The Uninvited

by F. P. Dorchak

  “Jolly Green Giants know what to do with delicious little morsels like you!” Mark roared.

  Emily giggled and giggled as Mark tickled her feet, her shins, and down her legs to her arm pits. When he thought she could no longer stand it, he gently lowered her back to the floor.

  “Okay, kiddo, time to eat!”

  “Eet!” Emily repeated, stretching out on the floor.

  “And what do we do before eating?”

  “Ans!”

  Now it was Mark’s turn to chuckle. “That’s right,” he said, “we wash our hands! Let’s go!”

  Emily got to her feet, quickly waddled her short, hurried strides across the living room into the kitchen, and stepped up on the plastic step stool before the sink, “Emily” marked on it in black, permanent marker.

  “Good girl!” Mark exclaimed. He reached across the sink and turned on the water, making sure it wasn’t too hot, then directed the faucet over Emily’s outstretched hands, as she already made preparatory washing motions in the air before it. Emily had a big smile on her face and gleefully rubbed her hands together under the water. Mark took the liquid Winnie-the-Pooh soap dispenser from the sink and squirted a drop into her hands.

  “We have to wash them good,” Mark said. He made sure her hands were properly washed before turning off the water.

  “Now, what do we do?”

  Emily stared at Mark, unable to say the word “dry.”

  Mark again smiled, “Aw, that’s okay, honey!”

  Emily turned around on her “Emily” step, and held out her dripping hands before her over the floor like a soggy sleepwalker. Mark pulled a clean dish towel from the kitchen drawer and draped it over her hands. He began to dry them, when she again called out in protest.

  Smiling, Mark let her have control, supervising as she did a fine job in drying her own hands. Emily handed over the damp dish towel.

  “Great job!”

  Mark scooped her up off her stoop and soared her through the air, over her highchair, by the table.

  “Now, we eat!”

  “Eet!” Emily mimicked, another huge smile consuming her sweet, chubby little face. “Eet! Eet!”

  As Mark buckled her in, Emily again grew fussy. Rather than fight her, he supervised Emily’s searching for the buckles, and, again, backed off to let her buckle herself in. Or try to, anyway. It was then the phone rang, but Mark let the message machine pick it up. It was Rodney, from work. There was a corrupted LAN server. He let him leave a message as he had to help buckle in Emily’s twenty-three-pound body to the highchair.

  Mark finished fastening Emily in, who was happily giggling and making “laddle-laddle-laddle” sounds, looking out the kitchen window, and went to the phone to return the call, when it again rang.

  “Hello?”

  But, this time, there was no answer.

  “Is anyone there? Rod? Hello?”

  Silence, dead silence. Well, not totally. Emily was still making her “laddle-laddle-laddle” sounds, fine little bubbles forming on her tiny, ruddy lips, while happily banging about on her tray, but Mark heard the faintest sound of breathing over the phone—or, to be more specific, a sudden inhalation of air—masked by the muffled sound of traffic. Then, a strange thing happened. As Mark stood there, empty phone pressed against his ear, he had that distinct feeling only a husband and wife knew. That feeling that the other was there, even though they didn’t speak... or that they were thinking of each other, miles apart. Mark felt a chill sweep through him and looked down to the caller ID box. It wasn’t a number he recognized, but had, instead, the phone company “Verizon” listed. Mark felt his legs go noodley and no sooner had he realized said noodley legs, when he collapsed, reaching out to the counter to break his fall. His heart had jammed itself up into his throat in fine sledgehammer fashion and his mouth went dry and dumb. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He tried to say something, anything, to hang on to this moment—his wife was on the other end, and he knew it.

  She’d finally called.

  Was she—maybe—finally ready to talk? Work things out? Explain what the hell had happened?

  Images of her beautiful, smiling face filled his mind. Of their wedding... bike rides and hikes, and—

  “Kacey? Is that you....”

  But the phone had already gone dead.

  “Kacey? Kacey!”

  No response. No sounds of breathing.

