A Better Life, page 13
Then pain, earth-shattering to begin with, had only grown more excruciating during his long, slow trek down the stretch of lost highway.
His right arm’s condition had worsened during his journey, too. The hand was now swollen to twice its size and the bruising there had darkened to near-black. Above it, blood swelled from the makeshift bandage he’d wrapped around the agonizing wound. The bone, ever resilient, poked the denim bandage, threatening to break through. Every time he moved, bone scraped bandage and agony reigned. His left hand, shorn of two fingernails, was kid’s stuff in comparison, though it still hurt like hell.
He’d picked up some new wounds along the way, too.
His knees, bare since he’d sliced up his jeans to stem the blood flowing from his arm, had been scraped bloody. Tattered skin hung from the seeping wounds, tearing further as he’d stumbled, crawled and fallen on his journey back to Jess.
And what happens when you get there? What then? Are you suddenly going to find the strength to fight Pete and defend your family? This isn’t a movie, Curt. You can’t just magic up the energy inspired by the power of love.
He’ll kill you. And he’ll have no trouble doing so.
Then he’ll kill them.
Lisa, the girl.
Jess.
You’re crawling back into a nightmare. Nothing waits for you there but death and misery and a pain far worse than you’re feeling now.
Fuck you, he told the voice in his head. I’m going.
Using his left hand, Curt pushed himself upright until he was on his knees. The lights from the house swayed in the distance, clear then fading, clear then fading.
Curt felt a fresh warmth kiss the flesh of his right arm as he moved. He looked down, almost too frightened to lay his eyes on it.
During his latest fall, the makeshift denim bandage had come loose. The huge gash beneath was spewing blood at an alarming rate. His arm was soaked. With his left hand he reached over and clasped the hanging bandage. Blood sluiced from between the folds, making his fingers slick.
Curt gritted his teeth, then he pressed down hard. He felt the bone prick the palm of his hand as he fought to tighten the bandage and stem the flow.
He had no more screams left inside him. He understood that should he pass out from the pain there’d be no waking up from it. Holding the ragged hole in one arm with the hand of the other, he used his legs to rise. Soon, he was on his feet, swaying like a tree in a sudden gust of wind, a feather on the breath of a god. He closed his eyes, allowed himself a moment to take in the cool night air.
“Move, Curt…move…” he told himself.
His body paid him no attention.
The darkness grew ever more inviting.
Then, Curt saw something.
Behind his closed eyelids, a dim light shone, moving closer, growing brighter even as darkness crept over his senses. He tried to open his eyes, but the strength had finally fled him.
A soft thrumming. The sound of a car engine. It drew closer and closer still, till it was right by his side.
He fell to his knees, finally acquiescing to the pain and the exhaustion.
That car. That engine. It sounded a lot like that old shits-mobile my sister drives. Curt grinned, as his ass fell onto the back of this feet and his torn and scraped knees were bit by stones.
“Lisa…” he muttered.
A voice he knew and loved better than the sound of his own heartbeat answered back.
“Not quite, baby. Not quite.”
32
No sooner had the door swung shut and Jess had left, the girl let go of Lisa’s hand. Lisa stared down at the child, her mind a confusion of fear, awe and a deep-seated maternal instinct to protect this strange, dangerous girl with her very last breath.
“Are you going to be okay, honey?” she asked Emily. She was unsure how to address the child and felt ridiculous even referring to her as such, but what else could she call her?
Emily’s emerald eyes shone from behind her raven-black hair, seeming to emit an energy and strength that made Lisa’s protective, nurturing instinct feel farcical.
“I’m fine,” the child said. “He was never going to hurt me. He wanted to, but he mistook me for something else.”
Lisa gulped hard. “What did…what did you do to him?”
Emily’s eyes burned with dark intelligence. “I sent him to where he belongs.”
Lisa had seen the spiders. So many of them. An impossible thing. And no less impossible than an endless army of spiders had been what happened to the ones that had remained when Pete had fled from the kitchen. They’d vaporized. She’d watched it happen. Wherever the disgusting creatures had come from, they’d found their way back.
“And…where is it he belongs?” she asked.
“In the forever place, where time is a lie.”
Something deep and primal stirred in Lisa; an age old, instinctual dread that made the fear of mortality pale in comparison. It clung to her soul as the girl’s luminescent eyes bored into her own.
“You sent him there?”
“I did.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you do that to anyone?”
“I can.”
“Good or bad?”
“No one is all good or all bad. Everyone is everything. Everyone is both. Everyone is everything in between.”
Lisa dreaded asking her next question of the girl sat before her. The child looked tiny, frail, beautiful, but within her bristled a terrible force that was almost palpable.
“What are you?”
Emily giggled. “Jessica asked me that, too. I told her I didn’t know.”
“And do you know?”
“I lied. At least, I lied a little. I’m a mirror. That’s how I think of myself sometimes.”
“As a mirror?”
“I reflect the things I see inside of people. I bring people to the truth about themselves.” The girl sat stock-still. She never blinked as she spoke. Lisa found herself immersed in the child’s gaze, lost in those ever-shimmering eyes.
