Black Water Tales: The Secret Keepers (13 page)

“Maybe …” He laughed.

“I’ll call you, house number still the same?” He shouted. Regina nodded.

He recalled aloud “555-1807.”

She smiled, unable to believe that after all of these years, he still remembered her home phone number by heart and she wondered if the fluttering that she felt in her stomach was more than nerves about seeing Natalie, as inappropriate as the timing, she couldn’t help but hope that it was.

“Nothing changes in Black Water,” she yelled to Barron before taking off on her father’s bike.

N
atalie’s 1920’s colonial home was sided with slate-colored New England panels. As they rode up the sidewalk on their bikes, Regina’s eyes were drawn to the trellis that led up the side of the house directly to Natalie’s bedroom window. It had once been lush with roses of all colors, but was now tattered and choked with disobedient vines. The frame of the front door and windows were accented in a once vibrant white with navy shutters. One of the scuffed shutters hung off the side of the weathered window and foretold the potential damage that lay inside. The grass was high in some places and beginning to yellow. Trees and brush grew tall on both sides of the front yard, isolating it from its neighbors, making it more desolate than any of the other homes on the street.

Regina and Nikki stood awkwardly on Natalie’s porch after ringing the doorbell.

It was several minutes before they finally heard footsteps scrambling inside the house.

The door opened, revealing a short woman in her late thirties; her blonde hair with its black roots was flipped up and sat high on the back of her head with a styling clip. She looked comfortable in scrubs that consisted of purple pants and a top decorated with colorful cats.

“Yes?” the lady asked.

“Hi, is Natalie here?” Regina asked. Nikki stood behind her not saying a word, which was customary for Nikki who was a firecracker with people she knew, but quiet in uncertain situations.

“Sure, come in,” the blonde lady instructed them.

“Thanks” The girls answered in unison as the blonde led them into the home. Nikki turned and closed the door behind them. Right off the front hallway they passed through French doors that led them into the living room that was deprived of light by the heavy drapes that hung limply in the windows.

“Are you the nurse?” Regina asked.

“That’s me.” The lady said pointing to herself with sarcastic glory. “I will get Miss Weston.” She said before disappearing out the glass doors and shuffling up the stairs. Regina could hardly breathe in the house filled with stale and stagnant air.

“It smells like death in here.” Nikki muttered to herself.

Regina knew that it wasn’t polite to meddle with things in the homes of others, but she felt overwhelmingly claustrophobic and decided to open one set of drapes before she passed out. Regina made her way to one of the vast windows at the front of the room and threw the bristly curtains in opposite directions. Light burst into the room and millions of dust particles swam through the dark shadows that were now struck by the harsh rays of autumn light, like lost souls floating aimlessly through the air. Regina shot a couple of quick breaths out through her nostrils to keep herself from sneezing.

“Regina.” Nikki called her name while moving across the room to be closer to her friend.

“What?” Regina asked as she followed Nikki’s nervous stare to several objects around the room. Before the room had been so black and she had been so focused on breathing that she had not noticed the legion of paintings that littered the room, some sitting on easels, others on the floor, a few leaned against the couch and many hung low on the walls. Regina gasped and sucked in as much of the dusty air as her lungs would allow.

“You have got to be freakin’ kidding me,” Nikki whispered.

Regina’s eyes traveled the room, finding that the gruesome paintings decorated almost every free space in the living room.

The first painting she noticed was a young girl sitting at a piano. Her tiny body sat upon a wooden bench and her stocking-covered legs hung down, unable to touch the floor. She wore gleaming black Mary Jane shoes and a dark purple dress with a white collar, fingers poised artfully over the piano keys as if she were banging out a masterpiece. To Regina, the painting would have been beautiful if the girl’s eye sockets had not been ponderous round empty swirling vortexes of blackness. Regina grimaced as she studied the soulless piano-playing girl.

“Oh my God,” she heard herself moan; Nikki was standing so close now that if Regina moved an inch she would have stumbled upon her friend.

