314 Book 2 (15 page)

Outside of Widowsfield

“
Why are you running the water again?” asked Amanda Harper.

Alma sunk beneath the water in the hotel bathtub. Her backside rubbed against the plastic grips stuck to the bottom that had been put there to keep patrons from slipping and having
a reason to sue the owners. This wasn’t the type of hotel that could afford lawsuits.

Alma had used a full bottle of the miniature shampoo that was set on the si
nk to create bubbles in the tub – it didn’t work well, and she wondered if the bottle had been half filled with water, the same way her mother did at home.

Being under water was the easiest way for Alma to drown out the world around her. It felt like a different world, where her heartbeat dominated her existence, overcome only by the squeak of her hands against the smooth sides and the roar of the faucet as she let it run.

“Alma.” Her mother’s voice was dulled by the water, but still audible. “Alma Harper, I told you not to fill the tub all the way up.”

Amanda turned off the tap and then reached under the frothy bubbles to pull her daughter
up. Alma kept her eyes shut and gasped as she emerged from the tub. Amanda wiped the bubbles from the girl’s eyes. “Look at me,” said Amanda.

“No, I’ve got soap on my face,” said Alma.

“I wiped it off.”

“No, I need a towel,” said Alma.

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” said Amanda as she pulled a folded towel off the rack above the toilet. “Here.” She wiped her daughter’s eyes.

The towel was
thin, rough, and stank of bleach.

“Why are you putting more water in the tub?” asked Amanda. “I thought I told you we were trying to get
a move on.”

Alma looked up at her mother and said, “I don’t want to go.”

“We’ve been over this.” Amanda spread the towel out on the floor in place of a bath matt and then got another one. She was topless, wearing only her bra and a pair of jeans, and her silver necklace dangled from her neck. It was a simple chain meant to keep charms on, but Amanda only had two on it: a pair of sneakers meant to symbolize her lost son, and a slice of pie.

“I’m not going to remember,” said Alma.

“Oh yes you will,” said Amanda, her calm demeanor only a mask for her furious determination. “I know the secret now, baby. I’ve got the key.” She held out the towel for her daughter, as if welcoming the girl into an embrace.

Alma reluctantly stepped out of the tub. Her mother wrapped the towel around her tightly and began rubbing it to dry Alma off. The
ten-year-old felt trapped as her mother dried her, like a fly in a web being wrapped by the spider.

Amanda led h
er daughter into the other room where they had slept on a single, small bed the night before. The hotel stank of cigarettes, and the carpet felt dirty on Alma’s wet feet.

“Okay, let me see your hands,” said Amanda.

Alma complied, revealing the symbol for pi on both of her palms. The bath had lightened the permanent marker.

“Let’s go ahead and do those over again,” said Amanda as she reached for her purse to get the marker.

“No, Mom,” said Alma as she pulled her hands away. “Can’t we just forget about all this? Can’t we just go home?”

“No,” said Amanda as if offended. “Absolutely not. Don’t you want to save your brother? Don’t you miss Ben?”

“I don’t know him, Mom. I told you that. How many times do I have to tell you? I don’t remember…”

Amanda slapped Alma, and immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry, baby, but you know I don’t like it when you talk bad about your brother. He meant the world to me, Alma. He meant everything.”

“Don’t I mean anything?”

Amanda glowered at the child. “Don’t you dare.”

“What?”

“Don’t you dare make me out to be the bad guy.”

“Mom, I’m not…”

“Don’t you dare!” She grabbed her daughter’s wrist and pulled the child forward. “Now open your hand before I do it for you.”

Alma kept her fingers clenched into a fist, refusing to let her mother write the symbol or the numbers down. “No!”

“You think you can fight me on this?” asked Amanda. She dragged Alma to the side of the bed and then ripped the wet towel away. Amanda smacked her daughter’s bottom and then forced her head down to the bed before doing it again. “You’re making me do this, Alma.” Amanda emptied the contents of the purse and dug out the permanent marker.

“Mom, no!” Alma pleaded and struggled, but Amanda slammed the felt tip of the marker into the child’s back as if it were a knife. Then she started to write the numbers all over her daughter’s bare flesh, stabbing the tip into her between each sequence.

314

Stab

314

Stab

314

Stab

It was as if a murderer was taking the time between attacks to write a message on
her victim.

She flipped Alma onto her back as the child screamed and kicked. Amanda crawled over the girl and
started to write the numbers on her chest and stomach. The marker kept slipping as Alma struggled, contorting the numbers as Amanda continued to write.

Amanda finally relented, and backed away from the bed. She stared at her nude, weeping daughter. The ten-year-old was decorated with that awful number, a sight as equally evocative as the symbol that Amanda was obsessed with. Amanda
seemed devoid of shame.

She promised that this
would lead them to Ben.

She promised that this
was the answer.

“If you stop fighting me,” said Amanda Harper, “then you’ll stop getting hurt.”

“I hate you!” Alma crawled off the bed and ran to the bathroom where she slammed the door.

Amanda Harper started to draw the symbol for pi on her own arm, followed by the number 314. She continued on down the length of her forearm, ending the string of numbers and symbols at the tip of her finger. Then she started over, a new line of symbols and numbers leading to the tip of the next finger, all while humming the lullaby she used to sing to Ben.

Alma surveyed the graffiti her mother had scrawled on her. The numbers covered her chest, arms, neck, and back. Alma took a small, plain, white bar of soap out of its generic wrapper and started to wash herself in a useless attempt to clean off the fresh marks. She got a washrag out of the tub and wet it beneath the sink’s tap as she scrubbed herself, but her skin turned red and stung before the marks showed any sign of washing away.

