Lynn’s voice came through the speaker.
“I’m outside,” she said. “Please, let me in.”
Chapter 42
The walk downstairs felt surreal, as if I were lost and wandering in a dream. My body was weak and my mind felt clogged with mud; the long months of anxiety and insomnia worked in concert to grind what remained of my spirit into dust. When I looked through the peephole and beheld Faye’s mother standing there under the palm trees on our walkway, my head felt even lighter.
I cracked the door open a few inches.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I whispered. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what Lynn was up to, but her presence here – and the look on her face – signaled that she came bearing grave news.
“I took a red-eye,” she said in a mousy voice. “Greg doesn’t know I’m here. Not yet, at least.”
Satisfied that this wasn’t some trick by our other unwanted guest, I pulled the door open. Lynn followed me inside, carrying only a modest suitcase and a grocery bag.
“I’ll wake Faye,” I said, turning toward the stairs. Lynn nabbed my arm and spun me around.
“We need to talk alone,” she whispered. Her wide eyes screamed the point.
We sat on the couch, where she quietly apologized to
me for everything: for constantly being evasive, for lying, and for letting us stay at the cabin in the first place. I waved away her ramblings and demanded to know the purpose of her visit.
Seeing my frustration, Lynn produced a photo album from the grocery bag.
“Felix,” she said, clutching it in her arms as if to protect it from me, “I told you the truth. Faye was about five years old when something happened at the cabin…when she developed her sleep disorder. But that isn’t what the number five means.”
Lynn stared at me for a moment, struggling to force up the words she thought she’d never speak. The mask was off, and beneath it lay only a barren sadness she’d hidden for decades. My gaze fell to her lap, where she opened the photo album. Its tattered spine groaned as if disturbed from centuries of rest.
As she turned the pages, I realized that it was actually a scrapbook – a very elaborate one that had taken years to construct. Inside lay photos, drawings, designs, letters, handprints, and even a garland of pressed flowers. There were pictures of Faye I’d never seen before. Her glowing smile poked out from beneath little strawberry locks in photo after photo. She looked exactly the way I imagined our daughter.
“This is what I wanted to show you,” Lynn said. “I don’t know how to talk to Faye about it.”
I was so amazed by the elaborate craftsmanship and the touching photographs that her words didn’t almost register with me.
“You made this?” I asked.
She flipped further into the scrapbook and revealed a few old pictures of herself in the later stages of pregnancy. The centerpiece of one of the pages was a Polaroid of Lynn, big-bellied and bearing a youthful smile, with little five-year-old Faye curiously resting her ear on her mother’s tummy. It was a priceless image, and one that hadn’t seen the light of day in decades. The elegant script above it read, Listen to him kick!
“Faye and I put this together, actually,” Lynn replied. “When she was little.”
It made sense. Faye was one of the most talented arts and crafts hobbyists I’ve ever known. She must have gotten it from her mom.
“So…uh,” I mumbled, unsure of how to broach the topic, “what happened?”
Lynn looked over her shoulder to the darkened staircase. She feared her daughter would wake up.
“His name was Christopher,” she whispered. Her lips quivered as she spoke. She turned the page, revealing a photo of herself undergoing an ultrasound and giving a thumbs-up. “He was stillborn a little under a month before the due date.”
I had no idea what to say. Between her loss and Tíwé’s death, I had discovered the true poverty of the words “I’m sorry.” I remained silent, and the stillness in the room spoke for itself.
“Placental abruption,” she continued. “It’s rare. But it happens.” Lynn scooted closer to me and put the scrapbook on my lap, then grabbed my wrist. “Felix, Faye doesn’t remember any of this. We’ve never spoken of it.”
I raised my finger to my lips, signaling her to be as quiet as possible. It wasn’t just Faye who might be eavesdropping.
“How is this possible?” I asked. “Five is old enough to remember something like this. I have memories from when I was two.”
