Duality

by Nasser Rabadi

  “It happens here,” Rose replied. “That’s what Carpenter is, it’s a place where strange stuff happens. Don’t you ever wonder why it’s always so dull here? Why the sky is always black as ink? Why those murders happen and there’s no sense of fear among… anyone? It’s almost as if she never died.”

  “I know.”

  “So if you know, please, please, please believe me.”

  “Okay,” he said, “I do.”

  For a moment—perhaps less—Rose thought she saw the light return briefly under the bed when Shawn looked away. She did not mention it. The last thing she wanted was for Shawn Porter to think she and Valerie were both loonies who belonged in the insane asylum.

  The little girl ran out of her room, there was a monster after her. She cried for mommy, but mommy couldn’t hear her, and the monster was oh, so close to getting her. She ran down the hall, hitting her hands against the wall, trying to make noise, trying to alert somebody—anybody! The scream in her throat was too big to escape, and she was too terrified to breathe. She was always scared of the monster in her closet, but never knew what would happen if it ever came running to her. The eyes were what she saw first: those weary, red-rimmed eyes. And the girl knew that in the heart of them, there had been something once that wasn’t so scary—sweet, even.

  Then the monster grabbed her in the inviting darkness. It wrapped a towel around her face and held her jaw shut. It silently dragged her back through the house until it got to the basement door, then the monster opened it and stepped down as carefully as a monster could.

  Down in the basement, in private darkness, the monster held the girl down on the pool table. The monster removed the towel and held its knife—no, it was a claw—to the edge of the girl’s throat. Without hesitation, the monster slashed. Sweet blood spilled out and filled the room with a coppery smell.

  Then the monster lifted the towel, wiped the knife, and went for an eye. After that, it chopped off the girl’s nose. The monster smiled and sunk the knife into the girl’s head. She had been dead for a couple minutes, but that didn’t matter. There was no stopping a rabid monster. It stabbed and sliced while wearing the biggest smile in all of Carpenter.

  When it was all said and done, the monster was happy. It kissed the little girl’s cheek and left the house.

  “I really should be going,” Shawn said. “The Harts will be back soon. I’ve still got homework to do, too.”

  “I have homework, too, but I don’t know if I can ever do it. I’m so distracted, so nervous and uneasy these days. I can’t focus on anything. I haven’t read a book besides her diary since I heard the news.”

  “It’ll get better,” he said, then hugged her. “It has to.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” Rose asked.

  “It’ll all be okay in the end,” he said.

  She hugged him tightly. She didn’t want to let go. She cried and tears fell on him, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  “Goodbye,” she said, then wiped her eyes and let go.

  She led him to the front door. As they approached it, it turned and opened on its own. It was the Harts.

  “Who is this?” Mr. Hart asked.

  “My—my friend. Shawn. From school,” Rose said. “He was just leaving.”

  When Shawn was gone, she went back to Valerie’s room and shut the door. She lay on the bed with her hands over her eyes.

  Could I have been wrong about the light? Rose wondered.

  She sighed.

  She almost drifted to sleep, then remembered the book bag by the closet. She had work to do. She had already ruined Valerie’s life, she shouldn’t ruin it any further. Rose grabbed the book bag, which she kept in the same spot every day, unlike Valerie who often would toss it wherever and often made them late for school because she couldn’t find it, found a pen, then went to the desk and got to work. For once, she was able to focus. She got to act—pretending she was Valerie. And acting was enjoyable.

  After a couple of hours of homework, she showered. Not once did she close her eyes, for fear that if she did, she’d open them to Val and Shelly’s bloodied and rotten corpses asking, “Why did you let this happen, Rosie?”

  Then, after the shower, she went to bed. She shut her eyes and tried to dream. Sleep came; it took a little bit, but it came. It was hard to sleep when she was filled with such regrets. At 2:00 AM, her sleep was broken.

