Though there are no musicians Darian can see, somewhere nearby a band plays the most mesmerizing music he has ever heard.
Cynthia smiles at him, and they begin to dance with such grace, it feels for a moment as if they’re gliding, their feet not quite touching the floor but hovering above it somehow.
He remembers the feel of her lower back, the bend just above her buttocks, and how his hand has always seemed to fit the spot perfectly. He remembers years before when they were dating and how he would touch her there and say, “See? A perfect fit. God made that spot on your back so my hand would fit it perfectly. We were meant to be.”
Her arm wraps around him and her other hand slides into his as they move across the floor, effortlessly twirling like seasoned partners that have danced this same routine for years and know it by heart.
In those moments he could remember happiness, conjure it, make it so, make it real and of value. Those fantasy moments of dancing with this woman he so adored and who so adored him while the result of that loving union—their daughter—watched on, made their problems and terrors fade to nothing, leaving only their love and the power of their family, kept him moving and provided the strength and conviction he needed to stay alive. But those moments were fleeting and always left him too soon; escaping his senses like drifting tendrils of smoke, gone so completely they left little or nothing behind, phantoms vanished with a sigh or the blink of an eye…
This time as they dance it begins to rain. Somehow the painted clouds turn black and rain falls across the dance floor in a slow but steady trickle, splashing about on the tables and snuffing out most of the candles.
Yet they remain oblivious to it all…until that spot on Cynthia’s lower back, the spot where his hand has always fit so perfectly, begins to change, to move beneath his fingers.
Like another hand beneath her skin pushing to get out, stretching the skin and muscle in an effort to break free of her body, it squirms about beneath his touch with jerking, spasm-like movements, and from the periphery of his vision Darian sees more movement, the shifting, scurrying, ascending movement of small dark beings scaling the walls around them like fleeing insects.
They stop suddenly, turn and look at him in unison with their dead black eyes.
He has seen them…and they have seen him. They are not fleeing. They are preparing, organizing. It’s a formation, a positioning for attack.
Debra’s smile turns to sorrow, then to terror and agony.
The ballroom grows darker, and whispers swirl around them from unfamiliar voices speaking in alien and ancient tongues, but Darian and Cynthia continue to dance, the pressure in her back mounting, pushing against his palm. He tries to remove his hand but something within her grabs it, the hand beneath her skin holding him now as Cynthia’s face contorts and her eyes look to him with confusion and horror.
Blood slowly drips from the corners of her eyes. She opens her mouth to speak but instead vomits blood. Hot, sticky and foul, it spatters Darian’s face as the pressure in her back mounts, bubbles out as first flesh and then fabric rips in a gush of blood and fluid, leaving a raw cavity and the play of spidery fingers reaching at air.
Whatever thrashes about from within her skin finds his wrist with those blood-soaked fingers and yanks his hand back inside of her along with it. Darian struggles to break free but cannot, screaming now for it to stop, but the blood and rain have become one, falling down on him in great torrents, splashing against him, momentarily blinding him and filling his mouth until he gags and is certain his lungs will fill and drown in all the gore.
Cynthia’s body goes limp but continues to jerk about, a lifeless being operated now by a demonic hand living inside her.
But their macabre dance continues, spinning them both without consent, two marionettes performing on a stage and unable to stop, twirling uncontrollably, their bodies moving so quickly they become a blur and Darian can no longer distinguish the room from the blood and rain. Debra and Cynthia’s faces are swept into a single distorted and hideous image, as the whispers become growls and shrieks.
Debra—he is certain it is Debra—begins to scream.
Darian has heard these screams before—perhaps even from himself—though never from his daughter. But he hears them now. He hears them so clearly he knows he will never again be able to completely eradicate them from memory.
They are a part of him now. There, in the dark, amidst a bloody rain.
Darian remained in the car a while, parked across the street from their townhouse, watching and waiting, a cold sweat peppering his forehead. He blinked rapidly and shook his head until the hellish visions cleared. They could find him even in his private dreams and fantasies now. Find him and fuck him and destroy him.
They show you things, Louis had told him, bloody and perched in the window to his apartment, the sickness in him already in control, his friend already dead, already gone.
Horrible fucking things.
Cynthia’s car was there, but if she and Debra were home, why hadn’t they answered the phone when work had called looking for him? What were they doing in there?
Have they shown you yet, Mother?
Darian forced himself from the car.
Game over, man.
The snow was falling heavily now, accumulating quickly. Soon the entire city would be cloaked in white, buried in snow and ice and cold. If they were going to get out of there, away from the city, he’d have to convince them quickly.
We’re done.
“Fuck you,” he told the voices in his head. “Not me.”
Gritting his teeth, Darian crossed the street and headed for the townhouse.
