The sun had dipped below the tree line and ushered in the dusk before Jennifer realized something was wrong. Mrs. Barnes always called them in before dark, and Jennifer should have already been sent on her way home for supper.
She watched the house.
Its dark windows gazed back at her, mournful in the deepening shadows, and then Mr. Barnes emerged from the back door, shaking, crying, and in moments Chloe’s life became something bleak and infinitely troublesome, although, truthfully, it had already been such a thing for many years.
Jennifer stayed to comfort Chloe. She watched the emergency medical technicians wheel Mrs. Barnes’ shrouded body from the house, and then she walked home late, and crept in the side door. Her mother started to scold her then stopped when she saw the confusion and grief in her daughter’s eyes.
Had there been something she had seen, something she heard that day that should have signaled what Mr. Barnes had done, she asked herself now.
“Came home early,” Mr. Barnes said. “Found Marion in the kitchen with her bottles lined up in front of her. She was slumped back in the chair, fading away, but she reached out for me one last time before she shut her eyes. I sat down and took a slug from the bottle, started crying, and made sure she was dead before I did anything about it. You and Chloe were singing and laughing out back.
“You were always so happy back then, kiddo. Chloe loved you for it. She felt good with you. It was bad for her when you weren’t around. Can’t blame your folks for keeping you away after what happened, but believe me, Chloe suffered without you. Marion had been hurting her for a long time before I realized it.”
The room lapsed into quiet, disturbed only by the electronic reports of the life support machines. Stillness seemed to shore up the entire house, and Jennifer wondered where Chloe had gone that she was away so long. How different might her life have been if her father had been a stronger man? How different if he had been any weaker?
She sifted her mind, wondering if there had been something odd that day, some out of place thing she had noticed and forgotten. She recalled the blank expressions of the neighbors, and Chloe’s whimpers, and the white flesh of Mrs. Barnes' bare arm propped at her side on the gurney as it rolled across the empty driveway, and then it came to her: she hadn’t heard Mr. Barnes’ car pull into the driveway. That day he parked in front of a neighbor’s house, as if he had known what awaited him at home. And in all the time since, Jennifer’s innocent face had haunted him alongside that of his dead wife, while he kept meaningless faith in a child’s nonexistent complicity.
“Marion started out smacking Chloe a few times, and we fought over it. She was afraid of what I might do about it, and she promised she would stop, but she didn’t. She just got better at hiding it, and she made Chloe believe it was all right, that all little girls suffered that way in secret. It escalated to cuts and stabs. Marion favored a pair of sewing scissors. Later she began with a lighter and sometimes a hot poker from the fireplace. I didn’t understand how sick Marion was until it was almost too late. She threatened to kill Chloe or herself.”
Jennifer had seen the scars on Chloe’s legs, the waxy-sheened welts and ridges of hard skin, the poorly-healed remnants of burns and lacerations. Chloe had always been covered in little bruises and wounds, patch-worked with Band-aids, but Jennifer had not understood what it meant. Bumps and scratches were part of childhood, like Chloe’s jagged memorial of falling out of the tree, like countless mars and scrapes Jennifer had suffered herself back then.
“Marion called me at work the day she died, ranting and blubbering about really committing suicide this time. I lost my temper and told her to go ahead and be done with. Then I was terrified for Chloe, so I raced home, and when I saw my daughter was all right, I decided that it was time for it to end. I couldn’t live with the fear anymore. In her heart Marion knew she was hurting all of us, but she couldn’t help it. She hated herself for it, hated me more for not being able to help her, and I was a fool who could do nothing but pretend everything would be all right.”
“You never told Chloe,” Jennifer said.
“She thinks I don’t know about the secrets she kept with her mother,” said Mr. Barnes. “Better that way.”
Shapes flitted in the windows. Something clattered against the glass, rattling the panes. Jennifer rose and snapped up the near window shade to reveal a swarm of gulls wriggling together like bees crawling over a honeycomb. Their fragile bodies twisted as they strained to beat their beaks against the glass. Jennifer crossed to the other window and uncovered a similar infestation.
