Echoes of Darkness (29 page)

“We may have a problem.”

Julie scooted around the tall man, then froze when she saw the kitchen . . . and the chair pulled up next to the counter beside the refrigerator. The refrigerator with the now-empty space on top.

“Oh, shit.” They exchanged a glance. “I
thought
she didn’t know it was up there.”

“You don’t think she’s . . .” Connor began, but they were already moving toward Pearl’s bedroom. They were halfway there when the slow, heavy knock came from the front door. They froze for a beat, then hurried whispers burst from each of them.

“That can’t be him, it’s broad dayli—”

“Doesn’t matter to the brush, it doesn’t—”

“But people would see—”

“He hasn’t been in the ground very long, right? He might look perfectly—”

“You weren’t here in the end, you son of a bitch! The cancer ate him alive. Danny weighed all of eighty pounds when he died—half of what people saw during the viewing was putty and pancake makeup, stuck onto a goddamn skeleton. Danny couldn’t have walked the street while he was
alive
without attracting attention. Now . . .”

The knock came again, louder, though no faster, the beats as evenly spaced as roadside telephone poles:
knock . . . knock . . . knock . . .

“Look,” said Connor. “We don’t even know if it’s him. It could be just a Jehovah's Witness or something. Why don’t you go look through the peephole and—”

“Jesus Christ, I’m not going
near
that door!
You
go look!”

Connor took a breath, then nodded and crept toward the front door. Julie followed him to that end of the hall, but would go no farther. Connor hesitated, then slipped into the dining room to peek out through a window overlooking the front porch from the side.

“Well?

“I can’t see the face, but he’s wearing a suit,” Connor whispered. “How are we going to know whether—”

“
Julie?
”

Her hand clamped over her lower face, but the voice from the front porch forced a whimper through her fingers. The whimper became a strange, high, gurgling noise, almost a shriek, almost a giggle, when the doorknob began to jiggle back and forth.

“
Julie? I can’t find my key. Julie?
”

It was Danny’s voice—
Danny’s
—but breathy, and distorted, like the words weren’t coming out quite right.

The undertaker ran a wire under his skin,
she thought, words skittering through her head like frightened spiders.
A wire, from one corner of his mouth, up over his nose, and down to the other—it’s how they get that peaceful smile. Must be hard to talk with a wire in your face like that.

Connor scrambled toward her, flapping his hands like someone chasing away pigeons in the park. “Go,” he said, not bothering to whisper. “Pearl must have drawn this—make her draw something else!” His eyes, though terrified, brightened at a thought. “Make her draw him in a coffin! Go!”

Julie burst into the bedroom. Pearl looked up from her place on the floor, sketch paper in front of her, eyes wide with fear. Again she had done something wrong, and knew it, and was babbling an apology even as her gaze shot wildly from the empty box, to the scattered and rainbow-wrapped Crayolas, then back to her mother, looking for something to say to make it better.

“What did you do?” Julie snatched the drawing from the floor, recognizing it easily: Danny coming home from work. It was something Pearl had drawn many times before Danny was diagnosed, and after, when he’d continued to work as long as he could. She stared at the scarecrow man in the boxy suit standing on a rough porch, hand on the doorknob.

She’s even got the smile
, she thought, remembering the mushy speech and the wire. She wondered what would happen if she just tore the drawing, ripped it to bits. Would that destroy what was in the picture, or would the magic do something else, something completely different? Worse?

“Julie,” Connor’s voice came up the hall. “Hurry!”

With a convulsive jerk, Julie tore the picture in two, and Pearl cried out, heartbroken. She tore it again. Then again—

Then the breathy, distorted,
un
-Danny voice came floating up the hall. “
Connor, I told you, I can’t find my key. Just open the door so I can come see Pearl. I
need
to see Pearl!
”

Pearl was on her feet and staring at the ruined artwork in her mother’s hands, eyes already spilling tears. Julie cast the shredded drawing aside and gripped the girl’s small shoulder. She fell to her knees, pulling Pearl down with her, and started scooping the scattered crayons toward her daughter.

“You have to draw Daddy again, okay? I want you to draw Daddy again. Draw him in a coffin. In a box. Right now.” The girl sputtered, sobbing, pointing toward what was left of her first sketch, but Julie dialed for that voice she had, that voice that was never disobeyed. It came out quivering around the edges and tainted by fear. “Just do it, Pearl! Do it now, and don’t give me any backtalk!”

