Dead Echo

  Chapter 29: Cold Realizations

  The clock had just ticked into the next day and Patsy stared at the gun in her hand. It was fully loaded with hollow points and she was not blind as to what those would do. The two of them, John and her, had gone out shooting pumpkins one day and right now those images were very real in her mind, the shards of orange flesh, the strings of entrails. She cast an errant look to the walls, imagining what her brains would look like spread across them. Pictured herself in a huddle on the floor, the blood running out while her dead eyes fixed on some permanent spot on the ceiling. Cooling here in the silence of this haunted house. Her finger twitched in the triggerwell but still she could bring herself no further.

  It was the night following Mrs. Tanksley’s appearance and her strange affliction in the kitchen. Patsy had done her level best to soothe the woman, pretending along with the octogenarian that her episode could be written off as having nothing to eat that morning, or perhaps some other haunting trick of old age pressing its advantage even into the daylight. Patsy had gotten her a wet rag and held it to the woman’s clammy forehead, all the while aware of the poor woman’s eyes wide with some fiery knowledge. She’d tried to hide it but Patsy had recognized the terror, known the fear. Because she lived it every day. Only, unlike the poor Mrs. Tanksley, Patsy doggedly refused to leave because of her daughter. There was no doubt she was here…somewhere. Her smell would carry into a room on occasion, so very real that Patsy would spin around, her heart pounding, her arms aching to hold her lost child. To comfort her. Because the worst thing, the most terrible idea which railed in her brain, was the almost unbearable certainty that little Terri was here, frightened and set upon by whatever beasts hung in the air like a bitter curse. Now there was no doubt.

  This was some zero set point, a borderline between opposing realities. She’d seen movies of such ideas in the past, writing them off as bullshit. But now she knew they were real. Therefore, the gun. It would be a simple thing, really. Just a little squeeze and then…

  What? The darkness of eternity or the starting point of continued persecution? She believed in hell now; she lived it. But even so she still had at least one foot elsewhere. She could still look out the window and watch the sunrise, see children playing in the yards (or you used to, the malicious voice whispered). Yes, that was true too. It wasn’t just this house; it was the whole fucking neighborhood. Everyone in it. This was a nexus of evil and somehow she’d become entangled in it like a bug in a web. But that was not the worst; she could live with that. It was little Terri; that was something she could not reconcile. Her sweet, innocent daughter was somehow caught up in the wickedness that had consumed this house. And that was unacceptable. She could not run; she could not hide. There was really, inevitably, only one thing she could do.

  And that was wait, the gun be damned. Because something terrible was on the way. It was headed straight toward her like a runaway freight train and there was nothing she could do to avoid it.