Apparition Read online

  APPARITION

  Michaelbrent Collings

  Copyright © 2012 by Michaelbrent Collings

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author. For information send request to [email protected].

  website: www.michaelbrentcollings.com

  email: [email protected]

  cover and front page image © 2012

  used under license from Shutterstock.com

  Dedication

  To...

  Matthew and Kendra, for being a great couple,

  Rick Hautala, for being a cool dude

  at the convention and a friend after,

  Shane Reese, for being such an example,

  and to Laura, FTAAE.

  Contents

  Prologue: Roach.. 1

  Chapter 1: Dream... 9

  Chapter 2: Nightmare.. 19

  Chapter 3: House.. 38

  Chapter 4: Blasphemy.. 52

  Chapter 5: Mirror.. 60

  Chapter 6: Dog.. 70

  Chapter 7: Outside.. 79

  Chapter 8: Footsteps. 88

  Chapter 9: Eyes. 93

  Chapter 10: Pillowcase.. 99

  Chapter 11: Door.. 109

  Chapter 12: Church.. 117

  Chapter 13: Toy.. 129

  Chapter 14: Game.. 148

  Chapter 15: It. 167

  Chapter 16: Research.. 178

  Chapter 17: Birthmark.. 193

  Chapter 18: Text. 203

  Chapter 19: Album... 219

  Chapter 20: Hands. 227

  Chapter 21: Change.. 235

  Chapter 22: Boy.. 251

  Chapter 23: Motel.. 261

  Chapter 24: Visit. 287

  Chapter 25: Monster.. 302

  Chapter 26: Story.. 314

  Chapter 27: Thralls. 344

  Chapter 28: Time.. 350

  Chapter 29: Ritual.. 358

  Chapter 30 Intrusion.. 372

  Chapter 31: Attack.. 383

  Epilogue: Reunion.. 403

  Author’s Note.. 409

  ***

  Prologue:

  Roach

  ***

  FACT:

  Filicide (a parent deliberately killing his or her own child) is the third-leading cause of death of American children between 5 and 14 years old.

  FACT:

  In the United States alone AT LEAST 250 to 300 children are murdered by their parents every year.

  FACT:

  No one knows why this happens.

  There is a very special – even peculiar – feeling when a bedroom has two people in it. No more, no less.

  More than two people in a bedroom, and the energy in the room tends to be insane or officious, because either great deals of money are going to change hands, or great deals of energy are going to be expended – or both – for obvious reasons. Less than two, and the room often feels lonely and stale, as though the person in the bedroom is most likely waiting for something… and perhaps has been waiting for quite some time.

  Two is, quite simply, the only number that feels right in a bedroom. Much can be determined about the quality and love of a couple if you can somehow manage a quick peek into their room when both are present.

  In the case of Shane and Kari Wills, they had a room that, by any who visited it, was uniformly agreed to be just the right kind of room. Good energy: neither too old and stale, nor too wasteful or misused. The room of a couple growing into middle age with one another… and who were determined to grow into gray hair and bent bodies while remaining just as close to each other, if not closer.

  The room held a total of one bed (king-sized), two nightstands (of the same dark stain as the bedframe; part of a set), one wardrobe (also darkly stained, though clearly not part of a set), one closet (deep, with a surprising number of shoes), one vanity (mirror attachment and only a few ladies’ toiletries atop), a small sitting area with two plushly comfortable chairs and a table (because there was room for them so it was unthinkable not to have them), numerous framed photographs (happy children, happy parents, happy days), two people (Shane and Kari Wills, asleep in the aforementioned bed)…

  … and one roach that had been… sent.

  Shane was the husband. He was in his late thirties, which he preferred not to think about because he was at last reaching an age where “just old enough” was rapidly approaching and behind that would be “middle aged” and from there it was all downhill – personally, professionally, and physically. Still, for the most part he was a person who managed his worries quite well, thinking about them only when they were in real danger of impacting his life. He was generally described by his friends as being the one who would likely not only stay latest at the party, but offer to help with the clean-up.

  Kari, his wife, was similar in temperament, though looking nothing like her husband. Where he was tall and dark, she was slight and had hair so blonde it almost seemed to carry its own light source with it: a brightness that nearly outshined the sun whenever the two were seen in comparison.

  The bed, the shoe-filled closet, the nightstands, even the items of the sitting room were all just set dressing. They were there to help tell the family’s story. But without those items, the story itself would have gone on just fine.

