“Do you really think that they would sit out there all night? And what about those noises?”
“What noises?”
“The noises it was making! I know you heard it! That’s why you covered your ears all night.”
“I don’t remember any noises.”
I looked up at her to find that she was staring out the window, making a point of avoiding my eyes. I had known her long enough to know that meant she was lying.
I downed what was left in my coffee mug before pouring myself a fourth cup. I looked at the clock on the canary yellow wall of her kitchen; it was 9:35 and we had been downstairs for an hour. Drinking four cups of coffee during that time definitely didn’t help settle my nerves.
“Allie, I know you’re freaked out. I am, too. But there is no way that thing was any of our friends pranking us.”
“Maybe it was a neighbor kid, then. There are these stupid kids that live up the street from here that always ding-dong-ditch the house.”
“People still do that?” I asked in disbelief. I shook my head slightly to get my mind back on topic. “It wasn’t anyone playing a prank. It was either a hallucination or…”
“Or what?” She asked, looking at me now. “Or what, Quinn?”
We were both quiet, not knowing exactly how to answer the question I had asked. Neither of us wanted to. We didn’t want to face the truth. Who could blame us for that after what we had seen?
“You’ll stay here with me tonight, won’t you? I can’t stay here alone.” She told me and the fear I had seen in her the night before resurfaced for a quick second.
“Duh.” I replied and I saw the faintest trace of a smile on her face. “All we can do now is just see if it comes back. If it does, we’ll handle it.”
“How?”
I looked at her and shrugged slightly.
“I don't know. But I'm working on it.”
XXX
We sat up with the blinds closed, dreading the moment that night fell, though we never said that out loud. I tried to remain as optimistic as I could when I knew down to my core that we would be seeing our freakish visitor again. Alice shook her head every time I tried to say that we wouldn’t until finally, I stopped speaking all together, realizing that she didn’t need me or anyone else to lie to her, ever.
As we sat in silence on her bed, my mind traveled back to when we first decided to go from being friends to boyfriend and girlfriend. Immediately, her mother and father objected, saying that it didn’t matter how far we had come as a society, we would still face the same barriers and prejudice interracial couples had always faced. Alice was young and naïve, they said, if she believed otherwise. But she was stubborn and so sure of the fact that we were meant to be. She didn’t hesitate to tell her parents that she saw herself ending up with me.
Young and naïve, they said again. Even if it weren’t an issue of me being black and her being white, the chances of us staying together for the rest of our lives or even through college were slim to none.
My parents were a little gentler about the whole thing, retelling all the stories they had been told by their friends who had married outside of their own race.
“Do you all have any idea what year it is?!” I had exclaimed furiously. “We’re past this! You claim society is going to object but it’s just you! It’s just you and her parents! We don’t even live in the south!”
They had tried to say that down in the southern states, we would face the worst of it.
“Good thing we’re not planning on moving to Texas, then, right?” I had laughed at the sheer ludicrousness of it all. They were out of touch and they just didn’t like her, for no reason I could pin down in certainty.
“Besides, Quinn, you shouldn’t be asking us if we know what year it is. You should be asking the people who will give you a problem over this.” My dad had reasoned. “It’s not right and it’s not fair, but it is reality. You understand that, don’t you?”
“It’s not reality! You two and her parents have no idea what you’re talking about! And it doesn’t matter what you say, okay? We’re going to be together.”
A teenage boy proclaiming his undying love for his girlfriend with all the naivety and idealism in the world is hardly front page news. Our parents projecting a completely ridiculous notion of racial prejudice to keep us apart was hardly a new tactic of division. But the situation we found ourselves in that night was so out of the ordinary that to tell anyone about it would surely have guaranteed our swift departure to separate mental hospitals.
“I just don’t want to see it again, okay?” Alice whispered to me and I looked up at her, seeing the darkness reflected on her face now instead of the fading streak of light I had seen before. We both turned our heads to the window.
“I don’t think it’s out there.” I replied after standing up.
“Quinn!” She exclaimed, grabbing my arm. “Just keep the blinds closed. Please?”
I nodded and we sat back down, waiting for any sign of its presence, be it a scratch, a heavy breath, or its blood-chilling voice.
“We’re being so stupid.” I told her as I laid on her bed staring up at the ceiling. The sun had gone down two hours earlier.
“Do you think so? Do you think it really was just a stupid kid in the neighborhood?” She asked, her eyes moving between me and the window.
“Or it was a group hallucination.” I replied, grinning.
“Shut up! It was not a group hallucination!” She laughed as she smacked me with a pillow.
“It was. You’re just in denial.”
“I am not in denial. Let’s just go to sleep.” She told me, still smiling. “It’s freaking hot in here. I’m opening the window.”
She grabbed the blinds and pulled them down slightly so that they flung up.
We both gasped, her covering her mouth to prevent the scream that rose quickly in her throat.
The thing was outside again, staring in at us with the faintest trace of a smile on its contorted mouth.
It was playing with us.
