Ghosts of Eden (2 page)

“Why don’t you go daydream somewhere else, is what I think. Play with your brother. The game’s about to start.”

It was Saturday and that meant it was the weekend and, as usual, as a way to make up for the long dry workweek, her father and mother had begun drinking at just before noon. They drank with a reckless dedication, each frosted bottle or sloshing inch of swirling treacle in a finger-smeared glass like a reward for the finishing the one before it.

Kayla turned to leave the living room.

“Hey,” her father said. “That bottle of vodka in the freezer. Get it for me, will ya? Don’t roll your eyes at me.” He slumped back into the couch.

* * *

All afternoon, Kayla was restless. She felt strange. She tried to read for a while.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
was the only book she owned, but her eyes couldn’t track the words, letters jittering on the page. She didn’t know why she felt this way, like she was waiting for something to happen, as if she sensed something lurking beneath the surface of this dull afternoon, something insidious—and exciting.

At one point, she wandered into her brother’s room.

The sounds of war immediately filled the room: gunfire and explosions and men yelling and screaming.

Without taking his eyes from the screen, Bradley said, “You wanna play?”

“Sure,” Kayla said. She was bored enough.

But Bradley was a better player than her and laughed cruelly every time he killed her, blowing her head off with a plasma grenade or shooting her arms off so her character was helpless, running around like a chicken. And, after twenty minutes, she dropped the game controller to the floor and went to do something else.

“You suck,” her brother said as she was leaving. “Big time.”

* * *

While her parents watched television in the living room, Kayla made spaghetti, browning the meat, pouring over it a jar of marinara sauce as bright and red as blood. She called everyone to the table.

“How are you feeling, Mom?”

Her mother let out a snort. “Stupid child. Just leave me alone.”

Kayla felt her heart leap, as if slapped, but was careful not to show how much her mother’s words stung her.

They ate in silence. Kayla looked from one face to the other. Bradley and her father ate quickly, while her mother moved her fork around absently. Her parent’s faces looked puffy, more strained around the eyes than usual.

“Finished?” her father asked her mother.

Her mother shook her head, as if from a doze. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

Her father snatched their mother’s nearly untouched bowl and, along with his own empty one, took them into the kitchen, tossing them in the sink with a clatter. “Come on, Laura,” he said when he came back, taking her mother’s arm. He led her up the stairs. Her parent’s bedroom door closed.

Kayla and Bradley continued to eat.

After a minute or two, Bradley said, “I can’t believe you, Kayla.”

Kayla looked up from her bowl. “What did I do?”

“I don’t know…you just…” He shook his head.

“What?”

“It’s the way you treat our parents. You need to just give them space. You’re an idiot.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Shut up.”

“Don’t tell me to shut up.”

Kayla stood and walked around the table to grab Bradley’s half-eaten bowl of spaghetti. “You’re done.”

Bradley grabbed the other end of the bowl. “No, I’m not.”

They each tugged at the bowl. Bradley gave a yank and the bowl slipped from Kayla’s fingers. Spaghetti and bright red sauce spewed out over the table and across the carpeted floor.

“Look what you did,” Kayla said.

Bradley began to laugh. “I’m not cleaning that up.”

“Yes you are. It’s your fault!”

“Yeah. Right.” Bradley stood, wiped a glob of sauce from his shirt. He licked his fingers and moved towards the stairs.

“Wait,” Kayla said. “Clean up your mess!”

Bradley continued across the dining room. “Freak.” And then he said the thing that always hurt the most: “Sometimes I really think you
were
adopted.”

From down the stairs, the sounds of her parent’s lovemaking came to her. It seemed louder than usual. The moaning increased to wailing, and the wailing became screaming, to her, like that of a tortured child.

TWO

She couldn’t sleep. She still had that fearful feeling something significant was about to happen. In her room, by the orange glow of her desk lamp, crouched on the floor, she flipped idly through a magazine.