  Even the framed pictures were mere ornamentation; garnishing in the tossed salad of family life. The frames and poses were less important than the people in them. The pictures might dissolve, but the only thing of value about them were the memories and the people that they recorded and represented: a boy and a girl, each a fairly generous mix of both parents’ features. Especially around the mouths, which were full and thick and wide and (if the pictures were any indication) often open in gales of full-bellied laughter.

  Only the roach kept this from being a perfect room – or as near-perfect as is possible on a world that sometimes seems to fling through cold space for the sole purpose of prolonging the agony of its inhabitants. Cruelty comes in many shapes. Sometimes, survival itself is one of them.

  The roach was on the floor.

  Any and all English teachers worth their salt would throw up their hands in dismay at reading such a sentence on a student paper: “The roach was on the floor.”

  “But where did the roach come from?” they might say.

  “But what is it doing?” they could cry.

  “But how did it get there?” they might shriek, and some of the more well-meaning ones – the kinds of teachers who believe that language is not to be enjoyed or played with as one might enjoy and play with a treasured friend, but is rather to be set atop a pedestal and used only when necessary, and then only in the most complicated and stilted ways – why those teachers might even swoon as a character from a Victorian novel which is now a “classic” even though at the time of its writing it was quite scandalous and low-class.

  In spite of such remonstrances, however, anyone writing about the roach would have had to start just that way:

  “The roach was on the floor.”

  It was on the floor, you see. Nor was it doing anything at all, beyond simply being. As to how it had come to be on the floor, there was nothing much to that story, either: one moment it had not been on the floor – one moment it had not even been in existence (at least not as far as you or I understand existence) – and the next moment, it just… was.

  So, you see, “The roach” really, simply, “was on the floor.”

  The roach was still. Silent. Listening, perhaps, or watching for something.

  On their bed, Shane and Kari breathed. They breathed for
a while in tandem, his deep and heavy breaths marking exact time with her lighter and slighter ones. Then, as usually happens, their rhythms drew away from one another and the synchronized effect was lost to the room.

  At this moment, the roach moved. It scurried forward, darting ahead as though it had in fact been held in place by the coordinated breathing that had been going on only a moment before. It ran differently than most roaches. Roaches have little room for brains in their small bodies, so most of what mind they do have is devoted to food and fear: either searching for sustenance, or preparing to flee from anything that triggers their distress. This often leads to a lopsided kind of run that keeps them close to the shadows in a room, and only permits them to leave the shadows in short arcs meant to put them in clear sight for the shortest possible times.

  But this roach… this roach….

  It ran in a straight line. No shadows cloaked its path, other than the diffuse darkness of the night itself. A bright moon floated outside the bedroom window, and blades of clean white light slashed at the darkness. Even the stars were bright, no clouds obscuring them from view or preventing them from further illuminating the bedroom.

  The light did not bother the roach. It ran through bright areas and dusky ones all the same. Its chitinous feet skittered across the hardwood floor of the bedroom, soft tick-tick-ticks that could be heard in the near-silence of the place.

  The sleepers on the bed did not move. Did not hear.

  The roach ran to the foot of the bed. The frame was walnut. The roach did not care what kind of wood it was, only whether it was too slick to be climbed.

  The roach put a hook-like tarsus – the end of its leading foot – against the shiningly varnished wood and pulled.

  Not too slick, it seemed. Not too slick at all.

  The roach shimmied up the leg of the bed.

  It disappeared under the covers of the sleeping man and woman.

  A moment later it reappeared at one edge of a heavy comforter, about halfway up the length of the bed.

  It continued crawling, pulling itself forward over the soft, fluffy comforter, a measured pace that was bringing it quickly toward Kari’s exposed face.

  Noises came into the room. They did not come from the roach. The roach was silent, the small taps of its footfalls now muffled by the folds of the comforter.

  The noises came from Kari herself. She moaned, a long, low sound that might bring to mind pain and suffering if the roach were able to comprehend such things. But it couldn’t. It kept crawling toward her.

  This was what it had been sent to do.

  Kari thrashed slightly, and the landscape of the blankets changed suddenly – valleys became mountains and mountains morphed to valleys.

  Still the roach crawled forward.

  Kari’s mouth opened. She spoke. Her voice was subdued, muffled.

  “The children,” she whispered. “The children.”

