“Shut up!” she screamed, raising her filthy face from the mud. “All of you! Shut up!”
Just then, a baby faintly cried beneath her.
“Aiden!” she shouted at the mud.
The distant crying continued. It grew louder now, and closer.
“Aiden!”
Marigold put her ear to the mud. The crying stopped and was replaced by the chirping of children’s laughter. She couldn’t tell how far down the noises were coming from, but they were definitely there. She began digging.
“Aiden, I’m coming for you, baby!”
There was a quick kick right beneath her, followed by another one, and another. She dug her hands underneath the mud to stop them. But suddenly, as if she had pulled the plug from a bathtub, the ground began to sink.
“Oh, my God!” Marigold clawed at the roaring mud as it collapsed beneath her. It sucked her down like a funnel. She reached out for the last bit of earth, but found herself falling instead. Hot air rushed against her cheeks. Even in the darkness, she could make out a baby’s face looking down at her from the edge of the world. As she sunk into oblivion, that face was all she saw.
Chapter Eleven
Marigold fell into a seated position with a thud. Her head throbbed. She sat in the passenger seat of a moving car that reeked of cigarettes. Twirling smoke wafted in her face. She didn’t have the energy to swat it away.
Outside it was sheet white, and painfully bright. She tried turning her head, but found she couldn’t. Her face was glued in place.
A hot and searing feeling rose from her stomach to her throat. It clenched her heart. Tears ran down her cheeks. It burned inside and the feeling manifested in explosions of red and blue behind her eyes—the colors of anger and sadness.
She wanted to scream but couldn’t.
“You’re going to pay me back, you know,” somebody said from the driver’s seat. Her eyes widened. Marigold knew that raspy voice and hated it. Her neck turned to look at the woman, but she hadn’t moved her neck on her own.
It was her mother driving the car. The woman, orange from sunbathing, had her skinny arms at ten and two on the ragged steering wheel. Jackie Onasis sunglasses covered half of her face. She looked like a praying mantis. Her bleached hair was in a tight ponytail and the lines around her lips were taut. Still, she looked about twenty years younger than the last time Marigold had seen her at daddy’s funeral.
How could you make me do it? Marigold heard an angry, whispered voice say in her head. Marigold could tell it was her own voice, but younger. Much younger. Made me do what? she wondered.
Marigold blinked, but there was no darkness when she closed her eyes. She realized just where—just when—she was. She was fourteen again and sitting in the passenger seat of her mother’s sedan, reliving a day she had been pushing out of her mind for the past thirty years.
“Did you even think about where the hell we would put the damned thing if you actually had it?” her mother said, throwing out her hand above the wheel.
Shut up! Marigold heard her younger self thinking. She stared at the dashboard. It wasn’t a thing! It was my child!
Marigold frantically searched inside herself for an eject button, but there wasn’t one. She felt trapped behind her own eyes. If she did die, then this was Hell.
“And I still don’t know why you’re covering up for that boy,” her mother said, shaking her head. The sunglasses wobbled on her tiny nose. “It was rape, Marigold. That boy raped you. Don’t you understand? He should be put in jail. You’re only fourteen. Who was he?”
Marigold didn’t answer.
“If he was any man at all, he would have taken you to the clinic himself. You know, I really should tell your father about this since you’re being such a little brat about it, but I don’t want to give him another heart attack. Making me take out all the money, all because you wanted to be a little whore.”
The young Marigold yanked at the door handle. The adult Marigold watched with fascinated horror. She remembered this day all too well even after trying to bury it for all these years. It was the day that she rebelled. Next, her mother was going to say—
“What the hell are you doing? Stop it!”
But Marigold felt her younger self spazzing out like she did back in the hallway of brown darkness. Her hands slammed against the passenger side window. Her feet kicked the glove compartment and her head banged against the head rest. Both Marigolds’ wanted out, one out of the car, the other out of herself. If her mother hadn’t wanted her and her brother, she shouldn’t have spread her legs to papa, at least not without protection. She was the one who should have had the abortions. She was the one being a hypocrite. Not Marigold.
Her mother pulled over the car.
“What the hell is wrong with—”
“I hate you!” the younger Marigold screamed. “You have no right to call me a whore when YOU’RE the one who’s cheating on daddy! Both me and Adam know. We saw you!”
The older Marigold saw her mother’s face contort beneath her sunglasses.
“You ungrateful bitch.” She reached over the younger Marigold’s knees and opened the door. “After everything I’ve done for you. You….Ooooh! GET OUT!”
Marigold looked into her mother’s furious face before running out into the white light. She heard screeching tires in the mist.
Marigold felt herself being sucked into the sky. As she soared upward, she looked down and saw her teenage self looking up at her. Her once unwrinkled face was heavy with confusion and fear, which was in turn only a mask for the underlying despair and hopelessness. Marigold closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see that face anymore. So she did something she hadn’t done in a long time to get away from it all.
She prayed.
Chapter Twelve
Marigold’s lips were still moving when she opened her eyes.
Marigold was back in the brown tunnel. A laugh escaped her lips. She went to wipe her tears, but as she raised her arm, something licked her elbow. She shrieked. The walls were closer now and louder. It sounded like dogs lapping water down the entire length of the corridor.
