Invisible Fences (11 page)
Authors: Norman Prentiss
Aaron wanted me to recognize him, to see his features in the bubbles of tar and blood and oil from the road, to remember his expression in the face I’d held and nearly crushed in my hands, the awful musty smell of the creek rushing from the punctured opening with the spirit’s first attempt at speech.
But Aaron needed something more: my full awareness of what had actually happened that long-ago summer.
Not simply that I’d watched him die, but that I’d hatched some stupid plan with a stick that must have pushed him under the water. I’d cursed him for drowning, then ran away like a coward.
My best friend.
Near the end of my conversation with Pam, the shadows in the curtain formed a child’s outline. Aaron’s face appeared gradually, damp hair matted to his head, and skin the color of pencil lead smeared across a white page. He wore the familiar blue-striped shirt, now sullied with mud and algae. The apparition moved forward with uneasy steps, as if unable to connect with solid ground. Water dripped on the carpet. I wondered if Pam could hear the faint plashes over the phone line.
It stepped closer, one arm raised to point an accusing finger. Instead of a fingernail, a crusted scab pruned darkly over the tip. Skin on Aaron’s face rippled with each shift through the air of the room; dark blotches of rot appeared on each cheek.
Aaron stopped when he reached the front of the chair—and I’d kept talking to my sister. When I laughed at her joke about an angry mob at Frankenstein’s castle, I was afraid I’d
keep
laughing, a nervous tremor shaking my entire body. She told me the family had protected me, and I agreed it was for the best—even as the ghost of a dead child bent at the waist and brought his face within inches of my own.
Aaron’s eyes were muddy and expressionless. His breath was a hot, rancid breeze.
With feigned calm, I agreed I’d call Pam again tomorrow. But to disconnect the phone, I needed to move my trembling arm close to Aaron’s leaning form. I was terrified I’d brush against his chest: would I touch him, or would my arm pass through where he stood?
I thought I felt the weight of water droplets against my legs.
I greeted Aaron, and he whispered my name.
His small hand reached toward my face, and I could feel the scratch of a scabbed fingertip against my cheek.
Epilogue
Now, when I think back to that day at the creek, I wonder about my motives. Shouldn’t my friendship have helped me overcome my aversion to the water? Could my momentary anger with Aaron have subconsciously influenced my clumsiness with the stick? Was it even remotely possible that I’d deliberately attempted to hurt my best friend? If so, what kind of person did that make me?
• • •
As I’ve mentioned, my sister and I used to hate those old haunted house movies without a real ghost, the cheap monster movies that never showed a monster.
In this story, Aaron is the real ghost. I’m the monster.
• • •
I sold Mom and Dad’s house, eventually. Following Pam’s advice, I stopped sorting through the junk and simply hired movers to haul everything away.
If the new tenants saw any signs of a ghost, I never heard about it. Nobody ran screaming back to the real estate office to demand a refund. No rumors of a haunted house arose in the neighborhood and followed me back to my apartment building.
Why would they? The ghost came away with me.
• • •
Do you see the point of the story, Nathan? We all cut parts of ourselves away, but we never lose them. Things stay with us—souvenirs with memories attached. We can’t always choose what to keep, what to throw away.
• • •
Sometimes, I’ll feel the stab of needles in my hands or feet, like the onset of arthritis—and perhaps that’s all it is.
At night, I occasionally hear a squeal, crash, and thump from the direction of the small road in front of my building.
And Aaron. Aaron’s with me a lot, offering me “toast” before I’m half awake each morning, inviting me for a walk in the woods.
That’s the Aaron I prefer: the one who appears when I’m less inclined to blame myself for a few moments of weakness when I was only seven years old.
In less-forgiving moments the other Aaron reaches from the shadows, screams for me instead of my sister because I was his friend, screams across the years I’d forgotten him, denied the sights and sounds and smells of a living boy dragged beneath those awful murky waters.
The smell of that creek stays with me now. It follows me from room to room.
Through it all, another voice haunts me, my childhood voice blended with my present one, angry, resigned, heartbroken, as if life is something a friend would give up willingly or out of spite, as if I can once again erase my worst mistakes even while the truth pulls at me with the force of a rushing current: “Swim. Oh, why,
why
don’t you swim?”
NORMAN PRENTISS won the 2010 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction for Invisible Fences, published by Cemetery Dance (www.cemeterydance.com). He also won a 2009 Stoker for his short story, “In the Porches of My Ears,” published in Postscripts 18. His latest book is Four Legs in the Morning, a collection of three linked stories from Cemetery Dance. Other fiction has appeared in Black Static, Commutability, Tales from the Gorezone, Damned Nation, Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, and in three editions of the Shivers anthology series. His poetry has appeared in Writer Online, Southern Poetry Review, Baltimore’s City Paper, and A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock.
Visit him online at www.normanprentiss.com.
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