Dead Echo

  Chapter 19: Locked In

  Fourteen hours before the ambulances arrived Patsy awoke from a fugue state. That was the first word that crossed her mind because it couldn’t really be called sleep. In a way, she had been aware of her surroundings: the living room with the TV armoire directly ahead, off to its right side, the fireplace, the two matching armchairs off to the left of the couch where she rested. And as she gradually came around she realized her confusion: the TV was playing some black-and-white quality reality-show of a large, consuming fire. But she could recall no details, discern no vagaries. Not to mention, of course, the fact that she felt the room was filled with others, a silent contingent of on-lookers who crowded, lumped into her space with a deep menace, as cold as she imagined the surface of the moon to be.

  She rose up from the couch, only now aware she had dozed off; the familiar leaden confusion a conundrum from which she could not escape. This was not the first time she’d made the acquaintance of such an emotion. Back in the days before John there had been many, and in much worse circumstances. Alcohol had done it a couple of times but never like drugs. Never. Back then she’d had access to just about every mind-numbing, mind-frying concoction known to man and she’d done them all with the intensity distilled from a life of rebellion. In those long lost days she’d never given any mind at all to the future; there was only the here-and-now, a chance to be grown and capable of making decisions, regardless how bad they proved to be. Because she hadn’t cared then, she hadn’t really begun to care until John, and then only truly after Terri was born. She even now remembered late one night (early in the morning, really) behind the wheel of someone else’s car, idling at a red light and cursing her luck in having to be the one, the designated one, to bring all these fuckers home. She’d suddenly caught herself cursing quietly in front of the light that was now green, the car behind her honking furiously to get the hell out of the way. She hadn’t known, for a moment, what to do, where she was even; she simply slammed her foot down on the accelerator and escaped to a side street where she pulled to the curb and rested her head on the steering wheel. Cursing her luck, cursing her friends, cursing all these asshol---and she’d looked over at the passenger seat. Realized she was in the car alone, had been for God knows how long. Shuttling ghosts from one place to the other, blasted completely out of her mind.

  It had been a bad one. Even the next day she’d felt the weight of confusion in her head: the very same weight she felt now…. The past rolls into today, she thought blankly, shaking her head to try and clear it. She was sooo sluggish, just like the drug nights, but now there was no excuse. The drugs a dead thing of the past. She hadn’t had anything harder than scotch at a Christmas party they’d been to when John was…. She couldn’t take that farther, not now, not like this.

  She sat bolt upright, not resting on her elbows anymore. She glanced back at the TV. Noticed it was off and that was strange because just a second before she’d been watching it; she just knew it. Something in black-and-white. Why, yes, she had, with—and the thought caught in her mind like a rabbit in a trap. She stood up quickly and looked around. It’s what had brought on the memory of the night driving. Like then, there was no one here. Both armchairs were empty. The couch. The light off in the kitchen, something she never did until she was ready for bed. But that’s what it was, the only light now was the one between the two armchairs, sitting on the side table next to the picture of the family. Her family. What had been her family. She scratched her head, still wondering if this was some lingering fragment of dream.

  And then the light came on in her bedroom.

  Right down the hall someone had clicked her night table lamp on. She recognized its distinctive glow, filtered through the stained glass shade.

  Not a sound in the house now. Just the fan of light slipping through her bedroom door. She backed up and bumped the coffee table, scooted it a few inches across the floor with a growling sound that tore the silence like the break of a stick. She made her way around the table and put her hand to the TV. Cool. It had not been on; that part must have been a dream. But she’d been so sure…

  What about the light? Don’t forget about that, the voice warned, another voice; one she’d never heard before. And that seemed to clear her head a little, bring her a step closer to reality. Strangely, she was not afraid. Somehow the feeling that this might not be anything more serious than confusion-upon-waking stilled her. She held up her hands and looked to make sure they weren’t shaking. Because if they were (even a little bit) that would probably be enough to send her screaming out of the house and down the street. Screaming and laughing and crying until someone came and took her away to the nuthouse. But they were all right, her forehead cool.

  Okay, okay, she thought. I’m back. I must have fallen asleep on the couch and had a dream or something. It had happened before, waking on the tail end of a dream or nightmare, sure the thing that was after her would grab her wrist from the darkness growing up from underneath the bed, or that the cops would begin to bash her bedroom door down any minute. But of course those things weren’t real. All you really had to do was lie in bed, staring madly at the ceiling, and keep telling yourself it was all a dream…all a dream. Like now. She slipped over to the couch again and peered down the hall.

