by Ronald Malfi
The bathroom door opened a crack and Josh poked his head in. “Am I bothering you?”
Carlos shook his head.
“Sorry. Thought you might have fallen in.”
“You would have heard a splash. How’s your hand?”
Josh shrugged and held up his bandaged right hand. “Flesh wound. I’ll survive.”
“Should have had me look at that before you mummified it.”
“No biggie,” he said. “You can check out the cuts on my feet if you feel bored later.”
Carlos offered Josh a tired smile and dried his face with a towel. “You get those windows papered up?”
“As best I can. I did a double-layer job in Nellie’s bedroom.”
“How is she?”
“Fading in and out. Stepping into that room is like stepping into a microwave oven on high. She’s not really all there, I don’t think. Her mind, I mean. She’s out of herself, searching for Kelly, trying to reach her.”
Carlos dropped the towel and glanced back up at his reflection in the mirror. For the first time in his life he thought he looked like his father. Having left Carlos and his family when Carlos was just a baby, his only memories of his father were from photographs, or quick snapshot-like blurs that occasionally danced through his dreams. The notion of “father” was almost like a religion to him—reverent but fearfully so. Fleeting. And the irony wasn’t lost to him: that he suddenly resembled his own father—or the notion of “father”—now that he was preparing to become one himself. Grinning, exhausted, he wondered if anyone had a textbook explanation for such things.
“This Kelly girl,” Carlos said. “What’s so special about her?”
“It’s the power,” Josh said. “The same as Nellie. She has some gift and now she’s in some sort of trouble. I don’t know the details, Doc, and it just gets confusing. I’m getting this filtered in through Nellie, who’s been pulling it directly from Kelly’s mind. She doesn’t think Kelly even knows, understands—”
Carlos shook his head. “No,” he said. “What’s so special about her to you?”
“Oh.” The tone of Josh’s voice suddenly changed. “I don’t know.”
Carlos raised an eyebrow at Josh’s reflection. “You don’t?” he said.
Smiling, Josh said, “No, that’s not right. I do. I do know.” He pushed the door open a bit more and leaned against the frame, picking at his fingers. “She doesn’t know it, but she helped me overcome a pretty significant hurdle in my life. Like a million years ago we started working on some project together, and I really loved and believed in it…but mostly, I needed her to be there. Like I said, she didn’t know it, but she helped me overcome.”
“Shot,” Carlos said from nowhere, startling even himself. “You…you were almost killed…”
Surprisingly unimpressed, Josh only nodded.
Carlos shook his head. “How…how did I know that?”
Josh twirled a finger above his head. “In the air,” he said. “All that mental charge coming from Nellie. Filters through the entire apartment and lingers. Gets on us too—gets in our minds. What is it? Osmosis? Something…”
“To use her power,” Carlos said, “she has to disperse it all around her. And some of it we collect. We get a little bit of her power. Like dust settling after an explosion.”
Josh nodded. The look on his face was of tired disinterest. “You felt it in the room with your wife,” he said. “That’s when you went gonzo.”
“Do you think it stays with us?” The idea both frightened and enthralled him. “Forever, I mean?”
Josh shook his head. “No,” he said casually, “I think it passes right through us. We’re not the same as Nellie and Kelly.”
“Yeah,” said Carlos, “our names don’t rhyme.”
Grinning, Josh’s eyes dropped to his hands. “Your middle name Michael?”
“Nope.”
“Yeah,” said Josh, “it comes and goes.”
Michael’s my brother’s name, Carlos thought, but didn’t say a word. Maybe we’re all just a bunch of groping hands, frantically dipping into each other’s brains, grabbing hold of the meat, and seeing what it looks like once we yank it loose.
“There’s more to it, you know,” Josh said, though his voice now sounded very far away. Carlos was lost in the memories of his mind…on a bus with a diseased homeless man…
The doctor looked up, forced another grin. I think I’ve used my last smile for the night. “Yeah?” he said.
“To Kelly, I mean.”
“Oh.”
“Never thought about it much,” Josh said, “but I think…you know…” He shrugged, laughed. “How do you know, right?”
“About Kelly?”
“How do you know about anyone?”
“When it’s right,” Carlos said, “you just know.”
“Yeah,” Josh snickered, “I figured you’d say something useless like that.”
Carlos laughed. “Take it to heart, kid. Or throw it away. Do whatever the hell you want with it—”
The mirror above the sink began to rattle in its frame. The wall behind it puffed powdery smoke and the single light fixture in the ceiling started to dim. Carlos and Josh looked up at it in unison, a comparable expression of fear and bewilderment on both their faces. The rattling mirror shook harder. The wooden cabinets beneath the sink creaked and one of the doors split down the middle with a loud popping sound. They both jumped at the sound, Josh nearly spilling out into the hallway.
“There!” Josh cried, the tremors now making their way across the floorboards and vibrating his voice. “This is what it did when I paged you! This is what broke the windows!”
