Ghosts of Eden (18 page)

“My colleague, before his untimely death, claimed to have discovered an equation proving M Theory to be correct in its assumption that everything in the universe is comprised of tiny vibrational strands. These strands, or strings as they are often called, can be compared to the strings on a violin or guitar, each stretched and curled in such a way as to make a specific wave of sound. If String Theory is correct, we are, and everything around us, made from sound.

Uncle Xander kicked the box at his feet. “Isn’t that right?”

Garty sighed loudly.

Uncle Xander whirled on him. “Do you have something to say, Garty? Are you still not satisfied? You haven’t been a very good assistant, you know. You’re not much use to me, as it turns out.”

Garty sat up straight. “Can I go then? Do I have to put up with this pathetic charade day after day?”

Uncle Xander lifted his telescopic pointer threateningly. “If you would only wake up and open your eyes, you might learn something important, you might realize your…situation.”

“Situation? I know exactly the fucking situation I’m in. I’m stuck here pandering to your ego, forced to listen to this bullshit day after day, while you go on and on about when you actually had friends and a job and a real life. I’m sick of it. I’m fucking out of here!” He stood, pushing his chair back violently so that it fell to the floor with a bang.

Uncle Xander’s eyes were wild; that smile growing. “Perhaps you’d like to see what’s in the box first?”

“I could give a fuck what’s in the box, or the jar, or behind curtain number three. Fuck you. I’m getting out of here and I’m taking Kayla with me.”

Kayla looked up at Garty. She felt numb; she was dizzy.

“I finally caught him,” Uncle Xander was saying. “Filthy creature!”

As soon as Uncle Xander opened the box, the room was filled with a piercing wail. With a gloved hand, their uncle reached in and removed a white flailing animal by the scruff behind its head. The animal tried to lash out with its claws, but Uncle Xander had it firmly in a vicious grip, holding it out at arms length.

“Eustis,” Kayla called out, but her voice sounded distant even in her own ears. Her vision blurred.

Garty turned back. “What are you doing?”

“I finally caught him,” Uncle Xander said. Then, turning to the cat, “Spying on me! You filthy, filthy thing.”

The cat screamed in terror, like no sound Kayla had ever heard come from an animal.

“Let it go,” Garty said.

Uncle Xander looked up. “What do you think, Garty? What do you think, Kayla? Do you think this
animal
has a life after death?” In a single motion, he lifted the cat, slashed the animal’s belly open with his telescopic pointer, turned it inside out, a warm splatter of internal pieces slapped the floor.

Kayla stared, horrified. She couldn’t turn her eyes away. Her beating heart choked her. She couldn’t move. She watched a dark lump slide stickily over a bent and broken rib, then plop by her uncle’s foot. She swooned, felt herself tipping, the legs of the chair leaving the ground. Blood. She was falling. Garty was crying out to her. Uncle Xander was laughing. Her body hit something hard and unyielding, her head struck: darkness.

* * *

“Kayla! We have to get out of here. Kayla?”

She opened her eyes. Above her, she watched the plastic—bulging slowly outward, then, just as slowly, sucked inward—that was taped over the jagged opening where the skylight used to be. Garty’s worry-streaked face loomed into view. “How are you feeling?” he asked her.

“Eustis?”

Garty gave a grimace. “I’ve packed your things. Can you stand?”

Kayla looked down at her legs, tried to move them, but they were stubborn, like two planks of wood beneath the bed’s quilt. A crashing sound came from the floor above. Garty cringed.

“Uncle Xander is up in his laboratory. I don’t know what he’s doing now.”

“I can’t…” she started to say, then gave up.

“If you’re not feeling well, we’ll wait until morning.”

Her head sloshed as if glutted with ice water. Her jaw clenched and trembled uncontrollably. There was a buzzing in her ears. She was terrified. “Wait…”

“It’s okay,” Garty said. “I’ll take care of you. I won’t let anything happen.”

“But…”

“We’ll leave in the morning.”

The ice was melting, her head burning up, forehead covered in sweat. But before she could tell Garty how desperately she wanted to leave this house and get away from their uncle, she passed into feverish dreams.

