Piercing the Darkness: A Charity Horror Anthology for the Children's Literacy Initiative Page 26

  Ruthie nodded toward the headstone where she’d left her bouquet, then pointed a shaky finger at his grandfather’s grave. “The Reverend Robert M. Dockholm might as well have loaded the shotgun, put it to Jenny’s head and pulled the trigger. As far as I’m concerned, he murdered that girl. Bob deserved to be broken like he broke Jenny, deserved a load of buckshot right between his sanctimonious eyes, but instead he got thirty more years of respect as the pillar of the community, thirty years of ill-gotten wealth by spiritually blackmailing all the sick old folks in the county into signing their worldly possessions over to his church. Jenny’s cousin at least had the decency to pick a fight in a biker bar and get his head caved in with a tire iron the year after he assaulted her, but that Bible-waving sack of shit over there got to enjoy a nice life and a nice quiet death. And so tonight he got me paying my respects the best way I know how.”

  Miz Ruthie stood up and put her fists on her hips, glaring down at Andrew. “There’s a whole lot more you need to know about this fine little town and the people who live in it, but it’s up to you whether you want to open your eyes and get a clue about the world, the real world, and get out of that nice warm pile of small-town bullshit you've been wallowing in. And here’s clue number one: God isn't your personal hit man. I learned that a long time ago, because believe me, I prayed for Him to take out your grandfather. You pray for anyone else’s death ever again, boy, you best be prepared for your own.”

  She inhaled like a diver preparing for a plunge. “So. You’ve got two choices here. Your first choice is to close your eyes and start praying again, pretending I’m not really here, and I’ll call a cab to take me to the airport and call the VFD to come get this tree off you. You’ll never have to hear from me again. Your second choice is you take my hand, I’ll get the tree off you, and I’ll get dressed and we’ll go down the road to the Steak and Shake. I’ll buy you a malt and tell you all about the skeletons in the family closet.

  “So what’s it gonna be, Andrew?”

  The boy stared up at her, took his own deep breath, and held out his hand.

  — | — | —

  LETTING GO

  MARY SANGIOVANNI

  They blurred sometimes so Hank Swanson couldn’t see them. They rushed by his ear and made angry sounds that he could no longer attribute to the wind shouldering through the cracks in the house. They were getting stronger. The day before, they moved the toaster three whole feet across the counter. And he suspected that one had learned how to break light bulbs. He’d found two already that week in egg-shell shatters on the floor in the front hallway. They were angry. Maybe getting dangerous.

  There were four of them in the house, although they rarely all convened together. Sometimes they were lured by the sound of Law & Order from the television set. Quite often, he caught them from the corner of his eye while reading the newspaper. Mostly, though, he felt them late at night, when he was alone with his thoughts. They stood behind him, surrounding his easy chair, charging the air with heat and cold and tension and thin noise. They had never tried to hurt him physically.

  He suspected that was going to change, though, now that they could act on things in the house.

  These certain memories haunted him—powerful ones. Ones he couldn’t let go. But he’d discovered that when one held onto such things long enough and hard enough, they took on lives of their own, lives of discontent and disapproval. They were stuck there with him, unable to rest in the dust of the past and the graves of resolution. And they hated him for it.

  He stood in the first floor bathroom, studying a worn and tired face. Thin lines fanned from the corners of blue eyes that had seen too much. Set grooves around his mouth spoke not of years of smiles, but of grimaces and bared teeth. That scar above his left eyebrow remained from when, in a flurry of fear, Linda had scratched at his face.

  Hank had done so much he wished he could take back. The lusterless gray of his hair reminded him of the overcast sky on the day Linda left. The DUTY HONOR FIDELITY tattoo on his right bicep was the same dark color as that little Vietnamese girl's eyes…

  Upstairs in his bedroom, Abuse howled like a battered woman. Like Hank’s wife had. Like his mother had, all those years ago. It was, perhaps, the most volatile of all the memories. Its explosive temper mirrored what his own had once been. He remembered that, every time Abuse threw an angry tantrum.

