by Tim Meyer
No, she thought. I deserve one.
(Ma-me)
Or maybe they had chosen her because they had seen dollar signs when they closed their eyes and pictured her face. No one really knew what happened that day, no one but Angela
(Ma-me)
so maybe Barry thought having her on the show would reveal some important clue, something the police had missed, something the lead detectives had never pieced together. Maybe the whole purpose of the show was to catch her.
But there was nothing to catch. She knew that. She also knew they needed the money so they could afford to get out of this godforsaken place and never look back. The salary from the show wouldn't provide that kind of freedom on its own but it was a good start.
“And now for our feature presentation,” said the off-screen host.
Terry nudged his wife. “Here we go, babe.” He watched the flatscreen with childlike enthusiasm, something Angela couldn't even pretend to match.
The show opened with, “Hi, I'm Angela.”
“And I'm Terry.”
In unison: “And we live here!”
[Angela and Terry point to their house in the background]
“Oh, God,” Angela said, covering her eyes. “This is so corny.”
“Relax,” Terry told her, rubbing her knee affectionately. “You won't enjoy it if you're criticizing the whole time.”
“How can I not?” She almost found her smile. Almost.
[Cuts to a woman, mid-sixties. “I'm Rosalyn Jeffries and I live here.” The woman speaks with little emotion, like the words are being forcefully drawn from her by outside influences. Her accent suggests she's European, from where we can't quite put our finger on. She points at the house where Angela and Terry had spent the last two months, a small ranch on a block all by itself, back facing a lush Vermont forest. It's mid-April and there are leftover patches of snow on the ground.
The scene quick-cuts to the house's interior. We see the woman sitting on her couch. Like us, this is the first time Angela has seen her. She has short curly hair. Earrings dangle from low-hanging lobes, the jewelry reaching her shoulders. She's wearing a black and turquoise shawl, making her appear like one of those phony palm readers offering five-dollar sessions at the local flea market. “I lost my husband six months ago, and...” she goes on and tells us how Carl was her best friend, her soulmate, and how empty life has become since his passing.]
“Hm,” Terry said. “She seems... nice.”
Angela rolled her eyes. “She looks... I dunno. Kinda crazy?”
“Is it the cape she's wearing?”
Angela burst out laughing. “I believe it's called a shawl.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Honestly.”
“You're so stupid sometimes.”
“Yeah, but you love me.”
They embraced. At the moment, things felt good. Things felt right. For the first time in a long time, Angela believed their marriage was slowly mending, fixing itself naturally. It's like he forgot. It's like he doesn't blame me anymore. Didn't her psychiatrist predict that? She distinctly remembered Abbie explaining the grieving process in great detail and how natural it was for Terry to blame her, how his cancerous feelings would abate with time. God, she was right. She gripped her husband as if she were sliding off the edge of the world, and squeezed.
They continued watching.
[Inside the Vermont house, Angela and Terry are unpacking. The room is painted Caribbean blue. There is a dreamcatcher hanging over the bed's bear-brown comforter. We cut to the confessional booth where Angela is telling us about the tragedy. “And then... {we do not speak his name} was gone. Just like that.” She excuses herself while her eyes begin to water and leak. We cut to Terry in the booth and he stares at us with a somber expression, his lower lip quivering. He swallows and his Adam's apple jumps in his throat. “We don't like to talk about it,” he tells us. “Sometimes it's best if we think it never happened. But it's hard.” He pauses and the instrumental music drops out. Barry says: “Do you blame your wife for what happened?” Terry hesitates, but, in the end, he shakes his head and says, “No. God, no. She would never do anything to hurt {we do not speak his name}.]
“Is that true?” Angela asked, peering up at him.
“Of course, baby.” Terry kissed the crown of her head. “I never blamed you.”
“Even right after it happened?”
Terry paused, longer than he had on screen when Barry had asked him a similar question. “Things were so crazy. I can't remember everything I felt. I remember feeling so... so goddamn numb all the time. During the entire investigation, I felt...”
“Empty?”
Terry nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, that's probably the best way to describe it. Like I was still in control of myself but also like I was watching myself through someone else's eyes. Like my life was a movie and I was the only audience member.”
“Yeah, I felt that way, too.”
“In retrospect, I wish we had talked more during those days.”
“Yeah, me too.”
[Rosalyn Jeffries is sitting on their couch, where the Shepards sit now, watching her daily programs. We cut to her in the booth: “There is an emptiness in my heart since Carl passed. I spend a lot of time watching television, reading books, catching up on current events. Carl was my life, you see. We did everything together. And I do mean everything. Since we retired, not a minute had gone by that we weren't at each other's sides. We had no children, so... it was always that way.”
Off-screen, Barry asks: “Do you still talk to your husband, Rosalyn?”
She looks off camera as if Barry had just asked her to solve a quantum physics equation. She scoffs.“Of course. He visits me every single day.”]
“Creepy,” Terry said, wincing from the chill erecting the hair on his arms.
Angela shook off a serpentine shiver from her spine. “Super creepy.”
