Apparition Read online

  With a knife.

  At first he thought about just grabbing the kids and retreating to his bedroom with them, barricading them in there and calling the cops. But he didn’t do that. He tried to convince himself it was because who knew how fast the overworked cops would show up, or if they would even believe his story, so he was on his own.

  But that was a lie.

  The truth was that he just had to know. Had to find his wife. To look in her eyes and ask her what had happened to change her from the woman he knew and loved to a killer of her own children.

  But where could she be?

  The answer presented itself almost the instant he looked down the hall. The one door between the kids’ rooms and the stairs led to the bathroom that Ella and Matthew shared.

  The bathroom door was closed. But light gleamed around its edges, like a strangely squared solar eclipse.

  Shane nudged Matthew toward the wall, a gesture he hoped his son understood meant he should stay put, and then crept toward the closed door. He wasn’t as light of foot as he had been earlier, but that was no surprise. Adrenaline had supercharged him, and shock and trauma had mixed with it to form a heady cocktail that had him shaking and breaking out in sudden sweats.

  He was at the bathroom door. Reached out for the doorknob.

  Locked.

  He knocked on the door. It was almost ridiculous. Knocking in this situation. What was he expecting his wife to do, say, “Hold on, I’ve just got to wash the blood off my hands and I’ll be right out?”

  But he stood there. Waited. And knocked again.

  “Kari?” he heard someone say, and almost scolded Matthew for making noise before he realized that he was the one who had said it. And the only reason he did realize it was because he heard the same voice speak again, and felt his mouth moving at the same time. “Kari, what’s going on?”

  There was no answer. And how could there be? What possible answer would explain how fifteen years of a perfect marriage had disintegrated in mere seconds?

  But he asked it anyway. He had to ask. Had to know.

  Silence drew a dark curtain across the hall. It was itself almost a living thing, another beast that had somehow invaded these previously safe halls that had been hallowed by love and sanctified by happiness. He hit the door again.

  “Kari!”

  This time there was a response. Not words, but the heavy crash of thick glass breaking. For a moment that made absolutely no sense to Shane. The only window in the bathroom was perhaps six inches to a side, and was made of thick acrylic. The sound that should have come out was if anything a dry crack, not the violent shearing he had just heard.

  What are you do –

  Then the thought stopped half-formed in his mind as he realized what was happening in the room beyond the door. Knew, though he did not know how he could know. Indeed, on a night where reason had ceased to exist, where insanity had been crowned king of this world, could anyone know anything?

  But he did know. And didn’t hesitate to act.

  A gasp came from inside the bathroom, even as Shane drew up his foot and kicked straight out, slamming his heel into the door just below the knob.

  He vaguely heard movement nearby, and knew that the kids were there. Ella had her arms wrapped around Matthew, who stood beside her, both of them forcing back sobs.

  “Kari,” he screamed, and kicked again. “Kari!” Another kick. The door started to splinter, sounds of wood disintegrating. “Kari Kari Kari Kari!” he screamed, with another kick each time. He twisted his ankle on the fifth kick. Heat exploded through the outside of his foot and he knew without a doubt that he had just broken a bone.

  He didn’t care. Kept kicking.

  Slam, crackle, crunch.

  The door came down.

  He had a glimpse, just the barest flash of what was in the bathroom.

  The broken glass of the medicine cabinet, half of it still hanging to the edges of the casing, half of it on the floor around Kari’s legs.

  Swatches of red, still hot and spurting forth from severed veins.

  The kids, screaming behind him. Screaming and screaming and screaming forever.

  And a voice. Under it all. Barely more than a whisper.

  “The… chiillllldrennnnn….”

  ***

  Chapter 3:

  House

  ***

  A girl named Tracy Latimer lived in Canada.

  Today she lives nowhere.

  Her father killed her.

  Fathers are not okay immune either.

  I’m so tired.

  Shane’s head bounced back and forth on his shoulders like he was one of those plastic pooches some people stick to their dashboards, bobbleheaded dogs willing to look around forever. That never get tired.

  Shane didn’t have that kind of physical makeup. If only he did. If only he could weather the constant strain and struggle that had become everyday life.

  This is the last house, he told himself. The last house, and if it’s not the right one, I stop looking. We just stay where we are now and let the chips fall where they may.

  But even though spoken only in his mind, the words rang false. Loud and clear, but they were like a starter’s pistol, a flash of sound and fury, followed by nothing. Nothing real, at any rate. Just an ebbing echo of the past, ringing in your ears and in your mind.

  He would keep going. He had to. If he had to look at a thousand more houses, even while he kept on with… other things… he knew he would go and go and go until the car wore to ribbons of unmoving steel around him. It was the only way he could think of to save what was left of his family.

