Dead Echo

  Chapter 9: The Attic, Late Night

  Patsy came awake to faint laughter. She rolled over in bed and reached for the alarm clock, hit the top until the faint green glow bloomed. 12:03, pitch black outside. She didn’t remember going to bed, had no idea what had roused her from sleep. But there, again, the same soft tittering. She sat up, pulled the hair out of her eyes. The covers were in a ball at her feet and the fan was whirling fast above her head. She reached over in the darkness to where she knew the fan cord hung, found it dancing crazily in the turbulent air and pulled, twice, hard. Instantly the motor disengaged, the room suddenly drenched in silence, save for the dying slash of blade against air. For a moment she considered lying back down but then the sound again. Unmistakable. Laughter. A child. Gooseflesh sprang up on her arms and down the length of her back.

  She had no idea where it was coming from.

  She rolled over, reached past the clock to the bedside lamp. She turned the knob and the darkness lurched away from the light. She swung her feet over the side to the floor, noticing the chill obliquely. She stood up, the current creepiness recalling the pair on the gravel road two days before, even then, trying to make some sense of their odd behavior and disappearance. Again, coming up dry.

  A tinny clash of silverware brought her back to the present. Brought on a fresh coat of gooseflesh all the way to the ends of her fingertips. She looked down at the phone and wondered whom she’d call, and then if she did, what she’d say. The sound seemed to be coming from somewhere out there in the hallway, maybe as far as the kitchen. The bedroom door was partially cracked and she was thankful she’d left the light on in the living room, though she had no memory of doing so. There were no moving shadows lurking against the wall, no further sound from out there. She moved to the foot of the bed already wishing she’d brought the gun in from the car, out from underneath the seat and in here, where she could get to it if she needed to. And God help her, she hoped she wouldn’t now. She considered calling out but wondered (as she had with the phone) what and whom she’d call out to. And after all, wouldn’t that be obliging the terror she felt building up?

  She crept over to the door and pushed it carefully back to the wall. It didn’t make a sound and for that she was thankful. The added light brought the furniture (what little there was) out of hiding. Everything was normal, not a thing out of place. She glanced back at the clock and saw four minutes had already been gobbled up. She stepped out into the hall and stared down its length. All clear to the curtain in the living room. No sound of approaching footsteps, no heavy breathing around the corner.

  And then the sound again and she jerked her head up to the attic door. Jesus Christ, it was coming from up there!

  Oh no, a frantic voice warned. This is not real, Patsy! You are, right this minute, lying in bed in the middle of a very weird dream! Remember this! Turn around and go back to bed. Pull the covers over your head and if you even think you hear anything else jam your fingers in your ears! This is not real, Patsy. This is where madness starts! And she found her hand rising to the pull cord. “A dream,” she whispered into the silence. Only a dream that would soon pass. But the cord was real; she could feel that, the length of nylon ending in the cold metal ball. It seemed to be vibrant with life against her fingertips.

  And now the whispering was not in her head, but somewhere up there, on the other side of the pull-down door. She could almost make it out but not quite (the voice so familiar), a short little round of laughter following. And then she said it, the name she would have followed into any fiery pit of Hell itself if the summons ever came. “Terri,” she said and pulled the door down. She was not afraid; that was the strangest, the most dream-like quality of the whole affair. Perhaps the possibility of dreaming gave her the strength to continue, knowing this had no right in the logical world, the world that she seemed to have less and less true hold upon lately. She folded the ladder down to the floor, set her foot on the first rung, didn’t even look up into the darkness until her head rose above the lip of ceiling. Then the gooseflesh returned in a solid cold wave. Her rational mind fought for control, attempting some plea that was lost in the crystal-shattering moment of her daughter’s voice.

  Terri! My God, somehow Terri was up here!

  Patsy’s motherly instincts kicked in and she envisioned her baby trapped, wanting her bed, her momma. She savagely attacked the darkness for the light cord. Missed it the first time, almost pulled it from the rafters the second. Suddenly the area was illumined. Quiet.

  No laughter, no sound of children’s whispers.

  But someone had been here. Or some thing.

  Her eyes went straight to the little children’s table with its set of matching chairs. There was no one seated around it but all the chairs were pushed back as if a small party had just disengaged and left. The table was covered in blood. The leg closest to her was painted all the way down to the plywood deck, the blood pooling out beneath it. A strange smell of carrion filled the air. But still she remembered the laughter, the thin whispering, the realization that this was probably only a dream. The realization that she would walk through the Gate of Hell Itself if that trail led to her lost daughter.

  She stood up, hunched over, studying the small bloody table. Silverware indeed, lying haphazardly in the mess that was much more, she saw now, than a gout of blood washed across the surface. There were other things there, muscled tissue, it appeared. Maybe even a couple of fingers removed at the knuckle.

  Then, another sound. Not laughter this time but a shuffling, back in the darkness where she’d thought she’d heard it previously. And then another, around behind her now. Shapes began to coalesce from the shadows. Small, child-shaped things hunching forward into view. Two little girls, red-eyed and blood-streaked, pulling themselves toward her with lurching steps, coming across the insulation which could in no reality hold them. Patsy jerked back and hit her head on a rafter, went down hard, a knife of pain racing her spine as it jarred on the two-by-six beneath the plywood. It was then she began to doubt the dream, began to see the logic of Hell. The two girls were still coming, oblivious to the beams and boards in their way. Their eyes were glazed, doll-like, their hair hanging in bloodied rivulets down from their foreheads. Patsy saw they held knives in their hands, still painted from whatever deed they’d done at the table. Then they stopped and their heads turned toward the darkness where Patsy had thought she’d heard the sound when she’d first come up here.

  Another shape began to move there in the darkness.

  She wiped a hand across her forehead to move her hair and a trickle of blood from her eyes. There, right behind the air conditioning vent. A flash of movement! Then, in the disparity of either a dream or a nightmare her little girl waffled into view. Terri! the word ripped through her mind, the complete impossibility of circumstance. She managed to lift herself to her knees, held her arms out for her baby, unmindful now of the other children drifting closer. She had eyes only for her baby now. “Terri,” and this time the word came from her lips, damned all nightmares to the corners. The little girl was now in the open beneath the angled rafters, and the sight of her brought tears to Patsy’s eyes. It was as if the night of the wreck, the fire, had never ended. Terri stood before her in her blackened, burnt dress, smoke still puffing out in little billows of besooted air. Her face was a dark red rash of angry, burned flesh and crisped hair etched into her cheeks. Her body broken and disfigured from the impact of the crash. She limped badly and Patsy saw it was from the fact that one foot was almost fully twisted around backwards. One arm was charred to the stump of her elbow. Patsy crawled across the plywood floor and raised herself on her knees again, held out her arms. If this was Hell, she’d take it, make it pay, refuse to give her daughter up again to it. And suddenly Terri was right there, she could smell the smoke wafting off her pretty little dress, or what was left of it. The scent of scorched flesh reached her, enveloped her. “Terri,” she said again and the little girl went to hug her with the one g
ood arm she had left. And just then Patsy felt another hand on her shoulder. A grave hand, as cold as endless winter and time lost to sadness.

  And then another one closed around her throat.