  “You left it on,” she said. Her voice was large in the room and she clamped her mouth shut. Nodded her head for confirmation. Yes, even though she didn’t remember, she had left it on. It wasn’t so hard to believe. Why, a minute ago she’d thought she was sitting in a room full of strangers watching a fire burn black-and-white on her TV. You’re out of your m--, the voice, the new one, tried to start again, but she pushed the door closed on it. Looked at the cable box underneath the Sony and it read 12:01.

  One minute into the witching hour.

  The thought raced a wave of gooseflesh over her body and then it was gone.

  Let’s face it, she thought, staring down the hallway toward her bedroom. You fell asleep on the couch watching TV and a bad memory woke you. The light’s been on. Don’t make something out of nothing.

  Except it wasn’t nothing.

  How can you go to sleep watching TV if it isn’t even on?

  She turned back to the coffee table. No remote. Somewhere in the couch, then? She pulled off the pillows at each end, ran her hands into the seams and cracks to no avail. She stood up and looked back at the Sony, but really she already knew. She didn’t want to but she did. There it sat right beside the black cable box where she always left it. Her grandmother had been a beast about losing the remote control. In fact, nothing with her had ever been where it was supposed to be. All during her Trailer Days (as she called them, the acrid taste of bile always rising in her throat) she’d constantly been on the search for that goddamn remote control. Having a place for it, knowing where it was, had always been a token of how far away from that hellhole she was so lucky to have escaped.

  Suddenly confusion had her. Maybe she was coming down with something. She really hadn’t felt good in days, and maybe she did have the beginnings of a headache. She might even have a touch of fever. Hell, it was late. She needed sleep; she needed to go to…bed.

  All she had to do was walk down that hallway, pull the covers back, and go back to sleep. Because back was the key. That’s where she’d been and what owed to all this confusion. That was it: signed, sealed, delivered, just like Stevie Wonder. But her legs wouldn’t work. She looked down at her feet, willed them to move. They finally did. They carried her over to the entranceway into the hall. The stained-glass fan of light lay along the floor, crept up the wall.

  She thought she heard a thump in the attic but dismissed it. That would be too much. No, no, no. That was the wind, or a squirrel, or simply nothing at all because that’s what it had to be. She would not allow it to be anything else. Right now she was going to walk down the hall, take a right through her bedroom door, and climb into bed. That was it: a very simple plan. Three steps, just like the ABCs. Step One
wasn’t so bad but her plan began to unravel at Step Two. She couldn’t step through the doorway to her bedroom. She really, deep down, didn’t even want to.

  Someone had been in it.

  The covers were stripped off to the floor even though the tail end of the sheet was still stuffed underneath one corner of the mattress. Both pillows on the queen-size bed had been piled on one another and there was the obvious impression of a head playing through them both. The under sheet was rumpled and creased. But the bed was empty. Of course it’s empty! the old voice shouted, the one of seeming implacable reason. There’s nobody in the house but you, so how could anyone else have been in here?! The window was closed. She knew that even though she couldn’t see it through the curtain because she heard wind kicking up out there now and rain pounding down on the roof. And come to think of it, she couldn’t recall when the storm had started (had it been raining like this when you woke up? she asked herself to no avail), but with all that racket the curtains would be blowing if the window was broken, or up. There would be a growing puddle of water on the floor beneath it. But there wasn’t. She took a step closer, a foot inside the room now, and glanced left at the closet. Closed. But her eyes drew back to the bed. Even now she remembered getting up this morning and making it. She did so every morning, religiously. Something she’d never done until they’d gotten that first apartment in the first heady days of John.

  This looked like her bed from the Trailer Days.

  She didn’t like it one bit. In fact, now felt her anger rising. It gave her the courage to cross over to the foot of the bed. To bend over and collect the sheets from the floor, to spread them back on the bed. But then she stopped.

  A smell. Perfume. Nothing she owned. Nothing she even recognized, which wasn’t so strange, seeing as to the fact she’d never been a connoisseur of women’s perfume. And then an odd feeling passed over. If John were living, if she’d just come into their bedroom and found the sheets like this with a strange female scent wafting off in all directions, she would have been mad as hell. It wouldn’t have taken her a second to click over to Extremely Pissed-Off.

  But now the only thing she felt was fear. Pure and simple. The last vestige of anger trailed away.