She eventually decided to go downstairs to get a glass of milk from the kitchen. She took the stairs slowly. She counted the steps as she descended, as she was in the habit of doing, freezing for a moment on the seventh step as it creaked—more loudly than she’d anticipated—then bounding down the final few steps, counting the floor as number fourteen.

She crept across the open darkness of the living room to the kitchen, flipped the light on, squinting against the fluorescent glow. She shivered in her pajamas. She fetched a glass from the cabinet, opened the fridge, and partially filled the glass with milk. For a moment, the air seemed to shimmer—hazy—as if a silvery veil had fallen over the world. She shook her head to clear it.

She flipped the light off. Holding her glass of milk before her, she made her way back to the stairs. The top of the stairs was dark and obscured. It was difficult to see. On the first step, the milk sloshed in the glass, running over her fingers. She gritted her teeth and continued more carefully. Which step was it that creaked? Step nine. Step ten. Had she passed it already? Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen…

A voice whispered from the dark near her.

She could almost feel the weight of the empty air behind her. She glanced over her shoulder and the living room seemed far away, the shapes of the furniture gray and indistinct. Something moved about down there, she could hear it picking at things, sniffing the air in search of something. It was looking for her. It paused, turning its head toward the stairs, and Kayla caught a glimmer of eye-shine as it peered through the dark in her direction. Then it looked away. It hadn’t seen her and she was relieved; she didn’t want to be found.

This is an interesting dream, she thought. Why am I so scared?

When she looked back down, the creature was gone from view. She began to move up the stairs again, going up and up. Her heart was beating too quickly. The stairs concluded upon a single attic door which she’d never seen before, of heavy and roughly hewn wood, like that in an ancient castle, a large cast-iron ring in place of a doorknob. But this strange discovery didn’t disturb her, the door was inviting—she was meant to go inside. It was her escape route, a safe haven from that thing lurking behind her in the dark.

Inside, it was warm—rusty hinges as the door groaned closed behind her—and a tidy little room, candles everywhere. Shelves of ancient books lined the walls of a small corridor, and then there was a small open room.

“Don’t be shy. Come in,” said the old woman. And she was old beyond reckoning, her face ornately wrinkled like a shriveled fruit, eyes sinking beneath her curling flesh, deep shadows—cast by the flickering candlelight—drawing a mosaic of lines through her cheeks and across her lips like crosshatching on an ink drawing. In a frilly threadbare dress made for a much younger woman, she leaned back in her chair and smiled at Kayla, a smile that drew lines up either side of her face, up even to her smooth and perfectly hairless head. “It’s okay. You’re safe here.”

And she did feel safe. She took a few steps into the room.

“Please, child. Sit down.”

Kayla sunk into the only other chair in the room, setting her glass of milk down on a stack of books by the side of the chair that served as an end table. The old woman was smoking, Kayla noticed for the first time, and the white smoke was drifting and curling about the room, obscuring her pale and wrinkled face in the cloud from her cigarette—long and thin, protruding from its quellazaire—drifting smoke like tangles of floating jellyfish. There was a book, cracked open in her lap.

“This is a dream, right?”

“I suppose,” the old woman said. “Although I’m reluctant to label it as such.”

Kayla felt her muscles relaxing, the tension melting from her shoulders and down over the chair beneath her.

The old woman smiled. “There is so much I wish I could show you. How things bend and move. Like liquid in the breeze. So much hurt I wish I could save you. But you’re a smart girl. I’m sure you’ll be alright.”

Kayla looked languidly about the room. It was small, its walls circular, the floor a polished wood. All around there were books, stacked in wobbly columns like stalagmites growing from the floor. Cutouts and clippings, pictures of people and places, were anchored into the smooth mortar by crude nails—layer upon layer all over the walls. Some of these pictures, she noticed, were of naked women, like those from the magazines her father kept in a shoebox under the bed. Above the old woman there was a painting in a plain wooden frame, a beautiful landscape, a field of rolling hills and a lake, set into the wall like a window—but there were no windows; the walls were solid, climbing upwards to where the smoke obscured their further reaches.

