker.

  But now there was a small warm hand lacing its fingers through his own. Alice appeared like a phantom at his side, pressing close to him, squeezing his hand in hers. He angled his head towards her, and though she did not meet his eye, something unspoken passed between them in the grip of her fingers, like an electric current. He squeezed her hand back, and looked past Kait’s finger-gun and into her eyes.

  “All right,” he managed to say. “You got me. I’m spooked.”

  This time Alice did catch his eye—her o
wn eyes shone, still glittering with tears. “But I guess I’ll get over it,” he said. “If that’s what it takes.”

  And then, as one body, he and Alice stepped forward, pulling a startled Kait into a deep embrace. For a moment she stiffened, her rigid shoulder digging into Ben’s chest. Then she fought them. She wormed in their grip, twisting and struggling, but never so hard that they had to fight her back, never with her full strength. And as she struggled she cried out, begging them to release her—but soon, these protests died away to ugly wet sobs that ran down her cheeks and down the front of Ben’s shirt. Alice, on the other side of the tight circle, had positioned her mouth next to Kait’s ear and was whispering constantly into it, and for the first time Ben did not care what he heard and what he did not. Even with him so close, this was a private moment, and he was content to let it stay that way. Or he would try to be.

  It could have gone on an hour—but after what was likely only a few minutes’ time, an unspoken signal went out and Ben and Alice eased their grip, letting Kait stand between them. Her face was pink from crying, but she had dried her smeary eyes on her sleeve, and she looked almost contemplative, gazing off past them at the stuffed deer head gawping down at them from the wall. Before anyone could speak, she retreated to her room, returning with the stained white pillowcase from her pillow. She crossed the room and knelt by Riley’s side, knotting her fingers through the dead girl’s own, and the hissing sound of her whispers carried across the cold room. Then she stood, but before she rose all the way, she slipped the pillowcase over the bloody mess of the head, carefully tucking every strand of blonde hair up inside it. Then she faced them.

  “Lutz made a mistake,” she said coldly. “He left us an opening. He was controlling Riley when I… When he made me kill her. But now he’s alone. With her dead, if he wants to control one of us, he’ll have to do it himself.”