Afterlife (21 page)

1

After Rick and Joe and dog left for the city again, Livy asked to talk to her in private. Julie went with her to her room, and Livy shut the door behind her.

“What’s up?” Julie asked.

“He came into my room last night,” Livy said. “Who?”

“Daddy.”

“Honey, it’s not Daddy. You know that.”

“It is,” Livy said. “But he told me you wouldn’t

believe me. He told me he was going to come for his family and that he loves all of us and not to cry.” “Livy, it was a dream you had.”

“Maybe,” Livy said, looking at her curiously as if she didn’t believe a word that her mother said.

“There’s nothing to be scared of. We have the burglar alarm. We have the NannyCam. Don’t be frightened by these dreams. You’re safe.”

“I’m not scared anymore,” Livy said. Then, she went to open her bedroom door again, and went down the hall to the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.

Julie sat down on Livy’s narrow bed and looked up at the NannyCam on the bookshelf by the door. She went to get the videotape from the previous night.

2

She fast-forwarded through the tape of the hallway NannyCam. Joe and Rick stumbled back and forth to the bathroom at the end of the hall. Matt got up to use it. And then, nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Empty hall. Bedroom doors either shut or slightly ajar.

And then, a movement through the hall.

Julie felt her heart leap into her throat. Adrenaline pumped through her veins. She paused it—looking to make sure that it wasn’t somehow Joe or Rick. That it was someone else.

It was a tall man with broad shoulders, but she couldn’t make out much else. It was like a dark shadow moving in the hallway, obscuring the nightlights as it went.

And then, it passed Livy’s bedroom.

It kept going down the hall.

Straight down the hall to Julie’s room, pushing the door open slightly.

Then, the shadow passed into her room.

It could not have been a shadow, she knew. It was someone. Some man.

Some stranger had gotten into her house and had gone into her bedroom.

And then the NannyCam’s videotape went to static as if it had shut off prematurely.

3

She checked the burglar alarm, made sure it was operational. Checked all windows. Double-checked the locks on the doors. Grilled both Matt and Livy when they got home from school in case there was any joke going on, but she didn’t tell them what she’d seen.

Then she asked Matt to move the wires and the videotape equipment for the NannyCam to her bedroom. They put one on her dresser, to the left of her bed, aimed for a shot of her entire bed. Then, the other one on the doorway. When Matt asked what it was about, she told him it was just an experiment to see when she snored because she had to see if it was sleep apnea or not. He didn’t quite get it, but he didn’t ask her too many more questions after that.

She couldn’t fall asleep that night until five a.m., because every time she started to close her eyes and drift off, she thought she heard a noise and woke up. She ended up sleeping all day, and then getting up that night to try it again.

She looked at the tapes of the first night, anyway. But there was nothing. It was too dark in her bedroom. She could just make out her sleeping form. Then it went to morning, and she fell asleep. Light came through her window. The clock’s display read: 6:20 a.m. Matt and Julie would probably be waking up. Nothing happened. The light came more fully up, and Matt came in to get her out of bed.

The next night, again, she had trouble sleeping. She took an Ambien, and did something she knew was stupid. She had a glass of the wine that Rick and Joe had left behind.
Sleeping aid and booze
, she thought when she watched the video later:
nice descent into pathetic, Julie.

That night, she had the dream of the dead man, again,
lifting her up, her legs around his waist as he pierced her, and she opened for him and he entered her deeply and she felt as if she had been plugged up, that she had no opening, and he took his fingers and pushed them into her mouth and she tasted his skin and in the dream she kept telling herself it was a nightmare and she had to wake up, she had to wake up right now!

She fast-forwarded the video, watched herself finish off the glass of wine and lie down.

And then, when the clock’s display read 3:00 a.m., a shadow moved into the room.

4

She could not see more than his dark form—his body was so much like Hut’s, it shocked her—but his face was darkness, and he came to her bedside, putting his face near hers. Then, he slowly slipped a hand beneath the covers and drew it back, exposing her in her night shirt. Then, he ran his hand down along her breast, squeezing lightly. She shivered as she watched it.

