Apparition Read online

  “I’m scared,” said Ella from the backseat.

  “I’m scared, too,” echoed Matthew.

  Kari wanted to reach out to them, to touch them with her hands. Not to comfort them, but so that she could more fully feel their terror.

  She needed their terror.

  It needed to feed.

  Water rose around them, up to their chests. It was cold and dark.

  “Mommy?” said Ella.

  “We’re going to die!” shrieked Matthew, his small face alight with panic and certainty.

  Kari shrugged. “If I’m going to die,” she responded, “you’re going to die with me.”

  The water rose over their heads. The children, barely visible in the backseat, began thrashing as their oxygen-starved bodies forced them to breathe. But no air came, only more of the dark liquid around them. They inhaled the water. Coughed and vomited and in so doing caused their diaphragms to spasm up and down, drawing more water into their lungs. That triggered another round of vomiting, more useless inhalation.

  It took almost a full minute.

  Kari held her breath the whole time.

  She watched.

  Smiled.

  Things shifted again. Now she was in her own room, in her own bed. But she knew it was still a dream, that she was still clutched in a nightmare that seemed as though it might never end. She knew it was not real because even though she loved her children, even though she would give anything for them, in this place she knew that she had to kill them. So it couldn’t be real.

  Could it?

  Her eyes opened in the dream –

  (yes a dream this is a dream because I don’t hate my children I love them even though I have to kill them)

  – but though open they did not see. Kari was here, but at the same time not present.

  Her hand went to her cheek. She felt like something had been there. Something dirty and defiling, but that had come to herald the arrival of a thing of even greater foulness.

  She found nothing there. Her cheek was smooth. Just skin and the slightest oily residue from the wrinkle-reducing night cream she always put on before sleeping.

  (and here she began to think, to worry, to wonder if this was really a dream or rather reality cloaked in the strange other-ness that characterizes so many dreams; she worried, but only for a moment, and then the same force, the same entity that had traveled along the outflung worlds of her dreams to find her was once again in command, and her questions receded as though sinking beyond the reach of light or life in the depths of a dark night sea)

  She rolled over and put her feet on the hardwood floor below the bed. The floor was cold, and her feet twitched automatically, but she did not put on her slippers. This was a dream, and one does not wear slippers in a dream.

  A sound sidled through the room. A smooth voice, a lilting set of syllables that sounded almost set in song.

  “The children….”

  It took her a moment, asleep as she was, captive in this strangely real dream, to realize that the voice was hers.

  “The children….”

  She stood. She looked at Shane. Or rather, she looked at the dream-Shane of this place. Dream-Shane slept on, unmoving, not noticing that his dream-wife –

  (but am I his dream wife or am I the real wife in a dream and what does it matter but it does matter I know it oh why is this happening and what is going to happen)

  – had gotten out of bed. The dream-springs whined ever-so-slightly, but apparently even the dream knew that the bed was a fairly new one, and would not make much noise.

  Kari stepped away from the bed. She walked like a puppet on a string, her movements jerky and barely coordinated enough to keep her upright.

  She spoke again, the same words she had already whispered. But this time they were driven by a need, a hunger that could only be filled by the snuffing out of a life.

  “The… chiiiillllldrennnnn….”

  And once more, she barely recognized the voice as her own. It was coming from her own mouth (dream-mouth), her own lungs (dream-lungs) were pumping the air through her vocal cords (dream-vocal cords). Nevertheless, the voice was not hers. Not really. It was high and keening, a whine of otherworldly agony driven by a hunger so cruel that to experience it for even a moment was to live in a world where madness held sway.

  It was hungry. It needed to feed.

  She moved forward. Her feet slid more than stepped, barely losing contact with the cold wood floor, as if by stepping high she might somehow lose contact with the dry, reptilian need that had crawled into her in this dream.

  Reptilian. That was the right word. The thing, the craving that clutched her, was cool and dry as a snake’s scales. Calculating, emotionless, the only feeling it permitted was the feeling of hunger that held her in its tight embrace.

  Her feet slid forward.

  She left the room.

  In the hall.

  At the far end of the hall a stairwell led down. Down to the living room, the kitchen: the rooms where, in a world where dream did not rule, a family would meet and live and love. But the reptilian cold permitted no such feelings. Only hunger. Only an insatiable craving for the suffering of the young.

  At the other end of the hall, the end where she stood in this dream of hunger and need, of lust for blood stronger than any need she had ever known, there was nothing more than the room she had just come out of.

  Dream-Shane snorted and turned over in the room at her back. Perhaps he was dreaming, too. A dream within a dream.

