Seed (7 page)

“Hello?” she called out. She tried to sound imposing, but her attempt at confidence only made her sound that much more frightened.

Nubs backed up. He plopped his butt down on the rug and watched Aimee approach the dark hallway, double-fisting a piece of home décor. Despite the intensity of that crash, neither Charlie nor Abigail stirred, as though the noise that had nearly stopped Aimee’s heart had somehow failed to infiltrate the thin walls of the girls’ room.

She wavered at the border of light and darkness, scared to cross over even if it was only a few feet to the light switch.

“I have a gun,” she warned. “I’ll blow your fucking head off.” But what was intended as a genuine threat sounded comical when it was whispered. Aimee eventually grew tired of her own apprehension and marched into the hall—suddenly a woman with no fear—and flipped the switch.

The hall lit up. Light spilled into the living room on one end and into the kitchen on the other. It was there, in the now hazy shadows of the kitchen, that Aimee spotted the culprit. Flipped over onto its top, the kitchen table rested on the floor with its legs pointing toward the ceiling.

She stared at the table for a long while, unable to look away from it as her mind tried to piece together how it could have fallen over. Every answer was improbable, every solution was ridiculous. Even if Nubs had taken a running start and jumped on it like a dog training for an agility contest, that table wouldn’t have budged. It was an old relic, made of solid wood, heavy enough for Aimee to need Jack’s help to move it. Sliding it across the floor, let alone lifting it and flipping it over, was impossible.

She turned away, unable to look at it any longer. Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to keep calm. Nubs watched her doubtfully as she stepped back into the living room. She stopped dead in her tracks for the second time, her breath wavering a bit, the fingers of her free hand trembling while the other continued to cling to the candlestick.

The mixing bowl was exactly where she left it—dead center in the middle of the coffee table. But it was empty. The popcorn was scattered across the room from wall to wall.

Aimee met Jack at the door the second she saw Reagan’s headlights cut across the living room window. Trembling, she pulled him inside before he could say a word and grabbed the bowl off the coffee table, on the verge of tears.

“It won’t stay in,” she insisted. “I keep picking it up but it won’t stay in. And this…” She caught Jack by the hand and led him down the hall, stopping at the mouth of the kitchen.

Jack blinked at the overturned table, confusion shifting to worry shifting to dread.

“Did you put the chairs like that?” he asked after a moment.

She hadn’t noticed it before. The table was upside down, but none of the chairs had been disturbed. They were all standing in their designated spots.

Startled, Aimee stood in the hallway with her fingers pressed to her mouth. Jack touched her shoulder, and she burst into tears.

Chapter Five

J
ack couldn’t sleep again. He tried to stay still as he lay in bed, not wanting to wake Aimee and throw her into another fit of hysteria. It had taken hours to calm her down. Finally exhausted by her incessant, inconsolable tears, she had passed out while Jack stared up at the ceiling. It was the moment he had feared, the moment when Aimee started to realize that something wasn’t normal. That something was terribly wrong.

Aimee was scared by the things she’d seen, but she had no idea her reaction was terrifying her husband. Jack couldn’t get the image of his own mother out of his head, couldn’t silence her choking wails as his father tried to comfort her, insisting that it was all in her head, that her mind was playing tricks. Offering the same argument to Aimee was to call her crazy. Jack had seen the immovable kitchen table sitting flat on its surface. If it had only been the popcorn it would have been a different matter. It would have been easy to convince her that Nubs was stealing snacks. But that table—he and Aimee’s father had struggled to get it inside the house when Aimee had bought it. They had to call Reagan for help. It was an old refurbished relic, heavy as hell, made out of wood as dense as the Louisiana swamp. Aimee hadn’t flipped that table over herself.

Jack squeezed his eyes shut and tried to put it out of his mind, but minutes later he was rolling over, making sure Aimee was really asleep. Holding his breath, he sat up on their creaky mattress, in desperate need of replacement. It was lumpy, and a couple of springs were starting to poke into the thin padding. It whined loud enough to wake the dead whenever they got intimate. He hadn’t fully sat up before the damn thing started to make noise. Eventually getting one foot on the carpet without those springs ratting him out, it took him another fifteen minutes to creep across the floor.

