Because it had run backward. Edmund’s beard wore no strands of grey and the lines on his forehead were mere promises of the aging to come. The woman spoke again, wringing her hands. Edmund shook his head. The woman turned, offering Alison a view of her face, all swollen, red-rimmed eyes and cheeks wet with tears.
She heard conversation, not whole, but in snippets.
“…we have no choice…”
“…Eleanor, he would not…”
“…cannot stay…”
“…what would you have me…”
Eleanor put her hand on Edmund’s arm again. He yanked it free, stalked over to the window.
“…I don’t know…”
“…not safe…”
“…George would not…”
Eleanor turned, her hands fluttering to her throat, and her gaze locked with Alison’s.
She’s looking at the Monstergirl.
Alison jumped back. Edmund swung around, his eyes narrowed, his mouth set in a grim line. A wave of cold pushed into Alison, the chill pushing deep inside her, cold enough to hurt. From the back of her mind arose a shred of something forgotten, a lightning fast image of hands kneading skin, pushing hard enough to bring tears. And a name—Meredith.
The cold wrenched out of her body, the air rippled, and the door slammed in her face with a dull thud. She rubbed her temples, not caring about their conversation or about George. Meredith and a Monstergirl? She tried to find the rest of it, even a tiny bit more, but the only thing that would come was an image of something striking the wall and falling to pieces on the floor.
A voice drifted down the hallway, deep and throaty. “Still so much to see.”
Tightening her hands into fists, she started down the hallway, a ghost-pale woman with one glass eye, a head full of empty, and a handful of hurt.
Then she heard a heavy thud behind her and spun around with a cry. A man, clad in a dark suit, lay face down on the carpet. One arm was extended, the fingers nearly touching the wall, his face turned away from the room. Something glittered, half-hidden by his hand—a monocle.
Alison backed away. Swallowed.
“Edmund?”
Don’t be stupid, he can’t hear you, a voice said, a voice that was oh so familiar because the voice called her names and—
Edmund turned his head toward her. “Hel—” His voice came out in a thick rasp, his breath labored.
This Edmund was older than the one inside the room. A line of drool spilled out from his lips and dripped down to darken the carpet beneath his head. His eyes rolled wildly in all directions, bleary and bloodshot. His hand scrabbled on the carpet, his fingernails scratching at the rug. A long moan slid from between his lips.
“I’ll get…” The words died in her throat.
No, she wouldn’t get help. She couldn’t. Like the conversation in the room, this was something old, something the house remembered.
Edmund groaned, fingers clenching around the monocle as he pulled himself forward with his other arm.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
He coughed, expelling a huge glob of pink-flecked phlegm. His breath turned to a shallow wheeze, and his skin took on a greyish cast as he dragged himself another inch and then rolled over onto his back. The monocle dropped from his hand. He tugged at his collar again and again. His heels beat a discordant rhythm on the floor and he gave another gasp.
Somewhere far in the distance someone whistled, and the tune set her teeth on edge. With one last glance at the dying man, she fled for the stairs.
She paused on the landing of the third floor. Closed her eyes.
A small voice hissed inside her head. Yes, sleep and pretend, like a child hiding under the covers. Do something. Make yourself remember.
Her eyes snapped open. She wasn’t sleeping. She was trying to remember.
Try harder.
A tiny tapping noise broke into her thoughts. Eleanor, clad in a flowered dress, was making her way up the stairs, her hand curled tight around the railing, her eyes no longer swollen but narrowed, her steps slow and labored.
Not real. It isn’t real. Go find George. You don’t need to see this.
But Alison couldn’t move, and Eleanor continued up the stairs, staring through her
Because I’m not really here. Not to her.
with eyes full of sorrow and pain and more than a hint of anger. Carefully controlled, but seething beneath the surface. The look sent a shiver down Alison’s spine, not because of its tone, but because of its familiarity.
It’s red, and it’s hiding inside, waiting to come out. Waiting and waiting.