  And what if he was dreaming of her asleep? she wondered fleetingly. A dream within a dream within a dream? Where would it end?

  Eternity suddenly beckoned, a Mobius strip waiting for her to walk its never-ending path. She wondered what would happen if she surrendered to the madness of this dream and allowed herself to drift on tides of insanity, never to find shores of rationality again.

  She wanted to do it. A part of her wanted to, because a part of her knew – or at least suspected – where this dream would lead. And knew that to follow it there would be to lose herself entirely.

  It needs to eat.

  The thought snapped her back, away from her musings and once more focused on the “reality” her dream had presented to her. A hall. Stairs at the far end. Her room behind.

  And between….

  An open door to a bathroom. Open and dark and empty. Uninteresting, unimportant.

  There were, however, two other doors. Closed. Also dark, for it was night in the dreaming, and all was dark. But these doors hid treasures behind them. They had luxury, and comfort, and life.

  They had food.

  Kari slid, foot past foot, toward the doors.

  Her hands curled into fists at her sides. Or rather, one hand curled into a fist. The other did not, for it could not, as there was something in her palm. She held it up.

  A knife. And now she was even more sure that this was a dream because where had the knife come from? She hadn’t had it when she went to sleep, and she hadn’t made any somnambulistic trips to the kitchen.

  But the knife was here. In her hands. And as real to the dream as the floor beneath her feet. The blade was well-honed and bright, and the edge caught the moonlight and cut it into a thousand diamond fragments that cast radiant strips all around her.

  The dream was hunger.

  The dream was beautiful.

  Slide… slide… slide… slide….

  She slid forward, not walking but sliding like a snake, like a thing that either had no legs or no longer used them, a thing that was low, a thing meant for the dark places beneath beds where it could wait for children to hang small feet over the side so it could snatch them away and feed and then rest for long days and years as it slowly digested its prey and fed from the everlasting fear of the damned.

  Slide… slide….

  She slid past a mirror. She looked at herself, at the reflection of a dream. She smiled, and her other-self, her mirror-self, also smiled. The smile was
hers: her own teeth, her own lips, her own tongue and mouth. But it was also not hers, for she had never before made her mouth form such a mockery of happiness, such a lustful expression.

  “The children,” Kari whispered.

  Her mirror-self nodded. Its smile widened, but it did not speak. It could not. Mirrors have no voice.

  “The… chiiiiilllldrennnnn,” Kari breathed, and turned away from the mirror.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw that her mirror-self did not move, but remained in place, watching her as she continued down the hall.

  Slide… slide….

  Knife in hand.

  “The children.”

  She slid to the first door. She turned to it, and for some reason the door reminded her of Christmas morning: all excitement and the culmination of months of longing.

  She reached for the doorknob. Gripped and turned it.

  The knob spun in her hand without a hitch, without a squeak. The latch disengaged with a click so low it was just the barest whisper in the dream.

  She pushed the door.

  It swung open.

  A faint breeze caressed her cheek, air from inside the room moving into the hall, air from the hall rushing into the room to take its place. The air from the room smelled of shampoo and soap and shoes and new-laundered clothes and for a moment Kari faltered, for a moment she wondered if this was a dream, because what kind of dream had this level of life, this completeness of being?

  Then a sound came from the room. A soft whisper, the susurration of small bedclothes moving across clean sheets.

  Kari smiled. She fingered the knife.

  “My… chilllldrennnnnn.”

  ***

  Chapter 2:

  Nightmare

  ***

  Andrea Yates drowned her five young children in a bathtub. She said it was because she knew her children were going to come to harm when they grew up, and wanted to spare them that.

  Another woman drove her four kids into a river and they all drowned together. Some investigators think she wanted to “save” them from growing up.

  I don’t believe either of the bitches. I think they wanted to kill their kids.

  Or maybe something else wanted them to.

  It wasn’t the sound that woke him, but the silence.

  When he spent his very first night with Kari, Shane had been more than a little worried about what effect their relationship would have on his sleep schedule. To describe him as an insomniac was equivalent to describing the Great Wall of China – four thousand miles long and the only man-made object visible from space – as a fair-sized heap of bricks. Sleep visited him rarely, and when it did it was always fitful.

  His fears turned out to be groundless. Indeed, that first night was part of the reasons he knew Kari was the one for him. And it wasn’t the vague, infatuated certainty that so many couples possessed as they meandered in a haze through the first months of marriage: his was a concrete, well-reasoned knowledge.

