by Ronald Malfi
“Kellerella,” they both breathed at the same time, and a flood of memories suddenly burst through the dam of her mind, and she—
(this is what I can do this is what I can create you don’t believe me but watch what I can do I can make things be real)
—saw herself standing up here with Mouse, telling Mouse that she can make things be real, that she can create things from her mind just by thinking about them, and that these were real things, and the only way to prove it was to stand there and open the closet and show Mouse, to show her those two dead girls, materialized into reality from the sheer power of her mind, and they were real and they could do things if they wanted and if she didn’t make them vanish again, and that was what happened at home, was what happened in the woods with Simple Simon the Pie Man, and that she had a power—
In her head, she heard the whizzing sounds of iron bolts fired from the framework of her mental dam just as the dam itself gave way, crumbling against the pent-up force of her memories, which now came crashing down around her.
She remembered.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Marlene Kellow thought of the baby as a beehive inside her, buzzing and bustling with life. With a hand to the gentle swell of her belly, she was certain she could almost feel the bees pulsing within, thudding blindly against the inner walls of her womb with dizzying stupidity. When standing, she could feel the weight of the hive in her gut, held there as if by invisible hands, pressing against her body, her flesh. And at night, lying on her back and barely breathing, she could make out the rise of her belly in the darkness, and would swear it was the shape of a beehive. Listening during those late hours, she could even hear the perfect buzzing, the unmistakable drone of thousands upon thousands of bees swarming around inside her.
There is no baby inside me. This thought haunted her constantly, most often in the quiet hours of a sleepless predawn. I don’t know what it is, but there is no baby inside me.
Not a baby; an infestation.
She found herself suffering from a barrage of nightmares. In one, she imagined her baby to be a goat-faced ungulate, a devil-child with glowing red eyes and a head swarming with stinging, angry bees. It would come out mewling like a pig, stabbing its hoofed legs into the air, hungry for human flesh. In another dream, she was being pursued through a field of wild sunflowers by a ravenous greyhound. And although the dog never caught her in these dreams, it would just get closer and closer over time…eventually to the point where she could feel its bristling muzzle pressed into the tight flesh of her shins as she ran.
There were times when she entertained the notion of killing herself and, inevitably, the hive inside her. She considered this act with the same sense of dispassion one might feel upon crushing a lizard beneath a steel-toed boot. She thought of pills. She thought of the poison fumes pumping from one of the cars in the garage. She thought of jumping out a window—quick and painless, over and done with.
But she never did any of those things. In the end, Marlene Kellow carried the baby to term and was rewarded with a quick and uncomplicated delivery. Kelly Kellow was born. The name had struck Marlene in a dream: the name of a fairy tale princess, of something she knew—she felt—her daughter would truly never be, no matter how much money her father made nor how many princes came knocking at the castle gate. Because Kelly, then still unborn and unnamed, would be different; Marlene knew this in that certain mystical way mothers tend to know things.
Infestation. She would tremble.
In the delivery room, when the child was handed to her, Marlene accepted it with passionless disinterest, not really wanting to touch it. It had lived inside her for nine months, and now here it was again, back again, and it weighed heavy in her arms. She despised herself for these feelings, yet she couldn’t deny them. And it occurred to her right then and there that she was actually afraid of the child…that all these confused and acrimonious emotions had welled up within her, augmented by a steadily mounting horror. It wasn’t fear for the child; it was fear of it.
It, Marlene thought. It.
Kelly Kellow spent her childhood mostly alone. Though her parents performed their requisite parental tasks from time to time, the young girl quickly became accustomed to the strange hands and cradling bosoms of a collection of live-in nurses and housemaids. There had been a young teenage girl named Sandy who would take Kelly to the park in town on the weekends. But eventually the trips to the park stopped, and one morning Kelly overheard Sandy speaking with her mother in the kitchen.
“She never plays with anyone,” Sandy told her mother. “She sits by herself in the sand, or by the woods, or in a tree, and she never plays with any of the other children.”
“Maybe she doesn’t like the other children,” her mother responded coldly.
“I don’t think I’m going to be coming around anymore, Mrs. Kellow.”
“Because my daughter won’t play with strange children?” There was spiteful humor in her voice.
“I just don’t feel comfortable around Kelly,” Sandy replied.
The absence of Sandy did not affect Kelly. Neither did the repeated abandonment of many other sitters throughout her early years. If she needed to be taken care of, Glenda was always around, always pleasant. In fact, Kelly was just as reluctant and solitary around the babysitters as she was around the other children from the neighborhood. Because she was different. The neighborhood children didn’t understand her, didn’t know her like she knew herself, and even at a young age Kelly understood this.
Still…she was alone.
Home-schooled throughout her childhood, she would ruminate about what it was like to attend regular school. Come two-thirty, she would dash outside and stand at the crest of the hill just as the school in town let out. From there, she would watch the children below disperse throughout the tiny streets, shouting and running and jumping and laughing. Over time, and with mounting curiosity, these hillside jaunts eventually brought her down the side of the hill and to the cusp of the closest town road. She never spoke to the children as they streamed by, never made herself stand out. Except once.
