Seth’s head began to clear somewhat, shining light on memories of the day and night before. He tried to think of something to say that might continue the conversation in a more original and meaningful way, but failed. Old patterns were difficult to break, and maybe for now that was best, because there was comfort in them as well.
“Were you able to sleep all right?” Peggy asked, rescuing him.
“Yeah, I think so, for the most part.”
“You were snoring a couple times.” She smiled the way she had when they’d first met, when many things still embarrassed her.
“Sorry.” He remembered drifting off to sleep with their arms around each other, and how for the first time in a very long while he hadn’t been forced to rely on memories of how she felt snuggled against him in the night.
“It’s OK. It didn’t really bother me.”
He knew that was untrue, and recalled nights when she would none-too-gently elbow him awake and growl that his snoring was keeping her up. But he appreciated her effort. “I was just so exhausted. I barely remember falling asleep, actually.”
I felt safe here—he’d wanted to say—rescued.
“Did you dream?” That had always been one of her favorite questions. Peggy was a great lover of dreams, but then, she could still afford to be.
“Probably,” he muttered. “But if I did I don’t remember.”
Peggy slowly ran her palm across her cheek, along her chin and down to her throat, finally resting it against her collarbone. “I dreamed of these strange patterns and textures…colors. But they swirled and moved like liquid.”
She even dreams like an artist, he thought.
Peggy sat on the corner of the bed. Had she extended her arm completely she could’ve touched him with her fingertips, but from her position enough space remained between them to give the illusion of breathing room.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked a moment later.
He didn’t, but knew he’d have to in some context.
* * *
The night before at the hospital, he had sat for hours with Raymond and Darian in the emergency room waiting area. The ride from Cape Cod to that Boston hospital had been mostly quiet but as oddly surreal as the hours leading up to it. Seth did his best to concentrate on the road and the rain while dozens of things fired through his mind at once, all of them patently absurd. He remembered a time he would’ve prayed for Louis, for God to protect him and to not let his injuries in the fall be life threatening. But he hadn’t said a single prayer since the night his mother died. He no longer saw the point of it. Whatever happened was going to happen regardless of anything he might say or think or hope for. That’s what he believed now. And that was all he believed.
Thought you didn’t believe in God, Louis had said to him that morning at the cabin, the morning after Raymond had disappeared.
I believe in God, Louis, he’d said quietly. I just don’t have anything to say to Him.
As he drove, remembering their exchange that morning in the chilly cabin, Raymond broke his concentration. “The more you push something into the shadows the darker it gets,” he said. “I didn’t make the rules, man. It’s just the way it is.”
Later, at the hospital, they’d found Darian slumped in a chair, a long-since cold cup of coffee clutched in his hands. Seth remembered how odd it was to find him dressed in a suit and tie on a weekend—had he been at work?—and how his suit and coat were uncharacteristically rumpled and mussed. He’d never seen Darian so disheveled, worn and tired, so visibly damaged. His eyes were heavy and red, his face twisted into an expression of horrific disbelief, like it had frozen that way and he could no longer correct it.
Darian looked up at them with the fear and confusion of an abandoned child as they rushed into the waiting area. Mother always had the answers, always held it together and helped everyone else do the same—that was his way, his trademark—but not on this rainy afternoon. His mouth opened to greet them, perhaps to offer more information, but words never surfaced, only an eventual sigh and a helpless shrug of his shoulders.
“What’s happening?” Seth asked, crouching before the chair. “Is Louis—”
“No one’s told me anything since they brought him in. I’ve asked two or three times now but no one seems to know anything. He was alive when he got here but he was badly hurt, Seth, badly hurt.”
“Did you talk to the cops?”
He nodded. “Briefly. I told them what happened, gave them a statement. When they saw the state of his apartment they didn’t seem to care anymore. Just some poor crazy bastard who lost it and pitched himself out a window, right?”
Raymond stayed back a bit, hands stuffed into his jacket pockets, eyes scanning the waiting room and reception desk on the far wall as if he were expecting the sudden arrival of someone or something at any moment. But the ER was unusually quiet for a city hospital, and only a few people were scattered about the large waiting room. An inordinately tall security guard with a shaved head and a utility belt that included a holstered 9mm stood at the entrance, arms folded across his chest and a bored expression on his face. They’d rushed right by him and never seen him.
Seth let a hand rest on Darian’s knee. He could feel the tension in him, the trembling. “Take it easy,” he said softly.
“You take it easy.” Darian sat back in the chair, away from Seth, his hands still clutching the coffee cup. “You didn’t see what he’d done to himself, to his arms and—and you didn’t see how he’d written on the walls with his blood—his own goddamn blood, Seth. You didn’t see him go out that fucking window.”
“Look, don’t make a scene, all right?” Seth checked the security guard, who had now come awake a bit and was watching them without subtlety. “Keep your voice down.”
Darian’s eyes shifted, locked on Raymond. He put the coffee cup aside on the chair next to him and slowly rose to his feet. Seth stood as well, making sure he stayed between them.
“And you,” Darian said. “He said you knew what was happening to us.”
