Authors: Karina Halle
“The fact is,” Sage goes on, “Jacob is here, where he should be. He did a brave thing, sacrificing his own life to save Dawn’s. I know that’s not how they say he died, but that’s the truth. There was no voodoo, nothing except bravery and selflessness. What they don’t tell you is both Jacob and Dawn died the day that the crypt collapsed. And they both came back. But she never would have without him. As such, I owe Jacob my life. I owe him the world. Even to this day. You see,” he says, looking at Perry now, “it’s not easy having to deal with things you can’t explain. Things that the world judges you for. The fact that you see the world differently. Or maybe the world shows itself differently to you. When you find that person who understands . . . you hold onto them with your life. And if there is anyone out there who can . . . give that person back to you, you’re in debt to them forever.”
I feel like this is totally a moment for Perry and Dex, considering they’ve been to Hell and back (again, literally) and seem to understand each other on this basic, soulmate kind of level. I guess it’s kind of inspiring to see a couple such as Dawn and Sage still together, considering they seem to have gone through something similar. True love binds.
Of course that makes me have a tiny pity party for myself, complete with festive hat, confetti, and party horn that makes a pathetic little toot, since I also seem to be damned with these afflictions and yet I’m still alone. Finding someone who understands me seems pretty much impossible.
That said, Sage didn’t really answer the Jacob question, whether I was talking to a ghost or not. It seems to be important only to me.
“So then what really happened during the Hybrid tour?” Dex asks point blank.
Sage grins at him. “What Dawn wrote for Cream magazine in 1974 is completely true. Everyone passed it off as clever metaphor. But it wasn’t. It took us a long time to even think about it, let alone talk about it . . . people died. And that still hurts. But time heals and we’ve had a good, easy, simple life since then.”
“So that means if the myth is true,” Perry surmises, “you made a deal with the Devil for fame and fortune and when you turned twenty-seven, he decided it was time to collect. That’s why your tour went awry, why people started getting hurt and dying.”
Sage gives her a quiet smile. “Sounds like a load of bullshit doesn’t it?”
She shakes her head. “Not at all. I believe it completely. It’s just something tells me you don’t tell this story to just anyone.”
He shrugs. “You’re right. And if I get too drunk or high and do, I can usually pass it off as ramblings of a tired old man, still living in the past. But I knew you guys would understand.” He fixes his green eyes on me now. “Even you.”
Especially you.
I can almost feel that radiating off of him. I think my paranoia amp has been cranked up to eleven lately.
He looks to Dex. “You play an instrument, Dex?”
It’s music to his fucking ears, no pun intended.
“I’ll play anything you give me,” Dex says, wide-eyed. “Just let me smell your guitar and I’ll be happy.”
“Dex don’t be weird,” Perry admonishes him under her breath.
I know Sage doesn’t want to discuss the past anymore and I know that Dex is a gifted musician in his own right, able to play any instrument he wants, let alone sing like a motherfucker, so the question easily swings the conversation back into neutral territory.
We head downstairs into the basement, which is in fact a funky jam room crammed with guitars, instruments, and band memorabilia (AKA not a dungeon). While Perry and I stare at framed platinum records on the walls and photo albums full of Sage and Dawn with Jimmy Page and Roger Waters, Sage and Dex start jamming together. It’s actually kind of an epic sight and I even record a few minutes of it on my phone just in case. Not that my blog followers would care, but you never know.
Finally Perry suggests it’s time to leave. I know Dex wanted to keep rocking out with a legend and I wanted Dawn to come home, maybe even with Jacob in tow, to get more answers but we can feel when our time is up.
We leave and I tell Sage he and Dawn are welcome over any time for dinner (my dad will sure as hell be surprised) and he heartily accepts. But while it was nice to get to know Sage and see his house and get to know a bit about him, I know I’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to our new neighbors.
And I’m not really sure what I’ll find next.
“Ada.”
A breath of a voice floats past, barely audible, like it’s more of a memory than anything.
I groan, my eyes too heavy to open and try and take stock of where I am, how I got here. My memory jogs and then stutters and I come up with nothing except the here and now: my cheek pressed against cold, hard ground, with dampness seeping in my clothes, going straight into my bones.
“Ada, come find me.”
The voice again. My mother’s. Here but not here.
Somehow I open my eyes and am faced with a grey world. I’m face down on frosted grass, sprawled against unyielding earth. Slowly I raise my head.
And I see her.
She’s standing a few yards away, her back to me. We’re on the island again, this place that only seems to exist in my dreams, only now it’s not an open space overlooking the sea, we’re in frozen woods of birch and hemlock. On the other side of my mother is a large, dark pond, a layer of thin ice stretched across like a spider web. I have this unsettling feeling that the pond keeps going and going and going underneath and there is no bottom.