When he finally made it into the hallway he stood in a daze. After all that effort, he wasn’t sure why he’d snuck out in the first place—something had pulled him out of that bedroom, beckoning him into the stillness of the house. He tiptoed down the hall to check on the girls. Abigail was on her side of the room, one arm jutting out over the side of her bed. Charlie, who was fond of odd sleeping positions, was pressed against the wall like a slug, her sheets pooled upon the floor like discarded snake skin. The coolness of the wall kept her from getting hot during muggy summer nights. He took a step back and pulled the door with him, ready to fit it snuggly into the jamb, and stopped short.

Something shifted in the corner of the room. It was a shadow; a squatting figure hiding in the darkness, waiting for Jack to leave the girls alone. Jack hesitated, his fingers clutching the doorknob tight. Something twisted against the valves of his heart. It whispered to him:
Close the door. It’s just your imagination. You don’t want to see what you’re afraid is here; and anyway, it’s too late to do a damn thing about it
.

He stood there for what felt like an eternity, an overwhelming sense of anger unraveling inside his stomach. He was a father, a husband, the protector of his family and his home, and here he was, afraid to stick his head back inside his daughters’ room, allowing this thing, this shadow, to consume his children rather than facing his fear.

He took a breath. Shoved the door open. Looked inside.

Nothing.

Closing the door behind him, he was both relieved and sure he was wrong. He’d seen something crouched in the corner next to Charlie’s bed. He knew he had. And while anyone else would have blamed it on too many horror movies, Jack couldn’t blame it on anything but his own memory.

He had seen that very figure perched at the foot of his bed when he was a kid; black skin, scaly like a lizard’s, small black horns poking out of its head. Its face, so eerily human, but yet so unearthly that it had certainly come from the very pits of Hell itself. When it smiled, its crooked mouth curled all the way up to its eyes, displaying a maw full of long, jagged cannibal teeth. And those eyes: they were nothing but vacant hollows.

Jack stood outside the girls’ door, chewing on his thumbnail. He needed a plan, a way to keep their lives from disintegrating into impossible chaos. It was what had happened with his own family, his own mother convinced that he’d gone completely insane. In the end, Gilda couldn’t look at him. Stephen tried to be strong, but during those last few days his eyes had betrayed him, radiating the fear he was so desperate to hide.

Jack and Aimee were headed down the same path. Aimee would eventually be too terrified to stay in the house. She’d lose her mind or run away, unable to take anymore, and Jack would be left alone.
But never really alone,
that voice reassured him.
I’ve always been here, and I’ll never leave
.

The morning after Gilda’s bout of hysteria, she dug through the bedroom closet like a dog trying to sniff out a bone, and eventually surfaced with an old Folgers Coffee tin. She shoved the tin into her purse before grabbing Jack by the arm and tossing him into the back of their old yellow hatchback.

The car came to a stop in front of a three-story building. By most standards it was relatively small, but in their neck of the woods it was tall enough to be considered a skyscraper. Gilda gathered up her purse, her coffee can, and her kid, and marched into the office building with the confidence of a commandant. Stopped by a woman working the front desk, she trudged up to the secretary, grabbed the coffee can out of her purse, and dumped it onto the receptionist’s counter. Jack had never seen so much money in his entire life. There were twenties and fifties, and he even saw a hundred dollar bill crumpled up with the rest. It was his momma’s life savings, and here she was, ready to give it all up.

“This is all the money I’ve got,” she told the now stunned receptionist. “It’s all my money and I ain’t rich, you understand me?”

The secretary, who was blonde and well dressed and had the reddest mouth Jack had ever seen on a woman, said nothing. She simply sat behind her protective barrier and tried to find the right words.

“There’s something wrong with my boy,” Gilda told her, her voice cracking, threatening another emotional collapse. “I need to see a doctor.”

“I can schedule an appointment,” the receptionist assured, but Gilda wasn’t having it. She shook her head and swallowed her tears and looked that woman straight in the eyes, unrelenting.

“I don’t think you understand me,” she said, her tone deadly serious. “I’m not here to make an appointment. I’m here to see a doctor.”