* * *

When she awoke in the night, the sheets were soaked with sweat. She turned over, trying to escape the incessant thumping of her heart. The fever was strong now; she breathed it like a burning mist. Her entire body trembled, and when she sat up, she could hardly feel the cool air against the heat radiating from her clammy skin. She was anesthetized, hardly had time for fear.

Above her, the plastic over the skylight sucked in and out to the rhythm of her breathing.

She stood, holding her hands out to steady herself. Where was Garty? She needed to find her brother. The bedroom door opened on a stairway going down. She began the descent, but it proved difficult. The soft carpeted steps soon became cold wood that became splintery and uneven the farther down she went. Then, colder still, the steps became stone, unevenly shaped. She gritted her teeth and continued determinedly. She came to a set of branching stairways, one going to the right, the other to the left. To the right, the stairway was fuzzy with a green moss. To the left, the stairway dripped and rippled with running water. She thought she could hear a voice calling to her so she took the left passage, her feet squelching in the moss. She seemed to be moving upwards this time, but it was impossible to tell, as if the stairs revolved on their own gravitational axis and she were turning with it.

She was panting. She could feel her strength leaking out of her. It seemed as if she’d been wandering these corridors for hours. She forced herself to go on. She needed to find Garty, to warn him. She couldn’t give up now.

She was moving down a long hallway. Ahead of her, a head peeked at her from a doorway, then was gone. Farther on, she saw another, but only its eyes and the beginning of its nose so that she couldn’t quite tell the expression it made before it too had disappeared from view. She heard muffled laughter, as of a small group of people attempting to hold back their mirth.

Somehow, she’d made it to the ground level. She wheeled into the living room, searching the dark for signs of her brother, but she’d come too far. She began to shake with cold. She checked the dining room and then the kitchen. All was dark and silent. What was she doing down here? She was sick. She should be in bed.

She turned back to the stairs and began back up, counting as she ascended. Fourteen. Fourteen steps exactly. She stumbled back to her room and flopped into bed.

When she awoke next, the light was only just beginning to enter the sky. She sat up, still exhausted, but feeling much better. Her fever seemed to have subsided considerably and she felt lucid, once again in control of her swirling thoughts. She was suddenly very hungry. She dressed and left the room, stepping out into the hallway.

Garty’s door was closed, as were the doors to all the other rooms, but the door at the end of the hallway was open, the one that led to the second set of stairs. She looked up: the door to Uncle Xander’s laboratory was cracked open. She began, taking the stairs one at a time.

Halfway to the top, one of the floorboards creaked and she froze. She cocked her head to listen. For a moment, she thought she heard scuttling movement, then all was still.

She continued to the top. Stopped by the door. Had she heard someone whisper? A faint orange glow emanated from the cracked opening. An acrid scent made her eyes water. She reached her hand out to push it open.

The place was a wreck, tables splintered and crushed, glass littering the tiled floor like sparkling confetti. Hoses and gears and other bits of crushed laboratory equipment were sprinkled amongst the detritus. From the ceiling, silver ventilation tubing hung like slaughtered animals on hooks. Shelves of books had been tumbled into the entropy, their pages musty and yellow. On the walls, charts and diagrams had been slashed. On the other side of the room, there was another closed door, probably a small utility closet.

Kayla’s mouth fell open. She stepped forward, felt something give beneath her sneakered foot, then stepped back again, looking down at the newly crushed beaker, its contents smeared over an open notebook. She bent and lifted the notebook, turning its pages: scribbles of equations she couldn’t understand. Then, in the margins in green ink: “I killed him and it was easy.”

She heard a scuffling sound. She jumped, dropping the notebook back to the floor. She looked up. The door across the room was opening. She took a step back, preparing to bolt down the stairs. The door swung open—not thrown quickly and angrily as she’d expected, but slowly—on creaking hinges.

“You know what I think? Hey! Are you listening? Wake up!”

