“Who the hell is Petey?”
“Our dog.”
“Cool.” Ruthie smiled, but it left her quickly. “Listen, don’t get your panties in a knot, but I have to ask this. Your wife, we can trust her, right?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“She’s my wife, I know her, all right? Sometimes you just know, the way you knew when it came to me. How did you know I could be trusted?”
“I didn’t.”
“Well obviously you trust me now.”
“I like you Seth—I always have—so I’m taking a chance.” As the cab took a sharp corner, Ruthie frowned. It didn’t suit her. “But I don’t fucking trust anybody.”
CHAPTER 30
Ruthie’s apartment was a modest three-story walkup on Washington Street, not far from Saint Elizabeth’s hospital. The apartment itself was small, and consisted only of a kitchen, bedroom, bath and living room. Seth expected it to be decorated as flamboyantly as Ruthie’s personality, and was surprised to find it furnished instead with very drab and purely practical furniture and accoutrements. Everything was dark and dreary, and the shades had all been pulled, giving it the charm of a cave.
“It’s not much, but it’s clean and warm,” she said, switching on a small lamp. “Severance doesn’t exactly pay me what they pay you.”
“It’s very nice,” Seth said, looking around.
Ruthie tossed her purse on the couch and made her way to the tiny kitchen. “I’ve got some kick-ass winter comfort tea, want some?”
“Thanks.” Seth joined her in the kitchen. An inexpensive table and chairs filled most of the room. He pulled out a chair and sat down as Ruthie retrieved two cups and saucers from a cupboard, placed them on the counter then ran water into a basic silver kettle.
“Give me a sec, OK?” She switched on the stove and slid the kettle onto a burner. “I need to get out of these work clothes.”
Seth sat at the table trying to collect his thoughts as Ruthie disappeared down a short hallway off the kitchen and slipped into her bedroom. He looked around a bit from his position in the chair, noticing how impersonal her living space was. Though it was nothing like he’d expected, it also made him realize how lonely in many ways her life probably was. For all her talk of friends she seemed more a confirmed loner, and her apartment only further illustrated that. There were no photographs of family, friends—of anyone or anything—and no sense that she was in any way connected in a personal sense to other human beings. It was an apartment that revealed no past or present, no future. It told one nothing about who lived there, and Seth wondered if she’d done this purposely. Perhaps her life before this place was not something she was comfortable with. Perhaps it had been horrible and was something she wanted to forget and leave behind.
He couldn’t be sure. In fact, Seth knew very little about Ruthie other than what she’d told him, and virtually none of that had included personal information. She was a woman that worked for him in the department, the eccentric and politically-charged girl on the other side of his cubicle who seemed to only exist between nine and five. Still, as ambiguous as the apartment was, it somehow made her more complete to him, this life she possessed outside the office, this place where she came to sleep and eat, to read and watch television and to listen to music.
A twang of pain trickled across his temple, followed by flashes of memory.
He brought his hands to his head, holding his temples and slamming shut his eyes in an attempt to deflect the pain. It left him, leaving more ghostly memories in its wake.
Christy running through the snow.
“You OK? Seth, what is it?”
He looked up. Ruthie was standing barefoot next to the table in a small black top and a pair of matching panties. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“What am I doing?”
“That’s quite an outfit, Ruthie.”
She looked herself over, as if she hadn’t realized what she was wearing. “I wasn’t done. You were screaming. Are you all right?”
Seth sat back a bit in the chair. “I was screaming?”
“You let out a scream,” she told him. “I didn’t know what was happening.”
The kettle began to whistle.
“I’m sorry, I…I’m remembering.” He suddenly felt lightheaded.
“They say that’s how it happens, that it comes back to you slowly, in pieces.” Ruthie turned her back to him, pulled the kettle from the stove and made the tea. A small tattoo of a tribal art design adorned the small of her back just above her buttocks, pieces of it still hidden behind her panties. The shirt was a t-back that allowed another tattoo on the back of her left shoulder—a yin and yang symbol—to be seen. She turned back to him and placed the tea in front of him. “Here, drink this. It’ll make you feel better.”
Seth brought the cup to his mouth with both hands then swallowed some tea. It had a vague mint taste and was very smooth. As he took another sip, the warmth spread through him, traveling slowly through his body. “Thanks.”
“Dude, I need to know some things,” she said, “and I need you to be totally honest with me, OK? No bullshit.”
“OK.” Seth tried not to notice how tight the little top was, or how it revealed quite a bit of cleavage and only reached to just above her navel. He tried not to notice how smooth her legs were, how delicate and cute her feet were, how the panties were tight yet rode up enough to reveal the underside of her ass. He tried not to notice how amazingly sexy she smelled. “But maybe you should finish changing first, Ruthie.”
He thought she’d respond with one of her typical wiseass comments. She didn’t. Instead she stopped halfway to the refrigerator, leaned back against the counter and folded her arms across her chest, crushing her breasts into an intentionally erotic swell. “Tell me what you know,” she said, clearly enjoying his embarrassment.
