Black Bells

by Dawn Napier

  "I'm sorry about how I acted on the camping trip," she said aloud.

  "What camping trip?" Debbie asked over her shoulder.

  Right; none of that had happened to this version of Debbie, not yet. She should have apologized to the adult Debbie, the real Debbie, while she was still alive. Mom was alive in a nursing home, though Dad had died of a stroke five years after the divorce. Megan could at least apologize to Mom, though in Megan's opinion she was the one who deserved it the least.

  Something in the trees growled. Megan froze, and Debbie stopped walking to listen. The growl came again. It sounded like a bear or perhaps a lion. Megan felt conspicuously naked and vulnerable, and she wished she had something to wear. Not that a bear would care anything about clothes. Steel armor would be a more sensible wish.

  "Just stay on the path, "Debbie said calmly. "Nothing can hurt you if you stay on the path." She kept walking.

  Stay on the path. Megan knew all about that. Many of her scariest stories had featured children who had wandered off the path, ignored their parents' advice, gone where they weren't invited. Or gone where they were invited by someone they should have avoided.

  It was fully dark now. Through the trees Megan saw hard, bright stars, cold as diamonds in the velvet sky. The path was still white as daytime. Its stones glowed like moons.

  A cool breeze ruffled Megan's hair and made her shiver. Gooseflesh broke out over her bare body, and she wished again for clothes.

  There was another growl, louder and closer this time. Megan stumbled and banged her knee on the path's round stones. "Ow!" she cried.

  Debbie looked back at her, and her eyes looked wild and frightened. "Stay on the path," she said. “She knows we're here. She knows we're coming."

  There was a third growl, longer and louder, that gathered into a dull roar. Then she heard the child's voice.

  "Mommy, help!"

  "Paige!" And before Megan could think, she had bolted toward the voice. Off the path.

  Behind her, she heard Debbie cry out in despair.

  She was instantly surrounded by darkness. The path was gone, the trees were gone, and the air was warm and close. She felt like she was in a warm closet. Megan reached out and waved her hands around, but she felt nothing. She knelt down and touched the ground beneath her. It was cool and earthy, covered with dry dirt and sand. So she wasn't back in the walk-in closet at home. She'd wondered, for a moment.

  "None of this is your fault." A distant voice echoed past her ears, like someone talking on a loudspeaker several miles away.

  "Mom?" Megan looked around, but she still saw nothing. Her eyes ached a little from the strain of trying to see.

  "It's not your fault," the voice repeated. "You couldn't know, even though you were told. None of it is your fault."

  "Of course it wasn't my fault," Megan responded. "I was just a kid. I trusted him."

  "It wasn't your fault, even though it was all your fault," Mom's voice went on. It sounded closer now. "It really was all your fault. We put you in charge. I blame you, and I will always blame you even though it's not your fault."

  Now the voice was deep in her ear, echoing and distorting like a bad recording that kept changing speeds. "It's not your fault but it's all your fault, and nobody blames you even though everyone blames you because you were in charge, you were responsible, and you LET IT HAPPEN—"

  "Stop!" Megan screamed, and her voice became a fiery roar. She lashed out at the voice and snapped her powerful reptilian jaws. They closed on nothing but air, but the voice was silenced. Megan was alone in the warm darkness.

  Fuck this shit. She'd find her own way to the Land of Sweets. She spread her wings and took off into the dark sky. She couldn't see where she was going, but that was all right.

  She'd been flying blind for most of her life, after all.

  There were no stars, and the land below was dark. Megan didn't know what the Land of Sweets looked like at night, but she imagined that it would be lit up like an amusement park. Glowing gumdrops and twinkling candy buttons. It would look like the amusement park Dad had taken them to on the ill-fated camping trip.

  She didn't feel like she was outside, despite the light breeze which was warm as a hair dryer. The sky seemed more like a ceiling; she still couldn't see any moon or stars, and there were none of the dark rushing clouds that one normally saw on cloudy nights. The sky above was completely blank.