It’s a door.
To someplace beneath Hell. A darker place where there’s no air, no life, no escape.
The thoughts rattle me and I’m afraid. I’m suddenly afraid that the door is real, that this is real, and that my mother might actually be in front of me and she’ll be lost to me forever.
“Come find me.”
She starts to walk.
“Stop!” I cry out.
She does.
I try to move, to get up, but every part of my body is heavy, swollen, and by the time I get to my feet, I’m sweating, my face red hot with strain.
She’s still standing there, dressed in jeans and a peasant top, the clothes she was wearing when she was last seen alive.
When she threw herself onto the train tracks of the New York Subway, before my very eyes.
She knew that if she killed herself, the demon that was possessing her, the demon that was intent on destroying us, destroying our world, would die along with her.
The memories hit me like a sledgehammer and I feel myself cracking into pieces.
My mother shouldn’t have died, it should have been me. I should have realized what was going on, I should have been strong enough. The demon was inside me first, albeit briefly, and I should have been the one to kill myself and the demon inside, not her.
But I hadn’t.
I wasn’t strong enough to fight.
And honestly, I don’t know if I would have been strong enough to throw myself in front of a moving train either. The fact was that if I had been in my mother’s shoes, if I had the choice, I may have been too much of a coward to do the right thing. Jacob had said that the young have courage. But I was only sixteen. And I had none.
“Mom,” I say softly, the ache in my heart growing and growing, adding to the weight, my body already so heavy, being pulled to the earth. “Please.”
I don’t know what else there is to say. What can I say?
Too much.
Not enough.
“I miss you,” I whisper. “I love you. I wish you were still here. That I’d wake up and come downstairs and you’d be in the kitchen with Dad. I wish we were all happy again. I wish everything was normal.”
My words float in this airless land and I feel she can’t hear me. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.
She starts to walk, straight into the pond. The ice melts instantly with a hiss and puffs of steam rise as her foot touches the water.
I can’t go after her. I can’t move an inch.
She gets in to her knees and slowly starts to turn her head. To look at me over her shoulder.
I suck in my breath, terrified that what I’m going to see won’t be my mother, will be a horrible demon instead.
Instead, it’s worse.
She’s my mother.
As she’s always been, as I’ve always remembered.
Just being able to look into her eyes again brings me to tears.
You’re stronger than you think
, she says in her inside voice.
Come find me.
“Mom,” I sob, nearly falling to my knees.
She turns her head forward, goes in further, one step at a time, until the dark water is at her throat.
You’re stronger than you think
, she says again. She pauses, her head cocked, almost as if she’s listening.
You need to be. To fight him.
My eyes widen. “Fight who?”
She glances at me quickly and in her eyes I see nothing but utter torment.
The one who died with me.
Her head goes under. She disappears beneath the water, only a faint ripple to tell that she was ever there.
The one who died with her?
“Mom!” I cry out and suddenly I can move. I stagger across the frozen ground, tripping over branches and low brush until I’m at the pond’s edge, beside the crooked, bare limbs of a birch tree.
I frantically peer into the water, expecting to see my mother.
A scream strangles in my throat.
My mother isn’t there.
Instead there is a girl with wisps of blonde hair cascading around her face like a veil.
It’s me.
I’m floating in the water, just underneath the surface.
Dead.
Suddenly my eyes pop open in alarm, staring right at me through the water.
My mouth opens in an underwater scream, bubbles rising, breaking the surface.
Hands, dozens of hands, some with peeling skin, some just fiber and bone, reach up, grabbing my body. Skeletal, rotten fingers digging into my hips, thighs, shoulders, arms, dragging me down and down until I’m fading before my eyes.
All I can do is stand there and watch until I’m gone, drowned in the depths.
Prisoner of the dead.
The pond is still and dark once more.
I turn around slowly, unsure where to go, what to do, the forest suddenly seeming to close in on me, growing thicker, darker.
A hand grasps my ankle.
I can’t even scream.
I’m yanked to the ground, my fingers clawing into the cold dirt, trying to hold on as I’m pulled back toward the pond.
“Come find her,” a disembodied voice says, raspy and metallic, like a monster over a radio. “And you won’t come back alone.”
***
I wake up with a jolt, my heart beating so fast in my ribcage I’m certain I’m on the cusp of it failing all together.
I open my eyes to the blackness and for one horrible second I think I’m underwater, drowning, that I’m floating in the depths of a watery Hell.
