Dan pointed to another tree. Tommy raised the flyer, his dad lined up the staple gun and fired twice. Clack clack, just like an action hero.
“Dad?” Tommy asked.
“What’s up?”
“Thanks for doing this.”
“Anytime pal,” he said, smiling and rubbing the back of Tommy’s neck. “Just don’t tell your mom what I said or I’ll be in deep... you know?”
“Shit?”
Tommy looked up again, unsure if he’d crossed a line only adults were allowed to cross. His dad just smiled and nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “That.”
The two of them, father and son, walked home, smiling in the final rays of daylight.
Having finished the last of the dishes, Linda turned the faucet off and turned her attention to the vase of sick roses above the sink. A brown discharge drifted from the base of their stalks and reached upwards in thin tendrils, like oil in water. Grime layered the surface. A few of the petals had curled in on themselves the way bugs did when they died. Sick or not, the roses were the last vestiges of summer, and she couldn’t bring herself to discard them just yet.
“Daddy!” Jessica shouted, turning her attention from her doodles in the margins of her phonics workbook to the back door. Linda felt two arms wrap around her, then lips settling on the back of her neck and a warm embrace that made her close her eyes and smile.
“All done?” she asked.
“Every tree from here to Channing. Half the neighborhood at least,” Dan answered. “Any word from the pound?”
“Nothing yet, but they’ll call if she turns up.”
“What about dinner?” he asked.
“I was waiting until you got home. What do you feel like?”
“No,” he said. “I meant, let’s go out for dinner.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Out? As in--”
“Chairs, a table, someone else cooking. Exotic right?”
“Indeed Professor.”
“Besides, when was the last time we went out to eat?”
Linda laughed. She really couldn’t remember. Six months, a year perhaps. “Our honeymoon?” she joked.
“Probably. It’s been a rough day on the kids.”
“Well, where should we go?” she asked.
He considered it. “I don’t know, but someplace special.”
Someplace Special
CHUCK E. CHEESE’S was a chorus of laughter and clattering games, a cavern of sounds and smells that filled the packed restaurant on that Friday night. The wait for a table took thirty minutes, a chore made easier for the kids when Dan gave them twenty dollars to spend on games and rides. Neither he nor Linda had envisioned spending their Friday night surrounded by arcade games and ball pits and families with twice as many screaming kids as theirs, yet once they arrived it seemed the most logical choice. The adults could eat and talk while the kids bounced off their glucose rush in a child safe ball pit and mashed video games with greasy fingers.
Back in the kitchen they had tossed around the idea of Mexican food or a new teppanyaki restaurant downtown, and he was certain the kids would enjoy watching a grilled onion sliced into a flame spewing volcano. However, once Tommy understood they were going out for dinner, a rare concept with their finances, he had refused to go anywhere else and soon found an ally in Jessica by reciting tales of excitement from his friend’s birthday party at the mouse house over the summer. The two of them had chanted: “Chuck-eee Chee-suh,” a dozen times, clomping about the kitchen like a marching band until both Linda and Dan had given in.
Twenty minutes after they sat the pizza arrived. The kids returned with handfuls of tickets and promptly devoured it, turning their napkins into stained rags like some oily crime scene.
“Can we get some more tokens?” Tommy asked with a hiccup that reeked of tomato sauce.
“I suppose,” Dan said, giving Tommy another twenty dollars despite Linda's scowl. “Share it with your sister.”
Tommy ran off, and Jessica followed behind. She paused, as if she’d forgotten something, then doubled back and tugged at her dad’s hand.
“Come on dad,” she said. “Let’s play in the ball house.”
She raised a finger, pointing at the neon colored ball pit and the undulating inflatable snake that wound its way into it, depositing screaming kids among the hollow rainbow balls.
“No thanks sweetie. Let your mom and I have some grown up fun. Besides, that’s only for kids.”
“But other dads are in it,” Jessica said. “See?”