  He flinched when he heard a wooden crash upstairs, heavy, like his dresser had been knocked over. He turned away from the mirror to find Nam standing behind him.

  It grinned. Its sweat-slick tanned body rippled with muscle as it stepped casually out of the way. Hank brushed past, and felt steamy jungle heat from its skin. Hank believed that the memories’ physicality was an effect of what Linda might have called personification. She was an English teacher, and although he’d paid little attention to English, it seemed to fit, that word personification. He’d suspected even then that the memories could take shape from the blurs of light and shadow they used to be. They seemed now more physical than ever. Now, they had faces. Patchwork pieces of faces from recollections in his head.

  Nam’s eyes were like that little girl’s. Its arms were like the Viet Cong he’d clipped in the back of the head. Its laughter was like the old woman’s before he’d burst her throat open. He didn’t acknowledge the memory, but it followed him into the kitchen. He felt its eyes on him as he made a sandwich at the counter.

  It spoke to him in Vietnamese. “We have come to a realization. A consensus.”

  He answered in English without turning around. “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  Its reply, also in English, came halted and awkward. “If we kill you, you will then must let us go.”

  “How so?”

  “No one take memory with him when he die.”

  Hank stopped, turning slowly, the mayonnaise knife in his hand. “That would only be true if consciousness ended with death. How can you be sure that will happen?”

  “Because you believe it.”

  “What if I’m wrong?” He turned back to the sandwich. “Then you’d be stuck with me for eternity.”

  “Not necessarily so, Hank.” A third voice frosted the air between them.

  Hank paused, mid-bite. Death in the Family was, by far, the most cool and collected. It scared him more than the others. He put the sandwich down and turned around. The memory—a first from his childhood—sat at the kitchen table. It wore a neat cream sweater which made the pale bluish boy-features of its face and hands more prominent. Its colorless lips pressed together. The black hair, rumpled like a child’s, recalled the windsweep of racing Schwinns and the sweaty hairlines of baseball and tag in mid-summer. It sat otherwise reserved, Sunday-best neat, its lean, pre-teenaged limbs poised. After a moment, it unfolded its hands and dusted an errant piece of fuzz from its sweater. “Really, Hank, give us some credit for a degree of forethought.”

  It looked up, and its pupiless white eyes managed the semblance of focus on him. He felt cold down his back. “Let's say you take with you into the afterlife whatever you remember of this one. Then it simply becomes a matter of eradicating the part of your physical brain which harbors memories. Now, we’ve mastered physical contact. It’s a matter of time before we master force.”

  It paused to let him soak up this information. Hank wasn’t sure that Death in the Family spoke the whole truth. There seemed to Hank to be a huge leap between wiggling light bulbs out of their sockets to crash on the floor, and wielding a baseball bat to brain him in his sleep.

  Death in the Family continued. “You hardly seem as hung up on the good memories as you are on us, so we believe the cost to be relatively low. I see from your expression that you don’t buy that. Consider for a moment if the Judeo-Christian concept of Heaven and Hell exists. Your soul—your energy—either seeks God and God alone, and leaves memories behind, or is sent to Hell for eternal torment, where memories will be the least of your concern. Or, for the sake of argument, let’s say it turns out t
hat the soul is home for the memories that construct your sense of self. Then the afterlife is buoyed by memories. If we simply disconnect you from us, you’ll go to the sweet peaceful oblivion you wanted anyway. No judgment, no reconnection with your angry dead. No hell.” It winked at him. “And we’ll be put to rest. There is no one else to keep us here. No one who cares enough to keep your memories alive. You’re alone.”

  Hank snorted. “Alone.”

  Death in the Family gave him a wide, crocodile smile. “Alone with us.”

  “There are holes in your theory. What if my version of hell is being forced to relive each and every one of you every day for the rest of time? Or what if I’m left a ghost in the afterlife, to haunt the earth where all my memories of violence and pain keep me chained?”

