Cleaving Souls

by Chauncey Rogers

  He kicked a rock and tightened his grip on the plastic bags. There was nothing wrong with going into a care facility, if that was what a person needed.

  He turned off the sidewalk and moved up to the door, knocking at it with his foot and then waiting for Zac to open it.

  “You’re quick,” Zac said after he swung the door back.

  “Well, I didn’t want to take up your whole morning. Thanks so much for doing this, by the way. You’ve been amazing.”

  “No problem,” Zac said. “I think Kylie wanted me out of the house anyways.”

  They switched places as they talked, Zac slipping on his shoes and stepping outside while Alex moved into the house and kicked his shoes off.

  “Well, tell Kylie that we said hello. We’ve been meaning to have you guys over sometime. Just need to get it fixed on the calendar.”

  “Yeah, that’d be awesome. Just let me know.”

  Zac was about to step down into the yard when he paused, smiling. “Oh, Alex, you never told me you were in a band.”

  “No?”

  “No. Kat put in one of your CDs for a bit. It took me a minute to realize it was you, but it sounded pretty good.”

  Alex felt his ears go red. “Thanks,” he said. “I think it sounds terrible now, but it was a lot of fun.”

  “Well, I guess that’s what matters. See you later.”

  “Bye.”

  Alex shut the door and turned around, eyeing the bags on the floor. He sighed.

  For whatever reason, he hated putting away groceries. Going to the store? Fine. Shopping? Fine. Taking the groceries home? Fine. But when it came time to put them away—No thank you.

  He pulled the box of Pop Tarts from one of the bags and went to the kitchen, tearing it open as he did so. Then he remembered that Kat wanted them cold and he altered course, moving down the hall towards the bedroom.

  As he neared the bedroom door, he could hear the faint sound of a guitar bridge coming from the other side, and he smiled. It had been a long time since either of them had listened to this album.

  He reached the door and pushed it open.

  “Kat? I’ve got your—”

  He stopped. The sheets and blankets were off the bed, there were clothes all over the floor, and no sign of Kat could be found. Worst of all, perhaps, was the shattered window.

  She’d made a run for it.

  Idiot, he cursed himself, dropping the pastry and checking the window. She’d busted it out with a drawer and climbed through.

  He slapped his palm against the wall, then hurried out of the room, wondering how he could have been so stupid.

  A quick look out the front room’s window told him what he’d failed to notice on his way in: the truck was gone.

  He threw his shoes back on and grabbed the keys from beside the door, then pulled it open. Since his cell phone was cooked in the cabin fire, and he hadn’t made the time to replace it yet, he’d have to drive to the police station to file a missing persons report and then get the police looking for her.

  He pulled the door open and ran to the car; fear of what Kat might do made him practically fly over the lawn. The car engine coughed out its sleepiness and came to life, and he backed out of the driveway.

  Just as Alex was about to speed off to the police station, he stopped.

  His map was gone. The one he’d printed off for their second honeymoon.

  He didn’t need to go to the police—not yet. Not while he could still take care of this himself.

  And he could. He knew where she’d gone.

  She’d headed back to the cabin.

  6

  Kat crested another hill and began driving down towards its bottom, letting the farms pass by on either side. Ahead, another patch of forest rose up from the countryside, waiting to shade her and the truck. She’d stop there, she decided. Just for a minute.

  Grabbing the spare keys from outside the house hadn’t been a problem. Once she’d gotten through the window, her only real concern was finding her way back to the cabin and little town. She hadn’t been awake for most of the drive there or back, and the only other time she’d made the trip had been five years ago.

  Fortunately, Alex had solved that problem for her by leaving a print off of the cabin’s address and driving directions in the car’s cup holders. For the first time, she found herself grateful that they didn’t have reliable phone service, otherwise Alex would never have printed it off in the first place.

  “Kat, stop this. You’re making me angry. How can you be so selfish?!”