Sure enough, a bearded guy with a TRON t-shirt in his late 20’s rolled around in the ball pit and laughed while his son held onto his arm like a rodeo rider.
“A little fun wouldn’t hurt you, eh professor?” Linda said with a smile and a raised eyebrow. A dare.
“Please daddy?” Jessica smiled and blinked with those eyes, the eyes of her mother. They were the same blue eyes he had fallen in love with years ago, when Linda had glanced past Nathaniel and the rest of the guests at the party and straight to him. He couldn’t say no to those eyes, he never could.
“All right, let’s go.”
Jessica squealed and almost pulled him out of his seat with an energetic tug. He gave a shake of his head back at Linda, an embarrassed shrug, only to be met by her smile. And her blue eyes, glimmering with a sheen of happiness.
Jessica surveyed the inflatable obstacle course leading into the ball pit and nodded like a tiny general preparing for war. “Now we have to go in there,” she said, pointing to the giant inflatable snake’s mouth. The structure, while large, wasn’t made for people of his age and size. It was going to be a very tight fit.
“First the snake eats you, then you go into his tummy, then it makes a poop,” Jessica said matter-of-factly, tracing the course with an outstretched finger all the way to the snake’s tail where it ended in the ball pit. Dan realized that she was, at least on an anatomical level, correct.
“I’ll go first,” she said.
“Okay honey.”
She climbed the pink tongue stairs, each flexible step tracked with dirt from countless shoes, and into the cartoon snake’s smiling open mouth. There she pushed aside the inflatable uvula that bounced from side to side.
“Come on!” she called from inside that rubber reptile mouth, and Dan felt his fingers twitch as he thought about climbing into the small space beyond. He stood there, waiting, and would have for hours, but an impatient line of kids had formed behind him.
He stepped into the snake’s mouth, pushed aside the uvula, and crouched to his hands and knees. The inside of the throat was pink, decorated with cartoon pictures of things the snake had eaten: cheesecakes, hotdogs, pizza, a cola, all items that could be bought at the snack bar, and Dan was impressed the company had managed to sneak in such a clever bit of subliminal advertising. No doubt kids would be craving a Coke after a half dozen laps through the digestive tract of some rubber serpent.
“Come on,” Jessica called out again and crawled around the bend ahead.
Dan followed, but where she was small and nimble and used to scurrying about on her hands and knees, he was clumsy and awkward. His hands had trouble adjusting to the flexible vinyl walls and his ankles shifted on the bouncing floor.
“Hurry!” she shouted, and he caught a glimpse of her Pink Princess slippers as another elastic hole swallowed her up.
He surged forward, head rubbing against the inflatable grooves and he felt sweat forming on his forehead, sticky and wet. He reached the second barrier: two halves of inflatable vinyl with a hole just large enough for a teenager. He wondered how adults, how even some of the heavier kids he saw, could fit through such a passage. Somehow, he thought, they did, and so he dug his hands into the seam, planted his feet into the rubber, and pushed himself into the shadows.
He fell sideways onto a hard surface and felt a sudden burst of pain as his shoulder groaned and throbbed. It was dark, surprisingly darker than the previous section. The floor was not
soft and flexible, but made of something hard like wood or stone. He blinked several times to check that his eyes were open, but each time the darkness remained, black and vast. Somehow the light didn’t penetrate this far in, and he found himself struggling to right himself in the pitch black.
Then, everything went sideways.
A distant buzzing filled the shadow, an electric hum, faint and unchanging and whispering of summer. He felt the floor, hard and cold against his body, and pieces of it caught on his shirt like splinters. He stretched his hands out in both directions, shocked to find they couldn’t extend further than his waist before running into the same hard obstruction. The corridor was small, too small for him, and when he tried to stand his knees were cramped and trapped and his head hit something hard only a few inches from his face.
This isn’t right, he thought. This isn’t right at all.
He pushed his feet back against the rubber seam, trying to wriggle back but found his feet running up against yet another hard obstruction. He kicked it but it just rattled and shook. Had he taken a wrong turn and perhaps ended up in some sort of maintenance section? Was that even possible? He was trapped, alone in that humid shade with that electric hum.