  Trying to restrain himself, but not doing a very good job of it, he half slid, half slammed the phone along the kitchen’s tiled floor. He sat there, listening to it as it glanced off a leg of a chair and the kitchen table, then spun around into the wall at the opposite end of the room. He watched as the phone did a couple of rebounded, confused spins, then came to a stop, like some angry spin-the-bottle game, its stubby antenna pointing, accusatorily, to Emily. The crunching and hollow plastic cracking sounds didn’t bode well. Then he looked to Emily, now silent and staring at daddy, her mouth open in a tiny “oh,” wide-eyed and confused, unsure of what to do next, hands poised in mid-air. Choosing the lesser of evils, Emily let out a strained wail, cut short—looking to him as if in confirmation to either stop or continue. Then she let out another one, dropping her hands to the tray, her little face suddenly, horribly contorted, flushed a fine bright red.

  “Oh, it’s okay, Em, everything’s all right....”

  But things were far from okay.

  Otherwise, why had his wife—the love of his life—run off a year ago? Go out for her daily run, only to never be heard from again? He’d thought her kidnapped, murdered—something terrible—but never had he thought she’d actually run away on her own—

  But was that true—really?

  No... he’d seen her frustration after having Emily. He had to admit he’d been quite surprised that she’d even conceded to having a child... she’d always been the wild one, the adventurous one, and had been adamantly opposed to anything that would have tied her down... even getting a house had been a huge deal for her. A new car. She’d wanted nothing that even implied permanence. Stability. Ties. So when she’d found herself pregnant and decided to keep their baby, he was as impressed as could be. Felt his wife was definitely growing. Sure, she hadn’t been happy about the weight gain, but on her well-developed, fit frame she hardly showed her pregnancy, and was, of course, the envy of pregnant women everywhere. She hadn’t gained much weight—not even in her face, her pregnancy had been a breeze.

  Labor?

  Not even an hour. Out popped their bouncing baby girl, and almost as immediately, off melted the baby weight. In no time, she was the same old Kacey—running marathons, teaching Zumba classes, hefting weights...

  Though she had had moments of occasional depression and self doubt.

  She attacked all the old sports with a renewed and, yes, scary-crazy recklessness. Rock climbing, skydiving, mountain biking. Bungee jumping. He was seeing a side of her that was troubling, and she just kept brushing him off matter-of-factly about it. Kept needling at him to go with her—but he had new responsibilities, now, they both did, and Emily had to come first, foremost, and all-consuming. Diapers had to be changed, formula made. Early morning feedings and wailing. He had a real job, now. Attention of the most intense and loving kind had to now be directed toward another...

  Emily started to cry. Wiping away tears, he sprang back into action.

  “Hey, Buckaroo... there’s no need to cry,” he said, still wiping away tears. He lowered his voice in a soothing tone, and a foot crunched down on broken plastic parts that used to be cordless phone as he approached her. “There-there... how about some breakfast, huh?”

  Mark checked Emily’s straps and smoothed aside wisps of her light blonde hair. “How about some applesauce? Huh? Does that sound like a plan?”

  Emily stopped crying and looked at him. Such all-consuming total focused concentration. Mark took her face into both hands and kissed her. As he looked into her deep, beautiful, watery blue eyes, he wondered what Kacey
was doing right this minute.

  Was she crying?

  Missing them?

  Considering a return?

  “Well, my love,” he said, “that was your mommy. She’s still having problems, but, I think...,” he began to say, choked off by emotion, “I think... she may be finally willing to work things out. And we’re going to be there for her, aren’t we, my sweet, little, pumpkin, because...” he again choked off, “because... we’re a family, and that’s what families do....”

  Chapter Eleven

  1

  Harry recradled his phone and stared at the Japanese urn sitting atop the pedestal across the room from him. Yet another call from a family member of one of the murdered Safe Harbor tenants. This wasn’t going to be just another small-town trial. Hell, it’d made it onto NNC, and there was talk of NNC’s producers actually showing up.

  Their story now belonged to the world.