  Leaning in the doorway, gleaming with sweat in the kitchen light, Nam cast an uncertain glance in Death in the Family’s direction, but the other memory seemed unperturbed.

  “Hell, Hank—any true form of hell, I’d say—would be more than that, by its very nature. In either scenario, you’re describing your life exactly as you live it now, on Earth, day to day remembering us, day to day chained to this house. Hell, by its connotations, would constitute more than the mere mechanisms of your daily life.”

  “You’re guessing. But you don’t know for sure.”

  The memory shifted in the chair, folding its hands on the table again. “Hank, really, it doesn’t matter. Crushing your skull would give us some satisfaction at least, even if nothing else were to change. And the potential risk is worth it to us, since the possibility that it will work in our favor seems higher than it working in yours.”

  “No single one of you can do it, anyway. You can’t kill me.”

  Death in the Family regarded him with a cool stare, eye to glassy eye. “That’s not true, generally speaking. Single memories drive the life out of people all the time. What about your Linda’s Death of a Child? The one you beat out of her. Remember that one?”

  Hank felt anger rise in waves of heat beneath his arms and around his neck. “That was an accident.” He cringed at how much he sounded like his dad, when his little brother Robbie had died. An accident, his father claimed.

  The memory seemed to read his thoughts. “Seems to be a popular refrain among the males in your family.” After a pause, it added, “Ask Abuse if that’s true, that it was an accident. See what she says.”

  “Screw you.”

  Death in the Family gave him a patient smile. “All of this conversation is of no real relevance. All of us together can do this. All of us together can overwhelm you.”

  “Why are you telling me all this? Giving me a running head start, are you?”

  “Common courtesy. You created us, after all. It changes nothing, though, for you to know. You’ve proved that there is nowhere you can go that we can’t find you. And face it, Hank—you’ve stopped running."

  ««—»»

  The night passed with little more than thumping in the upstairs hallway—they were practicing, evidently, but hadn’t quite worked up to smashing his skull in yet. They made their presence known, though. They wanted him to be afraid, to maybe force some soul-searching that might let them go.

  Wasn’t going to happen. Those bastards were his to hold onto, his to wallow over if he chose. He owned them.

  Not to be deterred, though, Shot in the Leg gave him a hard time the following morning.

  From the open window, he felt that outside the air was humid, thick with unspilled rain. The sky blew down and swallowed his neighborhood in fog. In the distance, he heard the hungry rumble of thunder.

  Oncoming storms always made the pain in his knee worse, right on the outer meniscus, which a bullet had nearly severed years ago. Even though he’d had surgery, the knee never felt quite right—not after those occasional nights in the bottle, and definitely not before storms.

  Shot in the Leg leaned casually against the wall by the TV. It wore the same flippant tousle of blond hair and the same cocky smirk as the punk from the convenience store who shot Hank. Its legs were mottled with scars beneath the rips in the jeans. One was large, thick in the thigh like his partner’s had been. The other was skinny, like the guy in shorts from the convenience store, the one who’d covered his girlfriend from the spray of glass and flying bullets. Both looked shaky. Shot in the Leg did not look phased, though. Its legs always shook. Hank wondered if it felt anything beyond hate—like pain. Throbbing ligaments. Strained muscles. Buckling knees. Now that they could think on their own, he wondered what the memories remembered. What they thought about when they were alone.

  The memory folded its arms across the blood-splattered chest. The clerk’s chest, the one the punk kid shot before shooting Hank. At the time he’d been Officer Henry Swanson, working his way up to a spot somewhere in the Tactical Division of Morris County’s Major Crimes Unit.

  He was now Mr. Swanson-down-the-street, ex-vet, ex-cop, ex-husband, full-time asshole.

  “So you ready to die, officer?”

  Hank tried to ignore it. On TV, Michael Strahan was making Kelly Ripa smile. He liked to see Kelly smile. Sometimes she looked so pretty. Sometimes she looked like Linda.

  “You can’t ignore me. Not today.”

