The Evil Inside (21 page)

 

Sunday lunchtime in the park.

I looked at Lucy's rosy cheeks and soft red lips and wondered where all those lovely, warm ‘Love to Love Ya, Baby' feelings had gone.

Because I could tell: she didn't seem to like me so much anymore.

‘You look pale, Guy, and there are bags under your eyes – have you been sleeping?'

She scrunched up her little snub nose. ‘And you smell a little … ripe.'

It was a gorgeous day but there were big black clouds approaching like zeppelins.

‘And how are you today, Mr Callum?' Lucy asked gaily, sipping her fruit juice. She handed him her bagful of breadcrumbs. ‘Would you like to feed the ducks, honey?'

We had arranged to meet at the Central Park Lagoon. Last time Callum and I been here, it had been stuffed with skaters. But now the homecoming ducks were the only ones coasting over the clear cobalt surface.

‘Guy, I'm pregnant,' she whispered just out of Callum's earshot.

She reached out to me, but I withdrew my hand like a snake slithering to safety.

‘I know this is not necessarily great news for you given what you've been through. But I wanted you to know because … Well …' she paused uncomfortably.

I stared at her.

‘ … because I'm going to keep it.'

Lucy's dream had always been to take the diplomatic corps by storm. Become the next Madeleine Albright. How did a new baby possibly fit into that equation?

‘I love kids, as you know. I spoke to my Mom about it and she offered to help raise it for me while I keep working.'

‘For Anthony? In New York?'

‘No, I'm leaving advertising. There's a big, important chapter of the UN down in Austin and I've got an interview there next week for a position as a translator. It's not much, but it's a start. A good place to learn. And close to my family.' She threw a ball of breadcrumbs towards the water.

She reached out again for my hidden hand. ‘Guy, you don't have to have a single thing to do with this baby if you don't want to. But maybe you could come visit us once in a while.'

She tried to read my face. ‘And don't worry, I haven't told anybody it's yours.'

Callum walked up to us with his hands outstretched. ‘Daddy, the ducks need some more bread.' He looked down at Lucy's hands covering her midriff. It was how Mia used to sit when she was pregnant.

‘Have you gotta Bubby in your tummy?' Callum asked hopefully.

‘Wow – is he psychic?' Lucy whispered.

I looked around. There were small groups of people right round the lagoon. Walking their dogs, cycling, enjoying the summer sunshine. It was steamy and tropical around the edge of the water. A chopper was scything the sky above and I was reminded of the wonderful joy flight I'd taken that first weekend we arrived.

I wondered what advice my former self would have given me if he could look down and see me here now.

A parrot shrieked from somewhere far behind us as a little remote-controlled boat putt-putted through a jungle of fronds.

Its leisurely arc described a large, rippling ‘C' in the water.

Then it changed course; coughed, spluttered and double-backed, making what looked like a sharp ‘V' within the ‘C'.

My Olcott key was biting painfully into my hand. ‘Thanks for telling me,' I said to Lucy. ‘But I've gotta get Callum home now.'

‘Guy?' I could hear her calling out to me as I spirited Callum away. ‘Wait! Is that all you have to say? Gu-yyyy?'

I'm squeezing Callum's hand very hard as we cross the park, lifting him off the ground.

‘Ow, you hurting my hand, Dad!' he cries.

But I don't say a word as we power along the poplared walkways. Past the fat-fingered Chinese masseuses, past the summer-lovin' ice cream hawkers and stars-and-stripes balloon salesmen, past a squeal of schoolgirls, past the ponytailed poodles and the rabid roller-bladers, past the ever-twinkling Tavern on the Green, past the never-ending John Lennon wake at Strawberry Fields, past the endlessly muttering bag lady.

Not a single, solitary word do I utter.

Suddenly there's a crash above us.

The mime artist at the 72nd street entrance to the park looks up at the angry clouds with a silent scream and holds his hand up above his face like a swooning damsel in a silent film.

Then the dark, dangerous sky above starts shooting hot silver bullets of hail down on the blameless throng below.

When we got back to the Olcott, I made Callum a nice big chocolate milk and mixed in some ground-up Valium tablets.

I needed to keep him quiet and I needed to keep him weak.

Then I plonked him down in front of
Scooby Doo on Zombie Island
and told him I'd be back in a few minutes.

I needed some time to think. And I couldn't think if Callum was there.

Because I now knew, without any doubt, that if Callum was there, then Violet was never far away.

I went up to the roof.

I lit a cigarette and considered the great big ‘C' I'd just seen in the pond at the park. Followed by the sharp, nasty ‘V'.

It was a sign.

An omen.

It was
the
omen.

‘
You'll “C”.
'

Violet's dying threat to me all those years ago.