Eleanor stopped three steps away from the landing and her mouth curved into a smile that did not reach her eyes. Her eyes flash with grim determination, and then she spoke, the words flickering in and out.
“…know what…did…”
“No, I didn’t do anything,” Alison said.
Fool, she isn’t talking to you.
When Eleanor spoke next, her words were clear and heavy with promise.
“You will pay.”
Another voice answered, but the words consisted of an unintelligible hum. Dark clad arms reached. Eleanor’s eyes widened. The dark arms extended and shoved. Eleanor’s face contorted into fear and disbelief. Alison tasted fear on her own tongue, bitter and acrid.
In slow motion, Eleanor’s feet left the stair. She grabbed for the railing, but it was too late. She plummeted down in a rustle of fabric and a trailing scream. There was a thud, accompanied by a sharp crack, and then all fell still. Eleanor’s head rested against the space where wall met floor, her neck bent at a wrong angle. Footsteps thudded back down the hallway; Alison caught a glimpse of dark hair and dark clothing.
Even knowing she could not help, she took the stairs. Halfway down, a shout of alarm came from deep in the house, footsteps scurried across the floor, and a woman in a white cap rushed over and bent over Eleanor’s still form. “Help,” she cried out. “Someone help…”
Her voice faded away at the same instant her body did, yet Eleanor’s broken body remained visible. Alison fisted her hands. This wasn’t real, not now, but it was a long time ago. Somehow, she’d been silent witness to Eleanor’s
murder
death.
Eleanor’s eyes opened with a tiny little snick. Filled with confusion and stark terror, they fixed on Alison’s. Her mouth worked, letting out a strange garble.
“No, oh, no,” Alison said.
Eleanor lifted one hand. But how? She was dead.
What had Edmund said? “Someone would know a thing like that, wouldn’t they?”
A foul smell made her gag. Covering her mouth, Alison turned and ran back up the stairs, a strange crackling noise following all the way.
She skidded to a stop just past the landing. Darkness shrouded the entire hallway. She blinked several times, but the pitch black remained, as though she stood at the edge of a great abyss. Impossible. She’d been here moments before.
From deep within the darkness, a voice said, “Come and see…”
She took a step back. The strange sounds, the stink, continued to drift up the stairs. Alison covered her face with her hands.
Enough. I want to go home.
She dropped her hands and stepped into the darkness.
No light, no sound, until a door creaked on her left, letting out a band of sunlight into the darkness.
No, don’t, it’s another trick.
But what if George was in the room? Only one way to find out.
The little girl sitting on the floor did not look up when Alison entered. The smell of talcum powder hung in the air, but another persisted beneath, sickly and wet.
Wisps of pale curls hung over the girl’s forehead and shoulders. She held a doll in one hand and a well-loved blanket in the other. Sing-song nonsense words slipped from her lips in tiny murmurs. Alison remained by the door with a smile on her face. The girl stood and spun around with her arms outstretched; t
he blanket trailed around her, obscuring her face. Her dress, a cheery sunshine yellow, belled out around her thin legs. With a ragged sigh, she dropped to the floor again and stretched out on her back, her narrow chest moving with harsh breaths of exertion.
When the girl turned her head, Alison’s mouth dropped open. Shadows marred the skin beneath the girl’s eyes, a sickly pallor tinged her cheeks, and her tiny rosebud mouth held a shade of pale instead of blossom.
Alison crossed the room and bent down on one knee. This close, the girl’s illness wept from her pores, a nightmare of labored breaths, fever, and sour sweat. In the back of her mind, Alison heard a clock ticking away the minutes.
The sun streaming in the windows offered no warmth. Beyond the glass, a grey mist moved, long tendrils that pushed against the panes only to slither away.
More tricklight. A fake.
“Elizabeth?” a voice said.
The little girl sat up, a wide smile on her drawn face. The air beneath the doorframe shimmered and took shape in the form of a teenage boy, all smiles and dark hair, with a cup in his hand.