Slowly—it might’ve taken him a half-hour—he unbuttoned her top and unlaced her bottom, pulling them both off, while she slept through this, moving slightly.

When he had her naked he pressed his mouth against her forehead while his hands roamed down over her breasts, and then further down, between her legs. He pressed his hand down into her, and the sleeping Julie lifted her hips to him.

“Fuck,” Julie said aloud, watching this, not believing it, her mind spinning out of control.

Then, he brought his hand back up to her mouth, and pressed his fingers between her lips. Julie couldn’t quite see, but it looked like the sleeping Julie sucked at his hand. Then he went to her breasts, taking each nipple in his mouth. For the flicker of a second, she was sure that he was looking straight at the NannyCam lens, knowing that he was being watched.

Then he kissed down her navel and belly and went to her pubic hair. He moved around so that he was crouched over. He was naked. Had he taken his clothes off? She hadn’t been able to tell because of the darkness. His penis was hard and long and poised over her mouth as his face went between her legs.

Julie stopped the tape, freezing it. She felt as if she were having a heart attack. She felt as if she had been raped, but wasn’t sure if she could really believe what she was seeing. It was like this was a tape, not of her bedroom, but of her dreams, of what she experienced in them.

She hit “play,” and the tape continued.

The man’s head went between her legs and moved around in circles as he dipped and wiped his penis across her face. Then, sleeping Julie opened her mouth and took him inside her. His buttocks began pumping against her face while he lapped at her vagina.

Then, after minutes, he drew out of her mouth and sat up beside her on the bed. Looking straight at the NannyCam, he rolled her over on her stomach. He got down on all fours and began licking down her back, to her buttocks—as she had remembered from the dream—and then he pressed himself deep into her, and sleeping Julie cried out into the pillow, and he had his face next to her, against her ear, and she cried out again, and his buttocks pounded harder into sleeping Julie.

And then, the tape went to static.

1

She rewound the tape several times, and watched it slowly and quickly and backward in parts. She tried to get close to the Sony Trinitron to see if she could make out a face. At first, she’d felt horror at watching it, then she was fascinated and generally confused. She cried on one viewing of it, because she was sure that it was a rape, but she didn’t understand how it could be rape because she looked as if she were going along with it. After all, although her eyes seemed closed—she couldn’t quite tell—it looked like the sleeping Julie opened her mouth on command for him. It looked like the sleeping Julie was fine with rolling over. There was no struggle. Worse, she had begun to think of the man as Hut, although their sex life was not nearly as exotic as the mating she saw on the video.

Watching it, she grew increasingly angry, and finally turned it off, and drew the tape out. She called up Mel and told her about it, and Mel suggested that she call the police. “What if it’s the man who killed Hut?” Mel asked. “What if he somehow drugged you?”

“With a
sleeping pill
? A mild one at that?” “You never know how this stuff works,” Mel said. Then she regaled Julie with the story of a teenaged daughter of a friend who was drugged with something called the date rape drug and was conscious through the whole horrible ordeal. But the family brought charges, and the boy responsible was behind bars. Then, Mel interrupted herself, “I’ll be over in half an hour.”

Mel came by and Julie reluctantly popped the video into the machine and pushed play on the remote control. When the video played, everything was the same as before—with the clock reading three a.m.—but there was no dark figure coming into the room at all. Instead, Julie threw off the covers and began taking her nightclothes off. Once she was naked, she began stroking her nipples. Then, she lifted her left hand and reached with it down between her legs.

“Oh my God,” Julie said, and turned off the tape.

Mel sat there and stared for a few seconds at the television screen. She looked over at Julie.

“Mel, I swear to God, that is not what was on the tape before.”

Mel offered up a warm look, and she looked too much like their mother at that moment. “Julie? What’s going on?”

“That was not what I saw. I saw a man. I saw…Hut,” she said it aloud, finally. Something in her mind cleared. “I slept through it last night. But I know I saw him.”