And indeed, I
did
see it all too clearly now: because I now knew for sure that my dead mother's evil, vengeful spirit was behind almost every single bad thing that had happened to me – and us – since that fateful night we'd lost Bubby back in Melbourne last September.

It was a growing, gnawing fear I hadn't ever fully been able to eject from my mind, even during those infrequent calmer times when I'd almost managed to convince myself that the threat couldn't possibly be real.

But what did it all mean?

Maybe she had played a role in Bubby's death?

Or maybe she hadn't been involved in Bubby's death at all, but because she'd initially been planning on coming back
as
Bubby, she had then had to make alternative plans once Bubby was no longer an option?

Maybe she showed me – through Callum – all those shocking things that initially only I could see to isolate me from Mia? And then everybody else.

And perhaps she worked her evil wiles on Mia at the same time so our family would inevitably implode?

But why wait till now? Why hadn't she simply come back when Callum was born?

Was it because she needed a new female host from the newborn stage?

Like Bubby?

Maybe that was why she could only channel and show things
through
Callum or the objects or people around him?

She needed a new little girl.

‘
You'll “C”.
'

What if it wasn't just a reminder, but a brand-new threat?

What if Violet was now planning on making Lucy's child her new incarnation?

Perhaps there was one upside to that devastating thought: because she'd no longer have any use for him, at least Callum was now going to be safe?

Who knew?

It was time to eat my logical hat. Because these were questions, suppositions and theories I had no rational answers for – in any universe.

I peered over the edge; the laneway below beckoned: a churning, sulphurous chasm.

For a split second, I pondered diving into it.

Head first.

But that was the coward's way out.

Hemingway blew his own brains out and left other people to pick up the pieces.

He wasn't a shark. He was a minnow.

I had to think really hard about what I could do to protect myself – and others who got in her way.

There was no telling what the mother from hell would do next.

I went back down to the apartment and washed down a couple of Valiums myself with a nice cool Coors.

The
Zombie Island
video had finished and Callum was now peacefully dozing with his head on a cushion.

I lay down on the couch next to him and drifted off nice and slowly.

I really needed a rest.

It felt good to close my eyes against the world for a while.

The coin rolls into the slot and Frank starts whistling the soundtrack.

I can see it all in gorgeous Technicolor:

I'm in the back of a long black car that's half Honda Passport, half Lincoln Continental.

A Chinese version of Lee Harvey Oswald is sitting beside me, radiant in Jackie Kennedy's hot pink Chez Ninon suit and pillbox hat. Twisting his foot-long Fu Manchu moustache between his spidery fingers, he waves his other white-gloved hand to the adoring crowd like a magician about to perform a trick.

But suddenly I realize that the presidential motorcade is driving up Elm Street towards the Texas Schoolbook Depository, instead of down Elm Street, away from it.

It's the Zapruder Film in reverse.

I tap the driver on the shoulder to find out what's going on.

Detective Barino turns around and smiles knowingly. His skin is weeping like stigmata.

We chug under the Triple Underpass and on my left, I can see Dr Hill crouching behind the stockade fence with a machinegun trained on the waving well-wishers on the grassy knoll. The end of the gun is attached by a cord to a foetal monitor that groans and moans like an old woman dying in agony.

As Hill opens fire, I can see my family sitting picnic-fashion by the left-hand curb. My father raises his beer can in silent salute. My mother is watching Raine, who is rocking happily back and forth under the shady protection of Umbrella Man.

The dead girl from the Hell or High Water is sitting on a seagrass rug next to them singing harmony with Frank, with her hair up in a bun like Kim Novak's.

Then, just before we reach the back of the Stemmons Freeway sign, a single ear-splitting report from a bolt-action rifle rings out above the machine-gun fire and Barino slumps forward onto the wheel. The horn keeps blaring under his weight and we begin to careen across the right-hand lane of Elm and onto the south side lawn as people scatter willy-nilly.

The famous long-coated spectators, Jean Hill in red and Mary Moorman in black, dive either side of us like synchronized swimmers. Moorman drops her Polaroid camera and we crunch over it.

Babushka Lady – a fatter version of Susanna Johnson – waddles away grumbling like a penguin hungry for fish.

Two more deafening shots ring out through the box canyon.

The wind is screaming now, but even louder than that is the sound of a thousand wings beating in unison.

We mount the curb, thump over the black epileptic thrashing and frothing on the pavement and smash into the low wall of the reflector pool right up near the corner of Elm and Houston.

Lucy's father takes off his Stetson and scratches his head. He looks just like Jimmy Stewart.

I look up at what I now understand is the Olcott Schoolbook Depository – a dirty amalgam of grey and orange bricks.

On the entry steps below, Mia is looking up, too, and pointing frantically at the watch on her wrist, like the White Rabbit imploring Alice to hurry up. On cue, two long, bony hands hold a plastic bag filled with water out of the sixth-floor sniper's window and let it fall.

