The Haunting of James Hastings (44 page)

Read The Haunting of James Hastings Online

Authors: Christopher Ransom

Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Suspense

BOOK: The Haunting of James Hastings
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‘Leave him,’ he said. ‘He’s gone. Stace, he’s gone.’
 
‘He’s not dead. He’s not dead!’ she kept saying.
 
James turned her away and hugged her on the side of the road, and she cried into his shoulder. He held her in his memory, the memory of them as children, and he told her it would be okay. He told her he would make it better and there would never be any more pain and he thought,
Stacey always loved the rabbits. That is why she ordered the silly paintings from the catalog fifteen years later, because the rabbits she hung on the bathroom wall were us, the couple from childhood. She had never been afraid of the rabbits.
 
He’s not dead!
 
His surroundings changed in a blink and he was no longer on the side of the road, he was no longer a child. He was in the bathroom with her, holding her as she cried into his waist.
 
Don’t let the red rabbit get me, James.
 
He looked down. It was not Stacey. Annette was in his arms. Annette, red-headed and wet, cold and shivering on the toilet seat, her head bleeding. Annette had seen the rabbits turn red, the redness of death that had been seared into Stacey’s memory, and Annette was terrified by them because Stacey wanted it that way.
 
Holding the towel around her, holding her upright, James backed away and made sure she could balance on her own. He turned and looked up at the paintings. They were just two paintings, black and white and harmless.
 
And then Annette was gone and he was alone, standing in the bathroom weeks later, after he had woken up on the floor downstairs, after hearing Lucy’s message, and all of the empty 9.12 calls from Stacey. He was staring at the paintings. The rabbit in the lower frame changed, her eye turned red. She was watching him, her eye toggling in its socket, following him as her body soaked through and turned red, everything red, the whole world turned red as if he were wearing tinted contact lenses.
 
Stacey trying to reach him, as she had reached Annette.
 
One was black and white, the other was red. Dead, red like the one Stacey found on the road when they were teenagers.
 
The other was alive.
 
The rabbits, the rabbits, one of the rabbits is dead and the other is alive.
 
From somewhere far away he heard a high-pitched piping sound, the sound of a tea kettle reaching steam, coming closer and louder until it cut off—
 
39
 
The kitchen floor was covered with broken glass and dishes. The window over the sink was a breeze of daylight and dry desert heat spilling in. The room very bright, shooting lasers into my head, dotting my vision with fuzzy red things that floated and faded. The roll of paper towels next to the toaster had been spun wild, leaving a long trail of perforated sheets pooled on the floor.
 
I looked over the car engine on the table. Rick was sitting in a chair with his back to the wall. His left arm was on the table, next to the cereal bowl of gasoline that had gone dry. He was staring at the kitchen sink or something just above it.
 
As I rounded the table and faced him I said ‘for Stacey’ and shot him in the chest. He jumped up an inch in his chair and then sat still. The gunsmoke curled into my nostrils and woke me up and I was ready to get it on.
 
I went closer and pointed the gun at the side of his face, said, ‘Rick.’
 
His eyes batted slowly. His chest was swelling and deflating with long intervals in between. The bullet wound was above his heart, close to his shoulder, so I guess my aim was off. His lips parted and he began to form word fragments.
 
‘Beg forgiveness,’ I said. ‘It won’t help.’
 
Then I saw it and lowered the gun. The grooved, black- and yellow-striped handle of a screwdriver was standing out the other side of his neck. The shaft had been buried below his ear. Snug around the base of the handle was a swollen red lump of his flesh trickling blood down into his collar, over his back, onto the linoleum.
 
I reached for the handle.
 
‘No,’ Rick whispered, his eyes widening. ‘No, no . . .’
 
I withdrew. ‘Who did this?’
 
He breathed deeper, storing a good one up. ‘She,’ he began, and was unable to finish. Something in his throat gurgled. He swallowed, his neck bulging as he got his air back. I peered into the living room. The front door was closed and the room was empty. ‘N-n-nuh-not . . .’ His lips pursed and he flexed his jaw, straining to form the words. ‘. . . not uh-uh-n-nnn-nhhh-nette.’
 
While I absorbed the meaning of this, Rick’s eyes rolled back. He began to choke, his body wracking as his face turned purple. He was suffocating. I placed my hand on his chest to steady him and took hold of the screwdriver handle. His big mitts clawed at my arms and throat. I pulled the handle sideways and it came away in a slide, easy as removing a thermometer from a chicken’s thigh. It was a flathead, the largest one in the set, with a wide tip and nine-inch stem. Rick bucked in the chair and flopped onto the floor. Mercy undeserved, I shot him in the chest twice more and once in the forehead. His heart pumped some more of his blood out of the neck hole before it stopped beating.
 
My blood continued to flow, the cuts reopening as my legs gave out and I sat down on the kitchen floor. Our blood met like two small flooding lakes over a shallow isthmus and I held on. I settled into the vacancy of this little patch of world and the one inside of me, and we waited.
 
I could feel it coming back. It was almost here.
 
The sky was turning red.
 
She Who Will Rise
 
 
 
 
 
 
James is
there
, the most important place,
now
.
 
He is not in the bathroom or at the rabbit farm or the lake house or in Sheltering Palms. He doesn’t know where he is. He is awakening as if from a dream, his vision returning before his eyes blink, because they are already open and staring up. The sky above is tinted red, and there are birds watching from telephone wires. The edges of the trees sway in a light breeze and he feels nothing. He hears nothing. He smells nothing. He remembers nothing. He doesn’t even know who he is. There is no James Hastings. There is no Stacey. There is no Ghost. There is no information. The hard drive has crashed and rebooted, starting from nothing but scattered zeros and ones. There is only the red sky, the telephone wires, the trees.
 
