Dead Reflections (18 page)

“Holy shit!” Hawkins’ exploded in horror. He stared between Robbie and the barn. “Isn’t that your wife?”

“I came home to look for her,” Robbie collapsed to the porch, his face crunching with emotion. “I just saw her in the mirror…”

Hawkins ran over to check on Tanya Parker. Robbie saw him lean down, feel for a pulse, then stand back up slowly, his shoulders heaving. He stared back at Robbie who sat, broken and beaten, on the porch of the house his wife had loved. He saw Hawkins’ make a phone call. He sat numb, inconsolable as police and an ambulance arrived. He managed to give the same statement as Hawkins: she’d gone into the barn for whatever reason she’d had and must have slipped up in the loft—they both witnessed her fall. So did a neighbor in the next yard who ran over within the minute.

“What do you think she was doing up there?” an officer asked Robbie.

“Trying to sort things out,” he sobbed. Only he would ever fully understand the truth of the statement.

* * *

His father came out to get him, and the two of them sat, crying, in the kitchen of a house once again up for sale. The police and ambulance had removed Tanya’s body. Funeral arrangements had to be made over the next several days. People had to be notified. Robbie sat at the table, feeling ice grow in his chest, his eyes raw from weeping.

“How could this have happened?” Doug Parker asked. “She must have tripped on something up there; an uneven board, a clump of hay…my God. Abigail’s comforting the boys. Naturally, they’re hysterical. Come home. We’ll discuss the furniture a little later.”

“I don’t want any of it,” Robbie wiped his eyes. “I want nothing material that’s been in this house.”

“Dear, you’ll want mementos when the worst of this pain passes.”

“No!”

“Okay, let’s just leave that for now. Come with me. You need family around you.”

“Just give me an hour please. Let me sit with my thoughts for a little bit. I promise I’ll accompany you then. I need some time to pack some clothes, gather any important papers…” He broke down, his head in his arms on the kitchen table. “Come back then.”

“How do I know you’ll be okay to be left alone?” Doug gripped his car keys, shaken and frightened.

Robbie almost said ‘because I know their game,’ but held his tongue at the last second. “I’m the only parent the boys have. I’m not going to let anything happen to me. One hour Dad. Please.”

“Okay. I’ll drive into town and get some groceries to bring home. I can barely function myself over this. One hour, son. I’m not leaving you alone after that.”

Robbie watched his father drive away, then he turned to face the house. Hawkins had returned to his office to list the property. The police and ambulance had left.

“I should burn you down, except I need my fucking money back to raise my sons! You’re evil. You’re all sick, you hear me? You’re social fuck ups, even when you’re dead! Murderers still, through a goddamned looking glass. I won’t let you do it anymore. You took my wife. You took my heart.”

He bore downstairs, Tanya’s final words in his mind, and found a gallon of black paint they had purchased to touch up some wood paneling in the basement area. He carried the can upstairs with the brush and began his task: he started painting the entire surface of the malevolent mirror black. He coated it in a thick layer, and as he did so he saw
them
move forward from the other side, at first curious, then incensed.

“You took her, but you won’t take anyone else,” Robbie heaved. An old man, an old woman, two younger women, another man, what looked like a teenager…their forms like dark shadows, their presence as cold as an Arctic wind, whispering among themselves as to what he was doing

“You could be with her,” the old man started to say and Robbie painted the last quarter of the mirror out, blocking them off. He heard them behind the glass, shuffling in there, the squeak of their fingers moving along the other side.

“As black as your souls,” Robbie hissed. “I loathe you all forever.”

He stood back and opened the window to allow a hot breeze to rush into the room. The paint began to dry in minutes. He left the mirror, looking like an ugly charred square on the wall, and retrieved clothing, important documents, money…and their box of photographs of them, as a family, taken over the last two decades. He shoved them all in a suitcase…turned, kicked the bedroom wall repeatedly until his foot ached…sat on the edge of the bed and wept…didn’t care what Hawkins’ thought of the mirror being painted. Robbie wondered if the next owners would remove the ruined mirror, only to find the ebony mess re-attached to the wall again on its own accord? It wasn’t his problem. It couldn’t be. He didn’t blame the last couple for selling, or the families before that. He knew why. Self-preservation is a driving force.