  John was gone. She lived here alone. Someone, some woman, had been lying in her bed! Lying right here while Patsy slept away some strangeness on the couch down the hall! The creeping unease began again, this time deep in her groin, working out like a heating pad. She dropped the covers and stepped away from the bed. She glanced back at the closet. Could be hiding back there right this minute!

  She sat down hard on the edge of the bed.

  No. She would not do that again. The conversation with the psychologist drifted back like a life raft. It had all seemed very pointed and matter-of-fact, sitting in that office discussing her problems with the stranger. But beyond all that, what it had mainly felt like was ridiculous. All those fears she’d expressed. The light of day and the office had given them an almost comical essence (not Terri’s! the old, frantic voice whispered). But now, here, they didn’t seem ridiculous at all. Right now she knew why she’d had them in the first place.

  She needed water, something to clear her dry pipe of a throat. She turned her head left toward the bathroom. That door was open just like she’d left it. She could see the sink from here and all she had to do was walk over and turn on the tap. Really, such a small thing. A test you couldn’t fail.

  And right now, with the storm ramping up outside and her bed a mess, right now, all she wanted was a test to pass. No matter how small, how trivial. She stood up and made her way through the room to the sink, watched as her hand turned on the Cold-water tap. She peered into the mirror and saw her red eyes, her tangled mess of hair. Nothing moved in the room behind her. She bent down and drank for what seemed forever. When she was done she breathed out deeply, surprised how much the water had calmed her. She almost felt normal. She knew now: she’d fallen asleep on the couch, dreamed, hell, maybe even sleepwalked a little (back to the bedroom to mess up the bed). It had given her a hell of a fright but that wasn’t out of the ordinary. A lot of people woke up confused in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t worry about the bed. She’d grab one of the pillows and go back to the couch. Somehow, that seemed better. She wiped her mouth with a hand towel and caught the glimpse from the mirror.

  The door to the closet was open now. Wide. Pushed all the way back to the wall.

  “Wait a damn minute,” she said, her heart starting to hammer. She turned back into the bedroom, stared at the door with eyes she hoped would burn the motherfucker to cinders. She didn’t look at the bed, at the rumpled sheets, at the impression of a stranger’s head in her pillows. She walked over to the closet (my house! my house goddammit!) and glared into the darkness. She watched her hand (as of its own accord) reach across the distance to the light switch on the wall by her bureau and flip it up. The closet came unveiled and there was no one there, no legs attached to huge feet dropping down to the floor behind the three rows of clothes, one for each wall. She shook her head and pinched the bridge of her nose right below her eyes. She let out the breath she’d been unconsciously holding and was reaching back for the switch to turn the light off when she heard it.

  This time a quick, grinding screech, followed by a hard thump. She’d heard it before and what it was drove her back against the wall next to the window. And dear God, her heart was pounding now!

  Someone had just pulled down the attic door in the hallway.

  She thought at that moment she would simply die. Her heart would seize up in her chest, her eyes bulge out of her skull; she’d claw at her neck fighting for air, and then she’d slide down the wall and die. Maybe she’d see whatever had pulled down the door and maybe she wouldn’t. Pray God she wouldn’t.

  But she didn’t die. And she didn’t slide down the wall. She just stood there staring through the bedroom door, seeing a slice of the attic door and, below it, the short run of rungs down to the floor. And then the whispers started, the sound of things shifting around in the attic. She tried to shut her mind, to just go drifting off to some safe Somewhere where she’d never have to endure this terror. This coming terror.

  The whispers grew louder, as if whoever (whatever! her mind screamed) knew there was no need for stealth now. Two voices running together as if completing each others’ sentences, but somewhere in the sibilant phrases of nonsense there was another one, a voice that seemed a little clearer though Patsy could no more understand it than the others. And God in Heaven! That voice was Terri’s!

  Patsy stood ramrod straight against the wall, her entire body a mass of gooseflesh. Out of the corner of her right eye she thought she caught movement from the closet, just a quick flash of something and it was suddenly ten degrees colder, twenty. She moved away from it, closer to the doorway and the voices stopped. She heard a brief, glass-breaking cackle of laughter that could have issued from no human throat, and then the attic door moved.

  Whatever was up there was coming down!

