by Chad Huskins
“Get her! That’s it! That’s it! Don’t let her go!” The hands. They were back! She felt them pawing at her, wrapping around her legs and ankles, arms and wrists, now her neck and hair, now her waist—
“Get her! That’s it! Almost got her! Almost!” The same voice as before, the same hungry, desperate voice that always commanded the others.
“Let me go!” she screamed. “Let me go!”
“Don’t touuuuuch me, please!” shouted the alarm clock. “I cannot stand the way you teeeeeeease! I love ya, though ya hurt me so! Now I’m gonna pack my things and go! Tainted love!”
The trembling returned, this time far more sickening, and vastly more painful. It gnawed at her insides, tore her intestines to shreds, swam through her guts and dove into her bladder.
Whatever it was, it came out from her fingertips, her eyes, her nostrils and lips, her toes and toenails, her privates and her ears. Out of everything. It was an immense expulsion of something grotesque that was rotting her insides, and when it happened, the hands tore away from her, almost painfully…
All at once, she was sitting straight up in her bed and her hand went flying towards the alarm clock. And it went flying from her nightstand, smashing against the floor and skipping over to her small bookshelf, knocking off a low-lying copy of The Lightning Thief. Soft Cell finally went silent.
Kaley sat upright, panting, the sweaty sheets falling from her chest as tears fell from her face. She was sobbing uncontrollably. She felt…warmth. A warmth on her bottom and between her legs, like something slithering…
“Oh God!” she screamed, and reached down to rip the sheets off of her. But this time it wasn’t bloody hands reaching up from an abyss. It was urine. She had peed herself, and was still peeing.
Kaley let the urine flow. She let it flow and flow, and never tried to stop it. It felt too good. Like a person that had suffered through a night of food poisoning and survived, she didn’t care what else her body did, as long as the pain was gone, as long as she was safe and secure and there was no more pain.
With trembling hands, she reached up to wipe her face. Kaley then looked around her room to survey it. All was right, except…The nightstand. Something about it was wrong. It took Kaley a moment to realize what it was. It’s so far away. In her nocturnal thrashing, Kaley had somehow wriggled away from her side of the bed and was now on Shannon’s side. The nightstand was on her side, out of arm’s reach. Then, she looked at the alarm clock on the floor. How did I reach that?
A mental fog had grown all around her. All sorts of blockages, brought on by fear and disorientation, muddled her thinking. And like tumbles in a lock, one by one, those mental blockages were lifted and another door of realization was opened. Kaley realized that if she was on Shannon’s side…
“Shannon?” she hollered at once, trying to hop out of the bed and nearly falling on her face. The sheets got tangled around her ankle, and for a terrifying moment her mind made it the hands from her dream. But it hadn’t been a dream, had it? At least, not all of it.
Kaley was up and searching for the light—at seven o’clock in the morning it was still dim inside their little apartment, especially with the black curtains that Shan insisted they needed. “To keep the monsters from seeing inside,” she had said again and again.
Kaley never found the light, and instead stumbled out of her room and down the hall. She made it into the living room, feeling that atrocious, old, flattened brown carpet beneath her feet. The same as always, no longer slippery as slime. The living room was exactly as she’d found it moments ago, the unpacked boxes stacked not quite neatly against the walls, the picture of Jesus beside the black-curtained window, the denuded shelves, the tangle of Xbox and TV wires on the floor. And Shannon, squatting in the corner exactly as Kaley had seen her moments ago. “Shan?” she said, on the verge of tears. Urine was still streaking down her leg. She’d clean it up in a minute, after she checked on her sister. “Shan, can you hear me? You all right?”
“Kaley?” she said, sniffling. Timidly, Shannon glanced over her shoulder, almost too afraid to find the truth. “Is it…is it you? Did you make it back?”
