Dragged into Darkness (21 page)

Having prodded and poked at the meal she wouldn’t eat, Tammy sought distraction by staring out of her bedroom window.  She longed for the world outside but how long would a lone twelve-year-old last?  Probably longer than if she stayed, she thought.

She shivered, sensing something was skewed.  Darkness shifted in the night.  It had shape and it didn’t.  It was there and it wasn’t.  Every time she thought she saw it, it popped up somewhere different.  She fixated on the delusion but it moved between blinks.  She forced her eyes to remain open and was rewarded.

An old man whose age was indeterminable slithered towards her home.  He could be either sixty-five or five hundred and sixty-five.  It was impossible to tell, for he was only there for a moment.  Looking up, he realized Tammy could see him.  He grimaced and became a shimmering haze before he disappeared again.  It was as if he was a sheet of paper and she kept seeing him edge on.  

Tammy spotted him again, opening the gate to her house, before disappearing again.  Her desperate hands pressed the glass, pleading for the man to reappear.   He wasn’t about to let her see him again and she knew it.  Then the horror struck her.  He was coming into the house.  She leapt up from her window seat and crashed into her mother standing directly behind her.

“You saw him, didn’t you?”

Tammy shook her head.

Ginny cocked her head to one side.  “C’mon, don’t lie.”

“What does…h…he
want
?”  Tammy stammered.

“His eternal love…me.”

“What about dad?”

“What about him?”

Tammy’s mouth was open and ready to scream for her father, but her mother clamped a hand over it. 

“It wouldn’t be a good idea to warn him.  It’ll only make things more…” Ginny paused, searching for the right word,
then
she sneered. 
“More painful.”

Downstairs, a window broke.

“Shall we watch?” Ginny asked.

She didn’t wait for an answer and dragged Tammy over to the banister overlooking the living room.  The old man was there.  He shimmered like a heat haze.  Tammy’s dad raced to confront the intruder. 

“Who the hell are you?” her father demanded.  He spotted his wife and daughter upstairs.  “You two stay put.”

“Wouldn’t dream of interfering,” Ginny oozed.

John
Testaverde
didn’t know what to make of that.  Tammy had an idea, but her dad didn’t have time to ponder further.  The old man pounced.  He streaked across the room in a blaze of white light.  Tammy’s father was driven to the ground, the old man straddling him.  Her father threw a fist.  The old man blocked it, swallowing his hand in his and crushing it.   Tammy’s father yelped.  The old man silenced the cries with a vicious backhand that whipped her father’s head to breaking point.

Tammy screamed.  Ginny clamped a hand over her mouth.

“Shut it.  My love is trying to work.”

The old man raised his hand high and held it flat like a knife.  He shimmered for an instant and his hand glowed white.  The air crackled with its energy.   His hand slashed through the air and cleaved Tammy’s father’s chest open.

“No!” Tammy screamed.

“Hush now, baby.  It’s nearly done.”

Tammy sobbed.  Ginny released her and she slumped to the floor.

The old man shimmered.  There seemed to be no end to it.  He flickered like a flame, his body melting, dissolving into light.  When he became molten, he flowed into Tammy’s father’s mortal wound.   When the old man was inside John
Testaverde
, his essence sealed the wound.

Ginny stroked Tammy’s hair.  “You won’t mind so much once you get used to the idea.”

But Tammy didn’t get used to the idea.  Two weeks had passed since her father had become a vehicle for another being.  Her imposter parents, the shape shifting lovers, didn’t have to pretend anymore.  Not to anyone inside the
Testaverde
household anyway.   Everyone could be themselves.  Her mom went from the perfect mother to what she really was—a mummified head rooted to a decapitated corpse.  Her new dad flickered between her gutted father and the old man.  When they were together, they
merged
as one in a ball of molten light.  Tammy cried and tortured herself with what she should have done.  Teachers noticed how gaunt she had become.  They asked if everything was okay at home.  “Perfect,” she answered. 

That was the problem.  Anybody watching from the outside witnessed the perfect family.  Ginny was the doting mother and Tammy’s father strove to make something of himself.  He was manager of the local
Kragen’s
, now.  It was everything Tammy had wished for, but nothing she’d bargained for. 

Tammy stared at her home cooked dinner and hers alone.  She didn’t want to witness her false parents drawing sustenance from living things.  They only had to touch a defenseless animal and its will to live disappeared, leaving a shriveled husk.  One by one, the kittens stopped mewing.  She wished her parents would eat elsewhere.

“Why don’t you do that to me?” Tammy asked.  “You don’t need me.”

“Don’t sell yourself cheap.  We owe everything to you.  We wouldn’t be together if it hadn’t been for your wish.”  Ginny clasped her lover’s hand.  Their hands glowed on contact.  “This is our way of thanking you.”

“You should be turning cartwheels,” her father said.

“I’m not, so what’s that tell you?”

Ginny grinned.  “Spoken like a true teenager.”

This was making her puke.  “Can I be excused?”

“If you’re finished,” Ginny said.

Tammy didn’t wait to listen to the rest of the speech.  She slid the chair back, screeching on the hardwood. 

“Tammy,” her father moaned.  “Mind the floor.”