The show went on for another twenty minutes. It followed the standard season opener formula where the characters were introduced, shown engaging in mundane activities and daily chores, while intermittently speaking about why they were there, what their lives were about, and how they felt the switch could help them.
During Angela and Terry's segment, they had traveled down the Vermont mountainside and into town where they had ended up at a small village of privately-owned shops. The shots brought back some pleasant memories and in that moment Angela smelled the sweet citrusy fragrance of fruit-scented candles. The scene cut back to Rosalyn driving down Route 9, into the heart of Red River. The roads had been congested as usual; it was a Friday night on the Jersey Shore and the traffic flowed with unpleasant southbound visitors. She had pulled into the Red River Mall parking lot, climbed out of her black Oldsmobile, and headed inside.
That was when the television began to flicker with intermittent static and—
[We're back in the house. Rosalyn Jeffries is kneeling on the living room floor, praying in front of the television displaying only static. Her eyes are closed, her lips are moving, and her naked body is still. We're looking at her from behind and only see the weathered, wrinkly skin of the old woman, her backside, her—”]
“What the hell?” Angela asked, launching herself from her husband's side, nearly jumping off the couch.
[Rosalyn begins to chant. The words are indecipherable, but they sound ancient, fragments of a language that predated man. A language one might associate with some kind of ritual, maybe satanic, since that's always the most popular association. On screen, static ripples down the picture, a minor interference. A low tone, like tinnitus, can be heard in the background, accompanying the woman's ritualistic vocalization.]
“Terry, I don't like this.”
“What is it, babe?”
[The woman rises up, tossing her hands in the air and throwing her head back. She's shouting the words now, stamping her feet in some tribal dance. At the television, she begins to bark like a d
og. Next, she folds her arms into wings and flaps them up and down, clucking like a chicken and jerking her head forward and backward in spastic fashion. The camera fades out so we can see more of the room and less of the naked woman and the television with no picture. The new shot reveals the walls and their new décor; ceremonial symbols have been engraved in all four, large shapes incorporating circles and triangles, hexagons and octagons, trapezoids and ellipses. They glow in the darkness like molten lava. They pulse along with the woman's dance, burning bright with her movements and fluid gyrations, fading during those brief seconds of inactivity. We watch as the woman bends down, picks up a limp object, and holds it in front of the television. It's a dead chicken. The woman takes the knife she also had staged on the floor, brings the metal to the chicken's neck, digs the blade in, and begins to saw...]
“What the fuck, Terry?” Angela shouted, her voice cracking.
Terry jumped onto the couch as if the carpet beneath his feet had suddenly become hot coals. He checked his wife to see if she was okay, feeling her forehead for a fever. He corralled her close with both arms and, during his heroic reaction, he knocked over the bowl, spilling popcorn across the couch and onto the floor. “What is it, babe? What's wrong?”
“What do you mean what's wrong?” she screamed so loud her vocal cords burned. Eyes locking onto the disturbed picture, she pointed at the insanity unfolding before her. “Don't you see what she's doing? Don't you see what she did in our house?”
Terry opened his mouth to speak, but
[Blood rains from the chicken's opened neck, torrents of black syrupy liquid splashing the carpet. The woman looks back at us, craning her neck slowly as if she isn't sure what's behind her, unsure if she should look back and confront the possibility of some unspeakable terror, some unnamed thing that has taken the house under its spell, its power, flashing its unlimited control...]
“God, what did she do in our house?” Angela cried, tears spilling over the rims of her eyes.
“Angela, I have no idea what you're talking about,” he replied, rubbing her back. They were on the floor. Angela knelt on all fours, glancing up at the television. Terry bent on one knee beside her, comforting her with his left hand, parading his fingers down her spine. “Calm down, you're freaking me out.”
“Freaking you out?” she squawked. “A goddamn ritual sacrifice took place in our home and you want me to calm the fuck down?”
Terry's hand stopped halfway up her back. She stared into his eyes and saw something there that induced more shivers than the unfolding events captured on camera; her husband was absolutely clueless. He hadn't seen what she saw.
“Angela,” he said, surprisingly serene. Sweat dripped off the end of his nose. “What in God's name are you talking about?”
[The woman turns and faces the camera. Her eyes are whited out like small marble orbs. A messy tangle of hair, thick as yarn, hides most of her facial features. Her lumpy breasts droop like half-empty sacks of laundry. Her stomach folds in three rolls, the bottom covering the top of her pubic hair. Moles the size of quarters pepper her doughy, dimpled flesh. With pure white eyes, she stares at the camera, at us, the audience, and in a harsh, long-time-smoker voice she says, “Stay out of this house.”]
Angela couldn't breathe as the words left the woman's mouth; feeling like an invisible claw reached down her throat and punctured her lungs. Nothing involving her body seemed to work except her bladder. The warmth of fresh urine spilled down her leg, tickling her flesh.
“Oh, Jesus,” Terry said, immediately smelling the bodily waste. Panic infiltrated his voice. “Oh, honey. What the... what the hell is happening to you?”
“She...”
“She what? What did you see?”