“I thought you might be cold, so I brought you some cocoa,” he said, stepping closer. “You should be in bed, resting.”
“I don’t want to rest. I want to play.”
“You can play when you’re well,” he said. “You don’t want to upset your mother, do you?”
She shook her head.
He held out the cup. “Here, little cub. Drink this and be warm.”
She took the cup in both hands and lifted it to her lips.
“Good?” the boy asked.
As she nodded and drank more, the boy winked at Alison, and she rocked back on her heels. She knew that wink, knew the man’s face masked within the boyish features.
Elizabeth drank the rest and handed the cup back to George, but it was the wrong George, not the George with answers, but a once-George.
“Now, back to bed with you, before I tell your mother you were up.”
“Please don’t tell,” Elizabeth said and scampered over to her bed, a tiny white-framed construction piled high with pastel blankets.
George tucked her in, pulling the blankets high, and kissed her forehead.
“My blankie,” Elizabeth cried out.
“Stay there, I’ll get it.”
When he picked up the blanket, his eyes met Alison’s. Without another word, he handed the blanket to Elizabeth and left the room, closing the door behind him.
Elizabeth began to cough, and her face darkened. Her eyelids dropped shut, her lips parted, she exhaled one long, ragged gasp, and her chest went still.
“Help, someone help,” Alison cried out.
But it didn’t matter how much she yelled or how loud, because no one could hear, no one would come in time. One of Elizabeth’s arms slipped from beneath the blanket and dangled off the edge of the bed.
Had there been something more than cocoa in the cup? No, George wouldn’t have done something like that, would he?
Bone ground against bone as Elizabeth turned her head, slow, so slow. Alison shrieked and backed away. The blankets slid off the bed and puddled on the floor. The air grew vile with a wet, rotten stink. Elizabeth’s flesh turned a dark shade of green, then grey. Her cheeks pitted and her chest collapsed, the ribs apparent even through her nightgown. The skin of her arms and legs shriveled into matchsticks of decay, and her hair sloughed off into a blonde mass above her head as her face turned into that of a wizened crone. Alison wanted to run, but her feet would not move, could not move.
With a whisper-soft rustle of fabric, Elizabeth’s nightgown rotted to shreds. Her skin began to flake off, falling to the sheet, first slow, then faster and faster until all that remained was a skeleton draped with desiccated bits of flesh. The bones gave way with a clatter and crumbled to dust.
A slick taste of ash and decay coated the inside of Alison’s mouth, and she scrubbed at her lips, gagging. The floor gave a gentle shift, a slight tipping first in one direction, then the other. Everything in the room disappeared, leaving behind peeling wallpaper and the broken frame of a bed. No foul taste, no foul odor.
Alison’s shoulders sagged. It hadn’t been real at all. But had it been real once? Just as Edmund’s collapse in the hallway and Eleanor’s fall down the stairs? She thought of the darkly clad hands pushing, the thump of Eleanor’s body, and the gasps from Edmund’s throat. Was it some sort of trickery, a sick game to frighten her? Or had George killed them all?
She held out her pale hands. Had he killed her, too?
“No,” she said. “I am not dead.”
She stepped out of the room, back into darkness.
Not yet.
Another door opened, letting out a grey light, and from within, a baby cried. Inside a wooden cradle, an infant kicked his feet and waved his arms, his tiny face red.
“Shhh, it’s okay. Everything is okay.”
Her body went cold as an arm clutching a pillow speared her chest. The arm descended. The cries cut off. Alison tried to grab the pillow, the arm, but she passed through them as the arm had her. She screamed for someone to come and help, for someone to come and stop it because she couldn’t help. She couldn’t do anything.
No, it’s another trick. Just a trick.
But she heard the choking, a terrible lullaby of death, and backed out of the room with her hands fisted against her breastbone.
Stop, please, stop. I don’t want to see this.
Shadows claimed the room, and someone whispered her name, freezing her in place.
Don’t go. Don’t listen to him.