His father arrived back as promised. Robbie locked the door, pocketed the keys to return to Hawkins later on, and drove away. They did not look back at the house as they swept past the ‘House for Sale’ sign freshly erected at the edge of the lawn by the road.

* * *

Hawkins’ called Robbie and they agreed that an auctioneer would sell off the household goods; anything remaining would be donated to charity or trashed. The money from the auctioning would buy them new clothes and furniture. For now, Robbie told Hawkins, they had what they needed.

Hawkins pulled up to the again-empty house and left the car running so that he could attach a lock box with an entry key to the front door. It was his job as a real estate agent to take a walk-through, but he could not bring himself to do it right now. He attached the lock box and drove away. The day began to deepen towards dusk and as he glanced back in his rearview mirror, he thought he saw what looked like a small, greenish ball emanate from one of the house’s chimneys and float towards the distant barn. He shuddered and stepped on the gas.

Night descended, this time with a three-quarters moon. In the darkened spare bathroom, the black paint had dried upon the looking glass. The mirror, an obsidian square that looked like the mouth of a mine shaft, shivered a little at this coating, cracking the freshly dried paint in spots. Paint chips, some as large as quarters, floated down to the counter and sink like chunks of soot. More loosened as the glass vibrated a little and soon a few widening spots of silver re-appeared. By the time anyone came in within the next day or two, all the paint would be off, a powdery mess that would have the agent cussing and cleaning up before the first showings would begin.

Jeffrey stood behind the mirror and peered through one of the widening silver holes. All they required was what they had always needed to see; who the next owners would be and which one might be most vulnerable. A kid was always easy. A mother very gullible. Every buying family usually had at least one of each.

Paint. As if that would have done anything to the portal. He smirked and shuffled back into the shadows of the house that mirrored the ‘House for Sale,’ knowing that time was on their side. So the woman had gotten away with the two young ones. They wouldn’t make that mistake the next time; and there
would
be a next time on such a large house going for so low a price. Every time.

The End

Rolling gurney wheels make soft clicking noises much like

blood drops, trickling in increments along stainless steel drains

Reservoirs meant to capture the last tendrils of a life

Nail fragments, a dash of cartilage, sinew glowing rosy-white

beneath the merciless surgical lamp, the knife descends

Cuts

open, raw red zipper grinning, exposing minutia of flesh

Striations of muscle, musical notes helter-skelter along bandwidths of bone

And entrails which spool out and over, bloating ribbons that

fall to the side, joining quivering liver and spleen

Filets of razor-thin memories laid upon the surgical glass

Life

is but a kaleidoscope of collected passing seconds

Death

is but the looking glass shattered into scattered fragments

Autopsy

A detailed glimpse of the many puzzle pieces

sewn tightly back together and buried deep with mortician’s thread

By

Carol Weekes

I saw the outline of the carny rides as I drove past them, looking like black bones whose flesh had been picked clean. I should have just kept going on home, but something made me turn around and go back there. I needed answers. The show shut down at midnight each evening and they were here for another four days. My car clock read 2:14 AM. I’d worked until 12:30 AM and had hit a late night diner for a bite to eat, given my family had gone to bed hours ago. I felt eager to go home and check on them too—but first, I need to do this. We’d watch their line of eighteen wheelers pull into town, the sides of the trucks depicting florid paintings of the various acts of magic or illusion. Promotional posters would appear in windows, bulletin boards, stapled to telephone poles and blowing along the town’s streets like oversized, garish stamps. And like a kid, always drawn to carnivals and wanting my son to experience the same kind of lurid thrill, I wanted to go. So we went together. It was a mistake.

