by Ania Ahlborn
“Shut up, ass-wipe,” he growled beneath his breath, and slammed his bedroom door behind him.
6
* * *
STEVIE SPENT THE rest of the day inside. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t sneak out if he wanted. His own mother may have been a total jerk, but Aunt Mandy would definitely want to hear Stevie’s story of how he’d been pursued by the shadow thing. She’d always been patient with him, even when he struggled with his vocal outbursts, with his jumbled thoughts. Perhaps she’d go with him into the forest—drive him down the washboard surface of that abandoned road and park just shy of that creepy house. They’d climb the rickety steps together, and she’d speak words of comfort as they knocked on the door. It’ll be okay. Don’t be afraid. We’ll find him, you and me. And there, with their forces combined, their joint need for Jude’s return would make him materialize. Like magic. Like the space-time travelers of Star Trek. Beam me up. Except they’d be beaming Jude down.
There was a chance Stevie’d get caught, end up being grounded for a year instead of a month. But it was a heck of a lot better than sitting there, thinking about worst-case scenarios.
He shot a look at the bedroom door. His mom hadn’t checked up on him since dinner an hour earlier—an awkwardly silent meal. She was still freaked out about everything, but she hadn’t mentioned their fight or the phone call she’d received to Terry, and Stevie was thanking his lucky stars for that. If she had breathed even a word, The Tyrant would have taken great pleasure in laying into him after a long day at work. Terry thought Stevie’s issues were bullshit anyway. The clanging, the nightmares, the echolalia when Stevie got worked up; according to him, all of it was made-up, a desperate ploy for attention. He’d be damned if a shitty kid pulled the wool over his eyes. But Stevie’s mom had kept quiet, and now The Tyrant was in the living room, sitting in his ugly recliner, hogging the TV and slurping at a can of beer. Stevie’s mom milled around the kitchen, never more than a gruff “Babe” away.
It was unlikely that she’d come in to check on Stevie before bedtime, which meant he had about an hour for a jailbreak. If he kept an eye on the time, his mom would never know he was gone.
Yanking open his desk drawer, he pulled out a crummy old digital watch—banana yellow and gotten from a Burgerville kids’ meal. He shoved it in the pocket of his shorts, then struggled with the window. The house was old, and the sills were swollen with the summer’s humidity. It took some muscle and a couple of grunts, but he managed to push it open, just wide enough to sneak through. And yet, he hesitated despite his resolve, his guts churning from the possibility of being found out. If his mom was next door, going to Jude’s place was the equivalent of a prison escapee running into the warden’s open arms.
Except she isn’t there, if I were you, he told himself. She doesn’t care, wouldn’t go in there. Perhaps Mom was just as glad as Terry that Jude was gone. If Jude didn’t come back, there was the possibility that Stevie would straighten out. Magically become normal. Poof. Like Pinocchio turning into a real boy. Everyone knew Jude was nothing but a bad influence. After all, it was after Uncle Scott died that Jude had gotten super rebellious. It was easy to blame him for Stevie’s state of mind taking a turn for the worst.
It was convenient to forget the trouble with Stevie had begun long before the accident, when he had been five or six. Back then, Jude had been happy, but Stevie’s nightmares were already keeping everyone up. He’d scream into the night, watching things crawl out of the walls, staring at monsters as they peered through the crack between the closet door and the jamb. During the day, unless Jude was there to distract him, Stevie couldn’t focus. His schoolwork suffered. His speech became unhinged, which amused his classmates but scared his teachers. Mrs. Tassel had been the only one who had truly tried to help.
Stevie’s problems seemed to stem from nowhere, and Stevie’s mom and dad began to fight more than they talked. Dennis Clark insisted they take him to a shrink, but Stevie’s mom wouldn’t hear of it. There was nothing wrong with her son. He was fine. It was just a phase. It would pass. Everything would be okay.
He spent evenings listening to their arguments while trying to fall asleep. It had been impossible not to. The walls were thin. Stevie’s dad was screaming about doctors. His mom talked about pulling him out of school, keeping him at home, changing everything about the Clarks’ lifestyle to accommodate whatever it was her son would need.
