by Kat Turner
Tears stung Helen’s ducts, though she didn’t yet see the point of the tragic story. “That’s so sad.”
“The next day the sweatshop exploded. She was inside.”
Gauzy, crushing images of tears and fire and black smoke flooded Helen’s addled mind. “She died in there,” Helen concluded.
Brian nodded grimly. “Her and hundreds of others.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, Brian. I can tell that you loved her. To lose the mother of your child, too, and when Tilly was so young. I can’t imagine. It must have been hell.”
“Thank you. It was rough, though we managed. I went through my grief, my stages, did the therapy and support groups. In the midst of mourning my dead wife, shouting at God for taking her from me in this meaningless accident—and right after she’s had a revelation about the abuses inherent in her industry no less—I wondered if it was a cruel kind of design.” His tone was flat though severe, his face a mask of funeral stoicism.
Dismay spread from her middle, motor oil soiling her edges. If that’s how the hex was working on the macro level, humming along in a clockwork evil until a ticking hand decided it was time for someone to pay the fee on their fortune and balance some kind of mystical scale with blood, she had no clue how to win at such a cruel game of chance.
Brian cradled his head in both hands. “Maybe I deserve what’s coming to me. Perhaps my time is up.”
“Don’t say that.” Lame reply. But she lacked the tools to argue, for in this arena, the tidiness of the scientific method did not apply.
She sat down beside him and touched his thigh, for assurance of touch was all she could offer. Human closeness alone made for a paltry sum, but care counted.
His sigh was a portend. “I don’t think it’s bad to say it, though. I think it’s honest. And if it gets you to stop blaming yourself, I’m all for putting these dark thoughts out in the open. Consider it more information for us to work with. But I stand by my claim. I reject this idea that you’re the nasty, reckless witch and I’m the pure and clean male with a heart of gold who found himself ensnared in your treachery by no fault of his own. I reject this nonsense, this misogynistic notion that the original sin sticks to the woman.”
In a halfhearted return to humor and play, she tugged the collar of his robe. “Time to take this off and put on your ‘Feminist’ shirt. Or better yet, one that says ‘Eve was Framed.’”
He took her hand. “She was framed, no doubt about it. And I’m nowhere near perfect, but I try to be evolved and enlightened. But back to the serious note, let’s keep on being a team, okay? No more guilt dragging you down. Accept that I play some part in this. And hell, if magic is real, which it clearly is, there’s a reason I ended up caught in this curse. Maybe we’re meant to be together, and this just so happens to be the force in the universe that’s set on aligning our paths.”
She blew a loose piece of hair off her forehead. “I like the idea. Still, we shouldn’t have had sex.”
He pressed his forehead against her temple. “But it was so fucking good.”
Her laugh brought healing rain, rare respite. “Truth.”
“We’ll clean up this mess together, Helen. I swear. But first we need to rest.”
Nighttime rituals followed, routine made special by being undertaken with Brian.
They brushed teeth in his opulent bathroom, and she stroked the shiny finish of his sink when he wasn’t looking, allowing herself a giddy half-second to appreciate his fancy home.
But as they settled in, bodies entwined in their lover’s hold, Helen’s system kicked into an agitated gear. She felt it all around them.
Felt it in the shadows on the walls, in every little whimper and whine the mansion uttered.
Though Brian snoozed like a man who’d exerted himself sexually, she lay piqued and restless. Flat on the bed in a sarcophagus pose with folded arms, she bore witness to a nighttime theatre surrounding her with its shifty, furtive performance of movement and sound.
This went on for awhile, though she refused to glance at the hell-red numbers on Brian’s digital clock.
“It’s okay. You’re allowed to sleep. Nothing bad will happen if you sleep for a few hours.” She’d almost convinced herself with the pep talk when the deck doors slid open on their own volition.
She bolted upright. But nothing would budge. Her arms were dead logs. Legs tubes of wet sand. She was trapped in paralysis, as rigid as a corpse. To the soundtrack of her choppy breathing, she tracked an undulating rope the hue and consistency of skim milk as it floated through the air.
