Dead Reflections

by Carol Weekes

  “We will, but you have to see this first.” He took her hand and led her up to the screen door.

  “It looks like your backyard, only different.” Gina peered around herself. “I don’t get this. How can it be a house inside a house, but it has a yard that we can’t see from your house? I feel like I’m in a dream. Let’s go back.”

  “Okay, we will, but this is the best part.”

  Gina’s breath became fast, scared. “Hurry. I’m afraid that if she comes back, she won’t let us go home.”

  Cory waved his hand. “Ruth won’t hurt us. Imagine your house,” he told her. “And your yard.”

  “Why?”

  “Just imagine it in your head. We’ll both think of it at the same time, okay? Just do it.”

  She sighed. “Okay, I’m imagining my house.”

  Cory opened the screen door and they saw the front of Gina’s house, its flowers looking parched in their window boxes, her bicycle lying on its side on the front lawn where she’d left it the night before, her mother sitting inside the small, screened porch, reading a paper and drinking a cup of tea.

  Gina’s mouth fell open. “Being here is like being awake in a dream.”

  “Come on. We’ll walk over to it.” He took her hand and led her down the steps and onto the street directly in front of her house. She stooped, reached down and touched the road; her finger came up dusty.

  “I can’t believe this,” Gina said, except now she sounded a little more excited and less scared.

  Chapter 19

  “I don’t want my mother to see me,” Gina said. She scooted behind a cluster of trees on her neighbor’s lawn. Cory ran with her, giggling. The neighbor, a heavy middle-aged woman, paused in her lawn watering to glance around.

  “Hi, Mrs. Dylan,” Gina said. The woman didn’t answer. She stood with water issuing from the end of her hose, her face confused.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Gina asked him. They watched the water hit the side of her house, soaking a window and creating a muddy current in the soil of her garden.

  “I don’t know. Let’s go.” They ran between the two houses until they reached Gina’s back yard where her swing set waited.

  “How can you just step out from someone’s porch door and be all the way over here?” Gina wanted to know. “What kind of a secret is this?”

  “Beat’s me, but it’s too cool. Jeffrey showed me this last night. I even got to go back to my old house. I was in my bedroom, looking out my window at my friends playing in the street.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “I swear, it’s true. We can go back and you can imagine something else if you don’t believe me. You’ll see for yourself.”

  “Let’s go inside for a minute. I’d like to get a drink of juice. You thirsty?”

  “Yeah.”

  They let themselves in through the back door of Gina’s house. A large orange cat lounging on a kitchen chair stood up on all fours to hiss at them, its hair rising into a ragged tuft along its back. It took off into another room as if it had been doused with water.

  “What’s with your cat?” Cory asked.

  “That’s Bobbins. He can be weird at times.”

  They let the back door shut softly behind them. Gina took two small glasses from the cupboard and filled them with orange juice. They gulped the liquid down.

  “Gina?” Her mother called. “That you, hon?”

  “Yeah,” Gina said. “I’m going back out to play.”

  “Gina?”

  “Yes!” Gina yelled, irritated. “Let’s go back out, otherwise she’ll find an excuse for me to stay in.”

  They stepped out, leaving their glasses in the sink and making their way over to the swing set.

  “At least swinging will give us some breeze.” Gina settled herself onto one of the swings, taking it higher and higher each time. Cory didn’t feel much like swinging. He took a seat on the one next to her and twirled himself around, allowing the chains to interlock, then unlock again.

  “We should head back there soon,” he said.

  “We can just walk up the road to your place.”

  “I think we need to go back through Jeffrey’s house first.”

  “Why? I don’t like the place.”

  “I think it’s the only way to get back to my house.”

  Gina laughed. “You just walk up the road and in through your front door. I don’t want to go into their house again. That woman…her lipstick almost looks like blood.”

  Cory rolled his eyes. “I think they’re just lonely for company.”

  “I’d still rather not go back there. Maybe they’re magicians or something.”