That’s what had pushed Dad over the line. “You can’t just ignore it!” he yelled. “People like this, they can get dangerous, Nick! You want him to grow up to be a psychopath? A school shooter? One of those crazy fucking kids who end up on the news?”
“That’s exactly what I don’t want!” she had roared back at him.
“Yeah? Well it’s going to happen. He’s going to go off like an atom bomb. And you know what’ll happen then? The people we know—the entire world—will put the blame on us. The irresponsible dipshits who let their kid blow up a cafeteria. Who didn’t know he was buying guns off the Internet. Just a couple of blind assholes. You want that? Fine. Be my fucking guest.”
The next morning, Stevie awoke to his mother weeping on the couch. Half of the master bedroom’s drawers had been emptied. His dad’s car was gone. Stevie patted his mom on the back and tried to comfort her as she cried. He supposed his dad just really truly didn’t want to be an asshole, and so he’d packed up his stuff and left. But Dennis Clark wasn’t the only thing that evanesced. Talk about pulling Stevie out of school, giving him anything he needed, it all went away as well. Because it was hard for Nicole Clark to stick to her guns when she was spiraling into the dark corners of depression; when she, too, felt like she was losing her mind.
Stevie still had the regular nightmares, but these days his fear of The Tyrant had taught him to keep quiet. He saw shadow people every day. Sometimes, he was able to talk himself through his own episodes, ignore them altogether; like the haze that had slithered out of the oven behind his mother earlier that day; like the time when, standing in the shower, octopus tentacles had come up out of the drain and whipped around as if searching for his feet. Or when, as he bowed over his morning bowl of cereal, his Cheerios turned into tiny serpents eating their own tails, their eyes blankly staring up at him as they bobbed in a man-made lake of milk.
Like how he’d seen a weird creature bound over their back fence.
Except, there was that fallen-over fender.
There was the cut on his ankle, created by a broken bicycle spoke; a reminder that what he’d seen must have been real.
Double-knotting his shoelaces, Stevie rose from the floor and crept to his bedroom door. He pulled it open a quarter of an inch—just enough to peer through the crack—and strained to catch sight of his mother, or at least echolocate her milling around out there. But Terry had the habit of cranking the TV volume way too loud. Football announcers yelled over the constant drone of a frantic crowd. He couldn’t hear anything above the cheering. He’d just have to risk it and hope for the best.
He quietly shut his door, skittered across his room, and crawled onto his bed toward the window, then shimmied beneath the pane like a squirming fish. It was a tight fit, but he made it. His feet hit the dirt, and he squatted, half hidden beside one of his mom’s flowering bushes, peering through the pickets of the side yard toward Jude’s house. If he was discovered, he’d plead his case: he just wanted to make sure that Aunt Mandy was okay. But if he was caught hiding in the begonia bush, it would be pretty obvious he was sneaking around.
That in mind, Stevie rose to his full four feet five inches and yanked a withering flower off a branch. Only two steps toward Jude’s place and he was already backpedaling, his back thudding against the siding of the house. A police cruiser eased up to the curb, its whirly lights at rest. Stevie ducked back down as he watched a couple of cops get out of the car. They didn’t speak to each other as they strolled past Aunt Amanda’s front fence and up her steps, out of Stevie’s line of sight.
He held his breath, straining to hear over Terry’s stupid game—muffled but still audible through the open front windows. Aunt Mandy’s doorbell ding-donged, soft murmurs drifting up into the almost-darkened sky. And then, the muffled beauty of the evening was shattered by a wail. A soul being torn from a body. Tragedy shaped into sound waves.
The cry was so all-encompassing that it seemed to blast in from every direction, as though an angel had stuck her head through a cloud and screamed down from the sky, her cry wrapping around the world like a choking veil. But it was a familiar voice, Aunt Mandy shouting as if those officers were fileting her still-beating heart.
