Seed

by Ania Ahlborn

  Gilda’s screams were wounded, primal, tearing themselves from her lungs with guttural rawness. She sounded like she was dying; that’s what Jack remembered most. Her cries, her wails, her indiscernible pleas in the arms of a man who couldn’t understand what his wife was saying. It all sounded like death throes of a woman at the end of her rope; like a final gasp rattling inside her ribcage before it was indefinitely expelled.

  Jack could see their shadows dancing outside his bedroom door. Gilda was gasping, choking on her own saliva as she wept like a woman with nothing to live for. The longer it went on, the more Stephen raised his voice despite trying to stay calm. But after a while he started to yell, his own panic taking control.

  “Stop it,” was the first thing Jack could make out. “Stop it, Gilda, stop it.” He imagined Stephen grabbing his mom by the shoulders and shaking her like they did in the movies—shaking some sense into her while shaking the chaos out.

  But Gilda was inconsolable. Stephen raised his voice. She babbled even more. He grabbed her by the arms and she crumbled against his chest. Typically a strong woman, she was little more than a quivering mass of maternal emotion.

  “There’s… something… wrong.” Her words came in gasps, caught between sobs and desperate gulps of air. It was that frustrating moment between hysteria and control; she was ready to talk but those emotions continued to claw at her composure, pulling her down, drowning her in her own instability.

  “Something wrong,” Stephen echoed. “Something wrong with what?”

  The question pushed her over the edge. She wailed again—a sound that Jack had never heard come out of his mother in his ten short years.

  “Something wrong with what?” Stephen repeated, more urgently this time. “Gilda, I can fix it. Just tell me what,” he said. “Just tell me what it is and I—”

  “With Jack,” she shrieked. The way his name slithered through the walls and under the door made Jack’s skin crawl. There was terror in it: a distinct pitch of absolute dismay.

  “What’s wrong with Jack?” Stephen asked, but he didn’t wait for her to answer. He let her go and made a move for his son’s bedroom instead.

  The door swung open and hit the wall, bouncing off the cheap particle board that made up the walls of the trailer. Stephen blinked into the darkness that faced him. He took a reluctant step forward, pushing his hand into the shadows. His palm slid across the wall in search of the light switch.

  The light snapped on and the room was revealed. Jack was sitting silently upon his bed. Stephen turned to Gilda with confusion, shaking his head, ready to tell her he didn’t understand. But she beat him to the punch.

  When she saw her boy sitting there so calmly, her eyes went wide. Her hands pressed themselves against her mouth and she stared at him as though not seeing him at all—looking though him, beyond him, at something behind their son that Stephen failed to see.

  “I’ve lost him,” she choked. “I’ve lost my Jackie, oh God, I’ve lost him…”

  Stephen looked back to Jack, his expression riddled with such intense confusion it verged on rage. Jack shook his head, silently confirming that he was just as clueless as his dad. And that was mostly the truth.

  But in the back of his mind there was a slight glimmer of understanding, a tiny shard of remembrance. When Gilda had opened the door to bring in Jack’s laundry, he remembered seeing her not right-side up, but upside down. What he couldn’t recall was whether his mom had been walking on the ceiling, or whether he’d been standing on his head.

  Despite his promise to come straight home, Jack decided to hit Bourbon Street for a few minutes after the show. It was tradition, and tonight that ritual seemed even more important to uphold than any night before. Every time he left home for a gig, he brought Charlie a toy. It started out as guilt but blossomed into a custom he and Charlie bonded over.

  That wasn’t to say the tradition was easy to uphold. Finding a toy for a kid on Bourbon was as easy as finding a nun in one of its bars.

  Reagan stayed behind at the club while Jack scoured the strip in search of an appropriate gift for a six-year-old. Unless he was willing to settle on a t-shirt that read ‘My Daddy’s big and my Mommy’s easy’, he had an idea it would take some time to find. He had already bought her a key chain with her name on it, and she’d already collected so much Dias De Los Muertos stuff Aimee threatened to pack it all up and leave it at the Goodwill. Once he’d found her a tiny wooden pig that, according to Voodoo folklore, was supposed to bring the owner good luck. Aimee hadn’t liked that so much either: the sentiment was there, but she wasn’t big on bringing Voodoo into the house.