A group of girls paused one afternoon beside the road and one of them pointed up at Kelly. They were giggling behind cupped hands, staring at her as if she were a caged animal at some small town carnival.
“Freak on the hill,” the lead girl provoked. “Freak on the hill, freak on the hill.”
“I’m Kelly.” She introduced herself with the understanding that these girls had no intention of befriending her, yet it was all she knew to say.
“Kelly is the freak on the hill,” the lead girl shouted. She was an ugly, pudgy thing with an angry face, Kelly noted. Faintly, she wondered how such people attract friends. This girl appeared to have a lot of them.
“Rich people are weird,” said a second girl.
“She don’t look rich,” said a third. Then to Kelly: “You really live in that big house up there? Your daddy’s rich?”
“I don’t know,” Kelly stammered. She suddenly wished she hadn’t come down the hill.
“Look at her clothes,” the girl continued. “She don’t look rich to me. Did your mommy make those clothes for you, rich girl?”
“Did one of your servants?” chided their angry-looking leader. Her friends exploded with laughter, pointing and snickering.
Kelly felt tears burn her eyes. “I don’t have servants,” she said.
“Those are ugly pants,” said one of the girls. Then she laughed. “Like your ugly face.”
“Ugly face!” another girl shouted.
“Freak on the hill!” they all began to chant. “Freak on the hill! Freak on the hill! Kelly is the freak on the hill!”
Trembling, tears streaming freely down her face now, she balled her right fist into a tight knot, felt a large, heavy stone there, and drew back her arm. She fired the stone at their pudgy leader; it caught the girl’s shin and bounced into the street. The girls fell immediately silent as their leader’s face blanched scarle
t, her eyes squinted, and she started to howl in pain.
Kelly just stared at them. Slowly retreating back up the hillside, she glanced once down at the palm of her right hand and saw that it was flecked with sand. The indent of the stone was pressed into the soft flesh of her hand.
I imagined you, she thought, and wondered where the stone had landed. Was it still there in the street? Could she go find it, pick it up? Or had it vanished? Where did it come from? Inside me, she thought, inside my head. I imagined it was there…and then it was.
It was make-believe.
Nights, Glenda kept Kelly on a strict diet of children’s books—nursery rhymes and fairy tales and stories of kings and queens and princesses.
“Where do they live?” she asked Glenda one evening, just as the woman was about to turn out the light and let her sleep.
“Who, dear?”
“The people in these books.”
Glenda smiled warmly, ran her fingers through Kelly’s hair. “Sweetheart, these stories are make-believe. The people don’t really exist.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “Too bad.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I want to go there.”
Still smiling, Glenda bent and kissed her forehead. She smelled of cinnamon and freshly baked bread and fruit-scented hairspray. Glenda was older than her mother, yet Glenda didn’t have children of her own. Eventually, the affection she displayed toward Kelly led the girl to believe that Glenda was her real mother. For some reason, Kelly rationalized, those two strangers who claimed ownership of her were insistent about keeping the truth hidden, portraying Glenda Banczyk as a simple housemaid. Who were those two strangers, anyway? Locked away in large rooms by themselves, fearful (or so it seemed) to be near the child they called their daughter.
Kelly Banczyk, Kelly would often think, smiling to herself. That doesn’t sound stupid at all.
Glenda turned out the light beside the bed and stepped toward the door, singing softly to herself:
Little Baby Roundabout,
Someone let the Baby out,
And now, Sweet Babe, it’s time for bed,
So close your eyes and rest your head.
“Goodnight, Glenda,” Kelly whispered.
“Goodnight, sweetheart.”
She never could remember her dreams.
For whatever reason children are prompted to suddenly and compulsively rebel against the canons of authority, a nine-year-old Kelly found herself in her father’s thinking room one day despite the man’s constant insistence that she never set foot inside the room. Perhaps it was for that very reason she felt compelled to push open the door and peek inside. Occasionally, when it was occupied by her father (most usually after dinner and with a snifter of brandy), he would leave the door open the slightest bit: just enough for Kelly to peer in and get an eyeful of the magnificent room…of the wondrous yet frightening floating animal heads that decorated the walls. They were real animals, she understood…or they had been at some point. Now they were dead, and at nine years old, the concept of death fascinated her.
It was a grand room with a vaulted ceiling and varnished wood walls. The massive, rhombus-shaped windows were covered by heavy palls of purple velvet and piped with gold embroidery. There was a single chair of red leather in the center of the room, facing an expansive mahogany desk that was propped against the far wall. Two out of the four walls groaned with books of all shapes, sizes, and colors. The room smelled of them—a musty, unused smell that reminded young Kelly of soggy old newspapers and unwashed laundry. And, of course, there were the animals…
They had congregated toward the ceiling, all of them, and stared down with sightless obsidian eyes, black as the darkest midnight. A stuffed owl was perched atop one of the ceiling rafters; a cougar, its jaws wide, protruded above an oil painting of some place called Aspen (the name was on a brass plate tacked to the bottom of the frame); horned animals—animals she did not know the names of—had gathered in military precision just above one of the immense bookcases, their faces lost to any attempt at expression. It occurred to her then what death actually meant: that in death, there was no expression, no smiling or crying or laughter or hurt. That these animals had for some reason been cheated out of such wealth frightened her. The dullness of their eyes and the rigidity of their flesh conveyed a certain sense of permanence to her, of finality, and the awareness of such truths stimulated the anxiety within her.