Stevie’s muscles spasmed, realization punching through his chest. He bounded upright, ready to leap across the junk-littered yard, but an inexplicable stillness overtook him; a sensation that left him unfeeling and numb. That scream should have thrown him into a tailspin of terror, but all he did was stand there, motionless, thinking, Dead, dead, red bloodshed . . .
He told himself to move, either toward Aunt Amanda’s squalling or back through his window. But before he could get his feet to cooperate, he saw his aunt stumble down her porch steps and launch herself across the sidewalk. She was screaming Stevie’s mother’s name.
“Nicki!” Like a bird with a broken wing. “Nicki!” Over and over—a parrot on repeat, an echo chamber loop.
A bang sounded against the front of Stevie’s house, out of view but hard enough to send a vibration through the building’s wooden frame. Aunt Amanda’s fists hit the front door with enough force to shake the walls.
“Mandy?” Stevie’s mom through the open front-room window, alarmed.
Another scream, this one more panicked than the last. Stevie pictured his aunt collapsing into his mother’s arms, fainting like ladies did in the soaps she loved so much, limp as his mom tried to keep her from hitting the deck beneath her feet.
“What the hell is going on?” The Tyrant.
“Mandy, what happened? What is it?!” Stevie’s mom. Concentrated dread.
But even he knew the solution to this dark riddle.
They had found Jude.
Dead, dead, limbs outspread.
7
* * *
STEVIE WONDERED IF it was possible to stay in his room for the rest of his life. Maybe, if he willed himself deaf, he wouldn’t have to hear the news he knew was coming. And perhaps, if he couldn’t hear the words, reality—at least for Jude—would cease to exist. It was like the riddle his teacher had presented at school: If a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer was no. Because without ears, sound didn’t exist. Without eyes, light was darkness. And without a body, there was no victim. Which is why, despite his aunt’s woeful cries, Stevie refused to believe it. Not until he saw Jude in a coffin, a waxwork dressed up in a suit he’d have never worn in real life.
But when he finally crept out of his room, Aunt Mandy’s weeping was amplified, fifty times louder than it had been a moment before. The house was a cavern of sorrow. All the furniture, the pictures on the walls, the TV, even Terry’s La-Z-Boy, had been swallowed up by all-consuming grief.
Stevie shot a look toward Dunk’s bedroom, but the door was closed. Duncan was a champion at avoiding the family in general. Toss a tragedy into the mix and he was the Invisible Man.
Stevie inched down the dimly lit hall, dragging his right hand along the wall, the texture giving him comfort; like reading Braille, its message reprised over and over again: Today will be okay, okay, someday someone will say . . .
“Oh God.” Aunt Amanda’s voice filtered into the hallway from the living room. “I don’t understand! How is this happening? What have I done?” A fleshlike thud.
“Mandy, stop.” Stevie’s mom.
“What have I done for you to smite me this way?” Aunt Mandy’s voice rising with each word, escalating toward a full-on scream. Smite. Smit. Smote. A word Stevie didn’t often hear, one he knew belonged in a church. His mom didn’t drag him there anymore, not like Aunt Mandy with Jude. She used to, but stopped when she and Stevie overheard some ladies talking, watching them shoot suspicious glances at the two of them after the service. “Maybe if he isn’t getting better, she should pray a little harder,” one of the ladies had murmured beneath her breath. “Maybe it’s a problem of faith.”
He peeked around the edge of the hall and into the living room just in time to catch another pounding thump. Aunt Mandy was sitting on the couch, Stevie’s mom next to her. She was hitting her breastplate with a closed fist, as if trying to crack her chest open to pull out her own heart. Stevie’s mom was attempting to stop her. Every time that fist came down, she struggled to keep it from making contact. But Nicole Clark was failing to make an impact with her sister. At that moment, Amanda Brighton was stronger than both Stevie’s mom and The Tyrant combined. What had once been quiet sorrow had now grown into a snarling, clawing beast.
“It’s just a shirt, Mandy.” Stevie’s mom. “He just dropped it. It doesn’t prove anything.”