“I don’t like lying,” Emily said. “It makes me feel bad, especially when I lie to people I like. I like Jess a lot. She’s kind.”
Lisa allowed herself to smile.
“I know what you mean,” she agreed.
“I know you do,” replied Emily. “I know you hate yourself for lying as much as you do.”
Lisa froze. A sinking feeling churned in her gut.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
Emily’s bright green eyes brimmed with sadness. “You lie a lot…”
Lisa took a step back, unknowingly distancing herself from Emily. “I never lie to anyone. Not ever.” And it was true.
Emily shook her head. Her long hair swayed like dark curtains, concealing her pale, white face. “Not to others, you don’t. You lie to yourself.”
“What?”
“You lie to yourself.”
“To myself?”
“All the time. You’ve been doing it for years.”
“If…if it’s true that you can see the truth of me, then you know that’s not true, Emily.”
“But it is true, Lisa. You’ve been lying to yourself so long, you don’t even know you’re doing it.” Emily shuffled lightly from the kitchen chair. Her round, full-moon eyes narrowing to slits. Her face flushed, her cheeks, rose-red.
“I lied to you, too” Emily said.
Lisa felt weak at the knees. It was difficult to catch a breath. She blinked sweat from her eyes as it streamed down her forehead.
“You…you lied to me? Just now?” Lisa asked, her fear intensifying with each passing second the child’s determined, pained eyes bored into her own.
Emily nodded slowly, taking another step towards the trembling, terrified Lisa. “I told you I wouldn’t hurt you…that was a lie,” the girl whispered.
Lisa was crying, now.
All around Lisa, the walls seemed to bend, twist and rearrange themselves. The glow dimmed from the overhead light, the faded paint on the kitchen walls peeled away, breaking apart and falling to the floor like autumn leaves, silent and almost serene. A suffocating darkness crept across the corners of the room, snuffing out the moonlight, strangling the air she breathed.
Emily’s face was a portrait of regret. “Some lies are too big to ever take back…”
33
“Jess, we have to get back. Right now! It was Pete. It was all Pete. He’s probably back at the farmhouse already. With Emily. With Lisa!”
Jess held his face. The drying blood that caked his visage like war paint cracked and crumbled beneath her tender touch. “Curt, I need you to calm down, okay? I need you to focus on me. Only on me. Can you do that?”
Curt forced a weary smile. It looked to Jess as he turned his head to her, like it might roll right off his neck and drop onto his lap.
He looked half-dead.
He was half-dead.
But only half.
Only half, Jess.
He’s still here.
With you.
“Lisa’s safe, Curt. So is the girl.”
“But Pete…”
“You don’t have to worry about Pete. Trust me.”
Curt frowned, unbelieving. “Are you sure?”
“I’ll tell you everything, honey, I promise, but right now, you’re bleeding like a stuck pig and we have to tend to your wounds. This first, then I’ll spill it. Deal?”
“Deal.”
She wiped a tear from her eye with one hand as she popped the clip on the first-aid kit with the other. “You look like you’ve gone ten rounds with a tiger.”
“I could take a tiger. It’s just a big cat.”
“A grizzly, then. Now shut up and let me prep this thing. We have to get you patched up right now, okay?”
“You’re breaking my heart. Here I was, thinking I looked like a dashing prince, valiantly returning to save his bride.”
His feeble attempt at humor stabbed her heart. After all he’d endured, there was still time for charm. He still sought fuel from making her smile.
And smile she did, for his sake.
Inside, she was screaming. He was soaked in blood.
Jess struggled to keep the panic from her voice.
“No time for vanity right now, handsome. You look like chewed hamburger. You don’t smell too delicious either.”
“I think I pissed myself when the van turned over.”
“Lot of that going around tonight,” Jess muttered.
“Huh?”
“Let’s just say I’m not in any position to judge, babe. Now, just lay your head back and let me get to work.”
“I’m still pretty…” he said to himself.
Jess smiled. “Yes, big guy…you’re still the belle of the ball.”
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Not even close, now shut the hell up and let me work, for Christ’s sake.”
She reached into the small white box and searched for the bandages. There was little she could do in the moment besides stem the alarming expulsion of blood that flowed in a steady stream from his mangled arm. The wound was horrible; a bruised, bloodied mess of bone and glistening muscle. Jess swallowed hard as she surveyed the damage.
She pulled free a thick rope of bandage, speaking gently as she did so. “I need you to lift up your arm for me. And baby…it’s going to sting a little.”
Curt raised one blood-caked eyebrow. “You know how I hate spoilers, Jess…”
“Save the sarcasm,” she said, working to unwind the thick cotton bandage. He sounded perilously close to losing consciousness, as though his words drifted from the far end of a long corridor. His face was growing more ashen by the second, taking on a sickly, death-like pallor.
There was no time for jokes.
No time at all.
“Babe…I need to do this now.”
Without another word, Curt brought his good arm from its resting place on his blood-slick leg. Trembling, he slid his good hand, palm up, underneath the wound. He groaned in dull agony as he cradled the shattered arm in his palm. Jess, knowing he’d only be able to manage a few seconds of the pain to come, held the bandage close to the wound, ready to slide it beneath his arm then over it, the moment he lifted.
