Dragged into Darkness (20 page)

Tammy shook her head, continuing to back away. 

Her father got to his feet.  “Ginny, you don’t know what you’re saying.  That’s Tammy.”

“Mrs.
Testaverde
, you need to calm down,” the wary nurse said.

“BITCH!”
Ginny shrieked. 
“MURDERESS!”

Tammy crashed into the wall, banging her head.  “No, mom,” she whispered.

The emergency team burst through the door.  They weren’t bothered by the scene and immediately got to work pinning Ginny down.

The nurse said to Tammy’s father, “You’d better get her out of here.”

He did as he was told and grabbed his daughter.  He ushered Tammy out of the room, fueled by the trail of obscenities following them.  “Don’t worry kiddo.  Your mom doesn’t know what she’s saying.  She’s ill.”

Tammy ignored her father.  She listened to the filth her mother spewed at her.  It’s not true, she thought.  I’m not a murderess. 

But the head’s voice whispered in her mind, “No, not yet, you’re not.”

***

The silence woke Tammy the following morning.   Her mother should have been demanding that she get up.  If not, the scent of one of her father’s deluxe breakfasts should have been invading her room from the kitchen.  But nothing, that wasn’t right.

Screaming filled her head.  It wasn’t hers.  The scream was of anguish and torment.  The screamer was on the edge of death.  Tammy clamped her hands over her ears to block out the wailing inside her head.  With horror, she realized who it was. 

“Mother, oh God, mother!”  Tammy exploded from her bed.  How could she have left her there alone?  How could she have cursed her own mother?

The answer was grinning at her from her nightstand.  The shrunken head was staring into her soul, and just underneath the tormenting scream of her dying mother, Tammy heard its laughter—mocking her, teasing her.

With tears in her eyes, she grabbed the shrunken head and held it up to her face.  “What have you done to my mom?”

The shrunken head’s
rictus
grin widened, stretching the binding stitches. 
“Just what you asked for, Tammy.
  Remember our deal?”

“Damn you, you son of a bitch!”
  She threw the head across the room.  It smashed into the mirror, reducing it to shards.

As she flew out the door, the voice whispered, “Sorry, Tammy, I’ve already been damned.  And now I’m taking your precious mommy to Hell with me…”

***

Tammy sprinted the mile to the hospital.  She burst through the door to her mother’s room, and was just in time to hear “Clear!” come from one of the doctors, and to see her mother’s body bounce off the bed.  Her father was standing beside the bed, tears streaming down his face.

“Daddy, oh daddy, what’s going on?”  Everyone was so engrossed in trying to revive her mother that they hadn’t noticed her.

“No pulse, Doctor Adams,” a pretty blonde nurse said, and then noticed Tammy standing in the doorway, horrorstricken.  “Get that child out of here!”

Tammy’s father whirled.  “Tammy, oh baby…” He ran to his daughter, and pulled her against his chest. “Oh Tammy, she’s dying, baby, she’s dying…” 

His tears mingled with hers as they listened to the doctor yell “Clear!” trying to shock Ginny’s heart back to life.  Seven minutes later the doctor pronounced her dead, and covered her pale face with a sheet.

That silky voice she had come to hate whispered in her mind
  “
One down, Tammy, and one to go…”

***

Tammy found herself walking the streets, barefoot.  It was night, dark enough for the moon to dare not show its face.  She had no idea how she’d ended up on the road, but the head, clutched in her hands, gave her a clue.  She didn’t feel as though she was being guided, but she was.  The head was leading her somewhere, but she had no conscious notion of where.  She hoped that a passing driver or cop would pick her up, but there wasn’t a vehicle to be seen.  Tammy crossed the street and entered the hospital where her mother had died that morning. 

No one noticed the girl with the shrunken head in her hands.  Tammy passed through them like a dream.  Either everyone was too busy with their jobs to care or Tammy wasn’t really there in body, existing only in spirit.  She pressed the down button on the elevator. 

The doors slid open and the morgue revealed itself at the end of the corridor.  Tammy should have felt trepidation as her bare feet slapped against the cold, tile floor towards the room, but it was as if she’d been anesthetized against the effects of fear.

She knew exactly which locker to open.  She needed no manifest.  Sliding out the drawer, she didn’t have to be told who lay beneath the sheet.  Carefully, as if she was making her own bed, she drew back the sheet and folded it back on itself, exposing her mother’s head and shoulders.  She was dead, no doubt about it.  Her pale skin had a gray tinge to it and she was cold.

Tammy should have been bawling like a baby, but she wasn’t.  The head’s anesthetic again, she guessed.

“Your mom needs you to do something,” the head whispered.

“You mean you need something done,” Tammy hissed.

“Oh, no.
  Not me.  See for yourself.”

Her mother’s eyelids rolled back.  Her eyes were yellow and bloodshot.  Her mouth parted and a stagnant exhale slipped between her lips.  But her chest didn’t rise and fall.

“This is your fault, Tammy.”

“No,” Tammy cried.  The same energy that had guided
her,
now rooted her to the spot.

“Oh, don’t give me that, Tammy.  You wished this on me.  Some daughter you are.  I think it’s the least you can do for me.”