His aunt’s face was swollen, as if she’d been stung by a thousand bees. The skin around her eyes was raw. And yet, the rest of her looked gaunt. Her arms skinny, jutting out of her sleeveless top like dry and leafless twigs. The thin, silky fabric of her shirt gave her shoulders a birdlike quality, nothing under there but a skeleton wrapped in skin. It reminded him of Egyptian mummies, of sickness and starvation. Had he passed her on the street, he wouldn’t have recognized her. She had changed almost completely in the past few days, looking weak and forlorn.
Stevie’s mom glanced away from her sister. A distant look was cemented upon her face, as though she were trying to will herself to a happier place—This is all too much. She could have been thinking about the lake house they had once borrowed from family friends. The cabin had been beautiful, way fancier than any place Stevie had ever stayed before. He spent the week cannonballing off a private pier while his mom read paperback thrillers, his dad burned hot dogs on the grill, and Dunk screwed around on his phone. That had been only months before Stevie’s first episode . . . before everything had started to fall apart.
Regardless of where her mind was now, his mother’s eyes settled upon her youngest son, and for a brief moment it was as if she were looking through him, as though Stevie, like Jude, had simply disappeared. It took a moment for something to click inside her head, but when it did, her eyes cleared. She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came. Stevie was sure that, at that very moment, she had forgotten his name.
Aunt Mandy was the one to jog her memory. “Stevie.” She sat up at attention, seemingly startled by the fact that there were still children in this world, kids who were alive and well while hers was possibly forever gone. Or maybe she was just upset that he was seeing her that way, haggard, overwrought. “Oh God . . . ,” she whispered, covering her mouth with a hand and looking away.
“I s-saw the cops,” Stevie told them. His eyes dared to wander in his stepfather’s direction. Terry was still in his easy chair, staring blankly at the TV, which was now turned down so low it was practically muted. His expression was hard, almost confused, as though he’d forgotten the rules of the game. Or perhaps he simply didn’t understand why Amanda Brighton had to have a goddamn emotional breakdown in his living room when she had a whole house to herself right next door.
The Tyrant didn’t regard his stepson. Not even a glance.
Neither his mother nor his aunt said anything, so Stevie pressed on.
“I—I—I know something happened.” He took a steadying breath. If there ever was a time for keeping his cool, this was it. Jude was relying on him.
“Nothing happened,” his mom replied.
“Wh-what do you mean . . . ?” Halloween. Murder scene. Was she really going to deny it? Stevie had seen the police with his own two eyes. Was she going to insist that he had imagined them there?
“Stevie, just . . .” A breath escaped her in a huff of impatient frustration. “We’
ll talk about it later, okay?”
“Go to your room.” Terry snapped out of his daze, always eager to boss someone around.
“But I want to know what happened . . .” Stevie had assumed Aunt Mandy had been made aware of the sweatshirt that morning, but it seemed that he was wrong. Or was there more? Despite their ineptitude, that bumbling search party could have actually found another clue.
“Hey, are you deaf?” The Tyrant’s eyes were fixed on Stevie’s face. “Your ears as bad as your fucking head?”
Head. Stevie mutely mouthed the word. Instead.
Both Stevie’s mom and his aunt winced at the profanity that came spilling out of Terry’s mouth, but neither said a word edgewise. For a second, Stevie was tempted to duck his head between his shoulders and go back to his room, to not make trouble or risk getting pummeled. But the look on Terry’s face—the total lack of sympathy for Stevie or his mother or his poor Aunt Mandy—tied up Stevie’s insides into a tight double knot.
“I can see j-just as good as I can hear, my dear,” Stevie fired back. “I saw the cops and I wanna know, you know? I wanna know what they said, meathead.”
“Stevie . . . !” His mother gave him a disbelieving stare. He threw it right back at her, astounded as well, because, while Jude’s disappearance had clearly messed up Aunt Mandy, it was now abundantly clear that it had done something weird to his mom as well. She didn’t understand anything anymore. He had to yell every word he said for her to hear him, and even that didn’t guarantee a response.
And on top of it all, he’d just accidentally called Terry out. He was going to get pounded, for sure.