The Wards (Novella #2)

by Alan Ryker

  And she couldn’t clean. The room filled with trash and flies and stink clouds, and there was no way to escape the filth. It’s not like she’d previously been a domestic goddess, but she’d kept the area around her lounging couch clear of annoyances.

  But then Elizabeth had a realization about the way Wards died. She noticed it while watching torture videos online. They fell to the ground, and much like while sleeping, the dimension of space they took up switched. Instead of occupying two cubes in the vertical plane and one in the horizontal, they took up one in the vertical and two in the horizontal.

  The Wards had to lay down to die.

  Elizabeth didn’t know if that were true. She quietly did research, not sharing her suspicions with her forum mates. Maybe they could die standing up, but Elizabeth didn’t find a single recorded case.

  So while Betty was on the toilet, Elizabeth placed walls around it, then removed it, leaving Betty a one-square room in which to live.

  It was barely wider than her shoulders, giving her only enough space to do two things: spin and scream. And that’s what Betty did, day after day, night after night, unable to sleep, unable to even die.

  With her ear pressed to the vibrating wall, the inhuman wailing made stranger by the klaxon effect of Betty’s spinning, it no longer seemed funny at all.

  “Do you know how to fill the tub?” Davey asked. She’d felt threatened by him at first, with his sunken eyes that noted the way she wore a bath robe and nothing more, but he was docile, hoping only for help.

  Elizabeth smacked the wall. It wasn’t like one in the real world. She sensed no hollow space between panels of dry wall. It was solid all the way through, but it didn’t feel that hard, or that thick.

  She walked to the living room and grabbed a crystal vase. She’d bought it for them from the Halloween expansion. It had come with dead flowers. Dumping them out, she returned to the hallway.

  Lifting the heavy vase overhead with both hands, she took a deep breath, then smashed it into the wall. It sank easily into the strange material and got stuck. Bracing a bare foot on the wall she tugged until the vase came free, sending her suddenly stumbling back, smacking into the opposite wall.

  She lifted the vase and brought it down again, and again. Each time it went deeper. Each time it was harder to pull out, until finally, when she did, light came through the hole.

  “How did you…? What are you…? How…?” Davey was frozen, but as she stood there clutching the vase to her chest, Elizabeth realized that she was, too. With the way she’d been bringing the bludgeon overhead, the hole was high, and she could only see wall through it, not Betty. But Betty still wailed, and now it was much louder. Without the wall to muffle the shrieks it was even more terrible, as if her soul were being ripped out through her throat, or being forced out and finding that it couldn’t escape, that it was stuck to that undying anchor of flesh.

  Davey sidled up to her and they both looked at the hole she’d made in the wall. When Elizabeth realized that she was staring at it with the same slack-jawed look of disbelief as this Ward she’d purposefully made as stupid as possible, it gave her the shove she needed to walk forward, stand on her toes, and look in.

  PART 6

  In the abstract, low detail world of a casual computer game, the scene had been funny. She hadn’t liked this lazy, mean-spirited bitch, and had enjoyed watching her exaggerated torments. Everything in The Wards was animated big so that its meaning would be clear on the small screen. When someone was tired, her arms spread wide overhead in a yawn, her head fell over the back of the couch, mouth open in massive snores that projected as an image of a log being sawed above her.

  But seeing the anguish she’d created live, Elizabeth understood that it wasn’t exaggerated for her benefit. This was a creature that had been tortured far past what any living thing could withstand, but because of her nature and an evil little glitch Elizabeth had found, she was still there to experience the anguish months later. There was nothing cartoonish about this. In fact, the low-detail she’d seen in Davey’s face, the mask-like lack of fine feature, wasn’t there in Betty’s.

  Despite her head being thrown back, eyes rolled white, and mouth stretched open until the cheeks looked ready to split, Betty looked exactly like Elizabeth. Elizabeth gasped and the stench hit her in the sinuses, filling her mouth so that it seemed that she could taste the filth and decay of this woman caught between life and death. This woman… Her. She was looking at herself, her soul stuck in a body that couldn’t die, like an animal caught by one leg in a trap that wouldn’t release it until someone opened it.

