She vomited in the sink unable to get those pictures out of her mind. Poor Dick, dead, for falling for her, just like Conrad. Maybe she really was cursed, how else could you explain it?
“Come on in here when you’re ready,” he said. “And don’t try anything stupid. I want to talk to you. I don’t even want to hurt you.”
Keisha wiped her mouth on a paper towel, trashed it, and walked into the living room. Brady patted the seat next to him on the couch.
“First of all. I wanna know how it felt?”
“How what felt?”
“This whole week of being ignored by someone you cared about who you thought cared about you? Be honest now. How did it feel?”
She looked down.
He slammed a fist down on the coffee table. Keisha jumped.
“It felt bad,” she said. “Sometimes I couldn’t stop checking my phone and different times I had to force myself to leave or sleep without it because hearing back from him was all I could focus on. And I got so mad at myself for getting worked up and that just made it worse. And then he’d finally text me, although now I know that was you, and I’d feel happy again when I realized that things were just fine. A lot of emotions for a lot of stupid reasons like a teenager all over again. There, are you happy?”
He smiled.
“That’s a pretty good start,” he said. “Now I have another question.”
“What?”
“Do you really believe that Conrad’s spirit is in that board? Do you really think he’s been guiding you this whole time? Or are you just deluding yourself because you like to be miserable and you get off on making others feel inferior and miserable.”
She opened her mouth, sobbed. Closed it. Wiped tears from her eyes.
“I… I don’t know,” she said.
“You don’t know…?”
“I don’t. You were here that night. Do you think I flipped the planchette off the board and hit you in the face? I don’t know. I guess maybe I could have, goddamn I wish I would have,” she said.
“Did you ever use it alone?” He asked.
She nodded.
“And what then? Did it always tell you what you wanted to hear? Did it always tell you what you already knew and justified what you already wanted to do… um... I don’t know... because you were moving the fucking thing?”
“Stop shouting at me.”
“Answer me.”
“I already answered you. I don’t know. When I used this thing, it was almost in a meditative state. Maybe Conrad’s spirit guided me; maybe it was my own subconscious. I don’t know. What do you want from me?”
He didn’t answer her at first.
“I want to see it work.” He dumped the bottle of ashes onto the board.
Keisha gasped, unsure what would happen. Conrad already inhabited the board. Would they coexist? Rip each other apart? Would nothing happen?
“Put your hands on it,” he said.
She hesitated.
He gripped a hand full of her hair and jerked.
“I said put your hands on it.”
Her hands shook, but she placed them on the planchette. Brady gripped it opposite her.
“Show me,” Brady said.
The planchette buzzed with enough energy to bring Brady’s eyes to hers. He nodded.
“Who… who am I talking to? Who’s here?” she asked.
The planchette drifted one way then another as if it couldn’t make up its mind. Then it darted to C and then to D. It jolted back and forth growing hotter in their hands until it stopped in the middle of the board.
Brady’s eyes came alive.
“Are they both in there?”
“Looks like it,” Keisha said. “But I haven’t talked to Conrad in a few days. I spilled his ashes on accident.”
Brady frowned, but she ignored him.
“Can I just talk to one of you?” she asked. “Just Dick. Sorry Conrad.”
The planchette went to the word “Yes.”
“I’m so sorry for what happened,” Keisha said. “I can’t believe this psycho murdered you.”
Brady stared at her, red-faced, but his face went ghost white when the planchette started moving rapidly, even with his hands on it.
“Are you moving it?” He gasped.
“Shut up. Pay attention,” she said.
It scritched like lightning across the board, spelling a message. Brady mouthed the letters as they came out. The message said: “A.D. Remember what Conrad told you to do?”
“What does that mean?” Brady asked.
“Yes,” Keisha said, and jerked the planchette from Brady’s grip.
She pounced on him like a puma, jamming the pointy end into his eyes, mashing the solid piece of wood down over and over into his face until it started to cave. He gurgled and blood dripped from the planchette as she walked back to the board and set it down.
