Apparition Read online

  The wall did not move beneath his trailing fingers. But the world itself seemed to sway around him, to whirl and dance like a ballerina drunk on something far stronger and more deadly than any spirits he had ever heard of.

  Shane moved toward the crack between door and jamb, the line between this reality and the next. He looked at the door opposite the open one, the door to Matthew’s room. It was closed, completely closed. He felt a sudden urge to go in there first, to check on his son. But even as he felt it he knew that the urge was not so much driving him to find out what was going on as it was pushing him into his son’s room to hide.

  He ignored the feeling, though it was harder than he would have believed. Ella’s room was where the problem was. Where the danger was.

  Shane reached for his daughter’s door. His fingers acted like they belonged to someone else, someone braver than him. They reached for Ella’s door. Pushed it open.

  The door whispered away from the frame.

  Something prickled his toes and Shane looked down in time to see something that looked like a piece of shadow run over his foot. In the next instant he realized it was a roach, but much larger than any roach he could remember seeing. Shane had to gag back a scream, the animal part of him clenching his teeth and keeping him silent. Silence was survival sometimes. Times like now.

  He looked up in the next instant. For a moment he relaxed as he saw Kari leaning over Ella’s bed. Ella was invisible, a mound of covers in a pink-frilled bed that was both childishly playful and surprisingly mature. Then his eyes were drawn back to Kari and he tensed again, though he couldn’t be sure why. It was his wife, and he had seen her check on the kids before. But there was something about her that put him completely on edge and into an even more pronounced state of alert and alarm. Perhaps it was the way she was standing. No, that was wrong, she wasn’t standing. She was looming, leaning over Ella’s still form in a way that was less concerned parent and more wild beast.

  “My children,” Kari whispered, and where before his skin had felt tight against his muscles and bones, now Shane felt like it was about to crawl right off his frame. A thousand creeping feet of terror left microscopic imprints on his nerves, and his skin stippled with gooseflesh as Kari’s voice writhed through the bedroom.

  Ella groaned as though something heavy was pressing against her in her sleep.

  Kari raised one hand high over her head. Something caught the moonlight that was streaming in through cracks in Ella’s drapes. It flashed.

  A knife.

  “My…. chiiiilllldrennnnnn….”

  For a moment, Shane was frozen. His mind locked up at the complete unreality of what he was seeing. The idea of Kari holding a knife was so utterly alien to what his brain would accept as valid that it paralyzed him, stole his ability to move, to think.

  It seemed like he was transfixed for a long time. Years. But it couldn’t even have been a second before he found himself again, before he was able to override the part of him that sought to retreat not just from what he was seeing, but from the universe in which he had suddenly found himself. He moved. Stepped into the room. Spoke.

  “Kari?” he said. His voice sounded higher than usual, terror crushing at his guts and making his testicles draw into a tight ball.

  Kari turned around with a sudden snarl, the knife still raised. Shane took a step back, the frightful rage on her visage pushing him away. Her features twisted in a way that he had never seen before. Wrath was there, yes, but it was more than that. There was something completely wrong about her, as though his wife had been replaced by a duplicate that was perfect in every detail but one: it was missing a soul. Predatory lust lit her eyes, and an animal rage curled her mouth into unnaturally twisted lines.

  “Kari,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  At the same time, the lump on the bed that was Ella moved. The new teenager sat up and said, “Mom?” Her voice was thick with sleep. Shane saw her head rise up a bit above the covers as she craned her neck to see why her mother was there.

  Kari moved.

  “No!” Shane screamed, and it was probably the scream that saved Ella’s life. His daughter shrank back from the sound, drawing closer to the wall just as Kari’s knife slammed downward like a piston. Shane’s voice dissolved into a wordless shriek as he saw the knife slash through Ella’s pillow. He saw a flash of panic in his daughter’s eyes, sleep now fled from them – perhaps forever. Then she disappeared in a cloud of feathers as Kari yanked the knife free and held it high once more.

  Shane pitched himself forward. He felt for an instant like he was hurtling toward his wife and daughter not just with the force of his own muscles but with the movement of the earth itself. Faces and bodies dissolved as he crashed into Kari.

  Ella was screaming, screaming. He could hear the sound of terror, of innocence ripped from a child. Then he heard the meaty thud of bodies hitting the ground. His and Kari’s. She landed mostly under him, and he heard the breath explode from crushed lungs in a whoosh.

  Then she pushed him up with one hand –

  (and she was strong so strong oh God so strong she’s never been this strong what’s happening)

  – and he saw the flash of light on steel again as the knife streaked out, Kari slashing at him this time.

  Time and space converged, all the dimensions of reality meeting along a single line, a bright razor’s edge.

