He let out an exasperated sigh. “You’ll remember eventually…probably. Until then, you might as well get comfortable.” He wound a tendril of her long, dark hair around his finger.
His nearness unnerved her and she stepped away and grabbed for the front door, only to find it locked. Her fingers worked almost mechanically over the locks. She needed air before she passed out.
His hands closed over hers.
“Get your hands off of me, you…you monster!” She shrieked and pushed him backward.
He stumbled on the carpeting but caught himself before he fell. “Go ahead and run you little bitch! See how far you get!”
She frantically worked at the lock until it snapped open and the door flew open. The acrid smell of smoke and iron assaulted her senses, but her momentum carried her out the door and onto the sidewalk.
Barefoot, she crossed the dark street and began making her way in the direction of the police station. If she remembered correctly, it was three blocks away. A chill rose on her skin as she tried to remain focused. She concentrated on taking one agonizing footstep in front of the other.
When she crossed over the first street, she stopped to rest beneath a street light. Leaning up against the side of a brick house, she took notice of how eerily quiet her surroundings were. The only sound was her breathing. There simply was nothing, and no one. Was she truly alone? she wondered.
She shook off the intrusive thought. Of course she wasn’t alone. Remy Moreland was real. Well, the late Remy Moreland was sort of real. Maybe surreal was a better word.
He had spun some tale of purgatory, of languishing between life and death. Then a thought struck her like a blow from above.
What if he was telling the truth?
She squeezed her eyes closed and tapped her temple with her fingertips. “Wake up, Leah, wake up!” But when she opened her eyes, nothing had changed in her dark, bleak surroundings.
Stifling a sob, she trudged on towards the police station. But with each step, hope faded. She looked in the direction of the Moreland Funeral Home. Maybe she should turn back. Remy was the only breathing connection she had. No, she wasn’t going back. She had to find the police station in the off chance someone might be there.
As she walked block to block, the futility of her situation set in. She was alone in a dark, abandoned mirror world of her old neighborhood, where she had grown up, and where she had once been happy.
She arrived at the North Pointe Hospital where she had been born more than thirty years earlier. Now, it was nothing more than an abandoned shell, dark and foreboding. She continued on.
Finally, just across the street sat the police station. It looked different. Where all of the other homes and businesses were closed up tight and dark, all of the windows here were broken out and the doors were wide open. A yellow light glowed within.
Picking up her pace, she hurried across the street. She peered cautiously inside an open door. It looked like a burglary scene. A metal desk was ransacked; all of its drawers opened or pulled out, smashed, and emptied of its paperwork and office supplies. A telephone book was ripped into ribbons and scattered like confetti all around the office. A desk lamp had been thrown against the wall, leaving a huge dent; the remnants lay broken in pieces. A telephone sat on the desk, its receiver dangling from a knotted cord.
Leah lifted the receiver and tapped at the buttons, but it was dead. She dropped the receiver and walked farther into the office. What caught her eye next was unusual. A flaky, rust-colored high velocity spray pattern covered one wall at about neck height. The same rust-colored flakes also covered the floor below in a drag pattern.
She touched the stain with two fingers and rubbed the flaky substance between her fingertips. She looked between the stain and her fingertips again and again until a morbid realization set in. It was dried blood. Someone…or something had died a very traumatic death here.
Get out, get out, get out! The words filled her head.
She turned and ran as fast as her legs would carry her, oblivious to the glass she stepped on along the way. Finally, she came to a street corner and stopped to gather her thoughts and catch her breath.
Maybe if she got to higher ground she would be safe. It would take a long time— all night perhaps—but if she could get back to her childhood home, maybe she could find sanctuary there, even if she was still alone. She knew how to get inside even if the house was locked. With any luck, her father’s loaded gun would still be in the closet.
Her plan was to take a short cut through the playground and make her way several blocks to an old trestle bridge. She hurried through the open gate. In the dim light, swings with twisted chains were visible as well as a small slide.
From behind her came the sound of crunching metal. Leaping forward, she stopped and turned back. She placed a hand over her speeding heart. It was just the gate closing, nothing else. But in the next thought she realized there was no wind to propel the gate shut.
Never mind. Just keep going.
She sprinted toward the softball field where there was an exit. Her lungs burned and her legs ached like never before. Still, she continued. Just as the exit was in her sight, she collided with a hard body and bounced backward in a stumble. As she fell, she braced her body with her right arm, her hand slamming into the dirt and taking the brunt of her weight. The shock of the fall sent her senses spinning.
“Remy!” Her voice echoed far into the distance.
But it wasn’t Remy.
As she got to her feet, her eyes adjusted to the figure before her. It was clearly a man—a small man—probably not over five feet six, petite and almost elf-like. Still, as small as he was, he was still taller than she. Long waves of raven hair spilled out from under a backward baseball cap and fell over his shoulders. Beneath his eyes, were long streaks of melted black gunk—something you might see on a baseball player after hours in the sun— and his lips appeared black as well. He had the same eerie paleness as Remy.