Stepping further into the room, her head as far back on her neck as it would go, she reached the large leather chair and decided to pull herself onto it. Giggling, she felt herself sink into the cushion. Beneath her, the chair sighed.
There were little orange tubes on her father’s desk. Plastic containers with colored bits inside. Medicines, she thought. Pills. There were a lot.
Behind her, she heard the door creak and her father’s heavy footfalls on the Indian carpet. Suddenly frightened, she slipped off the chair and poked her head around the other side. Her father spotted her as he crossed the room and froze in midstride, a look of utter disbelief across his face. She could feel a chill at her back, could feel gooseflesh breaking out along her arms.
Daddy’s mad, she thought. He always said not to come in here and now I’m here. And he’s mad.
“Kelly…” He looked so big to her. She didn’t know what to say. His cheeks quivered and the fingers of his hands worked spastically at his sides. He exhaled for what seemed like an eternity, the lower lid of his left eye beginning to twitch involuntarily. “Come here,” he breathed.
Shaken, she couldn’t move. She felt the eyes of the bodiless animals boring into her skin, the back of her head.
“Kelly,” he said, his voice trying to remain level, yet his anger clearly apparent. “What are you doing in here? I said never to come in here, didn’t I?”
She could only watch him from the side of the chair, fearful to move, powerless to move.
“Didn’t I?” he repeated. “I’m asking you a question, Kelly. Didn’t I say never to come in this room? Didn’t I say that over and over again, so many times? This is my room. I come here to be alone and I don’t want you in here. Am I going to have to start locking the door?” He brought his hands up, wringing them together. He too was shaking. Had Kelly been older, what she had mistakenly recognized as anger in her father would have more appropriately been identified as apprehension.
“Daddy…”
“What do you want?”
But she could say no more.
Gordon Kellow shook. “You…” he began, his words trembling out over his lips and breaking in midair. “This is my place, Kelly. I come here when I want to get away from things. Do you understand that? When I don’t want to be reminded of the things you…” His voice faded, too unsteady. Finally he managed, “Do you understand me, Kelly?”
She understood nothing yet nodded nonetheless.
“When I come here I don’t want to have to worry about things…about…” Now his eyes broke from hers, began darting around the room. “You shouldn’t come in here.”
It’s me, she thought. He comes in here to forget about me. She felt tears spill down her face. I hate this stupid room! her mind screamed. I hate this stupid room and I hate this whole stupid house! I hate you!
“This room is not for you!” her father shouted, and reached down and grabbed at her arm.
There was a faint cracking sound that permeated the room, like reams of wood being split down the center. Crackling, splintering. It wasn’t just in her head; her father heard it, too. He released his grip and took a startled step back, hands suddenly flattened at his sides, his head tilted back as if to examine the rafters in the ceiling. The sound intensified, multiplied into many sounds, and soon the crackling cacophony shook the room, as if the house itself had gained voice. Kelly could feel the vibrations in the floorboards.
“Daddy,” she blurted again, tears rolling freely down her cheeks. Looking above her father’s head she could see the so
urce of the noises: the animals were moving. Like arthritic patients rotating stiff joints, the heads bent side to side, pulling the molding and plaster from the walls. The black, sightless eyes began to shift in their sockets; mouths, creaking like bent steel, slowly began working at the air. The wings of the stuffed owl on one of the rafters began to tremble; a shrill hiss gained momentum in its plastic throat.
Her father had moved between his desk and the bookcase, mesmerized with disbelief at what was going on around him. He couldn’t look away from the heads, now animated and with increased flexibility. Kelly imagined the heads breaking through the walls, their bodies still attached but now only skeletons covered in plaster and insulation, and trampling her father to death. The vision was so vivid she feared that if she thought about it too long, it would actually happen.
“Kelly!” she heard her father shout, a tremor in his voice, and that was what got her moving. Without looking back, she broke into a sprint toward the door, her legs pumping, her hands balled into white fists, tears burning her face. She ran as if in slow motion; it seemed to take an eternity to reach the door. Behind and above her she could hear the sounds of the animal heads peeling away from the wall, their defunct vocal chords regaining composure: a chorus of unnatural sounds. Chunks of plaster crumbled above the doorway.
She burst through the door into the hallway and continued running down the length of the corridor until she spilled out into the main foyer and proceeded out the front door. The image of those struggling animal heads trapped inside the walls followed her into the daylight. Once she made it halfway around the house, she collapsed in a sobbing heap to the ground, exhausted and terrified.
What if he dies in there? What if those animals break from the walls and kill him? It will be all my fault.