  He knew she was right for him because when he slept beside her, he slept better than ever before in his life. Some people would have derided him for making a major life decision based on sleep patterns, but, he reflected, there were certainly far worse reasons for staying with someone – most of which he had seen in his own friends’ relationships.

  After over a decade of marriage, he still wouldn’t go so far as to describe himself as a heavy sleeper, even with Kari beside him, but he did occasionally make it through as many as two or three hours of solid sleep – something he did not think he had done since infancy.

  Recently, however, he had begun to regress. His sleep had once more become a mass of broken cat-naps, with him waking ten or even twenty times a night. Nothing had changed in their marriage – he still loved Kari with all his heart, soul, gonads, and everything else he thought of as part of him – but something had changed in Kari. She was restless at night. She twitched and writhed, sometimes even moaned aloud, as though her dreams had ceased to be places of rest and respite from the day’s labors, and had themselves become omens of doom, shadows of destruction skulking ever closer.

  Shane woke constantly with her now. She moved, and it woke him. She twitched, he was up for the rest of the night.

  So it was almost ironic that, now that she was not moving at all, it was the lack of motion that woke him. Something prickling in the back of his mind, a vague sense of unease. Like smoke in a hall, silent but clearly signaling nearby havoc. Death.

  He sat up, his arm jerking out to touch his wife.

  She wasn’t there.

  He looked over, and though his eyes felt gummy and unfocused he could immediately make out the twisted folds of blanket where Kari had been sleeping. Where she no longer was.

  “Kari?” he whispered. Unlike many women he had known in his life, Kari seemed to have a bladder with the capacity of an Olympic swimming pool; other than during her two pregnancies he had never known her to get up in the night to go to relieve herself. Still, he glanced automatically at the bathroom that was attached to their bedroom.

  The doorway to the master bathroom hung open, only darkness beyond. She was not there.

  He heard a sound and his skin suddenly tightened, his muscles tensed. The sound was… wrong. He didn’t even know what the sound was, but some primitive part of him immediately started screaming in the dark hollows of his mind. Shrieking in fear, or crying out to warn others of the tribe that something else – something Other, something to be feared – had come in the night to steal away life and light.

  “Kari?” he said again, but knew even as he said it that there would be no response.

  He threw aside the sheets and blankets that had wrapped themselves around his legs like a burlesque dancer’s boa and put his feet on the floor. The floor was cold, jarring him more fully out of the nightmare that had worried his sleep, jarring him more fully into whatever nightmare existed on this side of wakefulness.

  Shane looked around the room. The bed was empty, the few bits of furniture looked fine, nothing looked out of place.

  But it was all somehow wrong.

  He moved to the door, flitting on quick and quiet ghost-feet across the floor. He was almost dancing, light on the balls of his feet. Shane realized that he was moving as if he expected to find an intruder or other threat in his home. He chided himself internally – there was no reason to suspect anything was amiss. Kari wasn’t in the room, sure, but there were other places she could be. Watching television downstairs, or getting a drink of water, or even just checking on the kids.

  Even so, he maintained silence as he dashed quietly across the room. He pushed the door open, and peeked out into the hall.

  There was nothing in the hall. Nothing and no one. At the far end of the hall, the stairway fell away, disappearing into the first floor of their home. But no lights or sounds came from below. Besides, something in him – the part that had started to scream in terror and that now clawed at him in a burgeoning panic that he had to exert himself not to give into – was telling him loud and clear that there was nothing downstairs, the problem was here, and he had only seconds to find and stop it.

  Whatever it was.

  He heard something. Or perhaps that was wrong: it was as much feeling as sound, the prickle of nerves long-sleeping but now fully awake. The primal senses that had gone dormant when humanity as a species first slipped out of the trees and built new forests of concrete and steel were now fully awake once more, and Shane knew.

  It was in Ella’s room.

  He could see the room, off to the right, and noticed that the door was ajar. That was strange. Ella had become a teenager recently – though he wasn’t quite sure how that had happened – and had started insisting on a level of privacy that bordered on obsessive paranoia. For her to go to sleep with her door ajar was about as likely as finding an honest politician in Washington.

  It’s probably just Kari, checking on her, the rapidly shrinking rational portion of his mind whispered. But he di
dn’t believe it. Not for a second.

  He flitted down the hall, still high on his toes, still dancing the strange dance of a sneak-thief in his own home. One hand reached out and traced the wall as he moved. He knew part of that was to augment his balance as he moved through the hall. But he sensed it was mostly to feel the wall itself. To feel something real and solid in a night that had become tenuous and strange, a night where he had woken from a dream only to find himself caught in another unreality that he sensed would be worse than any nightmare he had ever found himself trapped within.