  A few minutes of stalking down uneven streets and a few close calls with the sludge-filled gutter, he found himself in front of an open door, its tiny shop window jammed with colorful odds and ends—candles and Tarot decks and shrunken heads that claimed to be authentic. Inside, there was a wall dedicated to African masks. Another wall was lined with tapered candles of every shade of the rainbow, hanging two-by-two by an uncut wick. Tiny stickers were tacked beside each color, distinguishing which candles were to be used with which spells.

  Despite Aimee’s distaste, Jack was drawn to these shops. He had Voodoo sonar. Every time he strayed off Bourbon, he’d end up in a cramped little store selling spells and herbs. He was comfortable among their overcrowded shelves. It may have been the scent of incense, or the way the shopkeeper never stalked or nagged the customers. These were sacred pockets of silence among a sea of debauchery and chaos. Jack was drawn to them, drunk off their mysticism. Tonight he was drawn to the back of that long, skinny shop. He paused at a red curtain, a sign safety-pinned to the fabric: Reading in session, quiet please.

  “She’s almost done if you want one,” the girl at the counter said.

  Jack glanced over his shoulder at her. “Sorry?”

  “A reading.” The girl nodded at the curtain. “She won’t be long.”

  Jack looked back to the curtain with a smirk. A framed price sheet sat at eye level, perched on a shelf. He’d gotten a reading a few years back. It had been on a rare Quarter visit; the band had an unusually late gig and had decided to shack up in New Orleans for the night. After a few too many Hand Grenades, Jack and Reagan ended up stumbling across a tiny Tarot reader’s shop. The guy who took Jack’s money was an awkward Dungeons and Dragons type. He wore a hooded blue velvet cape over an AC/DC t-shirt. Rather than enlightened, Jack was left feeling stupid, duped out of sixty bucks.

  “Thanks,” Jack said. “I’m just looking for something for my kid.”

  The girl shrugged and looked back to her paperback.

  “Any suggestions for a six-year-old girl?” he asked, hopeful that his time would be saved by a thoughtful customer service rep.

  The girl stuck a bookmark between the tattered pages of what she was reading and motioned for Jack to come over, tapping the glass case beneath her elbow.

  “Kids go nuts for these,” she said, pointing to a display of mood rings. “They’re made-in-China crap, but like a kid is gonna know.”

  “Do they work?”

  The girl shrugged again. “I guess. They work off of body heat, so they change color like they’re supposed to. It doesn’t have anything to do with mood, but like a kid is gonna know that.” She flicked a strand of dyed hair over her shoulder.

  “I’ll take three,” Jack said, reaching for his wallet.

  With the rings tucked safe in his pocket, he stepped out of the shop. In his rush to get back to the club, he crashed into a big guy trying to make his way inside.

  “Shit, sorry man,” Jack said, holding out a hand to steady himself.

  The big guy tipped the brim of a trucker cap at Jack in acknowledgement. He smiled a wide, toothy grin—a smile that gave Jack the creeps.

  “No problem, chief,” the big guy crooned, then slipped inside the shop.

  After the kids were asleep, Aimee popped a bag of microwave popcorn, selected a flick she couldn’t watch with the girls
around, and decided to have her own girls-night-in just as Jack had suggested. With the lights off and the television throwing blue shadows across the room, she tried to relax and forget all that had happened in the past couple of days.

  It was futile: her mind wouldn’t shut off. That incessant scratching was getting louder; loud enough now to make her wonder if it would wake the kids. She grabbed the remote and paused her movie, abandoning her popcorn on the couch cushions, ready to track down that damn scratching once and for all.

  At first it seemed like it was coming from near the front door, but as soon as Aimee approached the area, the scratching shifted to another part of the house. What she was once sure was an animal clawing on the outer walls of the house suddenly became an impossibility. The noise was coming from inside the walls, creeping along the arteries of their home, burrowing its way into random corners. Her search eventually led her to the kitchen. As soon as she pinpointed where the noise was coming from, it was back in the living room. If this was an animal, it knew it was being followed. It was playing games.