It reared back and shot straight toward her.
Helen was smart enough not to scream and grant the phantom access to her mouth, but her precaution didn’t matter. The mist burrowed in to her ears and nostrils while she lay in the dark, trapped in her useless body.
“Sacrificium.” It repeated the word in her head until syllables ran together.
Twenty
Brian woke from a dead man’s sleep, guided back to consciousness by a triangle of late morning sunlight that spilled through the patio doors and glazed his hardwood flooring in buttery tones.
For once, he had someone to spend such a graceful morning with. He reached for Helen, but his hand brushed against an empty spot. Confused, he sat up in bed.
“Helen?” Brian swung his legs over the side of the mattress and tugged on discarded boxer shorts. A wrinkle of tan latex hanging over the edge of the waste bin reminded him of their passionate sex. Surely she hadn’t pulled the dreaded morning-after disappearing act.
A check of the bathroom came up empty, and he was about to call her when he noticed the patio door ajar and went out on the deck. Helen sat poolside in her bra and underwear, messy hair flowing down her back, head hung as she stirred the water into froth with slow kicks.
Brian gathered a blanket off the bed and went to her, goose flesh flaring on his skin. The climate was brass monkeys for Los Angeles, and she must’ve had some heavy things on her mind to not be distracted by the cold.
“You must be freezing.” He draped her in the comforter.
She didn’t so much as twitch, didn’t speak a word. The cool feel of her skin leeched into him, bringing a deep sense of doubt. After the bathroom and storage locker incidents, he couldn’t assume he was talking to Helen and not her imposter. What a hideous feeling.
But when she turned to him, he connected with a texture in her eyes. The precise nature of the humanity inside Helen, an ineffable quality that the clone lacked, pulsed like a flame.
Human life had a sheen, a depth, but also a limit. Vacancy lurked in the clone’s stare, a retreating endpoint fading into an infinite horizon. Real Helen bore the sentient glimmer inherent in the look of a thinking, feeling, mortal person. He sure was learning a thing or two about metaphysical matters from their ordeal.
“The cold keeps me awake.”
As soon as she spoke the words in a resigned monotone, he noticed the dark rings under her eyes. He sat beside her, concrete nipping the backs of his legs in icy-hot pricks. Brian dipped a foot into the water in a halfhearted attempt at camaraderie.
“Why do you want to stay awake?”
“It came to me.” Her voice quaked.
“What did?” His heart plummeted. Why did he ask? He knew.
“The curse, the cloud of smoke. And it, and it, it… God, it was the worst thing ever.” Her face contorted in a grimace. She shook her head like she wanted to purge whatever she was remembering and flopped into his side.
He pulled her swaddled form close, taunted by the futility of his hug. He could alleviate her physical chill, but not the cold inside.
“Oh, Helen. What did it do to you? I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” A thousand half-formed scenarios, each more depraved than the next, played a sinister compilation reel in his brain.
“Don’t apologize. Don’t you dare. It possessed me. Spoke in my head, ordering me to do things. It tried to move my body around, puppet me, but thankfully it co
uldn’t pull that off. Not yet.”
They were alone in his castle, so alone. Spiritually alone. The fortress walls at their backs closed in, as did the rocky hills beyond his property, shrinking his world to a goddamn fiasco. “What did it order you to do?”
She buried her face in his chest and let out a keening wail. “It’s too awful, too awful.”
“It’s okay, Helen.” Brian was rocking her now, though it was he who felt as helpless as an abandoned baby. “We’ll figure it out and fix it together. We’ve come this far.”
She broke away, her face pale and thin-lipped. The fear in her eyes flayed him raw.
“No. I don’t think we will. I don’t think we can.”
“What are you talking about?”
She stared into the pool like answers would erupt from water. Or perhaps she couldn’t face him.
