No…this cannot be. I manage to twist my head to the left…I look for Jessica but do not see her. I look up at Lou, who’s now busy injecting something into my wound. Painkiller? I wonder for a moment where the medical supplies he’s using have come from…
…the Isolates, Michael…
…and assume that Lou has a medical bag with him.
A moment of blackness passes. When I come to I see Lou with a scalpel in his hand, cutting away at the wound.
I attempt to speak, only one thing on my mind. “Jessss…”
Lou looks at me. “She’s fine, Michael. Resting. She’s told me quite a tale.”
Pain riddles me from all directions. I feel myself slipping toward unconsciousness again. With a burst of panic, I shout out, “Jessica!”
“Michael…please,” Lou says. “You’ve been severely injured. You’ve got a high fever, are riddled with infection. You have to let me do my work here.”
Here.
That single word again sets my compromised state into another wave of panic. Why not a hospital? Surely Lou has the means to get me into Ellenville Medical.
But that would mean leaving Ashborough, Michael. And you know you can’t do that.
But Lou…
He knows it too. He’s known it all along.
“No…”
“Michael, please, calm down. If you want to live, you’ll need to let me do what I have to do.”
If I want to live. My thoughts move back to the moment I put the needle down on the table in the cellar, how in that very moment of indecision I decided to press on through hell instead of ending it all, right there and then. If I had to do it all over again…
“Lou…”
He continues to stare at me, dark eyes filled with distress, piercing deep holes into me.
“Please…let me see my daughter…”
He nods once, then paces from the room, only to return a moment later with Jessica following close behind.
I see only a part of her at first, just the left side of her body and a few ringlets of blonde hair spiraling down along the side of her face.
Lou steps aside.
As he quickly busies himself at the counter, Jessica looks up at me.
The happiness and relief that filled me the second she walked into the room drains from my body like a deluge bursting from a dam.
Her eyes are glowing gold.
Panic triggers in me, but is quickly assuaged as Lou plunges a needle into my shoulder—a sedative I can only assume.
My eyesight rolls into a void of gray that takes away every last detail in the room, save for two small ghostly auras of gold—the residue of my daughter’s baleful stare.
Chapter Fifty-Two
I come to.
I open my eyes, only a bit at first, then wider.
I’m in a dark place. My office? The examining room? I cannot tell because everything beyond a few inches from me is a dark blur. My memory is in a cloud, unable to discern any details of what has happened. Is the little man in my head suppressing the horrific events that have taken place? I can remember only the truck, the deer…then Jessica, leading me home. Is there more? For once I want the little man in my head to lend his assistance, but he is nowhere to be found.
Is he dead?
I attempt to speak but it is futile—my lips don’t even move, sending the message to my brain that I’m completely numb, from head to toe. All I can do is roll my eyes, back and forth, up and down.
I see only darkness.
I attempt to move, but that too is useless.
One thing becomes obvious: there is no pain.
My thoughts and memories come through to me in waves.
I try to remember…see Jessica leading me up the road toward…toward my home. The driveway…a car parked there…me, falling, snow in my face, trembling, shivering. How is it that I feel no more chills? Has my fever subsided? My fever, my infection, my wound. I roll my eyes downward and see on my naked torso a series of taped bandages, expertly applied.
Lou Scully.
Then I remember: Lou exiting my home, his face torn with surprise…or was it expectation, a dismay of seeing what he’d come to expect: my body tattered and torn, surviving the cruelest elements of a hopeless war. He, trudging across the snowy lawn toward me, Jessica pulling away from my downed body as if expecting Lou’s arrival, granting him full contact with me. His words, Michael, dear God, what’s happened to you? thick with feigned concern, the bandage on his head a warning sign as bright as a flash from a beacon in my eyes.
My…dead…mind’s eye recalls a jagged memory from a few nights back…
Lou looks more like a butcher than a hunter now. He fixes me with his Isolate gaze, mouth drawn back into a deadly, glowering smile, face underbelly-white. He takes a step toward me, bare wrinkled feet covered in mud and dead leaves, sliding across the bloody floor, leaving stark streaks behind. He says, "I’m here to save you, Michael."