Panic began to grow. He could no longer hear the kids laughing or screaming. He could no longer hear the clatter of air hockey or the beeps of video games. All he could hear was the beat of his own heart and the hollow sound his limbs made as they scraped up against the immovable surface. And that electric hum that blanketed the darkness like a chorus of insects.
He tried to focus his thoughts and brushed his hands over the obstructions, feeling for an exit, a hole, anything. He felt spots, small objects beneath his palm that broke loose and fell upon him likes leaves. Around them he felt indentations in the hard surface, slick and wet.
Oh God please get me out of here, he pleaded. Think, think, think. Keep it together. Keep calm and--
He remembered his key light. It was small, no larger than a bottle cap, and it hung from his car keys.
Please...
He pulled it out, fumbling with it.
Please!
*Click*
The blue light was overwhelming. His eyes shut on reflex but he forced himself to keep them open.
PLEASE!
The light cast long shadows down the wood, revealing grooves and indentations stained red and smeared like frantic cave paintings an inch from his face. In them he saw splinters, dozens of splinters, some bent at crooked angles, others pulled in long pieces as if the very grains of the wood itself had been stripped with bare hands.
And in those crimson stained grooves he saw a fingernail, bent and broken. No, not one, but several, hanging from the flayed wood grooves like dry leaves. And in that tomb he felt, above all else, that he was not alone. That something was whispering into his ear from cold lips behind that electric hum.
Dan didn’t remember screaming. Only empty sounds came from his mouth. The whole event, the shift as he later remembered it, happened to a different person in another life, one that he’d forgotten.
He felt hands, so many hands, all pulling at his ankles and knees and then a burst of light, like a supernova, a rebirth, and he was greeted by cakes and hotdogs and pizza slices, all flying past on a pink palette and then more light. Faces swam into view. First the bearded face of the man with the TRON shirt, then a woman who kept repeating: “I think he’s having a heart attack.”
Dan felt his head roll to the side and he saw Linda, running through a crowd that had formed, kids and adults and a giant mouse with its arms limp at its sides, and he heard a kid crying and somewhere beyond that someone said: “What have you done?”
He sat on the bench outside, eyes focused on his left hand, still shaking as it had for the last ten minutes. He didn’t hear Linda emerge from the entrance, but when he looked up, there she was. The color had come back into her face, but the worry was etched deep, a worry he’d never seen on her. It was the look of a mother after a child stopped choking on candy, when horror and fear had subsided and left behind relief and distrust.
“The kids are fine, they’re playing games now. I don’t think they’re too worried anymore,” she added, eyes falling to his shaking hands. “Do I need to be?”
“No,” he whispered.
“Hon, should we go to a hospital?”
“No,” he answered again and his shaking hand went into his pocket. “I’m fine.”
The air was silent and charged as Linda sat on the bench beside him and sighed. “Honey, you don’t look fine.”
“I am,” he said. “Really. Trust me, I’m fine.”
And he did feel fine, or at least he was driving in that direction. The panic, for now, was in the rear view mirror, safely receding to memory and embarrassment. He wanted nothing more than to put the whole thing behind him, move on, and forget it. It’d been years since he’d had a panic attack, so long he’d forgotten what they were like. Then the fear had turned the world sideways, and only the clattering glass and the darkness had remained, old and familiar.
“Dan,” she said in that soft voice that he knew meant she wasn’t convinced. It was the voice of a mother getting to the bottom of a mystery; a broken window and a baseball, a crying daughter and a desecrated doll, or a husband screaming in public before a dozen different families. “Honey? What just happened back there?”
“I have a thing about small places,” he said.
“Like claustrophobia or something?”
He nodded.
“Really? I never knew that. Since when?”
He glanced up at the flickering lights of the parking lot lamps. A family walked past, towards a minivan, and he saw the children turning to stare at him and he knew that when they got in the car they’d say: “That was the crazy man!”
