Ethan quickly rose and ran to grab the baseball bat from the corner, the first place his mind went. When he looked back to Jeff, his brother’s drained eyes were wide.
“He’s back,” Jeff whispered in shakes. He collapsed into a pain-ridden yowl as he began digging into his forearm again.
“Jeff, stop it! Don’t…” He tried to keep Jeff from ripping at his skin, but the digging was desperate and bloody.
Ethan stood once more, the bat still in hand and held like he would never have let his father see him hold it. With purpose.
“I don’t know what this is,” he said, shrugging away any doubts for the moment. He scanned intensely across the room. “I don’t know what you are or how you’re here, but I swear I’ll bring you down if you try and harm him anymore. I will see you fall, you son of a bitch.”
And as if to show he meant what he said, Ethan swung the bat in a circular path around his brother, breaking and scarring furniture. Splintering remnants from past ages and pulverizing the no-goods. Somewhere he had heard that circles were good things, safe things. Maybe making one around Jeff would help.
“Take on me, motherfucker! I’ll send your balls flying. I got more rage in me than I know what to do with. You’d be the perfect outlet for it!”
There did seem to be a lapse in activity. At least a stall. Jeff stopped crying. Even the wind outside hushed. But then Ethan saw the flash of a grinning face in the corner, and he heard a sickening giggle. And once more Jeff began to howl.
Ethan raised the bat and charged at the corner.
***
“Lana?”
The door was open. Chloe let herself into the big house. The darkness swallowed her whole as she stepped across the threshold. The last few streaks of light were rapidly disappearing from the sky and they were of no help within the house itself. Chloe felt her way around before her eyes began to adjust to the dark. She stopped at the library door. A branch tapped on the window. Books and papers lay askance and every candle was flameless. She noticed the book was gone. The table it had always rested on, the table where her soul had been, for lack of a better word, raped, was bare but for a single large candle that had been knocked over and bled wax on the old wood. Chloe shook her head at the nightmarish memory, resisting the urge to bolt from the place.
She continued through the house. The candles were all out or, at least, on the verge gasping their final smoke trails. Chloe called for Lana once more and again was met with silence. The wind coming in from the open door rocked the dark hallway.
The stairs denied Chloe a quiet ascent, announcing to any resting spirit that she was in the house. It was her own footsteps that made her blood pump the fastest. She gripped the banister as hard as she had at any mountain climbing line. Up into the dark. Into the cold.
The second floor was empty and just as dark as the ground floor. At least she was headed higher, though. If the big house had a basement, Chloe would have refused to enter it. Climbing was always preferred to falling.
She felt the ice cold breeze from above and realized,
Of course!
Of course, that’s where Lana would be.
Lana would watch the winter storm from the widow’s walk.
Chloe did not expect the door to the walk be wide open, though. She expected Lana to be watching from inside, at the windows of the cupola. She shook as she stepped outside and the wind blasted her like a horn.
At first she saw nothing but the snow-covered land to her fore and the choppy, cold waters to her side. It was getting too dark to see much else. But then she saw the figure of the woman, slumped against the house.
She was lifeless. Chloe knew this before she bent down to test Lana’s breath or feel for her heart. Despondency crept over her and she sat down beside the dead actress. There was nothing she could do now. There was no hope for Jeff. She did not feel the need to cry about it, but absorbed it. Tried to come to terms with the weight of what it all meant. The day had been miles and miles of trying for something that could never be. She saw that now.
And then the wind sliced past her, ripping at paper. The book. It was in Lana’s lap and it was opened. Chloe peered over Lana’s shoulder like a rising moon. There she saw the words written in their poetic script.
“Oh my God!”
She understood what she had to do, what Lana had intended. She kissed the actress gently on the temple and took the book from her.
“I’ll be back,” she said.
Her excitement grew as she raced back to the cottage with the book. It
would
work. It had to. It was all the chance any of them had.
