314

16 Years Later

  March 10th, 2012

  “I have to go back to Widowsfield,” said Alma as Paul held her.

  “Why?”

  Alma pushed out of his arms and stood up. She squealed in pain when she put pressure on her foot, and then limped through the door of her apartment with Paul following behind. “I don’t know.”

  Paul jokingly responded, “That makes sense.”

  “No, you don’t understand.” Alma went to the breakfast counter and started to rifle through the contents of her purse that had spilled out. She found Rachel’s card and showed it to Paul as if it should mean something to him. “I don’t know what happened there.”

  “Okay, neither do I,” said Paul. “You never told me anything about it. You just said that you wanted to leave that part of your life behind you.”

  “I know, and I did, but there’s more to it than that.” She sat on the stool and started to tap the business card against the countertop. She debated calling Rachel now, but it was too early in the morning to wake her. Alma felt frantic and got up to make a pot of coffee.

  “Are you going to explain, or what?” asked Paul.

  “I can’t, that’s the problem.”

  “Alma, you’re not making any sense.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Jacker from the hallway. He was still on the floor and was just now waking up. “What happened?”

  “Just stay there, Jacker,” said Paul.

  The big man groaned, but did as he was told. He folded his arms over his barrel chest and sighed.

  Alma’s hands were shaking as she tried to pour water into the back of the coffee maker. She spilled liquid over the side and had to use her other hand to steady the container. “I don’t remember what happened there. I get flashes of things from time to time, but nothing ever seems to make sense. There’s a whole chunk of time missing from what I can remember.”

  “Okay then, what can you remember?” Paul went around the counter and took over making the coffee. He pointed at the stool, commanding Alma to settle down and take a seat without having to tell her to.

  “Well, I guess before I go into that, I should ask you what you know about Widowsfield. Have you ever heard the legends and all that stuff?”

  Paul nodded as he wavered his hand. “Some of it. I know you get pissed off and stop taking calls on March 14th because there’re a lot of people that think you know what happened. I looked up some of the websites about the place, but it all seems like conspiracy bullshit.”

  “Do you know why people think I know something?” she asked.

  He looked hesitant to answer. “Every time I brought it up you told me you didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “I know, but did any of the sites you looked at talk about my brother’s disappearance?”

  Paul poured the ground coffee into the filter and turned the coffee maker on. “Yeah, but every site had a different version of the story. I’d rather hear the truth, if you’re ready to tell it.”

  She wasn’t sure she knew the truth anyhow, and started to draw circles on the counter with the corner of Rachel’s business card. Each circle started large, and then shrunk with each revolution, like a serpent’s coil. “Like I said, I don’t remember much of what happened, but what I can has screwed with me ever since…” she was overwhelmed by a sense of sadness that she hadn’t expected. Her eyes welled with tears and she dropped the business card to wipe them away.

  “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “Should I leave?” asked Jacker from the floor in the hallway as he lay patiently with his arms draped over his belly. “Or just stay here?”

  Alma laughed. Jacker’s unintentionally comedic timing was a welcome relief. “No, Jacker,” said Alma. “Come here and sit down with us. Are you okay?”

  The big man grumbled as he stood up. His frame encompassed the width of the hall, and he looked embarrassed by what happened. “I’m fine. Sorry, I have a problem with blood. It’s pretty pathetic. I feel like such a dork.”

  “Want something to drink?” asked Paul.

  “No, I’ve got a beer around here somewhere. Ah, there it is.” Jacker retrieved his beer from the end table beside the couch. “Honestly guys, I’ll take off if you want me to. I’ve already done enough damage here.”

  Paul looked at Alma for an answer. She shook her head. “No, you can stay. I don’t think you should be driving right after passing out anyhow.”

  Paul reached across the counter and set his hand over Alma’s. “We can talk about Widowsfield later if you want.”

  “No,” she said. “We can talk about it now. I don’t mind if Jack’s here.” She looked over at the giant as he downed the rest of his beer. “Do you know about Widowsfield?”

  “I heard you guys talking about it,” said Jacker. “I think I’ve heard something about it before. The people there disappeared, right?”

  Alma led them into the living room and the three sat down around the coffee table. There were stacks of old magazines littering the table, along with several half full glasses situated atop plates that should’ve been washed days ago. That, of course, reminded her of Paul’s spotless apartment, and she felt suddenly shamed.

  “Sorry,” she said as Paul and Jacker sat down. “Let me clean this stuff up real quick.” Alma gathered the dirty dishes and carried them to the kitchen where she checked on the coffee machine. It had hardly started brewing, but the smell was already filling the apartment. She was about to get creamer from the refrigerator when she realized that she was stalling. Alma was trying to avoid confronting her past, even by only the time it would take to make coffee. She forced herself to go back into the living room.