Raymond stood his ground but didn’t respond.
“You need to start talking, motherfucker.”
“We’re all going to talk,” Seth said. “But this isn’t the time or the place—”
“Oh yes it is.” Darian pointed at him. “I want some answers and I want them now.”
A sudden rush of activity distracted the three men. The automatic doors slid open with a whooshing sound and a couple came in hurriedly, escorted by two uniformed policemen. Though he had not seen her in quite a while and despite the fact that she looked different than he remembered her, Seth recognized the woman immediately.
“Becky,” he said, watching as she and the others disappeared down a hallway and behind a set of double doors. “How did she find out about this?”
“I figured where she’s his ex-wife they probably wouldn’t contact her or even know how, so I called her.” Darian’s voice and posture settled somewhat, but the power of his tension and emotion remained painfully obvious just below the surface. “I didn’t know how to get a hold of his family. I know his sister Claire still lives in Revere but I couldn’t remember her married name. Becky was the only one I knew how to reach.”
“Did anyone take a look at you?” Seth asked. When Darian shot him a disgusted look he said, “I mean, are you OK?”
“Yeah, just great.” Darian’s expression changed; fury to sorrow in an instant.
Unsure of what to do with himself, Raymond moved away, closer to the exit and the security guard, who had again slipped into something of a pseudo-coma of boredom.
After a moment Darian snatched his coffee cup from the chair, walked to a nearby receptacle and dropped it in. “I need to get out of here,” he muttered. “I need to get out of here but I can’t—I can’t go home. I don’t want to go home.”
“You can stay at my place if you need to,” Seth offered.
Darian nodded and wandered away among the rows of plastic chairs.<
br />
The glass wall at the entrance to the ER was blurred and distorted from rain flowing along the large panes, and the world beyond it had grown dark—too dark for late afternoon. But black clouds continued to linger, and night was coming.
Much like their fear, nothing could stop it.
Raymond stood before the large panel of glass near the entrance, watching the parking lot and street beyond through sheets of rain. They were near. He could feel them.
Slowly and deliberately, he scanned the lot. Rain-blurred cars passed on the nearby street, head and taillights distorted like vigilant eyes slithering through darkness.
Nothing else moved out there.
He craned his neck to get a better glimpse of a cement flight of stairs leading down from the street. The parking lot streetlights were already on, and one positioned next to the stairs managed to shine enough through the rain to partially illuminate the steps.
It was then that he made out the umbrella.
It was black and hard to see through the premature darkness and heavy rain, but he was certain it was there. Raymond squinted, realized it was stationary; whoever was carrying it had stopped about halfway down the steps. The umbrella was tilted forward but was also quite low to the ground, signifying someone exceptionally diminutive was in possession of it. Like a child, he thought, or something similar to a child.
He glanced over at the security guard, but he had his back to the glass and appeared to be struggling to keep his eyes open. Raymond turned back, saw the umbrella had not moved and was still tilted forward in a manner that made it impossible to discern anything behind or beneath it.
Slowly, it began to spin, twirling in unseen hands.
Rain spattered against it, ran down onto the pavement into pools already formed there and small streams speeding to nearby gutters. “Come on,” Raymond whispered in a tone one might use to call out a shy kitten. “Come on.”
Little by little the twirling slowed until the umbrella had come to a stop. Gradually it rose to reveal someone standing beneath it.
A small being stood on the steps dressed in a dull yellow raincoat and matching hat.
Where its eyes and sockets and nose should have been the skin was smooth, flat and blank. Its mouth was impossibly small, but it opened wide then wider still until the sides tore and began to bleed. The twisted, unfinished face froze in a soundless scream of inhuman fury and horror, and as the rain increased, falling in heavy torrents across the cement steps, the being dropped the umbrella.
Raymond watched it tumble off in the wind and blow away across the lot into darkness. The small thing—was it female, a little girl, perhaps?—held its tiny arms out; palms turned to the night sky, and tilted its head back to catch the rain. Behind it, others moved about in shadow, scurrying like rodents, a horde of barely distinguishable beings darting from the light.
Raymond sensed movement behind him. Seth and Darian stood watching the parking lot with him, and from the look on their faces they’d seen it all too.
“Hey,” a deep voice said, distracting the three men. They looked in unison at the security guard, who had left his post and was now peering out into the night with a puzzled look on his face. “You fellas OK?”
The beings were gone…if they’d ever really been there at all.
“What the fuck was that?” Darian asked, the words spilling from him as if beyond his control and in a tone that was in such direct conflict with his usually casual demeanor, it seemed to surprise even him. He looked suddenly uncomfortable in his own body, his movements economic but anxious. “Who was that, what—”
The guard strode closer. “Something going on out there?”
Darian spun toward him like the guard had snuck up on him. “Stay away from me. Just—just stay away from me.”
The guard gave them a quizzical look, the kind security personnel or police often use that wordlessly conveys the question: Am I going to have trouble with you?
“Sorry,” Seth said, quickly slinking an arm around Darian and steering him away from the window and back toward the rows of chairs. “We’re under a lot of stress. Our friend was badly injured earlier.”