“This is coming from Nellie’s mind?”
“Yes!”
In the confusion, Carlos’s brain shook loose another thought: “Could it not be Nellie at all, Josh? Could it be your friend Kelly coming through?”
“I don’t know. What does it even matter? Let’s get the hell out of this bathroom before the walls come down on—”
That instant, they both heard something that sounded like an aluminum baseball bat slamming against the hood of a car, followed by a spray of pale green tiles from inside the shower stall. The tiles shot like boomerangs across the bathroom and shattered against the opposite wall. One of the tiles caught Carlos in the forehead, gouging him, and he howled and stumbled backward. Following the spray of tiles, a rusted water pipe was forced through the wall of the shower stall, jutting like a displaced rib, and sent an explosion of water shooting across the bathroom.
“God!” Josh shouted, arms up in front of his face. He leaned into the room and clutched the collar of Carlos’s shirt, gave him a steady jerk toward the bathroom door. The doctor’s legs seemed to come out from under him, sending his body crashing against the partially-opened bathroom door. “Come on! Move it or lose it, Doc!”
Carlos stumbled into the hallway and toppled to the floor. In his amazement, he felt a laugh tickle his throat. Laugh now and the world thinks I’m crazy! It was all he could do to keep it at bay.
Josh tore down the hall and flung open Nellie’s bedroom door. But didn’t go inside. Instead, he just remained standing there, staring into the bedroom, the greasy hair forced back off his face by a potent wind. His shirt and pants rippled in the wind. He looked like a skydiver.
“What?” Carlos shouted. “What is it?”
Josh didn’t answer. Once his wits were about him, Josh darted into the bedroom against the wind. Carlos hopped to his feet and took off for the bedroom. He hit the door and was greeted by a cyclone. Inside the bedroom, the plastic had been yanked from the window. Some force beyond nature had forced the outside wind to amplify itself and remain in a steady whirlwind at the center of Nellie’s bedroom. In it swirled dust and old balls of tissues and bits of plaster from the walls.
Josh was at Nellie’s bedside, shouting at her to calm it down, calm it down, goddamn it, Nellie, calm it down. But Nellie wouldn’t calm anything; the old wom
an was no longer with them. Josh was right, Carlos thought then: Nellie Worthridge was someplace else. Her mind was someplace else. All that was here in this room with them was her lifeless body.
Let’s not forget the tornado, Carlos thought wildly. Sweet Lord, if I make it through this sane, I’ll owe You a lot!
“Can you stand it?”
It took Carlos a moment to realize Josh was shouting at him. “What?”
“Being in here,” Josh yelled back. “Can you stand it?”
Surprisingly, he found that he could. Either the electromagnetic sensation had worn off considerably…or he’d just grown accustomed to it.
He gave Josh the thumbs-up. “I’m okay!” He rushed toward the window and tried to tape the plastic sheet back in place. “Is she out of it?”
“Gone!” Josh yelled.
“Is there any way you’ll know when she…when she finds your friend Kelly?”
“I have no idea, Doc,” Josh said. And after several moments, he could only repeat it: “I have no idea.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Kelly walked through the front door of the gingerbread house.
The enormous shape tangled in vines and hanging from the rafters was another body. She edged slowly around it, her eyes wide and reluctant to look away. A hand, fingers frozen with rigor mortis: a perpetual claw. Beneath the body on the floor was a pool of black blood. As she moved beyond it, she accidentally bumped up against it and cried out in fright. Set in motion, the hanging corpse slowly rotated until the strained and lifeless face of DeVonn Rotley turned to face her, the large man’s eyes ruptured from his skull, his mouth impossibly wide. She screamed again, her own voice echoing back at her, reverberating inside her head. And faintly, beyond that: Simon’s dry laughter.
She closed her eyes and forced herself to back away from the hanging corpse. Keep it together, Kelly, keep it together, girl. You’re stronger than this. You can beat this. You can overcome. And she could, she knew she could—she just had to regain control of her own mind…seek out that alien hand and break its grip…
Backing up, she slammed into something large and gangly and screamed again. Behind her, whatever she’d struck toppled to the floor with a sound very much like a tumble of pumpkins falling down a flight of stairs. And she didn’t need to see it to know this was another dead body, another of Simon’s victims—
—No, she heard Simon say from all around her, I can’t take all the credit. It was your brain, after all.
She shook her head, sobbing freely now. This isn’t happening. This can’t be real. Why can’t I wake up from this nightmare?