  Elizabeth fell back, turned, vomited on the floor.

  “How did you do that?” Davey asked, having spent that time finding the words to his question.

  Elizabeth gasped, fighting the acid filling her throat, spitting it out and swallowing it down until she could breathe again. She had done this horrible thing, and she had done it to herself. That stupid, vain, lazy woman—that was her, spinning, howling endlessly in agony.

  Elizabeth reached out and gripped the vase in white knuckled little hands, using it to push herself up to unsteady feet.

  She used the lack of balance to lunge at the wall, using all her weight to drive the vase into the lower edge of the hole she’d already made. She punched the wall away in chunks, but she was gasping for breath, and still only Betty’s screaming face was visible in the tiny room.

  “Pull down the wall,” she said to Davey.

  “I can’t,” he said, shrinking away as if she’d raised a hand to him.

  “Pull it down now!” she shouted, not surprised at her sudden anger at this man with her husband’s face, but not expecting it either.

  “We can’t change things,” he said, but he moved toward the hole.

  “Put your hands through, grab the edges, and pull.” She didn’t know if he were right. In the game, she’d never seen anyone interact with an object in an unscripted way, except maybe Albatross, and even then she wasn’t sure. Maybe these walls were programmed so that the Wards they hemmed in couldn’t harm them. Or maybe the Wards were just programmed to never try. She’d find out in a second.

  Davey put his hands through the hole, braced a foot on the wall and yanked, dragging out an enormous chunk of building material as he smacked into the opposite wall and bounced to the floor.

  Then the world went terribly silent. The screaming stopped. Elizabeth stared through the hole in the wall at herself, watched her own eyes roll back down out of her head and stare forward at the first change in her environment in months, at the gateway to her salvation, and she saw the smallest glimmer of hope in her own face. But Betty hesitated, and Elizabeth knew why. She’d given her Ward hope before. That had been her favorite thing to do; give her a bit of peace and then snatch it away.

  But the screaming wasn’t the only noise to have stopped. The cacophonic music had as well. It was replaced by the stomping of heavy boots nearing Albatross’s bedroom door.

  Elizabeth’s eyes went back and forth, from the place where Betty hovered between life and death to the doorway Albatross was sure to come through at any moment. Davey and Betty, they were nothing to fear. She had made them weak. Albatross, though… Elizabeth had thought of a special torture for him: to be an intelligent person in a house full of morons. But besides being intelligent, he was belligerent and cruel. The only time he wasn’t openly imposing his will on others was when he was plotting something.

  And all the neighborhood pets had disappeared.

  Elizabeth looked to Davey, but he had frozen, too. She’d seen the stupid, helpless man-child become the object of his spawn’s wrath many times, watching the storm cloud above Albatross’s head grow large and black and begin spitting lightning, which always happened before he lost the already loose grip he kept on his temper and engulfed Davey in a cartoon whirlwind of black-painted nails and kicking boots.

  The bedroom door slammed open and Albatross stomped through.

  He wa
s taller than Elizabeth had realized, taller than Davey, if slimmer.

  He gaped at the hole in the wall framing the upper half of his mother’s body as she swayed in half-life. Elizabeth, though, gaped at him. His marble-white skin and pitch-black lips and eyes… She’d assumed they were makeup, goth makeup, but his flesh was actually those colors. She thought she saw fear in his eyes for a moment at this sight of a pain which must go beyond even what he wished on the woman who’d brought him into the world.

  He looked down at Davey. “What did you do? How did you do that?”

  Then, without moving, he turned his eyes to Elizabeth. They landed on her face and opened wide.

  “Mother?”

  He looked from Elizabeth to his mother, who responded then to his voice. Becoming unglued from the trance that had held her for so long, she stepped forward.

