Wild Swans

  “But he didn’t take you home, did he?” Cally asked, her voice quiet, her head lowered as if in shame.

  Ruby shook her head. She burst into tears, holding her stomach as if she’d been punched in the gut.

  “Oh Momma,” Althea whispered. The sudden, horrible, ugly realization struck her like a copperhead hiding under dank leaves. “Oh Momma, he didn’t.” She crawled toward her mother; put her hands on her mother’s arms. “Momma?”

  Ruby nodded, sniffed, and regained her composure. “I never regretted having you Althie. Not for a minute.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Did Lindt show you that? What that boy did to me?”

  “No, he didn’t.” she said. “I promise.”

  “Well,” Ruby said, wiping tears from her eyes. “Now you know. I suppose the truth would have come out some time or another.” She looked up at Hank. “I’m sorry. I really wanted you to be my son. I hoped and prayed.” Her face was pale, her smile wan, apologetic. “I guess God said no.” She shrugged. “It’s my fault for not listening.”

  “I want you to know, Miss Ruby, that I think Althea is a wonderful girl, and I do care about her. But,” he turned to Althea, “she made me see that my destiny lies elsewhere.” He shrugged, his smile crooked, charming. “I was meant to be a priest, and not a husband.”

  “I know,” Althea said. “I’ve always known.”

  “It appears, dear friends, that we have greater problems to consider,” Lindt said. His voice, though soft, carried throughout the room. He pointed at the door that was left open. Althea gasped.

  A shadow loomed in the threshold.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The shadow-thing was long, pencil thin and ran like a crack in the universe from the doorway across the threshold and into the apartment. The profound darkness clashed with the white radiance filling the doorway, which was eerie in and of itself. Althea knew at that instant that, like the scene in the alley depicting her mother and her aunt, everything beyond the door was void. There was nothing else. Somehow they had been removed from the reality they knew. They were quite literally trapped.

  “It’s a remnant,” Althea whispered. Lindt nodded.

  “We can’t get around it, can we?” Cally asked. “Even though it’s just a shadow.”

  “There is nothing beyond the remnant,” Lindt said, confirming Althea’s thoughts. “There is nothing beyond but a white empty expanse.”

  “No, there is something else. Something you’re not telling us.” Althea said.

  “Yes, there is one other thing, something that no human language can describe. It’s something so horrible that your mind will bog down trying to comprehend it. The long thin shadow we see is indeed a Remnant, just as Althea said. But there is more. What we’re looking at is just an appendage of the horror that lies beyond the doorway.”

  The atmosphere in the room became weighty, surreal. “What’s happening?” Althea asked. She laid her head on her mother’s lap. “My head feels so heavy,” she whispered as she slid down onto the floor. “I feel like a great weight is pressing down on me.”

  “Everything feels too heavy,” Cally concurred as she slid down the wall and onto the floor. Hank pressed his hands against his temples and began uttering the Lord’s Prayer. Seconds later, he too, succumbed to the intense pressure and collapsed onto the floor.

  “It is distorting the reality in the room. Your minds can’t keep up.” Lindt said.

  “But it’s not affecting you,” Hank said.

  “No, because I am a part of what the thing is. It wants to take me back into itself.” Lindt uttered a tired laugh. “I won’t let that happen.”

  The distortion grew worse.

  Ruby moaned, her fingers digging deep into both sides of her head. Without warning she doubled over and vomited over the chair’s arm, avoiding striking her daughter. She collapsed, first onto her knees, then across Althea’s back. Cally turned, her face reflecting the panic that Althea herself felt. She tried to rise, to rush towards Lindt, but stumbled and fell as soon as she rose, too, overcome by the pervasive evil of the shadow to rush to his assistance.

  Althea felt her own stomach muscles cramp up. She doubled over, grabbing her head as everything she knew or thought she knew warped and twisted around her. She felt her fingers twisting her hair, pulling hard, the pain jolting her into a framework of reality which she could understand. At that instant she realized that her eyes were clenched closed, her jaw tightened so much that the delicate sinews twanged like over tuned guitar strings.