Lynn explained that the emergency occurred while Greg was out with the girls. The paramedics rushed her to the hospital, but the baby could not be saved. When she and Greg finally decided to break the news to their daughters that Christopher had died, Becca was heartbroken, but Faye didn’t react. It was as if their words simply didn’t register. Lynn would say, “Do you understand that Christopher is never coming home?” And Faye would respond, “Yes, mommy,” with a blank expression.
This went on for weeks. Faye would occasionally ask about Christopher as though he’d be here soon, and then suddenly she’d forget all about him, as if he never existed. She began to act out at school and would throw violent tantrums. A child psychologist warned that Faye was not handling the situation well, so Greg and Lynn decided to spend a few days with her up at the cabin, in hopes of separating little Faye’s mind from the heavy event.
That’s when it happened. Whatever it is that lives in the forest up there, up in the trees or down in the hole, took notice of Faye. It found her fascinating. And it wanted to learn more about her, but her little brain shut down in terror when it got too close.
“After that day,” Lynn said, “Faye never spoke of Christopher again, and seems completely unaware that he ever existed. We didn’t know what else to do, so we played along.”
“You’ve kept this from her all these years?” I whispered.
“Her therapist wanted us to tr—”
Suddenly, Faye’s voice erupted from behind us.
“Mom?”
My head snapped toward the sound. Faye stood there at the bottom of the stairs – for God knows how long. I slammed the book shut. The air went out of the room. An agonizing moment of stillness ticked by, during which we all exchanged looks of shock. A shit storm was upon us. This much I knew.
“What’s that?” Faye asked gently, pointing to the book on my lap.
I was dumbstruck. My limbs ceased responding to my brain’s commands. Lynn jumped up between Faye and me.
“Sweetie, we need to talk,” Lynn said, opening her arms for a hug. She tried to obscure Faye’s view.
Faye pushed her mother aside and walked over to the couch. Her fiery eyes locked onto the scrapbook and didn’t blink. She reached down and tore it from my frozen hands.
Then she opened it.
The page she revealed bore a colorful cutout of the number 5. It was one of the final pages of the book. Her jaw trembled and her eyes became slick with welling tears. A look of excruciating pain fell over her face, and she cupped her mouth with a hand. Lynn reached out to assuage her, but Faye evaded her and raced back upstairs to the bedroom, taking the book with her.
Lynn tried for an hour to convince Faye to open the door, but it remained locked. During that time, Faye only spoke once, and she said,
“Go home.”
Eventually, Lynn surrendered to her daughter’s command and hugged me goodbye. I tried to get her to stay, but she seemed downright terrified of what her daughter might say when she finally emerged from the bedroom.
I spent the rest of the night alone, too afraid to go to sleep. I feared the Impostor might walk in my dreams, plucking bits of today’s events like flowers in a meadow. By now, he had almost everything he needed to conquer my fiancée.
Faye never came out of the bedroom, and wouldn’t speak to me when I knocked. I played video games and watched TV shows to distract myself from the horrible knot of stress in my stomach. I even texted with Tyler and Colin about the new developm
ents. But the night wore on slowly, and each passing minute compounded my worry. What would this news do to Faye? Would it finally break her?
As dawn crept over our home, I heard the bedroom door click. She was finally ready to let me in.
Chapter 43
Faye looked like a cemetery statue when I pushed the door open. She sat there on the bed, perfectly still, with the scrapbook resting on her lap.
I didn’t speak, but the look in my eyes asked, “You want to talk about it?”
The paths of a thousand tears streaked my fiancée’s face. Her skin was pale, and her bloodshot eyes seemed wrung of all their sorrow. A few tear-soaked locks of hair clung to the sides of her face.
“I remember now,” she muttered.
I stood there in the doorway, afraid to move. I had no idea how she’d react to the knowledge that I’d conspired with her mother to uncover the secrets of their past. This was new territory for both of us. I worried that Faye might try to hurt herself.