  His family.

  He flashed for a moment to that night, to the night.

  Blood on the walls. On Kari. On everything.

  The children rushing into the bathroom behind him, him trying to stop them from seeing but knowing that he couldn’t, that there was no way to stop some things from happening.

  The terrifying sound of Matthew’s shrieking.

  The even more terrifying sound of Ella’s silence.

  He gripped the steering wheel tighter, then began rubbing it quickly with his hands, as though he might somehow knead the memories out of his mind. It didn’t work. The memories stayed. But the harder he pushed his hands over the stiff plastic steering wheel, the rawer his palms became. And the rawer they became, the more discomfort it caused him.

  Shane kept pressing, kept moving his hands on the wheel, until he could feel friction blisters rising on his skin. They were agony.

  They were wonderful.

  They kept his mind on the pain of the moment, the kind of pain that would end in a minute or a month or a year. The kind of pain that would not, however, last forever.

  Anything that didn’t last forever must be good.

  He hadn’t always thought like that. One night in particular came to mind when eternity had seemed like the quintessence of perfection. A night when it rained.

  They were in the house –

  (not our house, though, never again our house because of what she tried to do there and what she did do there, that’s just a house now just a house and not a home not even in the museum of my memory)

  – and it was raining. Kari was asleep beside him. Still resting fitfully from the pain of a recent c-section. But alive and healthy, as was their new son, Matthew, who slept in a bassinette nearby.

  Kari sat up beside him, and a moment later little Matthew began to cry. Not loudly, but in the way they had learned meant it was time for another night-time feeding.

  How does she know when that’s going to happen? Shane thought. She always started moving just before the baby made a sound, always halfway to her feet before he let them know he was hungry.

  Shane pondered the question only a moment before he shrugged his shoulders mentally and concluded it must be a “mom thing.”

  Kari rose from the bed –

  (another “the” thing never “our bed” but “the bed” because
it was never “our bed” again even in his memory even after he took it out and burned it in a pit in the yard)

  – to feed the quietly crying infant. As always, Shane felt like he should get up and help. As always, he didn’t. He knew better.

  The first baby had been different. Then, he had “helped” every single time Ella needed a feeding. Meaning that he got up with Kari and stood there as she nursed the baby while drowsing on a gliding chair. Meaning he leaned on the doorframe as she got settled, her feet up on an ottoman and both ottoman and chair slipping back and forth with a gentle creak of hinges that he consistently forgot to oil. Meaning he didn’t actually help with a single damn thing, and all he accomplished was to ensure that instead of one tired and cranky person in the morning, there were two.

  He had finally learned. Had learned that if Kari needed him, she would call. If not, he would sleep – or at least try to.

  But for some reason, he didn’t sleep this time. He listened to the swish of cloth as Kari raised her night-time t-shirt up high enough to offer her breast to the hungry child. Listened as Matthew gurgled/sighed with contentment and then went silent.

  A moment later, the bed shifted as Kari returned to his side. But gently, gently. He realized she was moving slower than she usually did when getting into bed. Too slow for her to be simply trying not to wake him.

  Shane tensed for a moment, worried she might have hurt herself somehow. But no, she wasn’t hurt, she was just bringing baby Matthew into the bed with them. Feeding him there, and then probably letting him fall asleep beside her, as she did occasionally.

  The rain sounded beautiful, soft tapping that quickly sent him into a pleasant half-doze. He wasn’t fully asleep, but was more completely relaxed than he could remember being in his entire life.

  Even when lightning seared the room and was followed almost instantly by the echoing crack of thunder clapping right on top of them, even then he didn’t move. Just lay. Just was.

  A voice brought him closer to the surface of sleep, though he failed to completely break through to actual wakefulness.

  “Daddy?” said the then-eight-year-old Ella. “Daddy, I’m scared.”

  He still didn’t wake up all the way. His body knew what to do without bothering his mind about it, so without thinking Shane just threw back the covers and scooted a bit closer to Kari.

  Ella slipped into bed next to him in an instant, pulled her parents’ covers up tightly below her chin, and was almost instantly asleep.

  Or no, not asleep. She must have been in that waking-dreaming sense of relaxed unsleep that he was in, for when Shane reached out to touch her shoulder, she grabbed his hand in her own. She intertwined her delicate fingers tightly between his much larger ones, and held him fast.

  He didn’t have to leave his place of peace by opening his eyes to know – to feel – that Ella was smiling.

  Without thinking about it, Shane reached his other hand across Kari’s shoulders. Her back was to him, but his questing fingers soon touched the crown of Matthew’s head, felt the pulsing motion of his body as he suckled at Kari’s breast.

