by P. T. Phronk
“Dad, just sit down,” Caleb said.
“Didn’t this chick say Mae was the one who came up with this insane idea?” Ash said, pointing at me. “Are we all just going to believe her and pretend that makes any sense? I don’t see Mae here.”
Craig ignored him. “Do you really want to finish this, son?” He leaned forward to grip his son’s chin between his thumb and forefinger for a moment and examine his face. “Are you going to like the answer?”
The cutting board jumped, tilting to one side and sending the wine glass toppling. A chip of glass came off the edge of the base as it bashed against the Y note. Nobody had been touching it.
“Old floors,” Jasmine said, shifting her weight to make the wooden boards creak.
I leaned in to examine the board. “Or Trista telling us that Caleb didn’t do it.”
Lightning flashed, and I thought I saw faces outside the window, at the edge of the woods. Odd bulging eyes, like the aliens Wes used to mumble about in his sleep. Of course, as with all the other apparitions the house had thrown at me, they were gone the next moment, though the feeling of being stared at did not go away. Now, watching the glass wobble on the board with nobody touching it, I realized that perhaps the feeling never would go away.
“We should finish it,” I said again, stronger this time.
Craig’s face was still red, with a sheen of sweat. “Let’s go beyond yes or no, then, shall we?” he said. He’d failed to properly keep the hair out of his eyes and a strand of it stuck to his forehead. “Honey, if you’re really out there, or … God forgive us … up there, then help us settle this. Point to who took you away.”
Silence as we watched the toppled glass wobble, perhaps because of the uneven floor, perhaps not.
The house creaked behind me. I expected another apparition, but it was only Marcus appearing in the doorway with a silver tray of steaming food—a type of casserole on rice, divided in the middle to separate the vegetarian side from the omnivore side. Caleb’s head snapped up, as if he’d forgotten where he was.
The wine glass flew from the board, across the room, and directly at Marcus.
It shattered against the tray he carried. Shards of glass ejected in every direction as the tray clanged to the ground. Plates shattered, forks clanged, a perfect cube of tender beef left a trail of sauce as it tumbled across the rug.
Marcus hissed and clutched a bleeding hand.
“Daddy?” Jasmine said. Was she concerned for his injury, or for the possibility of his guilt?
“It was him,” Ash said, pointing.
Blood dripped from Marcus’s hand. He turned back to the kitchen, but Craig followed close behind him. “Marcus. Marcus! Don’t you go far now. Ash, can you help me?”
Ash got up from his seat and trailed Marcus too, forming a barrier around him as he rushed to the kitchen, then held his hand under the sink faucet.
“Have you all lost your damn minds? A séance?”
“Did you do it, Marcus?” Craig asked.
“Of course I didn’t do anything to Trista, Craig. How long have we known each other? How long have we been friends?”
Ash pointed at the shattered glass sparkling in the firelight across the hall. “The glass pointed right at you. It’s evidence.”
“You fool,” Marcus said as he wrapped his hand in a dish towel. “Kicking a glass at me is not evidence, and if we’re at the point of throwing wild accusations, I have an idea of who kicked it.”
“I saw it happen,” Caleb mumbled.
“Saw what happ—” I began to ask him, but everyone was talking over each other.
Ash held an odd crooked smile on his face.
Marcus tightened the towel around his hand and ranted. “We’ve all seen it, Ash.” He jabbed his wrapped hand in Ash’s direction. Blood was already soaking through. The cut was bad. “The way you look at her. Looked at her, God damn it.”
“Let me get this straight. You’re accusing me now.” Ash was as monotone as ever; if he was feeling anything, he kept it buried. “Accusing me of not only murdering someone you admit I care about, but staging a séance to kick a Ouija board and frame you. Do I have that right, Marcus? Because it sounds like a pretty complex plan, and have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor?”
“You condescending piece of …” Marcus said, and rushed around the kitchen counter toward Ash. Craig grabbed Marcus’s arm and got an elbow rammed into his nose for it.