Kayla stared at the man stepping into the room. His voice was familiar somehow, but she couldn’t see his face because he wore a mask: plain and wooden, tinted green with three roughly hewn holes—two for the eyes and one just large enough to showcase rows of yellowing teeth.

“I think little girls shouldn’t play where they don’t belong.”

Another figure stepped from the door and stood next to the man in the green mask.

“Father won’t like you being here,” the second figure said, a woman’s voice, also familiar, obscured behind another mask, this one a bright pink color.

Kayla took another step back so she was standing fully in the doorway. The masked figures were coming toward her—taking their time, moving fluidly and in sync—one going left around the pile of detritus, the other right.

“You shouldn’t have come up here.”

Kayla’s heart was beating furiously in her temples. She couldn’t move, only watch them draw closer and closer

“You’re supposed to be sick. You’re supposed to stay in your room.”

They were reaching their hands out for her. It was impossible to see their eyes through the gouges in their masks. She stepped back onto the first of the stairs. “Father is the other way,” a third voice said from behind her, but before she could turn, she was shoved back into the room. She stumbled forward, falling into the pile of ruined laboratory equipment. She struggled to right herself, shards of glass sinking into her hands.

“It’s time you met him,” the third voice said, a child’s voice.

The green masked man and the pink masked woman gripped her under her arms and began to drag her across the room. She flailed, but her struggles hardly seemed to make a difference as she was lifted effortlessly and pushed through the closet door.

For a second, she looked into the darkness. Her rasping breath seemed to echo in the yawning space. She could see nothing, but she knew it was vast and open and something large moved around in its depths.

She turned back, but a small figure, about her own size, blocked the light. The man and the woman peered over the small figure’s shoulders, having removed their masks, their faces those of her mom and dad. The child stepped forward and gave her another shove. She wheeled backwards into the dark, expecting at any moment to collide with something, but there was nothing, only empty space, and she continued to fall. “Have fun,” the child said, as Kayla fought to reverse her momentum and began back toward the shrinking sliver of light that was the closing door. “Father likes to play.” She could hear the thing’s slow breathing, rising to a wheezing snicker. The doorway was gone and she was trapped in the utter dark forever. The last thing she saw, before the wheezing mass began to slosh towards her, was that the little girl that had shoved her had not been wearing a crude wooden mask like the others. The little girl had been wearing a slanted smile. The little girl had been wearing Kayla’s face.

INTERLUDE: LOS ALAMOS

“WHERE DISCOVERIES ARE MADE”

The citizens of Los Alamos are friendly small town folk, but are still a private people. They prefer to keep family concerns within the family and emotional stress safely contained from the outside world. Perhaps this is why the strange things that have been happening around town have remained mostly unreported—rumors spread, but only with a grain of salt, never with serious intent, because everyone knows it is always best to seek the most rational explanations for irrational things.

A few days ago, for example, a man no one had ever seen before walked into the local Starbucks smiling widely. He wore a large-brimmed hat and he was very short, but carried himself with the easy movements of one who was seldom, if ever, crossed. Rachel, who was working the register that day, couldn’t help but return the man’s smile. And when the man kept on smiling and ordered a Latte, Rachel found herself at a loss for words, and unusually attracted to this confident man. She, of course, made the latte herself and when she brought it to him, his fingers brushed hers and it was as if electricity passed from him to her and she nearly swooned. The man took his steaming drink to the corner of the shop, where an elderly Mrs. Granger was sitting alone, and asked her if he might join her. Mrs. Granger looked up, scowling, but when she saw the man her face changed and—to Rachel’s astonishment—she actually smiled. The man wore a powerful and sweet perfume that made her head spin. Mrs. Granger agreed to talk with the man. Rachel jealously watched the two talking from behind the coffee bar, but she could hardly hear what they were saying: “…happen to know…much appreciated…Xander house…of course…thank you very…” And when they were done, the man stood and walked to the door, flashing Rachel that smile one final time, and slipping a piece of paper to her across the counter with an address and a time written on it. After the man had left, Mrs. Granger leapt from her seat: “I know where the Jeffrey kid is! Does anyone have a phone I could use?”