  Shane threw himself backward, and pain bunched his back muscles into a tight knot. Then pain in front as the knife in Kari’s hand razored through his t-shirt and carved a deep furrow in his chest. The knife slashed through flesh and muscle, then skipped along his breastbone. It emerged with another flash, but now the brightness along the blade was muted by crimson tones.

  Shane felt almost nothing at first, nothing but a strange sense of separation, and then pain hacked into him. He gasped. Fell back. His hands went automatically to his chest, and blood washed over them. The warmth drowned out his pain for a moment, as though his mind was seeking to take itself away from the reality of what was happening, focusing on the least essential things about this moment in which sanity had fled his life.

  A whine invaded his senses, which gradually resolved itself into a scream. Ella. She was shrieking on her bed, mouth open so wide it looked like her entire head was going to come unhinged like the jaw of a snake.

  Shane’s fingers clutched spastically at the gash in his chest, as though they might pull the wound shut and all would return to normal again. That was impossible, though. Nothing would ever be normal again. Not after this.

  With that thought, time seemed to snap back to full speed, abandoning the slow motion pace it had taken for the last second or two – seconds that had seemed to last an eternity, as only moments where life completely changes can do.

  He looked into his wife’s eyes. The snarl still hovered on her face, still curled her mouth into a grimace of anger. She held the knife high, clearly planning to bring it down on him before turning once again to Ella.

  “My children,” Kari said, and her voice rasped like a viper across a desert sand dune.

  Shane held up one bloody hand, as though that might save him; might save Ella. But it wouldn’t, he knew. It couldn’t.

  Shane knew he was going to die, but contrary to movies and stories, his entire life failed to flash before him. Instead, his mind went to and stayed at a single moment: the moment of Ella’s birth. The sweet feeling of her oh-so-soft body in his hands, one hand cradling her head and neck and one hand holding her back and bottom. She was so soft then. So soft.

  And now his hands were not big enough to hold her. Not big enough to protect her from the thing that had somehow invaded their lives, from the insanity that was drawing them all into itself.

  Kari shrieked.

  The knife slashed downward. A trajectory that could only end with the knife hacking through his upraised hand and then into his neck or face. His entire body went rigid, muscles clenched with fear, with terror.

/>   With regret.

  He had held his daughter in his hands.

  The moment drew out into another. Ella was still screaming, but the scream had gone from a drawn-out shriek to strange, panting wheezes.

  That was wrong. How could it be that she had time to scream like that? Why wasn’t he dead, or at least laying wounded on the floor?

  He forced his eyes to focus, to take in what was happening.

  Kari was still standing there. Still holding the knife. But no longer plunging it down at him. The knife hovered perhaps three or four inches above his upraised hand. It shook, as though Kari had suddenly been gripped by an exhaustion so complete that merely holding the knife had become a herculean feat.

  He looked further, pushed his gaze past the hypnotic edge of the knife and into Kari’s eyes. He saw what was there, and knew why the knife shook. There was no fatigue in her gaze, no exhaustion that would cause her to shiver as she held the blade. Rather, he saw a struggle there, a conflict so great that it defied adequate description or understanding, as though everything good and right with the world had stood up before everything that was dark and evil. The universe was in her eyes, a universe at war. But whether light would triumph or darkness come to reign, he could not say.

  Kari blinked rapidly. Her eyes seemed to be looking at something far away, something beyond the straight walls of the bedroom. She was whispering, wheezing.

  “My children my children my children my children….”

  She rocked back and forth, and the hand that held the knife beat against her breast as though she were a woman in deepest mourning. The words poured out of her, the same syllables repeating over and over and over until they bled into a single word.

  “My children the children my childrenthechildrenmy childrenmychildrenmychildrenmychildrenmychildren….”

  Ella quieted further, even the panting cries that sounded like a beaten puppy had petered out to almost nothing. It was as though the litany of her mother’s deranged mumblings had caught her in a spell and silenced her.

  Kari blinked, tears welling up in her eyes. She looked at the knife in her hand, the blood-streaked blade, the trails of red that dripped onto the floor below. She looked at Shane, curled in a bloody ball at her feet, a useless hand upraised to stop a strike that would easily end his life.

  A shadow flitted across Kari’s face, and Shane thought for some reason of the roach that had run across his toes when he came into the room. In the same moment, Kari’s eyes grew cold, almost reptilian: the gaze of a snake about to strike.

  Then the shadow passed beyond her face and Kari’s visage was, for the first time since this madness had begun, her own once more.

  “Kari –” Shane began, but before he could say anything else, Kari lurched forward. She stepped half-over him and ran to the door that had swung shut behind Shane. Shane had a moment in which he wanted to relax, a short instant where he almost succumbed to the invitation his body was extending to him to just pass out and wake up when all this was over.

  The feeling of respite ended as quickly as it had come. Kari threw the door open, and there, framed in his own doorway directly across the hall, was Matthew.