Mia hops out of the way at the very last second and disappears into the building as the bag shatters onto the pavement into savage red and yellow glass shards, like a stained glass window smashing.

They look like pieces of Callum.

I can see a shadowy figure in the window but I can't make out who it is.

Somebody with bright-blonde hair.

And as I slowly rise above the adjacent Dal-Tex Building with my myriad baleful eyes, I get a bird's eye view of Lee Harvey Oswald washing his suit in the pool below, trying to wring the blood out of it.

His pillbox hat is floating on top of the water, bleeding pink.

He curses in Cantonese.

And as I look down on the crashed presidential limousine, I can now see that it's not me in John Fitzgerald Kennedy's brain-spattered Cardin shirt and single-breasted Savile Row suit after all.

But Bubby.

And half her little head has been blown into smithereens.

 

When he'd come over to visit that day, Bill had slipped an envelope stuffed with twenties into my jacket pocket.

I'd only just discovered it.

Go crazy. Love Bill
he'd written on the outside.

It was now Tuesday and Callum and I were heading out to the gee-gees to see if we could win some money for the next few months' food and rent.

I'd tried to study the Belmont form guide in the paper, but my mind had been galloping even faster than usual since my meeting with Lucy some forty-eight hours before.

There was so much to think about.

I had a whore's bath in the kitchen sink and donned my best racing outfit: a pin-striped navy-blue suit and a red tie with little white carousel horses on it.

Belmont Racetrack, here we come, doo dah, doo dah …

It was funny, but I wished my father could have seen us.

Callum hadn't been on a New York bus yet and this morning he was begging me to take him on one.

Can we go on the bus, Daddy? Can we go on the bus
? he kept repeating.

Late morning, clouds lifting.

Weather: fine.

Track: fast.

I lifted Callum up the two big metal steps of the bus and nodded to the female driver. Late fifties with curly blonde hair that made her look a little like Harpo Marx, she chewed gum with her mouth open while tapping the cigarette pack in her breast pocket – as if her fat yellow fingers enjoyed smoking as much as her puffy red lips did.

There were already some older people on board with shopping bags and newspapers, a couple of punks rocking to the noise in their headphones and a small group of schoolkids aged seven or eight with a ‘Bellerose Elementary' crest on their schoolbags. Their early thirties female teacher was telling them there wouldn't be any more excursions to Manhattan if they didn't sit down in their seats and start behaving themselves immediately.

I let Callum push a few quarters into the machine for our tickets. We sat halfway down, near the rear exit doors. Callum stared straight ahead without expression, waiting for the trip to begin.

The doors hissed shut and we lurched out of the terminal, throwing a couple of the still unseated schoolkids together in the aisle, who laughed at each other in surprise. ‘Sit
down
, I said!' the teacher repeated. ‘You're not the only ones on this bus – think about it!' Her eyes bulged through her glasses. The teenage punks smiled at the young miscreants, no doubt reminded of their younger selves.

As the bus picked up speed, trees and telephone poles blurred past. Wind whistled in through the windows. We were going pretty fast. And we seemed to be getting faster.

After a couple more kms whizzed by, one of the old men with a string shopping bag and a walking cane stood up and reached up for the cord. ‘She's going too fast!' he complained, shaking his head. ‘She's going to go right past my stop!' He yanked hard on the wire twice with his cane but the bus just kept right on going. ‘Stop!' he yelled at the driver. ‘Stop!' He began waddling down the aisle, buffeted from side to side by the bus's increasing velocity.

Some of the other passengers craned their heads for a better view as the two standing schoolkids stepped out of their teacher's reach and followed behind the old man to see what would happen next.

There was a scream of brakes from both sides of the intersection as we accelerated straight through a red light.

I felt Callum's body lean into me.

One of the teenage punks unhooked his headphones and frowned at his ghetto blaster: his hip hop radio station's frequency must have been bumped and now ‘I'll Come Back as Another Woman' by Tanya Tucker suddenly flooded the bus.

I suddenly understood what was going on, but wished with all my soul that I didn't: we were suddenly all expendable extras in a murderous set-piece orchestrated by Violet Russell.

‘Stop!' I echoed the old man. I was already halfway down the aisle. ‘Stop!'

I could now see Violet in the rear-view mirror, smiling evilly under her electric Harpo hair.

She even slumped her shaking arm onto the horn like the mute Marx Brother.

‘Stop!'

I bundled the two kids behind me with big butterfly strokes, then bumped the old guy over to a seat on the left, grabbing his cane.

There were now screams inside the bus, rising above the horns and screeches of metal outside. A siren outside somewhere began howling in pursuit.