I’m not sure what I expected to find as I turned onto the unpaved dirt road that led out to Barker’s field where the carnival had set up their fairground this year. Their tents and trailers formed black pyramids and squares against the sky. I saw distant fires burning and knew that some of them would still be awake; warming their hands over heated oil drums and smoking cigarettes, maybe tossing back raw bourbon or gin straight from the bottle. On instinct, I shut my headlamps off and kicked the car into first gear so that I crawled along the road in the dark, using only the moonlight to guide me. I got halfway there and stopped, idling in the road, unsure as to whether I should proceed or just turn around and go home.

I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d picked up after going to the carnival grounds last night with my little boy, this feeling that we’d been noted and followed by something eager, sinister, and hungry. And I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do about it. Ask them questions? Threaten somebody? I was fine until last evening, and then I’d felt as if I couldn’t shake something an hour after we arrived at the fair. It had begun when Randy, my seven-year-old boy, had wanted to try his hand at some of the games in order to try and win a prize. Five dollars got us three tickets. He’d done well on the ring-toss and had won himself a bright pink stuffed gorilla in a cowboy hat with a plastic sheriff’s badge, which had delighted him. Then he’d wanted to try his hands at the beanbag toss—the beanbags stitched out of odd, almost oily black cloth that had felt greasy when I’d touched one, and whose destiny had been the open, dark maw of a painted monster’s mouth. The monster was some unidentified specimen with its black painted face looking like storm clouds and smoldering orange eyes. It had fingers depicted along the sides of the board in smudged tones, twisted, almost root-like fingers with charcoal, broken nails.

I hadn’t liked the image at all. It seemed too ominous even for an adult-based form of entertainment, and certainly not for kids. But I’d bought the tickets anyway from a girl dressed up as a clown at a nearby booth and Randy had insisted he wanted to try the beanbag toss. He got three out of three bags into the monster’s mouth while the carny worker, a reedy fellow with long grey hair that trailed past his shoulders and wearing what reminded me of a Victorian-era frock coat and shirt whose collar bore a deep red silk scarf held in place with a neck brooch, leered. I don’t know why, but I instantly thought of the word ‘abductor.’ I wanted to haul Randy away by the hand, insisting that we go home, now. Dump the pink gorilla into the nearest trash can and drive home, shower, cleanse ourselves of this feel of some kind of pall, an almost moist sensation of fungal growth or sticking fog that had descended onto my skin.

“Three bags a prize does be,” the carny worker bent down to address Randy. I thought I saw the man’s eye color change for an instant, the eyes shifting from a pale blue to a grey so deep the irises and pupils merged. I shivered. “One for you, and one for me.”

He opened a small wooden gate leading into the interior stall where the monster head (what looked to me like some hideous depiction of a cross between a storm cloud and a woods animal—wolf or coyote perhaps), loomed above Randy’s small frame. Various prizes were arranged along the shelf below the painting; everything from stuffed animals to glow-in-the-dark stars attached to the ends of wands, to boxes of candied popcorn with a surprise prize inside. Randy latched onto the popcorn as I suspected he would, given he’d already chosen a toy animal. For just a second, I thought I saw the painting of the monster shift a little, as if aware of Randy’s presence. Ridiculous notion. As ugly as it was, it was just an acrylic paint image on a piece of sanded plywood. I stared at it and didn’t see anything amiss beyond its visual grotesqueness.

“An excellent choice,” the carny man laid a hand on one of Randy’s shoulders and leaned down to grin at him. I saw that the man’s teeth were yellowed and broken in places, probably due to years of neglected dental work and fistfights.

“Come along, Randy,” I said too forcefully. The carny man stood up and when he turned to regard me, his smile froze like egg white on his face, the teeth aligned in their deformity, the smile as frozen as a winter landscape. His eyes went dark, then light again. Then the moment broke, as quickly as it had occurred.

“You enjoy the fairgrounds, son,” the strange man in the frock coat told him. “It’s a magic place. Do you believe in magic?”

Randy peered up at him, his gorilla tucked under one arm, his free hand grasping the pink, blue, and white box of carnival popcorn. “Like Santa Clause?”

“Something like that.”