Dead Echo

  Chapter 41: Decision Time

  Patsy lay on the living room floor, having rolled off the couch almost an hour before. Her stomach cramped as if she’d swallowed poison and her throat was dry sandpaper. Regardless, she stayed put, only occasionally opening her eyes to stare at the ceiling or look through the front window. The curtains were partially drawn and she could see the leaves of the maple outside swaying gently in the sunlight. It made her hungry for her lost life. The one that had died with her family. More and more she came to long for that moment again, to somehow replay the tragedy so that she could, at least, join them. Her head a little more this way, perhaps to throw the seatbelt off altogether. These thoughts seemed to help her stomach. Though it still gnawed, gnawed.

  Being eaten alive.

  She rolled into a ball and pawed with her memories. The good with the bad because all were sweet now in this seeming extremis.

  She did not know what she’d done. Well, at least, that’s what she told herself…but the kitchen table, her laying open to the insidious stranger, well, she did remember that. How cold he made her…how dirty. She felt of the grave now, but doomed to some unimaginable purgatory, no damp, soulless void, just the knowledge that key decisions had been bungled. To lay, drained, on the floor of a newly-bought house, knowing that everything good was in the past.

  Terri had finally convinced her of that. Poor baby Terri. Lost somewhere in a real purgatorial hell. Pursued by demons. Every time the image crossed her mind she felt another piece of herself die, just wither and die within her. Because she had to believe what her daughter’s poor ghost had warned, hell, she’d been told as much at Sunday School all those years before when she’d been a member, albeit shortly, of the First Baptist Church. Lies dressed up for comfort. They were so easy to believe when you had nothing else.

  And she’d seen Terri, dammit, felt her presence in the house from the first moment, the very first day. Craziness, she had thought. A yearning gone rancid. She thought she’d do anything to have Terri back, but she realized now the folly of those thoughts, the price of a promise. And now that she’d gone over, she suddenly realized how nonsensical her whole train of thought must have been to bring her to this point. Made her wonder how well her reasoning was at this very minute.

  The neighborhood was dead and she’d killed it. She hadn’t pulled the trigger but her hand was still on the gun.

  She knew there were dead people in those houses. The air outside bore testament. Every day she waited for a gamut of police cars to stream into the neighborhood followed by ambulances, hearses. It would be a long time before they’d see anything like this again. If ever.

  But they didn’t.

  Surely those people were missed at work, tardy on a call to a close relative, but still no one came. That was the worst, that somehow, this was being allowed. And she was a part of it. No, no…she had to be realistic. Not a part…the key.

  Another bout of cramps advanced like a swarm of ants and she cried out in the stillness of the house, curling up into a tighter ball. With Terri it had never been like this, even at the beginning. Because she knew; she didn’t have to have a test to know.

  She was pregnant.

  From him.

  It was so hard for her to line up the points on the compass. When she looked back to her months at this new home it all seemed staged. Like she had been walking through the whole thing in a daze. Blindfolded.

  She’d given herself to whatever he was like a common whore. Simply opening the door and letting him sodomize her. Then letting him back in…for this. She relaxed her legs and cupped her small belly in her hands, remembering how it used to be when she was pregnant with Terri. John and she had sat for hours sometimes, her hands cradled just so, his ear down to her taut skin, listening for the heartbeat. And now there was nothing but emptiness, everywhere but inside her. Because, oh yes, inside there was something growing.

  Something terrible.

  She wondered if it would take the full nine months to reach term and thought not. How could this neighborhood remain so for another year? How would someone not know by that time?

  She thought about her soul and wondered when she’d lost it. Had it been the moment she entered this place? The first time she’d seen Terri in the attic? The walk on the trails? She didn’t think so. This sort of proposition had to be entered into willingly and that she’d done. From the very moment she decided she’d do whatever it took to have Terri back. And now this. Terri was as far away as ever and here she was, pregnant. As if this thing growing in her womb could ever replace her daughter. Had she been so naive? She wondered if all the lost held such views when the point of salvation was done. It was so hard to hunt down the good in the world but the bad always came calling with a smile on its face. And she’d been dumb enough to fall for it.

  Perhaps it’d been the pure chance of an afterlife. Because she’d ceased to believe in that possibility after the accident. And then her daughter had come back. She’d actually seen her, heard her voice. Spoken with her. If this was true, if she was not insane, then she’d been gravely mistaken indeed. She’d let her despair lead her off the edge of a cliff from which there was no return.

  Or was there?

  The rogue thought trailed through her mind. A possibility.

  She rolled over to her elbows and worked herself into a sitting position. Breathed deeply to try and settle her nerves. Gradually she was able to stand. She made her way to the window and looked out. Just another day. The yards, most of them at least, ragged, sure, but nothing really to draw the eye. Even now, some neighbor struggled behind a push-mower to snap his lawn back into shape and Patsy wondered what foul mess the man lived among within the walls of his home?