  Physically, Matthew took after Shane more than his mother. Like his father had been, he was tall for his age, with thick brown hair that persistently resisted the control of comb or brush. Now, that same brown hair was flipped half-over his eyes. He flicked his head back and said, “Mom, what’s go –”

  Shane guessed at that moment Matthew looked into his mother’s eyes, for at that moment the boy completely froze, and terror burst into full bloom across his face. His forehead and chin went chalk-white, while two fever highlights exploded onto his cheeks.

  “Momma?” he said.

  Shane wanted to scream at Matthew to get out, to go, to run and never stop running. But he didn’t. Couldn’t. Something had utterly stopped his tongue. As though someone unseen but no less real for its invisibility was clutching Shane’s throat, forcing it shut, choking him with vile hands from another world.

  He could see Kari shaking in the doorway. And once again he felt as though she was fighting something, something within herself that would make the difference between life and death for the children – perhaps for all of them and more if she let it escape while in this insanely murderous state.

  “I… I have… I have to kill you,” she finally said, and each word sounded like it was being forced out of her mouth, as though she were a ventriloquist’s dummy that had suddenly decided to cut all ties with the master but wasn’t finding it as easy as anticipated.

  “Kill me?” said Matthew in a high voice, the voice of pure innocence meeting unyielding terror for the first time. The boy stepped back.

  Kari screamed at that moment, and Shane knew she was going to do it, she was going to kill their son. He lurched to his feet. Slipped in the pool of his own blood that had accumulated beneath him. Almost went down. Righted himself.

  Then he was up. Running. Reaching for Kari even as she reached for Matthew. But he knew he wasn’t going to get there in time. Wasn’t going to be able to stop her from murdering their youngest child.

  Kari screamed again. She grabbed a handful of Matthew’s thick black hair and yanked it back, exposing his neck.

  Shane knew what was coming next. Knew in that instant what was worse than death: it was seeing the death of your child, and being helpless to stop it.

  Matthew screamed.

  The knife slashed down.

  And he was still screaming.

  Shane almost faltered, wondering how that could be possible, how could a dead boy scream? Then he saw that Kari had not cut his throat, but had instead swung the knife into her own arm.

  She shrieked, her head rocking back and forth in agony, then threw Matthew away from her. The boy flew through the air and hit the hallway wall hard enough that Shane actually heard the explosive “whoosh!” of his son getting the wind knocked out of him.

  Then Kari was gone. Disappeared around the corner, going the other way down the hall.

  Shane glanced back at Ella. The thirteen-year-old had a double handful of her blankets pressed up against her cheeks as though she had regressed to a baby whose only comfort in darkest night was the knowledge that monsters would not attack a child hidden under a blanket. She wasn’t looking at him. Wasn’t look at anything. She wore a stare so blank he worried she had fallen catatonic.

  “Ella, you okay?” he said. Merely talking pulled the edges of his wound farther apart, and he could feel fresh blood spilling down his front, soaking his slashed shirt and seeping into the elastic waistband of his sweat pants.

  Ella didn’t answer. Her eyes remained fixed on eternity.

  “Ella!” he shouted, and put a bit more strength – even a bit of anger – into his voice. “Are you hurt?”

  Ella pulled her gaze away from whatever horizon at the edge of the universe she’d been staring at long enough to nod and say, “Uh-uh.” Then her gaze lengthened back to look at forever.

  Shane wanted to spend more time checking his daughter out, but he couldn’t. No time for unnecessary first aid or even for necessary therapy sessions. Not now. Not with the danger still in their home.

  Shane lurched out of the bedroom, and saw Matthew slowly getting to his feet. The boy looked terrified – certainly reasonable under the circumstances – but his face lost a trace of its fear when he saw his father.

  “Dad!” he said. Then he apparently noticed the blood all over Shane. New panic started to appear on Matthew’s face.

  “It’s okay,” Shane said quickly, and held out a hand as though to ward off Matthew’s fear. Even that simple motion sent waves of pain crashing through him. He felt like he had to puke, but forced himself to stand as tall and calm as possible. “You all right?”

  He limped over to his son and quickly ran his hands over him. He didn’t know what he was looking for – it wasn’t like he was a doctor and could identify broken bones by feel. But he did it an
yway, as though his mind and body both needed to touch Matthew, to assure Shane that his son was still alive, that neither of his children had been hurt. “You all right?” he said again, when Matthew didn’t answer.

  The boy choked back a sob and at the same time the words, “What’s going on?” lurched out of him.

  Hearing Matthew’s voice, even as upset and terrified as it was, was enough to reassure Shane that his boy was all right. He hugged Matthew briefly but intensely, crushing his boy against his chest. That brought new pain, and he had to release his son almost immediately, but he felt better for having done it.

  He turned. Things were hardly back to normal. His wife – his wife, his lover, the mother of his children and his best friend – was still in the house somewhere.