by Ronald Malfi
“Kell,” he said, but nothing followed.
She just held up one hand to him, palm out, like a crossing guard halting traffic. The last thing she needed to hear right now was a lecture from someone, from anyone. She was suddenly too frightened to listen to rational thought, too. From behind her closed lids, the image of the blinking red beacon taunted her. And damn it, she knew that light, had seen it somewhere before but couldn’t put her finger on it. It was like some memory from another life, something she almost remembered, yet her physical brain would not allow the entire thought to fully process.
“I’m okay,” she finally managed. She thought Josh would come to her side and kneel down beside her, but he only remained standing in the doorway, silent and staring. “I just…something I ate today didn’t agree with me, I guess.”
“Yeah,” he said, his tone monotonous, “something you ate today.” He had been with her since dawn and hadn’t seen her eat a single thing. And she knew he was thinking just that.
“Don’t start, Josh.”
“No,” he said, “of course not. I’ll never start, right?”
She didn’t know what he meant by that and said nothing when he turned away and walked back down the hallway. Listening, she heard him gather his things, open the front door, and slam it behind him. Her head still against the rim of the bathtub, she listened to his footsteps recede down the hallway until there was nothing left to hear but the simmering hiss of the toilet.
Something jarred her awake in the middle of the night. Some fleeting sound, there and then gone, too quick for her to catch. But it had been there.
She lay in bed for a long while, staring at the dark ceiling. The lull of traffic down below used to soothe her, put her right to sleep, but not tonight. She’d grown immune, she supposed. Either that or she was in some bad shape. Through her bedroom door she could see the bathroom across the hall even in the dark, a bitter reminder of what had happened earlier that evening. She closed her eyes, trying not to think about it, trying not to think of that peculiar image of hands reaching out for her, of water—no, it wasn’t water, it was blood, somehow she knew it was blood—running down her legs and pooling on the floor. A bright light…a closed door, her hand coming out and slowly turning the knob, pushing it open…
I won’t be getting back to sleep tonight, she thought and got up.
In the kitchen she fixed herself some warm milk to which she added a tablespoon of sugar. In the dark, she crept back out into the main room with her milk and sat down on the couch. The only visible light issued in from the two windows on either side of the computer desk, and the computer monitor itself, blinking its KEEP EARTH CLEAN, IT’S NOT URANUS! screensaver. She reached up from the couch and tapped the space bar on the keyboard and the screensaver disappeared. What took its place was the paused video stream from the tape she’d been watching with Josh before getting sick and charging into the bathroom. Setting her milk down, she got up and sat down in front of the screen, rewound the video stream, and played it back. Nellie Worthridge’s voice came out, too tinny on the computer speakers: “Could just be a hunger headache.” Hunched over the keyboard, she watched the old woman spread jam on her toast and smile at the camera. Then the camera panned to the left, following the old woman over to the cupboards where she replaced the jar of jam. One of the gears stuck on the wheelchair and Nellie toggled with it for perhaps a second or two—Kelly remembered this happening—before bringing the wheelchair back around. At that moment, the audio stream died and the sharp black-and-white fuzz invaded the screen.
“Damn you, what’s the deal?”
She brought up the computer’s video editing bank, tried to eliminate as much static as possible, but it was a futile attempt. And it made no sense. For whatever reason, the dailies were ruined.
Just for a second, the audio stream kicked back on. The sound jarred her, and she lifted her fingers off the keyboard, thinking something she’d done had made a connection somewhere. But just as quick as the sound came back on, it vanished again.
And what the hell did I just hear? Maybe I’m really starting to lose my mind, but I could have sworn…
She rewound the footage a few seconds then played it again. Still no clear visual, still no audio…but then yes, she heard it, that quick little audio blip, so abrupt yet suddenly so clear…
It was her name. Someone was saying her name.
But that didn’t sound like Nellie Worthridge and it didn’t sound like Josh, either.
She played it back a third time, but this time she heard nothing. A fourth—nothing. A fifth—nothing.
What the hell is going on?
Although the picture on the screen was still fuzzy with static, she thought she could almost make out shapes beneath it. At one point, the video cleared enough so that she could make out Nellie Worthridge in her chair talking to Josh behind the camera. Still no audio, her wrinkled lips worked in silence. She brought up her hand and motioned at something on her kitchen counter, silently laughing to herself like an ancient, crippled mime. Then blurbs of sound, too there-and-then-gone to be properly deciphered: “on it…making for…see…ate”—or was it “eight”? It just didn’t make sense; digital video simply did not operate in such a fashion—
On the screen, Nellie eased her wheelchair around, her back briefly facing the camera, just as another figure moved past the front of the camera. Upon seeing it, Kelly froze (and she felt something in the back of her mind turn over, or almost turn over, like something trying to return to life but not quite able to). The moving image—it was most definitely a person—was too close to the lens of the camera to be properly defined. But it was definitely there, this moving figure that was neither Josh nor herself, and obviously not old Nellie Worthridge. The figure, from what she was able to ascertain, was pale and quick, nearly transparent—almost like a ghost. If it wasn’t for the fluid, muscled way it moved across the camera’s field of vision, she would have no reason to even think it was a human being.
