The Fall of Never (36 page)

“No,” she breathed. “Don’t.”

Josh shook his head. “I want to help.”

Carlos breathed into the old woman, pumped more, breathed more, and then she breathed back. Sputtering, turning her head from side to side, greasy slicks of sweat at her temples, Nellie’s eyes fluttered open. Her pupils were dilated, and there was a lack of comprehension in her gaze.

Carlos straightened. “Nellie? Nellie? Can you hear me? Nod your head if you can hear me.”

Slowly, the old woman nodded. She struggled with words:
“…hear…”

“Call a doctor,” he said to Josh, turning away from Nellie and moving toward his wife. Like a child he reached out for Marie with both arms, her lower lip quivering, her eyes like two silver dollars. “Shhhh,” he said, grabbing her, holding her tightly against him. He could feel her frame shaking, could feel the soft push of her belly against his own. “I’m sorry, Marie, I’m sorry. Shhhh. I’m sorry.”

Through the tangles of Marie’s hair, Carlos saw Josh standing distraught in the space between Nellie’s bed and the wall.

What did you people just do to my wife?
his mind screamed.
What in the world just happened here?

Marie’s hands found the small of his back. Her fingers pushed into him hard as her sobs subsided.

“Okay,” he whispered to her, “we’re getting out of here.”

Chapter Twenty

“What do you remember about the day we met?”

Kneeling on the floor in the hallway, searching through a series of water-stained cardboard boxes he had pulled from the hall closet, Gabriel Farmer looked up at Kelly. The boy he had once been briefly emerged in his features, his face looking very young and very innocent. There had always been a sense of purity in Gabriel, and such purity had somehow managed to follow him into adulthood. It conveyed a soothing element of trust, of compassion, that put Kelly at ease. He was smart and creative and talented and very good-looking. Not for the first time, Kelly wondered why he was alone in life.

“Embarrassment,” he said, grinning to himself.

“What? Why?”

“Here I am, whining like some damn baby, and then out of nowhere this beautiful young girl appears. Sneaks up on me, really. Almost gave me a heart attack. Then again, I think you might have actually saved my life that day.”

“How’s that?”

“Well,” he said, “I’m sure I would have tried to tackle that tree swing at least one more time. Who knows? I could have killed myself. In fact, I’m almost certain of it.”

“Or you could have made it to the top,” she suggested.

Gabriel shook his head. “Not a chance. Thump—right on the ground.”

Kelly laughed. “You certainly were a dumb kid,” she joked.

“Ouch. Salt in the wound now?”

She smiled. “You weren’t the only one who was hurt,” she said. “Do you remember?”

“Hurt.” He rubbed his eyes with his hands. “You mean the blood? The cut on your forehead?”

“So you remember…”

“Sure.”

“I can’t remember how it happened.”

Gabriel shrugged, occupied with his search. “Don’t really remember. We were kids playing in the woods. Kids fall and bleed.”

“We both remember how you got hurt. We remember the tree swing.”

“So?”

“I’ve just been thinking about that.”

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. In fact, the quality of his voice reminded her now of Josh Cavey—and she suddenly hated herself for not having called him as she’d promised. Anyway, she didn’t owe Josh anything. They were just friends. They weren’t even that close. Yet, like a sharp spear to the heart, the notion pricked her:
Do I love Josh Cavey?
And where did that come from, anyway?

“This is from before,” Gabriel said, not looking up. “This is about finding yourself again, right?”

“I think I hate this town,” she said. “I mean it. Really hate it.”

“Welcome to my head.”

“Why don’t you leave?”

“Where would I go?”

She crouched to his side and peered inside the boxes. Gabriel smiled when he came across a large purple folder held together by rubber bands.

“Here it is.”

“You save everything.”

“Memories. Who wants to throw them away and forget about them?”

“Sometimes we don’t have a choice,” she said.

Pulling the rubber bands off and peeling back the folder’s worn cover, Gabriel presented her with a series of rough sketches and drawings done in crayon and by a child’s immature hand.

“Damn,” he said, “will you look at these? I haven’t seen these…”

“We drew them?”