  Vaguely, in the back of her mind, she heard the rain, the thunder, the sudden cracks of lightning. All right on the other side of that thin sheet of glass. She saw herself ripping the curtain aside and tearing the window skyward. Breaking through the screen and falling out through the window into the mud outside by the foundation and wall. A very important part of her mind kept telling her that was exactly what she should do. Fuck everything and haul ass! And as if to add weight she suddenly felt the rock of her car keys pressed tightly against her thigh. Go! Go, dammit! Jump straight through the damn thing if you have to and just Go, Go, Go!! Don’t stop until tomorrow! Decide what to do then, but right now just get the hell out of h---

  And she saw the tiny muddy hand. Then the other. She came out of her trance and hunched near the bureau. No, no! Now two little arms were bending at the elbows, the rest of the body hidden behind the attic door, and my God, whatever was coming down the attic ladder was doing so head first!
r />   A fall of muddy wet hair came next and the hands crab-crawled down one more rung. Patsy dumbstruck at the details she was suddenly aware of: the thin lines of water running down and pooling on the rungs, the hair all twisted and clumped together, pieces of sticks and dead leaves, the terrible, bursting smell of rot. And then a forehead, ghost white behind deep, muddy seams in the flesh. The hands clumped down one more rung, this one two from the floor and Patsy saw the upside-down face of the thing. One of the girls from the attic, one of the ones from the backyard. Only now the face was a muddy puddle of clay, the cloudy cataract eyes glaring balefully from the puffed and swollen face. The thing smiled then, really just a rearranging of the monstrosity, and the smell intensified, grew like the lid coming off a summer garbage can, and Patsy saw the black, putrid maw, a glimpse of yellow-white teeth. A black, runny trill of water spilled out, washing through those upside-down eyes, and Patsy looked on in something so extreme the word ‘horror’ was like putting a Sunday school dress on it. The eyes didn’t blink. They just continued to stare at Patsy through their thin, cloudy sheen of filth.

  Patsy somehow found the reserve to stare it down as it continued to smile, hanging there, some horror from hell. Water ran off the thing and Patsy looked at the foot of the ladder as the puddle grew out to the walls.

  “Patsy,” it croaked, the voice as if from a long tube sunk into the mud of a deep grave. “We’re so glad you’ve come. Terri is our greatest little friend,” and the thing laughed, also deep and long, like the voice of a massive bedridden man lost in the soup of his mind. Then the thing began to back up the ladder, pushing back effortlessly with its thin, grimy arms, the head slowly becoming lost behind the attic door.

  For a moment Patsy was sure she’d died. Probably still on the couch in the living room, stone dead from a heart attack or brain embolism. And all the wrongs she’d committed were now here and forever to torment her, even now, in her first few minutes in hell. The only thing that didn’t seem congruent was the fact the thing had mentioned Terri. Terri would have no right inhabiting a place like this!

  So Patsy determined to set things straight. In the land of the dead she had no more fear for herself, but she was goddamned if she was going to let them have Terri too.

  She stumbled over to her bedroom door, hardly aware how the awful stink grew the closer she got to the ladder. She ducked underneath the open attic access and squeezed past with the wall at her back and the ladder pressing against her breasts. She noticed numbly how the putrid water stained her shirt the minute the two came into contact. But she squeezed past and stood at the foot of the ladder, looking up into the darkness that was as thick with menace as a nest of snakes. The rain was coming harder, each booming blast of thunder seeming to shake the very foundation of the house. But incredibly the power was still on. And when her eyes found purchase in the darkness at the top of the stairs she saw both girls, hand-in-hand, ghastly and dripping, their dead and muddy eyes shining dully in the thin, impossible eldritch light.

  That was also the moment when Patsy heard, just at the outside range of perceptibility, an unmistakable voice pronounce that single heartbreaking word. “Mommy?” Terri asked from the darkness up there at the top of the ladder.

  Every trace of remaining fear vanished. Suddenly there was no room in Patsy’s mind for anything but her daughter (your dead daughter, the old voice tried to reason, but of course this advice went unheeded) from the grip of whatever these hellish things were. And they were real all right, as real as anything she’d ever seen. Standing there at the top of the ladder, filthy hands linked as they stared down, dripping sewer water down on her below. Patsy lips twisted into a tight snarl of hatred, her eyes flashing like red signals of death itself. She stepped forward and grabbed both sides of the ladder, her necked craned up at the terrible girls above her.