  The window was cracked open, and a muffled voice that sounded as if it traveled there from another dimension said, “Rose? Rose? Help me, Rose!”

  Rose shot up and looked around, scared. She raised her arms in defense. She saw no one, and shivered at the sight of the moving curtains. But she had heard the voice clear as day. Somebody had definitely called her name. She did not want to admit she heard it, but it rang over and over again in her ears, “Rose? Rose? Help me, Rose!”

  Rose cried.

  “Valerie?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “I heard her voice, I know I did! I know I heard her!” Rose said. “How did I hear her?”

  “Are you kidding me, Rosie?” Shawn replied.

  She leaned forward over the lunch table, and whispered, “Don’t call me that at school, I don’t want anyone to hear you.”

  “Sorry,” he said, “but she’s dead. You couldn’t have heard… there’s no way.”

  “Oh come on! After that talk we had yesterday, do you really find this stuff hard to believe?”

  He ran his hand through his hair. “What if I don’t want to believe? I don’t want to start believing. I don’t want to be a crazy person like she was. There’s normal and then there’s crazy, and I’d rather things be normal.”

  “You’re lying to yourself,” Rose said.

  “I don’t want it to be true. None of it. I want her back, too, Rose, but that doesn’t mean I should believe her wacko hallucinations.”

  “Why can’t you believe that I heard her voice? What’s wrong with believing that? You’re aggravating me. You told me last night you believed me about the freaking lights under my bed!”

  “Because if you heard her voice,” his face turned red, “I don’t know how to handle that. A light? Sure. There was a light. But dead girls don’t speak!”

  “Fine,” she said. “You don’t have to believe if you don’t wanna, but I would know her voice anywhere.”

  “One thing at a time,” Shawn said. “That book was a lot to take in. Now I have to think about her voice and what it could mean. It’s—it’s evil.”

  Rose frowned, rubbed her eyes, then said, “I was chilled by what the book said too.”

  “How’s this so easy for you?”

  “Didn’t you feel it when you were in there, Shawn? I know you felt it. The coldness. Her room has taken on such a new feeling to it. I can’t be the only one to feel it. And it’s not just cold, it’s like a whole other place.”

  “Yeah, it was,” he said. “I can’t deny that at all. Figured I could… but I feel I’m way deep into this now. Whatever it is, it’s like I can’t back out now.”

  Rose drank from her bottle of water; neither she nor Shawn had really touched their lunches. They were too busy talking about Valerie. Even when she was dead, she still hung around their lives. And somehow Rose knew that the journal was only the beginning.

  Rose set down the bottle and buried her face in her hands. The day she asked Valerie to switch kept playing over in her head. She could still remember running to Val’s room—picturing her smile—and thinking about the best way to ask her about switching. Then she remembered how silly she felt in the following days, how it was something so petty to do.

  “I read up on that guy, the Sunday Slasher,” Rose said. “His name’s Ed Holland. Her dreams weren’t that accurate but some parts were… oddly close.”

  “Her mom told her about it, she said that.”

  “But every single detail?”

  “I don’t know, Val, but she must’ve told her something,” Shaw
n said. “And her imagination could’ve filled in the rest.”

  The bell rang and they each went their own way. Valerie was still on Rose’s mind. And Rose couldn’t describe the pain she felt when she heard others talk about herself being dead. She wanted to leave school and never come back.

  And deep in her heart, she knew that’s what she’d do.

  There was no dramatic chase or time for final words. No panic, no time to cry. Cynthia drove home from Miller High—a short drive from Carpenter High—parked, grabbed her book bags, and went inside. There was food in the fridge; her mom cooked before leaving for work and wouldn’t be home until six.

  Cynthia was alone with the killer. He watched her from her bedroom closet, through the partly opened doors as she sat on her bed and kicked off her shoes before slipping into comfortable pajamas. She put her hair up in a bun, set her alarm for an hour nap, and buried her face into the pillow.