“Ma’am, you can’t just come in here and see—“

Gilda slammed her palm flat against the counter, loud as a gunshot. The red-lipped woman jumped, her manicured hands flying up to her heart as if to protect herself from the crazy woman with a can full of cash.

“I just
did
come in here,” Gilda told her. “So why don’t you scurry your pretty little self up to your boss’ office and tell him he’s got an emergency appointment with a boy who needs his help?”

The receptionist opened her mouth to protest.

“Just do your job, sweetheart,” Gilda said under her breath, “and don’t piss me off.”

The blonde woman snapped her mouth shut. She looked at Jack, then shuffled off in a hurry. Jack watched her disappear around a corner, then took a seat in the waiting area, sure the cops would come.

Jack woke to the sound of dishes clanging against the side of the sink. He blinked against the rectangle of sunlight that shone into his eyes, moving an arm to shield himself from the glare. The muscles in his neck had petrified during his night in the wingback chair.

Charlie ran into the living room in her bare feet, twirling in a bright white sundress he hadn’t seen before. In the morning light she looked like an angel, the light casting a halo around her hair. Smiling wide, she jumped into her father’s lap, and pain shot up his neck. He exhaled a groan.

“What’s wrong, Daddy?” she asked, surprised by the pained expression that seized his face.

“Just a stiff neck, sweetie.” He tried to rub the frozen muscles loose, but the more he rubbed the more it hurt.

Charlie suddenly looked serious. “Daddy, did you sleep in the living room?”

“Just for a few hours,” he answered through gnashed teeth.

“How come?”

“I don’t know, baby. I came out here to read and fell asleep in my chair.”

Charlie’s eyes drifted across the room before returning to her father.

“What book?”

“A boring one.”

“But you just woke up, and there’s no book…”

“I put it back.”

“But you said you fell asleep.”

“I put it back before I fell asleep.”

“Then how come you didn’t go back to bed with Momma?”

There were cons to raising a smart kid.

Jack’s patience was short. His nerves were frayed. He didn’t respond to Charlie’s question, kneading his neck instead.

“Daddy, did you put the table upside down?”

He blinked at the oversight. The table was still in its place, legs stabbing up into the air, unmoved. They hadn’t bothered trying to flip it over, knowing their efforts would be useless. Jack would have to call Reagan for help.

“Yes,” Jack said after a moment. “Yes I did.”

“How come?”

“Because one of the legs was loose. I didn’t want it to fall on top of you or your sister. What’s your mother doing?” An attempt to change the subject.

“She’s making breakfast. How come the leg got loose?”

Jack sighed. “I don’t know, Charlie. Why don’t you go help your mom in the kitchen?”

“Help her do what?”

“I don’t know, honey. Just go ask her if she needs some help, would you?”

Charlie didn’t move for a few seconds, sizing him up, before abruptly dashing down the hall to the kitchen. A second later she ran back into the living room with a message from Aimee.

“Momma says you better get ready.”

“Get ready for what?”

“She says you gotta take a shower and get dressed because we’re going to church.”

Jack was completely caught off-guard. Of the years Jack and Aimee had been married, they had gone to church all of three times. Two of those times were in the first year of their marriage—Christmas and Easter. Patricia, who liked to think herself a God-fearing Catholic, insisted that if he wanted to marry her daughter, he’d be attending church the way Aimee had her entire life. The third time was for Abigail’s baptism two months after she was born—another one of Patricia’s demands. Charlie hadn’t been baptized.

“You’re inviting the devil into that girl,” Patricia had warned. Six years ago, Jack called it bullshit. Today he wondered how he could have been so stupid.

Jack reluctantly pushed himself out of his chair and shuffled into the kitchen. Aimee stood over the stove in a blue polka dot dress, an apron tied around her waist. She had curled her hair in 1950s style—June Cleaver poised over the stove in high heels and full makeup. Sensing his presence, she glanced over her shoulder at him, the crackle of bacon completing the morning’s soundtrack.

“We’re leaving in half an hour,” she said.

“I heard.” Jack still couldn’t believe it. Aimee had been the one who had given up on the idea of religion in the first place for no reason other than to declare war on her parents. For her to turn to God for answers—something she knew would overjoy her mother—was unlike her. She was stubborn, and she’d do just about anything it took to make sure she had a foothold over Patricia’s head.