“Since when?” she asked again.
Go on, said Mr. Glass. Lie to her.
But he couldn’t. If only for tonight, there would be no lies.
“Since I was ten,” he said, taking a deep breath. “My brother and I, we were playing a game. See, there was this old house down the hill from the orphanage. It was his best hiding spot.”
“A game?”
He nodded.
“You mean, like hide and seek?”
He nodded again.
“Anyways, there was this basement inside. A storm cellar. Only a few kids knew about it. In the basement there was this old trunk, you know, like a hundred years old, half rusted but sturdy as hell. Kids would stash their cigarettes and nudie magazines in it.”
He waited for a laugh or smile but none came. All said was: “Go on,” so he did.
“He umm... he convinced me to climb into it. And I did, you know, to hide.”
“Oh gosh,” she said, her hand squeezing his.
“Anyways, he closed it on top of me. He said it’d be just for a moment. But it wasn’t. See, he slid this old railroad spike into the latch so I couldn’t get out.”
She gasped. “What? Why would he do that?”
“It was just a stupid kid prank, I dunno. He said...” Dan paused, rubbing his head as the glass grew warm at the memory. “He said: ‘I just wanted to scare you. I just wanted to scare you.’”
“Dan, sweetie, that’s awful.”
He nodded.
“It was the worst thing I can remember. I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breath. I scraped my fingers raw on the wood, fighting and screaming for him.”
“How long were you in there?”
“I don’t know, hours maybe? I blacked it out. Even to this day it’s just... emptiness, you know? What I do remember is this: it was Father O’Malley, and not David, not my brother, that finally let me out. I never forgot that.”
Linda squeezed his hand and he could feel it was no longer shaking.
“You never mention him, so I never ask.”
“What’s to mention? He was older, I was smaller. That was that.”
“Did he ever apo
logize or get in trouble?”
“In a way. A few months later some kids made fun of his haircut. He almost beat one of them to death. He got worse, his sickness more...” he trailed off, remembering the lights and the white room, the silence and that shell that sat eternally staring back. “Anyways, they transferred him out of the state, into special care. He bounced around. Different places, different treatments, nothing worked. I wrote him, but he never wrote back. We drifted, grew up and grew apart.”
“Was that where he...” she hesitated, unable to finish the question.
“Died,” he said, finishing it for her. “That’s where he died. Yes.”
“Did you see him before that?”
“Once. On my eighteenth birthday.”
The room was white, Dan thought. So white and lonely. Only the buzzing of the overhead light and the psychiatrist’s pen, clicking in and out, as they stared at the silent, shackled form of his older brother. A pale visage, deathly so. A form that didn’t move but simply existed, staring slack jawed at the corner of the room. A form that whispered: “I’m sorry,” in an endless loop. It was a husk, a shade, and whatever lived inside was silent and still.
“He didn’t recognize me, or if he did I couldn’t tell. They kept him drugged up, sedated, and the disease did the rest. I knew, somehow I knew, I’d never see him again. And the truth is, I suppose, he died years before. To me at least, he’d been dead a lot longer.”
Then he turned to Linda, shrugged his shoulders as if to close out that forgotten chapter, and said: “And that was that.”
Plan B
BREAKING INTO HIS house was easier than she had imagined. The lights had been off for over a half hour since that liar and his whore had driven away with their crotch goblins in the back of their shitty sedan. In the silence and shadows she had watched, and now the wait was over. All she needed to do was reach over the side gate, unhook the latch behind it, and slip into the house.
Now to deal with the dog, Karina thought as the gate closed behind her.
She had never been in his house yet she had seen it dozens of times. First, from the maps on the internet where she could zoom in, almost all the way on the front door, and read the brass NO SOLICITORS sign above the door bell. And from the seat of her car, parked in the darkness, watching the silhouettes by the windows. Those shadows, large and small, that sometimes kissed and sometimes fought but never invited her in to that warm house.
Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity Page 13