  Pencil in hand, Harry leaned back in his chair and strayed back to his visit with Dr. Arnot. The funniest thing (besides him giving the time of day to his so-called “Japanese experience”) was that, for the first time in years, he’d had absolutely no nightmares. All his logic told him that what had happened the other day had been the product of a highly stressed imagination—of which, curiously, he never really thought he’d had much. He didn’t believe in other lives. The soap opera had it right. All we had was one life to live. That was it.

  Uno.

  Whatever happened after we died... was, well, better left to philosophers and theologians. Schmucks like him, stuck in the down and dirty of society’s worst didn’t have the time nor luxury to ponder such useless notions. If we lived other lives, then why hadn’t we learn from them? Why were there so many criminals to prosecute? To jail? To execute? If there really were other lives, what a goddamned waste of time and energy. We keep living and remaking mistakes—murder, rape, burglaries? Jesus! And Mr. Harry fricking Gordon was turning Japanese?

  I don’t think so.

  But—what the hell, let’s consider this for a bit; consider the evidence of the past few days—not a big effort, mind you, didn’t want the bar or profession to catch wind of one of their finest dabbling around in such metaphysical nonsense—but he had done some quick and dirty Internet research. What he’d found was a wealth of information on the subject—even support groups—out there.

  With the eraser tip of his pencil, he scooched toward him the hastily scrawled list he’d penciled, pulling it out from under his paperwork as if he were a teenager sneaking a peak at nudie pictures hidden under school work. On his list were such titles as ... To Be Continued: Reincarnation and the Purpose of Our Lives; Other Lives, Other Selves; You’ve Been Here Before, Passport to Past Lives: The Evidence, and Mystery of Reincarnation: The Evidence & Analysis of Rebirth. And there were plenty of books on children remembering their so-called past lives: Return From Heaven, Children’s Past Lives, Old Souls, and Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot.

  There were all kinds of fictional work on the subject. The novels of M. J. Rose and L. E. Waters. Films like the old Reincarnation of Peter Proud, from 1975 (even George C. Scott’s riveting 1970 film, Patton, involved reincarnation—General Patton, himself, believed his was reincarnated), Living with the Dead and Yesterday’s Children, not to mention those Medium and Ghost Whisperer reruns, and the more recent The Fountain and Cloud Atlas. There were many Japanese and Indian films, like 2005’s Reincarnation and 2012’s Dangerous Ishhq. And stuff from psychics (or so-called psychics, Harry’s jury was far from out on such things, but he was suddenly a bit more open on the matter). People who just seemed to have this stuff come pouring out of them, like Edgar Cayce, Jane Roberts, and a quiet, little-known early 1900’s Midwest osteopath, named Riblet B. Hout.

  How did stuff like this happen?

  Given any of it was real, why’d it happen to some and not others? Perhaps that was a question for another time, but on the “evidence” of it all, there did appear to be a fair amount of circumstantial data. Lots of people claimed experiences, but did a lot of people claiming anything make anything real? Proof of existence beyond the grave? Many claim visitations from the Virgin Mary or Christ Himself, but there’s no proof for any of that, either.

  Has any archeological evidence—hard, irrefutable evidence—ever been found to prove the existence of Christ? A person and personality literally touched by the Hand of God that something should have survived? A transference of divinity from spirit to the physical?

  Barring the controversial Shroud of Turin, has anything ever turned up, say, a tablet written from His hand, a lock of hair, a shred of His clothing? Maybe a goblet from which He’d sipped? A sandal?

  No.

  All of his existence has been based upon a book written by imperfect Man and all His filters (substitute “Woman” and “Her,” it doesn’t matter), and something called faith. And don’t even bring in those Da Vinci Code books. So, what hard evidence was there for past lives? Define “hard,” and define “evidence.”