Open
The cottage was a wreck. Ethan stood in front of Jeff with the baseball bat in his hand. He was breathing heavily and gripped the bat so tightly Chloe could see the rage in the striations in his forearm.
“What is that thing?” he asked. “Nightmares aren’t supposed to be real.”
Chloe moved toward Jeff. His color was ashen and his breathing labored. His pulse was faint and he was sweating profusely. The only evidence of sentience was the speed at which his eyes were moving beneath their lids. He was dreaming frantically.
“My God,” Chloe gasped.
“It started a bit after you left. It’s only gotten worse.” Ethan looked nearly as bad as his brother, only he was conscious to view the horrors around him. “The fire went out… was blown out.”
Chloe shot him a glance.
“Now’s not the time to say I told you so, Chloe. Save it for later.”
Chloe leaned in and kissed Jeff on the lips. Ethan watched, but then looked away in a self-conscious manner. He let the baseball bat fall to the floor with a hollow knock.
“You found the book,” he said, pointing at the large leather-bound volume at her side on the floor. “Does it have what you were looking for?”
“It does.” Chloe picked up the book and took it to the kitchen, placing it opened on the counter. Ethan followed her, taking quick glances over his shoulder in his brother’s direction. “This is what Lana wanted us to find. It’s a containment spell.”
Ethan looked over the strange print of the old book. “Where is she now?”
“She’s dead.”
Chloe said it with such finality and so little emotion that Ethan simply stared at her for a moment, wondering if Chloe was capable of murder.
“Shit, Ethan. I didn’t do it. I found her on the widow’s walk. She couldn’t have been there for too long. She was still warm to the touch. In her lap, she had the book opened to this page.”
“What’s a containment spell?”
Chloe petted the page and whispered, leaning closer to Ethan, “It’s a trap. It lures a vagabond spirit, a wandering soul, into another form. I imagine it could be very dangerous in the wrong hands.”
“How do we know
our
hands aren’t the wrong hands?”
“They’re the only ones we’ve got.
This
is the only chance we’ve got, Ethan. It’s this, or we watch him die.”
Ethan then grasped what she was driving at. He swallowed. “I’ll ask this anyway, though I’m afraid I already know the answer. Where are we going to find another form to trap the spirit?”
“She’s dead, Ethan. She has no more use for her body. There will be no more glamorous movies. No more parties.”
Ethan turned back to the living room, running his hands through his hair. “Jesus fucking Christ!”
Chloe waited in the kitchen. Ethan paced behind the couch, his head in his hands. The woman under the kitchen floor was watching. Chloe could see straight through the boards. The woman’s jaw dropped and she formed a word.
Open
.
“All right,” Ethan said, coming back into the kitchen. “Let’s go get her. Let’s do this now before I lose my nerve.”
Chloe said nothing, but picked up the book with a heavy breath.
“Just leave that here,” Ethan said.
“That would be a terrible idea, Ethan,” Chloe replied. “Maybe the worst thing we could do.”
***
Jeff lay in his dream hospital bed surrounded by crumbling walls and ruins. The sky rushed dark overhead and the horizon was unfolding like fingers reaching across the expanse. Beside him stood the rascal. It was only he who, in the end, had refused to leave Jeff’s side, chirping and whispering his threats and promises. Together, they watched the sky take down the walls around them.
“You’ll let me in, won’t you? Won’t you?”
“No,” Jeff moaned. But he was not quite so sure anymore.
“You will. You’re crumbling. See? Look at yourself. And there’s no one left to help you. They’ve all run away. I scared ’em off. I’m a mad dog. I’m the boogeyman. But we can be together, me and you.”
“They’ll come back. People always come back for me.”
“Naw. You’re a mess. This time nobody wants to fool with you. You’ve gone all ugly.”
A rumble filled the dream and what was left of the hospital fell, deconstructed rather than wrecked. The horizon was here. Even the whispering had stopped. The rascal was gone and Jeff was alone. He closed his eyes in a painful squint as the horizon’s fingers reached for him.