Pearl settled to the floor. Julie went back to the bedroom door and pushed it almost closed, peering out and down the hall, though she couldn’t see the front door. She could hear what sounded like an argument, two voices in a back-and-forth, hurried on one side, slower and more plodding on the other, though she couldn’t make out any actual words until one of the voices rose to a shout.

“Hurry
up
, please!” Connor sounded panicked. “Julie, what the hell are you
doing
in there?”

Julie slammed the door, leaning back against the wood, bracing herself as much as it. She looked to the floor, where Pearl was hard at work, making straight lines and corners: the edges of the coffin. The words
hurry up, faster!
flowed through her mind, but she pressed her lips tight together: in her terror, if she started screaming at Pearl, she might never stop.

“Julie! What’s going—wait—no,
no
!”

Connor screamed as the other voice—the
un
-Danny voice—bellowed a hollow, almost two-toned note, something both more and less than human. There was the thud of something striking the wall, hard enough to shake the house. Connor screamed again, rising toward a throat-tearing pitch—but was cut off like someone had flipped a switch. In the silence that followed, Julie leaned on the door, staring at nothing, focused only on
listening
, listening so hard it almost hurt.

Then she heard it.

Slow, unsteady footsteps, making their way closer to the bedroom.

“Jesus Christ,” she hissed, looking down at Pearl. “What did you do? What did you—”

She saw the drawing, pinned to the floor by tiny fingers. Angles and corners, the shape hastily scrawled, but easily recognizable. The squarish box at one end, for the thumb and forefinger to pinch. The straight spine. The row of jagged teeth. It would be hard
not
to recognize this crude sketch for what it was.

A key.

Julie’s eyes shot up to meet her daughter’s, and found them steady, hard, and frighteningly adult; she realized with a terrible start that Pearl had not
known
where the crayons were; she had
overheard
. Maybe not everything, but
enough
.

“But, Pearl, honey, you don’t understand—”

From just to the other side of the door, the
un
-Danny spoke, the nearness of that voice making the back of Julie’s neck crawl.

“
Julie? I must have lost my keys, but I found yours on the porch. Is everything all right? Is Pearl all right?
”

“You said Daddy was never coming home,” said Pearl, her voice flat and emotionless, her words horribly familiar. “And you yelled at me. I want my daddy.”

“
Is Pearl all right?
” the
un
-Danny repeated, as the doorknob turned. Julie shook her head in denial, locking her legs to jam the portal closed with everything she had.

“
Is something wrong?
”

Pearl pushed the drawing aside and bounced to her feet, smiling toward the door in anticipation. Julie strained, but her feet slid on the floor, yielding to the inexorable pressure from behind. The door opened, just a crack, before her sneakers regained purchase on the carpet. Through the thin opening the voice rode in on air that smelled of chemicals and dirt.

“
Juuulliiieeeee . . .
”

As Julie began to scream, the edges of her sanity collapsed under the strain. With a fluttering commotion at the window, the great green parrot settled onto the sill, watching the scene unfold with one round, black eye.

WENDIGO

Nearly four thousand pounds
of bronco-bucking aircraft aluminum and safety glass, two tons of fuel and fear, whirl across the sky like a leaf tossed in a breeze. Maggie’s hand squeezes mine, well-manicured fingernails digging into my flesh, and just for a second I don’t hear her panicked cries, or see her eyes—huge, blue, and round with terror—staring into mine. Instead I have a flash of memory: a woman I do not know, small and dark, probably Filipino. Her name tag reads
Sue
. She holds Maggie’s hand aloft, twisting it this way and that to showcase clear nails tipped with white, something I have just learned are called “French tips.”

“You like?” she says, and Maggie nods, smiling, stretching her other arm to its fullest extent to examine that hand at a distance.

Strange, the things your mind latches onto when you think you’re going to die.

“Mayday, Mayday.” The pilot’s voice snaps me back into the present, tense and loud enough to carry clearly over the engine noise and the storm pummeling the little plane. “This is Piper N-two-eight-seven-nine-D, en route from Fargo to Saskatoon. We’ve taken damage to the engine. We’ve lost altitude and the wings are icing. I need to make an emergency landing. Please advise!”