  “Okay,” said Alma before she took a deep, exaggerated breath. “It’s about time I talked about this.”

  Paul moved to the side of the love seat for Alma to sit with him. Jacker was lounging on the center seat of the sofa, and managed to usurp most of the space there. Alma sat beside Paul and he pulled her to his side with his arm around her shoulder.

  “My father used to take my brother and me on fishing trips to Missouri every spring, during our break.” Alma started to absently rub her thumb over a ring on her right hand. It was a simple silver ring with holes bored through it in random spots. The ring was the only thing of her mother’s that Alma still owned. “It was supposed to be a vacation for us, or at least that’s what he used to tell my mother.” Her voice cracked and she took a deep breath to steady herself.

  Paul squeezed her shoulder and Alma smiled up at him before continuing. “We didn’t do a lot of fishing. I was pretty young at the time, I was eight and my brother was ten. We’d been going there for a few years, and my mother would stay home. It was supposed to be a chance for my father to connect with us.” Alma twirled the loose fitting ring around her bony finger. “That’s not what it was really about. I didn’t know it at the time, because I was so young, but my father was using the vacation as an excuse to meet up with one of his girlfriends. God, just talking about it makes my stomach turn.”

  “You don’t have to, Alma,” said Paul.

  Alma was quick to respond. “No, I do. I know this sounds nuts, and maybe it is, but it’s time for me to deal with this; to get it all out in the open.” She took off the ring and started the slip it onto other fingers and then back again, as if her hands were desperate to be active. “My father’s girlfriend owned a cabin, more of a house really, but everyone called them cabins. They’d rent movies for my brother and I to watch while they did their thing. They would go upstairs, and my brother and I would sit in the living room, watching those stupid movies while they…”

  She pointed up and had trouble continuing, but forced herself to say it, “While they went upstairs and had sex. We could hear them, but I didn’t understand what was going on. They would spend all day up there sometimes, and my brother and I were left to fend for ourselves. We’d make our own food, and put ourselves to bed every day while at that cabin.
If we ever dared go upstairs we would get screamed at. I made the mistake of going up there a few times, and I’ll never forget the acrid stench of the drugs they were smoking. My father’s been a meth addict for as long as I can remember. That smell, that chemical, ozone-like stink that came out of the room is something I’ll never forget.”

  “Damn,” said Jacker. “That sucks. Sorry to hear your dad was such a prick.”

  Alma laughed inappropriately and shook her head. “You don’t know the half of it. We used to get beatings for seemingly random stuff. One day it was no big deal for us to wear our shoes in the house, and the next we were getting whipped for not taking them off at the door. He used to have this belt that he cut holes in, and he only used it for whipping us. He would carry it around with him, and said that the holes made it easier to swing, and made it hurt more. I remember him standing in the kitchen, in his dirty white t-shirt, making breakfast with that belt over his shoulder, like he was just waiting for an excuse to use it.”

  Paul kissed the top of Alma’s head and continued to try and be supportive, although nothing he could do would help her forget.

  “I know lots of people had shitty fathers,” she said and slipped her mother’s ring back onto her right ring finger. “And at least my mother was good to us before she went crazy. A lot of kids don’t even have that. But, you get the point: My dad was a Class A piece of garbage. He was out on business a lot, thankfully. I think that’s how he met his girlfriend.”

  “And was his girlfriend’s cabin in Widowsfield?” asked Paul.

  Alma nodded. “Yeah. I remember that our spring break came one week before the kid’s in the town. My brother and I used to watch them all walking home after school, and we would ask if we could go play with them, but my father would always say no. The last time we went there was the week before the town disappeared. I can remember everything about that week up until just after the fog rolled in.”

  “The green fog?” asked Jacker. “I remember hearing about that part.”

  “Yeah, although it wasn’t so much green as it was lit up with green light, if that makes sense. It was thick, and rolled through the street almost like it was more liquid than cloud. And somewhere inside of it there was an electric energy that kept bursting into green light, almost like there was a thunderstorm going on inside of the mist. My brother and I were watching a movie, Toy Story to be exact, and were waiting for the kids to get out of school. We always liked to watch them walk down the street. It was kind of pathetic, really, but we even started giving them all fictional names and pretending like they were our friends. We were waiting for school to get out when the fog rolled in.”