Can’t be. Just isn’t possible.
She rewound the video and played it back and yes, the pale figure again moved quickly in front of the camera. With her computer’s editing tools, she tried to clean the image, take some of the distorted fuzz away, but the image—whatever or whoever this was—was just too close to the lens to see clearly. She rewound the video a third time, now hitting the keys with shaking hands, feeling that sense of mounting dismay rise up inside her like a volcanic eruption. Suddenly, it was like smelling something she hadn’t smelled in a long time, or hearing a song she hadn’t heard since childhood.
That’s nostalgia, something inside her head whispered. It’s finally remembering the unremembered.
This time, the fleeting pale visage did not pass in front of the lens. Like a piece of dirt that had rubbed itself free of the lens, the figure was gone this time, and all she saw was old Nellie Worthridge turning around in her wheelchair and bumbling toward the refrigerator while Josh filmed. The picture was clear now (there was still no audio) and whatever had been present on the screen only a minute before was now absent. Vanished, like a phantom.
Dumbfounded, Kelly just sat there behind the computer, staring at the monitor, her entire body shaking. What she’d just seen—yes, it had been there, it had been right there on the screen, on the videotape, had been real, damn it, had been real. Maybe not a ghost or a phantom—surely not—and maybe not even a person at all, either. Maybe just something passing in front of the lens, something that, for some unexplained reason, was not there now.
It was a person, that same spiteful little voice spoke up inside her head. You know it was, you saw how it moved. People move like that, not pieces of dust on videotape, not botched patches of an effects-loop on a computer screen. People move like that.
“That can’t be,” she whispered, not realizing she’d just spoken aloud. Something about that pale, ephemeral image passing in front of the camera, quickly moving across her computer monitor…
Is it
possible to capture ghosts on videotape? she rationalized. Is it really, genuinely possible? And even if it is, do I really believe such a thing?
Something on the screen caught her eye. Not something moving in front of the camera this time (this thing, if it even really existed outside the scope of her imagination, was behind Josh’s camera) but, rather, an image of something reflected in the tinted black glass of Nellie’s oven door. Again, the image was there for only a split second, hardly conducive to ocular registration, yet for some reason she saw it immediately, almost as if she had been looking for it all along. It was a face. Its reflection was distant and somewhat undefined in the smoked glass of the oven door, yet clearly and undeniably there. Despite the mild disfiguration of its features, it was irrefutably the face of a human being: the deep-set eyes, the rudimentary nose, the slope of a pallid and hairless scalp, the hasty slash of a mouth. The reflected face was only visible for a count of two seconds before Nellie Worthridge maneuvered her wheelchair in front of it, her mouth moving soundlessly on the screen. And in the wake of the wheelchair, the reflection was gone, as if Nellie’s passing had wiped it clean off the glass.
I know that face, she thought, I’ve seen it before. It was different somehow—I don’t quite understand it—but I’ve seen it before.
An image flooded her then: the pale feet of a small child covered in blood, its soles lacerated and oozing. And with that, the faint echo of a young child’s relentless sobbing.
She rewound the video again but this time there was no reflected face in the glass of Nellie Worthridge’s oven door.
Who are you and how do I know you?
Like the dawning of some amazing idea, she suddenly realized what the noise had been that had awoken her from her sleep just a little while ago. Ringing—the telephone.
She stood from behind the computer and turned around. The apartment was still dark and after staring intensely at the computer screen for so long her eyes could only make out the fundamentals of her apartment before her eyes. The phone rested on the half-wall that separated the living area and the small kitchen vestibule. Beside the phone was the answering machine.
Someone had called in the middle of the night.
The red, flashing message light on the answering machine was like a beacon summoning her in the darkness.
Chapter Three
If asked, Joshua Cavey would have agreed that monsters certainly did exist. Just over a year ago, he’d looked one right in the eyes.
He thought about it mostly in the predawn hours of morning, usually while seated outside on his fire escape, smoking a joint and watching the traffic crawl along the street below. This morning, it was unusually cold and he wrapped himself in a thick sweater before creeping out onto the escape, a freshly rolled joint tucked behind his ear. Sitting cross-legged on the grated floor, he slowly rotated his left shoulder—forward-forward-forward, then rotated in reverse. With the cold front that arrived prematurely, his shoulder was already beginning to cramp. It would be a bitter, bitter winter.
Monsters, he thought, watching plumes of steam rise up from the manhole covers and grates on the street below.