XXX
She buckled after that second night. She tried to call her mom and dad. When we’re afraid as children, the only people that can soothe the fear are our parents. Alice was grasping at that straw, thinking that if they came home, the creature would be frightened away.
“My dad will shoot it if it tries to get in, Quinn! They’ll protect us both!”
Somehow, I doubted that they would be willing to lay down their lives for me. My parents liked Alice as a person but did not approve of us as a couple. Her parents felt exactly the same way. That level of affection was minimal, to say the least. They would not protect me.
She paced around the kitchen floor with the phone pressed to her ear.
“They’re far out in the ocean, Allie. There’s no cell service out there.” I explained to her after she slammed the phone down hard on its charger. She pressed her face into her shaking hands before running her fingers through her hair.
“I need them to answer.” She told me uselessly. “I think they can check email on the ship. Come on!”
After hurrying into the dining room where the desktop was set up, she began to furiously type out a message.
“Are you going to tell them exactly what’s going on?” I asked after sitting down beside her.
“Of course not. They won’t believe it. I’m just telling them to call me as soon as they get the message. Then, I’ll tell them everything. I’ll tell them that as soon as they reach the port in Bermuda, they have to get on a plane and come home.”
“I don’t think they’ll believe us either way. They’ll think that we’re messing with them. Then they’re going to be really pissed off.”
“When they hear my voice, they’ll know I’m not messing with them. They’ll know that this is serious. Quinn, we can’t do this by ourselves. I know that if we can just get them here, that thing will leave us alone. Have you talked to your parents?”
I had, but I hadn’t ment
ioned anything about our current issue to them. I knew that they wouldn’t believe me just as I knew that Alice’s parents wouldn’t believe her. My parents were home and could offer help immediately. But there was no way that I would be able to convince them. Imagine the story: Every night, we were being stalked by a hideous, otherworldly creature that sat outside of our window, watching us until the sun rose. Then, it ran over the roof and disappeared, hiding out until the sun went down again. I certainly wouldn’t believe a word of that story if it was told to me.
“They won’t believe me.”
“You have to try, Quinn! You have to make them believe you!”
“Alice, would you believe us? This is something straight out of a horror movie. They’re going to think that we’re here alone every night and letting our imaginations run away with us. Either that or they’re going to think we’re smoking a lot of weed! Or taking lots of pills!”
“My parents will believe me.”
“That’s great for you. Really, it is. I have to tell you, though, that I don’t believe that. I don’t think they’ll believe any of this.”
“Well, we’ll see about that. As soon as they hear how afraid I am, they’ll be on the first plane home. And my dad will kill it!”
“I think your mom will kill it. She’s way scarier than your dad.”
“Maybe so. One of them will show it how wrong it was to come around here. I know it, Quinn. I know it.”
We waited, both struggling to hold onto the belief that they would believe us and be able to help. We struggled to continue thinking that everything would be alright when they came home. We prayed that they would be able to save us.
The email went unanswered and the phone never rang.
XXX
It wasn’t until the third night that Alice finally broke. She cried with her face against my chest from the time the thing appeared (this time, we had kept the shades open, trying to see how exactly it appeared, only to look up and find it staring down at us from the roof) to the time that the sun came up.
“What does it want? We have to try to talk to it. We have to figure out what it’s doing here, Quinn!” She exclaimed at me in a perfect show of misguided frustration.
We had gone two and a half days without sleep. Every time we dropped off, the thing’s horrific face would pop into our minds and we’d both immediately sit up in bed, regardless of the hour in the day.
“No. We need to ignore it. You remember that movie we saw a couple years ago? They said that with anything paranormal, if you address it, it only gets worse. If you feed into it, you give it power. We just have to ignore it.”
“Ignore it?!” She screamed at me, “How are we supposed to ignore it?!”
“It hasn’t done anything to try to hurt us…”
“Besides trying to break the window on the first night! What’s stopping it from breaking in here and… who knows, Quinn?! Do you know?!”
“How would I know, Allie? What, you think I have some sort of connection to it?”
“It’s always looking at you. It’s always looking directly at you! It’s never looked at me the way it looks at you!”
“Are you really happy about that?! Are you really happy that it wants me?! And it has totally looked at you!”
“Did not! It smiled at you night before last!”
“It was smiling at both of us because it knew that we had really thought it was gone!”
“See! You do know what it’s thinking!”
“I’m just guessing!”
“Well, maybe you should just go. Maybe you should go home and we can see whose house it shows up at. Then we’ll know who it’s after!”
“And then what?” I asked her, bringing my voice back to normal.
She stared at me, her eyes hostile now. She didn’t answer, but I knew: If it was after me, she was saved. If it was after me, she’d be relieved. She’d rather me suffer whatever that thing had in store for us alone than for us to face it together.
I was young and idealistic, as my parents said. I would have done anything to protect her and if that meant dying in her place, then so be it. How could that feeling have been one-sided? How could she not have wanted to reciprocate such selflessness? The short answer is that her mind was on par with her physical age; she was a self-interested teenage girl terrified to die before she could live. I will explain the long answer later.