  Alma heard the coffee maker start to chug through the last drops of water. She wanted to get up and go to the kitchen, but realized that she was just trying to find an excuse to stop telling her story. She spun the ring on her finger and forced herself to continue. “My brother and I were terrified. We didn’t know what to do, and my brother…” She paused and stopped spinning the ring. “Jesus Christ, it’s even hard for me to remember his name. His name was Ben. I don’t know why I have so much trouble remembering it. Sometimes I can’t even remember what he looked like.”

  “I have trouble remembering what my dad looked like,” said Jacker. “He died in a car accident when I was twelve. My mom says he looked like me, but I have trouble remembering much about him.”

  Alma recognized that Jacker was sharing his own pain as a way of trying to help. The big guy was genuinely sweet, and Alma liked him almost immediately. He was the epitome of the teddy bear personality.

  “Ben wanted to tell my dad about the fog, but I told him not to go up the stairs. I begged him not to go.”

  Alma paused for too long, and Paul asked her, “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.” She laughed uncomfortably and looked at them both as she shook her head. “That’s just it. I can remember everything leading up to Ben going up those stairs. I was standing at the bottom as Ben went up, and then the fog surrounded the cabin. It blocked out the sun and I can remember the shadows closing in over us. The green electricity flashed and the television died, but there was still light coming from up the stairs as Ben went up. I yelled out for him to stop, and that’s the last thing I can remember about what happened.”

  “The next thing I recall is driving in the car with my father. We were in the fog, and there were shadows all around us, almost like there were creatures running through the mist beside us. They were huge, like dragons or monsters or something, but I couldn’t see what they were. The electricity kept flashing and my father was screaming at me to shut up, but I wasn’t saying anything. He was driving fast, and was leaning forward as if he was trying to see through the fog. I was curled up in my seat, and my brother was gone. The worst part of all it was that I didn’t know Ben was supposed to be there. It was almost like I’d forgotten he ever existed.”

  “We got out of the fog, and didn’t stop driving the whole way home except to get gas. I remember crying, a lot, and my father kept telling me to shut up. He told me that we were never in Widowsfield, and that nothing happened. He said that we were in a different town, called Forsythe, and that we never went through Widowsfield. And he kept checking his watch, over and over, for no apparent reason.”

  Paul held Alma’s hand and she thanked him by the way she looked at him. His massive hand was so warm, and her thin fingers seemed to disappear in his grip. “Neither of us mentioned Ben until we got home, and then my mother went insane. I can remember her screaming and crying and shaking me, begging me to tell her what happened. It felt like she knew that my father had done something to Ben, and just needed me to confirm it, but I didn’t remember. Honestly, I didn’t even remember who Ben was anymore.”

  “The police came, and my father was accused of all sorts of things, but no one could prove anything. I told them that we were in Widowsfield, but my father denied it. He said that we passed through the town on our way home, but that we’d been staying at a cabin in Forsythe. He even had the keys to prove it. The police eventually assumed I was making everything up, and that I had heard the rumors about what happened in Widowsfield. They couldn’t find any evidence that my father had done anything, so he was eventually cleared of all charges.”

  “My mother never gave up, though. She was determined to find out what happened. She would take me back to Widowsfield, and try to get me to show her where the cabin was at, but I lied and said I didn’t know. I just didn’t want to go back there. My mother tried all sorts of tricks to get me to remember, including hypnosis, and even herbal concoctions that were supposed to help me remember past trauma. That’s how she got introduced to Chaos Magick.”

  “What’s that?” asked Paul.

  “You’ve actually probably heard of it, but didn’t know what it was,” said Alma. “Have you ever heard of The Secret? That book that Oprah used to talk about all the time?”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Jacker.

  “That’s basically the same thing as Chaos Magick. It’s the idea that if you focus on one thing, you can make it a reality. I never studied up on it, but my mother was obsessed with it. She said that we had to come up with a symbol that we could focus on that was tied to the day Ben disappeared. She started with his name, and would write it on slips of paper that she would hide all over the house, but when that didn’t work she decided to try the date.”

  “March 14th?” asked Paul.

  Alma nodded and took her ring off. “To be more specific, 314.” She held the ring up to show to them. “3.14 is also the number for pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.”

  “Uh oh,” said Paul as he made a goofy grin. “We’re not getting into math, are we? Because I suck at that.”

  Alma shook her head and offered a grin. “No, not exactly. The reason it was important is because the date that my brother disappeared was also a symbol; the symbol for pi. In Chaos Magick, you’re supposed to choose a symbol that you can focus on
to help force everything else out of your mind. My mother started writing 314 on everything, and then switched to the symbol for pi. She would force me to stare at it for what felt like hours at a time.”

  “Wow,” said Jacker. “You had some nutball parents.”