I tear my eyes from Maggie’s to look out the window. This is my mother we’re going to visit, and I’ve made this flight before, and I know what I
should
see: treetops, all the way to the horizon, greedy green fingers thrusting skyward from the thick, white snow that marks the Canadian winter. All I see now is white, the snow not lying prettily on the ground like some sort of picture postcard, but whirling through the air, clawing at the window like a hungry animal as the wind howls and buffets the small aircraft.

“Mayday! Mayday!” shouts the pilot again. He has a name, and I know that I know it, but it won’t come to me. Before he can shout a third “Mayday,” my stomach flips as the plane dips, those greedy green fingers suddenly rising through the kaleidoscope of white, much closer than I have ever seen them, closer than they have any right to be, to poke the Piper in the belly.

The pilot (
Bill
, a part of my mind says, far too calm for the situation,
his name is Bill
) bellows into the radio again, but Maggie’s shriek drowns him out as more trees strike the plane, harder this time, and then I am screaming. My scream goes on, the only sound I hear until the final, terrific
cruuuump
of some great ancient trunk shearing off the wing outside my window. The world barrel rolls, flinging me hard against my seat belt, knocking the wind out of me. Hot piss stings my lap, and that part of me that knew the pilot’s name has an instant to feel embarrassed—to hope that, when we get out of this, no one notices my soiled pants—before there is an earth-shaking
crack
and an instant of pain before everything spins away into blackness.

I open my eyes slowly—they’re sleep-sticky, like I have a bad cold—and Maggie’s face swims into focus in the dim light. Something doesn’t look quite right, but I’m not fully awake yet, and I can’t put my finger on it. I open my mouth to ask if she’s all right, but what spills from my lips is a meaningless jumble of croaked sounds: “Mahee, yoo aw-eye?”

My mouth is so dry I can barely speak. I lick my lips, work my tongue, summoning some moisture for a second attempt as I blink, trying to wake up. Then it comes to me, what is wrong with my wife. Arms up like it’s some old-fashioned stickup, fingertips nearly touching the low ceiling. Hair standing straight up from her head like a frightened cartoon character. One eye is open wide, staring at me; the other, her right, is stuck at half-mast, like I caught her in the middle of a long, lazy wink. Then there’s the blo—

I turn away, wincing. My head hurts, like the mother of all hangovers, especially the right side. My right temple pulses in time with my heart, a
thud-thud-thud
over my ear. Christ, even the ear hurts. I pull a hand down—noticing now that
my
hands, too, are raised like I’m at gunpoint, the backs of my knuckles actually touching the ceiling—and explore the side of my head with tentative fingers. There’s a goose egg along my temple, the hair strangely sticky and wet, and . . . and the top of my ear appears to be missing.

I look at my hand, see the fingers covered with something, the same something I saw staining Maggie’s face: blood. I look back at Maggie, this time seeing the stuff I didn’t want to before: her split lip and the gash along her jaw, the blood running up and across her half-open eye.

“Maggie?”

Her hair. Her arms, straight up and motionless. My own hands, both of them again, resting their knuckles against the ceiling. The pressure across my lap, a painfully tight band across my hips and testicles. The intense pressure in my head, pulsing in time with my heart.

We’re strapped into our seats, hanging upside down.

Suddenly it’s all there: the blizzard, the Mayday, the trees punching the Piper. The memory doesn’t crash in on me like you read about in books, but is simply
there
, like it was right in front of me the whole time and I just wasn’t paying attention. I’m shocked that I could have forgotten such a thing, no matter how temporarily, but that feeling is pushed out in an instant by the thought of Maggie, hanging there with blood running across her face. Maggie, needing help.

“Maggie?” I say again, more clearly this time, fumbling at my seatbelt with numb fingers. The more I wake, the more I can feel myself, the pain of my own split lip, my hands clumsy and sausage-swollen with trapped blood from dangling inverted for so long. Jesus, how long?

“Maggie!” The shout nearly makes my head explode, a party balloon inflated to its very limit. My oafish fingers find the belt release, but the weight of my body against the buckle makes it hard to pull. I look at Maggie’s eyes, one open, one squinted half-closed as if she’s watching me through an oncoming migraine, and with an inarticulate sound of effort and pain, I yank the belt release with everything I’ve got.