Is this indeed what he has done? Saved me? My wound is bandaged, and it appears my body has been relieved of its fever. But…I cannot move. I am ridden with paralysis, arms and legs numb, heavy with pins and needles as if the blood has been drained from them. My mind injects another not-too-distant memory into me, like a charge from a prod…
Lou’s free hand grips my neck. I twist around and Lou’s Isolate face jerks forward, glowering as the hatchet swings down at my head. I thrust both my arms out and seize Lou’s wrist just seconds (and inches) before the hatchet finds my face. I reach back and grab the bottle I’d left out on my desk. It’s still filled with bourbon, brown and pungent. I swing it over my shoulder and connect squarely with Lou Scully’s head. The glass shatters violently…
And again, I cannot help but think of the bandage on Lou’s head, my last thought before I fall back into the abyss of darkness that swallows me whole.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Darkness.
Movement all around me.
Whispering voices. I hear them, but cannot make out any words.
A pressure upon my body. Dizziness…and then, pain. I can feel it. My wound, a burning sensation within. My body jolts as if suddenly charged with volts. Automatically, my lips part and a grunt escapes my throat. I can feel myself moving…but not of my own accord.
I’m being dragged.
The surface below me is cold and rough, painful.
I open my eyes and see a canopy of trees above me, naked branches seizing tightly to close out the moonlit sky.
Ahead, shadowy forms loom, pulling me through the cold, wet darkness. They’re holding my arms and legs, bound tightly by tape. Over a bump—a frozen root, perhaps—and then through a small puddle. Pain lashes out at me, and for once it is welcome, signifying the simple fact that I am still alive.
Suddenly I am lifted, encircled and clutched by dozens of hands plunging out of the darkness. More whispering…and then, an instant hush as I am dragged into...
…dear Jesus, no…
…into the circle of stones.
I tell myself that this is another Isolate-induced nightmare, filled with enough hellish realism to make me believe it’s all actually happening. To some unexplainable degree, every dream I had was real, and if I recounted them and all their dark and dreary details then I could tell you how each one has adversely affected me to a point that made me want to kill myself. And here I am again, wondering if everything around me is actually here, and not some illusion set up in my mind as I continue to sleep under the command of the sedatives Lou Scully gave me.
I look at my surroundings. Everything is deadly silent now, no twigs snapping, no agitated rustling, no fervent whispering.
But I’m not alone.
Despite knowing that I’d been carried here to the altar of the Isolates, and that either a number of humans or Isolates brought me here, I do not see either.
Besides myself, the only other thing here is the dead deer from my bedroom, the same one I fixed up and brought to the Washburn home�
�the same deer I plowed over in Pops-Eddie’s truck.
I look up at the destroyed animal and wonder how in God’s name it can be alive, much less standing. It gazes at me, its destroyed head and moist bulges of guts for eyes. On skeletal legs stripped of flesh, it limps out of the circle of stones and into the woods, dripping a trail of blood and skin from its hollowed-out cavity.
My breathing begins to quicken, the onset of panic. I squeeze my eyes shut, praying silently to myself that I am home in my bed, under the sheets, eyes rolling heatedly beneath my lids in a feverish dream-state.
When I open eyes, the deer is gone. But I am still here, laying on my back upon the frozen forest floor, staring up at the circle of stones as they appear to crowd around me like a circle of thugs readying to pounce. I try to move. Despite feeling pain, I am still a victim of paralysis. Still the ground beneath me feels so damn real: the sticks, the roots, the soil...and now, the rising mist. The night wind is cold against my bare torso.
How is it that you’re not freezing to death, Michael?
My lips part, and although words do not emerge, I ask the little man in my head, Where did you come from? You’ve been gone. What’s happening here?
And he answers: I’ve come to say good-bye, Michael.