“Peekaboo,” the rascal said. “Wakey wakey, bones are gonna breaky.”
Jeff opened his eyes to see he was back in the cottage on the couch. The fire was out and the place looked torn to pieces and deserted. Chloe and Ethan were gone. They had left him. But near the fireplace stood the rascal. He bobbed from foot to foot, his shoulders hunched as if ready for a fight, and his bulbous eyes glowing.
Jeff fought against his fever, falling to the floor out of his blankets and the sleeping bag. He crawled a few inches toward the door but found he was too weak to bridge the distance. He cried in desperation and fear.
The power flickered. The lights came on and the television flashed, but only for a moment. The rascal was distracted by this brief display, however. Jeff held his head as a sickening vertigo overtook him, and then he folded into a fetal position.
The house stretched. Every fiber of wood groaned and snapped, and the sound coming from the kitchen was that of a home being torn apart in a mudslide.
“Stop it, Momma!” the rascal shouted. “Shut up and stay put!”
Jeff gagged, lurched up, and vomited. The vertigo was not letting up, and he let his head fall backward onto the floor, which only jarred him the more.
“Don’t matter none, Momma,” the rascal said as if answering a question. “He’s gonna let me in and there ain’t nothing you can do about it. The dog’s done got the bone.”
Jeff raised his head enough to peer at the rascal through his eyelashes.
“Oh boy! I’m excited.” The boy ghost swung from side to side in an exaggerated dance. He slurped and ogled and rubbed his belly. “We’ll be fed for days, me and you.”
The kitchen was screaming now. Jeff covered his ears. The rascal prepared to pounce and dig through what remained of Jeff.
But the house became suddenly very still. Jeff felt the change immediately, and he took his hands from his ears to listen. From outside came a song. A chant. Jeff recognized the voice as that of Chloe. But where was she? He held his breath as the vertigo began to dissipate.
The rascal tensed and slowly looked to the back door through the kitchen. “They’re calling for me, Momma,” he said. “You remember that song?”
He seemed to forget about Jeff altogether and headed for the kitchen. His voice faded even as Jeff heard him say “Pretty pretty pretty…”
***
The worst part wasn’t that he was doing it, but that he recognized what he was doing as justifiable. As having a chance of success at all. Chloe’s lost grasp on reality—for there was no doubt to Ethan she had come completely unhinged—had somehow encouraged his own thinking. There was no way around it. Ethan had to let go of control at last. He lit a candle and they climbed the stairs in the big house to where the dead woman lay.
Lana Pruitt, once famous and glamorous, once covered in adoration the world over, lay on the floor inside the glass enclosure of the widow’s walk. Chloe had dragged her in from the cold and now had come back to fetch her. Lana’s face was at last serene, void of the guilt that had weighed on her so heavily.
Chloe held the book tightly still. “She looks content,” she said.
“This is crazy. We’re sick for doing this. Have you talked to your god about what we’re doing? Would he approve?”
“Just go find something for us transport her down the hill. We need to get her to the cottage.”
Ethan’s mind immediately went to Rebecca’s room, wherever it was. He had seen signs of the child throughout the house. Paintings and framed photographs ‘in memory of.’ If the little girl had been as beloved by her father as she was mourned by her mother, there would be something in her room. Some large, overpriced toy or toy box strong enough to transport a corpse. Guilty parents are prone to extravagance.
It did not take long for Ethan to find Rebecca’s bedroom. Aside from Lana’s own, it was the largest. He had expected the room not to have been altered since the accident in any way. Ethan wondered if it had even been entered since the child had died. That’s how it was done in the movies. Rooms became shrines to dead children. But the sight he came upon was something different altogether. It smelled like a tomb. The dark of the room gave great shadows to fragments of little toys. Broken dolls’ heads became monsters, and scattered alphabet blocks on the floor became antiques to avoid lest they collapse and wake the demons. He could not help but step on things further, breaking them even more. A china saucer from a child’s tea set went
clink
; the broken ribs of a small rocker went
snap
.