  Below were black, lumpy shadows that she thought were probably trees. There was no sign of the glowing white path that she and Debbie had followed. Megan worried about Debbie, but then she remembered that the child wasn't even real. She was a dream or a memory that Megan had conjured. Nothing in this place was real except for Megan and Paige. And maybe Jack.

  Where was he, anyway? Had he truly died in the troll attack?

  The air was thick and humid, and Megan had to take deep breaths to keep moving. It felt more and more like an enclosed space. Maybe it was; maybe the world had done one of those weird reality shifts and she would find herself crashing into a stone ceiling any minute now. Megan drove the thought out of her head.

  On and on she flew, alone in the dark with her thoughts. it was strange and a little scary, but it was also very familiar. After a moment, she figured it out. She felt like she was in the closet. Not the one in her master bedroom where this strange dream had begun, but the sacred sanctuary of her childhood. It even smelled like her closet, like dust and the dirty clothes she'd always shoved in there to keep from carrying them all the way down to the basement to be washed. It seemed silly now, to have let dirty clothes pile up in the den closet and trigger a bout of Mom’s rage just to keep from walking down those basement steps. Child logic, she supposed.

  Megan stretched out her legs and flexed her claws. They dug into something soft. She sniffed, and coughed. She was standing in a pile of dirty laundry.

  She felt dizzy for a moment, and when her head cleared, she was lying in the clothes, surrounded by the warm smells of dirt and body odor. She was herself again, naked and human.

  At least now she could put some clothes on. She rummaged around in the darkness until she found what felt like a T shirt and a pair of sweat pants. She felt a little strange putting on clothes without undergarments, but she had a feeling that she wouldn't find a bra in this pile. She was surprised the clothes fit at all, in fact. More fairy land logic.

  She leaned with her back against the wall and wrapped her hands around her knees. She felt safer now, more secure. In a moment, she'd gather up her courage and try the closet door. Surely some new monster or memory waited outside that door, and she'd better be prepared to face it.

  She heard footsteps outside. They were slow and steady. Almost thoughtful. They stopped, and Megan sensed something large looming just outside the warm darkness, something frightening and familiar.

  "Megan?"

  Megan shivered, and she bit back a whimper of fear. It was her mother's voice, but it was That Voice. The calm, reasonable voice that held a knife edge of violence.

  "Megan honey, can I talk to you?"

  No you can't, go away! But Megan kept silent. Talking back would only make it worse. Better to keep hidden, keep her head down. Perhaps something would distract her, and she would go away.

  Mom knocked on the door. "I know you're upset, but could you please come out? I want to talk to you about what happened."

  She can't come in here, Megan realized. She's trapped out there.

  But in here, Megan was also trapped. She couldn't become the dragon and fly away this time. She was locked in with her mother's shadow just outside.

  "Megan honey, please!" Mom sounded tearful. "We need to talk about this. Daddy took Debbie to a movie. It's just us here now."

  Danger, danger. She was alone with her mother. There would be no witnesses.

  In here, she was warm and safe. Out there would be tears, accusations, ugly words. She would certainly be spanked or struck with some random object, but that wasn't the worst M
om could do. She could say things that made a shoe to the head feel like a hug.

  But in here, she was trapped in the dark with piles of filthy stinking laundry. Paige was still out there somewhere, and Megan had no way to reach her from in here.

  Slowly, Megan stood up and touched the doorknob. She held it in her hand for a moment, as though testing for fire on the other side. But of course she knew what was on the other side. It was worse than fire. Fire could only hurt her body.

  Then she turned the knob.

  As soon as it disengaged, the knob was jerked out of her hand. Megan was momentarily blinded by the harsh light that poured in, and her eyes watered. When her vision cleared, a hideous specter in a sensible navy suit glared down at her.

  "Now, young lady," the Thing said in her mother's voice. "You and I are going to have a little chat."