  “Well, the crazy thing is that it kind of worked.”

  Both Jacker and Paul sat forward in anticipation of what Alma was going to say next.

  “Somehow my mom found out the address of the cabin. She took me back there, and forced me to stare at the symbol. She kept asking about what happened, but I couldn’t remember anything. And you know how I was saying that I’d forgotten about Ben?”

  Paul and Jacker nodded.

  “That was still the case. I couldn’t remember anything about him except for what I saw in pictures. It was as if he’d never existed except for how my mother could prove that he did. It was in Widowsfield, when my mother was forcing me to look at the symbol for pi, that I suddenly remembered who Ben was. I remember it so clearly. I was standing in the kitchen, and my mother had drawn the symbol on the kitchen floor and circled it with candles. She made me sit there and stare at it while I hummed a tune. Then, suddenly, everything came flooding back. It was the most intense and terrifying moment of my life. I can’t even explain what it was like. One minute I had no brother, and the next I was feeling such terror and grief over his loss. It was overwhelming. Easily the worst thing I’ve ever experienced, which is why I never did it again.”

  “That’s so creepy.” Jacker had moved forward to the edge of his seat and was listening to Alma intently.

  “It was like my brother was born and died all at the same time. I experienced the emotions of having a sibling all at once. After that, I told my mother everything I could remember about our trips to Widowsfield.” Alma sadly shook her head and stared at her mother’s ring. “It wasn’t long after that,” Alma closed her eyes and forced herself to finish the sentence, “she killed herself.”

  “Oh crap, Alma,” said Jacker. “I’m so sorry.” The big man seemed uncomfortable and uncertain how to respond. “I know we just met, but can I give you a hug? I feel like you need a big bear hug.”

  Alma laughed as her eyes filled with tears. Then she nodded and stood up to accept Jacker’s kindness. He wrapped his arms around her and she tried to do the same to him, although he was too big for her hands to touch behind his back. He started with a soft hug, but then lifted her off the ground and squeezed her in a tight embrace. “You’ve got Paul to take care of you, kid. And I know how much you mean to him, so I’ll be there for you too if you need me. Okay?”

  “Sure, thanks,” said Alma as Jacker set her back down.

  Paul took her hand as she sat back down. “Thanks for telling us.”

  “Thanks for listening,” she said. “It feels good to talk about it. I need to figure out what happened. It’s been too long. I need to know what happened to Ben.”

  “How do you plan on doing that?” asked Paul.

  Alma got up and went to the counter to get Rachel’s business card. She brought it back to the living room and handed it to Paul. “The reporter that interviewed me is going to Widowsfield today. She wanted me to go with her, which is why my father showed back up again.”

  “How did he know?” asked Paul.

  “They contacted him first, to see if he’d be willing to go on camera and talk about what happened. He followed them here, which is how he found me. He’s desperate to keep me from going back to Widowsfield, which is exactly why I have to go.”

  “Why do they want you to go?” asked Paul as he looked at the card.

  “They’re doing a story on the disappearances in Widowsfield for their website. They wanted me to go back there with them and talk about what happened.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” asked Paul.

  Alma responded as if he were joking. “No, not at all, but I’ve been trying to avoid this for years. I can’t keep hiding from it, and maybe this is the best way to force myself to confront it.”

  “Yeah, but on camera?” asked Paul. “Why don’t you let me take you there? We can do whatever you need to do by ourselves instead of with some strangers.”

  Alma considered the offer, but was already set on her course. “I know it sounds insane, but I’ve been hiding this for so long; I think the best solution is just to fling the doors open on it as wide as I can. Does that make sense?”

  Paul shook his head. “Nope.”

  “I get it,” said Jacker. “You want to force yourself to be honest. I can respect that.”

  “I think you should be careful,” said Paul as he offered the card back to Alma. “I wouldn’t trust these people at all.”

  “Then come with me,” said Alma as she took the card.

  “All you’ve got to do is ask,” said Paul.

  “I’m asking,” said Alma. “Come with me to Widowsfield. We can go with these guys, and tell them that we’ve got final say on what footage they use. You can help me try and figure all of this out. You can be my big, burly security guard.”

  “Nothing would make me happier,” said Paul as he held Alma’s hand.

  “Are you scared?” asked Jacker. Alma didn’t answer immediately and Jacker elaborated what he meant. “I’d be scared out of my mind. I admire what you’re doing, but if I were you I’d be terrified of going back there.”

  “Why?” asked Alma.

  “I don’t know, I guess I’m just scared of skeletons that want to be left alone in their closets.”

  314

  PART TWO : RESPITE