  Albatross flung himself back in horror, and Elizabeth threw herself back against the wall. Betty was moving. Betty was coming at them. And it was the most terrible thing she’d ever seen.

  The woman was dead, even though she was also conscious. If there had been any question of her dead state caused by her ability to spin and scream, it disappeared when she began to approach them. She moved in fitful spasms, some shorting circuit inside her firing, sending her entire body jerking at the same time it propelled her. It tugged the corners of her mouth back into a grimace and jolted her eyes so wide and round they looked like they would explode out. At the same time, other limbs went suddenly dead, drooping. She reached up with gnarled clawed hands and braced herself on the sides of this new escape hatch Elizabeth and Davey had created for her, something she must have prayed for nonstop if her brain were still capable of prayer, of anything but the perfect misery Elizabeth had crafted for her. She propped herself shakily up.

  Then her arms gave and her upper body toppled through the hole.

  Elizabeth dragged her eyes away for a moment to see Davey kicking with his heels, trying to push himself back through the wall behind him. Albatross, though, displayed more than fear. Fear made the eyes buzz, made them lose focus in the search for escape. His eyes were locked on his mother in fascination, as if he were an artist who’d stumbled across a completed version of something he’d been unsuccessfully struggling to create for years.

  Betty hung limply for a moment, high-centered at the waist on whatever the hell the wall was made out of. Elizabeth thought that maybe the horror was over, that the change of posture had been enough to let her die, but then another jolt ran through her, sending her hands scrabbling like spiders across the edges of the hole, down the wall, blindly searching for purchase. She pressed herself up, looking forward with rolling eyes, a mouth still stretched for shrieking, split and then healed over in the corners God knew how many times.

  And then her eyes met Elizabeth’s for the first time. Betty didn’t look past her, but saw her, and the shrieking began again, this time in fury.

  Davey covered his ears, turned his face away, closed his eyes. Albatross looked at Elizabeth again, and then mouthed to himself the words that his mother shrieked over and over, almost unintelligibly except for in the accumulation of repetition, “The Eyes,” and his face showed awareness, then astonishment.

  Betty hoisted her leg over the lip of the hole in the wall with newfound energy and surprising speed. Elizabeth looked for a way out, ran a step down the open end of the hallway and tripped over Davey, who had curled into a blubbering ball. He grabbed at her ankle as a child clings to his mother. She hit the ground and flipped onto her back, began kicking at Davey, trying simultaneously to push herself along and find her feet.

  But Betty was watching her, and she was coming for her. Her waxy skin gleamed. Her hair hung in limp, greasy tendrils. She wasn’t dead, but she shouldn’t have been alive. She screamed as if she’d never paused for a moment, even screaming as she caught a foot on the wall as she dragged herself through, finding freedom and a face full of floor at the same time.

  Then silence. Total silence.

  Elizabeth stopped trying to kick away from Davey. Davey peeked over his shoulder to see why the omnipresent noise had finally ended, leaving a vacuum in which the thumping of their hearts and the pumping of their blood became audible.

  “Betty?” Davey said. Elizabeth heard something mixed in with the fear, something thick and choking: love.

  Albatross hesitated, reaching slightly out, almost stepping forward, until he looked up and saw that he’d been caught by Elizabeth in something like a human gesture and strode boldly over to where his mother had collapsed onto her face, motionless.

  “Mom?” he asked with far less tenderness than Davey had. When she didn’t reply, didn’t move, he put a hand on her and pushed her quickly over, then wiped his hand on his pant leg.

  She was dead, her twisted face had gone slack so that she looked almost peaceful.

  PART 7

  Elizabeth vomited on the floor, her back rounding with the long, dry heaves. Seeing herself not just dead, but so much better off dead, was too much. And she’d caused it. Betty had recognized her as her tormentor and come after her, but as soon as she’d emerged from that one-square torture room, as soon as she’d had enough space to die in, the overwhelming trauma caught up with her.

  Her final thought, though, had been of vengeance. Elizabeth fought to control her stomach and looked up at Davey and Albatross. If they knew who she was, they should feel the same way.