Three more steps and I was up by the driver's seat. She turned to me and scowled, suddenly taking her hands off the wheel and clapping them together, applauding her own wicked ingenuity.

I smashed her head with the willow cane, then wrapped the end of it around her wretched neck and yanked it as hard as I could. She came out of the seat surprisingly easily, hit her head on the passenger rail, then slithered into a heap on the floor.

The bus slowed down a little now her foot was off the pedal but started to veer dangerously over to the left, across the opposite lane of oncoming traffic. I jumped into the driver's seat and stamped my foot first on the accelerator by mistake, then on the brake.

We thudded to a stop.

When I finally looked up from the wheel, I saw that we had mounted the curb outside a fire station.

At least something had gone right.

Some of the firemen walked out scratching their heads and one of them explained how to open the pneumatic doors.

We made the six o'clock news.

But when I looked at the screen later and saw the man and his son sitting by the side of the road, I couldn't recognize them.

The driver's official cause of death was given as ‘cardiac arrest'. Some of the passengers claimed that I had struck her with the cane for no good reason. Others – like the punk kids – claimed she'd had a heart attack at the wheel and that I was a hero who had saved all our lives.

The fire chief mentioned something about a possible medal.

Sitting on the curb next to Callum, I watched the schoolkids walk quietly away behind their quietly sobbing teacher. They kept turning round to look at me, as if I might suddenly spring up and hit them with a cane.

Callum had looked completely wrung out when I'd carried him off the bus. As if he had drowned and been resuscitated.

We'd just survived a bus crash, but were still travelling down an impossibly dangerous road.

Because Violet's objective was, and had always been, to destroy me and those I loved.

The dead bus driver marked the second occasion I was aware of where she had taken over the body of another adult woman.

Because, of course, it was now obvious to me that Violet had been responsible for Bubby's death: she'd been there hiding in plain sight all along – inside that cruel, cold nurse in Mia's room at Cabrini.

‘You'll see,' she'd promised after she'd squeezed Mia's shoulder.

Then that same chilling message delivered to me in writing on Bill's pad straight after I'd received the awful call from Esmeralda about Mia being in Mount Sinai.

And then again on the boardroom whiteboard when the coolcams clients had come to town:

you'll see

Constantly channelling herself through people, objects – but mainly Callum – as she became stronger; endlessly torturing me.

Trying to make me lose my mind.

Like the real-life horror movie she'd produced – and that only I could see – at Arcadia: the TV screen; the drawing; the episode in which she actually revealed herself, reaching out of Callum's chest and pointing her finger at me.

All this was her way of showing me that she was the evil inside and that I would be totally powerless to make anyone else believe me.

And to drive our family even further apart, all the time working on Mia behind my back – appearing to Mia in her perverse birth dream at Arcadia. And the cruel symmetry of Mia's suicide attempt and Violet's own gassy endeavor to abandon me when I was a child.

Part of Violet's sick genius was that I could never be totally sure it was really her pulling the strings until it was too late for me to act and stop her.

Callum would become a nice, normal little boy again, like that short period of time after we returned from North Fuck – not because we'd returned to normality or I had ‘come back to reality' or whatever Blakely might call it – but because Violet was now elsewhere, working on Mia or simply lying low to make me doubt what I'd experienced and question my own sanity.

Or perhaps she
hadn't
been deliberately torturing me all those months? Perhaps she was simply growing in strength as time went on? And then as she became stronger, other people around me also began to experience her insidious influence.

Esmeralda had witnessed the omen of the deer; Bill the portent with the bird; our maid had been seconds from seeing me being attacked by Callum's Buzz doll and had seen the destruction that this left behind in the apartment.

While poor Courtney may be forever tainted by Violet's unsuccessful attempt to frame me on her birthday.

And, on top of this, and all along, there was the one thing that Violet knew I would never be able to rationalize.

The sockets.

Speaking through Callum, uttering that chilling warning: ‘Stay away from the sockets, Daddy!' that morning in the Olcott hallway all those months ago, was her way of letting me know there was something I simply couldn't explain away, no matter how hard I tried.

And now, today, Violet had tried literally to drive us to destruction.

For me to be so stupid as to think that Callum might now be spared because Violet had set Lucy's baby in her sights.

How had I been so naïve? Believing what I wanted to believe, pretending that my son could just become my son again and that any of us could ever possibly be safe?

No. It was crystal clear that whatever plans for the future Violet was harbouring, she was also prepared to do absolutely anything to get rid of me – right now.

Even if that meant taking the lives of innocents.

But the one thing she didn't plan on had happened.

I had survived.

So I now had one last chance to stop her.

I had to stop her once and for all.

Because this was about more than just me now.

Whatever it took, I had to do it.

I'd done it before.

I could do it again.

By the next day, I have my plan in place.