  Harry grunted. He remembered a prime time news magazine show he’d watched about a-then-two-year-old James Leininger (the name he found from the Soul Survivor book search) who “remembered” a past life as a WWII aviator, and another about an English woman, Jenny Cockell, who’d claimed she’d lived in Ireland from 1898 to 1930, as Mary Sutton. Harry’d also found four books Jenny Cockell had written (and Yesterday’s Children was the made-for-TV movie of Cockell’s accounts). According to Mrs. Cockell, as Mary, she’d been married to a rather nasty fisherman in this small coastal town and they’d had something like eight kids. From what he remembered, her life had been hard, and her husband had been far from nurturing, which had, ultimately, resulted in her death. To make a long story short, the present-day Mrs. Cockell’d been sketching images of that past life since early childhood, and had finally made the trip to corroborate her images, with her present-life’s (God, this sounded so ridiculous!) son and husband. She found things exactly as she’d envisioned—and all without ever having set foot there in her current life. She even tracked down the hidden, overgrown remains of the past-life house she’d lived in, which wasn’t visible from the road that went past it—and the clincher?—she’d found several of her surviving past-life children. Still living, though well into their sixties and seventies.

  Harry shivered. “I can’t believe I’m giving serious consideration to any of this!”

  How could any of this be? If none of this was true, how had this Mrs. Cockell’d been able to track everything down? How could her childhood scrawlings corroborate her adult discovery? Had she ever been there? Everyone who knew her swore she hadn’t, yet the argument could be made that she’d researched it without anyone’s knowledge—but how had she known about events in the lives of those surviving elderly? Things only a mother would know? When Jenny had been a young child, she’d started drawing all this stuff—this was known—just like the fact that she’d never been out of the country. She still had many of the sketches. But were the seventy year olds simply wanting it to happen, making it all up with her? A product of senility? Empathy? It’s always a possibility, but think about this: given what we know of the mind, is it any less amazing that things like this could happen? If we attributed so much “poppycock” to the imagination—that our minds have this incredible capacity toward the imagined—why not also presuppose that maybe—just frigging maybe—some of it might be true? How much of a leap would it be, really, from our minds making us believe things that are false... to our minds simply releasing—remembering—real, past-life memories?

  Memories.

  Which was more far-fetched?

  If what we were asking for was to remember a past life, isn’t this exactly how it might happen?

  Why deny it? And if what we base reality upon is what Most People agree upon as What’s Real and What’s Not, by the ability to distinguish, on a mass level, that basically the same thing one sees is the same thing others see, than wouldn
’t that also apply?

  Every lawyer knows that no one person sees exactly the same thing as another, even if both are handed the same object, each standing before each other, or witness to the same event firsthand—but certain basics always hold true, such as time, space, ground, sky, etc. This has been proven countless times in courtrooms across the globe and throughout time.

  Jesus—has it always been that obvious?

  Has it been there all along, right under our own noses, but we’ve simply been too close to the evidence, too disbelieving, to notice?

  Harry got up and came to the Japanese urn. Touched and traced it’s smooth surface. Looked to the framed ekotoba scrolls on the wall behind it.

  Shit... no two people can perfectly describe a single object or event in the same precise detail as another (and why was that, anyway, if facts were facts?)... hell, even Harry’s own perceptions were different from those of witnesses he’d dealt with over the years... but if we used the judgment that what Most People Agreed Upon is reality... what about all those claims of past lives? The Civil War, Nazi death camps, the Titanic, you name it—and even little children are documented as having said such things as my other mommy’s hair was curly, or I died at this intersection before. One of the books Harry’d hyperlinked to on the Internet talked about a man fraught with insomnia had recalled a life as a marshal in a western town... how a sexually frigid woman remembered a life as a slave girl—how another suffered from an inexplicable fear of heights, only to recall a violent death from a high fall during the Middle Ages. Do people just make this stuff up for their own amusement, or are deep, buried memories actually, slowly, fizzling into conscious and full-on awareness? It’s like UFOs... if so many people are coming up with this stuff, must there be some truth to it?

  Harry picked up the urn and stared into its polished surface.

  And a lawyer, from Sunset Harbor, Florida, suddenly recalled a past life as a Japanese ronin on a cliffside dwelling overlooking Mount Fuji...