In the moment, Leah merely stared, transfixed by a mesmerizing beauty the creature possessed.
When his lips creased into a smile, rows of jagged black teeth showed and Leah snapped out of her reverie, prepared to run. She was so close to the exit of the playground. But her feet stuck to the ground.
“Please,” she pleaded, but her voice was a mere whisper.
He held out a cupped hand to her.
She merely stared at the outstretched hand with its long, black lacquered fingernails.
In return, he clenched his fingers in a fist, and opened his hand to her once again.
“What do you want?” she managed to say through her dry lips.
He said nothing.
Was he expecting payment?
Her teeth chattered. “I’m…I’m sorry, I have nothing…I just want to go home.”
He took one step forward, reached out with a greasy hand and traced a fingernail along the skin exposed above the bodice of her dress.
“No!” she shrieked and recoiled immediately. Her upper body recoiled from his touch, yet her feet remained planted in the dirt of the softball field.
He shrunk back, almost respectively, and pointed to the gold bangle on her wrist.
A memory flashed. The bangle had been a birthday gift from her parents. She had received it earlier that night at the party.
Before she went to Hell.
A flood of emotion erupted inside her and she stifled a sob as tears poured from her eyes. She removed the bangle and handed it to the creature.
From behind her, a gate creaked, and she turned her upper body toward the sound. As she did, her feet left the earth. The gate was open: she could leave. When she turned back to the creature, he was gone, obviously satisfied with his prize.
The sobs she had valiantly
tried to hold back, now broke through. She should have never left the safety of the funeral home. All she wanted to do now was lie down and never wake up again.
But that wasn’t an option. Summoning all of the strength she could muster, she trudged on through the open gate, and back onto the street, determined to make her way to her family home.
As she shuffled along the lonely street, she tried to sum up her situation: Despair. Panic. Paralyzing fear. Mortality.
She didn’t know how much time had passed when she finally reached the foot of the old trestle bridge. She paused and took in the impossible amount of steps she needed to climb. Even if she could make it all the way on to the bridge, more steps followed.
She considered her situation. If she could just lie down for a little while, enough time to rest and regain some strength, she could finish her journey. She walked behind the steps hoping to be hidden from the view of anyone or anything that might be lurking.
Just a few minutes, she thought as she sunk to her knees, and lay down on the bed of hard stones. She looked up into the night sky and the blanket of twinkling stars that provided a strange sense of comfort. The stars were so close, as if she could reach out and touch one.
And then Leah was sucked into the black void.
***
It was always the smell that got to him.
Remy Moreland stepped out of the safety of the funeral home and immediately covered his nose and mouth with his hand.
The stench of iron, and smoke, and God knew what else, made him wretch uncontrollably.
“Damn woman!” He hissed into the night.
And his mother always wondered why he would never settle down with a good girl and get married.
“Because women don’t listen to me,” he muttered to himself as he slipped the key into the lock on the front door of the funeral home and turned it.
Maybe locking the door was stupid. If any of the abominations that existed in this hell wanted in bad enough, they would find a way. Still, blocking the door, signified that the property and what was inside belonged only to him, and that brought Remy a small sense of comfort in a world he could no longer control.
Why had Leah run away from him? Didn’t she fathom the danger she was in?
Of course, his calling her a bitch hadn’t helped the situation. Then again, Remy had no clear idea what Leah actually was.
Sure, on the surface, she looked like an angelic, curvy brunette, with doe-like espresso brown eyes who had been thrown into a horrific, nightmarish world she could not understand. Yet, his years here warned Remy to never, ever trust anything he saw. In reality, Leah could very well be some type of malevolent force that would tie him up and torture him with teeth and fingernails for years if he got too close or too comfortable near her.
Staying on his guard was paramount to his own safety. Still, on the off chance she was like he was, his conscience and guilt drove him out of the safety of his flat and into the darkness to find her and bring her home.
Damn him for having a conscience.
But where to start looking? he sighed. He knew where to look; he just didn’t want to pay the price. The Playground Magician. The nightmarish little man-thing who smelled of gasoline, with zig-zagged rows of razor teeth, who guarded the playground and held you hostage until you paid him a ransom. Lord, how he hated that guy—or thing, or whatever the hell it was.
Remy twisted the gold band on his right ring finger as he walked along the sidewalk looking for shadows of what might be hiding in corners or behind buildings. The ring had been left to him by his paternal grandfather. Not only a valuable heirloom, but something he was meant to wear when he finally married.
An ache filled his chest.
Sentimental fool.
And to think he fancied himself a cynic.
If he could take it all back, he would have married the first nice girl he met after graduating Mortuary College and thrown himself into the family business. Like his brother’s did. Were Ryan and Rory really happy?