Immediately it started moving.
“Conrad says, he just wishes you would’ve done it sooner. You looked happy with Dick.”
Keisha’s tears splashed onto the messy board, mixing with the blood and ash. She looked from the heap of Brady to the board containing the spirits of the only two men she’d ever loved.
“I… I can’t do this anymore,” she said. “I’m sorry, for what happened to both of you, but I can’t live like this, and neither should you two. There’s gotta be more for you on the other side than that. But I want to thank you both for everything and I’m not going to ghost you. Right now, I’m saying goodbye.”
For a long second the planchette didn’t move, and then, as tears poured down her face, it glided to the word “Good Bye” where it stopped forever.
Her story broke and she got a lot of local and even national attention, but in time she proved her innocence with people across the country lauding her heroism. A lot of that attention came from men who thought she was strong and pretty. She could have her pick. And if one didn’t work out, there were always two more ready to take his place until she got it right.
On her own.
Kerry Lipp
Kerry lives in Louisville, Kentucky. He hates the sun and loves making fun of dead people. His parents started reading his stories and they’ve consequently booted him from their will. Kerry's stories appear in dozens of anthologies and his first solo work, Live Action Hentai, came out in early 2016. He’s a regular on The Wicked Library podcast. He is currently editing his first novel, writing his second, and shopping a bizarro novella. Kerry rarely (but still) blogs at www.HorrorTree.com and will try to launch his own website sometime before he dies. Say hi on Twitter @kerrylipp or come find him on Facebook. And he wants you to remember to always cover the camera on your laptop. You never know who is watching you.
Find out more:
@kerrylipp
kerry.g.lipp
www.HorrorTree.com
Blood Born
Megan Hart
1
The baby had been crying for about an hour before Tori found a place where she could pull over to the side of the road. The weeping had begun with tiny, mewling whimpers that sent a warning tingle through Tori’s heavy, aching breasts and had escalated into ear-shattering shrieks, relentless, one after the other. Now the kid was sobbing breathlessly, each small and sighing cry breaking Tori's heart. Her baby was barely over a week old, and already the newborn had stopped believing her mother would always be there to take care of her.
"Shh, shh, Little Bit, shhh, shh, Mama's trying." Tori eased the car, a hulking Buick station wagon that had been new sometime in the mid-eighties, onto the rural road's narrow shoulder.
Leaving the behemoth running to combat the frigid mid-January temperatures, she unclicked her seatbelt and twisted to look into the back seat. The baby had calmed at the sound of Tori's voice, but the small snufflings and whimpers hadn't ceased. The Buick's front bench seat made it difficult for Tori to reach over and get to the car seat, not to mention that it faced backwards so she couldn't even see the baby. Strainin
g, she reached again. Her fingertips skimmed the baby bucket's plastic handle, but that was about it. She was going to have to either climb over the seat, or get out of the car into the freezing weather. Not that the car itself was much warmer. The heater had conked out a few months back, when the weather had still been warm enough that she'd been able to convince herself she didn't need to spend the money to fix it.
"Shh, shh, Little Bit, I'm coming."
Steeling herself, Tori found the inside door handle, which had been repaired with a few twists of some kind of wire that now dug into her palm. With a deep breath, she shoved open the station wagon's weighty door and did her best to push herself out onto the ice-crusted road, but she was still ungainly from pregnancy, loose-limbed and clumsy. Her balance had shifted, and she hadn't yet gotten it back. It took her several tries before she could heave herself out of the seat. The treadless tennis shoes and layers of ill-fitting clothing didn't help, nor did the aches and pains that had not yet healed after a twenty-three minute labor that had turned her practically inside out. One foot slipped as she tried to stand. She managed to grab the car roof to keep herself from falling, and her bare fingers clung instantly and excruciatingly to the metal.
Something tore a little inside her.