I watched in horror, but tried to hold on to the details and piece together what was happening. One piece that stood out was that Ash had been sitting a good distance from the Ouija board, and while I hadn’t seen anyone kick it, there was no way Ash could have done it.
Marcus calmed down as soon as he saw Craig’s bleeding nose. “Oh Craig, oh Christ, I’m sorry man.” He grabbed another cotton dish towel from a drawer and held it to Craig’s nose.”
“It’s fine,” Craig said, but he recoiled from Marcus’s touch and took the towel himself.
I cleared my throat. “Let’s cool off. We still don’t know anything here.”
“I need a smoke,” Marcus said.
Jasmine stepped forward. “I’ll come with you, Dad.”
Before Ash and Craig could object, I offered to go along and keep an eye on them. Nobody said anything, so I escorted the recently accused murderer to go have a cigarette and calm down.
The mud room near the stairs to the basement doubled as a smoking room, at least when the weather was bad. It smelled like cigarettes there before Marcus even lit his, and I could imagine generations of household help and rebellious teenagers using this one smelly room to get away from the odourless opulence of the rest of the house. A narrow door off the mud room must have led to the pantry near the family room—a clever layout to enable the hired help to load groceries right into the kitchen, or quickly slip outside to serve appetizers to the guests lounging at that tiki hut by the pool. That gave me another vision of grabbing a bottle of air freshener from the pantry to spray the mud room, in a futile attempt to hide their smoking habits from Craig.
Jasmine opened the back door while Marcus lit up. The sound of the storm was nearly deafening when it wasn’t filtered through windows and walls, and I could feel the sting in my lungs from the acrid red rain. When lightning lit up the yard, I could see the swimming pool, the immaculately trimmed shrubbery all around the grounds, and the gated wall around the yard. Beyond that, towering, untamed trees loomed, reminding me that we were on an island of luxury in a sea of wilderness and chaos. Was it any wonder that some of the chaos had seeped inside?
Marcus tossed the cigarette outside after only a few puffs. He pulled two dish towels from under his shirt. “I didn’t do this, Amy. I know you just met me and have no reason to believe me, but I didn’t. I wouldn’t. Why would I?”
Jasmine hugged him. “You treated her so well, Daddy. I know you didn’t do it. Of course you didn’t.”
“If we can all just stay calm, we’ll figure it out in the morning,” I said.
But Marcus shook his head. He handed one of the towels to Jasmine, then grabbed an umbrella from a rack near the door. “If we cover our mouths it won’t be too bad. Under umbrellas, running, our exposure time won’t be too long, and we can make it to the car. I just had the filters replaced in Jasmine’s car, so it will be safe in there.”
“Wait,” I said.
Jasmine helped Marcus wrap the towel around his face. He held up the increasingly red cloth failing to keep his hand from bleeding. “It’s not safe for us here.”
“You can’t just run away,” I said, my voice starting to crack. Because wasn’t running away what I did best? Could I really protest this, when I’d left my entire family at the first sign of trouble?
“Look, you tried to keep us safe. I appreciate that—you coming all the way out here to fix our shit. But your room didn’t keep Trista safe. You can’t keep me and Jasmine safe now. You might not even be safe yourself. I had no part in this, which means one of the pe
ople back there did. You could come with us.”
“No,” I said. I won’t run away again. “I won’t try to stop you, but I need to see this through.”
Jasmine touched my wrist. My lips trembled, and when she saw that I was about to break down, she leaned in and hugged me. “You remind me of Trista,” she said, a tremble in her voice now too. “She always tackled problems head on.”
Head on. Pretty much the opposite of the reality of my life, but I was something different to these people. These strangers. To anyone who didn’t know me well, I was a stereotype, a fantasy.
I pulled back but held Jasmine at arm’s reach a moment longer. “I’m so sorry about your friend. I’m going to do my best to help find justice for her.”
Jasmine leaned close and spoke softly in my ear. “Oh, Amy, she wasn’t just my friend.”