  The roach did not understand this. It hadn’t been sent to understand. It had been sent for other things. Darker things. And darkness required no understanding. Fear fed on ignorance, just as ignorance fed on fear. The great truths were always circular.

  Fear was evident in the woman’s voice now. In her shuddering, shaking breaths that seemed too long and yet not long enough to give her the oxygen she needed to outrun whatever dream beast stalked her and her children.

  “No,” she whispered.

  The roach was at the thin line of sheet that lay like a printed blue sidewalk between the blanket and Kari’s throat. Like Kari’s hair, her throat was so bright, so clean and unlined, that it was almost its own source of luminosity. Not merely reflecting the glow of moon and star, but rather an as yet unknown light source, one that was clean and self-renewing.

  Life.

  The roach put its first foot onto the sheet, and skittered quickly across it. Before she turned or rolled over.

  It stepped onto Kari’s throat.

  She shuddered, but there was no way of knowing if the shudder was born of the tickling touch of the roach’s leg on her bare skin, or came from the cool air around them or even from the dreams that held her captive in dark halls whose brickwork was half past-memory and half future-fear.

  The roach walked across her throat. Kari was silent.

  The roach ran along the curve of her jaw, the sharp but still pleasant line of her chin. It crawled up onto her mouth, across her lips.

  It crawled to her cheek.

  And waited.

  It was but the forerunner.

  The real guest to this room had not yet arrived.

  But it was coming.

  The roach ceased moving. It did not even preen itself. Just lay motionless on Kari’s cheek, less than an inch from her closed right eye.

  It would wait.

  But not long.

  ***

  Chapter 1:

  Dream

  ***

  Filicide has been around forever. As long as people have had babies, they’ve killed them.

  So why does it strike us as so unnatural, if it’s been with us for so long?

  Kari Wills dreamed dreams that did not belong in her mind. She was a person best described as loving. One could perhaps occasionally call her merely “caring,” but only on an off day where personal tragedy kept her from being at her best.

  The description “saintly” was out of the question – if only because she had not yet achieved the required number of wrinkles that would permit beatification.

  That was why her dreams – dreams that not only featured death and suffering, but seemed somehow to be actively powered by them – were as out of character for her as eating licorice. More so, in fact – she had once voluntarily eaten licorice that her favorite grandmother made her from scratch as a present. Absent such extraordinary circumstances, though, licorice was definitely persona non grata to her. To say nothing of a dream where she was murdering her children.

  And not just murdering them, but doing so lavishly, longingly, killing them in ways that allowed her to linger in their pain, to watch the happiness disappear from their eyes and be replaced by the burgeoning – and, in a child, the wholly unnatural – certainty that they were going to die.

  In her dreams, she was a monster.

  She killed them both. Then they were suddenly alive, and she killed them again.

  She held a knife in her dreams. Long and gleaming, but she knew that the edge was actually quite blunt. And that was all right.

  Indeed, it excited her.

  She brought the blade down on Ella’s shoulder. Sweet Ella, staring up at her as though waiting for a birthday present. But instead of a ribbon-strewn gift box, she received only pain as Kari pushed the blade down with all her might. She dug through Ella’s skin, then felt around with the point of the blade until she found the connection between shoulder and arm bone. She pushed harder, digging through gristly cartilage and tendon. Blood soaked the sheets that Ella was laying on. The young girl screamed.

  The arm came away slowly; Kari had to saw at the meat around the bone to get it to separate from her daughter’s torso. But come away it did.

  The blood that soaked the sheets a moment before was already running out. It became a stream. A trickle. A drizzle. Then dry.

  Ella’s eyes were open and clear. Open and bright.

  Open and empty.

  Then everything changed, and now the knife was gone. Instead, Kari was holding something round in her tight-fisted hands. A steering wheel.

  Kari – the dream-Kari, the only Kari that mattered in this place – glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Ella in the backseat. Matthew was there, too. They were holding hands, which never would have happened in reality.

  Kari drove the car forward. The surface beneath the vehicle was made of wood slats that bump-tump-buh-tum-tump-buddump under the tires.

  Then the car lurched. The tires continued to spin, but they found no purchase. They spun in the air as the car fell.

  The fall was not far. Maybe
only a few feet. Then the car hit something.

  Water flooded into the vehicle, entering through cracks around the doors, through the air conditioning vents, even through unseen holes in the floor itself.