“Mom and I spent all summer getting the nursery ready,” Faye said, tracing a finger over one of the photos. “Dad was so excited that he was finally going to have a son. So we did a sports theme.”
I sat down beside her, quiet as a lamb. Talking to her in this state seemed a bit like handling a bomb, so I opted to just listen. Faye kept her hands pressed on the scrapbook as though she were feeling for a pulse, and closed her eyes in search of distant memories. A colorful ‘5’ rested at the center of the page, overlaid with various photos. One depicted a baseball mural painted on the wall with five players, and another displayed a toddler onesie in the design of a basketball jersey. It bore the number five.
“I always wanted to be a big sister,” Faye said. “I used to lay on my back in that room, staring up at the ceiling and wondering what kind of person he’d be. What he’d look like. I fantasized about all the adventures we’d have.”
I rested my hand on her back. Her skin blazed with warmth.
“You’d have been the world’s greatest big sister,” I offered. “I’m sure of it.”
Faye turned a few more pages. Some were unfinished, and then the rest were blank.
“I never got to see him,” she replied. “That number was how I always thought of him. Christopher was going to be the fifth member of our family.”
We sat there for a long time. I listened quietly as a deluge of ancient memories surfaced within Faye. Sometimes she could barely speak. Other times she shook her head and said it was all a dream. Her denial rose and fell in waves. She grasped at all the faded images in her head and tried to describe them to me with great strain. A tomb had been unearthed from the deepest catacomb of her mind, and despite the pain it wrought on her, Faye was excavating it. All I could do was hold her hand and listen.
After our conversation, Faye asked to be alone. I nodded and kissed her forehead. As I left, I took out my phone to call Nathan, wanting to update him on all the new developments, but then realized it might be a bad idea. The more people who knew what the number five symbolized, the more opportunities the Impostor would have to discover it. Nathan had told me about his dreams of the cabin and his father. Perhaps the creature was already inside his head.
As I came down the stairs, my eyes fell on the TV stand, and I suddenly remembered the package I’d hidden behind it the day before. Perplexed, I retrieved it and brought it to the dining room table. Lynn mentioned she would send a box out to me, but she ended up visiting instead. So who the hell sent this?
I ripped the thing open and discovered a jar of something that looked like tea leaves. A little note attached to it read:
My friends,
This is Calea, the dream herb. It’s used by Native cultures in Mexico, but some folks in my community make tea from it to ward off nightmares and promote good sleep. In case you find what you’re looking for, may this protect you.
An-we hite’anei,
Nathan
I opened the jar and sniffed the leaves inside. They smelled bitter and earthy, and I guessed that the tea made from them probably tasted horrible. But, I trusted Nathan’s judgment. Perhaps it could shield us from the Impostor’s nightly intrusions – or at least prevent us from dreaming about Christopher and the scrapbook.
Night eventually fell, and I slogged up the stairs, barely able to keep my eyes open. Faye had taken the day off work and spent most of it texting with her family, probably getting everyone’s version of the tragedy. Surprisingly, she was receptive to Nathan’s gift, and said she’d try anything to stop herself from having any more bad dreams.
I brewed up enough of the tea for both of us. The look on her face as it touched her lips confirmed my suspicion that it tasted awful. As she forced it down, I said,
“Actually, I lied. We’re sending you on a vision quest. This is going to be intense.”
She laughed. And it sounded like heaven.
We slept like corpses that night. Colorful dreams washed over my mind, bringing with them a dizzying euphoria. I soared over fairytale landscapes and met bizarre creatures. I wandered through a bright green forest whose trees stretched up to the sky, and discovered Faye at the edge of a glowing pool of water. She stood there nude, fiery hair billowing in the gentle breeze, and beckoned me to follow. I watched as she slipped beneath its surface. Inviting warmth crept up my feet as I dipped them into the pool. The feeling rose up my body, almost to my neck, so pleasurable that my vision faded into a soothing darkness.