“Fine. Face it on your own, then.” I muttered, stung by her words and what they meant for us.
I was ridiculously melodramatic in those days. I stormed out, vowing never to go back. If I had been half as smart as I thought I was, I would have stayed. For the rest of my life, I will carry the fact that what happened next was my fault.
XXX
There was an ear-splitting whistling that caused me to fall to the ground, covering my ears. I looked up to see others crumpling around me. After several painful moments, my ears were soothed with an ethereal silence, a calm before the storm. Then came the blast. For a too-short second, I saw the wave of fire coming towards me. As it consumed me, my entire body burnt and I saw clearly my flesh being blasted from my bones…
I awoke, yelling out and slashing my arms in the air to hold off what could never be stopped. My entire body was dripping sweat and I wiped at it furiously with trembling hands.
It had been so real. There had been no other reality, just the one where I met my demise. Unlike when we first saw the creature outside the window, I couldn’t rationalize the dream away. It was real and it would happen. But when?
I didn’t know.
My phone rang about ten minutes later, some obnoxious ring-tone that I can’t remember. I looked at the caller ID to see Alice’s name.
“What?” I asked abruptly, rubbing my eyes.
All I heard was her breathy sobs on the other end of the phone and immediately, an alertness came over me that shook all thoughts of the most horrifying nightmare I had ever had from my head.
“Allie, what’s going on? Is it back?” I didn’t wait for her answer; I was already pulling my shoes on.
She continued crying for a moment.
“Alice!” I exclaimed, climbing out of my window with my car keys in hand.
“Quinn…” She whispered, “I let it in!”
XXX
I sped to her house with absolutely no idea what I was going to do when I got there. My tires squealed around every turn and I blazed through every yellow light I came to. On the one red light that I was unfortunate enough to catch, my legs were shaking up and down the entire time and I’m pretty sure that I was bobbing in my seat a little, too. Anyone who saw me would have assumed I was probably just racing home to use the bathroom. Little did they know I was actually zooming to my girlfriend's house where I would more than likely be killed by a demonic creature that had been stalking us for a week...
I watched the light that was green for the other direction of traffic turn to yellow and slammed the gas, swerving to avoid a car trying to make it through before the light turned red. The flash of the traffic camera provoked images from the dream to flash through my mind; I wouldn't have to worry about ever paying that ticket...
As soon as I reached her house, I put the car into park and pulled the keys out of the ignition, running to the tree I always climbed up to get to her room. But my eyes found her front door instead of looking up to climb; it was open completely.
I ran forward, ducking down so that if the thing was watching, it couldn’t see me. But something told me that it knew I was there. It was waiting for me to come into the house, too.
Despite believing that, I walked into the house, staying down low, listening for any sound, even the smallest, that might tell me where the thing was. I wanted to whisper Alice’s name but knew that it was too risky. So instead, I let my feet carry me; they seemed to know exactly where to go.
I was walking down the basement steps, hearing the soft breathing now in the distance.
“Alice?” The woman’s voice hissed i
n the darkness ahead of me. “Alice?”
“Get to Alice.” My mind demanded and instantly, I picked up her familiar scent of coconut shampoo. She was close; if I kept walking, I’d probably trip over her. I had to chance saying her name. I had no other way to find her.
“Alice?” I whispered, my voice so low that there was no way she could have heard. But I felt her small hand reach out and grasp mine. In an abrupt jerk, she pulled me down to the floor. I closed my eyes, picturing the layout of her basement, where we always hung out. I knew that we were now crouched down below her mother’s old computer desk.
“Quinn, she’s close.” She whispered with her mouth right up against my ear.
“How did she get in?” I breathed back as my eyes widened by their own accord, trying to see her.
“Shh!” She shushed me and suddenly, she came into view; I could see in perfect darkness.
“I can see you.”
She nodded but said nothing. We both looked simultaneously to our right, where we could see the creature pawing the ground soundlessly.
“What is it doing?” I mouthed to her and she shrugged, shaking her head slightly as she watched it with terrified eyes.
“Where?!” The creature exclaimed suddenly, causing us both to jump.
“She can’t see us. Or hear…” I mouthed to her and she nodded again.
“We have to hit her with something!” Alice mimed the gesture as she said the word before crawling out from under the desk and moving quickly to the fireplace at the end of the room. Her father hid his shotgun in a secret compartment under the ledge that their family pictures were currently decorating. I rolled out from under the desk to help her move the pictures silently and quickly. Our eyes never moved from the creature who was stomping the ground now and jerking around the open space with its arms outstretched.
Alice opened the shelf silently and took out the shotgun. She pulled it open, checking to make sure it was loaded before carefully snapping it back together. She had always been the more outdoorsy of the two of us; her dad took her shooting at the gun range in the next town over almost every weekend. If we stacked our experience with firearms side by side, she trumped me every time. I had never even held a gun.
The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) Page 6