Inside the car, the baby wailed. Tori ripped her fingers from the roof, praying she hadn't left behind a layer of skin. She pressed the other hand between her legs, pushing the thick pad back into place and sending up another prayer to whatever god was watching over her that she hadn't leaked through. The last time she'd stopped to use the bathroom had been three hours ago, just before getting off the major highway and onto the winding, narrow and black-ice covered roads that might've been fine, just fine, in daylight or in a car with better tires or with a more skilled driver or a dozen-hundred other things that weren't true for her.
Carefully, she closed the car door. She had a moment of panic when she worried she'd just locked herself out of the running vehicle with her baby strapped into a car seat inside, but then she remembered the locks on the car didn't work anyway. She pulled open the creaking back door and slid across the seat to get to the infant, who'd at last fallen silent.
Not sleeping. No, the baby had simply given out, exhausted from weeping and hunger. Her small red face glistened with tears and snot. At a sudden hard gust of freezing wind, she startled, gasping.
Quickly, Tori shut the door behind her. She fought with the car seat straps, brain fuzzy with weariness. She hadn't had more than two hours of uninterrupted sleep in over a week. Why the hell did all of this gear have to be so complicated? Her fingers, numb with cold on the one hand and stinging fiercely on the other, fumbled but managed to unhook the straps so she could wrestle the bundled infant free.
Her milk had come in hard only a few days ago. The first few days after giving birth had seen her nursing nearly nonstop as the baby struggled but couldn't manage to get enough to eat. Now at the first peep of discontent from her tiny daughter, Tori started to let down. The nursing pads in her bra had already soaked through. So had her bra and her t-shirt, though thank God her sweatshirt was still dry. Her nipples hurt, cracked and sore, but she got the baby to her breast and gritted her teeth, waiting for the dual agony and relief as the infant latched on and began to suck.
It took a second or so for the milk to really let down, but once it did, the rush of it was so intense that Tori let out a small cry. The baby choked, gulping. Milk spurted everywhere, but Tori got the baby latched on again, and both of them settled down. She hadn't quite managed to get into a pattern with it, and there was still the midway burping and switching to the second breast to deal with, but for now they sat in the dark lit only by the lights from the dashboard.
Soothed by the baby's steady gulps, Tori dozed. Darkness, exhaustion. The contentment of finally making sure her kid was able to eat. There was no way she'd have been able to keep herself awake.
She didn't dream, not far enough under for that, but she was most definitely not awake enough to register the flickering glow in the distance as a pair of headlights. At least, not until the glint had turned steady, and the low, throbbing rumble of an engine probed her awake. Tori hadn't seen any other cars since getting off Route 80 and following this spiderwebbing maze of winding back roads through the mountains of Western Pennsylvania toward her father's house. Barreling toward them now was not a car, but an eighteen wheeler. She could tell by headlights. It was a big rig like the one her father used to drive, moving fast. The hulking vehicle took up a lot of room on the road, and though Tori had done her best to find a straight stretch with some space to pull off safely, it was becoming very clear that she hadn't pulled off far enough.
She couldn't move. There was no time, and even if there had been, what could she have done? The truck was on one side. A steep mountain and thick forest on the other. No place to go. No time to do anything but clutch her baby against her, close her eyes, and wait for the pain.
"Never get on the road without a fully stocked first aid kit and emergency supplies, Little Bit." George Denaio hooks his thumbs into the front straps of his overalls and gives Tori a serious look. "Water. Flashlight. Blankets. Batteries. Dried foods, like granola bars or nuts or raisins, shit like that."
Tori is five. She can drive when she sits on Dad's lap, her hands on the wheel while his big feet press the pedals. She doesn't like raisins, though. She would never put them in the car, not even for 'mergencies.
"Look at me, Little Bit. Right here." His big fingers poke toward his own eyes, then at hers. "When you're out on the road, you need to make sure you're prepared. You don't know what might happen. Anything could go wrong, and you're stuck out in the desert on the side of the road, sun burning so hot you could fry an egg on the hood of your car. But don't pack eggs in your supply kit. They'll spoil and you'll never get the stink out of your car, not ever."