  Hank felt a twinge in his knee, and he rubbed it absently.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Shot in the Leg shove itself off the wall. It sauntered, as best as it was able, in front of the television set, crossed around the coffee table, and sat down on the other end of the couch. It kicked up dirty worn sneakers and propped them on top of an old issue of Penthouse.

  The woman on page 12 of that issue looked like Linda, too.

  “Hank, do you want to die?”

  He didn't turn his head. “No.”

  “Do you want to live?”

  “Haven’t given that much thought.” Hank watched the Kelly-Michael banter without really hearing it. Michael was a snappy dresser. Kelly could be beautiful sometimes.

  “Just let us go.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  Shot in the Leg laughed. “We’d like to. Let us go.”

  Hank sighed. “You think I like having you here?”

  “I think you keep us to fill up that space. Somehow, we’re easier to hold onto than your wedding, or birthday parties, or making the force.”

  “Nothing to them. I can barely remember those things.”

  “Consider recalling them a project then.”

  “I’m in retirement. I’m not looking for new projects.”

  Shot in the Leg gave him an exasperated sigh. “Look, I’m trying to keep you from getting little sharp broken pieces of skull all stuck in your nice, clean brain. But there’s no love lost if you won’t listen. We hate you, and we know you hate us.”

  That was not entirely true. What Hank hated was to admit that, of the four of them, something about Shot in the Leg seemed okay. He’d been trying to be good the night he was shot, trying to Serve and Protect, to save lives. He’d failed, of course, as he’d failed at his marriage, as he’d failed as a son and a big brother, but for that one memory, he could at least honestly look at himself and know he tried.

  His knee ached in little pulses. That he tried to be good—that was not entirely true, either. A clusterfuck of a situation, the shooting had been. Protocol ignored, hair-trigger Dirty-Harry hijinks ending with people getting shot. A barely-cleared IA investigation. A bum knee.

  But if any of the memories ever cut him a break, it was Shot in the Leg. He thought that warranted a certain degree of honesty between them.

  “You four are all I’ve got.”

  “How about no memories at all, then? A clean slate. A new beginning.”

  “Too old for that. Too late. Now if you don’t mind, I’m watching this. Go practice moving toasters.” Hank scowled and turned up the volume. Sometimes Michael looked waxy and Kelly looked plastic. A cranky thought, and one, for some reason, that reminded him of Linda.

  She looked waxy
when her eye swelled. And plastic when she put on extra make-up to cover a bruise.

  He felt bad about both. Sometimes Linda was so pretty. So pretty. He missed her.

  Shot in the Leg got up. “Suit yourself. Kitchen appliances, nothing. I’ve learned the fine and dexterous art of loading a firearm. You know…in case the toasters don’t work.”

  ««—»»

  Abuse rarely confronted him head on. When it did, it usually sported something sprained, mildly fractured, or in need of stitches. He hated those rare occasions when he ran into it in the upstairs hallway, not so much because of the sight of the physical injuries, but because of the guilt. He’d taken to avoiding it as often as possible. When it went on one of its tearing fits in the bedroom upstairs, he slept on the couch. When it tore up the kitchen, around seven most evenings, he went out to China Wok down the street.

  He was nearly certain Abuse learned to move the toaster first.

  The memory used to remind him of weak and beaten women, women whose fragile inner beauty and relentless outer beauty drove the awful sinking feelings of possessiveness, helpless mistrust and blind anger. The beauty that struck chords of remorse after.

  Nowadays, he saw the purest and most intense rage of all the memories in Linda’s swollen eye. It glared at him from beneath the long blond hair, stringy with blood in the front, his mother’s split lip puffed out in an angry pout. There was even some reclamation of power in the broken wrist, the cracked rib that bled out underneath the pale and papery skin, the dress he’d nearly twisted Linda’s arm off for wearing one night. These things reminded him of the horrible mistake he’d made. He’d hurt her, again and again in ways she could never forgive. In ways he couldn’t forgive himself. And Abuse reminded him every chance it got.