In another painting two young girls were surrounded in darkness created by charcoal smear. The two girls were standing at the edge of a stygian forest, the trees were bare and the skinny branches reached up into the midnight sky. Only their backs and the sides of the girl’s faces were visible and they appeared to be leaning forward, peering into the depths of an obscure forest blackened with the heart of every evil creature that lived within. If one looked just close enough, there was the tiny red glow of two eyes in the mass of black as if what they were looking for stood watching them, but it was impossible to tell whether they were going to the evil or if the evil was coming out to get them.

Regina traveled to the wall slowly, in a quest to view the most powerful painting and to put some space between her and Nikki, which was of no use because she could feel Nikki mimicking her every move with the precision of a reflection.

The painting illustrated a cult of naked girls; some knelt down with their foreheads pressed to the ground, while others danced with solemn faces around a gargantuan beast, symbolized in the ways that traditional versions of him cause people to manifest his image in their brains. He sat as tall as the trees that shaded the ungodly ritual that was taking place out of the sight of God-fearing men. No horns, but his entire body was red and not the cherry lipstick red that he is shaded in cartoons or other satirical replicas, but the color of rich rubies. His eyes were black and they glowed into and instantly captivated the soul of those who dared to look into them, let go and allow themselves to get lost. Exceedingly long arms stretched from his statuesque torso, warning that no one was out of reach. His arms were muscular and high above his head he dangled one of the naked girls over his enlarged mouth. The girl cupped her hands together over her abdomen, with eyes wide open; she seemed neither happy nor unhappy in the face of her impending fate, but appeared perfectly resolved to it. Bloody rivulets dripped out of the mouth of the beast as if he had been
devouring vulnerable little girls all day long; seductive bastard. Regina was amazed at how real the blood looked on the portrait. The entire scene was almost three dimensional and emerged from the canvas. Regina directed trembling fingertips toward the artwork to touch the drippings that ran from the lips of the beast; the closer her fingers traveled to the face of the wild animal the more real he became to her until her hand was less than an inch from his feral mouth.

“The devil.” A voice spoke.

The girls had been so engulfed in the painting, their eyes so glued to the images, their bodies so rigid with tense morbidity, that when the voice startled them, Regina took a clumsy step back, crushing Nikki’s foot. Unable to hold her ground, Nikki lost balance and grabbed Regina who grabbed aimlessly as both girls tumbled to the floor taking an easel down with them in the colossal collapse.

Both girls scrambled clumsily, getting to their feet again only to meet the cold eyes that shared no similarities to the eyes of the Natalie Weston that they had known years ago.

“Natalie,” Regina said enthusiastically. She wanted to run over and hug the unmoved woman, but the thought of the paintings dampened that feeling and the apathetic expression on Natalie’s face washed it completely away.

“Do you ever think about the devil, Regina?” Natalie asked. A disturbed Regina pondered the question.

“Uh, no …” Regina shook her head. “I suppose I don’t,” she finished.

“I do,” Nikki interrupted, her voice broken down to a childlike whisper by the emotionally draining tension that filled the room.

“Do you know why the angel Lucifer was cast out of heaven?” Natalie asked her next question gently fiddling with her bangs. Natalie’s chocolate brown hair fell over her left shoulder in a thick, neat braid. She wore a long-sleeved white shirt, fitted jeans, and brown riding boots; her eyes sparkled behind her dark reading glasses.

Regina and Nikki exchanged a look.

“He was cast out because God told him that angels were to serve man and in his arrogant pride, he refused. He and other angels who agreed with him were cast out of heaven. Once exiled, the fallen angel decided to take his revenge by tormenting man, his proclaimed enemy. God and the devil have been in a bitter battle over our miserable souls ever since,” Natalie lectured as her copper-colored eyes glared at them from behind her dark-rimmed glasses.

Nikki’s mouth dropped open and she was breathing methodically.

“Why does God allow the devil to touch us?” Natalie asked into the air as she crossed the room and peered into her own painting.

“Because we have free will just like those angels did,” Nikki told her. Regina shot Nikki a fierce look that scolded her for taking part in this ghastly oration.

