A Better Life, page 17
Jess tried not to think of Curt or where he was and would remain. He’d been right to try to rid the world of the child, however unthinkable. He’d been right.
It was better this way, with Emily gone and the world free of whatever she was set to become as she grew into adulthood.
Better.
Licking a tear from her parched, busted lip, Jess sat on the bed, beside the girl.
She raised the knife to her throat.
It felt cold there, against her skin. She swallowed hard and felt the knife’s edge rise and fall upon her flesh. She wondered if it would hurt and found she didn’t really care. It would be quick. It would be final. She gulped hard, feeling the blade catch upon skin.
Silently, Jess began to countdown from three.
Three…
She closed her eyes.
Two…
She gripped the knife’s handle tight.
One…
From behind her, a small, unmistakable voice.
Though weak and distant, the venom in Emily’s words froze Jess’ heart.
“I thought you were good, Jessica. But you’re bad,” Emily snarled, all sulk and rage.
Oh Jesus, no!
The knife dropped from her hands as fright seized her.
No!
She’d been sure the girl was gone. Dead. She was sure of it. She’d checked for a pulse. She’d watched Emily’s pupils dilate as the life fled her tiny body and her vision spun towards eternity. She’d felt the girl’s flesh go cold.
She couldn’t be alive!
Jess had no time to speak, no time to contemplate her mistake.
From under the bed came a high-pitched cry, terrible and pleading, pathetic, traumatized.
The cries of an infant.
Jess would recognize the owner of those cries anywhere, though a single sound had never passed those cold dead lips.
It was her baby. Her long-dead daughter.
Gripped in the maws of shrieking terror, Jess lunged forward for the knife. It lay before her on the carpet. If she could get it in time! If she could just end it…slice her own throat open and escape the child’s wrath.
There was no outrunning eternity.
Jess gripped the knife. Her dead child’s cold, tiny hand gripped her wrist, horrifyingly strong.
The infantile weeping changed.
It grew cold.
Devoid of inflection.
Dead.
Maleficent.
Infinitely evil.
The whole horror lasted no more than two seconds, three at most.
The tiny hand twisted. Jess heard the crackling of bone as her wrist bent backwards. Blood spewed from the mangled veins as her skin ripped and her bones ground together, then snapped. Instinctually moving into the path of least resistance, Jess fell to her knees on the carpet. The baby’s hand receded into the darkness beneath the bed.
The knife!
Still time.
Laughter poured from the shadows.
This time, the horror beneath the bed used both hands.
It grabbed Jess by her ankles, and pulled.
Jess was dragged, screaming and wailing, into the darkness, where a tiny form, abominable and cruel, waited for her, its un-beating heart filled with cold, cold love.
43
She awoke on her back under the harsh, cold glare of a blinding light. Electricity hummed like a summer’s honeybee while her vision swung like a pendulum from clarity to distortion.
Where was she?
She remembered screaming.
She remembered horror, and bloodshed, and terror, black as death’s suffocating shadow.
And she remembered one little girl with eyes that shone green like sunlight through summer leaves, and a smile that brimmed with intellect and lit her eyes with cheer.
Squinting her eyes against the cold light that shone above her, Jess began to scrutinize her surroundings.
Besides the overhead light, the rest of the room was eaten up by a thick blackness, and though she couldn’t see anything beyond the light’s radiance, she sensed things moving amidst the gloom beyond, like hungry wolves regarding a campfire, camouflaged by the night. Looking down at her body, Jess saw she was lain on some sort of hospital bed. Her legs were parted, her knees brought up towards her waist, the legs held in place by thick white harnesses.
She realized with a dawning horror that her arms, too, were bound and held tightly in place. They lay flat, palms down on the cold white, sweat-sodden sheet.
In her mind she saw a knife.
She’d been going to use it, hadn’t she…the knife?
On who?
On herself.
Why?
The girl.
Something to do with the girl…
In the splinter of a moment, it all hit.
The girl. Her dark gift. Her power over…
Death.
No!
Please Jesus. Please God. If anyone is out there, please take me home, away from here, I beg you.
Her senses were returning now, and in the hollow glow of the strange dark place in which she found herself, she began to comprehend.
She was on an operating table.
From somewhere before her, where the unseen shadows moved within shadows, Jess heard a soft cry. She peered between her legs into the darkness as fear rose in her soul like a black wraith.
Something was coming.
It moved slow, and its low position on the floor made it impossible to see its approach.
But she could hear it.
Not only its soft, lilting cries, but the shuffling of tiny hands and knees on a cold, hospital floor.
Please, Jesus, take me away from this place. Please. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything. Pleeeeease!
The shadows around the operating table grew restless, excitable. Through the murk, with eyes adjusting, Jess could make out the frocks and masks of surgeons, their garments grey and filthy, caked in black blood, stained with infection.