The hallway was hotter, too. She unbuttoned the top three buttons of her pajama top, which made her think about her husband because he always did that, too, when he was hot.
When I went through the door at the top of the stairs, why wasn’t Jeff there?
That must have been him on the other side of the door. She heard him. More importantly, she felt him. He had been that close. His ear was right on top of her chest, and if that was the case, then the basement door was nothing more than a front. But a front for what?
I fell down the stairs and he was shouting at me to…to wake up!
The idea sprung to her mind like a street lamp coming to life in the night.
“I must be unconscious.”
If she wasn’t unconscious, then she was dead.
But something deep and primal told her that wasn’t quite the case. So she was still alive, but knocked out pretty badly. When she went through the door, she felt a detached sense of awareness. She was a vagabond in a strange tunnel leading to the center of her brain.
“Precisely,” a voice above her said that made her jump. The voice was followed by a square light from a TV that lit up above her, and static came from it. She was no longer alone.
Grinning at her with a crooked, yellow smile was Mr. Chomicki, her high school guidance councilor. His pockmarked face took up the entire screen. He still had the unkempt eyebrows, wild gray hair, and square glasses she remembered. Almost everything about him was the same. Except for one thing. Mr. Chomicki never had blue eyes. But the Mr. Chomicki on the screen stared down at her with bright, sky blue eyes. So bright, they cast a bluish glow over the rest of his face. An aqua aura surrounded him making him appear at least twenty years younger. She stared up at the screen with wonder.
“Hello, Marigold,” Mr. Chomicki said with his nasally, Brooklyn accent. “I’m glad you’re finally here.”
He grinned again. But this time, instead of teeth, he had wiggling baby fingers in his mouth, just like the demon on her couch! She reared back. This was not Mr. Chomicki.
The light from the TV pulsated as if agreeing with her. In the hallway’s new brightness, she saw that the walls were made of human tongues. She squirmed and squeezed in her shoulders to avoid touching them. The tongues furiously stretched and flicked, trying to lick her skin.
“Who are you?” Marigold asked, scowling. The impostor’s smile faded.
“Saw right through me, huh? Well, of course you would. You’ve known me ever since you got pregnant and I started talking to you.
“’Purge yourself.’” It was the same words in the same voice that she had heard in her living room.
“As to your question about who I am, I’ll be straight with you, Marigold. I’m your Imagination. In fact, I’m everybody’s Imagination. Whenever anybody has a creative idea, that’s me. I’m their muse, their guide, their inspiration to create something beautiful. But right now, you’re all that matters to me. You have no idea how glad I am to see you, Marigold. I’ve dreamt of meeting you for centuries.”
Even though what the imposter said sounded too bizarre to be true, she knew it was. Just as she knew she wasn’t dead. It was his fault she had gone completely bonkers, his fault that she had lost her job, and now, maybe her child.
“What the hell do you want?”
“The same thing that you want. To save your son.”
The floor felt like it had dropped from beneath her.
“What do you mean?” she grabbed the boxy sides of the TV and shook it. “What do you mean?”
“Stop shaking me for a second and hear me out.”
“Where’s Aiden!” she cried. “He needs me.”
“I said stop it!” he boomed, and Marigold released the TV.
There were blue flames in Imagination’s eyes. She took deep breaths and calmed herself.
“Good,” he said, and his eyes simmered down. “We don’t have much time. You’re brain dead, and as far as the mind’s concerned, that’s the same as being dead dead. So you’ll go to the Internal Landscape where the newly dead and the unborn reside. That’s also where your son is. But he doesn’t want to be born, Marigold. He wants to miscarry himself.”
Marigold stood with her mouth agape, struggling to understand.
“Don’t worry about why. He just does and you need to stop him. Outside these walls, there will be a lake, and yes, I know, you hate lakes. But that’s the whole point. After you die, your mind drops you off in the last place you’d ever want to be. Don’t ask me why. It can’t be helped. Once there, you’ll meet somebody with a green aura. That will be your Instincts.”
“What?”
“Your Instincts. I’m your Imagination; he’s your Instincts. You’ll understand more once you’re there. When you meet him, he’s going to try to steer you away from the trees.”
“What trees?”
“You’ll know when you see them. Instinct will try to force you away from them. He’s going to be very convincing. You’re going to want to follow him. Everybody does. But you must head toward the trees, Marigold, because that’s where your son is, and you must get to your son. He needs to know that you’re here for him so he’ll want to be born. Are you willing to go after him?”
She didn’t answer. What kind of question was that? She would go to the end of earth for him, and in a way, she already had.
“Of course you would. There’s one caveat, though. Everything you saw before with the conversation you had with your mother is going to impact you once you leave here. Instinct is going to take on a form of somebody important to you. He always does.
“Everything you saw in the hole had relevance. That’s what Instinct is going to play on. But you can’t listen to him. He wants to protect you, but saving yourself would be abandoning your son in the Landscape, and I know you don’t want that. You don’t care about what’s best for you. You care about what’s best for your child. So that’s who you must remember once you’re in the Landscape. Aiden is in the trees, Marigold. Head toward the—
Z-z-z-z-i-i-i-i-i-i-p!