  Eventually losing the noise’s location, Aimee shook her head in exasperation. She had wasted a good half hour chasing rogue scuffing, as though finally cornering the noise would make it disappear. If she wanted that scratching gone, she’d have to knock a hole in the wall first. She grabbed a can of diet Coke from the fridge and padded back to the living room, stopping short of the couch.

  Her jaw fell slack at the mess. The popcorn she’d left on the couch was now all over the floor. Nubs was happily cleaning it up, crunching salty kernels with the wet smacking of his chops.

  “Nubs!” she whispered with as much authority as she could without waking the girls. “Goddamnit.” Waving a hand to shoo him off, she snatched the metal mixing bowl off the couch and dropped to her knees, scooping up popcorn she’d eventually end up pouring into Nubs’ bowl.

  “Stupid fucking dog,” she muttered to herself. “Last bag of popcorn too. I swear to God, if I was just a little meaner…” She looked up from the carpet to see Nubs sitting not more than a yard from her stripe-socked feet. “I thought I told you to get out of here,” she said, waving her hand at him again. “Get.”

  But rather than sulking off into the shadows of the hallway, Nubs lowered his muzzle, looked at her with sad eyes and whined. Aimee peered at him. It wasn’t like Nubs to be so pathetic. He was an obedient dog; dumb, but not a troublemaker by any stretch. Some days it was almost impossible to move him from his napping spot, as though he hadn’t slept in weeks when, in truth, he slept a good sixteen hours a day.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Aimee asked him with a scowl. Nubs answered by exhaling a sigh. He flattened himself out on the carpet, assuring her there was no way he was moving from that living room. Squirreling her mouth up into a cockeyed smirk, Aimee continued to pluck popcorn off the floor.

  “You’re kind of freaking me out,” she told him. “Do you need to go out?”

  Picking up the last bits of mess, she slid the bowl onto the coffee table and got to her feet, moving to the front door to let Nubs into the front yard to do his business. But Nubs, who was typically out-of-his-mind-excited at the prospect of going outside to pee, didn’t move from his spot. He didn’t even lift his head, only following Aimee with his eyes. He watched her put her hand on the door knob and whined before looking away.

  Aimee furrowed her eyebrow and shook her head. “Whatever,” she said. “If you pee in the house…” She paused, sighed. “I’m talking to a dog. I’m having a conversation with a dog on a Saturday night.”

  Collapsing onto the couch, she grabbed her soda off the floor, pulled her feet up, and unpaused the movie.

  Less than thirty seconds later, a crash from the kitchen had Aimee on her feet in wide-eyed panic. Nubs jumped as well, growling at the darkness, his teeth bared. Aimee’s heart slammed itself against her ribs like a bird trying to free itself from a cage. Her first thought was, Someone’s in the house. Someone’s broken in and is going to kill me and the girls, unbeknownst to Jack. He’ll arrive home to a gruesome murder scene. Her eyes flitted around the room in search of a weapon. She lunged at Jack’s old piano and grabbed a candlestick off its top.

  “Hello?” she called out. She tried to sound imposing, but her attempt at confidence only made her sound that much more frightened.

  Nubs backed up. He plopped his butt down on the rug and watched Aimee approach the dark hallway, double-fisting a piece of home décor. Despite the intensity of that crash, neither Charlie nor Abigail stirred, as though the noise that had nearly stopped Aimee’s heart had somehow failed to infiltrate the thin walls of the girls’ room.

  She wavered at the border of light and darkness, scared to cross over even if it was only a few feet to the light switch.

  “I have a gun,” she warned. “I’ll blow your fucking head off.” But what was intended as a genuine threat sounded comical when it was whispered. Aimee eventually grew tired of her own apprehension and marched into the hall—suddenly a woman with no fear—and flipped the switch.

  The hall lit up. Light spilled into the living room on one end and into the kitchen on the other. It was there, in the now hazy shadows of the kitchen, that Aimee spotted the culprit. Flipped over onto its top, the kitchen table rested on the floor with its legs pointing toward the ceiling.