  I can still see, she thought with a shock, even though my eyes are shut, I can still see.

  And what she saw defied anything that she could possibly comprehend, and the only thing that she did understand was that Lindt had changed.

  Lindt was no longer a slightly flabby middle-aged man with graying brown hair sitting in the middle of the floor in a pair of old man’s khakis and a white t shirt. He, or what Althea could understand of as he, stood in the center of the little living room; his body glowed, growing longer and thinner as the center axis of himself rotated while pulsating great beams of pure white light.

  The shadow slipped into the room and erected itself, then, divided itself into six more shadow-things, all tall, all utterly black, all standing slanted and twisted like a grove of crooked old trees.

  Hank stumbled toward them, holding his crucifix out like a man holding a vampire at bay. He uttered something, but the sound was so distorted Althea couldn’t understand it. She wanted to cry out to him, to warn him, but she found she could not. Hank stumbled just a few feet toward the nearest shadow-thing and then succumbed, collapsing into a heap, clasping his head, screaming as blood poured from his nose and ears.

  There was sound, a terrible rushing sound, and yet there wasn’t. Dazzling lights assailed her, and a buzzing sensation ripped at her skin as if she were standing too close to a high tension wire. There were colors she couldn’t begin to comprehend as the warp of the tiny pocket of their universe twisted and bulged. Althea shoved her head between her knees, trying not to see what was happening, yet, it seemed that her own head had opened up and became a receptacle for every perception.

  **No.**

  Huge dollops of blood splattered on the floor. Althea’s nose gushed, blood oozed from her tear ducts and trickled from her ears. And yet she could still see. She saw Cally stumbling toward Lindt, her arms open wide. Althea was astonished at the sheer strength of will and love that her aunt showed. The terrible thrumming sound intensified, Althea’s field of vision was invaded by brilliant white lines. She pressed her cheek against the floor and vomited weakly.

  **Take me with you. **Althea heard Cally say in her mind.

  **Cally **Lindt said.

  **Take me**

  **With all my heart I wish**

  **I love** Their minds pulsed together.

  **Yes...**

  The creature that they knew as Lindt became longer, thinner, until he was nothing more than a long thin string of violet gold light. No one could look at him. Cally collapsed to the floor, one hand raised as if trying to grasp for him. At that instant, the shadows rushed towards him, light pulsed, and the string shot through the ceiling. The shadows pursued. Reality rushed in; there was a loud slam as if a tremendous door had shut. The sounds of summer returned. Althea raised her head and looked toward her aunt. Cally, still stretched out on the floor where Lindt had stood only moments before, keened.

  ****

  After what seemed like an eternity, Althea regained consciousness. Ruby rose, and knelt next to the wall. Althea stood shakily, as did Hank who helped her up. With a trembling hand, she wiped the blood from his nose and upper lip with her veil. He smiled weakly down at her.

  “He’s gone.” Cally moaned. She knelt in the spot where Lindt had stood, heartbroken, utterly devastated. “I’m never going to see him again.”

  A soft breezed stirred, whirled around her. She looked up, confused, as something that Althea could
only describe as flower petals (although she knew that they were from no plant that ever lived on earth) spiraled around and upon her aunt. They floated like tiny pieces from heaven, soft, purple and crimson, and the room was filled with a scent that no perfumer in Paris could ever duplicate.

  Cally was showered with them. She looked up, tears glistening on her cheeks, the petals landing in her hair, onto the floor, piled into her lap. She grasped double handfuls of them, and buried her face in them.

  A word hung in the room. It was Lindt’s voice, soft, humorous, the culmination of everything Althea knew he was.