Now with sleep in full retreat, Kaley had her wits about her again and knew what Shannon had meant. “Yeah, baby. Yeah, I made it back.” Shannon stood at once and rushed into her arms. They clung to one another like they were sinking, and each of them was the last piece of driftwood that would help them stay afloat.
“They gonna keep comin’,” Shannon lamented, sniffling. “The Others are gonna comin’ in your sleep, ain’t they?”
“I don’t know, girl. And that’s the truth.”
“I don’t want you to go! I don’t want them to take you!”
“Shhh, I ain’t goin’ anywhere.”
“What do they want with you?”
Kaley kissed the top of her head. “I don’t know, baby.” But that wasn’t true. Kaley had a suspicion, one that she didn’t want to voice, lest she give power to the notion.
“I wish they would go away,” Shannon cried.
“Me too, girl. Me too.”
For several weeks now, it had been like this. First came the dream of some unknown place, the things and the people inside of them were obviously conjured up by her own imagination. This seemed to be the way the Others found their way in (she and Shan had resorted to calling them the Others, for what else would you call them?). With her mind relaxed and at play, they poked and prodded ever so gently, and when they were right upon her, she felt the explosion of…of…some force that took her away. In those moments, she wasn’t exactly her. She was both in her bed and yet somewhere else, too, in a kind of state where she could be seen, yet she couldn’t interact with the world around her. When Kaley was in that state, everything was slippery.
Sometimes at night, Kaley found herself adrift in the halls of their new apartment, trying to touch the walls and yet watching her fingers slide right off. There was no air, and none necessary. Actually…that was wrong, wasn’t it? There was air, she even felt it on her face sometimes, like when the air-conditioning cut on, it was just that she had no lungs.
“A spirit ain’t got no use for breathin’,” her Nan had told her once. Kaley had asked some question about angels, asked how they could die. She had asked about chopping off their heads or drowning them. That’s when Nan had told her. “Spirits ain’t got no use for breathin’, chil’. You find that out one day, too.” Kaley had assumed Nan had meant someday when she died, when she too became a spirit ascending to heaven. But had Nan meant something else entirely? Did she have first-hand experience? Or had she known how far the charm could carry Kaley?
There had been a few times when Kaley found herself walking through the house alone, touching things experimentally, feeling the slick, soft surface of things. It was almost as if she could pass through them if she wanted. One night, while asleep and fleeing the arms of the Others, Kaley had suddenly appeared in the kitchen—it was a reflex, it seemed, a way of escaping the Others. Her mother had been up getting a late-night snack, her back to the dinner table, hunched over the sink, weeping.
When Kaley had softly said, “Mom?” Jovita Dupré had nearly leapt out of her skin. “What the hell are you doin’ there? Ain’t you s’pposed to be in bed? Get’cho black ass in there—” She’d cut herself off when she saw Kaley staring at the thing in her hand. “Don’t’choo judge me, now,” she said. “I’m livin’ under pressure you don’t understand! I’m tryin’ to survive! Keepin’ this family together ain’t easy! Gawn now, get in the damn bed.” But Jovita had stormed off, leaving her daughter’s spirit standing dumbfounded where she had found her.
“The laughing man brought them, didn’t he?” said Shan presently.
Kaley looked down at her sister. Pity poured to and from Shannon in an endless cycle, one sister assuaging the other. The laughing man, she thought. She still can’t even say his name. She’ll call him anything else. The monster. The mean man. The laughing man. Anything but his na
me, even though she knows it full-well by now. She’s seen all the news stories about him that came after, and she still won’t say his name. As if it somehow gives him power, like saying Bloody Mary in front of a mirror.
In fact, that’s exactly what it was for Shannon, and Kaley knew it, because she could feel the emotions and surface thoughts of others, sometimes their whole mind, and none more so than her sister’s.
Kaley pulled away from her sister and touched her face, wiping the warm tears away from her cheeks with her thumbs. “Listen, this is something you and I have to deal with on our own. We can’t tell Mom, ’kay? She won’t believe us. Nobody will. Just like they didn’t believe us when we told them about…about all that other stuff.”
