With the split lid open, the body lying in repose was visible from the waist up. Although she didn’t want to look, the closer she got, the more curious she became. She lost her breath when she saw a red silk gown, one she owned. Then she saw the face. Her face. Her hair. It was Kate!
She stumbled back. Before she fell, two strong hands held her tight against an even stronger chest. She knew Charlie’s powerful build anywhere.
“Kate,” he said. “Kate, your number…your number is coming. Don’t let them get you, too,” he allowed his eyes to cover the vast audience, the celebrities taken before their times. “Like they got us,” he stared at her again. “Kate, you have to break the cycle. You have to stop them.”
“But-but how? How am I supposed to stop those things? They’re so scary.”
“You have to,” he squeezed her shoulders. “Watch for the sign, Kate. The sign. Don’t let them get you—”
He threw his attention over her shoulder. She looked, and her whole body seized in terror. The aisle was black with the scraggly, wrinkled, horn-billed creatures, their menacing claws digging at the stone floor, the cathedral echoing with dreadful screeches, the shrill cries of conquest.
People in the back rows stirred into a panic. Bench to Bench, the horror spread, and the church became a madhouse of stampeding people and shrieking, scurrying vermin with glowing eyes.
Charlie took Kate’s hand and ran, forcing her to follow. The panic-stricken souls sounded tormented. She heard snapping and gnashing, sharp beaks clacking and clicking, talons like razors digging into flesh, severing arteries, breaking bones. She sensed this was once a place of refuge from this torment, and now it had been tainted, its location discovered, its walls breached. Charlie and Kate reached a doorway behind the altar, just in time for the biggest shock.
The whole building—walls, floor, ceiling—reverberated with a low, menacing tone. Kate held her hands over her ears, but that did no good. The sound penetrated her, inside and out. She glanced behind Charlie, toward the main entrance. There she saw the unholiest of unholies.
Shrouded in a dark mist, it pushed inside the church, its multiple legs, bent and skinny and lanky, stepping in rapid succession, so fast it seemed simultaneous. The giant thing had so many legs, she couldn’t decide if it was more like a spider or a centipede. It ran a rampage through the horrified gathering, snatching up several individuals with its multiple limbs, each person crying in agony. Endless agony.
“Go!” Charlie opened the backdoor, the secret passageway out. She didn’t want to leave. The freakish insect set its smoldering sights on Charlie, and she shuddered at the thought of what it would do to him.
“No!” she snatched at his hands, but he forced her to let go, letting her fall on her back. She expected a hard landing, outside, in some dirty alley. What she got surprised her even more. The soft, down comforter on her guest bed.
6.
She sat up. Then she got up, still not ready to be anywhere near the spot where Charlie had died. She felt bad enough being in that room. It was cold, even for February. Her nightmare ran through her mind, fresh as rain. The cathedral, brimming with celebrities who’d died before their time. That atrocious beast and its nasty little pets. Charlie and his warning about the death number. Seeing her own body in the casket.
Voices in the other room brought her down the hall and into the den, where her big screen was on, tuned to CNT, the twenty-four hour news station. A segment called, Hollywood Headlines. And who had to be leading the show? Eva, and her now famous explosion at Charlie’s memorial service.
“What the hell? Slow news day, guys? Give it a fucking rest!”
She changed the channel, and found another twenty-four hour news station. Bigger than life was Eva, storming from the funeral, screaming at some photographer. The graphic at the bottom had a clever rhyme about a troubled starlet and her more than public outburst at another troubled star’s funeral. Two commentators, neat and trim, with spotless clothes and empty smiles, prattled endlessly.
“Is this another case of a young star with the world at her feet, letting the pressure get to her, or is this something else?”
“We know Charlie Monroe died from abuse of a controlled substance…”
“A drug overdose. Let’s not mince words or try to sugarcoat it. It was an overdose. And Eva Rome was a friend of Charlie’s. I’m not accusing anyone of anything here…”
“Yes, we have to clarify that…”
“Of course. I’m not at all saying that Eva Rome has any sort of drug addiction or anything like that.”
“But?”
“But you have to look at this behavior and take it for what it is…a cry for help.”
Kate’s stomach turned. How dare they speculate about Eva! And to keep saying Charlie had died of an overdose. It was too much.
“He didn’t die from drugs!” she shouted at the screen. “And my sister is NOT an addict, you bitches!”
She flipped the channel, and saw Eva yet again at the funeral. This time it was from a different angle, on a different network, but the commentary was the same: drugs and the Hollywood lifestyle. Young stars killing themselves with the search for ever-lethal intoxicants.
“Eva Rome…is she headed for the same dead-end that Charlie Monroe found?”
Kate switched it again, and again. On each and every station, all she found were pictures of her sister. Some were from the funeral, some from movies she’d made, one from her high school prom. Over and over, channel after channel, Kate saw her, and, over and over, one name kept repeating.