“Helen, tell me. No secrets. I can handle it.”
Her chin quivered. “It ordered me to kill you. And with so much detail, directions. It told me to get a belt from your closet and kneel on your back while I strangled you. It was awful, so awful. Oh God, it’s voice. It was all raspy, like exactly how you’d imagine a demon would sound. I’ll never forget that voice. It eats through my brain like battery acid.” Her speech came in a whisper punctuated by jolts of unregulated breathing.
“But you didn’t hurt me. You didn’t even try.”
“Not this time, but it’s tried to possess me before, and the first thing it did to announce itself after I drank the potion was speak in my head. It repeated the word it spoke that day, too, ‘sacrifice’ in Latin. So it hasn’t forgotten its mission. Things are intensifying, speeding up. And I have a hunch that whatever those masked guys were saying in the storage locker, all of that shit about Sister Folly and chaos born, has helped it make gains.”
“You have your spell book—”
Helen jumped to her feet. He followed suit, though the distancing autonomy of her motion didn’t miss him.
“Spells make it worse, which I already knew. Or they make it better at first, but then it gets worse later. Some kind of boomerang effect. I’m screwing up, over and over,” she said.
He held her arms, pinning her in place. “Wait. You can’t be sure of what you’re saying.”
Robust winds made whirling dervishes of her hair. Unspoken sadness passed between them. “Let me go, Brian.”
Brian released his grip, keeping his hands in the air. Her point emerged into focus, a finality whose sharp edges sliced. Boundaries weren’t fuzzy. She’d thought this over and made a decision. Didn’t make it hurt any less.
Still, he said, “Come on now. Let’s take today to think about our options and make a plan.”
She brushed past him, up the ladder to the deck and into the house. Brian walked a few steps behind her, details unfolding in harsh clarity. Her fast hands, snatching clothes from her suitcase. A mole on her leg as she hurried into jeans. All of the wasted opportunities, the things he still had not told her. The things he didn’t know about her. Their special ease with each other had been cancelled by evil.
With a tug so big it ripped a seam, Helen pulled a T-shirt over her head. Traces of her vanished from his life, bit by bit in a disappearing act of eccentricities. Spell book shoved in a messenger bag. Then her phone. Laminated buttons adorning the front of her bag slipped from view when she slid it around her back.
Though they’d spent only a single night together, already the lack of her opened a familiar abyss. He looked into that howling chasm, stared into the hole in his heart.
“I’m not leaving because I don’t care. I’m leaving because I do. I’m not a safe person, Brian.”
“You are safe.” He reached for her in one final, desperate effort. “You’re safe here, with me.”
“Stop.” Her voice cracked, those soulful brown eyes he could gaze into every morning for the rest of his life moistening. “You know what I mean.”
“The finale show is tomorrow. I need you by my side. In case something happens.”
“Something happening is what I’m worried about.” Hopping on one foot, she wrestled with hiking sandals, the crunch of Velcro gunfire in his ears.
Brian’s wound opened, a festering boil erupting on the surface. One by one and in their own unique way, they all eventually did this. His beloved mum, hustling his thirteen-year-old self on a train to London.
Grandmother, withdrawing her warmth for reasons he’d never figured out.
Kris.
Even Janet, leaving him and Tilly alone.
The thoughts were selfish, unfair, and indicative of problems with women. But self-awareness didn’t heal the sore.
Even the word that sprang up from his poisoned bog was lonely and sick, a child shaking in an orphanage. Abandoned.
His heart tore in two. Aftershocks reverberated through the depths of him. He turned his back on Helen before he cried. “Fine. Leave. Run away instead of facing this thing with the strength I know you have. You’re weaker than I thought.”
Her hand, soft like she bathed in coconut oil, caressed the arm he folded over a chest crushed by pain. “Someday you’ll understand.”
Streams rolled down his cheeks. Someday would never come. Yeah, he was cursed alright. This time an actual entity orchestrated the maleficence, but the hex had been around for years. About time the monster came to collect.