“You can’t wash it off,” said Amanda from the other room. “It’s permanent.”
Then she added, as if it gave her pleasure, “It lasts forever.”

Alma stared at the numbers, reflected backwards in the mirror, and understood that she’d never be rid of them. Even when these marks finally faded, they would never truly leave.

It was March 14th, and they were headed back into Widowsfield.

Alma heard her mother crying in the other room. Then she heard her singing to Ben before saying, “I’m coming, baby.”

Alma went to the door and listened as her mother spoke to herself in the mirror. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get you out, even if it kills me.”

Alma heard the squeak of the felt tip marker as Amanda scribbled on the mirror.

The people in Widowsfield suffered a thousand times, perhaps more. I was never able to get a true idea of how many divergent time lines had sprouted from that one fracture.
I could never draw that many memories. The Watcher in the Walls was slow and methodical, using timelines to lie just a little at first; focusing only on one person until his altered reality trapped them in a maze of their own memories. That’s how he convinced people to do such awful things to one another. Slowly over time, anyone can be driven insane. And when he sapped one person of all the fear they could muster, he moved on to the next, leaving his past exploits for The Skeleton Man to enjoy. He trusted The Skeleton Man to repeat the same horrors, and to never stray from the lies that had already been told.

Then
The Skeleton Man slipped away from the script, and he hid from the Watcher in his new, altered timelines. That’s where he would begin to focus on one person at a time, sometimes even playing in their own nightmares instead of on the streets of Widowsfield, all while leaving the rest of the town to function as if no horrors had ever befallen that place. It would’ve been a nice respite for the tortured souls, except The Skeleton Man had accidentally opened a pathway for other vengeful creatures to roam the streets, free of the Watcher’s wires.

Lost in Widowsfield

Jacker stepped out of the fog and into a familiar alley. It was late, but the city lived by streetlight. Steam rose from the gutter, a result of the dryers in a nearby laundry mat, and Jacker was reminded of the time he spent in New York, where it seemed all the sewers smoked that way.

“I see you,” said Kyle, the boy that Jacker had come for. He was leaning against the wall, beside the back entrance to the grocery store. This was where the trucks pulled up to offload their supplies. A wider alley with space to allow trucks to back up would’ve been ideal, but being in the middle of the city required concessions when it came to space. This small market was once a sporting goods store, and not well equipped
for frequent grocery delivery.

Jacker’
s girlfriend, Debbie, complained about the truck’s exhaust wafting into the store. She hated working here, but Jacker’s recent job review hadn’t gone well, and he was refused his usual annual raise, which meant they needed Debbie to keep her job here. It wasn’t long after his poor review that Debbie started sleeping with Kyle.

“You can’t trust the bitch,” said Kyle before taking a long drag. The tip of the cigarette smoldered like a cigar, producing more smoke than seemed natural.

“Watch your mouth,” said Jacker as he approached.

“I’m serious, Hank.”

“Don’t you talk about Debbie like that.”

“I’m not talking about Debbie.” Kyle flipped his long blonde hair back and Jacker saw a hole on his jaw, as if he usually wore an odd piercing that he’d since taken out.

Jacker paused at the bottom of the short staircase that Kyle was standing on. He was across the alley from the gutter that the steam came from, but he could still feel its warmth. Oddly, it didn’t smell of detergent or fabric softener. Instead, it had the distinct odor of meth.

Jacker was very familiar with all types of drugs, having tried nearly all of them before settling on heroin as his escape of choice. Meth, when free of impurities, has
very little odor. However, it’s commonly laced with things that cause the smoke to stink like an oven set to self-clean.

“Are you paying attention?” asked Kyle. He wasn’t holding a cigarette anymore, but a glass pipe.

Jacker saw the blackened bulb at the end of the pipe’s stem, a flower of black streaks rising from the bottom, painted there by a lighter. Jacker’s mouth watered, an odd symptom of his disease that no one else he’d ever met seemed to share. Whenever he saw a glass pipe, he salivated as if staring at braised beef.

Kyle offered the pipe to Jacker.

“I’ll help you,” said Kyle.

“No,” said Jacker. “I shouldn’t.”

“Cool, man,” said Kyle. “No pressure. Way I see it, we all have a responsibility to make ourselves happy, right? I get that we have to do no harm, but what the fuck does it matter if we toke? It’s our lungs, right? Am I right?”

Jacker looked at the pipe, and then at Kyle. He’d come here to confront the little bastard about sleeping with Debbie, but now his anger had abated, replaced by
an intense desire for what Kyle offered.

Debbie had weathered Jacker’s addiction. She’d been there to help him during his darkest moments, and was one of the reasons Jacker quit in the first place. Her betrayal had been the ideal excuse to fall back into old habits, and smoking meth with the man she’d been sleeping with felt
almost poetic.

“Is this what you do?” asked Kyle as he looked at the pipe. “It’s all I’m familiar with.”

“I do lots of stuff,” said Jacker, dazed. It was as if he were a child at the feet of the pied piper.

“Pleasure,” said Kyle, as if participating in a different conversation. It was a bizarre interjection.

“What?”

“And pain,” said Kyle with a quick frown. “We’re all bound up in the fog. Let’s be adults.”

“I don’t understand,” said Jacker.

“Have a seat with me
,” said Kyle as he sat on the top step.

“I’m here to fight,” said Jacker as if embarrassed or apologizing.

“I know, but we’re past all that. You can trust me, Hank.”

Jacker was better known by his nickname, only going by his given name when visiting his parents. He sat down on the step below Kyle, although his size made them nearly equal height.