“He ain’t comin’ back, is he?” Shannon said fearfully. Her face contorted, her eyes shut automatically and her lips curled into great rolls as tears began to pour again.
“Shhhh-sh-sh-sh,” she said, pulling her sister’s face to her chest again. “Nobody’s gonna hurt you. Not anymore. And the laughing man’s gone, you hear? He’s gone and he’s not ever coming back. Ya hear me, chil’? He ain’t never comin’ back.” It would be a little while later that Kaley realized she had sounded exactly like her Nan. “What were you doing up in the first place?”
“I was itching again,” she said. Shannon had an infection, something the doctors called vaginitis. An inflammation of her private parts, with terrible itching and the occasional discharge. Shannon was the victim of rape, and she wasn’t just dealing with the emotional stresses of it—as a matter of fact, she had buried much of that pain, likely thanks to the “charm” she and Kaley shared—she was also dealing with the infection her rapist had given her.
They had given her another sickness, too, one that removed her innocence, took away that playful youth, that sanguine outlook she’d long had on life. They had amputated a part of her, opened up another door in her mind, one that let all the pain and hurt of the world flood in, and left her in fear of what total strangers might do to her. For Shannon, the world was no longer wide open and full of wonder, it was cold and deceitful and evil and crowded with terrors. She wanted nothing more than to keep it out. Hence, all the black curtains.
“I woke up itchin’ all over,” Shannon said, “and saw you jumping and jerking in your sleep again. I shook you, tried to wake you, but you told me to run.”
“I did?”
Shannon nodded meekly. “You said, ‘Run away, Shan. They gonna get you too. Run!’ I stayed and kept shaking you, but then I felt the hands…or…or I felt the hands around you.” This was due to the empathic connection of their charm. Almost always, when either of them was under terrible stress, the other one detected it, just like they always seemed to detect the surface emotions and occasional thoughts of others, like a spider detecting movement in its web. The web stretched out from them, and as far as Kaley could tell, the web had no limit. But the closer someone was, the stronger she felt about it.
Or, in some cases, the more powerful the pain, the more it seemed to ripple through the web, along various avenues and arms, and finally resting inside her head and guts. Inside my everything.
“I knew you was about to jump out again, that you would be safe enough for a second,” said Shannon. By jump out, she meant exit her body. Kaley didn’t like to think of it like this. It made her feel like her soul was actually leaving her body, and that meant death. And if she died while those things were pulling her down, down, down…
Shannon started weeping again. An alarm bleated obnoxiously somewhere in the apartment for a full two seconds before it stopped. A light suddenly switched on down the hallway. Mom’s up. Jovita Dupré would be around and about in a moment, and then there would be inevitable arguments, possibly even shouting matches if Kaley elected to retort.
“Hush now, we’re okay. Hush it, I said,” she told her sister sweetly, quietly. “Now come on, help your big sister clean up this mess,” she said, pointing to the wet spots she’d left on the floor, droplets of urine that made a trail all the way to her room. “And let’s put those sheets in the washing machine. Before Mom gets up and has a fit.”
The hunting lodge that his family once rented out twice a year to members of the Slaviansky Trophy Hunting Society was now empty. The lodge was forty meters away from the main house, it was two stories and fully powered by gas year-round, with air-conditioning and water that was kept from freezing by its own independent gas tank and generator. There was a snow-capped shed with a Subaru Forester parked inside, flanked by two ATVs, all with chains for their tires, and plenty of petrol cans and spare tires.
Zakhar kicked the snow off his boots on the doorstep, pulled his right glove off with his teeth and fished in his pocket for the key—even after all these years of living alone in the middle of nowhere, he still locked it behind him whenever he left. And why not? He had other reasons for keeping people out, and not just poachers.
He glanced at the ice-covered thermometer hanging on the wall beside the door: -20° C.