  “Maybe.” They watched Mrs. Dylan drag her garden hose along the side of her house. “That would make some sense.”

  * * *

  Linda Dewar placed her teacup on the table and listened as the back door of her house open and shut. Her husband, Rod, was at work. It had to be Gina, back from the library, although the reading group was to be going on for another hour. Perhaps her daughter had become bored. It happened sometimes. All these years later, she wished she’d had another baby, someone who could have kept Gina company. Too late now.

  “Gina? That you, hon?”

  Silence, other than the impression that someone had just stepped inside the house. She stood up. “Gina?” She saw their cat, Bobbins, fly towards her, moving in a curve around the stairwell, his tail thick like a section of fire hose.

  “What’s gotten into you?” she mumbled. She stood by the door, looking in through the screen at the dimness of the corridor. She swore she’d heard the back door open and shut. She let herself inside. A delicate shiver danced up both arms, lifting the hairs along the skin as if something in the house was different. Linda made her way into the kitchen and glanced around the room. It was empty.

  “Gina? I heard you come in.” She waited, then irritated, moved towards the hallway, wondering if the girl had gone upstairs to her room. She caught sight of dishes in her clean sink. She walked over. Two small glasses with remnants of orange juice sat there. She’d just washed up all the dishes before she’d gone out onto the porch. So, Gina had come in with a friend, gotten drinks, and they’d left again without saying hello. She wondered who Gina’d brought home. She didn’t have many friends. Occasionally, one of the kids from school might come around to watch a television show or to work on a homework project during the school year, but mostly, Gina was alone, a quiet girl who spent a lot of time reading, playing out in the yard by herself, writing in journals and tinkering on her computer. Sometimes it made Linda feel sad. She loved her daughter more than anything else in this world. The fact that the child was growing up so fast made her feel teary at times. She walked back to the stairs and called her. “Honey, are you up there?” Silence. She sighed and climbed the stairs. She found Bobbins crouched beneath a basket chair at the far end of the hall. He hissed again and dashed past her, growling.

  “What has gotten into you?” she asked him. The cat tore down the stairs, his growl a low whimper. On impulse walked into Gina’s bedroom, which faced the back yard. It was a small room with an angled ceiling. Her daughter’s bed sat kitty-corner to the higher wall, its comforter decorated with several big, colorful cushions and some of Gina’s favorite stuffed animals. A soft cover book lay, spine-up, in the center of the bed. Linda walked over to see which one it was: one of the Twilight books. She smiled. The girl was smart, pretty, but shy. Who knew what she’d grow up to be? Sometimes, Gina’d talked about becoming a teacher. She was bright with words and ideas and she possessed a vivid imagination. She was too preoccupied with ghost stories, vampire stories, and tales of the eerie. The girl was drawn to the topic of the macabre. It wasn’t Linda’s idea of reading material, but then, Gina was her own person. The book brought her mind back to the boy who’d shown up at the house yesterday afternoon. Cory something. Quiet young fellow, but living in that house! It gave her a chill. Even when she’d been Gina’s age,
that house had come with a history.

  She and her girlfriends would walk past it on their way to school because the fields behind it had once contained a footpath. And then odd things had begun to happen on that footpath when she had been fifteen. A couple of girls had complained about strange men appearing on the path behind them, asking them to come over to the house and visit some time. One of the girls had been groped and the man who did it had never been found or charged. The girl, a kid Linda remembered by the name of Amy Dickson, had told the police that the man who’d grabbed her had been old. Old as in elderly the police had wanted to know? No, Amy had insisted; he’d looked old, like he’d been from another time. The police shook their heads, but had conducted a search around town for any man of that description. They’d written her statement off as the imagination of a hysterical young woman.

