The Unwanted (Black Water Tales Book 2) (20 page)

The woman’s eyes swelled with a jumble of emotions, and she pulled the door wide open.

“Is Ivan alright? Has something happened to him?” Her voice shot up to an unforgiving pitch.

“No, he’s fine. I’m his teacher.”

“His teacher?” Mrs. Andrich looked confused.

“Yes, and I just wanted to know if I could speak to you for a bit?” Blaire asked.

Despite her shock, Mrs. Andrich stepped aside and allowed the young woman into her home. “Of course, come in.” The woman took a look around to make sure that no one was watching before she closed the door tightly behind Blaire and flipped the lock.

“Would you like some tea?” Mrs. Andrich offered nervously.

“Sure,” Blaire said as she sat down on the couch in the living room not far from a roaring fire. Mrs. Andrich went into the kitchen and began clanking objects around in the chore of properly hosting her guest.

The house was warm and smelled of sugar cookies. Blaire’s attention was drawn out a large square window to two children playing in the backyard, kicking a ball and laughing uproariously.

“Are you American?” Mrs. Andrich called from the kitchen.

“Yes, I am.” Blaire was still staring through the window, amused by the play outside.

“Cream and sugar?”

“Just cream, please.”

“What are you doing so far from home?” Mrs. Andrich’s voice shook as she entered the room, placing the tea cups on the center table. Blaire took a sip of the warm liquid before speaking.

“I’m at St. Sebastian volunteering with a program that helps less fortunate people all over the world with education, medical attention, community infrastructure, and things like that.”

Mrs. Andrich stared at Blaire intensely as she spoke, but Blaire knew that the woman had not heard any of the words in her last sentence because she was too focused on what she was about to hear about her son. Blaire looked away at the room. Upon the mantel place, was a family photograph composed of the woman who sat in front of her, a tall
dark
-haired man, and three young boys with the youngest at the center of the bunch. Blaire went over to it.

“Is this Ivan?” Blaire said, picking up the picture in disbelief

“Yes.”

The young,
bright
-eyed smiling boy offered almost no resemblance to the brooding child that skulked about the halls of St. Sebastian. His features were the same, but this little boy, the young child in this photograph, had a light in him that was not present anywhere in the facility that she had left that morning.

“He was a beautiful boy.”

“You have a beautiful family,” Blaire said, turning to face the woman who was suddenly standing right in front of her.

“Why have you come here?”

Blaire paused and studied the boy’s mother before she spoke. “Ivan is a wonderful boy, but in order to better assess him I need to find out a little more about his history.” Blaire said, as she moved passed the woman and found her seat on the couch once again.

“His past?” the woman inquired. “Are you a psychiatrist?”

“Uh, no,” Blaire stuttered. “I’m just a teacher but I do know that he has a wall up, which I need to break down in order for me to reach him, and I need your help to do that,” Blaire said, unsure of whether or not Mrs. Andrich was buying her story.

“It all started when he was four years old.” The woman broke immediately, little persuasion needed. “Before that he was a normal
fun
-loving boy with a sweet nature. Things began to change when he was four. He started talking about Borslav.”

“Wait, you all went to Borslav?”

“Never. He would tell us stories about living there and the place where he lived called St. Sebastian. We would sit around the table and laugh at what we thought was a quirky son with an unbelievable imagination, but soon he was talking about it all the time. He told me that St. Sebastian was a place for unwanted children. My husband assured me that it was just our child’s overactive mind. My husband said that some children had imaginary friends, and this thing that was going on with Ivan was similar, but Ivan started with these stories all of the time. He never stopped talking about the place, and the stories became more detailed and more…dark. I was afraid. Once at the dinner table he told me that Ida locked herself in her room, but Lorna lured her out.”

Ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies…
Blaire could hear the haunting melody.

“Lorna? Are you sure he said Lorna?”

“Yes, they wanted to play Ring Around the Rosie, and they lured her out of her room. Ida’s hands were bloody from breaking the glass to get the fire axe and…”

Blaire thought of the night she saw Ivan leaving St. Sebastian with the woman from the photograph, the woman who was carrying the bloody fire axe.

Ashes, ashes…

“…And what?” Blaire asked.

“I don’t know. He would never finish the story.

WE ALL FALL DOWN

“But whatever it was, it was bad. I scolded him and I told him to stop it, to stop telling those stories because he was scaring everyone, but he wouldn’t. He couldn’t help himself. Is it true?”