“This is going to suck,” Curt moaned.
“You’d better believe it,” she agreed. “Now lift your arm, big man. Let’s get this done. You ready?”
“Not even close.”
“Good…then let’s make music.”
“Fuck my life,” he whispered, more to himself than to her.
Jess smiled gently. “I know…fuck mine, too”
Curt slowly lifted his arm. Jess had expected screams, but instead he uttered a deep, low moan that somehow sounded worse than any scream could.
“Shhhh, baby…just close your eyes. You’re doing great. Hold it a little higher for me.”
Curt did as she asked.
She tried to ignore the sickening way his forearm drooped lifelessly as he lifted, dangling unnaturally as gravity did its cruel work.
Jess took a quick, sharp breath.
I wish you were here, Lisa…
“I love you, husband,” she whispered.
He was past responding.
Jess wrapped the bandage tight.
She’d been wrong about Curt’s agonized moans.
The screams were worse.
Much worse.
34
“I didn’t want to do this,” Emily said, tired and sad.
Lisa heard herself whimper, her eyes darting from one terror to the next as she desperately tried to make sense of the shifting, malleable world in which she found herself. Deep inside her reeling and already fractured mind, Lisa wondered how she’d ended up here, on her knees on the kitchen floor.
Not that it was a kitchen anymore.
Nor a kitchen floor.
Beneath her, incredibly, there was now a carpet, soft to the touch.
“Please make it stop,” she pleaded to the girl as all around the room dissolved, blurred from sight, pulsated and fluctuated. The world she inhabited becoming no more than a mirage.
The girl, though…the girl remained solid, untouched by the shifting reality, horrifyingly present. Looking at her, Lisa tried to tether herself to the sane world where walls didn’t melt, where floors didn’t grow carpets and where little girls played with dolls instead of souls.
Emily’s eyes shone with a dark intellect, a psychic predator looming over the delicate spoils of a warring, twisting mind, sympathetic of her prey’s plight, yet unwilling to subdue her terrible intent.
“I didn’t do anything to you!” Lisa cried.
“I never said you did. It’s what you didn’t do…”
“I…I don’t understand.”
The small girl looked at her with something like pity. Her emerald eyes cut holes into Lisa’s soul while the room that had been the kitchen continued to contort, shift and breathe. The darkness that had eaten the room seemed to be lifting, replaced by an icy blue light like that of the moon on a clear Mojave midnight. There was something artificial in the hollow glow. It flickered as though it fed on electricity.
Lisa shuddered as the icy radiance lit the girl in silhouette. The child, or whatever she was, stood still as stone, while reality, as Lisa had always known it, bent to the child’s terrible will, wiping away the last remnants of the farmhouse, the kitchen and the sane, safe, understandable world.
“Do you ever feel alone?” the girl asked her with a disarming innocence.
Lisa, unsure of the correct response, said nothing. The eerie blue glow, that seemed to battle with the shadows, dressed the girl in a ghostly light.
“Billy felt alone, too.”
Billy…
What had Billy got to do with…
“You’re scared of what’s coming, aren’t you?” Emily asked.
Lisa thought of the spiders. Millions of hungry, crawling things. “Please…don’t let the monsters come.”
“Monsters?” Emily repeated to herself. “Oh, you mean the things that took Pete. They’re not coming.”
“Thank you…thank you…I…”
“But there are other monsters. All sorts of other monsters. There are even monsters in our world, Lisa,” Emily said. “Monsters that wear human skin. Some of them are easy to see. They wear their corruption with pride. They delight in it. They’re the ones who steal children from the schoolyard, who rape and murder in the shadows, who leave ruined bodies in muddy fields like trash.
“And then there are the other monsters. The ones who don’t know they’re monsters. The ones who should know better, who do know better. They cover their eyes to the evil they see. They will themselves deaf to the screams they hear, just so they can sleep easier at night, just so their lives are a little less painful. They allow the terrible things to happen. They see it, they know it, yet in their weakness, they shrivel beneath their cowardice and they do nothing.”
The girl’s eyes burned with a muted, sad fury as she spoke. Lisa, on her knees, felt tiny before the child, like a bug underfoot, set to be squashed.
“Sometimes, I think those monsters are even worse than the ones who revel in their foulness. The monsters like Pete…their souls are already forfeit. But those who allow them to wallow in their filth, when they could do something about it and don’t…sometimes I think those are the worst kind.”
Lisa was crying now. She wanted to beg, to plead, to appeal to the girl’s sense of morality, but she was unable to speak. Terror climbed down her throat and nestled there, choking her, stealing her breath away. In the dimming light, she could just about make out the details on what had once been the kitchen walls. It looked like…
The light flickered. Darkness and light. Darkness and light. Darkness and light. Faster and faster until…
All went dark.
Sobbing in terror, Lisa found herself alone, in a perfect blackness that seemed to press in on her with evil intent.
Then the room, as sudden as it had been plunged into darkness, was cast in light.
Instead of cold, crumbling yellow paint, the walls were now covered in fresh, clean wallpaper. The new decor featured stars and planets of all shapes and sizes.