But she knew that voice. It wasn’t George. It was someone who shouldn’t be here, someone she knew, but his name was buried somewhere deep in her mind.
“Alison?”
She started down the hallway. Maybe he
who?
could help her remember, could help her find the way out.
“Alison, is that you?”
“I’m coming,” she said.
She came to a halt just inside the doorway. A figure stood at the window. The light from the sconce played along the length of her green dress.
No, this is wrong. Wrong.
Slowly, Rachel turned around. “I think I’m lost,” she said, holding up her arms, arms bound at the ends with thick white bandages. “I only wanted to play the piano again.” Roses of red bloomed in misshapen stars on the bandages. “You can understand that, can’t you?”
A drop of blood freed itself from the bandage and dangled in the air, gem dark and shimmering in the light, before it let go and fell to the floor with a tiny splash.
Rachel lifted her arms higher. “They couldn’t save my hands. My mother said they did all they could.”
One after another, pearls of blood dripped onto her dress, turning the green fabric black. As Rachel shuffled forward, she left a trail of red on each side. The blood flow quickened into macabre leaking faucets, and the ends of the bandages fell free, uncoiling in slow motion like barber poles of red and white.
You can’t help her. You have to go home.
Rachel watched them uncurl, her mouth slack. Finally, the bandages fell free, floating to the floor, unveiling two raw stumps with hints of white bone beneath the gore. A hot, meaty stench poured from the wounds, strong enough to make Alison’s eye water.
Rachel smiled, despite tears in her eyes. “When they stop bleeding, I’ll be able to play again. Will you stay with me until then?”
“I’m sorry,” Alison said. “I can’t.”
“Please?”
“I, I…” Alison fled before she could finish. As soon as she ran back into the hallway, the door closed with a definitive click, muffling the sound of Rachel’s cries, and plunging her once more into darkness.
“Alison?”
She turned from side to side. The voice was faint, coming from no discernible direction. Then another door opened on her right.
“Hello?”
No response.
&nbs
p; Her hands shaking, she peered around the doorframe. Josephine sat on a chair in the corner of the room. She gave Alison a cursory glance before looking back down at her lap. The pale gold gown she wore hung in tatters around her emaciated frame, sores dotting the corners of her mouth, her skin a shade of grey-green. Her hair, the dull color of dishwater, clung to her shoulders in tangled clumps.
As she turned to go, the woman spoke, her voice soft. “I’ll eat this time. I promise I will.”
Without a word, Alison backed out of the room. The door swung shut. The dark returned. All around her, voices whispered.
Don’t listen to them. Don’t listen to any of them.
But—
“Ally?”
She pressed one hand to her chest. His name, his name, what was his name? She couldn’t leave him. Not in this place.
But he left you, a small voice said.
Another door opened, and soft moans issued forth. Madeline was lying in a canopy bed beneath a nebulous figure. His pants were pushed down to his ankles; her legs were wrapped around his waist. But Madeline was
wrong
a grey husk, her cheeks withered, her eyes dull pits of dark held in hollow sockets, her body twisted. Her lips curved into a smile, a horrorshow of pleasure.
“I told you I was the first,” she said. A flake of skin dislodged from her shoulder.
Alison ran. The door slammed shut. She stood in the darkness with her hands over her ears. “Alison.”
“Go away, just go away,” she said.
But when the door opened, she turned.
No, don’t do this. Don’t look.
Damn her for a fool, she did.
A man stood in the corner, his face hidden.
“Alison,” he said in that terribly familiar voice. “Please help me.”
His steps were limping and awkward, his face still a dark blur. A scent of warm bread fresh from the oven made her mouth water, and she took a step inside,
They’d made bread together, that first night in their new apartment, laughing at the misshapen lump they created, pulling it apart with their fingers, eating it with the steam still rising up and butter dripping down on their fingers and then the love, oh the love, and he said forever and she believed him and he gave her the tiny diamond ring.
Paper Tigers Page 15