* * *
In the darkness of their room, as children they had laid next to each other, just feet apart, listening to the night and the rhythmic sound of each other’s breathing. On the first night back from the sleep specialists, Raymond had said little. Their parents had thrown a small party of sorts, with Raymond’s favorite foods for dinner and even a cake for dessert. They had all made an effort to make his homecoming a happy event, but Raymond was anything but festive. He returned home more removed and sullen than when he’d left, and on that first night, lying in their beds as they had hundreds of times before, Seth finally stopped listening to the questions filling his head and said, “It’s OK if you don’t want to talk about what happened there. You don’t have to tell me.” He propped himself up on an elbow so he could see his brother in the bed next to his own. “But if you want to you can, OK?”
“Thanks,” Raymond whispered. “All I know is I just don’t ever wanna go back, Seth. Not ever.”
Seth leaned far enough out of bed so he could reach across the space separating them and muss Raymond’s hair with his hand, a brotherly ritual he had often executed over the years that signaled he loved him and was there for him and had missed him.
Raymond responded with a restrained smile. Though just barely visible in the sparse moonlight, it was a smile as effortless as it was genuinely affectionate, and revealed in him an expression as close to peaceful contentment as Seth had ever seen in his little brother. For a few seconds, everything was right with the world, with their world and his world and all the noise in his head. Seth had never forgotten that smile, and though he knew it was something relegated only to memory, even all these years later he would’ve given anything to see it just once more.
Now Raymond sat just feet away from him again, this time in an upstairs bedroom Nana had taken them to and then excused herself from. Three tall windows overlooked the dunes and ocean, but with the snowfall there was not much to see but curtains of white flakes and a distant monochrome sky. Still, Raymond immediately took up position in a wide window seat and watched the snow with unusual intensity, seeing something more beyond the whiteout.
Seth stood in the center of the room feeling lost as ever. He wanted to leave as soon as possible, to get away from here and confront those things that needed confronting. But he also understood this could conceiva
bly be the last time he saw his Nana and little brother, at least in this way, and in this world, and that possibility kept his feet firmly planted.
“Were you thinking about Mom and Dad?” Raymond asked without turning around.
“Yes.”
“I always try to remember the last time I saw them alive. What we did and said; how we felt and what we all looked like then…but I can’t. I can’t ever remember any of that. Some days I have to think really hard just to remember their faces.”
Seth nodded even though Raymond couldn’t see it. “Me too.”
“It’s always made me sad,” Raymond said softly. “I want to remember but some days I just can’t. I remember the things I want to forget and forget the things I want to remember. What a bitch, huh?”
“Ray, I—I have to go soon.”
“You can’t win, man.”
“Doesn’t matter, I can’t just lie down.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing?”
“I didn’t say that, I—”
“If you’re going, go to Peggy. Be with her now.”
“I will.” He pushed visions of her away for the moment. “But is it Peggy I’ll find, or something else?”
“Maybe she’s wondering the same thing.”
“Nothing’s as it seems now, is it?”
“Never is.” Raymond slowly turned, looked over his shoulder at him. “Never was.”
“No, I guess not.”
“They’ll try to break you,” he said suddenly, as if he had just remembered to tell him. “And if they can’t, they’ll try to make you think you’re crazy. Maybe by then you will be, but don’t listen to a fucking word they say. It’s all illusion, a mind-fuck.”
Seth nodded awkwardly, unsure of how to respond.
“I’m so fucking tired, Seth. Nobody should be this tired at thirty-one.”
“You don’t owe anybody anything, Ray. You don’t deserve this. You never did.”
A quick smile came and went, as if without his knowledge. He needed a shave and bags even darker than usual hung beneath his bloodshot eyes. “It’s all fluid, all constant motion, that’s what life is. Our bodies and brains are just energy surrounded by doors and windows, realities side by side and stacked one on top of the other. We know nothing, Seth. Nothing. People talk about other realities and the afterlife and all the things we don’t understand like they’re things out of children’s books. They’re not. The mysteries surrounding us are just that—mysteries—and they stay that way because we can’t even begin to understand any of it. We’re not wired to. We don’t have the ability to. But it is human nature to try, isn’t it? To try and to fail, because it’s a shell game on a street corner, man. People want everything explained and tied up with perfect pretty ribbons, but it’s not like that. It’s so far beyond our ability to comprehend it’s like an ant trying to grasp calculus.”
Seth felt numb. His brother laughed lightly, and at that moment, appeared to be completely out of his mind and as lucid as he’d ever been all at once.
“That’s why we have faith,” Raymond said. “It fills in the gaps, counters nihilism, but the enlightenment people look for never amounts to much of anything because they expect human explanations given from human perspectives and carried out with human comprehension. They’re just running blind. They forget… the Devil ain’t human.”
“Neither is God.”
Raymond returned his gaze to the endless white swirling beyond the windows. “You’re the one who says you lost your faith, Seth, not me.”
“How could you still have faith?” Seth felt anger rising from deep within him, the same kind of anger he’d felt when their parents were killed in a seemingly meaningless accident, and when his once innocent little brother had been taken from him by whatever dark demons now haunted them both. “Faith in what? God turned His back on you and left you to rot here with the rest of us. He does nothing to help us, so what good is He? Tell me, what good is He, Ray? What good has He been for you?”
