They were wearing the same clothes they had worn the day of his track meet, the day they had died in the car accident. His father, his light gray serge suit, with the gray pencil stripe. And his mother, her charcoal jacket and black skirt, and her best leather pumps. They were smiling at him, looking up with broad grins on their faces, as if he’d just run up to them with a blue ribbon fluttering right there in his hand, flushed with victory.
“Look,” he found himself saying, glancing down at his hand. There it was. The blue ribbon. It was actually there. Right there in his fingers!
“Congratulations,” said his father. “We’re so proud of you, son. But not if you don’t stop this tomfoolery.”
“What?”
“You know,” said his mother. She brushed his hair back from his face. “All this rushing about, digging up things best left alone”
Decker wiggled away with a sigh. “No, I don’t know. I don’t know who or what you are.”
His mother looked stunned. “You don’t know us? Your own flesh and blood.”
“There’s nothing flesh and blood about any of this,” Decker said. He turned back toward the blond man. “None of this is real. Not even you.”
“I’m offended,” he said.
For a moment, the street opened up, and Decker found himself sliding down a decline on his knees, into scalding hot pitch bubbling upward like magma. It was as if he were trapped on La Palma in the Canary Islands again, as tectonic forces ripped the island apart, as volcanos heaved and pitched toward the sky… until there was nothing but silence.
Now, he stood at the foot of a long, sloping hill, covered in wild flowers and grasses and grain. Butterflies filled the air. Blue, purple and gold. Teal, cyan and cinnamon. They bobbled and bubbled and bounced all around him. In the distance, at the top of the hill, was a small grove of trees, a Druid cluster of oaks swathed in mistletoe. She was standing at the base of a tree. She was holding a songbird, some kind of bright, jewel-like shimmering thing.
Emily!
Decker took off his smoking jacket, swung it over his left shoulder, and climbed up the hill, slowly, languorously, drinking in every second. Emily was standing in a white, almost translucent slip, with straps thin as mermaid hair, with a shine hovering over the silken material as lustrous as pearls. “Emily,” Decker said, as he came up behind her.
She looked over her shoulder, her long blond hair rolling, cascading like froth down her back. And her eyes. Those Antarctic blue eyes, as cold as the tailings of glaciers.
“You can have me,” she said. “If you want. And I know that you do. I can feel it.” She glanced down at his crotch. She started to rub him. “See?”
He could taste her breath on his skin.
“Don’t you want me, baby?” she whispered.
The sound filled him like a warm glass of absinthe. “Of course I want you,” he said through clenched teeth. He found himself grinding his crotch against her round ass. He bit her hard, on the neck, until the blood started to flow. He watched it pearl up and shiver, and fall, like a shower of apple seeds, unabashedly red.
“Then who is that girl?”
Decker turned to see Lulu standing in a fairy ring of wild prairie oats, stark naked and exposed to the elements, save for the tattoos of lotus blossoms, vines and lily pads on her skin. Her heavy breasts heaved as she stared at him with unabashed longing, pure animal lust. Her crimson lips trembled as a bead of glistening perspiration snaked down her left temple, only to roll, roll and then vanish back into her silken black hair. She held her hands open, palm upward, beside her bare hips, and the topiary tattoos came together into a bower of ghostly white flowers and snakes of green vine, until her frame became nothing but a flesh-and-blood trellis for the pinpricks of life growing upon it.
“That’s…” he began. But Decker could not, for the life of him, remember her name. “That’s…” It just would not come.
“I can give them all back to you,” said the blond man beside him. “Your parents. They don’t have to die. Not like that. Not burned alive in that manner.”
Decker felt a wave of nausea sweep through him.
“And Emily too,” he continued.
For a moment, kinesthetically, Decker sensed more than saw as Spanair Flight JK 5022 fell apart, crashed soon after take-off from Barajas Airport, Madrid, killing one hundred and fifty-four souls on that fateful summer day in 2008, in Spain’s deadliest air accident in twenty-five years. The plane suffered multiple malfunctions, it turned out, but the airport mainframe computer — which should have raised the alarm before the MD-80 took off — neglected to do so because the airport’s central computer was contaminated with malware. It neglected.
“But that was Madrid,” said the blond man. “Not Dallas, for sure, right? For sure, John. Not Dallas. Emily’s death was simply an accident, right?”
Decker swung out at the blond man without even looking at him but the punch went drunk wide. He missed by a mile. Almost literally. Decker found himself standing on an outcropping of rock.
Far below, on the small Druid mound, circled by oak trees, Emily looked up at him with tears in her eyes. “Don’t you want me,” she cried as she stretched her arms toward the heavens. “Aren’t you tired of carrying the pain? It was you they invited to Dallas. You should have been on that plane, John. Not me. You should have taken that flight.”
Decker pulled himself out of her grasp.
“Don’t you love me, John? Don’t you care anymore? Or, has Lulu stolen your heart?”
Decker pressed his palms to his ears, trying to blot out the words.
“We can be together again,” she continued. “Like before. You can have me again. In more ways than you can even imagine.”
“This isn’t real,” Decker said. He clamped his eyes shut. “None of this is real. Emily’s dead. And my parents. They’re all dead. Dead. Dead!” He started to run down the hill, trampling bright yellow daffodils under his feet.
He ran and he ran in this manner for what seemed like hours. The hill kept descending. The terrain never varied. He ran and he ran until he entered a corridor, running through first one room, then the next, the nurses looking up in surprise or disdain, clasping clipboards to their breasts, some recoiling in horror. He ran until he finally found himself outside her hospital room, and he opened the door with a stone in his heart. He turned the doorknob so carefully, afraid it might simply pop off in his hand or snap like a wishbone. He pulled the door open and saw her inside, still pinned beneath that thin plastic skin, just there, just out of reach, like a body floating under a tablet of pond ice. “Becca,” he found himself whispering. “Are you okay, baby?”
“I can save her or I can take her away,” said the blond man beside him. He was dressed like a doctor now, with a stethoscope, a nametag and lab coat.
The clear plastic tenting started to part. A tiny dark blade pierced the shell from within. Then another, and another, until it was clear that the little dark blades were her fingernails, blackened and burnt. They melted the plastic until it came apart in her hands. Becca slithered out of the cleft, like an eel, her fingers and arms and whole torso sliding out of the vaginal opening, until she flopped onto the bedclothes, a black shriveled mass of burnt skin held together by gristle and bone. She looked up at him with her ivory smile and traced a narrow ellipsis in the air directly over her head. “For infinity, Daddy,” she said.
“If you don’t do what I tell you,” whispered the blond man beside him, “I’ll suspend all her life support systems. She’s not dead… yet. Each sub-routine. Gone.” The stranger’s voice altered. The pitch became feminine. “You know I can do it, John. It would be…” He turned and saw his Aunt Hanne. “…child’s play.”