A clarion burst from Mr. Barnes’ heart monitor jolted Jennifer’s attention back to the dying man. Blue lines lanced a black screen, leaping and spiking, as a series of racking coughs exploded from Mr. Barnes’ throat. The gulls released a fusillade of squeals, intertwined themselves into the rough delineation of a wicked, seething face that stretched its jaw wide and mouthed an empty laugh; and then an instant later the birds scattered apart, dipping and soaring, coursing over the treetops until they reached the hot, black plane of the parking lot. There were hundreds of gulls gathered now, if not thousands, gulls of all sizes, their wings white and silver or tipped with black feathers, their tiny eyes shining like marble chips in the sunlight.
Mr. Barnes groaned and his knobby fingers groped for an amber bottle on the nightstand. Jennifer grabbed it, shook out two pills, and fed them to him with water from his glass. The medicine kicked in quickly, and the coughing subsided. Mr. Barnes nestled into his pillows and fell into a shallow slumber. The alarm ceased and the room fell quiet. Outside a car engine droned, grew nearer, and then grumbled to silence.
Chloe was back.
* * * * *
Mr. Barnes awoke to Jennifer beside him and his daughter at the foot of his bed.
“Who is it?” Chloe said. “Jennifer won’t tell me.”
The frail man turned away.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Someone filled with hate and misery, that’s all.”
“Tell me! Who do you think is waiting for you? Is it Momma?”
Mr. Barnes avoided his daughter’s gaze. Chloe let the seconds tick by in the sepulchral atmosphere. “This is insane,” she said, and then retreated across the room.
“When I’m dead,” Mr. Barnes whispered to Jennifer, “you can tell her everything you think she should know.”
Jennifer nodded. “I’ve given this some thought, Mr. Barnes, and there are few possibilities to explain what’s happening. Old legends speak of birds acting as psychopomps, guides to usher the spirits of the newly dead to the underworld. Sometimes they work with spirits who were close to the dying. This could be a rare instance where they’ve actually manifested a physical presence rather than a symbolic one. There are some documented cases of it, though very few. It’s generally regarded as a metaphor, but if that’s all that’s going on, there’s nothing I can do. The gulls will help you find your way wherever you’re going.”
“To Heaven or Hell,” the old man said.
Jennifer shrugged. “The afterlife isn’t that simplistic.”
“What else might it be?”
“An individual will controlling the gulls to mislead your spirit from its rightful destination,” said Jennifer. “To limbo or to a trap or to the things in the next world that feed on souls, devour them, and erase them from existence. Only the guiding spirit can know what it’s trying to accomplish. But it might be something else.”
Mr. Barnes waited for Jennifer to continue. Instead she paused and watched Chloe, who was thoughtlessly rearranging picture frames and cologne bottles on the dresser.
“You could be doing this to yourself,” Jennifer said. “Some overwhelming guilt or resentment buried deep inside you might be driving your subconscious to leech off your vitality to manifest this bizarre situation as a way of punishment.”
Mr. Barnes gave himself over to a fresh spate of coughing. Jennifer waited until the fit passed into a steady gasping respiration a
nd then helped him to a sip of water.
Chloe approached them, and said, “This was a mistake, bringing Jennifer here. It’s feeding your delusions, Dad. There’s nothing waiting to steal your soul. Nothing! You’re just terrified of dying. That’s all. There can’t be anything else. Do you understand? This nonsense is not real!”
Mr. Barnes beckoned his daughter closer and took up her hand. “Maybe I was wrong about all the things I kept from you, but I had to shield you. What’s happening to me now is part of all that, Chloe, and if you want to understand it one day, then you will. And when you do, you can decide whether I failed or succeeded in protecting you. You’ve been everything I’d ever hoped you could be, kiddo, and when I’m gone, you’ll really be free. So trust me now. Okay? Go downstairs and let Jennifer help me with what I have to do.”
Chloe yanked her hand from her father’s fingers and bolted out of the room.
“You’re lying,” Jennifer said to Mr. Barnes.
“What do you mean?”
“You told me earlier that Marion means to take Chloe next,” Jennifer said. “This may not end with your death. Chloe will suffer exactly the way you have.”
“You can stop her,” said Mr. Barnes.