“Where are you going?” Ginny asked in that ever-optimistic tone.

“Out.”
  She opened the door and was met by the rumble of thunder.

“Don’t you want to take a coat?”

Tammy slammed the door.

She didn’t care that she was soaked through.  It wasn’t important.  Her cave was.  It was the only sanctuary she knew.  The tainted world ended at its entrance.  She ducked inside.

The cave had changed complexion since the head had taken over.  The mementos and keepsakes had been exchanged for new ones.  Not as childish as they once were, but nevertheless just as important to Tammy as any Barbie or boy band poster.  The church candles were long since melted to the quick.  A simple flashlight was all that was needed.  Pretty things were for the innocent.  Innocence was a street Tammy would never find again. 

She stared at the Polaroid she had taken of her new parents, pinned to the cave wall with razorblades.  It was about time she showed them the keepsakes that made her happy.  She gathered them together.

As she stepped from the cave, dirt fell from the rooftop.  Within seconds the cave collapsed, swallowing itself.  It had been corroding for weeks.  Tammy had decided that this was her last visit.  After tonight, she would have no further use for it. 
Strange that the cave chose to die then.
  It was as if it knew it was the end.

Tammy didn’t go inside her home right away.  She stood on the porch surveying the suburban nightmare. 
Rain
splatted
on the windowpane, distorting the distortions inside.
  They were a ball of light again, floating and rotating in the middle of the living room.  They couldn’t do a thing when they were like that.   It was now or never.

Now, Tammy decided.

She burst into the house, unsheathing the carving knife from her belt.  There was no fear.  Success or failure didn’t matter.  Action counted.  The swirling light was naked and uncaring.  Tammy drove the knife into the heart of the glow.

She half expected the knife to pass straight through it.  It didn’t.  Although it didn’t look like it, the light was a solid mass.  The knife was buried up to its hilt in the glow.  The light flickered and sheared in two, the pieces crashing to the floor.  Severed, the light faded quickly.  With its fading energy it lost integrity, changing back into her parents. 

Ginny was dazed.  Her father writhed, the knife a hideous dorsal fin.  Tammy wasn’t about to give them time to recover.  She squirted them
with a
Nerf water cannon stolen from a neighbor’s yard.  Instead of water, gasoline splashed the parent-murderers.  Tammy didn’t stop pumping until the pistol was dry retching.

“What have you done?” Ginny screamed, gas burning her eyes. 

“I’m doing what I should have done ages ago. 
Before you took my dad.”

Her father groaned.  Desperate fingers struggled to find the blade.  Tammy pointed it out for him by stamping on the knife’s butt.  He screamed at the discovery.

“You two are bad parents.  I’d rather have no parents than parents like you.”

Ignited by anger, Ginny leapt.  “You think you can stop us?”

Tammy anticipated her mother’s move.  She took a step back and swung the hatchet she’d brought for just this occasion.  The axe, honed every day for a week, sliced through Ginny’s neck like cream cheese.  The head was separated from her mother.  Just the way it should be.  Her body flopped on top of her phony father.

“Is that the best you can do?” the head demanded.

Tammy knew the head spoke hollow words.  Once severed from her mother the head was dead again.  Before it could pour scorn, it shrank to its former self, decaying while it shrank.

“Let’s finish this thing,” Tammy murmured.  She pulled out a Zippo lighter, lit it and dropped it on her parents. 

They erupted.   The old man tried to escape from her father but the flames beat him and he remained trapped inside.   It was pleasure to see them burn.

The head, unable to speak, screamed obscenities.  It was pathetic.  Tammy could only laugh.  And laugh.  She snatched up the head and ran with it.  Down to the river where it all began and where it would all end.  She was okay.  It was over.  Life would start anew. 

Rain peppered her face, but she didn’t care.  She was happy and couldn’t stop laughing. 
Except, it wasn’t her laugh.
  It was the laughter of the demented, the insane.  She hoped it was a just phase she was going through.  Somehow, she didn’t think it was.

Steam swirled in the bathroom and Patrick wiped the condensation from the mirror to see his reflection.  Although the temperature was balmy, he was shivering.  The razor slipped from between his trembling fingers.  It wasn’t the flu or malaria causing the shakes.  It was the reflection—the reflection of a face in the mirror that wasn’t his.

The face was pressed into the fabric of the shower curtain.  The contorted features stretched the material to breaking point until every characteristic of the man’s face could be seen.  The reflected face dissolved as fresh condensation consumed the mirror.

Patrick knew no one was in the bathroom with him.  He lived alone.  The bathroom had no windows.  No one could be playing a joke.

Too afraid to turn, too afraid to run, too curious to ignore, Patrick wiped the mirror clean again.  The face was still there and this time it wasn’t alone.  A woman’s face joined the man’s.  Disembodied arms grew out of the plastic to join their disembodied heads.  Their arms and faces pleaded.  They needed his help.  He turned towards them.

The plastic curtain hadn’t molded itself to the bodies behind it.  The curtain itself was the faces and limbs.  Patrick’s shower curtain was alive.  It was too much to take.  It was all his feeble legs could do to back away from the living shower curtain.