The sound of the little man’s voice sends me into a swoon of blackness where I dream (or is it real?) of Old Lady Zellis, returned from the dead to touch me with her dreadful intentions. She’s floating over me like a ghost, straggly hair wavering slowly in the wind as if under water, eyes deep-set in a visage of craggy skin, glowing gold. She scowls as though in pain, and it’s here I realize with terror that it’s not Old Lady Zellis after all, but the woman who used to be my wife: Christine.
I squeeze my eyes tightly, and when I open them, hoping her to be gone and me back in my home under the sedated care of Lou Scully, she is still there, her face inches away from mine, fetid breath hot against my freezing skin. Her cracked and bleeding lips pull apart, revealing dirty Isolate stumps for teeth embedded in blood-red gums. A black, ulcerated tongue emerges and licks my face.
I make every attempt to scream my terror, but not a whisper breaks free of my throat’s bonds. As I squeeze my eyes shut again, my DEAD mind thinks back to the last time I visited here in a similar dream-like state, and how all the characters of my crusade ended up here to bring closure to my defeat. Alongside Old Lady Zellis were Phillip and Rosy Deighton, Sam Huxtable, Lauren Hunter, the dead deer from my shed, Jimmy Page, and even Christine, for this had been the defining moment of the beast showing me how she’d gotten pregnant after all.
Now, with Old Lady Zellis’s replacement here in the form of my wife, the saga continues in a similar fashion, with the dead deer that has played such an integral role in my downfall making an appearance.
I open my eyes, and find that my expectations are correct. Standing in the circle of stones a few feet away are Lisa and Danny Washburn. Each have deep-sea fishing hooks embedded into their faces. Danny’s hook enters through his right eye and curves back out through his left, with a chunk of brain skewered on the end. Black blood pours down both of their faces, dousing their shirts, wet and glistening in the pale blue light. They’re both staring down at me (well, Lisa is for sure), and she utters in a monstrously deep and braying voice, "What have you done with my daughter?"
From behind me, another deep, echoing voice: “He raped her.” Footsteps crunch alongside me. I try to move but am still fettered by paralysis. I’m able to stare down at the tape holding my arms and legs together, and see that it is now deeply burrowed into my wrists and ankles, the skin bleeding as it overlaps the thin white edges.
A shadow looms beside me, and then a pair of bloody, muddy boots appear to my right. I roll my eyes upwards and see Pops-Eddie standing over me, the hatchet Shea buried in his skull still there. A thick shell of blood and brain matter coats his entire face, giving it a horrifically featureless look.
Pops Eddie’s mouth opens, and along with a thick surge of blood, the gurgling words, “You fucked her good and hard, didn’t ya doc?” came out.
I try to shake my head no, but am only able to look back at Danny and Lisa, now standing near my bound feet, Lisa staring accusatorily at me, Danny blindly groping the air before him as his eyes gush blood and vitreous fluid.
“He sure did.” Another voice. Shea. For a fleeting moment I think maybe, just maybe, she might be able to get me out of here. Help me wake up back in my home like I have in the past after one of these real-dreams. But like all things here in Ashborough, there’s no telling what’s real and what not, what’s "safe" and what isn’t.
She appears before me, and I know: I am wrong.
She’s one with them. Her concern for me was a ruse all along.
She enters the clutch between her brother and sister, standing at my feet and rocking back and forth like a drunk bum. She’s been through a war of sorts, considering her battle with Christine (and then the Isolate) in the stairwell of the witch’s house, her hair wild with bits of wood and hunks of dust and soil; her mud-spattered T-shirt, torn open beneath the leather jacket she still wears, revealing blood-slashed breasts that jiggle perkily. It’s only now I become aware of an unbearable stench, something like dead fish, which lends to the scene more realism than I can handle.
And then her face, once perfect and pristine, now clawed in a dozen places, perhaps bitten, seeping blood.
Her eyes begin glowing gold.