“Help meeee!” she wailed into the void that surrounded her, pungent with death.
One of the infernal doctors stepped from the shadows. He, if it was a man, loomed tall over her. Behind the filthy mask, she could see no eyes. The smell of feces poured from the surgeon in stomach-churning waves. It moved around the table till it was stood before her bare, and parted, legs.
Then, silently, it bent towards the floor.
When the hellish surgeon stood up straight again, Jess’ knew her prayers were all in vain.
Held in its bloodied surgical gloves was her daughter. Stillborn, dead yet alive, already rotting, her skin a thin grey covering, stretched over tiny, brittle bones. The baby’s eyes were gone. In their place…black pits, deep as the deepest well, and in them Jess saw forever.
The surgeon laid the dead child on the table between Jess’ sweating, trembling, wide-open legs, and the dead child began to crawl.
It crawled towards the soft, warm center between Jess’ legs, then disappeared from sight.
Jess felt small hands probe the tender, sensitive lips of her vagina, prying them open, then delving deeper, growing more frantic as it explored the soft meat inside the welcoming orifice.
Then came the agony, the blood, the ripping and the tearing.
Jess begged for death, while her dead daughter slowly worked her way back inside, first one arm, then the other, then her tiny head, lubricated by the blood pouring from Jess’ torn and mangled vagina. Jess stared in horror as her stomach distended, growing larger and more pregnant by the second as the baby clawed its way back inside her body, returning to the safe, warm place from which it had once entered the world of the living. It settled, content, inside its rightful home. Back within the tomb of its mother’s worthless womb.
Jess shrieked one last prayer for salvation.
The black void swallowed her prayer whole.
EPILOGUE
Emily sat on the porch chair, rocking slowly as she watched the rising sun. It peeked over the distant mountain range, heralding a day that promised clear blue skies, far as the eye could see. It was beautiful here, and despite all that had happened she felt a quiet peace swell within her. In the distance a titmouse sang a song for the Mojave morning. Emily closed her eyes, listening intently to the lonesome melody.
Wincing, she idly fingered the wound in her belly where Jess had slid the knife into her. It hurt a lot, but the wound had almost stopped bleeding now that she’d stuffed cotton into the gash and bandaged the wound.
She’d found the first-aid kit as though by luck, tripping over it as she’d stumbled from her supposed death-bed and into the kitchen, making for the door. Emily had acted as her instincts demanded. She seen enough movies to understand the basics. She almost giggled, realizing that it was her parent’s neglect that had forced her to retreat into the world of movies, and it was the movies that may well have saved her life.
Everything came around in the end.
The white bandage was stained dark red and the red was slowly spreading, but if she got help…
She was feeling almost strong enough to move.
One hour had passed since Jess had betrayed her. One long hour, in which she’d sat on the porch chair, and cried all the bitter tears she had left to cry. She’d never once thought to look under the bed where Jess’ remains rested. She had no desire to see the state of the kind woman’s corpse. It would only inspire sorrow. Despite what Jess had done, Emily missed her. She missed her smile. She missed her touch. She missed the way Jess would comfort her, even knowing what she knew of Emily’s gift.
And what was her gift? She had no idea. It seemed no one did. Her mother and father, though she rued to call them such, were every bit as fearful as Jess and her companions had been.
Every bit as suspicious.
Every bit as disappointing.
She vowed that she’d never go back there to that cold, loveless home, decorated in the finest furnishings, admired by all who visited, yet in truth as cold and desolate as a tomb.
No, she’d leave them to their riches and their fear. She felt no bitterness towards them, no pain. The time for that had long since passed.
She mourned Jess, though.
Just the thought of the kind woman made her want to cry her heart out anew.
She focused on the shifting sands beyond the porch, hoping to dispel the image of Jess that haunted her so. In the last twenty-four hours, she’d learned that to trust implicitly, even if the person seemed wonderful, was never going to be an option. Her guard, from this day on, would have to remain up.
But it wasn’t all bad.
In the time she’d spent in the beautiful old house she’d learned that she herself was capable of something that she’d never imagined…
She was capable of hope.
Jessica had proven to be a failure as a mommy, it was true, but until their meeting, Emily had simply accepted her lot in life – to live a life bereft of love. She’d acquiesced to existing in a world of comic books and video games, movies and flights of fancy within her own mind, prepared only to ever view the world through a prism of her own imagination. With Jess, she’d found someone special. Someone that – had events transpired differently, she had no doubt - would have loved her with as much devotion as she would have loved her own child.
The circumstances had been wrong, that was all. Jess had suffered too many losses in too short a time. It had driven her to madness.
She wiped away her tears and closed her eyes.
A cool breeze picked up, whipping the Junipers into a gentle dance. They swayed on the morning air, and on hearing their leaves rustle in the wind, Emily was soothed. Even the deep pain in her belly seemed far off.