  She reached up and turned the radio off, again. It was coming back on more and more quickly now, but she couldn’t stand to just listen to him. The bitterness and anger in his voice frightened her.

  It didn’t last hardly at all. The radio clicked back on.

  “You took away our chances to be together in life, Kat. You owe it to us. Stop! Stop and get rid of him! It’s her turn, Kat!”

  She slammed her palm against the volume button, but it barely lasted a second.

  “Stop fighting this. You can’t get away. It’s our turn to be together now.”

  She resisted the urge to slam on the brakes, instead slowing the truck gradually and guiding it onto the shoulder. Enough was enough. No waiting for the trees. She’d deal with this now. The fear that had been plaguing her for so long was slowly turning to anger. Anger that he would do this to her. That he would try to do this to them.

  Kat turned the truck off and spun around in her seat, searching for something, anything, that would work, depending on Alex to keep his truck just dirty enough that....

  She found something suitable. A screwdriver.

  Even with the truck turned off, the voice managed to come through the radio, though much quieter now.

  “Do you know how miserable it was? Do you know what a mercy this is? At least you got to be together. At least you had some time to know one another!”

  She tried to stick the flat head screwdriver into the tiny Phillips screw, but it was too fat. By twisting it sideways, she could poke just the corner of it in—maybe it would get enough bite to spin it.

  “You can’t get rid of us,” the radio was saying. “She’s part of you. That means I’m part of you. Quit being so—”

  She spun the screwdriver, but only succeeded in stripping the screw.

  “He doesn’t love you, anyways. Don’t you know about the other girls? You’ve seen, haven’t you, how much he looks forward to his drives?”

  She eyed the radio, considering.

  “You know he has them out there. He can’t wait to get with them. They’re younger, thinner, trashy, and will—”

  She plunged the screwdriver into the radio’s face, then yanked it out and stabbed into it again, shoving it in down to the hilt. The fire man’s voice crackled and died, but she gave it another deep stab, just to be sure.

  She left the screwdriver sticking out of the radio’s face, then wiped a hand across her brow, restarted the engine, and kept driving.

  7

  Alex steered down the town’s main street just a bit over the speed limit, checking both sides of the road for the old pickup truck. He’d finished the drive a full forty-minutes faster than he had when Kat had been with him, and he would have counted it a small miracle that he hadn’t been pulled over once, if he’d stopped to think about it.

  But he didn’t stop to think about it. He hadn’t stopped to do anything.

  He pulled into a parking space at the end of the main street and killed the engine, frowning. He hated this place—not the town, so much. He had some good memories of the town. But this tiny witch’s hut felt repugnant to him, and he couldn’t fathom why Kat felt so differently. Yet, he knew that she did. And, just as surely, he knew that she’d come to Suzzane for help.

  Perhaps it was simply that she felt Suzzane understood her. Crazy minds think alike, or some such nonsense.

  He ground the gravel beneath his heels as he stepped down the alley. It was late morn
ing now. Anywhere else, there would be other people about. But in this town it seemed like it was just him.

  He pushed the door open, and realized it wasn’t just him.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t Kat, either. It wasn’t even Suzzane, for that matter. The tall, bearlike form of the old gardener stood inside Madame Suzzane’s Souvenir Shoppe, facing away from him. He didn’t respond to the sound of the door chime, but when a breeze sneaked in before the door shut and ruffled his thinning hair, the man turned.

  “Good mawning,” he said. “Can I help—”

  “I’m looking for my wife,” Alex cut in. “We’ve met before. We were staying at the cabin. You’re name’s Daryl, isn’t it?”

  “Doyle,” he said. Then he shook his head. “It’s a shame, ’bout that cabin. Been gard’ning for it for a long time, son. I—”

  “My wife,” Alex said. “Have you seen her? This is urgent. I thought that maybe she would have come here to see Suzzane.”