  Something tapped from inside the closet. She wondered what had made the noise, but it was brief, only a moment, so she ignored it. But once it came again, this time longer, then a third time. She sat up, gulped, and went to see what could be making the strange tapping.

  As she reached for the handle, the doors abruptly swung open and the killer tackled Cynthia to the ground. In a split second, the knife tore through her neck and pulled tendons like wires. The killer buried the tip of the knife in her cheek, then raised it, and luscious threads of blood raced down her freckled skin.

  The monster removed one eye, then her nose.

  Cynthia was unrecognizable.

  Rose was unaware of the eyes that watched her; not one pair but two. They looked on in confusion, and when Rose walked out of Valerie’s bedroom, they whispered to each other. When she came back in, the eyes hurried away. They—and others—would still watch over her. The eyes would always be there.

  Rose lay on her stomach, then shifted onto her side. She wanted to leave school and didn’t know how to explain it. She had to figure out a whole new way to talk to Valerie’s parents. Hers were much different than Valerie’s. Both sets of parents were nutty, either way. She thought about homeschool, but already knew Mr. and Mrs. Hart were against it. Then she had the urge to read one of her Agatha Christie novels, but those were back at her true home.

  She eyed the space under the dresser, and was tempted to read Valerie’s journal again, but decided not to; there was nothing new in it for her. It would only freak her out more. Rose was bored. The memories of going to Eli’s with Val brought tears to her eyes. She missed those days; she hadn’t gone there once since Valerie died. It would be too painful. She hadn’t even visited the bookstore.

  Everything had turned drearier. It wasn’t just a thread of disquiet running through her, but a whole ocean of it. Anxiety filled her mind. She was suddenly biting her fingernails (gross, Rose, gross). So she grabbed a comic book from Valerie’s stack—her to-read pile that she would never be able to read—and lay back in bed. It was better than nothing.

  When she finished the issue, she cried.

  Shawn Porter watched baseball alone in the dark. He hadn’t thought of Rose or Valerie all day until now, when he had gotten bored and his mind began to wander away from the game. It wasn’t boring—tied at the end of the seventh, heading into the top of the eighth—but it was hard to focus when such bombshells had been dropped on him two days in a row. He had pushed it out of his mind for around two hours since the game started, but he couldn’t not think of it.

  Carpenter felt even faker to him, as if it weren’t a real town at all. Perhaps it was because he never had to deal with death before. Time seemed to speed up since Valerie Hart had passed. He didn’t understand how or why time could still go on even past death. And the afterlife worried him so much that he turned red whenever he thought of it.

  When the game was over, he did not want to go to bed. Mom and Dad were already asleep, but not Shawn. The house was quiet and he loved the peacefulness—it was half of why he loved to stay up very late. After the post-game interviews, he flipped through the channels, staying for five or six seconds before skipping.

  He paused when the segment on Cynthia came on. He felt numb to the news. A little surprise bloomed deep inside of him, and he felt the worry spreading.

  Shawn did not want to believe that the killer was still on the loose; he did not want to think about what came after death. Surely something did, and he had grown up believing so, but his faith in a destination after departing earth wasn’t so strong.

  After the segment concluded, he waited in case they brought it up again, but by the end of the news spot, he was already looking it up on his phone. Outside of all the victims being pretty girls, he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Random murders, all but one in Carpenter, all girls. One happened to be the girl he adored.

  A sense of tiredness came over him, and he headed to his room in the basement. He got in bed, and after tossing and turning below cold covers for twenty minutes, noticed the window was opened.

  Explains why it’s so cold.

  On the windowsill was a handprint of blood and art of a skirt, but he could not see them now. Not in the dark.

  Not until morning.

  And when the morning came, he saw the blood and the fabric and he trembled. Through the window, he looked at the sky. It was as if the world had stopped altogether. As if he were the only person left.

  Somebody’s blood was in front of him. But whose?.