  But Linda remembered one time when she’d walked home from school alone along that path. It had been autumn, late October, and the house had risen up in view, stark against the backdrop of half-bare trees, its many attic windows peering in all directions, their glass and frames staring at her like an ephemeral beast. She’d paused to stare, curious about the house, but afraid of it. It had been one of those times when the house had sat empty between its last fated residents, waiting for another sucker to purchase it. She’d stared at its vacant windows, wondering about its empty rooms; how the shadows would elongate as the sun slid past them on its apogee from dawn to dusk. How anyone’s footsteps would echo through its corridors and against the starkness of its high-ceilinged, empty rooms. Its basement would be a damp whisper. Its attic would be a held breath. She and the house watched each other. Ridiculous, she’d thought. Houses can’t stare.

  But this one could.

  She’d felt its eyes on her and she’d picked up her pace, moving past it, glad when its trees finally cut it off from view. She’d crossed the road to keep her distance from it, but before it had fallen out of sight, she’d glanced back. She’d seen an old man’s face framed in one of the upstairs bedroom windows, watching her. He’d smiled and waved.

  She ran home, sobbing, because she’d recognized the man in the window. His name had been Jeffrey William Hopkins, and he’d been born in that house. He’d lived and married in that house. He’d killed his daughter Madeline in that house for trying to run away with a man whose character Jeffrey hadn’t liked, but he’d had money and power as one of the town’s bankers and his jail sentence had been relatively light. He’d also been involved in gambling and criminal elements, and he’d owed debts to questionable characters, one of whom had gone missing shortly before Jeffrey had died. His wife had disappeared and he’d told everyone around town that she’d left him. Her body was later found buried beside her daughter’s, beneath soil inside the barn, five feet beneath one of the animal stalls. He’d perished in that house, falling down the long set of stairs leading from the second story to the main floor. She knew his face because her parents had talked about him, the stories around him; they had kept newspaper clippings with his photographs.

  He’d been dead for over twenty years on the day Linda had seen him smiling at her from that empty upstairs bedroom window, and when he’d waved, she’d felt the scratching dry skin of his fingertips linger against the nape of her neck, a gentle pulling to come over…come visit.

  She’d not walked that way to school again and, years later, she’d almost wept when her own husband had purchased this house, on this street, just up the road from it. He didn’t believe her story. He said she’d probably seen some real estate agent checking out the condition of the house, and nothing more.

  “It’s just a rambling old house with a bad reputation, thanks to Hopkins,” he’d told her.

  “Why do bad things happen to all the people who move in there then?” she’d demanded.

  “I don’t know,” he’d shrugged. “Shit happens to people.”

  “In the same house?”

  “Maybe it just draws unlucky people. It’s not our problem, Linda. We don’t live in it.”

  “Thank God for that,” she’d whispered.

  Chapter 20

  Linda picked the book up off the bed and set a loose piece of paper into it to set the page location, then laid it on Gina’s desk. She stood in front of the window, and glanced into the brilliant morning yard, her mind on the gardening she still needed to do out there. She saw both swings on the swing set move back and forth, except they moved in opposite directions from each other. Then they gradually stilled. She felt a burst of sour panic cut through her stomach.

  “Gina?” she called through the open window. That same melancholy feeling crept back to her, the kind that always made her want to cry whenever she thought of Gina growing up and moving away from home--this idea of somehow losing her daughter to the world out there. She was growing up, her little girl was. Almost a teenager. She had to cut her a little more leeway. As for the swings, maybe a storm front was coming in, pushing hot air ahead of a cooler system behind it. She peered at the sky, which was a transparent blue. The bad feeling wouldn’t go away.

  “I love you,” she said into the room. Okay, time to stop being weepy, as her husband would call it. Go downstairs, wash the two glasses and decide what she would make for supper. Linda headed back down, noting that Bobbins now crouched beneath the living room sofa, his eyes wide, dark orbs, watching her. He hissed again.