Well, they didn’t seem unhappy.
Of course, who knew what his family members were up to these days. The only thing he knew for certain was that after his accident, his family told everyone he succumbed to his injuries, and then dumped him into a cut-rate nursing home, and never bothered to take an hour out of their busy lives to visit him.
The Fates made sure he knew his family had abandoned him.
He could see it all so clearly in his mind. But time had more or less curbed the sting.
For Remy, there would never be a marriage or a family to follow. His behavior had seen to that, and now he was paying the price. Oh well, at least the ring could buy the information on Leah’s whereabouts.
“Leah! Where are you?” He called out into the black night, his voice echoing into the distance. But he soon realized that calling out to her was fruitless. The way he acted around her had ensured she would hide from him even if she did hear him.
As he stepped through the playground gates, he readied himself for the magician to appear. As usual, on their own power, the gates swung closed behind him and he heard the lock snap shut.
But the magician didn’t appear.
He was toying with Remy.
“Where are you?” Remy called into the darkness.
From his peripheral vision, he saw a movement. Before he could turn his head, the magician was in front of him. The quickness of the odd little being startled him, but Remy quickly recovered. The beings fed on fear and weakness.
“Where is she?” he demanded.
The magician lifted his shoulders in a shrug.
He didn’t speak. He never spoke.
“You know where she is. You know everything!”
A look of feigned innocence came over the magician’s features.
“Stop playing games with me, you little maggot!” Remy sunk his fist into his palm. “You may have your magic, but I have nothing but pure rage! I will tear you into little pieces and scatter you all over this playground. I’m not afraid of you, and I have nothing to lose!”
The magician let out a noiseless sigh and rolled his eyes before holding out a grease-streaked hand.
Remy twisted the gold band from his ring finger and gave it a final squeeze in his fist before handing it over.
The magician took his payment, and the ring vanished. He then looked at Remy with a blank stare.
“Where is she? I am not asking you again.” He punctuated each word with impatience.
Finally, the magician relented and pointed toward the slopes, and used his fingers to mimic a person walking up steps.
At first, Remy was baffled. Then it became clear. “She headed to the trestle bridge?”
The magician didn’t change expression. It was the only information Remy was going to get from him. It was enough though. He at least had a direction to look. Without any further acknowledgement, Remy moved quickly toward the playground exit. Luckily, the gate was open and he exited without incident.
But strangely, as he stood outside the twelve foot high chain link fencing, a gold bangle was clutched between his fingers
A sinking feeling filled his chest. Was this Leah’s jewelry? And if so, what had the playground magician done to her? Maybe the magician had been playing with him all along. Still, he had to try to find her—or what might be left of her.
He hurried down the dimly lit street until he reached the funeral home, and ran up the slope to the trestle bridge. Had Leah been this close all along?
At the foot of the steps, Remy paused to look around. The bridge above looked dark and foreboding, and the hairs on his forearm stood up to attention. Beneath, the train tracks looked crisscrossed and raggedy, filled with wildly overgrown weeds.
“Lea
h!” He called out at the top of his voice, and heard the echoes vanish into the distance.
There was no response—not that he really expected one. He walked to the foot of the stairs and tentatively tried the first step, half expecting it to crumble beneath his feet, but it seemed to be strong.
Of course, nothing in this world was what it seemed. It was very possible he could ascend the stairs to the top and then be mercilessly hurled to the ground below, paralyzed and buried beneath a pile of metal and rotted wood.
As he took the first step, something caught his eye. In the weeds, almost concealed behind the steps was what looked like a mannequin. It only took a second to realize it was Leah.
He jumped off the step and rushed to her. Kneeling down beside her, he saw he was too late.
Leah was on her back, her brown eyes with long lashes staring up. Her lips were slightly parted as if ready to speak, and her fingers reached upward. But there was no animation in her features. The sure sign she was gone.
A potent wave of sadness mingled with anger overtook him. Why couldn’t he just lie down and go wherever it was Leah had gone off to? It wasn’t fair. He had done enough penance for his sins.
But Leah, beautiful Leah. She’d come down to his purgatory and right back up again. Maybe she was an angel who had committed a tiny indiscretion. How he wished he could take the events of earlier back and enjoyed her presence, even if only for a short time.
He looked up at the black sky, and something different filled his vision.
Stars.
There was a scattering above of twinkling stars that had never been there before.
At least her final vision was a sweet one.
He couldn’t leave her here alone. Back at the funeral home, he could at least clean her up and put her into a nice, locked coffin where her body would be safe.
A sharp pain emanated from his hand. He looked down to see he had unconsciously squeezed the gold bangle in his hand until the edge cut into his fingers.
Lifting Leah’s hand, he pressed a kiss into her palm and slipped the bangle over her limp fingers onto her wrist. “I’m sorry, Leah, so sorry,” he whispered.
Remember the Stars Page 2