But my eyes adjust quickly.
I’m in my bedroom, the covers thrown aside, my limbs sprawled across the mattress.
I want to sigh in relief, to shed the nightmare from my heart. Fucking hell, that was a doozy.
But I can’t.
I can’t move.
Sleep paralysis
, I remind myself quickly, trying to quell my racing heart.
You know this happens with the syndrome. It happens all the time when you wake up. That’s what the internet doctors say.
Knowing doesn’t change anything.
I
can’t
move.
And I’m not alone.
Everything in me suddenly freezes, like my blood is paralyzed as well, and I’m acutely aware of everything around me, down to the molecule.
I’m aware that the room is quiet and absolutely still.
Unnaturally still.
I can hear my heart beating in frantic thuds.
I can hear the tick of dying bubbles inside the half-drunk can of soda by my bed.
I can hear a low, ragged
breath
.
A breath that isn’t mine.
Someone is else is in the room with me.
My heart skips.
Heavy breathing comes from the foot of the bed. The same place where there is immense pressure on the edge, just to the side of my bare, exposed feet.
I can feel them,
it
, sitting there in the dark, breathing in raspy little gurgles.
But I can’t move.
I can’t see them.
My whole body feels awash with dread, colder than the ground in my dream, a frozen kind of panic that prickles at me, steals my breath and holds it.
There’s someone in my room.
Someone.
Someone.
Another rough, guttural breath.
Something.
The terror has never felt so great, so overwhelming. I am nearly enslaved by it.
I close my eyes, trying to breathe, trying to find the strength to move. I will my limbs, my muscles, my bones, and nothing happens. I can’t even open my mouth to scream.
It could be in your head, it could be in your head
. I’m practically crying on the inside.
Perry, Perry, Perry!
I don’t know if she can hear me and it doesn’t matter.
Because there is now another sound.
The closet door slowly creaking open.
I can see it out of my periphery, opening by itself until it’s wide and there is nothing inside the closet but a black, gaping hole.
The pressure comes off the bed, weight lifted.
It brushes against my foot and I scream internally. The fear is so sharp.
I see a dark, tall shape glide toward the closet, my eyes fighting to adjust, to pick up the form from the darkness.
Something thick and about two feet long drags behind it, rustling on the carpet as it goes.
The being steps into the closet.
The door slams shut.
And suddenly all feeling returns. Like chains and shackles have fallen off me all at once and the breath flows into my lungs so fast I nearly choke on it.
I’m up, out of the bed, on my feet and panting, wheezing, slapping my hands up and down my arms, my neck, my face, trying to make sure I’m alive, I’m awake.
It
went into the closet.
That motherfucking closet.
I stand there beside my bed, unsure of what to do, where to go.
There was someone here.
Something.
It was real.
It wasn’t a dream.
And it’s in my closet right now.
I have to go to Perry.
I start walking across the room quickly, afraid to look at the closet again.
Then I hear it.
Her.
“Ada, please.”
I freeze.
My mother’s voice again, crying out from the closet.
“Please, he’s here with me. He won’t stop. He won’t stop.”
I try to swallow and can’t.
“You have to be brave sweetie, you have to be brave.”
“Mom?” I manage to whisper. Because this isn’t a dream now, this is real, this is
happening
.
I move toward the closet, each step I take becoming lighter, like the closet itself is pulling me in. I have a vision that if I closed my eyes and let myself go, I would fly through the air, into the darkness, into my mother’s arms.
I open my eyes and suddenly I’m right there. My hand is inches from grasping the knob. It wants to. My palm burns and my hand twists involuntarily, desperate for contact.
“Don’t.”
The voice comes loud and clear across the room.
I gasp and spin around.
There is someone standing by my bed. Tall, broad-shouldered, faceless in the night.
Sweet fucking bejesus.
My mouth opens, words on my tongue, a scream building in my lungs.
But nothing happens. I stand there, staring, unable to move again.
“Don’t touch that door. Don’t go inside.”
His voice is hard and commanding, yet instantly familiar.
But it can’t be.
“You’re not dreaming,” he says, softer now. “Not this time.”
I lick my lips, my throat parched. “It was you,” I manage to say. “You were sitting on my bed.”
The man shakes his head and I wish I could see more than just his form against the windows. “No. That wasn’t me.”
“Who was that?” I whisper, my voice trembling, every single cell inside me trembling. I’m legitimately concerned I might pee right here and now.
“Something you don’t want to meet,” the man says smoothly, his voice still taking on an edge.
But for whatever reason, the man in my room now is much less terrifying than the thing that went in the closet.
“Who are you?”