The tearing and sucking noise came from behind at the end of the hallway. Wind whipped through her hair. The tongues receded into the wall.
“Dammit, I thought we had more time,” Imagination said.
The brown darkness began to recede as it closed and expanded in undulating patterns. A giant blade sliced through the end of the hallway in a chopping motion. It was slim and precise, like a scalpel, and if it got any closer, she imagined it would cut her in two. The loud sucking continued.
“Pay attention,” Imagination commanded, “for Aiden’s sake! You must go into the Internal Landscape now. I thought we had more time, but we don’t. If you’re ever going to save your son, you need to hurry.
“In seconds, this tunnel is going to fall apart. You have to head toward the trees. Your Aiden is there. No matter how much you want to follow Instinct, you can’t, no matter what form he takes. You need to prevent your child from miscarrying himself. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she cried, sensing her time growing short. “But why are you helping me?”
“Head toward the trees,” he repeated a final time before the TV went black. The walls collapsed like a house of cards.
Now she stood outside in a foggy area that was even hotter than the hallway. The sun barely peeked through the milky clouds here.
Where the hell was she now?
The earth erupted and the ground started to disintegrate. Marigold ran and looked back as the ground sunk away like the edge of a waterfall. As she sprinted, she saw the trees in the distance. They loomed so high that they disappeared into the clouds. She had to get to the trees. Aiden was no longer inside her belly. He was there.
The ground slipped from underneath her slippers, and she bolted across the rough boards of a pier that appeared out of nowhere. She jumped as the last of the ground was swallowed up and she landed in a rowboat. It was just as Imagination said.
“Please, mama, don’t be afraid,” a child’s voice pleaded.
At the far end of the boat was a baby. He had a small, bulbous head and peered at her from a tiny blanket that covered his mouth. A green aura engulfed him completely, and she knew immediately who he was. It was her Instincts, the one Imagination had warned her about.
Row, commanded the childlike voice in her head. She grabbed the paddles and took her first stroke, turning the boat into the fog.
Chapter Thirteen
“We’ll be watching the fetus for the next 24 hours to see if there are any problems.” Haunt nodded and squeezed Marigold’s hand.
The silver-haired OB-GYN stood on the opposite side of his wife’s bed. Her thin lips curved in a lugubrious pout. It made her whole face droop down.
Haunt stared at his wife. The OB-GYN cleared her throat. She sounded like a dead car trying to start up.
“For the time being, the fetus looks okay. Very little amniotic fluid leaked out during the fall.”
Haunt stayed silent.
“Do you have any questions, Mr. Haunt?”
Haunt didn’t respond and his eyes didn’t leave his wife. He stared at her intensely until he saw two of her. Both of them were stiff as a board and wired with tubes. He rubbed his eyes and when he looked up, the OB-GYN was gone. She was probably never there in the first place. Ever since he got to the hospital, it was like he had stumbled into a dream. He had seen doctor after doctor come through the cloth curtains, but none of them seemed real.
But he wouldn’t believe it. She would wake up. She had to. He had talked to her just this morning and kissed her. She had kissed him back. That was only a few hours ago. But now, Velcro straps tied his wife’s arms and legs to the bed rails. A clear tube disappeared into her mouth. The tube was connected to a machine that pumped breath in and out her lungs. Everything sounded so mechanical that it made him sick.
&
nbsp; He watched it until he couldn’t take it anymore. He couldn’t breathe. Every breath the machine gave his Marigold, it stole from him.
Even if it was only for a few minutes, he knew one thing for certain. He had to get out of this hospital.
Chapter Fourteen
Haunt pulled his car into the garage and stared at the dingy wall in front of him. He had driven the half a dozen miles home from the hospital, but couldn’t recall anything along the way.
The last thing he remembered was calling Steve back in the hospital parking lot. He tried three times but Steve never picked up. Why didn’t Steve pick up?
Whenever he had these lapses behind the wheel, he always worried that he might have run over somebody along the way and not even realized it. But now he didn’t give a shit. Fate had already fucked him pretty hard today. So why not fuck with fate? Fate was an asshole. It took the mother of his child. The tears in his eyes made it too blurry to see.
His child. He screamed at the steering wheel and rocked back and forth. What would happen to his baby without his wife around to help raise him?
He felt so incredibly old. His joints felt stiff with what was probably arthritis. But fuck it, what was the point of worrying about that now? He stomped on the gas two times, revving up the engine. He refused to turn off his car. He was afraid the cold air would freeze him to the bone if he turned off the heat. And he knew he couldn’t go into his house. Not after what happened there. Not after what he saw in the basement.
Why didn’t he think of going to a motel on his way home? He couldn’t go into the house. Just looking at his wife’s white Celica parked to his left made him want to rip out all of his hair and kill himself.
His chest ached from sobbing so hard. He rested his forehead on the steering wheel. As he murmured to himself, he heard a woman talking. It was from the radio. He turned it up and heard a woman’s soft-spoken voice against a saxophone playing in the background.
The Darkness of the Womb Page 4