  “YOUFUCKINGBITCHESLEAVEMYDAUGHTERALONE!!!!!” she screamed in one monstrous burst of adrenaline, her eyes riveted to the apparitions at the top of the stairs, her right foot already on the second step with her left coming up quick from behind. Because she could feel the savageness in her body, the death-dealing hatred that threatened to blow out her brain. At that moment all she wanted was to get to the top of these goddamn steps and start tearing. Her hands itched to get around the necks of the girls, to rip the skin from their rotten faces and tear them limp-from-limb. The anticipation broke a grisly smile upon her face, and the girls slid out and away from the opening, looking at one another now and laughing at a seemingly small joke they shared. Patsy snarled and lunged into the eldritch light that still held sway in the attic. For just a second she thought she actually had her hand around something (a rotten piece of cloth, perhaps the tail edge of one of the dresses) but it squirted away with a sickly ease as her elbow came down hard on the plywood flooring. Her underarm and right breast also scraped down hard on the unyielding opening and for a moment, with stars flashing behind her eyes, Patsy was sure she would lose her footing and fall back to the hard floor beneath. But luckily, with her right hand numb and useless, her left did manage to grab hold of the top rung of the ladder and she swung away from the opening, her right leg also swinging out into space as her left foot held tight regardless of the excruciating pain she suddenly had from the scrape she’d sustained on her left shin before her foot found a rung.

  But her pain was a small thing compared to the apocalypse she intended to bring.

  She grit her teeth and leveraged herself up with her right elbow. Within seconds she was lying in a heap at the top of the ladder, vaguely aware of the smell and seeping rot that was climbing into her clothes. She spat into the thin darkness and swung her head around trying to find the ones she intended to rip into tiny, rotten pieces.

  And it was then she saw what the attic had become.

  It was no longer a place of wooden struts and rafters, blanket insulation and air ducts. Not now, even though the vague forms still held in subtle degrees. The rafters and struts were now bones, blackened and bloody; the insulation, thick mounds of rotted tissue and festering organs; the air ducts, clotted, ragged veins and arteries dripping and pulsing with the vileness they contained. Patsy was suddenly (surprisingly) reminded of an old movie she watched as a kid, The Incredible Journey, where scientists had managed to shrink themselves and be injected into a live human body. She’d really only watched it because it happened to star a very young and beautiful Rachel Welch, but the idea of the thing had always been in the back of her mind, apparently, because that was the first thing that came now. She was within the body of something huge, powerful, and ultimately evil.

  She was in the Belly of the Beast.

  And as point of fact, she didn’t give a fuck. They were up here somewhere and if she had to stomp through twenty miles of shit to get them that’s what---

  “Mommy?” The word broke the stillness and the deathgrip in her mind like a karate chop to the throat. That one little word. That one precious little word from that precious throat. Everything else was sucked away in the vortex it left in the air, in the hole she could feel in her heart. Instantly the other two girls were forgotten. She had no mind she was standing in the body of some horrible, heaving beast. She didn’t hear the violence of the storm ramp up like wildfire above her head. The only thing she heard, the only thing she sought, was the source of that tiny, frightened voice.

  “Terri,” she said. “Baby, it’s Mamma. Where are you baby?” and she squinted into the half -light to try and find her child in this hell house. It took virtually no time at all. Just to the right of one glistening rafter, back toward the slant that described the angle of the roof, on top of a slat of plywood that had taken on the oily, diseased sheen of cancerous flesh, sat the small child’s table. Its selection of four matching chairs. In the one closest to the roof-slant sat Terri. She was small and dirty and huddled upon the edge of the table, her elbows resting on it, the chair tilted up to its front two legs. She was looking in Patsy’s direction but there was no indication that she
saw her. In point of fact (notwithstanding the creeping green darkness of the attic enclosure), her eyes were as dull, cloudy and lifeless as the ones Patsy had followed up here. But her voice, Terri’s voice, the one that sent a solid jolt of pain and terrible longing through Patsy’s entire frame, was pitiful and true. The little girl raised her hands from the table and Patsy saw the lengths of black chains descending down from her wrists and out of sight below the table.

  “Oh, baby, it’s Mamma,” she croaked and fell to her knees in the spongy mess of rot around her. She determined to crawl through it all, beat every demon of hell that stood in her way, but she’d get to her daughter. Nothing in heaven, hell, or earth would stop her now. She’d just begun to move when a tremendous crack of thunder lifted the very house around her and its accompanying effusion of lightning seemed to glow through the roof, blast through the ventilation ducts around her. For one terrible moment (the time it took to draw the knob of one startled breath) the entire attic was drenched in a blinding whiteness that seemed to erase everything else from existence. But in that same instant it was gone, and with it every semblance of grainy light within, save for the impression of stars that winked crazily before her eyes in the coal blackness.