  Love.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Two weeks after Lindt’s memorable disappearance, Althea began frequenting the library. She poured over microfilm documents and old moldy papers, looking for anything about the man whom Ruby named as her father. It took some doing as Ruby wasn’t willing to give up the name so easily. It took Cally’s threat of telling the girl herself before she finally relented, wrote the name down on a scrap of paper, shoved it into her daughter’s hand and then fled upstairs and locked herself into her apartment.

  The name written on the note was that of Jimmy Winthrop, and during Althea’s research, she discovered her father had been a busy boy these past eighteen years. A very busy boy indeed.

  Busy. And rich.

  Althea was determined to meet him, and the subsequent argument across the breakfast table the morning prior to her adventure sent her mother scurrying to Mrs. Bristow’s Cadillac, and driving off in a huff, puffs of exhaust and river dust blowing in the hot August wind as she sped away, theoretically at least, to pay off the last of the failed wedding’s bills.

  This was fine with Althea. She didn’t want her mother; who had recently gone from angry and obtuse, to being cloying and bitter, around when she left.

  Despite her mother’s fears for her daughter’s safety, Althea was not in the least afraid of meeting her father for the first, and most likely the last, time.

  Althea smiled like a well fed alligator.

  If I should disappear, like Mom is afraid will happen, she told herself, the US Army would get involved. And what would become of Mr. Jimmy Winthrop, his little wifey, and his political ambitions then?

  Besides, she thought. I have a trump card. She shifted further up on the bed, crossed her legs and opened the box that she had found in the brown paper sack that Lindt had given her the night he left.

  She hadn’t opened it until just then. Had Althea known what treasure lay inside the little box, she would have worn it on her wedding day. Had she done so, things would have ended differently.

  The box was filled with white light. It shone around the cracks of the little box and flared like a tiny lighthouse lamp when she opened it fully. The light dropped to a small soft blue white pulse. She reached inside and extracted a necklace. A soft white gold stone glistened on a long thin filament the same color of Althea’s resident universe. She held it in her hand, and the filament inside the stone twisted and morphed like a living thing.

  Instinctively she knew that it wasn’t merely a pretty bauble. It was somehow alive, and that it connected herself to Lindt.

  “You gave me a part of yourself, didn’t you?” Althea asked as she raised the pendant to eye level. “I can feel your presence and that makes me glad. And I know you won’t let anything bad happen to me.” She smiled as she put the pendant on. The stone slid down and nestled between her small breasts. “It’s like you said. We’re connected. Everything is connected. There is no place you can go without me being aware of you.”

  She frowned at that moment. If that were the case, wouldn’t the Remnants, who were also connected to everything, time and place also know? Surely they too knew where Lindt was, if they did not have him already. But no, Althea was certain that they had not. They might have a good idea as to where he went, but not the means to reach him.

  It was equally possible they would return for her and her family as well, but that was highly doubtful. The Remnants, Lindt had once explained, had short memories.

  A horn blared, interrupting her thoughts. It was Cally, with Stephen Grangier’s beat up old truck. She stepped out onto the balcony and looked down. Cally leaned out of the driver’s side window, looking up at her niece.

  “Are you coming or what?”

  “Is Mom back yet?”

  “No, she’s still off paying bills. Now, let’s go if we’re going.”

  “Okay, I’ll be down in a minute.”

  She touched the pendant. It was warm, even through her blouse. Althea thought of her mother, of the boy whom she nearly married, who had finally stood up to his parents and gone off to join the priesthood, as he said, to “battle the forces of darkness,” that he knew were all too real. She thought of Jake who left home to seek his own destiny. She experienced a bittersweet pang, just as she did the day she watched Lindt tossing shovelfuls of dead fireflies onto the fire, and how the black line of smoke smeared the pale sky.

  It was one thing to want to know certain things, something completely different to rush headlong into something that was frightening and dangerous. Her father was, after all, a monster, and she was now preparing to go into his lair.

  The horn blared again. Althea gathered her purse along with her courage and called out the window to her aunt. “I’m coming.”