Eva Rome…Eva Rome…Eva Rome.
“What the hell?” finally, she hit the power button and the TV turned off, but, in her head, Kate kept hearing her sister’s name, in different voices, repeating again and again. Thousands and thousands of voices. Millions, probably. All saying Eva’s name. Kate shook it from her head, but the thought remained. Because of those bogus news reports, people all over the country, all over the world were saying Eva’s name, bringing her closer and closer to the death number.
A flash of clarity brought home a sinking feeling in her gut. Her dream, the one where she saw herself lying in a coffin. The more she thought about it, the more she began to realize it wasn’t her. It wasn’t Kate in that casket. It was…
“Eva!” she called her sister on the phone immediately, number one on her speed dial. It rang and rang until, finally, voicemail picked it up.
“Hi! It’s me!” her bubbly tone disarmed Kate. “You know I wantcha!” she giggled, and then the beep.
“Eva! This is Kate! Where are you! Have you watched TV lately? Your name is all over the news! Eva, call me back, right away!”
Kate threw her phone onto the couch and paced a groove into her floorboards, biting her nails. All she thought about were those slanderous news shows, repeating Eva’s name again and again, and the ripple effect that had to be causing. Then a vision of Eva’s face in that casket, lined in white satin, the room filled with victims of the death number.
The phone rang and she about jumped to the ceiling. She fumbled with it, stumbled to accept the call, and stuttered when she saw her sister on the caller ID.
“Eva…Eva, where are you? Are you okay?”
Silence.
“Eva!”
Scuffling. Low, deep, slow breaths. “Kate?” Eva’s voice was a gravelly whisper. “Kate, help me…”
“EVA!”
Before she knew it, Kate was in her Ferrari Spider, screaming down Melrose Avenue, to Eva’s rental in the heart of Beverly Hills. She left her car still running in the street after coming inches from ramming a parked Ford Bronco. After three flights of stairs, she reached Eva’s floor, and sprinted to her door. Locked. She dug in her pocketbook for the key. She had a key, she knew she had a key…found it!
Inside, the apartment looked normal, nothing disturbed, everything in place. Eva was a neat freak and her home always looked immaculate. It made Kate sick.
“Eva?” she called
. Silence. Stillness. Then she heard something from the master bedroom. Running water. Kate found the room just like the rest of the house. Spotless. The bathroom, though, told a different tale. At first, Kate thought she was seeing things. Maybe Eva had painted her bathroom without telling her. Then she saw handprints on the shower walls, stained in crimson, deep and dark, the color of death.
Her heart felt like it stopped when she found her sister on the floor, water still raining down on her, giant gashes in her wrists pulsing red, gushing like a geyser.
“Eva! NO!” she threw open the shower door and sat in the puddle of bloody water, pressing her palms over her sister’s wounds. Then, in a shaking panic, she searched and found two towels and tried tying them around Eva’s wrists. Blood soaked through instantly. She took Eva in her arms and shook her gently. Her sister garbled incoherently, and her eyes rolled in the back of their sockets.
Kate called 911 and somehow got the words out that her sister was dying, to send an ambulance, and do it quick. Within minutes, she heard sirens. Soon after, two EMTs were beating on the door. Soaked from head to toe in her sister’s blood, she let them in and rushed them to the back. There, Eva lay lifeless except her jaw, opening and closing as if she were trying to say something. The medics worked fast, removing Kate’s makeshift tunicates and applying ones of their own.
“She’s not responsive!”
“Hurry!”
“What’s that?” a medic pointed to the shower stall. Kate had to look twice, and didn’t want to believe her own eyes. Written in blood, finger smudges across the tiles, was the symbol:
#
“Nothing!” Kate shouted instinctually. “It’s nothing. Help my sister! Help her!”
The EMTs carried her until they got outside, where they had a stretcher waiting. Kate stayed close, not letting her sister out of her sight. When she got to the street, a dozen flash bulbs blinded her, and she was peppered with questions from every direction. She waved them all away, jumping in the back of the ambulance, its siren piercing a swath through the Sunset Strip.
At Cedars Sinai, she tried to muscle into the ER. A rather large orderly, assisted by a female security officer, teamed up and forced her to the waiting area. There she marched back and forth forever. It seemed like hours. Actually, it wasn’t long until a doctor came to find her. He didn’t need to say a word. His gloomy eyes said it all.
“E-E-Eva?”
She wept openly and fell into his chest. He patted her on the back, tenderly.
“I’m sorry.”
7.
Kate didn’t want to stick around another second. Despite multiple pleas from the hospital staff for her to stay, she slipped out back, avoiding the phalanx of paparazzi already gathered in the main parking lot, and caught a taxi.
“Just drive,” she told the cabbie, then cringed when her cell phone went off. She really didn’t feel like talking to anyone. She knew she’d have to call her mother, and dreaded that conversation.