Kayla felt a rise of excitement flow through her, even though her limbs were heavy, the chair cradling her in its warmth. This was what she’d been waiting for all day: what this woman was about to tell her…

“You might die, of course,” the old woman said, her voice deep and casual. “There will be tests, and plenty of them—you can be sure of that. But I’ll help you.”

Kayla stared carefully into the old woman’s face, to be sure she’d heard correctly, but her eyes were drawn to the slow snaking curls of smoke; she thought of fading spirits; she thought of ghosts.

“Yes. Don’t worry. I will guide you, child,” the old woman continued. Then she tilted her head back. “I’ve seen so much.” She sighed. “I’ve walked through the Orchard of the Blood Monkeys. How I miss those days. My only concern the lilt of poetry and the wait between meals, when next I was allowed to dine on the crimson fruit. I’d spend hours discussing the philosophy of the universes with Lemmenkainen… Or we’d wonder at the existence of different animals…”

Kayla watched the old woman, unsure what she was supposed to say. The old woman took a drag on the tip of her cigarette holder, exhaled with another sigh. She seemed to fall asleep for a moment, her head nodding forward. She was so old, so very old.

“Oh, Lemm,” the old woman said to the smoldering ceiling. “Remember the Looaphant? The size of a house and it could swim? And two prehensile trunks? Or was it three?”

The old woman’s eyes slid closed. The cigarette holder drooped in her mouth. “I wish there was another way,” she mumbled. Then a fresh cloud of smoke puffed up between Kayla and her. The old woman’s liquid eyes pierced the smoke. “You have a brother, isn’t that right?”

Kayla nodded.

The old woman’s eyes closed again. “Good,” she said. “That’s good. He can help you.”

Kayla tried to picture Bradley rising up next to her on a quest, standing to protect her with sword in hand, but the image was ethereal in her mind, cartoonish—laughable.

The old woman shook her head. She slumped forward.

Kayla watched the smoke swirl slowly upwards, filling the room like a tornado in time-lapse video. She tried to make out the old woman’s eyes again through the haze—to gauge the old woman’s intentions—but the smoke was too thick, her own eyes too bleary and unfocused. From behind the old woman’s chair, another pair of eyes, with hourglass-shaped pupils, blinked once, then were gone. She heard a faint snicker.

“It’s okay,” the old woman said. “He’s gone now, child.” And Kayla knew the old woman was talking about the thing that had been looking for her in the living room. “You have so much to learn…I just hope…the fight of your life…” The old woman was asleep.

Kayla stood slowly and began to back towards the door.

“…I’ll help…show you things…such things…”

Kayla pushed out of the room and down the stairway. For a moment, the stairs canted at an alarming angle and she felt her balance give way, her vision jittering dangerously. Then she was turning down the hallway and crossing to her bedroom. She had the feeling something vastly important had been shown to her, but only for a moment, and she unable to comprehend exactly what it had been.

As she struggled beneath the sheets of her bed, she thought she heard whispering, but when she remained still, there was only silence.

She felt she was being watched.

* * *

The next day—Sunday—she still had that funny feeling. As if a thundercloud loomed over her entire family, an impending storm they should be preparing for, only she was the only one aware of it—the only one to feel the charge building in the air—and no one would believe her, even if she were to try to warn them.

She thought about going outside—she needed some fresh air, some time alone to clear her head, to forget about her strange dreams from the night before—but by mid-morning, it had begun to rain and the house was filled with the low roar of the storm. She sat in her room for a while, which faced the street, watching the front-yard lawn begin to puddle, watching the trees outside swaying and dancing, the houses across the way seen as if through a gray sheet. For a moment, she thought something moved in the large cottonwood tree by the mailbox—the glint of an animal?—but it was only a branch partially broken by the storm.