  Doyle nodded. “She did. You just missed ’em. I think they was going back to Suzzane’s place for something or other. Didn’t say for certain, I don’t think. But they says they wasn’t going to take too long. I was just coming back from the post, and Suzzane asked me if I’d watch the shop for a spell.”

  Alex gave a small shake of his head, trying to sort through Doyle’s thick folksy accent. Then he held up a hand and said, “They were going to Suzzane’s home?”

  “Think so,” Doyle said.

  “Do you know where it is?”

  Doyle snorted, as if offended. “Course I do.”

  “Could you take me there?”

  Doyle opened his mouth, but then stopped himself from saying anything, holding in his first response. Then worry lines formed across his face and he looked across the shop, as if checking for other customers or for the form of Suzzane to appear and offer advice. “Well,” he said, reaching up to scratch around his cochlear implant, “I did tell her I’d watch the place. But...” he shrugged, “I guess ain’t nobody likely to come in here while we step out for a few minutes, anyhow. C’mon, I’ll take you there.”

  Alex stepped outside, expecting Doyle to be immediately behind him, but Doyle didn’t come out for another minute. When he did emerge, he held a large key ring in his hands. “Couldn’t find the keys,” he explained as he inserted one of them into the deadbolt and twisted it into place. “Should we take your car or mine?”

  “We’ll take mine,” Alex said. “It’s right here.” And without waiting, he hurried out of the alley to his car.

  8

  “It’s just here, dear,” Suzzane said, pointing a crooked finger at a break in the foliage up ahead. Kat slowed the truck, then eased it off the gravel road and onto a dirt one that curved into the trees. After a single twist—just enough to get the gravel road out of sight—a little house came into view.

  Kat had half expected it to be a squat thing with mud walls and a thatched roof. It wasn’t exactly that, but it was rather squatty, with dark brick walls and a roof in need of repairs. Some vines clung to the home’s south-eastern corner, almost completely covering the window there. Out front sat a nicely-kept lawn and flower bed, with a garden spade still poking out of the earth.

  Kat cut out the engine and glanced over at Suzzane. Suzzane stared at her with her blind eye, then shook her head and clicked her tongue.

  “She doesn’t like this, you know,” Suzzane said.

  “He doesn’t like it, either,” Kat said as she opened the door. She moved around the truck and helped Suzzane down, then walked with her across the lawn.

  “How long ago did this start?”

  “A week?” Kat said, glancing behind them as Suzzane shuffled over the worn path through the yard.

  “And how has it changed in that time?”

  “Just dreams, at first,” Kat said. “Then, whenever I was tired. Then in anything electronic, I think.”

  Suzzane nodded pensively, as if this made some sense to her. “The aura in your shoulder—your twin sister—has grown much stronger since first we met. I suppose that they are giving one another strength, now that they’ve had opportunities to be together.”

  “So, the fire man, he and my twin....”

  They stopped at the front door, and Suzzane fixed Kat with her mismatched eyes. “Had she been born, they would have been like you and your Alex are: matched auras. Soulmates.” She turned to the door and unlocked it. “But, since your sister was never born, that poor man could never find her, though I suspect he came as close as he could have. Fate has a way of doing that.”

  She pushed the door open.

  It was as if he had been waiting for them to open the door. Lights throughout the house began to flash on and off, in the kitchen several appliances turned on, and every single speaker throughout the house began screaming out, shouting, “YOU CAN’T DO THIS! STOP! STOP! DON’T DO THIS TO US! PLEASE!”

  “Poor man,” Suzzane said, seeming almost completely unfazed. “We’d better not do this in the house. I’ll get some things, and then we can go into the woods. You just wait here.”

  She stepped inside without waiting for a response and shut the door behind her. The sounds of yelling were muffled slightly, but they did not go away. As Kat stepped away from the doorstep, she could hear the screams becoming more frantic, oscillating between desperate pleading and angry, curse-filled threats. She covered her ears and sat on a rock in the garden, waiting there beside the garden spade.