  ****

  “Do you know where he is?” Cally asked as Althea climbed into the passenger side.

  “Yes,” she replied. “He’s been making a big name for himself. He’s not hard to find.”

  “That’s good,” Cally replied as she put the truck into gear. “I want him found and dealt with, so we can all get on with our lives.”

  “Same here,” Althea replied.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” Cally asked as she pulled the truck to a stop in front of a series of nondescript buildings. “We can turn back now, let this whole mess go.”

  “You and Mom have let this whole mess go for eighteen years now,” Althea replied. “Ain’t it time someone put an end to this?”

  “I don’t see why. Let’s go home and get on with our lives.”

  “I plan to,” Althea stated, “as soon as I take care of a little business with Daddy Dearest.”

  “He was a punk when we were kids,” Cally said. “I never liked him. He bullied the smaller kids and the girls...well, you already know what he was like with the girls...But his parents were loaded and he was popular with the jocks and the girls who didn’t mind walking on the wild side. That made him bad back then, but now he’s all grown up, still loaded, but with political ambitions. He’s got friends, Althie, dangerous friends. You might not make it out of that store; much less us get home in one piece.”

  “You really think he’s that bad?”

  “All I know for sure is that there’s a lot of swamp land between us and Eldred’s Bend.”

  Althea felt the warmth of the pendant nestled between her breasts and said, “He ain’t gonna do nothing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life,” Althea replied.

  “You might find that being sure of something isn’t necessarily a good thing,” Cally said. “I told you before; the man inside that shop is a monster. Your momma and I spent our whole lives protecting you from him. Now, I’m going to ask you again. Are you sure you want to confront the man who raped your momma and made you a bastard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m coming in with you.”

  Althea put her hand on top of her aunt’s. “No, I have to do this, Tante. It’s got to be me.”

  “All right,” she said after what Althea saw was a long deliberation. “But I’m letting you know right here and now I’m not happy with this in the slightest. Who knows what he might do to you when he gets you alone?”

  “He can’t do too much. It’s a hardware store.”

  “You’d be surprised. That man
is a pig, Althie. A big nasty pig and he ain’t particular about who he goes after. And remember, he’s got friends now...powerful friends.”

  “So do we.”

  “What are you talking about?” Cally asked.

  “I’ve got a trump card,” Althea said, pulling the stone out of her blouse. “You know he’s not gonna let anything bad happen to us.”

  Cally’s eyes widened. “He gave you one too.”

  Althea laughed. “So, the two of you did more than just smooch in the bushes then.”

  Cally offered Althea a lopsided grin, and pulled a similar stone out of her blouse. “He gave it to me the night we went to the movies together. Lindt said it was a part of him, and as long as it was close to me he’d be close to me too.”

  “Well what do you know?” Althea said. “Lindt was the lover you yearned for and the daddy I wish I had. I wonder what would have happened to Mom if she had let him into her life, even just a little bit.”

  “I don’t know. But I tell you, I wish she had. His brief stay healed this family in more ways than you can know.”

  “I wonder what would happen if we got into big time trouble? Is it like a bat signal? Will he come to us when we call?” Althea asked, changing the subject.

  “I have no idea niece-mine. And I don’t care to risk it.”

  “I’m not a stupid woman, Tante. I know this is taking a big risk,” Althea said slowly. “But I’m really not afraid. I honestly don’t think Winthrop can hurt us anymore.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” Cally said as she returned the pendant to its place between her breasts. She gave the front of the hardware store a scathing look

  . “You’re hunting razorbacks with a hope and a prayer that our angel will come in case the boar charges. I’m not so sure this is a good idea. But you’re a grown woman and you’re as bull- headed as your momma, so you’ll do as you want regardless of what I tell you.” Cally jerked her head toward the store. “You go in, say what you’ve got to say, and get out. You’ve got ten minutes or I’m coming in after you. Got it?”