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was shapeless and blank-faced, and its hair was wild. The only part of the specter that made sense to Megan's eyes was the sensible navy suit, an ensemble Megan remembered well. Its lining was pale pink, she remembered, and its label was designer. At four, Megan had taken a pair of blunt-tipped scissors and snipped off the tag. She'd thought that it must have itched Mom's neck the way clothing labels always itched her. That was her first memory of what later came to be called the Mom Spanking. More frantic and furious than the one-two butt slaps Dad usually administered, and generally followed with tears, self-flagellation, and ice cream, the Mom Spanking was a terrible, frightening experience.

  Mom had sewed the tag back into her suit, but for years afterwards, the scissors came up in conversation whenever she put on the suit.

  But the specter wearing the suit was as unfamiliar as the wind. Its face was hideously blank, with huge black discs for eyes and a horizontal slit for a mouth. Its hair was long and stringy, then short and neat, then curly and blonde. When it spoke, its mouth gaped open and exposed rows of shining, silver needles.

  "How dare you hide from me," the Mother thing rasped. Its voice was old and harsh, the voice of an old woman in a nursing home who’d smoked too many cigarettes for too many years.

  "I'm not afraid of you," Megan said. Her stomach wobbled, and she thought that the next time she opened her mouth she would vomit.

  "You should be. Bad girls should be afraid of the consequences of their actions. Girls who don't do what they're told should be afraid of consequences. And it's time. Time to face those consequences, young lady."

  Megan felt cold and dizzy. The floor beneath her feet wobbled and waved. She must not faint. If she fainted now, she'd lose everything. She had come too far to faint. She felt like she was pulling a rubber band, almost to the snapping point, and if she let go now, she would fly back to her starting point.

  Jack be nimble, she thought suddenly.

  Jack Benimble, Jack be quick.

  I need you now, help me fight this chick.

  Past the mother-specter, in the blank and empty room behind, Jack Benimble stood silently with his arms crossed. Watching and waiting. He couldn't interfere directly; this was her fight. But just seeing him there brought Megan's heart back into focus. Jack had always made her feel stronger, just by existing.

  The black bells on his motley suit rattled softly.

  Megan looked the mother-thing straight into its blank, black eyes. "I didn't do anything wrong," she said. "What happened to Debbie is not my fault. Why did you always blame me instead of Uncle Glen?"

  The specter leaned back, and a ripple of something scattered across its white face. "It is your fault." Now its voice sounded younger and angrier, the voice of a middle-aged woman on the ragged edge of marriage's end. "Everything is your fault. Your father and I divorced because of what happened to Debbie, and if you hadn't taken her to Glen's house that day—"

  "You and Dad divorced because you blamed me for what Glen did. You guys were never that stable; I remember all the fights even before the bad thing happened. But the way you treated me was the nail in the coffin. He tried to get us away from you but he lost the custody fight. Why are you still blaming me?"

  Megan's last words came out in a horrible, tearful wail. Almost thirty years' worth of pain and anger poured out in her helpless, childlike question. She felt like she'd puked up something alive and wriggling. She was empty, hollow and sore, but also relieved. She'd finally asked the question, the one that had plagued her for most of her life. Whatever the answer, at least she'd gotten it out of her body.

  Behind the specter, Jack grinned. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes shone, as though he had just run a race and won.

  The specter was shorter now, smaller and thinner now that Megan had let go of her question. The face that looked up at her was a cracked white mask. "Maybe there's a reason why I always told you to stay away from his house unless I went with you. Maybe I knew something about him that you didn't. Maybe it happened to me when I was Debbie's age and Glen was fifteen."

  Megan shook her head. "You could have protected us by keeping us away completely." But her heart ached. She didn't know how much of this was real and how much was out of her own imagination, but it made perfect sense. It explained so much. Mom had always been the one to lash out when she felt guilty.

  "I wanted to have it both ways." The specter was still shrinking, shriveling away like a melting witch. The navy suit was baggy and sank to the floor. "I couldn't cut Glen off without cutting off my entire family. They all thought he was the greatest. Glen the football star..." Her voice was small and distant. Her face was just a white dot now, fading and fading away. "I thought that as long as you girls were never alone with him… please forgive me…"

  The specter was gone. There was nothing there but a pile of expensive blue fabric. Megan knelt and put her hand on it. "I forgive you," she whispered.