“If it’s Marion’s spirit that’s after you, I might be able to interfere long enough for your soul to pass out of her reach but that’s all. She could still come back for Chloe. Saving you solves nothing. The only thing that might is if you let her take you and hope she’s satisfied at that and leaves Chloe alone.”
“Do you think that’s likely?”
“No way for me to guess,” Jennifer said. “But I don’t see any other way to help your daughter.”
“I’ve spent my whole life helping her,” said the dying man. “And what a fucking mess I’ve made of it. Now it’s my time, and all I want is some peace. If you stop Marion from taking me, I’ll wind up where I belong, good or bad. So, I’m leaving this up to you. You’re Chloe’s friend. Save me or don’t, let me have my fair shot or not, whichever you think will be best for my daughter.”
Jennifer knew a single binding incantation, gleaned from her research. She could try it and hope it would be sufficient to hold Marion Barnes, but she feared it would not be enough. She wasn’t sure she should use it to help the dying man at the expense of her old friend.
She lifted the hem of her shirt, knotted it above her bellybutton, and then stood in the mirror, hoping for some sign among her tattoos. Nothing came at first. Sweat trickled through her hair and dripped down her back. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, closed her eyes, and felt the room swimming around her. It was baking and hazy. She opened her eyes and felt the pull of her tattoos, drawing her line of sight along her abdomen, over her ribs, across her chest to her neck and the bulge of her clavicle. The black ink flowed like melting ice, drifted, and roiled, and then as swiftly as it had happened, it ended.
Jennifer turned back to Mr. Barnes. “I must have something that belonged to your wife to make this work. Chloe told me you got rid of all her clothes.”
“Not all.” Mr. Barnes pointed toward the closet. “Top shelf. Shoebox.”
Behind old pillows and stacks of books and papers, Jennifer found a tattered cardboard container. A pink, silk scarf lay coiled inside like a petrified newborn. Jennifer removed it and let it unwind.
“She was wearing that when she died,” said Mr. Barnes.
He gasped abruptly for air, and then seemed to diminish as if he had just expended his last reserve of energy. His eyes shimmered with dying light, and his face turned ashen.
A blur of motion crossed the corner of the mirror and set Jennifer’s skin crawling with goose bumps.
Gulls flapped at the windows.
In seconds the tapping began.
Mr. Barnes shrank into his voluminous bedding. His machines launched into a series of pleading alarms. His body trembled, and he coughed up something gray and sticky from between his cracked, blood-crusted lips, and then his head fell back, and his last breath passed out of him. The heart monitor recorded a fading beat, and Jennifer guessed Chloe’s father would be dead in seconds.
Glass cracked. The noise cut through the air like a snapping whip. Another broken pane followed.
A horrible noise gurgled from Mr. Barnes’ throat, and his cardiac monitor howled a single, prolonged note.
The windows erupted inward, spewing thin slivers of glass pecked loose by the frenzied gulls. The birds hammered their beaks relentlessly against the ragged openings. Their wings beat like drums. More glass cascaded into the bedroom. The gulls ripped at the shades, creating a snowfall of vinyl shreds, and then they poked through the ragged openings. Blood streaked their gray and white skulls, and some of them had lost all or part of their eyes to the needle-sharp points of the broken window panes. Through the jumble of maddened bodies, Jennifer glimpsed the sky where hundreds of the shorebirds spun and twirled with cyclonic fury, a frenetic mass pressing down on the meek defenses of the house.
A window gave way and gulls spewed into the room, filling the space with their darting bodies and the scent of stale seawater. Jennifer fell to her knees and covered her eyes. The second window crashed inward and more birds flooded the room, ramming one another, and then dropping broken-necked to the bed and the carpet. Jennifer scrambled over them to reach Mr. Barnes, clambered onto the bed, and forced herself into a kneeling position at its foot.
Gulls slashed and pummeled her.
The cries drowned out the life support machines.
The bedroom door opened, and Chloe peered in.
A gull lanced her cheek, drew blood.
She screamed and dropped to her knees.
“Dad!” she screamed, and then began crawling across the floor.
