Ghosts of Eden (19 page)

That same night, Lawrence Tasker was outside locking up the Bradbury Science Museum for the night when movement from across the street caught his eye. He thought he saw a man in a billowing lab coat—white as bone in the moonlight—suddenly transform into a hideously large raccoon and scurry into the bushes. Lawrence rubbed his tired eyes: clearly he’d been working too much.

Across town, in the warm safety of his upstairs room, fourth-grader Zach Morgan was playing a violent video game and trying not to think about the man he saw in the woods the other day, the one with the wide-brimmed hat, and that hideous laugh, loud and wet, escaping a mouth that seemed too large for the man’s face.

A few days later, Martin Fisher, a grown man who has lived his entire life in Los Alamos and now works as a particle physicist at the national labs, awakened suddenly from the worst dream of his entire life, remembering that day, when he was just a kid, and he’d thrown the rock that had finally killed the strange purple man he and his friends had found at the golf course—utter hopelessness swimming in those purple eyes before they glassed over forever.

And Peter Ramsey was out for his morning jog up the mountain roads when he saw a gray car careen around the corner, swerve past him, and tumble over the side of the road and down into the ravine. He ran across the street, but when he looked over the edge, there was no sign of the car, only the trees and the undisturbed groundcover of pine needles. He continued his run, shaking his head. For a second there, he thought he saw the terrified faces of his old high school buddies Greg and Catherine, but that wasn’t possible: they’d both died in an accident, years ago in high school.

And Leslie Barnes heard a knock at the door in the middle of the afternoon and when she opened her door the quiet street she’d known her entire adult life, that she’d always felt was safe, that she’d raised all four of her children on, wasn’t there, and the dark jungle seemed to close in on her and she saw animal faces leering from the trees and she screamed and slammed the door shut.

And Rachel Parker hurried from Starbucks to meet the alluring man with the wide-brimmed hat in a corner behind the high school:

“I’m so happy you made it.”

“I had to see you again.”

“Of course.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Make out with me?”

“Of course. But first you have to promise to stop going to the cave behind the Methodist church.”

“But that’s where me and some of my friends keep our stash.”

“Would you like to make out with me or not?”

“Okay… oh… oh… Ah!”

And then it rained an entire morning in mid-July, and it turned to snow in the afternoon. And Michael McCarthy slipped on his letterman jacket, checked his hair in the mirror, and left his house. He got in his car, cranked the stereo, and drove down the street, around the corner, and parked behind the Methodist Church. He looked around to make sure no one was looking, and then sauntered into the woods. He followed the path down to where a narrow jut of rock led around a crevasse that dropped down into where water had carved a sharp opening and around to where a small natural cave loomed from the rock and found Rachel Parker’s body lying face down at the back of the cave. He shook her and slapped her hands and felt her wrists, but she was cold and motionless, and when he turned her over, and saw the expression on her face, he backed away so quickly, he nearly dropped into the ravine himself.

They found Peter Jeffrey’s body at the bottom of the same ravine. Part of his cheek had been eaten by an animal, but his facial expression, even after all this time, remained mostly intact. The police refused to allow the parents to see the body.

THE GODGAME

“In a fever I experienced a reality within a reality, days and weeks seemed to pass, until the fever ebbed and I shifted in and out of differing worlds…”

—Brian Greene, author of
The Elegant Universe

ONE

Kayla wasn’t in her room. Garty had looked everywhere. He needed to find her because he’d rather they not stay in their psychopath uncle’s house any longer than they had to.

The door at the very end of the hall was open. Could she be up there? Hopefully their uncle hadn’t called her up to watch him slaughter more animals needlessly. Sick fuck. He took the stairs two at a time.

At the top of the stairs, there was another door, this one closed. He reached out and turned the knob, it clicked, and the door slid open smoothly and soundlessly.

What a mess. He knew now what all those crashing sounds had been: Uncle Xander had been destroying his lab. “Crazy fucker,” he said to himself. Everything had been destroyed and piled roughly in the center of the small room. But there was no sign of Kayla, or his uncle. He stepped carefully around the pile of junk and up to the door at the other side of the room. Given the dimensions of the house, it couldn’t be much larger than a broom closet, but he thought he better check it anyway.

As soon as he touched the knob he felt a rush of energy pour through him, the door swung open, nearly knocking him over, and he was forced to shut his eyes against a rush of air that swept into the room. He was assaulted by a strangely synthetic smell, the stench of wet paint and brand new carpeting, of plastics still soft and recently molded. The breeze stopped as the air pressure settled. He brushed sand and grit from his face and opened his eyes: there was another small room before him, dark and plain, with a brown-carpeted floor. He stepped into the room.

It was perhaps ten feet by ten feet with the only furnishing in the room being a single unassuming bed pushed against one wall. The walls were a smooth unblemished manila color. A single bare electric bulb hung from the ceiling by a wire, providing the room’s only illumination. On the other side of the room, there was another door. He opened it.

He found himself in something like a waiting room. There were two plain couches, set up perpendicular to each other, with a small wooden coffee table between them. Above the table, hung a bare light bulb by a wire. An extravagant staircase led up to another floor of rooms.

Garty looked around. He knew this wasn’t possible—he’d seen the size of the third floor from the outside of the house—but here he was. He swallowed.

“Kayla?” he called. “Kayla? You there?”

This was bullshit.

He began up the staircase. It curved, came to a small landing, then continued. There was a hallway lined with doors. He walked down to the first door, opened it, peered inside. It was another ten by ten room with only a single bed. He tried the next room: the same. Then the next: identical. What the fuck was going on? His heart began to lurch and he could hear the rasp of his accelerated breathing. He ran down the hallway. “Kayla! Hey! Where are you!”