I hear myself crying, and as the paralysis holding me begins to slip slightly, a series of sobs spill from my lips. “No…no…I’m sorry…”
And somehow I am forced to think back (as if by supernaturally induced means) to the very moment I let Shea slip away from me…seconds after she saved my life…
Shea stomps on Christine’s head, once, twice, three times. Christine releases me and on all fours I clamber up the steps, following Jessica as she scurries from the horrific scene playing out below her. Behind me, Shea pushes up against me, screaming. I don’t have to look to know. Christine has her…
…and I let them take her.
“I’m so-so s-sorry, Sh-Shea,” I blabber, barely able to comprehend myself.
“I saved you, Michael,” she croaks, blood oozing from her mouth. “And now look what you did, all for your little cunt daughter.”
Pops-Eddie begins to laugh, as does Lisa and Danny. Shea places her hands on her hips. “Did you really think you were gonna fuck me, Michael? Did you really think I’d go with an old, beat-up bastard like yourself?”
More laughs from the Washburns…and then from Christine, Ashborough’s new and improved Old Lady Zellis (I suppose now she’ll be referred to Old Lady Cayle now) staggering into the scene from somewhere behind me. Her hands are coated with blood and I can’t help but fear this to be real now and that somewhere nearby, Jessica is waiting for me to save her.
“Where…is…she…Christine…” My words are mere whispers, laden with razors and nearly unintelligible. I can’t help but stare at the blood on her hands, and then think of Jessica, my poor little girl who got mixed up in this world of hell thanks to her dear Daddy. Damn me to hell. All I did was try to provide a better life for her, and now she’s here in this hellish real-dream world, her very soul damned, her very body—
“Daddy…” Her voice oozes out of the dark shadows of the woods like the moans of ghosts riding the beams of an old haunted house.
I try to move…and manage to squirm forward on the cold ground, my bound hands and legs striking out against the hard ground. Pinpricks of pain gather in my tailbone—the anesthetic Lou Scully gave me some indeterminate time ago wearing off. I can feel it.
“Daddy…” Again her voice, closer now. The cast of hideous characters in this real-dream gather close to me: Lisa and Pops-Eddie Washburn on my right, their children, Danny and Shea on my left. Blood from their wounds, cold and dreadful, patters the skin of my chest as they loom over me. Christine steps aside and Lou Scully walks into the picture. The ba
ndage on his head is gone, showing a jagged patch of wounds, the amber shards of the bottle I struck him with in my real-dream glistening like tiny stars in the darkness. And just like the real-dream from my bedroom, the rest of Lou’s body is composed of decomposing bones and shreds of fleshy gore. He brings his skeletal hands forward. In them is Bonzo’s head, its bloody little kitty maw opening and closing, opening and closing. “Did you forget, Michael?” Lou says, his voice a dead croak. “Jessica is my daughter, Michael.”
“No…” I mutter, shaking my head back and forth against the ground.
Christine…no, the witch, Old Lady Cayle, sidles up alongside Lou, petting the Bonzo’s headless body which she has cradled in her hairy arms. She looks down at me and nods, speaking with a crackling voice as foreign as this real-dream. “It’s true, Michael. Look at her…she doesn’t even look like you.”
“Hi, Daddy…”
I follow Jessica’s voice to the center stone—the sacrificial altar of the Isolates—and see my little girl there, sitting with her legs dangling over the hard gray edge. She’s got on the same clothes she wore when I took her to the witch’s house. (Damn why did I take her there? Why, why, why!) Although her shirt and jeans are still dirty, she appears unharmed.
“Are you hurt, baby?” I manage to say.
She shakes her head back and forth, smiling. How can she be smiling? I wonder, then realize the supernatural elements here are fully in charge.
“I’m gonna get you out of here, I promise, baby.” I can feel more of my strength returning and try to envision how I could release my bonds, get up, and fight off these beasts. I wonder if it’s really possible.
Jessica hops down from the stone and moves in alongside Christine.
“Jessica…no, baby…don’t. That’s not Mommy.”
Jessica says nothing as Christine runs a single claw through her hair, leaving behind a streak of Bonzo’s blood in my baby’s previously untainted curls.
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