The corpse she’d sent in a heap to the floor reached out for her and grabbed her ankle. Too shocked to make a sound, she could only stand there as an icy tract of horror exploded up from her leg and dispelled through the whole of her body. She felt her heart falter in her chest. Throwing herself back and pulling her foot free, she sent herself sprawling to the hardwood floor, nearly face to face with the living corpse—
But it wasn’t alive at all. It hadn’t even grabbed her; she’d just stepped into its hand, and—
And she recognized the face. It was pale, almost bleached-looking, with cobweb hair and small, beady eyes…and then she saw the corpse’s neck: a wildflower sprouting the crooked and busted handles of two-dozen plastic forks, flowering with congealed blood and pasty sinew…a dark pit near the jugular, the carotid…
It was one of the detectives who’d questioned her awhile back at her parents’ house. As if she’d picked up the body’s lingering thought from the air, she was suddenly certain of it. The detective. Raintree, his name had been…
She pushed herself up from the floor…and noticed that the floors were neither earth and sod and grass, nor were they shoddy, termite-ridden planks laid one next to the other. No—this was a floor, an actual floor you’d find in someone’s house…
My parents’ house, she suddenly understood. This is the same floor in the front hall of my parents’ house.
“Are you coming?” Simon said from behind her, his voice now very real and very exact. Still on her hands and knees, Kelly spun around to catch a glimpse of the monster, but it was too dark. She could hardly make out his shape in front of her. Simon laughed at her persistence. “What a waste if you choose to sit around on the floor all evening…”
She pushed herself up. Her body protested, a barrage of aches and pains exploding in every joint.
“I remember it all,” she said, her voice faltering. “I know what’s next. It’s the dog again, isn’t it? Only this, too, you’ve improved on. Am I right? This is something bigger, just like all…all these innocent…”
“You have no idea,” Simon breathed…and she saw his shape begin to weave in and out of the darkness. She followed, her shoes clacking loudly against the floor—her parents’ floor. In the distance, she could see the dull, throbbing red light radiating up through the floorboards like a nuclear silo. And she could hear it now, too, and feel its beat reverberating throughout her body.
The heart of Never, she marveled. Oh my God, it’s real. I can feel it and it’s real.
She imagined the entire forest valley and hillside, including the Kellow Compound, as the camouflaged carapace of some supernatural basilisk now just moments away from exhuming itself from the earth and standing upright for the first time in ten thousand years. And not just the valley and hillside, but all of Spires itself—the schools and tiny houses, the village square and the confused jumble of diners on the outskirts near the highway. All of it. All part of some irrational, awakened beast…some monster that had existed here since forever.
And did I bring it all to life? She couldn’t help wonder.
As the red light grew stronger, Kelly was able to make out Simon’s grotesque, shuffling shape in the gloom. Over the passage of years, and in seeming defiance of Kelly’s struggle to heal, Simple Simon the imaginary boy was now a deformed, troll-like adult. His body suggested a human being in only the most rudimentary ways: two arms, two legs, a head. The knots of his elbow and knee joints had grown to obscene excess, and instilled on him significant lameness. He walked like an elderly woman…although something deep down inside Kelly told her that she was not being permitted to see all there was, and that this creature was only appearing to her this way because he chose to.
She stalled and Simon urged her on, pausing slightly and waving his right hand in a beckoning gesture. She caught a glimpse of the hand in the red light: it was more a web than a hand, the fingers practically twisted and fused together.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about anything.
As had happened so many years ago, her legs now seemed to be propelled by some extraneous force, urging her along the dark room like a dummy being controlled by a puppeteer. Beneath her feet she could hear the floorboards creak and pop—but not from her footsteps: the heart was slowly pushing up through the floor, starving for exposure and freedom, splintering the manicured floorboards down the middle like balsa wood. Each beat, elucidated by a tremendous throb of red, burning light, caused her entire body to shake, right down to the center of her bones. It was alive, she knew: the house, the forest, the hillside, Spires. And Simon. Somehow, despite everything he’d done, that rhythmic cadence beneath the floor solidified Simple Simon’s existence more than anything.
A shape lay slumped against the far wall, in the exact same spot the injured dog had been bound to so many years back. But this wasn’t the shape of a dog; like the rest, this was the shape of a person. Details were impossible to perceive in the blackness of the room, but of its form she had no doubt. A person, another dead person…
His head turning slightly over his finlike shoulder, Simon passed between the slumped figure and the light, his eyes aglow with a preternatural omnipotence. He watched Kelly with a frightening sense of hunger, of mastery, waiting for her own expression to falter and change—waiting for her to reach that final plateau and look up, only to realize there was no place left
to go, and that the body slouched against the wall—wrists tied, hands dangling from pegs, legs spread akimbo—was her precious Gabriel Farmer, now as dead and as pale as the creature she’d created from her imagination.
And she saw this. And she felt the world turn to ice, felt it crystallize all around her, threatening to fracture and break apart on itself immediately afterward. Gabriel. The name no longer made sense, as if the abrupt comprehension of his demise somehow rendered those three syllables meaningless. Gabriel! Her mind screamed this with authority, yet the name’s uselessness did not falter. Gabriel! Gabriel! Gabriel!
“This was the one,” Simon muttered from the darkness, “that I enjoyed the most. This one. This one who dared come and interrupt, to come between anything we had; anything we still have.”