Jennifer clutched Marion Barnes’ scarf tight between her hands, the silk drenched with her perspiration, and began the incantation, her voice floundering in the whirlwind of rushing, screeching gulls. But the effect was immediate. The gulls dove and swooped with fresh urgency, and several tried to pluck the scarf away from Jennifer. A shadow appeared in a corner, and then vanished, only to reappear in another place. The figure blinked around the room, taking shape in flickering clusters of gulls. Jennifer shouted louder, continuing the incantation.
The rhythm of the gulls changed.
They tightened their groups, traced a series of interwoven rings centered over Jennifer at the edge of the bed. Jennifer glanced back to see Chloe reaching up for her father, and then she felt the frigid, clammy hand on her shoulder. The dark figure stood beside her now, its face unmistakable, its features focused by rage.
Jennifer shouted until her throat ached.
Marion Barnes hissed.
Filthy rags, the remnants of her burial clothes, hung in tatters from skin that looked like orange rind left to rot in a puddle of water. The dead woman’s eyes blasted Jennifer with a palpable sensation like twin millipedes crawling over her flesh. Jennifer squelched the panic welling up inside her, struggled to keep her stammering voice even, and continued the incantation.
The dead thing churned, a construct of squirming, terrified seagulls bound by raw, malevolent will. Here and there a gull’s head broke the fetid skin with little pairs of stark eyes staring out from the ruined human shape that contained them. Marion opened her mouth and her gnarled lips flapped, but no voice emerged. The caws of the gulls filled the air.
Jennifer edged backward, scuttling over Mr. Barnes’ corpse. He was dead, and as Jennifer had imagined, the machines persisted in emulating his life functions. His chest rose and fell. Medicines drained into his veins. Meaningless air passed from his throat. Jennifer inadvertently slid a finger in his mouth, felt a whoosh of dead breath, and then snatched her hand back. She needed to hold out just a while longer. Chloe threw herself across her father and sobbed against his chest.
Jennifer lunged forward, catching the dead woman’s neck in the silk scarf she had once owned and dragging her to the floor. Gulls battered them. The bi
rds were everywhere, filling the air, rising from Marion Barnes’ makeshift body. Jennifer knotted the scarf, tightened it, bound it. Chloe’s mother reached around with decayed fingers and scratched at Jennifer’s back. Her body lurched as she tried to buck free.
Jennifer clamped down tight, shrieking the incantation again and again. Marion snapped her head up and bit down with jagged, cockeyed teeth on Jennifer’s bottom lip. She pulled her down, close to her putrid face, and still Jennifer managed to voice the incantation. Pain lanced her mouth, and she gagged on the awful flavor of decay. Her stomach turned in a knot. She wanted to vomit, but she held back, until finally the jabbing bones forfeited their unbearable kiss. Marion Barnes’ head cracked against the floor and burst in a spray of blood and feathers.
The silk noose jerked free.
Jennifer sank several inches, landing on a bed of decimated seagulls slicked with putrescence.
The other gulls descended into rampant chaos.
All sense of a pattern to their flight dissipated as they turned wild, shocked by the confinement of the bedroom. They lashed out, and gradually managed to find their way to the windows and to the other rooms of the house. Soon they dispersed, leaving behind only a scattering of broken-winged gulls among the dead.
Jennifer experienced a moment of overwhelming grief, and wondered if she had made the right decision. She rose and walked around the room, unplugging the electrical cords of the life support machines. The appearance of life in Mr. Barnes’ corpse had deceived Marion Barnes’ into lingering too long, while her husband’s soul fled to whatever awaited it. The mechanical sounds and beeps ended. Mr. Barnes’ chest fell one last time and never rose again.
Jennifer put a hand on Chloe’s shoulder, helped her onto her feet, and led her outside to the backyard and fresh air. She peered through the trees and saw the parking lot was empty now; the only gulls in sight were far-off specks in the clear sky that might have been the last to flee the Barnes house. Chloe pressed her head against Jennifer’s shoulder and cried, and they stood there together like they had on an awful day a long time ago, and Jennifer thought to herself how the worst things that passed among people never really ended, but rolled on forever in ripples across time, eternally unanswered.
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