“Don’t pander to me. Just leave.”
“Brian, stop. You think I’m not going through hell? What we had was special, and I’ve never felt anything like it before. It’s killing me to do this, because I lo—”
“Don’t say it.” His voice wobbled wetly, but he didn’t care. Some stupid societal mandate to uphold the lie of hard, unfeeling masculinity was the least of his concerns. Something beautiful inside of him, something precious he’d thought he’d lost years ago, had been nurtured back to good health only to be stomped and murdered.
“I mean it. I’ve never said it to anyone, and you need to hear it. I love—”
“I said be quiet,” he shouted at her, yelled at her, making him a bona fide heel. A real git. Shame for lashing out assailed him in a fresh assault of stabs. He bit down on his tongue and shirked off her touch.
The feel of her skin went away, leaving a sucking emptiness and the ghost of her contact. Numbness washed over him, a hateful and familiar sedative. He looked outside without seeing anything but formless shapes and drab scenery.
His bedroom door opened and closed. The snick of the tab engaging brought closure to her unceremonious exit from his life.
Robotic and numb in lieu of going to pieces, Brian dried his tears and put on clothes. He ought to do something, undertake a pursuit in service of his career. His ambition had kept him alive through the years, cushioned his landing from devastations such as the one moments ago.
The taste of heartbreak salty in his mouth, he went downstairs, the belly of his cavernous home swallowing him.
Tilly sat at the kitchen island, hunched over a laptop as her bugged eyes darted over a screen.
An army of credit cards lay strewn about. Brutus sat beside her, watching videos on his phone.
Brian opened the fridge and took out a jug of orange juice, averting his eyes from the salad False Helen had mixed. Needed to get rid of that. Needed to show up for his daughter as a stable adult. “Morning, princess. What are you doing?”
Tilly jumped and yelped. “Ugh, you startled me.” She knotted her face into a concerned wince. “What’s wrong?”
“That obvious?” His voice was hoarse. He poured juice. Supposed he ought to heed his usual pre-show routine, rest his vocal chords for awhile then do some warmups. Head over to the venue tomorrow afternoon for meet and greet, sound check, and the rest of the rigmarole. Lock step, march through the motions, good toy solider. Joe would have been pleased.
“Yeah, you look like you got hit by a truck.”
“Helen left for good.” There, he said it. Spoke the truth. Didn’t make him feel any bet
ter. He drank, seeking to drown his feelings in citrus sweetness. Didn’t work. Perhaps he ought to drink a bottle of vodka. Who cared?
His daughter closed the laptop lid. “Bummer. I was starting to like her.”
“Same. Well, correction. I already liked her. A lot.”
“Sorry, Daddy. You wanna cancel your concert? We could binge on ice cream and watch sad movies.”
“No. The show must go on. But I was thinking after this finale, perhaps we could make a change. Start over.”
“What do you mean?”
He finished his juice and set the glass down. “You ever want to move back to the UK? Head up north, live on a farm like your grandparents do? Nothing but sheep and chickens and rolling green hills?”
Tilly scrunched her nose. “Hard pass. All of my friends are here, and no way am I leaving the country in the middle of senior year. You aren’t selling that plan well at all.”
He conjured a sad laugh. “I suppose not. I think I just need a dust-up.”
She donned a mischievous smirk. “I suppose I’ll allow you to chaperone the senior trip to Cancun if you want.”
“Senior trip to Cancun. Is that why all of my cards are here?”
Her sheepish glance slid from the assortment of plastic rectangles to him. “Yeah. Can I go on the senior trip to Cancun?” Tilly fluttered thick false eyelashes.
Perhaps a vacation with his daughter would calm his spirit with familial bonding. He hadn’t a clue how he’d keep a herd of teenagers out of trouble, though such a challenge might offer a learning experience and welcome distraction. Plus, Tilly had been so good overall, coping with recent madness. He owed her a nice present.