[“Stay out of this house,” the woman says again. Then, in a voice no one would consider feminine, nor masculine, but a strange amalgamation of both, she repeats, “Stay out of this house.” The throaty voice keeps changing, growing deeper, but the message remains the same: “Stay out of this house. Stay out of this house. STAY OUT OF THIS HOUSE.”]
“She...”
“Angela, talk to me.” He held his wife closely.
“What she did in our house...”
“She didn't do anything in our house,” Terry said, shaking her, trying to snap her back to reality. “Angie, she didn't do anything.”
[“Stay out of this house.”]
Terry leaned into her ear. “She's getting an ice cream cone from the food court.”
[Stay out, Ma-me.]
Ma-me.
Angela opened her eyes and saw Rosalyn Jeffries accepting a cone from a young teenager manning the ice cream stand in the center of the mall. The old woman immediately started licking the frosty treat, catching the runny cream with her tongue before it reached her fingers.
“What?” Angela huffed, breathless.
“That's it,” Terry said. “Calm down, honey. Everything's all okay.” He rocked her back and forth, cradling her in his arms.
“What happened? She was... and now she's...”
“I don't know but it's okay now. You're okay.”
“You didn't see it?”
“See what?”
Ma-Me.
“The woman. In our living room. Dancing?”
Terry looked down at her, his usual complexion escaping his face. “No, babe. I didn't see anything. Are you okay? Are you feeling all right? I mean, Jesus, Angela, you pissed yourself.”
She'd forgotten about that. She looked down and saw her pajamas and the dark wet stain running from her crotch to her ankle. The sour smell permeated the air, biting her senses.
“Why don't we get you off the floor?”
Her husband helped her to her feet.
“I'm so embarrassed.”
“Don't be.”
She threw her arms around him and roped him in. In his ear, she whispered, “What the hell is happening to me?”
If Terry wondered the same thing, he didn't say. “You're okay. You're fine. Let's get you showered and we'll talk about this tomorrow.”
She followed him past the table featuring the vase of flowers and headed upstairs. She looked back into the living room the moment before the 60-inch screen disappeared behind the hallway ceiling; she swore the picture obscured, warped in a frenzy of black and white pixels, and then she listened as the soft crunch of static buzzed between her ears.
IV.
THEY MAKE PILLS FOR THAT
“I'm going to change up your prescription,” Abbie said, scribbling on her notepad.
Angela sighed. “You think I'm nuts, don't you?”
Without looking up, Abbie shook her head. “No, dear. I don't. Sometimes stress gets to be too much and begins to manifest physically. Common problem amongst my patients.”
“So... I'm hallucinating?”
Abbie paused for a beat, and then glanced up. “Well, you don't believe sea monsters exist inside of your bathroom wall, do you?”
“No... but...”
“No one else in America saw the old woman cut off a chicken's head but you.”
“Yeah, but it seemed so real.”
“Honey, I was one of Switch's fifteen million viewers and I can guarantee you they didn't air a ritual sacrifice on cable television.”
Angela wanted to laugh or maybe cry; she wasn't sure which. She kept replaying the nightmarish scenario over and over again; hoping the more she relived the horrible fantasy, the less it'd feel like reality. Didn't work, though, in fact, the more she revisited last night, the more her brain revolted and the more her skull felt like it might split in half.
“I'm losing my mind,” she admitted.
“Well, it hasn't been easy. What happened to you and Terry was awful, something no two parents should ever have to experience. You'll never fully recover, but, over time, things will get better. Manageable.” She paused, placing the end of her pen on her lips. “You'll deal.”
“Terry's been nice to me lately. We haven't fought for a who
le week.”
“I'm glad to hear.”
Tears eminent, Angela sniffled. “I think he loves me again.”
“Of course he does. He never stopped.”
Angela fought back the sadness, the burning sensation seeping into her eyes.
Abbie leaned forward and gently placed a hand on Angela's knee. “I want you to take these pills. They'll help curb the hallucinations. But your usual pharmacy won't carry it. It's a... let's call it an experimental drug.”
Angela looked at the script. “Is it safe?”
“Of course. It's just not FDA approved. Yet. You can purchase it at Robinson's over in Carver's Grove, only about twenty minutes from here. In fact, I'll call it in. It'll be ready by the time you get there.”
“And it stops hallucinations?”
“Yes. And, if for whatever reason it doesn't, call me immediately and we'll get you on something else. However, I'm confident this will work. It's worked on my other patients who have experienced similar symptoms.”
Angela took the script, folded it, and buried it inside her purse. “Thanks, Doc.”
“My pleasure.”
* * *
The drive to Robinson's in Carver's Grove took exactly twenty minutes. She listened to the classic rock station the entire way over, and they were playing Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet in its entirety, an album she had listened to countless times when she was about twelve. The music brought back some great memories of her rocking out in her bedroom, belting out the lyrics at the top of her lungs while jumping on her bed and strumming her air guitar, annoying her parents and siblings to no end.
She parked outside of Robinson's, stepped out the car, and headed inside. Robinson's wasn't your ordinary pharmacy. Perusing the aisles, she found not a single brand name stocked on the shelves. Every remedy had been made with “natural” ingredients. A lot of the packaging looked thrown together by some amateur graphic designer who had just started to experiment with Photoshop.