  She knelt there for a long time, until Jack walked over and touched the back of her neck. "You did well," he said quietly.

  Megan looked up at her imaginary friend. The room around them was brightening, and Megan could make out her surroundings now. She was in her old house, the one she'd lived in in Hillcrest, Illinois.

  She was in the den where Dad had always hung out to hide from Mom and smoke weed. The closet behind her really was her own personal closet, her special hiding place. It had made her feel closer to Dad to hide in there, drawing her pictures and smelling the sweet, burned-leaves smell of Dad's seemingly bottomless bowl. There was an enormous pile of clean laundry on the loveseat, just like always. Dad had always used that laundry as an excuse to come in here. "I'm going to put a dent in that laundry pile," he'd say, and then he'd disappear for three hours. To be fair, he usually had folded and put away some of it. If he didn't fall asleep first.

  And there was the TV and VCR that he had used to watch inappropriate movies. Usually they were violent action or horror movies, but once Megan had heard the cheesy music and over-the-top dialogue of a Dirty Naked Movie, a porno. That had made her feel extremely icky, and that was the last time she'd snuck into the closet without letting Dad know she was there. Spying on grown-ups was not as fun as she'd thought.

  The TV was broken, its screen spider-webbed with cracks. The VCR looked as though it had been dropped out of a plane. Half the buttons were missing, and some of its metal guts were poking out of the cassette slot. It made her think of a dead frog she'd seen run over in the road. Its insides had squished out of its mouth like a messy white tongue.

  Megan walked around the den to see what else was different. The curtains were heavy with dust and cobwebs, and the dirty window was rusted shut. Megan sniffed, and she smelled mold and dry rot. It was like the house had just been left, abandoned after Megan and her family had moved out. That wasn't true though, not in reality. She remembered what had happened to the place. After the divorce, Mom had attempted to keep up with the mortgage payments while she tried to sell, but in the end the bank had won and they'd lost the house to foreclosure. Mom and the girls had moved to a rather nice apartment in an extremely se
edy nearby town, and Megan had ridden past her old home at least once a week on her bike. Another family had moved in right away, replaced the siding, planted a bunch of flowers, and installed a swing set. Megan remembered the swing set with an ugly little twitch. The swing set had been an indignity, a slap in the face. Someone else's privileged brats were enjoying her house and her fenced-in yard while Megan was stuck at a tiny little dump where she couldn't play outside after dark or even own a cat. She'd gone home and broken three plates in an argument over whose turn it was to vacuum the carpet. Mom had screamed at her and grounded her for a month, but at that point she'd been too big to hit.

  The school counselor had decided that it was a delayed reaction to the divorce. Megan didn’t correct him. She didn't think he'd understand about the swing set.

  But here she was back in her old home, and the place was filthy with neglect. Jack watched her explore with calm eyes. He seemed to be in no hurry.

  Megan poked at the pile of laundry on the loveseat. It reeked of body odor and human filth, though in the real world those clothes had always been clean. Dirty clothes went into the hamper in the basement, and God help anyone who left their laundry anywhere else. That was why Megan had always hidden hers in the den closet.

  Sarah lay curled up among the dirty T-shirts and towels. She wore one of Mom's old shirts, a thrift store purchase that said something about Piccadilly Circus. To the best of Megan's knowledge, Mom had never been out of the country, but that had been one of her favorite shirts. Megan touched Sarah’s shoulder. It was stiff and cold as a gravestone.

  Sarah opened one eye. "What you want?" she slurred.

  "What are you doing here?" Megan asked. "I didn't even know you until I was past thirty."

  "Dunno how you think I know any of that shit." Sarah yawned. Her teeth were white and even, which did not jibe with what Megan remembered of the woman. Her neck flexed as she yawned, and Megan again saw the burn marks around her neck. She felt that somehow she was meant to see them, to notice, and to know what they meant.