  She stared at the table for a long while, unable to look away from it as her mind tried to piece together how it could have fallen over. Every answer was improbable, every solution was ridiculous. Even if Nubs had taken a running start and jumped on it like a dog training for an agility contest, that table wouldn’t have budged. It was an old relic, made of solid wood, heavy enough for Aimee to need Jack’s help to move it. Sliding it across the floor, let alone lifting it and flipping it over, was impossible.

  She turned away, unable to look at it any longer. Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to keep calm. Nubs watched her doubtfully as she stepped back into the living room. She stopped dead in her tracks for the second time, her breath wavering a bit, the fingers of her free hand trembling while the other continued to cling to the candlestick.

  The mixing bowl was exactly where she left it—dead center in the middle of the coffee table. But it was empty. The popcorn was scattered across the room from wall to wall.

  Aimee met Jack at the door the second she saw Reagan’s headlights cut across the living room window. Trembling, she pulled him inside before he could say a word and grabbed the bowl off the coffee table, on the verge of tears.

  “It won’t stay in,” she insisted. “I keep picking it up but it won’t stay in. And this…” She caught Jack by the hand and led him down the hall, stopping at the mouth of the kitchen.

  Jack blinked at the overturned table, confusion shifting to worry shifting to dread.

  “Did you put the chairs like that?” he asked after a moment.

  She hadn’t noticed it before. The table was upside down, but none of the chairs had been disturbed. They were all standing in their designated spots.

  Startled, Aimee stood in the hallway with her fingers pressed to her mouth. Jack touched her shoulder, and she burst into tears.

  Chapter Five

  Jack couldn’t sleep again. He tried to stay still as he lay in bed, not wanting to wake Aimee and throw her into another fit of hysteria. It had taken hours to calm her down. Finally exhausted by her incessant, inconsolable tears, she had passed out while Jack stared up at the ceiling. It was the moment he had feared, the moment when Aimee started to realize that something wasn’t normal. That something was terribly wrong.

  Aimee was scared by the things she’d seen, but she had no idea her reaction was terrifying her husband. Jack couldn’t get the image of his own mother out of his head, couldn’t silence her choking wails as his father tried to comfort her, insisting that it was all in her head, that her mind was playing tricks. Offering the same argument to Aimee was to call her crazy. Jack had seen the immovable kitchen table sitting flat on its surfac
e. If it had only been the popcorn it would have been a different matter. It would have been easy to convince her that Nubs was stealing snacks. But that table—he and Aimee’s father had struggled to get it inside the house when Aimee had bought it. They had to call Reagan for help. It was an old refurbished relic, heavy as hell, made out of wood as dense as the Louisiana swamp. Aimee hadn’t flipped that table over herself.

  Jack squeezed his eyes shut and tried to put it out of his mind, but minutes later he was rolling over, making sure Aimee was really asleep. Holding his breath, he sat up on their creaky mattress, in desperate need of replacement. It was lumpy, and a couple of springs were starting to poke into the thin padding. It whined loud enough to wake the dead whenever they got intimate. He hadn’t fully sat up before the damn thing started to make noise. Eventually getting one foot on the carpet without those springs ratting him out, it took him another fifteen minutes to creep across the floor.

  When he finally made it into the hallway he stood in a daze. After all that effort, he wasn’t sure why he’d snuck out in the first place—something had pulled him out of that bedroom, beckoning him into the stillness of the house. He tiptoed down the hall to check on the girls. Abigail was on her side of the room, one arm jutting out over the side of her bed. Charlie, who was fond of odd sleeping positions, was pressed against the wall like a slug, her sheets pooled upon the floor like discarded snake skin. The coolness of the wall kept her from getting hot during muggy summer nights. He took a step back and pulled the door with him, ready to fit it snuggly into the jamb, and stopped short.

  Something shifted in the corner of the room. It was a shadow; a squatting figure hiding in the darkness, waiting for Jack to leave the girls alone. Jack hesitated, his fingers clutching the doorknob tight. Something twisted against the valves of his heart. It whispered to him: Close the door. It’s just your imagination. You don’t want to see what you’re afraid is here; and anyway, it’s too late to do a damn thing about it.