  Could it be her? he wondered. Rose heard her voice. Now I find this…

  No. He did not want to think about that. It was much too painful a thought. And if it were true, if it were her, he worried about what might have come back with her. Cheating death couldn’t be easy. Not without a price.

  A chill slithered along his spine. He stuck his finger in the blood, and his thoughts ran back to being in Valerie’s room. It was that goddamn room that was the root of his problems. He just knew it in his gut. Rose had been right about that. It was the room. And it made him feel sick: could the room have poisoned him, too? Corrupted his mind? He wondered what effects it would have on him, having been in there.

  It’s just blood, why assume it’s hers? Jesus, get her off your mind. There’s no getting her back. Besides, you hardly knew her. How can you be this into somebody who didn’t even mention you in her journal? She never cared. Why should you care if this is her blood? Why should you care if Rose heard her?

  Rose heard Valerie’s voice again. It was the middle of the night; she ignored it and she cried—cried so loudly that she worried she’d woken up the Harts. Rose didn’t know exactly what time it was, and she was petrified as the voice spoke to her. She clung to the pillow and remembered how Valerie said she kept a knife under there, and Rose was tempted to do the same to defend herself.

  “Help me! Rose! Help me!”

  All warmth disappeared from the room. A current of cold air ran over Rose’s body. The darkness was unnatural; she shut her eyes to escape it, but it was still there, that putrid darkness, behind her eyelids. And the voice wouldn’t stop talking.

  “Rose? Rose? It’s scary here. Can you hear me? Please hear me! I need help, Rose! I’m sick! Rose, can you hear me? I’m sick!”

  Rose wanted to turn over—she wanted to see who it was. And she also wanted to run from the room and never come back.

  Then she was asleep. She didn’t remember falling asleep, but she remembered those minutes perfectly. She remembered the fright and sorrow in Valerie’s voice. She remembered how scared she was. Maybe she was so frightened she fell asleep (and wondered if that were possible).

  In the morning, she did not get ready at all in the room. The voice in her mind kept reminding her—kept insisting—how evil the room was. And she began to believe the man—Ed Holland—really was in the walls, keeping watch.

  When she was done getting ready, she grabbed her water bottle and headed out the door. As Rose walked to school, she was sure that afar off she saw an impossibly tall figure in th
e shadows. She blinked, and he was gone. He was hard to see, but she knew it was a man and that he was creepily tall.

  Rose was aware of the eyes that watched her. He seemed familiar. Almost comforting. But scary nonetheless. She looked around her—her imagination running wild, and in her mind, a dozen of these figures were about to charge at her—but she saw nobody but students.

  They all seemed like robots. Carpenter became faker by the day. And she felt lazy. She didn’t want to walk. But she did, and she kept glancing over to the shadows, absolutely certain she’d catch another tall figure looking at her.

  At the same time that the bell rang to begin homeroom, the killer was watching its prey in Raven Hill. And under Valerie’s bed, a light was shining as brightly as her eyes once did.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The light was still shining while Rose and Shawn were in school. It stopped when Rose led Shawn into the Harts’ home and shut the door. They walked together in silence to Valerie’s room. Rose stayed in the doorway as Shawn looked under the bed.

  After checking, he stood up and shrugged. “There. Nothing.”

  “I don’t want to sleep here anymore, and I don’t know where to sleep. I’m just so scared and uncomfortable with this weird room. It’s terrible.”

  “I wish I knew what to say,” Shawn said. “I’m sorry.”

  Rose finally came in from the doorway and sat in the chair at the desk. An enchanted wind breezed through the room, and the door rattled then slammed shut.

  “Rose! Shawn! Help me!” a familiar voice shouted.

  It was coming from above them. It had to be Valerie.

  Rose looked at Shawn. The terror etched on his face mirrored her own. His mouth opened to say something—but the door rattled again, and now the voice came from behind it.