Before I could ask what she meant, Marcus tied the cloth around her face and gently pushed her toward the door. “We gotta go now, honey.”
They gave me one last wave as they slipped out through the open door, then ran across the path to a side gate where they could get out of the yard and around to Jasmine’s car at the front of the house.
I started to think of excuses for letting them go. Did I even need any? This wasn’t my family. None of this was in my job description.
A loud crack rang out, accompanied by a flash. I went to close the door against the thunder, but there was something wrong—the flash didn’t have the red tinge of the storm’s lightning, the crack wasn’t booming like thunder.
Jasmine screamed.
I swung the door back open, and then a double-flash of lightning lit up the yard. Marcus lay on the ground. Jasmine covered him with outstretched arms.
Behind them, a tall person wearing a gas mask lowered a rifle. “We warned you,” he shouted over the thrashing storm. “Now it’s our turn.”
Part III
An Invasion
Chapter 7
I panicked, and in that moment of weakness, I was stupid enough to try something heroic. They needed their fantasy. Their Jack. The one who didn’t run from her problems.
Two umbrellas were left in the rack by the door. I grabbed the larger one, flipped open the Velcro strap with my thumb like it was the safety on a gun, then pushed the trigger on the handle as I ran out the door. The umbrella whooshed open. Instead of putting it over my head to block out the rain, I held it in front of me. Was I thinking that it would block a bullet? Perhaps my panicked mind thought so.
It would, at least, make it harder to aim at me. Another crack filled the air, and I didn’t feel any pain, so I kept running and hoped Jasmine and Marcus would still be breathing when I reached them.
The wind tugged at the umbrella. Rain splattered at my face. I could feel the sting as droplets exploded on my skin, and my lungs burned from the horrible mist that filled the air when it rained, ever since the day of the first environmental catastrophe—the same day I lost my family. The smell of the mist, which I thought of as rotten apples, and others associated with licorice, or old molasses, was strong enough to make me retch. I didn’t have long before the rain would make me sick for days, or worse.
I wasn’t sure how many bullets that rifle could fire, but surely he’d need to reload. Where was Mae? She would know. And she had a gun of her own.
Nobody else saw Mae, I thought. They all looked at me strangely when I brought her up. Could I have dreamed her up when I bumped my head?
I nearly stumbled on Jasmine and Marcus. The rain and darkness were so thick that I could hardly see them, but I heard Marcus groan. That meant he was alive, but I could make out a lot of red.
Jasmine faced me. “You came?”
There was no time to verbalize a plan. I lay my umbrella down in front of us for cover, jamming it in the branches of a rose bush beside the path so it wouldn’t blow away immediately. I did the same with Marcus’s umbrella.
I pointed back at the glowing entrance to the house, where I must have dropped my flashlight as I bolted. “Too much light. We’d be sitting ducks.”
Jasmine pointed at where the path split off to the right, then across the darkened pool deck, and over to another entrance that must have been near the ball room.
“What about the cellar door?” I asked.
Jasmine shook her head. “There ain’t no cellar door. We only joked about it when we were kids. How … how did you know that?”
Mae had said she got in through a cellar door. How did she get in the basement?
No time.
Marcus sat up. I took Jasmine’s umbrella and she got an arm around him, while I helped him from the other side. We all coughed, a last chance to get it out, then I held a finger up to my lips, and we bolted along the path.
One of the umbrellas I’d put on the ground blew free and sailed toward the large man in the gas mask—Mary Poppins on the offensive.
It was enough distraction for us to break free of the meagre light from the door and enter the darkness of the back deck. Surely he wouldn’t be able to see us there unless the lightning gave us away. Jasmine tried to keep the last umbrella over us as we ran, but the stinging water still got in my face, and I could barely draw enough breath to keep running. Marcus wheezed too, and I hoped it was only because of the rain and not a bullet through his lung.
I glanced back, but there was no sign of the man in the gas mask. Lighting flashed in the distance and, still, he did not appear, which I hoped meant he’d lost track of us too.