“I know that.” Natalie snapped venomously. “… But why should we even have a choice? Why doesn’t God just do away with him?”

“Because the devil is powerful.” Regina was not sure this was the right answer, but injected herself into the exchange in order to get through this conversation as soon as possible.

Natalie, who was not even a foot away, turned to face her friend.

“… And doesn’t that scare the shit out of you?” Natalie hissed.

No one spoke. Natalie turned again to face the painting.

“That’s why I paint these. If I explore the abyss, if I get there before he does and I get it all out of me, there will be nowhere inside of me for him to hide. Does that make any sense at all?” she asked as she picked up the brush, adding skillful detail to the artwork. Regina took a deep breath and let her eyes float to the floor before returning her gaze to Natalie.

“I suppose it does,” Regina answered.

“What do you want?” Natalie abruptly changed the conversation.

“I just wanted to see you, to see how you were, to say I’m sorry about your mother.” Regina told her. Natalie motioned to the couch and Regina sat, Nikki followed sitting as close to Regina as possible. Natalie took a seat on the chair that sat on the other side of the coffee table. She noticed the unzipped duffle bag that contained her dirty secret at the end of the couch where Regina and Nikki sat and prayed neither of them would spot it.

“You don’t want to talk about Lola?” A question, to which, of course, Natalie knew the answer, but wanted to hear the truth out loud.

“We want to talk about Lola too,” Regina answered.

“We need to talk about Lola,” Nikki joined the conversation.

“Of course. What is there to talk about?” Natalie threw her palms face up into the air and spoke as if she were exasperated by a conversation that had barely begun. For a moment, her eyes were drawn back to the duffle bag that guarded her one last connection to Lola, the only way that she could be with her.

“What do you think happened to her?” Regina asked.

“Do you think that DeFrank had anything to do with it?” Nikki asked.

“Anything is possible,” Natalie answered.

“Well why did he bury her so close to the highway? Wouldn’t he have buried her closer to the house? From what I understand, he became a recluse. Hardly anyone ever visited him. It would have been a much better idea to bury her closer to the house or not on his property at all,” Regina theorized.

“Maybe he didn’t want to have a corpse too close to his house so he buried her as far away as possible, but still on his land so that he did not have to feel like he was giving her up. Psychopaths are funny that way.” Natalie guessed with a dull tone that inferred an irrefragable indifference. She tolerated the conversation only to pacify the two women’s needs to reason something that was utterly unreasonable.

Both Regina and Nikki glanced at one another, the heinous paintings on the wall and nervously down to the floor, anywhere but at Natalie, who had become beautiful, but frightening.

Regina’s forehead creased with frown lines.

“I don’t know, I guess I just think that is too easy, it’s too obvious. I feel like we’re missing something.”

“Why do you care so much?” Natalie’s anger was now apparent. “Why is this so important now?”

After a long period of silence where Regina took several moments to contemplate the very question that Natalie asked.

Why do I need this so much?

“I don’t know,” she finally admitted to herself as much as to the girls she sat with now.

“… But the question should not be why I care so much; the question is why don’t you care at all?” Regina snapped back, surprised by the spitefulness that had risen in her so quickly.

Natalie’s eyes narrowed in sheer rage.

“I don’t care?” She spoke in a controlled manner, with a climbing rhythmic melody that foreshadowed the coming climax.

“I don’t care?” She repeated lifting her index finger like a gun and pointing it directly at Regina. “You are the ones who don’t care, neither of you.” Her voice dripped with bitter resentment.

“What are you talking about?” Nikki asked.

“I cared about her as much as you did, if not more. I cared about all of you and you abandoned me at the time when we needed each other most. You two left me! We were supposed to do everything together. We were all supposed to go college together. You, you, me, and Lola.” She pointed her finger at Nikki, then Regina, and to herself to drive her point.

“… But then Lola left us, she abandoned us. After that, you two just threw me away.” She looked at Nikki. “You decided to go off to state.” Next she pointed to Regina. “And you ran off to Texas and it was just little Natalie left, like some charity case.” Tears were pouring over the brims of her eyes.