He is on his back and something heavy and rough covers him, scratches his bare chest. He is frightened by an undefined menace and now the questions come.
 
Where am I?
 
Who am I?
 
What happened to me?
 
The sense of evil that pervades him induces a crawling claustrophobia and he throw his arms up and wrestles to shove the dirty thing off, the layers of scratching, stiff blanket, until it flaps to one side. He sits forward as if controlled by another entity, as if someone stronger has entered his body to save it, and this force wants him to get up. He is cold all over, cold inside his bones. The red is everywhere, and blurred in places. He sees the fences now, and the long lane of dirt, a shopping cart on its side, and the tops of the houses beyond the fences. There are dirty weeds and dust particles and trash. Beside him is a broken hulk of furniture, sour and rotting, and his senses begin to fire, sending their messages, the sensory sum of which amounts to:
 
This is a bad place.
 
He doesn’t know how to move, but his body knows, it remembers, and though he is numb and cold all over, he is rising.
 
He staggers to his feet and the red world tilts and feels as though he is walking on a balance beam and will fall off any moment now. He walks until he is standing beside a small building with a car parked in its mouth. The car door is open. It’s a low, sleek thing, this car, and when he wipes his eyes and moves closer to it some of the color returns and he sees white through the red, the car is white. He stares at the car and though he does not recognize it, it gives him a warm feeling, encouraging him,
yes, yes, come this way
.
 
The keys are in it. This car belongs to someone else. He should not touch it. He walks past it, through the garage -
yes, that’s it, this is the garage
- and emerges into a yard of nice grass. Above the yard is a big white house that fills him with hope. He knows this place. He will be welcome here. He crosses the yard and enters the house through the door on the back patio.
 
In the kitchen the smells come alive, all of them familiar. This is his house, he is sure of it now. This is
home
, and every emotion and meaning that word contains fills him up. Happiness, relief, safety, food, warmth, love. He will be safe here. Whatever happened, this is where he belongs and he will find his way out of the nightmare, beginning here.
 
He is numb and things don’t work they way they should. His neck is stiff. Walking is hard, slow work. His balance is off. He looks down and his pants are scuffed and torn. He is dirty, covered with sticky trails, not wearing a shirt, cold. He wants to be warm, clean himself off. A hot shower makes everything better.
 
He moves on instinct to the front of the house, up the stairs, over the landing, and up more stairs. He makes it to the top and down the hall, to the bathroom. It is dark with evening light and tinted red. He peels off his clothes and they stick to him in places. He looks in the mirror and is shocked to see that he has the red dirt streaked in thick lines from his nose, around his neck, from his ears and on his chin.
 
Oh, mother of God help me, it’s blood—
 
He looks away and turns the water on very hot and steps into the tub and pulls the curtain around the hoop. The water feels so good, but most of all just because it
feels
, he feels it, it allows him to feel. He is increasingly sore and tired, bones throbbing, the him of him settling into his body again, his soul one hundred and sixty pounds of sand pouring back into its proper bag, returning, and he lets the water pound him, cascade over his head and drum against his neck and skull to stem the headache that has been growing stronger since he woke up, but it doesn’t help. His head hurts too much. He washes the dried dirt from his nose and ears and corners of his eyes and by the time the water has run all the way to cold, his head hurts too badly to stay in and he knows he won’t be able to stay on his feet much longer.
 
He steps out of the tub and looks into the mirror, wiping steam. He see colors now but the red lingers. One of his eyes, the left one, is red where it is supposed to be white, as if the eyeball is a bauble half full of blood. His hair is white and his head pounds and the bathroom spins. He turns away and moves to the medicine cabinet above the towels on the other side of the room and catches a glimpse of the rabbit paintings. They are in love. There is a boy rabbit and a girl rabbit. They are a couple and they live here and they are loved. The rabbits are black and white at first, but then the lower one begins to throb like a heart, like his swollen brain, bulging, turning red and fading, turning red and fading, and another spike of fear pierces him.
 
She is red because she is hurt.
 
Where is Stacey? Why isn’t Stacey home with me? She is supposed to be home.
 
His head hurts too much to look at the rabbits. The room won’t stop spinning. He staggers in a circle and throws his arms out, catching himself on the sink where he vomits. He throws up again and again and the pain and pressure behind his eyes is unbearable. Rods of steel are pushing through his frontal lobes and exiting his eyes. He coughs and washes his mouth. His head is going to explode. It does not seem possible that a human head can hurt this much and still be attached. He drinks some water and staggers, sliding along the wall to the other end. He holds onto the cabinet door as he fumbles for the aspirin. He finds the bottle and pops the top and swallows four quickly, dryly. He needs to lie down. He needs to close his eyes.
 
I’ve suffered a head injury. A terrible, terrible head injury. Something bad has happened. Where is she? Where is Stacey? I need my wife. I need help. I miss her so much . . .
 
He tries to walk and the bathroom door floats before him and he becomes untethered as his head floats away.
 
Time slips.
 
 
He wakes on the couch with no memory of how he got there. His head still hurts but it is better. He thinks he is hungover. He must have thrown down too many beers last night wondering where she was. He must have slept for a long time. It is afternoon already, almost sunset. Where is Stacey? Why hasn’t she come home? He can’t remember the last time they spoke. The last time he looked into her eyes. He can’t remember why, but he is sure that she is mad at him. That she has been angry at him for a long time and he doesn’t know why.

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