“You were a stubborn student, but I eventually got you to sit down and draw. Only took some bribery. And a couple of locks and chains.”

“Which ones are mine?”

He laughed. “The bad ones.”

“Ha. Thanks, Picasso. Let me see.”

There were about twenty leaves of paper, all scrawled with swirls of Blue Sky and Brick Red and Grass Green—puerile renditions of dogs and ducks and boats on ponds and people on bicycles and trees and houses with candy roofs. It was obvious which ones belonged to Gabriel—some of the drawings showed evidence of artistic promise—while Kelly’s were merely crude imitations of the world as seen through the eyes of a small child.

“Amazing,” she said.

“I keep everything,” he said. “That’s my thing.”

“Gabe?”

“Hmmm?”

“I don’t want to insult you…”

“Uh, here it is.”

“Seriously.”

“What?”

“This town is horrible. Spires is like a bad dream. What are you doing wasting your time here? And I don’t just mean with your artwork; I’m talking about your
life.
This place is dead and empty and there’s really nothing here for you.”

His smile faltered and she feared she’d insulted him. She started to apologize but Gabriel only shook his head.

“I’m not insulted,” he said, “and in a lot of ways you’re right. In fact, when I had that showing in the city, I honestly considered moving there. I mean, all that inspiration every day, right? I even made some phone calls about apartments. But in the end, I wound up changing my mind.”

“You were afraid?”

“No. If I was afraid I would have forced myself to go. No, this was something different, a little more complex.”

“What?”

“I guess I didn’t want to have to run away from anything. And that’s what I realized I’d be doing. The city is beautiful and inspiring…but it’s there, it’ll always be there, and I can always
go
there for inspiration. That wasn’t why I wanted to go, despite what I tried to convince myself. I really wanted to leave because I wanted to run from this place, from Spires. And for some reason, that didn’t sit well with me. I mean, it just seemed like such a cowardly reason to go. I didn’t want it to be for that reason. I wanted to pursue what was right, not just run away from what was wrong. I don’t know, maybe that sounds crazy, but I don’t feel like I’m really wasting my time in Spires. I feel…well, I feel like I’m really prepping myself, preparing myself. This way, when I finally leave, I’m able to look back without regret.”

“No,” she said, “that makes perfect sense.”

“I thought you’d understand.”

“Yes.” She smiled at him. He smiled back and kissed her. It happened too quickly—over and done with before she even had time to register what had happened. It was Gabe, Gabriel, Gabriel Farmer, the young boy with the tousled hair and conspicuous laugh who’d fallen from a tree and skinned his knees on the day they met. Kissing. And in the follow-up moments, as Gabriel pulled away, she felt something hot and uncomfortable turn over inside her chest which she recognized to be the initial stirrings of guilt. Again she thought of Josh, despite her intentions to pitch him from her mind and live in the moment.

“It’s too bad we never had the opportunity to…” Gabriel faltered, smiled, blushed. “I don’t know. To be ourselves. To really get to know each other and grow up together. I think that would have been good. Things might have turned out different.”

“You were a good friend.”

“I wish I could have helped you. I didn’t know what to do when you went away.”

Smiling, she rubbed his arm. “I didn’t know what to do, either,” she said.

It was late when she finally arrived back at the compound. Slipping in quietly through one of the many side doors, she made her way down the hallway and into the kitchen where she set the purple folder on the table and poured herself a glass of milk. The house was silent. Peering out the window over the sink, she saw past the film of frost on the pane to the blackness of the forest beyond.

There was a noise behind her. But when she turned around she saw that she was alone.

“Hello?”

This house brings out the fear in people. So big and empty, jumping at shadows. This house and this town.

She finished her milk and tucked the purple folder under her arm. Careful not to make a sound, she crept down the main hallway toward the winding staircase, her mind preoccupied with Gabriel and his words—
It’s too bad we never had the opportunity to…

To what?
she wondered now.
To what, exactly?

The basement door at the end of the hallway caught her attention for some reason and she paused just before mounting the winding staircase. It was closed and bolted. She was abruptly overcome by a strong urge to go to it, to unlock and open it, to go down into the basement.