A sharp, metallic pop, and the pressure across my lap is gone. I have a moment to register the strange, nearly weightless feel of falling, before the back of my head and shoulders strike the—

I wake slowly again, this time fighting it, not wanting to stir. If I thought my head hurt before, it was only because I had yet to experience my head now. It’s impossible—a pain far too large to fit inside my little skull. I open my eyes but see nothing, whimpering as I push the lids back. This is a mistake. At my sound the pain spikes, sharp agony keeping me awake as my consciousness tries to creep back into the warm embrace of oblivion. It’s no use, however, and I blink in surprise and frustration.

My lashes tickle, brushing against something as they flick up and down; there’s something on my face. Through the pain I make out the pattern of light pressure against my skin—a familiar pattern, to be sure, but foggy as my mind is, I have to fight to place it—and then I have it.

Four fingers and a thumb. There is a hand on my face, covering my eyes, and it isn’t mine.

Pure reflex sends me scooting backward, launching myself away from this strange indignity, slapping the offending hand away.

In reality I barely manage to twitch out from under the invasive palm, my intended slap a pitiful flutter as the pain in my head makes my stomach lurch. I have a moment to make out Maggie’s long hair hanging toward me—the bristle end of a blond broom, some of it stiff and dark with dried blood—and her dangling arms, one trailing hand so recently draped across my face, before I’m struggling onto my side as the vomit comes. The convulsions in my abdomen make my brain swim with agony. I lie there, huddled around my head, waiting for the world to stop hurting.

The pain doesn’t stop, but dies down some. Enough to allow me to think and remember: flying over the Canadian wilderness, the storm, the crash. Then Maggie, hanging in her harness above me, bloodied and open-eyed. The more I remember, the worse I feel, though the physical pain is fading somewhat. The more the pain fades, though, the more I become aware of the cold. Cold that makes me shiver, and
that
starts to bring the hurt back. I have to do something here, no matter the agony. I really have no choice.

I open my eyes.

I’m lying on the ceiling, now the floor, I guess, facing away from Maggie, which is good, but facing the cockpit where the pilot (
Bill,
that calm part of my mind reminds me.
His name is
. . . 
was
, Bill
) hangs in his own harness. I can’t see his front, and that’s good too, because the back of his seat has a thick branch sprouting from its center. The tip of the branch pokes a foot beyond the chairback, jagged and white, like shattered bone, twigs, and bark stripped away on its passage through the seat . . . and Bill.

“Oh, shit.”

The limb destroyed one side of the windshield when it came in to nail Bill to his seat like a spear thrown by a Titan, and that’s where the cold is coming from. The glass is shattered, maybe half gone, and frigid air streams through the ragged hole. The plane coming to rest upside down probably saved me: if we’d been right-side up, the broken window would have been too high from the ground to be mostly blocked by the deep snow, and I likely would have frozen to death as I hung unconscious in my seat.

My seat . . .

I turn, stiff-limbed and wincing, to look up at my seat. The unbroken section of windshield and some of the windows along one side are above the snow, allowing me wan illumination. Hanging from the shadows between the seats, Maggie dangles. I stare, letting the tears run rather than trying to wipe them away; every movement causes my head to throb, and I can’t afford the extra motion. I wonder how I’ll get her down, how I’ll half-stand to release her belt and cushion her as she falls, when I can barely move myself. I have no illusions about her being alive. Her eyes—one filming over, one blood-caked—still stare vacantly from a face bloated and mottled, and her hand, the palm that lay across my face, is locked in position, wrist flexed back, fingers spread and stiff and swollen.

Her blood has settled, and rigor began while I lay beneath her.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been lying here crying. It didn’t seem long a minute ago, but now it
feels
long.
Really
long. I think my time-sense is messed up. Shock at finding Maggie? My head
does
hurt.

I investigate my head with my fingertips and find a goose egg behind one ear, and the hair is all stiff with what has to be blood. I have a sense of déjà vu, but I don’t remember ever having a lump like this, even when I played football in college. And what the hell happened to my ear?

Something’s wrong. Concussion? Shock? My God, I’m cold.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I murmur, crawling the couple of feet to where I see my coat, thrown to the floor—or, I guess, the ceiling—during the crash. “I’ll get you down, I promise, but first things first.”

I have to drag myself beneath the hanging seats to get to the cargo area, but that’s all right; I’m not sure I could stand if I tried. When I get there, I can’t tell if the difficulty in opening the Piper’s door is due to the frame buckling in the crash, or because I’m just so beat up. Probably both. Eventually though, I struggle out into the snow.