“Is what true?” Blaire asked.

“The things he said about St. Sebastian, the terrible things he said?”

“No,” Blaire lied, not wanting to upset the woman.

“I started to look into some of the things that he was saying, and I found out that there was actually a town by the name of Borslav not far from here, and St. Sebastian existed as well. I knew he wasn’t making those things up,” Mrs. Andrich explained.

“Are you sure that there is no way that he could have known of this place on his own? Maybe he saw Borslav in the paper or heard people speaking of the place.”

“No! He could barely read at that age. We have no television. I asked everyone. His teachers, friends, family, no one spoke to him of that place. My husband told me the same thing…that he heard of these places on his own somehow, but he didn’t; I know he didn’t. I asked him how he knew of them, and he told me it was because he had been there,” the beleaguered mother said, finishing up her story.

“How?” Blaire asked.

“In another life, he told me, before he was Ivan Andrich,” Mrs. Andrich said as she sobbed into her palm. Moving to the edge of the couch, Blaire placed her hand on the woman’s knee. She spotted a box of tissues across the coffee table, which she retrieved and placed in front of the emotional mother.

“He said that before he was Ivan, he lived at St. Sebastian. He told me how everyone dressed in all white. He told me about the pool in the backyard and the sea just beyond a stretch of land,” she finished. “And when I looked that place up, it was there…it was all there.”

“Why did you bring him to St. Sebastian, Mrs. Andrich?” Blaire asked.

“I didn’t want to take him there!” Her tears drying almost instantaneously as a fierce mother emerged.

“I’m not accusing you of anything,” Blaire said softly.

Mrs. Andrich went on to explain further her struggles with Ivan, and Blaire listened intently.

“Can I see his room?” Blaire finally asked.

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

M
rs. Andrich led her down the hall to the first door on the right and allowed her to look around while she checked on her family’s dinner. Blaire could still hear Mrs. Andrich’s voice as she studied the boy’s room and its contents.

I didn’t want to take him there, I swear, but I had to. He was not my little boy anymore. At first he was just talking about the place, telling stories sometimes, but it got worse…much worse.

A strained screech erupted from the twin bed as Blaire sat on it, studying the tiny red sailboats that illustrated the comforter.

He became obsessed; he was talking about the place all of the time. He kept telling us to take him there, that he had to go there, that he had to stay there. A dark child emerged, a shadow of some sort settled over him, and he was insatiable.

Blaire stared out of the window, Ivan’s view for the first years of his life.

He began skulking about the house at all hours of the night babbling. He would not eat, he would not sleep. We saw countless priests and therapists, but they were no help.

The open land outside of Ivan’s window spread out a couple of hundred feet before the forest covered everything on the deep horizon. Along the walls were pictures of a happy Ivan at play.

Next, he started having these fits of rage, screaming, seething, and demanding that we take him to St. Sebastian.
When he went into one of his hysterics, it would take me and my husband, both, to hold him down. He couldn’t go to school anymore.

Blaire shifted through some of the small clothes in his closet and looked down to the floor, where there was a soccer ball with Ivan’s name scribbled upon it in red marker.

Sometimes when he was in one of these convulsions, things would move all on their own, and the rumors began. People were saying that he was possessed. A couple of times on the playground, children cornered and pounded him. People didn’t want him here anymore. We were afraid for him, afraid for our other children. We didn’t know what he was capable of. People were scared of him…we…we were scared of him. We had no choice but to take him. I keep telling myself that we had to take him, that we had no other choice, but he was my baby.

Blaire spotted a photograph set in a yellow frame on the boy’s dresser.

He kept talking about the basement, about what happened in the basement!

Blaire went over and picked it up, the sunlight shining into her face through the window. She brought the picture closer to the light, examining Ivan, dressed nicely in black, and she gasped, jumping at the loud thud of something hitting the window. The kickball that Ivan’s brothers were playing with had bounced harmlessly off the glass and back onto the ground. She looked back to the picture and felt a particular kind of dread, the kind one feels when they are the last one alive on a sinking ship. The trepidation filled her as she studied the small distortion that was beginning in Ivan’s face on the photograph. Blaire reviewed the other photographs of Ivan in the room, and they were all free from deformity.

“You didn’t come here, just so that you could assess him, did you?”

Blaire spun around to find Mrs. Andrich standing at the door.