Another staircase, spiraling upwards. He took the steps two and three at a time. Another hallway, the first room: identical. The second: the same. The third…something stirred in the bed… It was soft and pink, like malformed flesh, and it gasped at him, trying to speak, but as soon as Garty saw it he slammed the door and went to the next room, telling himself there’d been nothing. And he was right. In the next room: nothing. The one after that: empty. He gave up looking in the rooms and ran to the next staircase, bolting upwards. He could feel an insane grin forming on his face. “Kayla? Kayla!”

He was halfway down the next hallway before he tried another door. He could feel the house’s presence over him, floor after floor of empty rooms. How many? It was impossible to know, the stairs spiraling up and up, the rooms gradually becoming darker and darker. Something was in the bed, pale and lumpish. He could see the curve of an ear, and then the bubbling opening of a mouth.

He slammed the door and ran up another staircase and to another floor. What was he doing? Where was he going? The next door he tried revealed a woman sitting on the bed with straight black hair that fell over her knees and nearly touched the floor. Her face was fully formed, but pink and free of wrinkles and blemishes. She turned her head to look at him and she was familiar to him somehow. When she stood, naked and wobbly, a choked wail nearly escaped him and he slammed the door and kept going.

“Oh, fuck. What the fuck. Kayla! Kayla, where are you!” He tripped on the next set of stairs and fell face-first to the carpeted floor. He gasped, trying to catch his breath. His heart beat at his ribcage like a cornered animal. He lifted himself to his back and spots exploded over his vision.

“Garty?” said a voice, soft and calm.

He jerked to a sitting position. At the bottom of the stairs, Kayla stood looking up at him. “Kayla! Thank god!” He raced down the stairs and hugged her. She was stiff, reluctantly put her arms around him, squeezing him back.

“What are you doing here?” Kayla asked.

“I was looking for you.”

“We better get you out of here. Follow me.”

Garty was so relieved, he let Kayla lead, back down the hallway the way he’d come, and stopping before one of the first doors he’d skipped. “Try this one,” Kayla said, stepping aside. She wore a slanted smile and was nodding her head. Garty opened the door. He gasped. On the other side, there lay the shattered remains of Uncle Xander’s laboratory. He didn’t have time to question things. He grasped Kayla’s hand in his own, and pulled her with him through the doorway.

The door slammed shut behind them.

“Come on,” Garty said, yanking Kayla through the ruined laboratory and down the stairs. “We need to get the fuck out of this place. Get your things.”

He left her standing in the hallway by the door to her room and rushed into his own room for his stuff. For a moment, his mind was blank as he looked about. Then he remembered his duffle bag by the door, snatched it, slung it over his shoulder. He took a deep breath. He couldn’t think straight; what was he forgetting? His eyes were drawn to the bookshelf. The last Narnia book—Kayla wanted to read it. He snatched it from the shelf and tossed it in his bag.

The jar.

He’d forgotten all about the jar. He could see it sitting there behind the books where he’d stashed it. He reached his hand out and lifted it. It was satisfyingly heavy, cool to the touch. For a moment, he couldn’t help but to admire it, turning it so he could see the inlaid designs that cavorted over its surface.

“What are you doing?”

Garty jumped at the strange voice, the jar slipping from his hands, tumbling to the floor. He turned and Kayla was standing in the doorway. She was staring intensely at the jar on the floor, its stopper having popped free when it hit the carpet.

“What is that?” Her words came out strange and deliberate, not with the same cadences Kayla usually used.

“Nothing,” Garty said, scooping the jar from the floor. For some reason he didn’t want Kayla to see it.

“Where did you get that?” Now her voice sounded tense, on edge.

“I don’t know.”

“Put the stopper back on it!”

“Why? What’s…”

Something shifted in the hallway behind Kayla. It was suddenly dark. Outside the window there were faint oily movements. Something tapped at the glass.

“Close it!” Kayla’s voice screamed with such authority Garty immediately dropped to his knees, fumbling on the floor for the lid to the jar.

The tapping on the window became a pounding. He heard the glass crack, then shatter.

“Give me the jar!” the purple-skinned being bellowed through the new opening.

Garty’s hands brushed frantically over the carpet. He couldn’t find the lid.

TWO

Garty felt as if he’d suddenly found himself under the influence of a powerful drug, a psychedelic. The air seemed to thicken, shimmering, as if a veil, a silvery sheen had fallen over the room.

Kayla turned and backed away from the door, her eyes locked on the source of the bellowing voice. The churning darkness filled the hallway. Just over his shoulders, Garty could hear the observer climbing through the window; he knew the darkness was outside too, pushing into the room. His hand flailed under the bed, but there was nothing. The jar seemed to pulse in his grip.

“Give it to me!”

Kayla had a look of complete terror in her eyes.

Garty’s fingers brushed something. He reached, his shoulder joints straining painfully.

“Close it! Close it!” Kayla screamed.

He fell to his back. The tall, purple-skinned being stepped over the shattered glass and into the room. The being’s bald head shone with grease; his vermillion robes clung to his body like a roiling vapor.

“You opened it!” the observer said, clear triumph rising in his voice. “Finally!”

Garty’s fingers grasped the thing under the bed.

The observer reached out for the jar.

Somewhere, Kayla was yelling.

He lifted the thing from under the bed, and slammed it down on top of the jar. Only then did he look down to make sure he’d found the cork stopper.