  She had to get rid of this, but now her mind began to consider what that would entail—surgery. They’d talked about it briefly back in Suzzane’s shop, but Kat hadn’t really been thinking about the process then. She certainly was considering it now. She was going to be sliced into, opened and carved. But if she waited? Waited for a real doctor? Someone with real painkillers...?

  The fire man’s yelling came through her cupped hands and bore into her ears. Real doctors would be surrounded by electronics. He’d interfere with all of them. It wouldn’t work. It had to be this way. Besides, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to wait a week for an appointment, anyway.

  Her stomach tightened, and despite the bright sun overhead, she began to feel cold. Maybe she was crazy, after all. This certainly seemed insane.

  She startled when a hand touched her shoulder a minute later. It was Suzzane, back remarkably quickly. Suzzane held up a bag, then nodded towards the woods.

  “I know a nice glen where we shouldn’t be disturbed. I’ll take you there.”

  Kat got to her feet and stood, her legs beginning to shake now. She walked beside Suzzane towards the woods and, after a few steps, offered to take the bag.

  “That’s alright, dear. You just focus on walking.”

  The yelling from the house got quieter for a second, blending with the sounds of the woods and then fading. The fire man, it seemed, had gone quiet before they’d finished crossing the yard.

  Suddenly his voice exploded from right between them. Both women jumped, and Kat grabbed her chest, but Suzzane just chuckled once she’d caught her breath.

  “My phone,” she said, her cackling voice barely loud enough to hear over the fire man’s frantic yelling. “I forgot it was in my pocket.”

  She took the phone from her pocket and tossed it gently onto the lawn.

  “Won’t be needing that until we get back,” she said. Then she walked into the woods with Kat, leaving the fire man to yell on the lawn at nothing but the trees and grass.

  9

  Alex’s heart jumped as a truck came into view through the thinning trees. As he pulled the car the rest of the way down the driveway, he became positive that it was his vehicle. They’d found them, then.

  He didn’t wait to thank Doyle. He barely took the time to turn off the car before practically leaping from his seat, running across the hard-packed dirt driveway and over the lawn to the front door. He knocked rather loudly, then tried the doorknob after a second’s wait.

  Locked.

  “Doyle,”
he said, “it’s locked up.”

  Doyle was still working on getting his large body out of the small car, but he stopped for a moment and said, “She keeps a spare key on top of the frame.”

  Alex ran a hand along the door frame and knocked the key down to the ground. It tinkled and bounced across the porch, stopping beside the mat. He stooped and retrieved it, then unlocked the door and replaced the key.

  The house was quiet and still, and immediately he felt that sense of lonesomeness that occurs when a person is alone inside a building. He checked the small house anyway, moving quickly from room to room, throwing open doors and even poking into closets, just in case. By the time he had reached the last room, he heard the front door open again.

  “Hello?” Doyle said. “Suzzane? You in?”

  “They’re not here,” Alex said, stepping around a pile of wicker baskets on his way back to the front door. “Does Suzzane have a car?”

  “Sure does, but I’m pretty sure it’s still at the shop in town. I saw it on our way out. I’m guessing that she rode here with your wife.”

  Alex stepped outside again. It was too dark inside the little house. He walked into the yard and ran a hand through his hair, thinking.

  Alex turned back to Doyle. “Hey, does she have a phone? A cell phone?”

  “She does. I’ll ring her right now.”

  He retrieved a blocky phone from his pocket, squinted at it for a minute as he navigated his contact list, then held it up to his ear.

  Almost immediately, they heard a jingle of sprightly music coming from across the lawn. Alex stepped toward it, and his heart sank as he saw Suzzane’s cellphone lying on the grass. He picked it up with his jaw clenched, looking out into the woods. When he turned back to Doyle, the man was itching at his cochlear implant and looking into the forest as well. He’d already put his phone away. His hand finally lowered from the implant and fell to his side.