After a quick glance at Raymond, who was still at the window watching the rain, the guard acknowledged Seth with a slow nod. “Sorry to hear that.”
Seth motioned for Raymond once the guard had returned to his post. Reluctantly, he joined them by the cluster of chairs. “They’re getting stronger,” Raymond said quietly.
He stared at him, unsure of how to respond to such a statement while still trying to make sense of what he’d just seen. “I want you and Darian to go back to my place,” Seth said. “I’ll stay and see if I can find out more then meet you back at the apartment later.”
“Maybe we better stay together,” Darian said.
“Just do what I tell you on this one, Mother. Please.”
“I’m not leaving you here alone,” Raymond said.
“I’ll be fine.”
“You’re not hearing me, man.”
“Go back to my apartment and I’ll be there later.” Raymond said nothing and made no move to comply. Seth stepped closer and leaned in so only Raymond could hear him. “Darian’s ready to come apart and I don’t want it happening here, you understand?” He dug his keys from his jacket and pushed them into Raymond’s hand. “Get him back to the apartment and explain this to him as best you can. I’ll see you back there later.”
“Darian drove himself here, remember?” Raymond handed the keys back. “Hang onto your own wheels, man, you’ll need them. We’ll take his car.”
“You be careful, you hear me, Raymond?”
Darian watched the night through the sliding doors, the rain and darkness that had swallowed the visions only moments before still lingering, waiting for them. “Is there another exit?” he asked the guard.
He raised an eyebrow. “There something wrong with this one?”
“We’re parked around the other side,” Raymond said quickly.
He let a few seconds burn before answering. “Straight down that hall there,” he said, pointing. “Take a right at the elevators and there’s an exit down the end, put you right into the north-side parking lot.”
“Thanks.”
The guard let slip a peculiar, rather negligible smile. “No problem.”
“Watch yourself.” Raymond turned to Seth sharply. “It’s not safe here.”
Seth nodded, watched them leave the waiting area and pass cautiously into the hallway. As they rounded the corner and disappeared from sight, Seth glanced back at the guard. He was still staring at him, the same strange grin in place.
* * *
“If you’d rather not, it’s OK,” Peggy said, ushering him back. “Talk about it, I mean.”
“I’m sorry I showed up so late last night, out of the blue and all.” Seth looked at the alarm clock on the nightstand. Red digital numbers read: 7:45. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept beyond seven o’clock in the morning. “I should’ve called first.”
“You’re forgiven,” she said, smiling casually, “obviously.”
“I didn’t mean to complicate matters.”
“Little late for that, don’t you think?”
The wind howled, thrashing branches just outside the bedroom windows. Seth followed the sound, half-expecting to see a face peering in at them, but instead found only shadow and gradually increasing daylight. It rarely seemed to recede now, the uncanny feeling of being watched and on display, gawked at from the far side of some unseen veil.
“I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately,” he said, telling her things he knew she realized all too well. But what was the alternative? To tell her he was losing his mind, or worse, that something had stolen it from him? “And yesterday, with Louis, I just—I really needed to see you, Peg.”
She breached the space separating them long enough to touch his hand with her own. It was a gesture so swiftly and efficiently executed—familiar and reassuring fingers th
ere one moment then gone the next—that by the time he realized what she’d done it was already a memory. But that single move also served to summon up their history together, the longtime familiarity togetherness breeds—which often continues to survive even in the stasis of separation—and the anticipatory instinct one develops for the thoughts and actions of the other, all of which nearly become second nature. And so, an entire conversation passed between them in that now empty space, as if they’d never been apart, none of it spoken until she asked, “Is Louis going to be all right?”
“I hope so,” Seth said wearily. “But it didn’t look too good last night.”
“Awful. Darian must’ve been really freaked out after seeing something like that.”
When he didn’t offer an immediate response, the atmosphere in the room again became edgy and still.
“He obviously had issues,” she said. “To do something so extreme, he—”
“Peggy, look,” he interrupted, the memories of the night before already wrestling his reason away, tearing down his defenses and ravaging the short-lived comfort he’d embraced just seconds before. “I can’t—I’m sorry, but I can’t stay long.”
Her mouth curled into a bit of a smirk. “I don’t recall asking you to.”
“I just don’t want you to think I was—”
“We’re adults,” she said. “Well, allegedly. Let’s behave that way, OK?”
“I’m doing my best, Peg.” He looked down at the rumpled sheets between them.
“You didn’t promise or imply anything last night.” She slowly rose from the bed and moved to a free-standing mirror in the corner, the faint scent of vanilla and baby powder in her wake. “And neither did I.”
Seth nodded, though he knew she was no longer looking at him.
Again, the room drifted into silence, but in his mind the maelstrom raged on, growing stronger despite his best efforts to fend it off. He was remembering. Little by little, through the disjointed storm of paranoia and terror, he was remembering more and more about that night at the cabin. Yet it all continued to remain blurry enough to just barely elude him, closer than it had ever been before but still not clear enough to make out, to make sense of.
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