Kelly turned and went to the basement door, turned the bolt, and cracked the door open. It creaked and she winced, the sound amplified in the nighttime silence of the house. Leaning into the doorway, she put her hand against the stairwell wall to feel around for a light switch. Finding none, she forced the door open wider to allow light from the hallway to flood the descending staircase. She peered in. After the first three steps, the rest of the staircase was devoured by darkness.

Why in the world do you want to go down there?
a small voice spoke up in the back of her head.
What’s gotten into you?

But she had already started descending the stairs. Her body blocked out the light of the hallway behind her, making it nearly impossible to see. Each footstep caused the risers to creak and groan. With her hands she traced the walls as she crept further down, intent on uncovering a light switch. Still nothing. And the stairs seemed never-ending.

What am I doing?

Finally she reached the bottom and felt something cold brush by her face. Startled, she jumped back…then sighed as she realized it was the chain to a light fixture in the ceiling above her head. Blindly, she groped for it, found it again, yanked it on. Shadows scattered. The light was strong enough to illuminate only her immediate area—a section of basement encumbered with countless brown boxes, each stacked one on top of the other, straight to the ceiling. Spools of masking tape lay scattered along the floor and in rings at her feet. Old, moth-eaten clothes lay stacked in forgotten piles.

Ahead of her, the basement landing communicated with a large room. Creeping forward, her hands splayed out before her face, she found a second light fixture and turned it on as well.

The basement opened up before her.

It was a mausoleum of forgotten artifacts, stiflingly congested with domestic refuse, making navigation difficult. Mildewed sofas; pitted brass lamps; scores of leather-bound books; a hand-carved coat rack adorned with a twist of tangled Christmas lights; busted wicker chairs; an old sewing machine housed in a mammoth maple cabinet: these things loomed liked the skeletons from some lost era, mummified in dust and frozen in time. Generations of family possessions. The heads of innumerable mammals, horribly tremendous and lifelike, stared at her with black, glassy eyes from against one wall: remnants of her father’s forgotten obsession. The entire cellar exuded a stale, necrotic stink; it seemed to coat everything, to radiate from every shadowy corner, every piece of junk that littered the floor. She could already start to smell it on her own skin.

Kelly skirted around a water-stained bombe chest and bundles of soggy newspapers tied with twine. Against the wall behind the stacks of newspapers, and quite out of place among the rest of the junk, was an open box brimming with toys. A plastic doll with curly sprigs of blonde hair poked out of the top. A stuffed zebra with button eyes also hung halfway out of the toy box. She tucked the purple folder Gabriel had given her under her arm and bent to her knees, peered inside the box. Sifting around, she uncovered unused coloring books still shrink-wrapped, a slinky, and a collection of ceramic horses, mostly broken. A doll’s shoe; a busted water gun; a toy wheelbarrow
sans
wheel…

I came down here looking for this box,
she thought, not quite understanding why, nor truly believing the thought.
All this stuff in here…

Toward the back of the box was a sketch pad, its cover torn off, its pages yellow and stained. She reached for it, tugged it free of the box. On the first page was a crude drawing of a tiny, square house with shuttered windows and large plumes of flowers on either side of the front door. Flipping through the pad, Kelly saw that it was filled with similar sketches, all presumably drawn by her sister Becky at some point. For the most part, the majority of the drawings were exactly what one would assume from a young child. But the drawings on the last dozen or so pages toward the end of the pad were different. Looking at them, Kelly felt herself slowly being consumed by some sick, spreading fear. One sketch depicted a young girl on her hands and knees, blood on the palms of her hands, crawling through the forest. In her wake, the girl left bloody hand-prints in the grass. Another drawing portrayed the same house from the front page of the book, drawn now with much more haste—all sharp angles and heavy impressions. In certain spots, Becky had pressed the pencil-point through the paper, puncturing the page. And on closer inspection, Kelly saw that the shutters were now open and that there was a face in one of the windows. The face itself was too abstract to make out any details—in fact, it hardly even resembled a face at all—but something about it caused Kelly to tense, the muscles in her body becoming taut and myalgic.