“Human explanations, that’s what you want.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I want. He made us human, didn’t He? And as far as I know I’m still a human being.”
“For now, though that’s never been anything to brag about far as I’m concerned.”
Quiet fell over the room, leaving only the sound of snow ticking against the windows.
“When we were little,” Raymond said a moment later, “and in our room in the dark, sometimes even when nothing happened I’d be afraid. It was like knowing there really was a monster in our closet, and that it was only a matter time before it came to get us, so even in the quiet, I was afraid a lot of the time. Most nights I never said anything to you, and you never said anything to me, remember? You didn’t do anything, you were just there. I knew you were there, and that was enough.”
“Well I’m sorry, but I expect a bit more from God than His simply being there.”
“And who the hell are you to expect anything from God? Can you even hear yourself? You expect more from God. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
“I don’t know, you tell me.”
“There’s sickness everywhere, spilling over. It’s a plague now.”
“How do I stop this, Raymond?”
“You don’t.”
“But I—”
“You don’t.” He stood up, touched the glass pane in the window with his fingertips. “They’ll take you places, Seth. You’ll see things they want you to see, awful things. And you won’t be able to look away. Time and space—reality—it’s all different with them. They know how to control it, to bend it. We’re just game pieces.”
Seth wanted to reach out and touch his brother, to hug him and tell him he loved him and that everything would be all right. But such things seemed pointless now.
“I need to sleep. I’m so tired.” Raymond shrugged, laughing a bit, perhaps at what he’d said, perhaps at the snowflakes dancing beyond the windows. “Sometimes I think maybe that’s all any of this really is. Maybe we’re still just two scared little kids in the dark late at night, watching shadows and moonbeams and imagining what our lives might be like when we grow up…if we grow up.”
“Wouldn’t we imagine something better?”
“Nobody ever imagines anything better in the dark, Seth. There’s only hope in daydreams, never in nightmares.”
“I’ll see you again, Ray.” Seth moved closer. “Won’t I?”
Raymond looked at him sadly. “Go do what you got to do.”
Seth took the final step separating him from Raymond, put his arms around him and told his brother he loved him.
Even before he’d let him go, perhaps for the last time, Seth knew he’d been wrong.
Such things were never pointless.
* * *
The front door was unlocked, which was unusual. Though this was a good neighborhood with little crime to speak of, one rarely left one’s door unlocked in the suburbs these days, much less the city.
He pushed the door open enough for him to see inside before crossing the threshold.
The house was quiet, the front hall and living room empty. “Cynthia?” he called. Silence answered. Darian stepped inside, reached behind him for the door then slowly pushed it closed as he moved cautiously into the den. “Cyn?” he called again. “Are you here?”
He walked down the short front hall to the foot of the stairs and looked up at the landing above. Darkness concealed most of the area beyond the last few steps, and though he hesitated a moment to listen, none of the normal sounds associated with their home answered. The television in the den was off, the stereo was off; the entire place was draped in a silence indicative of no one being home. Yet Cynthia’s car was out there. Could she have gone for a walk? She enjoyed walking around the city, but rarely during winter months.
As he began to slowly climb the staircase, eyes trained on the darkness beyond the landing, he wondered if perhaps she’d gone off with one of her friends or busines
s associates and they had taken their car instead of Cynthia’s. Yes, he thought, that must be it. She just isn’t home. She’s gone off to…to do what? He’d been gone overnight and she decided to go out for lunch with a friend? It made no sense.
Then he thought of his parents. She might’ve gone with them somewhere. It would be just like his father to insist upon driving so—
An odd sound interrupted him. Darian froze on the stairs, about halfway up, and strained to listen.
A wet sound, water or fluid of some kind splashing about, like a large sponge being wrung out into a bucket of soapy water. Yes, that was it. That was the sound exactly. He listened a moment longer. The sound was coming from the end of the hall upstairs. From their bedroom, or perhaps Debra’s, but the sound was definitely emanating from one of the two bedrooms, no question about it.
There’s someone in the house, he thought. Someone in the bedroom but…
He drew a slow breath, wrestled his nerves into some semblance of control then grabbed the rail and leaned forward a bit, hoping to hear more. He was still only about halfway up the stairs. Darian looked back in the direction from which he’d come. The front door was still relatively close. If need be, he could turn and run back down the stairs and straight out of the house if…if what? Goddamn it, stop being so frightened of everything, he told himself. Stop being such a pussy. Get a grip.
“This is my fucking house,” he muttered, unaware that he’d said it aloud until he heard the sound of his voice. “Cynthia?” he called out, much louder than he had twice before. “Are you up here?”
“Dar?”
His heart slowed and he let out a long sigh of relief. “Yeah, it’s—it’s me.”
“Come on up, I’m in the bedroom cleaning.”
He climbed the remainder of stairs and was already nearing their bedroom when it occurred to him that her response had been anything but usual. She should’ve been furious over his being out all night. She’d have come running the moment she heard him, if only to make certain he was all right and to then demand an explanation.
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