The monster in question had been a twenty-year-old kid with greasy hair and chapped lips named Sampers. Just over a year ago, this greasy-haired, chap-lipped monster made a decision to send two burning pieces of lead into Josh’s chest and left shoulder, nearly puncturing his heart. As with most tragedies, it happened without notice or warning (except for that split microsecond when their eyes locked and Josh suddenly knew what was about to happen, yet was powerless to avoid it) and, now that it was in the past and he had survived, the memory of the event was like the memory of some multicolored abstract painting. His mind only allowed him to recall selected visuals: the way the handgun bucked in Sampers’s hand; the dark, scaly-looking rings around Sampers’s eyes; the constellation of blood, more black than red, which arced into the air, seemingly in slow motion. Then there was the pain, which he didn’t think he’d ever forget—the sudden impact of heat, the brief but blessed moment of total numbness, then the burst of flames, abrupt and roaring. The first collision—the one that hit his shoulder—was like being whacked by Babe Ruth’s ash-handle, and the follow up shot—the one that pierced his chest, nearly plugging his heart and turning out his lights permanently—was like a Mike Tyson upper-cut. He went down, and the world seemed to spin before his eyes, to cant to one side, his entire world suddenly consisting only of those things nearest to him in the physical world: Doritos, two-liter bottles of Coca-Cola and Sprite, a streaming waterfall of Lotto tickets, and the tortoiseshell bulb of the theft mirror hanging from the convenience store’s ceiling. In that mirror he saw himself fall, saw the entire cramped convenience store in disproportioned miniature. There were sounds, only now blocked out by giant wads of cotton in his ears, and then there was nothing but darkness and the insanity of his labored breathing echoing deep within his head.
The memories immediately following the shooting were tumultuous ones. He recalled the sounds of people standing above him, and even remembered the wail of the ambulance as it pulled up outside in the street. He even remembered someone in the distance shouting, “Listen, this is not what I meant by ‘immediate’! This is not what being ‘quick’ is all about! What you fail to understand is that fast is fast and there ain’t no other way about it!” Whatever that meant.
In those moments he thought of God. Insanely, he imagined Him as a giant insect with a large, bulbous head hosting countless feline-like eyes. And when God spoke, His voice was like resonating guitar strings in a silent room, and the trick was actually deciphering those plucked notes and arranging them into some semblance of comprehension.
Monsters, he thought again. He lit the joint and inhaled vehemently. Who would have ever thought such things existed?
Yet for what it was worth, it was Sampers who had eventually led him to Kelly Rich, and that was a good thing. A very good thing. Obsession, Josh quickly discovered, was simply a fungus waiting to take hold. In many respects, it was a monster in and of itself, very different from Sampers, and somehow worse too because of its inability to think, to feel, and to contemplate. Obsession was just this thing, and in the months following his run-in with the greasy-haired kid with the handgun (particularly during his time in recovery), he discovered that the fungus had somehow managed to catch hold of him. It grew on his brain, impeding him from stepping outside his apartment other than to go to work, forcing him into paranoid seclusion. But he’d always been strong-willed, and after he realized the fungus wouldn’t just disappear on its own, he knew he’d have to find a way to scrape it off.
It was an obsession with survival, an obsession with the fear of dying. We never realize just how close we are to death, just how fleeting life is, until it is nearly taken away from us. It was an obsession with paranoia in a way too, and Kelly saved me from it.
Kelly…and her project, We the People. For some reason, he felt like his old self again when working on the project, partially because it kept his mind focused, but mostly because he genuinely believed in the project. The money was nowhere near what he usually made on a freelance project, but he’d discovered a sense of kinship with Kelly and an uncommon sense of peace in the work itself. Answering Kelly Rich’s ad in the university paper, he understood, was what had really saved his life.
“And what the hell is wrong with you now, Kelly?” he said aloud, still slowly rolling his left shoulder. In the past few months they spent working together, Josh felt he’d grown to understand Kelly Rich. And the Kelly Rich of the past few weeks was not the same Kelly Rich of the past several months, was not the same Kelly Rich whose ad he had answered. Something had changed within her recently—something akin to the degeneration of the human soul, the human spirit. Not that he really believed in such things. But he understood that something was wrong with her, and it bothered him that she felt so insecure about talking to him about it.
Or maybe she doesn’t even know herself, his
mind added as an afterthought. Maybe she’s just as lost as I am.
Then why was she so cold about it? Why did it seem like she was trying to cover something up? Something big that she was afraid of, for whatever reason people have for being afraid of certain things? He was here to help, was her friend. Couldn’t she see that? Didn’t she even care?
Now I’m really getting ahead of myself. Why in the hell should I even expect her to tell me her deepest, darkest secrets, anyway? It’s not like we’ve been best buddies for the majority of our lives. Despite how closely we’ve worked together on this project for the past several months, we’re still essentially strangers in the whole scheme of things. And we’ve cultivated our relationship that way on purpose, so who can really blame her? Everyone’s got secrets.
And that was true. Kelly knew nothing about Sampers, knew nothing about that late afternoon over a year ago when Joshua Cavey took two burning-hot slugs in the upper torso, had nearly died, and he had no desire to tell her about it. Sure, she knew he liked cappuccino and was a damned good editor and occasionally went skiing in the Adirondacks. Likewise, he knew some cursory details concerning her divorce and knew she spent her childhood upstate—was a “country girl,” according to him, but that was really about it. As far as their friendship went he never really opened himself up to her, so why should he expect her to do the opposite? That wasn’t fair. As his mother would say, that was being downright stupid-headed.
You only get what you give, he thought, thinking it was a line from some song. You only get what you give and if you expect anything different, then you’re only being stupid-headed.