  * * *

  Mrs. Dylan dragged the section of garden hose along the side of her house towards her back yard, her head tingling with a headache that had come on suddenly while she’d watered flowers in her front yard. For a reason she could not explain, the day had become different at that moment, as if the air had thinned and had denied her enough oxygen. She’d felt the passing of a pocket of cold within the humidity, an anomaly of temperature so out-of-place that she had been unable to swallow for a moment. She would have sworn she had heard someone call her name. It had been the voice of a child. Then the cold passed and the heat of the day flooded back. She continued watering, trying to place the owner of the voice. A child…a girl.

  “Gina Dewar,” she said. “That’s who it was.” The voice had sounded as if it had come from right beside her, and yet the girl had not been anywhere in sight. Mrs. Dylan had glanced up at the Dewar house. The girl must have called a greeting as she had passed by a window. As for the cold pocket, who knew?

  She reached her backyard and started the hose again, determined to get the remainder of her flowers soaked before the sun peaked at high noon. The sound of creaking swing chains from the Dewar yard caught her attention. Ah…the girl was out back, playing before the day became too hot.

  Mrs. Dylan went to wave hello to Gina. She saw two swings moving on the set, one lifting high, rolling back, lifting higher, then back again in a steady arc. The other spun around like a top, paused, then retrograded in the opposite direction. She saw dust kicked up from the ground where feet may have dragged, had children actually played there. Yet the swings moved by themselves. She gripped her hose, feeling its hard rubber press into her palms. That acute stab of cold air returned, enveloping her like a cloying bubble. A miasma of something rank, a placid yet definite stink of something gone off, drifted past. She thought she heard children giggle. The swings continued to move despite the breathlessness of the day.

  “Oh my,” Mrs. Dylan uttered. Nausea hit her hard in the gut. Colors faded, bird calls muting. Then, the swings slowed and came to a stop. The day held its breath. She sensed movement ease past her and with it, the cold trailed out again. She stared at the swing set whose seats hung like nooses from their chains. She had not fainted in years, but she felt the blackout coming with the speed of a train. The last thing she saw before everything went dark was the detail of her lawn rising up to greet her face; the minutia of grass blades, some yellow and parched, some green. She hit hard.

  * * *

  Mrs. Dylan paused in the yard and stared at them, but didn’t say hello. She seemed to look through them.
>
  “What’s with that old lady?” Cory asked. “Is she not all there?”

  “She’s usually friendly.” Gina raised a hand and waved, then used her feet to dig into the lawn to stop her movement. Mrs. Dylan didn’t acknowledge her.

  “Maybe you should tell your mother.”

  “If she sees me, she’ll want me to stay in. She thinks I’m at the library. She won’t let me go back to your place. We should go before my mother sees us out here.”

  They ran alongside the yard, past Mrs. Dylan. Gina waved again and the woman still refused to acknowledge her. She stood there, gripping her hose, her eyes focused on the Dewar back yard.

  Cory laughed at this. They hurried towards his house.

  “Let’s try to just go back to your place,” Gina said.

  “All right.”

  They reached the mid-part of the road; Cory hit something that felt spongy, like slamming into a volleyball net, only cool, sticky. It sent him sprawling backwards, his arms looping to regain his balance.

  “What the hell?” Cory said. He could see the road clearly, and yet something in the air would not allow him to pass beyond this section of the sidewalk. Gina stopped beside him, her face curling with unease.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I just walked into something.” He put his hands up and felt the air grow thick and solid despite its transparency. It felt like he was pushing his hands into cold, wet steak. He pulled his fingers back and they were coated in a translucent slime. “What’s going on here?”

  Gina put her hands up now too and the look on her face told him that she felt the same thing. They moved over onto a lawn and the clamminess followed them like an invisible border.

  “It won’t let me go past it.” He glanced at her and felt fear for the first time. They could see the world around them, yet could not reach anything beyond this point. A woman moved towards them on the sidewalk, walking a small dog. When the woman and dog got to within twenty feet of them, the dog, a beagle, went crazy. It yanked back hard on its leash, howling and shrieking as if it had been attacked. The woman cried out in surprise.