Leaning forward so that his arms could rest on the kitchen table, he sipped more tea then relayed to her everything he knew and everything that had happened to the best of his ability. He told her all of it—from Raymond and his experiences as children, to the night up in Maine, to everything that had happened since—and the more he told her the better he felt, like a huge weight had been dislodged from the back of his neck. But even as he explained things to her, despite all that had happened, it still sounded absurd, still sounded like the ramblings of a madman, and in expressing this all at once for the first time, the thing he realized most profoundly was the full extent of what he still didn’t know.
Throughout, Ruthie stood perfectly still, leaned against the counter and listening intently to each word. She never had any reaction or give any indication that what he was saying was bizarre or frightening or troubling her in any way. In fact, she seemed almost bored, like she’d heard this many times before. He might as well have been talking about some mundane television show he’d seen or a typical project at work.
When he’d finished she sighed long and hard, blowing a renegade piece of hair away from her face. “You don’t remember anything else about the night at the cabin?”
“It seems to be coming back to me slowly, but only in flashes.” He sipped his tea. “But the memories are getting longer and more vivid. Stronger.”
“And it hurts?” she asked. “It hurts to remember?”
“Doesn’t it always?”
She arched an eyebrow. “Good point.”
“Now you.”
Ruthie squirmed a bit but remained leaned against the counter, arms folded. “I’m not from here originally,” she said a moment later. “I was born in Delaware, grew up with my mom. My father died of cancer when I was little, so it was just my mom and me. We were really close. When I was a senior in high school we moved to Massachusetts. We lived in Dorchester for a while, then Jamaica Plain. She was a waitress mostly, made shit but we got by. It was tough because my mom had problems. Like your brother.”
“They took her?” Seth asked.
Ruthie nodded. “When
I was about thirteen, she had this…experience…and she was never the same. Gradually, she went crazy. About a month after I graduated high school it all got too much for her and she had a breakdown. They locked her up in a psychiatric ward, medicated the shit out her and threw away the fucking key. She’s still there, rotting.” She cocked her head to the side to indicate the psych ward at nearby Saint Elizabeth’s hospital. “That’s why this apartment’s perfect. I can stay close to her. She usually doesn’t recognize me anymore, though. All the drugs over the years have fried her brain like you wouldn’t believe. Maybe in the end that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s more merciful to not know what’s happening. I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry, Ruthie.”
“Like Raymond, she’s a carrier. For years she just thought she was going nuts, and maybe she was. Either way, eventually it crippled her. Even though those things hadn’t set all this motion yet, she knew what she was carrying. She understood what her role would be in all this when they finally did. Like the rest of us, she just couldn’t get it all to fit in her mind. Square peg in a round hole, you know?”
Seth wanted to tell her how deeply he understood everything she was feeling, everything she had felt over the years, and that she no longer needed to feel so alone because now neither did he. Instead, he asked, “How did you come to know all this?”
“Same way you did. My mother finally told me just like Raymond finally told you. The rest I got on my own by finding other people who were going through the same thing or who had loved ones who were.”
“But your mother, she didn’t spread it to you?”
“Did Raymond spread it to you?”
He shook his head. “If it even has been spread to me then it came from Christy.”
“And if it has you’ve been able to fight it off, just like me. Some of us can…for a while anyway.”
“How do we do it?”
She smiled slightly. “You still don’t know?”
“Do I look like I’m playing games to you?”
“Love,” she said softly. “And faith.”
“Ruthie, when my parents were killed I lost my faith.”
“You only thought you did.”
“No.”
“You only thought you did,” she said again. “What you did without even realizing it was the same thing I did when my mother had to be institutionalized. We got so angry with God we stopped talking to Him. It took me a while to realize that only made my faith stronger. Your anger, my anger, it made Him even more real to us. No one’s angry with someone or something that isn’t there, that doesn’t exist, right? That makes no sense. In being so angry at Him for allowing the things that happened to our parents and to Raymond, we only made our belief in Him stronger. And the stronger you believe, the more you love. We’re angry because we loved God and felt like He’d let us down, abandoned us.”
“And this stops the spread, or slows it?”
“Our minds are the battleground, Seth. That’s how they move and breed and control us, through thoughts and dreams and nightmares. There are only three avenues they haven’t been able to break in human beings: our free will and our proven ability for boundless love and indestructible faith. My mother didn’t spread it to me and Raymond didn’t spread it to you because they love us and would never do anything to hurt us. They weren’t capable of it. Others, yes, they can’t control what’s inside them in those instances, but with those they love, these things are powerless to turn us. That’s why they send others to do it when the time comes, other carriers at other times and in other places.”
“Christy,” he mumbled.
She nibbled her lower lip a moment. “It’s not like the movies. Monsters and lizard people jumping around, bug-eyed gray aliens flying in spaceships and all that shit, that’s all human invention, people putting a face on the boogeyman so they can make some sense of it in a way that even a child could understand. The reality is these things are far more complicated than that. They abducted people, like Raymond and my mother and that Christy girl who came to you in the forest. They’ve done it for years, taking hundreds—maybe even thousands—from everywhere, every walk of life. Then they sent them back, at different times and to different places, so when they finally flipped the switch and set this all in motion, none of us would have a chance.”