"I don't wanna go out in the desert and get a stinky egg cooked on my car!"
Dad laughs and shakes his head so that his hair catches in the breeze. The top of his scalp is shiny and bald, but the rest of his hair hangs down past his shoulders. Sometimes he puts it in a ponytail, but not today. "Don't be scared. I'm just saying."
"Did that happen to you, Dad?"
For a moment, his face twists so hard that Tori's sure he's going to holler at her. That's the thing about Dad, he can be laughing along like the world's the best place ever, and in the next second he's angry. Or crying. She'd rather have him yelling than weeping. The tears frighten her.
Dad leans close, fingers curling over her shoulder a little too hard, but not like he's squeezing her on purpose. Like he just doesn't know that he's hurting her. Like the time he was crying and hugged her too hard, and she had to get a bandage on her arm. She'd told Mom she fell down, because otherwise Mom wouldn't let Tori visit with Dad again.
"Yeah, yeah, it happened to me once, Little Bit. Back when I was driving truck. Before you were born. Before me and your mom even knew each other, how about that?"
His fingers dig deeper. His nails bite into her skin through the thin material of her summer dress, the one she picked out because it's got ladybugs on it. Tori tries to get away, but Dad's holding her too tight. He leans down, looking into her eyes. His have gone narrow and almost all black except for a ring of green around the edges. She can see herself in them, a little dark-haired girl with pigtails and missing her two front teeth. Dad's teeth knock against each other. She can see them when he grins. His lips pull back. His breath stinks.
"Went out in the desert, hauling a load, blew a tire, then another, you can't prove nobody didn't put something on the road, glass or nails or something, someone did it to get me off the road, you can't tell me it wasn't true. Someone wanted me off the road that day."
The words run together, mushy and hard to understand, especially when his voice becomes a low growl. His mouth twists again. She looks at her shoulder, at his long and dirty nails. He's pinching, pinching her so tight.
Tori s
tarts to cry.
"Ah, shit, Little Bit. Don't get started with that." Dad lets go and takes an unsteady step back. "Don't you tell your mother, either. She'll...."
He doesn't have to finish. Tori knows what her mother will do. Already, Mom has threatened not to let Dad take Tori every other weekend the way he's supposed to. She will keep Tori at home with her and her new husband John, in the house where there is never enough to eat because John says he doesn't want Tori to grow up to be a sloppy piggy like her father. He wants her to stay slim like her mother. Pretty like her mother. Eyes closed, mouth open, not like her mother, whose eyes are open but whose mouth is always closed.
If there are secrets she needs to keep so she doesn't lose any time with her dad, Tori will keep them.
"I won't say anything, Daddy."
He nods and the weird look in his eyes fades away. They're green again. Like hers. No longer scary, even though he's looking past her like he can see something behind her that nobody else can see.
"Something happened to me in the desert, Little Bit, but I don't want you to worry about it. I don't think you have to. Yeah. Yeah, I think you're okay. I don't think it got into you. Even if...." He shakes his head again and finally looks at her with a smile that doesn't make her want to run away. "How about some ice cream, what do you say?"
She's not allowed ice cream at home. Ice cream, even one bite of it, will make you fat. Nobody will love you. Not ever.
"Yeah! Ice cream, Daddy!"
"Yeah," Dad says. "Let's get some. Mint chip, isn't that your favorite?"
He takes her to their favorite ice cream shop, where they both order giant sundaes and eat them all, even though Tori's belly gets upset. She's sick on her ladybug dress, and even though Dad helps her clean up, the smell lingers. Mom notices.
It's the last time Tori is allowed to go with her Dad. It's the last time she sees him until much later when she's seventeen and living on her own. He shows up outside of her apartment, the one in the bad part of town, with a crumpled piece of paper and a fistful of dirty fives and tens he insists she take even though she doesn't want to.