“What did I tell you, Tammy?” the head said.  “This isn’t for
me,
it’s for your mom.  You did have her killed, after all.”

Tammy wasn’t so dumb.  She knew it was the head operating her mother the same way it was operating her.  The head toyed with her, all a charade for its amusement.

The circular saw, a more delicate one than the one her father kept in the garage, beckoned.  It shone under the florescent lighting.  Tammy picked it up and plugged it into the nearest socket.  The cord extended far enough to reach her mother.

“Go on,” the head urged.

Tammy hit the power switch and the saw jumped in her grasp.  It jumped again when she sliced into her mother’s neck.  The spinning blade ate into dead flesh without a hint of trouble.  Ginny’s body trembled as the angry saw consumed.

“I can’t do this,” Tammy said, but her hands contradicted.

“You can,” the head encouraged.

Gore spattered bloody freckles on Tammy’s face.  She took a second, deeper cut.  The blade relished the chance to eat bone.  It accomplished its task with ease. 

The saw chattered in triumph as Tammy removed it from the successful decapitation.  She returned it to the lab bench, not bothering to clean her mother’s gore from the blade.

The head instructed.  “Remove the head.”

Tammy did as she was told and moved her mother’s head to one side.

“You know what you have to do next.”

Tammy did.  She placed the shrunken head on top of her mother’s corpse.  It was not only disproportionately small but its withered and desiccated flesh didn’t match her mother’s nightly moisturized neck. 

But the head did its best to make amends for the difference.  Strands of flesh lashed out of the shrunken head and dug into Ginny’s bloody stump.  The head swelled to normal proportions.  Skin oozed like a mudslide, sealing it to Ginny’s corpse.  The stitches sealing its lips and eyes snapped, revealing a black tongue and black eyes.

The head turned on its new neck and regarded its predecessor with distain.  Blue flame jetted from its mouth, incinerating Ginny’s head on contact.  Tammy felt her tears evaporate from the heat coming from her mother’s burning skull.  Within a minute, it was reduced to ash.  The skull was a husk and unable to support its own structure, collapsed in on
itself
.

The head’s mouth opened wide, producing a clown-like leer.  It inhaled, producing a gale.  The wind whipped at Tammy’s hair and hoisted papers into the air.  The head was in danger of consuming everything in the morgue, but it was interested in only one thing—the ashes of Ginny’s head.  It sucked the carbonized flesh and bone.  It closed its mouth when not a scrap remained.  The head went translucent, becoming paler than the sheet that covered Ginny.  The ashes swirled in a hurricane of activity under the skin and when the ashes settled, color returned to it, revealing Ginny’s face.

The new Ginny sat and shook her head.  Ginny’s long, flowing, blonde hair grew instantly and cascaded over her shoulders.

Tammy threw up.

The new Ginny hopped off the locker drawer, wrapping the sheet around her to hide her modesty.  She offered a hand to Tammy.  “Let’s get you home,” the creature said in a voice that wasn’t the head’s but Ginny’s.  “Coming?”

***

Tammy couldn’t stand it.  It was like living in a room filled with dead rats.  The stench of deception was everywhere and the stink came from her mother.  Tammy sat down to one of Ginny’s perfect meals—again.

“Cheer up, kiddo,” Tammy’s father said.  “You’ve had a long face since your mom left the hospital.  Anybody would think you aren’t happy to have her home.”

Tammy huffed and played with her silverware.

“Thanks, muffin,” John
Testaverde
said as Ginny set a wholesome meal of tri-tip, mashed potatoes and asparagus in front of him.

“Gravy’s coming.” 

Ginny went to get the gravy, but John stopped her.  “You’re the best,” he said.

“I know.” 

Ginny pressed her head against her husband’s.  Her fresh good looks evaporated in a second.  Her flesh dried, losing substance, and withered against her skull.  Cataracts washed away her clear blue eyes with a milky gray and her eyes sank back into their sockets.  Her gold locks dwindled to muddy strands plastered onto her scalp.  Inhuman stitching held the abomination onto her neck, although the join wasn’t perfect and teardrops of blood trickled from failing grafts.  Tammy’s shrunken head showed itself again, but full size, on the shoulders of her mother’s corpse.

Tammy buried her stare in the spotless tablecloth.  Couldn’t her father see it?  He should have been able to smell it.  Ginny reeked of ancient coffins.  Her stench consumed the dining room.

Nobody but Tammy could see what her mother had become.  The hospital had no record of Ginny’s death.  They said she’d been admitted for observation but went home fit and well the following day.  Tammy’s father was no different.  All he remembered was that Ginny had been under the weather.  Truth had been swept away like so much dirt to be hidden under the carpet.

“I’ll get yours now, Tammy.”

Tammy kept her gaze rooted on the tablecloth’s weave.

“What do you say, Tammy?” her father demanded.

Against her will, muscles forced her head up.   Her mother’s face smiled back, the shrunken head hiding under the surface like a disease.   The only trace of its presence was the blood that dotted Ginny’s throat, which was fading by the second.

“Tammy?”  Her father frowned.  “We’re waiting.”

“Thanks, mom.
  I would love my dinner.”

***