  Davey had crawled to Betty’s side. Cradling her lolling head in his lap, he wept over her.

  Albatross’s focus, though, was on Elizabeth.

  “She was right, wasn’t she? You’re her.”

  “Her?” Elizabeth said, though she knew what he meant. She began to rise to her feet as if she were still feeling weak, though adrenaline filled her veins with electricity.

  “You’re The Eyes.”

  “No? I’m Elizabeth.”

  Albatross scoffed. “You’re certainly not a god the way they,” he gestured to his father and dead mother, paused, rephrased, “the way he thinks. But you are the eyes in the television, in the computer screen, in the sky, always watching, always tampering.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. She needed to get out of there. Albatross was too unpredictable. Too violent. And when Davey realized who’d killed his beloved wife, even though she’d hated him…

  “You don’t believe in The Eyes,” Davey said, seeming to always catch hold of the strangest thread of any situation. “You never come to church.”

  “I don’t believe in the version you worship, but I know there’s something out there. I’ve seen them up in the sky. I’ve seen where they go, how they track misery and how they smile when they find it.” He smiled and pointed to Elizabeth, “Those are the eyes.”

  Elizabeth couldn’t find words. Her throat seemed to close up as she considered running, wondering how far she’d make it in her bathrobe and bare feet with the tall, lanky Albatross chasing after her in a world he’d stalked as a hunter his entire life.

  Unlike her other idiot creations in the torture house, Albatross was perceptive. She saw his muscles go loose, saw him lean slightly forward as he prepared for the chase, saw him smile ever so slightly. Elizabeth looked to Davey, but Davey, the pathetic creature he was, had been brought even lower by his wife’s sudden death. If he’d ever been of any use, he wasn’t at that moment.

  She would go for the kitchen, for the knives. Had she given them knives? She had given them a microwave, then took it so that they had to eat their frozen meals cold.

  Jesus, she deserved whatever Albatross did to her. That was the worst part.

  A buzzing started. With so little background noise in the world, she heard it when it was still very faint, when it was the sort of white noise that could be imagined.

  But it grew quickly.

  Albatross apparently heard it too, because his eyes went wide. His hands, already hanging low and loose, spread wider, reached for the ground as he knelt down.

 
; “I’ll find you,” he said, though he glanced quickly around as if he might be punished, as if he’d just kicked the back of a pew in church.

  She knew, then, what the buzzing was, and her heart flopped in her chest. She did not want to meet its source and discover if it had power over her as it did over the occupants of The Wards’ world. More than before, everything in her screamed that running was the answer, but run where? The buzzing, which grew louder and louder, came from nowhere, from everywhere at once.

  And then it exploded, the cacophony so loud and huge that she had to cover her ears and it still seemed to fill her skull, to shut down thought and make her consciousness disappear, her self-hood, to replace it with the totality that was everything, the wind, the crashing waves, the hum that scientists recorded of the space between the stars. The frequency seemed to match her skull perfectly, but then she began to feel it in her muscles, and deeper and deeper until it was in her guts and all the way through her and grown so loud that she thought her head would explode. She opened her eyes and looked to Albatross. Tears streaked down his face where he knelt, but didn’t smear his makeup because, it struck her again, it wasn’t makeup that he wore. His skin was pure white. His lips pure black and stretched over white teeth and moving quickly, speaking to no one… Praying.

  Elizabeth almost shut her eyes, almost gave herself over to the consuming roar, but before she could, something landed on her nose. A fly.

  She looked up, forced her neck to tilt her thousand-pound skull back and saw that the air was full of black dots, whirring merrily to the same chaos that filled her. It hadn’t come into the house, yet. Its portal had opened, though, and it was about to, preceded by its tiny minions.

  Reality visually hummed, too, as if someone were shaking the camera impossibly fast, but Elizabeth wouldn’t close her eyes again, not with what was at stake. Not with what was about to step into the world. The one force that Albatross respected would not find her collapsed on the floor.