Blaire’s heart was pounding. “This picture…tell me about this picture.”

“That was the first day he mentioned Borslav.” Mrs. Andrich crossed the room and gently removed the photograph from Blaire’s hand. She studied it lovingly before carefully placing it back down on the dresser. “We attended a funeral earlier that day.”

“Whose funeral?” Someone here in Cruslav?”

“A woman, her name was Frita Gauer, and she lived one town over in Slokivka,” Mrs. Andrich explained.

The name of the city immediately rang a bell. “Slokivka, is that where she is buried?”

“Yes,” the woman nodded.

“I need to go there.” Blaire rushed toward the bedroom door.

“There is only one cemetery, and she’s buried under the large oak tree in the center of it.” The woman added, “What is happening to him?”

Blaire turned back to the woman, but neither of them said a word. The oven timer sounded and Mrs. Andrich seemed relieved and excused herself by disappearing down the hall.

Her other two children came tumbling into the house emitting their own innocent laughter just as Blaire entered the hall, and she could hear their mother telling them they needed to get cleaned up for supper. As they came bounding down the hall, Blaire offered them halfhearted smiles. The younger boy smiled, waved, and bounced off into the bathroom, and the older boy strolled by, watching her cautiously. She could feel his eyes on her back, and she turned to face him.

“There’s something in the basement,” he croaked in the same alien voice that she had heard come out of Ivan just the day before.

“What did you say?” Blaire questioned, stumbling back into his mother who suddenly reappeared behind her.

“Who is this?” the boy asked his mother softly.

“Oh…she’s just selling magazines,” Mrs. Andrich said. “I’m sorry, but you should be going, my husband would kill me if I purchased one more magazine subscription.” She laughed lightly. Blaire could not take her eyes off the boy as Mrs. Andrich practically pushed her toward the front door. Carefully, he eyed her to the door as if to make sure that she exited their living space, making sure that it was free from any remnants of St. Sebastian.

“How do I get to Slokivka?” Blaire asked, as she was being shut out of the house.

Mrs. Andrich eyed her cautiously for several seconds before answering, “One bus ride north, about thirty minutes.”

“Thank you,” Blaire said, as she began down the steps.

“I don’t know if this helps, but he said that his name was Dmytro,” Mrs. Andrich said in a whisper before slamming the door shut.

In a matter of seconds, Blaire was freezing again. She had walked halfway down the path before she turned back to see the older boy in the window. He was waving to her, his hand swinging back and forth slowly, and she remembered the little girl from her first train ride to Borslav. She wondered if he and the girl had both been trying to give her the same message…
don’t go.

CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

“W
ait!” Blaire yelled as she dashed to the bus that was pulling away from the curb. Coming to an abrupt stop, the bus obeyed the command of Blaire’s fist as it pounded into the door panel.

“This bus going through Slokivka?” Blaire shouted through the door with labored breath.

A burly man with a toothpick in the side of his mouth pushed the doors open. “You got a ticket?” he asked, apparently annoyed at the prospective rider for stopping the bus.

A frustrated Blaire fumbled through her bag and held up a crumpled one hundred dollar bill, “I got this.”

The bus driver grunted under his breath as if scolding himself on the fact that his judgment had yet to improve with his age. He nodded her on to the bus and snatched the bill from her hand as she boarded. She searched for a seat with no neighbor, closed her eyes, and hoped for a little peace before her next stop.

It was colder in Slokivka than it had been in Cruslav, and a light snow was beginning to fall. The bus driver had given her directions from the bus stop to the cemetery and directions from there to the only inn in town. Blaire walked the abandoned streets with her gloved hands tucked under her arms. She focused on the puffs of smoke that came from her mouth every time she exhaled into the frigid air.

Blaire had been walking for almost five minutes when she became aware that she had not seen one person. There was no one on the streets of Slokivka, and the realization made her stop and stand still for a moment. Blaire turned around and looked down the street behind her; there was no one there. She looked up into the empty windows of what seemed to be abandoned buildings and, as alone as she obviously was, a chill slithered up her spine in response to the intense sensation that she was being watched, that hundreds of beady little eyes peeked just over the edge of each windowsill and out through every crack in each building. The crows were back, just watching and waiting.

Blaire began walking again, faster now.