“You know what we both just saw on that tape,” Mel said in a too-sympathetic tone. “Why would you tape yourself like that?”

“Mel,” she said. “You know I’d never do that.”

“All I know is I didn’t see Hut in it, Julie. Hut is dead. He was murdered. I know that’s hard to face. To look at. And I love you. You’re my sister. We’re best friends. I have nothing against anyone getting their jollies from innocent stuff, but…I didn’t expect this. Are you doing okay? Is that therapist even helping you through all this? I’ve seen the house. I know it’s a lot to keep up with, but have you looked around? I can only come over and help so much, Julie,” Mel said, her hand laid gently on Julie’s arm.

2

Mel told her to rest, that she’d take the kids for a few days, but bring them over after supper so she could get some peace and do whatever it was that “will make you whole again.” She lectured her that she needed to somehow face herself, deal with life as it was, “the hand that the fates dealt.” Mel talked a blue streak about responsibility and shirking and getting back on your feet and her work at the hospital and planning on the future happening even if Julie wanted to remain behind, and it just went on and on. Julie listened, nodded at the appropriate times, but began to resent Mel—resent her family—resent Hut and his death and the cops who couldn’t catch the guy who’d killed him and a few others and even Rick and Joe and their oh-so-perfect coupledom and finally she just told Mel to leave, that she was getting a headache and they could talk about this later.

Then Julie wandered the house, room to room, looking at it in a way she hadn’t in a long time. There was dust and dirt where the kids had brought it in from outside. Hadn’t she cleaned up for Joe and Rick? Perhaps she’d been preoccupied. Then the kitchen, with dishes and glasses piled in the sink, and three dirty saucepans on the stove, with some stains around the counter, and empty soda cans near the toaster. That wasn’t too bad. She wasn’t much of a housekeeper, but she hadn’t even called in the cleaning service in weeks to help out. She saw the piles of clothes on the washing machine, and more of them as she passed the kids’ rooms—in the corner of Livy’s room, her T-shirts and shorts from the summer in a heap. The whole house seemed dull and gray.

She went into her bedroom and for the first time felt as if it were stuffy. She went to open the windows, and then saw her own clothes on the other side of her bed. In her bathroom, the medicine cabinet’s mirror was still broken. She hadn’t even thought of going to Home Depot to get another one. And she had done so little shopping in the past week that she wasn’t even sure if the kids had snacks or if they had what they needed for the first weeks of the school year. Mel had taken up the slack, and she supposed Matt had done some of it, too.

How could she have had friends over with the house in that condition? What was wrong with her? She looked at her cracked image in the mirror and wondered what it was that made her see a man who looked in the dark very much like Hut, having sex with her while she slept, forcing himself into her and against her body, and yet, somehow seeing a video of herself masturbating? What had brought her to this, she wondered.
Where am I in all this?

She lay down on the bed, but could not stop looking over at the NannyCam’s metal eye, watching her.

How can someone put an image in my head like that? Make me see it on a video that changed when someone else saw it?

She got up and tried calling her mother, but couldn’t. Next, she tried calling Michael Diamond’s office, but tracking him down was next to impossible.

Julie couldn’t bring herself to watch the tape again until after more wine. She watched it again, and this time, it was exactly as she’d seen it with her sister: she was masturbating, alone in bed, and the room seemed to have more moonlight in it, for she could tell that her eyes were not closed. The video itself didn’t seem that fuzzy. They were open. She felt disgusted with her own body, watching this. She felt as if a nerve pinched inside her mind as she tried to make sense out of this—out of the dreams, out of the tapes, out of seeing things that weren’t there. Seeing things that could not be there.

She had two choices: she was either losing her mind, or this was something else.

3

Her laptop open on her bed, she connected the cable and went online. She pulled up some search engines—Google and Hotbot and Yahoo—and began searching for the terms “school,” “psychic,” “remote viewing” and “1977,” hoping this would come up with something. In each case, there were pages upon pages of listings, and she scrolled up and down the screen, taking a stab at each listing or mention. None of it seemed to point to anything helpful.