  Kari’s own hand lightly touched the top of his.

  He was in bed with his family. Touching and touched by all of them. Rain sang a quiet lullaby.

  This, he remembered thinking, is what Heaven – the real Heaven, not the angels sitting on clouds kind of heaven that we see on evangelist shows or Saturday cartoons – must be like. Touching your family. Cuddled together. Huddled together not for warmth but for love and peace, and staying that way forever, for all eternity.

  The rain sang on.

  Then the memory ended and Shane shook his head. Eternity was different now.

  Eternity wasn’t hopeful. It wasn’t soft rain and children under your hands. It wasn’t holding and cuddling.

  Eternity was a red-painted room in his mind, and children’s shrieks mingling with children’s silence.

  A sign leapt into sight ahead, appearing so suddenly that Shane could imagine it simply punching into existence from nothing in the instant he saw it. A singularity that coughed up not a big bang and a universe of danger, but instead a simple sign.

  Shane turned at the sign. The road he turned onto was hard-pack dirt, even more pitted than the lane he had just been traveling, but that was okay. He was almost to the end of his travels. Almost to the house.

  He hoped it was the one.

  Because he was tired. He couldn’t do this forever.

  That’s what he told himself, knowing it was a lie. He would do what had to be done, no matter how long it took.

  He glanced down at the seat beside him. The printouts of listings and pictures. All with red pen slashing through them. Some neatly crossed out, others scribbled into almost complete oblivion.

  Only one page remained unmarked.

  God, I hope this is it. I hope this is what I can make work.

  He noticed he wasn’t hoping for a place to live in, even in his mind. Just something that he could make work. He had stopped living long ago. Work was all that remained. Just work, because life had left him a year ago.

  A moment later, the house hove into view.

  His first impression was that the place was too old, too bowed down by decades of weather, too unkempt and unclean.

  Then he suddenly realized that it wasn’t any of those things. It was worn, but pleasantly so. Like a pair of old shoes that you know you will never throw away, because they perfectly understand your feet, and your feet understand the shoes perfectly in return. Not old, but broken in.

  The house was like that. Broken in. Life had happened here. It had left its mark – didn’t life always do that? – but the mark somehow just increased the attractiveness of the place.

  He pulled the car up to the house. The engine died with a sputtering cough before he even finished turning the ignition key to the off position. Shane sighed to himself. They used to own a nice little Japanese sedan. Nothing fancy, but fairly comfortable and it ran well.

  Just one more thing he had lost once upon a time, in a black night tinged with red.

  He opened the car door. It resisted him with a metallic groan, whatever balance its hinges might once have possessed now gone forever. He finally stopped pushing, in fact, and instead shot a foot out and just kicked the damn thing open.

  He unlimbered his body, cracking his back in order to quell the complaining knots and sore spots that had developed on his drive. He swung the door shut, and turned around to face the house.

  Before he could spend more than ten seconds eyeing the place, the screen door at the front of the house swung open with the dry screeee of a poorly-oiled tension spring.

  “Wellwellwell,” said the man who came out. That was what struck Shane first: that the man said it all as one word: “Wellwellwell.”

  Shane had never met Jonathan Cole before, just spoken to the realtor over the phone when he saw the listing for this place and decided it was worth taking a look. He had heard his voice, sure, but never pictured anything like what walked out of the house, speaking ten words as though they were one. Making “Glad you made it” into “Gladyamader.”

  Cole walked down the steps toward Shane, holding his hand out. The realtor had a happy smile that creased a well-tanned face. But unlike a lot of the tans that Shane had seen on other realtors in the past weeks and months, Cole’s seemed to be the real deal: color that was neither purchased in a tanning salon, nor acquired by peeling away a heavy burn and living with what remained. Cole’s tan was one that spoke of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors.

  And not just skiing or rollerblading or running, either. For one thing, Jonathan Cole was enormous. So big he had to both lower his head and slump his shoulders in order to walk through the house’s front door; so big that the sturdy steps that led to the porch groaned in muted pain under the bear-man’s footsteps. Shane couldn’t picture anything his size on rollerblades without the skates just exploding into their constituent quantum particles under the pre
ssure, possibly creating a nuclear blast.

  Nor could Shane envision Cole ever having to run anywhere for any reason: planet-sized masses didn’t run, they simply pulled in whatever they needed with the power of personal gravity.

  So the tan was neither the kind Ella would have called a fake-n-bake, nor the kind casual sportsmen enjoyed. It was a tan earned by someone who had spent most of life outdoors. A hunter, perhaps, or maybe a one-time farmer turned to real estate work as a change of pace. Either way, the man exuded solidity and a sense of timelessness.