The pool did not have a fence around it. That’s not up to provincial safety codes. What if a kid wandered away and fell in? Apparently part of my mind was always at work, worrying about government codes and child safety, even when I was being shot at.
Jasmine led us around the pool carefully. In the dark, it was nearly invisible, but she knew what to look for. I hoped—and perhaps Jasmine was hoping the same thing—that the man behind us would fail to notice the pool before tumbling in and drowning.
We crossed the pool deck, then the bit of lawn before the other back entrance.
I heard a voice behind us. “Shit!” I hoped for a splash following that, but none came. Still, if he came at the pool from the wrong angle, it would take a moment to get around it, which would buy us more time.
An APT Security sign was poked into the garden beside the back entrance, identical to the one around front: This house protected by APT Security. A security camera above it would have backed up the sign’s promise, at least when power and communications were functional. I’d approved the design for the signs myself, back when I was more involved with the marketing department at APT. One feature I’d insisted on was a long, sturdy stake to go in the ground—if homeowners had to replace the sign too often, or neighbours saw broken signs blowing across the lawn, it’d do immeasurable harm to our brand.
I grabbed the sign and pulled, taking just a bit of pride in the fact that I had to apply significant force to wrest it from the wet earth.
“The key. My front pocket,” Marcus said.
“It’s okay, I’ve got mine,” Jasmine said as she produced a handful of keys from her purse and unlocked the back door. How many people had keys to this house?
Splashing footsteps approached from the left. I didn’t even see the man until he was upon us, suddenly blinding us with a flashlight.
“Get in the house!” he shouted, his voice muffled.
Marcus collapsed through the doorway. Jasmine followed and cushioned his fall, dragging him inside. When I hesitated, the man roughly grabbed my shoulder and turned me around, then pushed me toward the door.
“G-go! Now.”
Thunder crashed, and anger flashed within me. Was this the same guy that was shooting at us? His voice sounded different, less certain. But he could have a gun too. He could follow us inside and use it at any moment.
I knew a sturdy lawn sign would protect my company’s brand from immeasurable harm, but this was even better: my brand could do immeasurable harm to this asshole’s
face. I lunged backward with the pointy end. He screeched and dropped the flashlight.
In the light reflecting off the ground, I could finally see who was terrorizing us. He wore a full raincoat that may have been yellow at one point, but the red rain pouring over it had dyed it orangey-pink. His gas mask, too, had a bleached pink hue, and now it also had a puncture just below the left eyepiece, with my APT security sign sticking out of it.
He removed the sign and tossed it to the ground.
“Who are you?” I shouted at him. “Why did you kill Trista?”
He clawed at his face. Blood dribbled from the rip in the mask before the rain washed it away.
“Why did you kill Trista?” I asked again, picking up the sign and pointing it at him like a spear.
Finally, he raised his head. I could just make out blue eyes behind the glass windows in the gas mask. “Who the f-fuck is Trista?”
He went for a pocket in his raincoat.
Gun. Gun! Gun! my mind reminded me. I threw myself backward and slammed the door shut before I could find out if my mind was correct.
Jasmine was hyperventilating. “Who the hell was that? What is happening?”
I snapped the lock on the door shut, then looked for a chain lock. No dice. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Oh, Daddy.” Jasmine sobbed. Marcus mumbled something. His breath came out in an unsteady rhythm.
Voices shouted on the other side of the door. As I’d suspected, there were two of them. The glass window in the door was too high for me to see out of, but beams of light suggested a pair of bobbing flashlights carried by the two men: the big guy with the rifle, and the smaller guy in the pink raincoat.
“We need to get away from the door and warn the others.”
Jasmine closed her eyes and exhaled slowly, willing herself to calm down. She unwrapped the cloth from her face and applied it to Marcus’s wound, which was forming a pool on the tile floor of the small anteroom we’d found ourselves in. “Yes. Yes, okay. Daddy, can you walk?” She grabbed his good hand and placed it on the cloth. “Put pressure on this. It’ll help.”