She wondered where she’d go from here. She was alone, she was hungry, she was tired, and she was hurt, but her spirits soared. It was a big world out there with a whole lot of people in it – some kind, some not so kind – and if her time with Jess had taught her anything, it was that she yearned to be loved, to find her proper place in the world, with a mom and a dad and maybe a little puppy she could call her own.
Whatever else was to become of her, as her powers grew and her understanding of herself deepened, for now she was a kid, and a kid needed a family.
Next time, she’d make sure she chose more wisely. And her gift? She’d keep it hidden away.
The morning was growing hotter now, and sad though it made her, Emily knew it was time to go. No one was coming down this old lonely road any time soon. If she wanted to find help she’d need to do the looking for herself.
She rose from the old swing-chair and made for the stairs. She’d lost her footwear during the kidnapping, besides her socks, and her kidnappers hadn’t supplied her with shoes or sneakers, so she’d have to walk carefully.
Every few steps she’d turn and look at the house, wishing things had been different, allowing the pain to enforce her will, strengthen her determination.
After thirty minutes or so, the house faded from sight. No more than a memory, both bitter and sweet.
It took an hour to walk from the old house to the place where the dirt road joined the main highway. By the time she’d arrived, the bandage around her wound was sodden, and her feet bled from a hundred cuts. She paid none of the wounds any mind.
They’d heal just fine.
She had faith in her destiny.
Exhausted, she hoisted herself up onto an old wooden post, glad to have her raw, torn-up feet off the ground, happy to rest her little legs after walking so far. She watched the dust dance on the hot concrete of the highway. It made her think of old cowboy movies she’d watch alone in her room back home. The sort of movies where the heroes were always pure, and the women always proud. Where they looked after their children and sometimes died to protect them.
Emily smiled at the thought.
Out here where the dust and sand seemed endless, dreaming came easy.
She’d sit, and she’d wait, and eventually…
Eventually someone would come her way.
Someone good.
Hours passed. One then another, then another, until the burning sun hung high in the sky. And Emily, her faith in her future made whole, waited patiently. She grew weaker as the sun crossed the sky, but she was never afraid. Help would come.
Her patience, and her faith, paid off.
When, after so long and wearisome a wait, she heard the distant rumbling of a car engine and turned to see the tiny metal object glinting in the sun, shimmering like a mirage, Emily laughed aloud. It hurt, but it was worth it.
Perhaps the car was owned by a family, driven by a loving father. Perhaps they were on their way to a holiday destination. Perhaps they were young lovers, keen to build a home, build a family…
The possibilities seemed as endless as the Mojave itself.
She’d behave as best she could. She’d do as she was asked. She’d keep her secret all to herself, and if they resisted or turned out to be bad people…
Emily had a solution for that, too.
Hopping from the worn wooden fence-post, she limped to the side of the road. She glanced back only once, not seeing it, but knowing the house was out there. The house where she’d learned to dream of a better life. The house that now stood in silence. The house that was no longer a house, but a tomb sheltering the body of her poor, lost friend.
“Bye, bye Jess,” she whispered.
On the warm desert wind, she imagined she heard screaming.
Emily turned to the highway.
And raised her thumb.
THE END
Afterword
Thanks for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed the story.
I know I had a lot of fun during my time spent with sweet little Emily, getting to know her, suffering with her, fearing her, and in the end, hoping for a better life for this strange, wise girl. I came to see her as both my protagonist and antagonist, and I wanted to allow you guys to view her in whatever manner suits your perception.
Whether villain or foe in your mind, I hope you found Emily to be a fun and fascinating character. I often feel that when too much is given away by the author, a story can lose the ferocity of its bite, or at least its sense of mystery, of the uncanny. For me, she’s a mirror in many ways. She reflects many of my own fears growing up, and many of my hopes, too. I like her a lot, and would love to spend more time with her. Whether I do or not, only time will tell. I can envision all sorts of fates for her, but a part of me just wants to leave her as is - by the roadside with her thumb held high, eight-years old, and with her future and her purpose left as an open book.
Maybe it’s best that way. Not everything need be explained, and not all stories need to be told.
We’ll see.
For now, I got what I need from Emily and she took what she needed from me. What she’ll take from the poor people in that car, who knows.
I dread to think…
Let’s hope they’re good people. Good enough to stay on her sweet side.
Thanks for reading, guys.
I hope to see you for the next one.
Your pal,
Kyle
Other works by the author:
Anthologies
Consumed Volume 1
Consumed Volume 2
Novels
Devil’s Day
Aftertaste
Where the Dead Ones Play
The Club
Razorblade Candies
(Novellas)
Love Lies Dead
VHS
The Wild
Tradition
Contact Kyle at –
authorkylemscott@outlook.com
Kyle M Scott, A Better Life
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