But then, a familiar cold licked my neck and ears. It pushed through my hair and forced its way into my nostrils, jarring me from the calmness of the dream. I rubbed the darkness from my eyes and opened them.
A yellow light glimmered high up in the air against a black background. It cast a pale beam down to the ground, where beneath it, a blurry figure stood.
“Faye?”
A sharp, green thing poked against my bare arm. The sensation jerked me from my stupor. It was a palm frond. Short trees lined the sides of my vision, and a little stone path stretched out before me toward the yellow light.
I stood on the walkway in front of our condo, looking out at the street. It must have been very late, because most of the lights of other houses were off. A few crickets chirped, and in the distance, sprinklers hissed.
There, across the road, standing under a street lamp,
was a man. His body glowed in the yellow light, but his face remained in shadow. Even with a hunched comportment he looked about seven feet tall. One of his shoulders arched noticeably higher than the other and his head cocked to the side, reminiscent of the way Faye looked when she sleepwalked. The figure swirled a bony finger in the air as if conducting a choir of ghouls, then dropped his hand when he realized I’d woken up. It seemed that the tea had stopped me from dreaming of the awful things I’d learned about little Christopher, but it did nothing to prevent the Impostor from seeing whatever came into my mind while I slept. For the second time now, the monster led me right to him with my own dreams.
“I thought I told you to fuck off!” I roared. I don’t know what possessed me, but I strode toward him, fully prepared for round two. To my surprise, instead of clawing me to death right there in the street, the figure turned and ran. Against my better judgment I gave chase, screaming at the top of my lungs to stay away from my family and my house.
He moved faster than I could, even with his freakish limp. I’d always imagined the Impostor as some hellish mockery of a man, but the longer I watched him move, the more I realized he was more of a patchwork of things. My mind tried to comprehend what exactly I was looking at; I envisioned a rail-thin creature made of oily black parts, squeezing into the costume of a human and gracelessly lurking around in it. His movements looked animalistic, his strides far too long. He wheezed the night air like an old accordion, and the stench that dragged behind him singed my nose. It smelled like wildfire.
“No woods for you to fuck around in out here!” I screamed. Lights came on in houses all around me as I chased the creature. He
practically galloped, and was always twenty feet ahead.
I chased him down for two blocks. He rounded a few turns and finally bounded over a chain-link fence into the nearby community park, where there were no lights. Unable to climb the fence, I ran all the way around and found him standing perfectly still in the grass.
Only the hideous silhouette was visible. The figure stood there in the empty field, shrouded in the night, gazing up at the moon. One of his hands reached into the sky, twitching wildly, and the other hung at his side like gnarled driftwood. My adrenaline faded as I realized how far away we were from help. Out here, no one would hear me scream. But I approached the figure still, committed to ending this nightmare tonight, one way or another.
As I neared him, the creature issued a rumbling growl. The sound was so deep I felt it in my ribcage as much as I heard it. I stopped in my tracks, but still managed to push out the words,
“You will never have her. Never. Go back to that goddamn mountain and bury yourself in a mine.”
The figure growled again, then gurgled up a wet laugh.
“What is your name?” he asked – in my voice. He’d been practicing. The impression was perfect now. “May I come in? Open the door, Faye.”
I didn’t know how much of human speech he could truly comprehend, but my tone must have communicated whatever my words could not.
“You will leave us alone and go back to the mountain,” I said, louder than before. “Faye will never be yours.”
The Impostor emitted the shrieking of an infant. The sound mortified me, not just because of its accuracy, but because my brain refused to match that noise to a person this large. Then he said, in the voice of a child, “You go down in the hole. That’s where he’ll put you.”
“Look at me, you piece of shit,” I said. I tried to sound menacing, but my flight instinct was beginning to kick in.
Stolen Tongues Page 22