When he stepped inside, Zakhar closed the door behind him at once in order to preserve the precious warm air. Then he paused, looked around, and listened. The lodge was dark and appeared exactly as it always had: quaint, old, well kept and with lots of character. Two large bearskins were dangling from the rafters, a third one splayed on the wall, and a forth one, the largest one, growling angrily in front of the fireplace. Over that fireplace was an oak mantelpiece, and above that hung a large rectangular mirror, which made the living room appear more spacious than it actually was. A moose was mounted on the far wall and looked straight ahead dutifully, never eyeing him. The place still smelled freshly of the pinewood it was made of. A gun rack over the door was still full, nothing missing there. The wicker couches and chairs still had their plush pillows and cushions, all soft and new from his latest additions.
After a few moments of checking the other doors and giving the windows a jiggle, Zakhar decided the poachers hadn’t been this brave. He unshouldered his Tigr-308 and replaced it in its own gun cabinet, which he also had a key for. He kept the pistol strapped to his side, though. When spending long holidays out here alone, he never went anywhere without it. He even slept with the Colt Woodsman .22 on the nightstand, within arm’s reach. Home invasion was highly unlikely out here, which was why he sold his property in the city years ago and moved back home. But there was a first time for everything, he mused.
The rest of his family in Derbent had found that out the hard way. They lived in the boring part of a boring town, and yet look what happened to them. Some nobody, a drifter some said, had come out of nowhere and shown them how the outside world could intrude on such tranquility.
The lodge was warm, despite there being no fire in the fireplace. He never liked to leave a fire going while he was away from the cabin, but he liked for it to be heated when he returned. Let’s turn that heat off, get a fire started. He made a brief stop in the kitchen to flip on the tiny radio, and turned it to the weather station so that he could start monitoring this storm.
The logs were outside, chopped during the spring when the Siberian territories were only slightly cold. Zakhar poured some water into a kettle, put it on an eye of the stove and got it going, then stepped outside. The snow was coming down even harder, if that could be believed, so hard that he could no longer see the forests of Siberian Pine where he’d conducted his day’s hunt. The cold ignored his gloves and penetrated his bones, and the wind forced those snowflakes into his face, like little needles of ice.
He gathered up the logs covered in hoarfrost, counting out six good ones, then stepped back onto the front porch and paused at the front door. The footprints he’d left coming back from the woods were already getting filled in, and he was struck by their shape. Some of them looked wider, and a little longer than the others. The wind must have had some effect on that, he figured.
Balancing the chopped logs between his chest and left arm, Zakhar used his right hand to open the door, and halfwa
y through, he paused again. He bent to drop the logs on the rug inside, then turned back to the footprints leading up to his doorstep. Zakhar stood there for a moment, examining, his breath coming out in great clouds, his eyes attempting to penetrate the white curtain that nature had covered the world in. He looked east, towards the frozen lake and its single, dilapidated dock. It was also mostly ensconced by the downpour.
When he stepped back inside, he shut the door and locked it. He waited, listening to the house, the lonesome creaks and groans. The wind was pushing against the windows, causing them to make little snapping sounds. He reached for the Colt at his side, checked it again to reassure himself, then he went about searching the house.
When Jovita stepped out of her bedroom, folding the front of her robe around her waist, she was already shivering. Cold as a witch’s titty, she thought briefly, but her mind was already working on what she had to get done today. She had to restock the house with some groceries—they were almost sittin’ on empty—and she had to talk with her sister Tabitha about that job down at the church she’d been talking about. Jovita’s only concern was that it was another ambush, a trap set up to look like a job interview, but once she got there they would tell her that she needed to stay clean and go through regular drug tests in order to get her measly paycheck. Tabitha had done this to her once before with another church, an arrangement that was more intervention than interview, and that had turned out…
“What’cha’ll doin’?” Jovita asked, stopping short in the living room. Her two girls were bent over on the floor beside the couch, working the carpet back and forth assiduously with a pair of towels.