“Hey,” the driver peered at her in the mirror. “You’re that actress. The one who’s sister…” he lowered his stare. “Sorry.”
“I said drive,” her phone kept ringing. She decided to look at the caller ID, just to see if it was her mother. She was sure Mom had seen the news already, and Kate didn’t know what to say to her. The screen, though, showed no information at all. Blank. Then the electronic ringtone played again, and a single symbol popped onscreen:
#
“What the hell!” she jammed her finger on the call end icon. Before she took a breath, the phone rang again, and she felt a wave of unmitigated fury. To hell with these…things that killed her sister! And her friend! She gathered the courage and punched the screen to accept the call, then screamed: “What! What do you want from me! Why are you doing this! Why are you killing everyone around me! WHY!”
She fought for breath and listened to static on the other end. Then a meek voice, almost a whisper, came through.
“Kate?” it was her agent.
“Jan? Jan is that you?”
“It’s me, Kate. How are you? You okay?”
“Not really, Jan,” she huffed a fake laugh. “Not really.”
“Kate, I’m so sorry. I saw on the news. Everybody’s covering it.”
Kate sat silent, slumped in her seat.
“Kate, I-I know this is a terrible time to bring this up, but this is too important, and it can’t wait. I have to have a decision today. I think I’ve landed a role for you, this is the one. The big one. I know you’re hurting right now, but I have to think about you, and how all this affects your career.”
“My career? My career?” Kate was incredulous. “How can you think about that shit right now, Jan. My sister just died, for chrissake! My sister!”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry. Listen, I’ll just tell the studio you’ll take the part. I know right now you don’t want to think about this stuff, but trust me. This’ll be the role of a lifetime. Everyone in the whole world will be saying your name.”
“No!” she screamed so loud the cab driver swerved and almost hit a transsexual crossing the street. “Don’t! I don’t want the role, you hear me!”
“But, Kate—”
“NO! I mean it! I’m done with this…I’m done with acting! I just wanna get out of this town and go back home!”
“Kate, you can’t just quit now.”
“Watch me!”
She rolled down the window and chucked her phone into the road.
“What’d you do that for?” the driver whined.
“Just take me home!” she demanded. “El Royale Tower.”
8.
The last thing Kate wanted to do was go inside that apartment, but she had too many cherished mementos, and couldn’t leave without them. She’d go home to Spokane, to her mother, and her old cat Pumpkin. She’d change her name immediately, and get a job in real estate, or find work as an interior designer. She always wanted to become an interior designer. Hollywood had nothing left for her, and she had nothing left for Hollywood.
The front door opened silently. As soon as she stepped inside, she heard rustling noises from deep in the apartment. She felt for her cell phone, wanting to call the police, finding only an empty slot in her handbag.
“Dammit!” she whispered stridently, remembering she’d tossed the phone. More rustling, then a solid Crash! She backed out the door. Then a gust of either bravery or stupidity came over her, and she slipped back in, and crept to the kitchen, where she grabbed the biggest knife she had. Then she tiptoed toward the source of the sound—her bedroom.
The door was ajar slightly, and she tried to peek inside, but saw only her dresser, every drawer open, and her clothes strewn onto the floor. The pictures had been toppled over, pictures of her and Charlie. Suddenly she was pissed, fuming at whoever the hell had the nerve to break in and go through her things.
Then a noise behind her, clicking on the wood floor, made her twist around. She saw one of the nasty creatures, its dark gray plumage sickly and sparse, its curved beak snapping and frothing. She dropped the blade, screaming, and bolted inside her bedroom, no longer concerned with who was in there. She slammed the door and locked it. Then she felt another presence and spun to find a young girl. Chocolate skin with scars blanketing her arms, half of her face, and her left leg below a bright yellow dress.
“Sunshine?” Kate puffed for breath. “What do you want?”
“I want to help you,” she bent over a pile of pictures and other personal effects, searching. “But we have to be quick.”
“What’re you looking for?” Kate heard a sudden and forceful thump against the door.
“There’s no time,” Sunshine kept searching, throwing aside a picture of Charlie and Kate. “Help me find something with your sister’s imprint.”
“Eva? What for?” more banging forced Kate to flinch.
“Just hurry!” the girl commanded. “Anything that has a connection to Eva. A picture, a gift she gave you—anything!”
>
“What?” she trembled. “Why?”
“HURRY!”
Kate got on her knees and sifted through the pile. She found an old scrapbook of Eva’s—drawings, poems, random thoughts.
“Here!” she gave it to Sunshine.
“This is perfect!” the girl thumbed through the pages and her eyes got bigger and bigger. “Just perfect!” she placed it on the bed and opened the satchel she had draped over her shoulder. From inside, she produced the same talisman Kate had seen her use before, at their first meeting.
Your Number Page 3