Time isn’t the same when you’re with them.
“It’s not about flying metal ships or wars or big explosions. Just madness, a sickness in the human spirit no one can see or put their finger on. They’re phantasms traveling through our minds, never provable, never seen and always hidden in the dark.”
Seth finished his tea. His hands had again begun to tremble uncontrollably. Even when he concentrated and stared at them, the shaking refused to stop. “What are they, Ruthie, do you know? These things, what the hell are they, aliens from some alternate existence?”
“I’ve read everything on these subjects I can get my hands on,” she told him. “Most of the serious, highly-educated, scientific researchers that investigate the whole alien angle no longer believe these things are from distant planets. Most believe this phenomenon is much closer to Earth and the origins of Man. Ever heard of the French National Council for Scientific Research?”
Seth tiredly shook his head in the negative.
“It’s pretty prestigious stuff. Trust me, we’re not talking a bunch of UFO geeks and alien enthusiasts sitting around jerking each other off, these are serious scientific people.” Ruthie left the kitchen long enough to rummage through a small bookcase in the living room then returned with a dog-eared paperback. “They quote a guy from there in this book, some big-shot.” She rifled through the pages, many of which had been flagged with sticky notes, until she found what she was looking for. “Here it is: Dr. Pierre Guerin, from the French National Council for Scientific Research. He said the alien phenomenon and its behavior—and I quote—‘is more akin to magic than physics as we know it.’ And there’s another one where he says the demons of yesterday and the aliens of today are probably one in the same.” She tossed the book onto the kitchen table. “Basically, a lot of these guys believe that what people used to worship as gods and angels or fear as devils or demons, and what people are encountering today are the same beings.”
“But they’ve changed over the centuries.”
“No,” Ruthie said. “We have. And so they have different faces, different looks to fit different, constantly changing cultures and times. Our minds do the rest, filling in the blanks and trying to make sense of something that makes no sense. Our minds define things as best we can so we can understand or at a minimum identify them, right? They used to burn crazies as witches. People used to see fairies and gnomes and shit running through the woods. Now we lock people like that in institutions, the way they’ve locked my mother away and the way they’ve locked Raymond up before too. But it’s been a slow burn, the world’s gone nuts, and the whole mess is entirely fucking human. Turn the TV on, dude, read a newspaper. The whole planet’s going to snot. Chaos and violence rules, nothing makes any sense anymore, good countries, good people gone mad and nobody even seems to give a shit when they’re lied to or manipulated by the government. Long as the cable TV works and the cell phone bill gets paid, who gives a shit what’s happening in the rest of the world or even your own backyard, who cares what the price is as long as we don’t have to pay it right here and right now? If they ain’t taking a big steamy dump on my head or someone’s head I love, who cares? And if you fight it or stand in the way or have even the slightest dissenting voice, you’re the bad guy, right?” She reached for her tea, took a quick sip. “It’s over, life the way we knew it once. It’s changing, the planet and everything on it is changing, being altered. Maybe like when the dinosaurs were wiped out, or evolved and became something else. Maybe the same way we have again and again from the time we crawled out of the water. Maybe this is just the next evolutionary step, the next big shakeup on Planet Earth. Maybe it’s as natural as life or
death and everything that happens in the middle. Either way, it’s all controlled by these fuckers and we can’t stop any of it anymore than we can stop a hurricane, a blizzard or an earthquake.”
“And who do they answer to?”
“Maybe they are angels, or demons. Maybe they’re something in between, something we can’t even begin to comprehend. Maybe they’re us, or some form of us. Maybe they are gods in a way, lesser gods that answer to the Devil. Maybe in the end we don’t answer to anyone but ourselves. Or maybe we all answer to the same God.”
“What about Him?” Seth asked. “Where is God in all this?”
“Personally, I think He’s always with us,” she said. “But it’s the way parents are still with us once we grow up and move out, you know? Maybe when it’s all said and done, when it’s all over, maybe He’s there to make it all better, to make sense out of it for us. I don’t know. But out in the real world, we’re on our own.”
“Then Raymond was right.” Seth brought a hand to his head and rubbed his temple. “We can’t stop this.”
“How do you stop something that uses your own weaknesses against you?” Ruthie pushed away from the counter. “That’s the vehicle they use for movement, for infection from one person to the next. Sin. They use our sins against us.”
Seth looked at her, speechless.
“Because what is sin? Think about it, Seth, what is it really? I mean once you strip away all the bullshit and religious definitions and all that, what is it?” Ruthie moved closer to the table and put her hands on the back of one of the chairs. “It’s human nature. Sin’s just a label we use to hide the facts that those things we do—both good and bad—are simply human nature. Our nature, Seth, it’s how we’re made. It’s our own nature used against us, to control us, to destroy us. Human beings are amazingly flawed, each and every fucking one of us, and they use that against us.”
Lust. Christy had used lust. Whenever Seth remembered her, he remembered lust.
Deep Night Page 31