Tombstones came into view, and Blaire could hardly believe the size of the cemetery. Slokivka’s dead population was larger than its living one, a decaying empire of death. There was something alive about the cemetery, something not vitalized with fresh, exuberant life but with the clumsy, crippled movement of the reanimated dead. Massive trees in variegated stages of life and death littered the ground, but there could be no doubt about the tree to which Mrs. Andrich made reference. The sprawling oak sat in the center of the tombstone dotted land. Its strong arms stretched out in all directions, summoning any and everything to
come
.

C
ome one, come all…see DEATH
.

There were land blocks of headstones bordered by dirt roads on each side. Blaire walked up one of the roads on the left side and made her way into the bed of tombstones, to stand beneath the tree and look up at its massive trunk and
far
-reaching branches. It was beautiful and awesome, and its roots grew strong generating effervescent life from rotted death. Up and down the rows, in and around the tombstones, Blaire ambled until she found the stone just a few feet from the trunk of the tree that read,
Frita Gauer
.

“Frita, what happened?” Blaire whispered to the stone. “What have you done to Ivan?” The wind whistled through the open land, and Blaire pulled her hat down further to cover her ears. When Frita failed to answer, Blaire passed a few seconds swirling her gloved finger in the thin layer of white snow that blanketed the ground before she got up, she then walked along the row of markers toward the other dirt road. She studied each block of chipped stone as she passed it. At the sight of a particular one, Blaire stopped and cocked her head, bending down and sweeping dirt away from the
ancient
-looking headstone.

“Holy mother,” she said, gasping as she read and reread the name.

Blaire dropped to her hands and knees, and the clean stone seemed to coruscate under the light of the ornery sun. Blaire doubted what she was seeing, but the irrefragable fact remained that the small, flat piece of stone read only two words, Dmytro Prada.

Blaire looked around at all of the tombstones once again, and suddenly the dead seemed clever, and were watching closely as she tried to unravel the mystery.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Blaire spoke to the tombstone. “You died there,” Blaire said, delivering every sagacious word as fact. “You were brought home and buried. Frita had nothing to do with it; she just offered opportunity.” Blaire looked down the row to the road, and then back in the other direction at Frita’s tombstone. Looking back to the road again, Blaire could visualize the Andrich family pulling up in their vehicle as they must have done that day, the boys cloaked in their mourning garments, walking toward Frita’s burial site, marching right through the place where little Dmytro’s soul waited.

“They walked right by you…” Blaire explained to herself, unwrapping the secret like a sage detective as she watched the shadows of the Andrich family pass over her as if it were all happening again, deceitful deja vu, one of many spots of spiritual residue that stained the world’s fabric. “…and you got Ivan. Somehow, you got into Ivan, you clever little boy, you.” Blaire was whispering aloud.

“But why? What did they do to you? What do you want?” Blaire rolled her legs out from under her and sat flat on the ground. “Whatever happened there, it’s happening again, isn’t it?”

Blaire waited but received no response and before she realized it, she was on her feet.

“ISN’T IT? TELL ME SOMETHING!” She was screaming.

A family entered the cemetery and watched her strangely. Blaire admired the scarlet roses that the mournful matriarch clutched tightly in her hand. The fragile petals were the only color in the vast landscape of grays. At once, Blaire wished that she had brought flowers, an offering of some type, and then maybe the spirits would have been more inclined to speak to her. Blaire snatched up her bag and charged in the direction of the inn.

Before leaving Slokivka the next day, Blaire noticed a postbox while standing at the bus stop on the main road. She dug into her bag and pulled out two white envelopes, studying them nervously before shoving them back into her bag. Blaire thought of Mrs. Andrich’s last picture of Ivan in his stiff black suit the day of Frita’s funeral, the slight distortion that had begun on his face. After retrieving her cell phone from her bag, Blaire clicked open the camera application, held the phone out in front of her and snapped. With trembling hand she reeled the phone back in for review and a rickety breath escaped her. It was clear as day, showing the navy of her coat against the bright red brick of the building behind her. Every image was crisp except her face, which was completely dissolved in a hodgepodge of unidentifiable, swirling lines. Blaire’s hand, which previously had a gentle tremble caused by the cold, now shook violently as she buried the phone back in her bag.

Just then Blaire heard the old bus rattling, resembling the cough of an aging smoker. Blaire shuffled toward the door of the bus and just as she reached its steps, she stopped and said, “One second, please.” Blaire turned and ran back to the postbox where she pulled out the envelopes. After fumbling, she managed to throw them into the dark mouth of the metal box.