  The house creaked under its weight but Patsy didn’t move. There were no longer visitations during the day. Of course at night she heard any number of things creeping along the bricks outside, howls that echoed long into the darkness, but the days were different ever since…and this was the hardest part to accept. Ever since she’d let him…

  A semblance of normality reigned in the daylight.

  A cushion. Anything to buy time while whatever he’d put inside her developed. The thought coursed a lethal wave of nausea through her again and she bent double, her vision blurring, fully expecting to vomit on the floor. But it passed. Like an ill wind through winter-scarred trees, it passed, and she was left stupefied and listless before the window. Looking out on the bones of a dead world. Where would she go from here? Where could she go?

  She thought about Carolyn Skate, that poor woman running across the neighbor’s yard with the mob closing in. She remembered the laughing neighbor who drove past in the woman’s BMW, just another nice drive. Gone. All gone. In a way she’d killed her too. She didn’t think there would be any more lifelines, if, in fact, Skate had been one in the first place. Patsy had only seen her once so the thread was tenuous at best, but…

  But she came…

  The thought sent an ache through her belly. A persistent little reminder, getting bigger every day. Yes, the woman had come. For some reason she’d been concerned enough to drive out here.

  To die.

  Because that was it in a nutshell. One meeting had been enough to whet her appetite and the second phone call had been a death knell. This thing was that pervasive. That deadly. And Patsy carried its spawn in her belly. Not something forced upon her; something she’d gone to willingly.

  She lowered her head to her chest and watched the falling tears splash off the floor. There were a great many and they solved nothing. Like watching a person burn behind a plate glass window. A helpless witness.

  Was that what she’d become?

  She wiped her forearm across her face and grimaced. Was it? Because if so she was no better than the helpless schoolgirl she’d been all those years ago, at the mercy of her grandmother. Always at the mercy of someone, and now that someone had no mercy. Her line had run out.

  Or had it?

 
Again the random, niggling thought.

  She remembered meeting John, how he’d said he thought he recognized her from somewhere, that he knew her. Up until now she’d always considered it a line he’d used to open conversation, but now she wasn’t so sure. Hadn’t the same thing happened with this Lorca? He’d said he recognized her right from the start too.

  An easy target. A girl, and now a woman, who could be pressed into any shape, as malleable as lead. A fucking puppet on a string. A dupe. There were a thousand other names for people like her and none of them were good.

  She thought about the box she’d found in the attic. Everything had been right there in plain view, the dangerousness of this place, and she’d ignored them because they hadn’t fit her plan. The new life. To somehow put everything back together again and move forward. Jesus, it was sad now that she knew the roll of the dice. Because, goddammit, she’d always known she was heading for something like this. She’d always known she was doomed. Right from the start. Better for everyone if she’d simply walked off into that field all those years ago and laid down and died. It would have been better for everyone.

  And with this thought came another. The gun. All she had to do was put it in her mouth and maybe, just maybe, this whole fucking thing would come to a screaming halt. It was such a simple thing, really, just a little pull and she’d be gone. For a fleeting moment the thought crystallized in her head, made the feasibility of itself real. She could see the whole thing, even the seconds after, when she’d lie dead and bleeding on the kitchen floor. Because that’s where she’d do it, where else would be more suitable? How long would it take someone to find her?

  She had to think not long.

  Lorca would be back. That was sure. He’d come to figure out how he’d let that one little detail slip through his fingertips. At this thought her heart jerked wildly in her chest and her breath came in a violent intake of air. She whirled her head around, staring down the hallway toward the bedroom.

  It was right there in the side table. She knew because she’d put it there herself. All loaded up with nowhere to go. “Oh my God,” she said, stumbling toward the couch. Surely not.

  She made her way down the hall, steadying herself with hands on both walls, the gnawing ache in her belly getting worse the closer to the bedroom she got. As if the thing inside her could read her mind. As if it was actively taking action to deny her this new idea.

  But she didn’t think she’d be that lucky.

  She made the bedroom and stood holding on to the doorframe. She was so dizzy the effort to stand was almost beyond her. In the next minute or two, perhaps, it would be. She blinked her eyes hard and started around the foot of the bed, the side table like a tunneled bulls eye. She fell against the bed and clawed at the drawer. Pulled it open. Frantically rampaged through its scant contents for the thing that was no longer there.

  Gone.

  The sonofabitch had taken it. Reading her mind before the thought even crossed it. “No, no, no…” she moaned, giving up the search and collapsing back on the bed, the ache in her belly letting up as if the creature there realized it too.

  A puppet on a fucking string…

  But then the random thought again.

  She quit wailing into her hands and pushed herself to a sitting position. Yes, there it was again. So simple, brutal. Unlike anything that had ever passed through her mind before. Therefore not surprising as a last option. Maybe, just one more chance. With gritted teeth she regained her feet and shuffled over to the closet. It was closed and her hand shook as she pulled it open.

  So simple, really.

  She walked inside and looked around.

  Ran her hands along the rows of coat hangers and stared off into some vast, unknown distance.