As if she hadn’t known ten minutes ago, she now understood this was no longer the man she’d married, the man she had fallen in love with once upon a time ago, the man she’d wanted to have babies with, lots and lots of babies. Nor was he the man she wanted to grow old with, have their ashes combined and scattered across their favorite Jersey Shore beaches. This was another man. A man who had, like a fine piece of fruit, grown rotten and sick, decayed from the inside out. She knew it was partially her fault—if she had been more responsible and been watching their son a little more closely that day, then none of this would be happening. In fact, if the tragic event hadn’t transpired, the three of them would probably be on the couch right about now, eating bowls of homemade ice cream sundaes and watching LEGO BATMAN on Blu-ray.
This is all your fault, she thought. You deserve this.
“Terry…” she said, tears streaming out of her eyes. “…you’re sick.”
He only smiled at this. “No, baby. I’ve never felt better. This is how we get on. This is how we get through. Fuck therapy, fuck house-swaps, fuck moving and selling. This—” he placed his hand on her bloated stomach, “This is how we heal.”
“Terry, I love you. I really do. But this is so wrong. Everything about this feels so wrong.”
He placed his hands between her thighs, knife included, resting all three on the edge of the toilet bowl. She looked down at the tip of the blade. If he wanted, one upward motion would plunge the knife into the softest flesh under her chin.
“I dreamt this,” he said. “I dreamt you were pregnant again, with our Will. That we were able to reincarnate him. Give him new life so we can gain back the old one.”
A blurry smear filled her vision. “Terry, I don’t care what this test shows, I’m not pregnant. This is a trick. Whatever it is, it’s a trick. Your dreams, Terry, they lied to you.”
He scowled. “Dreams don’t lie. Not in this house. Don’t you see that?”
Blanching, she glared at him. “You’ve seen the hallucinations, too?”
Terry’s face twisted into wrinkles, lines creasing his face like a brown paper bag. In a brief fit of rage, he buried the knife in the plasterboard over Angela’s wild, knotted hair. White dust sprinkled the top of her cowering head.
“I am not hallucinating!” he yelled as he stomped his foot on the tile, making the entire room vibrate. He marched over to the far wall where Angela had put a piece of duct tape over the hole that had once shown her things existing in faraway worlds. “Look through there,” he demanded, ripping the tape away. A small beam of light filtered through. “Look in there and tell me what you see.”
Crying, she shook her head. “No.”
“Do it.” He bared his teeth like some savage beast born in the wild and raised on a steady diet of violence. “Goddammit, do it, or I swear to Christ I will rip our unborn son from your womb and make you fucking eat him.”
The look in his eyes suggested he might actually do that, or something equally vile. She removed herself from her position on the toilet and crawled on all fours toward the small pinprick of light. Once in the path of the beam, she felt a warmth infiltrate her bones, and not in the comforting way the morning sun sometimes felt on the back of her neck, how it sometimes soaked into her skin. This was a dark warmth, a conquering warmth. It made her feel like maggots were hosting a party beneath her flesh, an all-encompassing death orgy.
When close, Terry reached out and grabbed her by her hair, guiding her toward the hole. With force, her eye met the opening and she peered through, her body teeming with the sick shine the aperture emitted.
[It’s the house, but it isn’t their house. It sits in the middle of the Everywhere, the surrounding world a blanket of dirt, a boneyard of old souls, lost and wandering, eternally trapped here. She pushes her way past the spirits, their amoebic shapes swirling in the atmosphere, disappearing when touched. Before blinking out of existence, their physical manifestations disperse like dandelion seeds, wafting into the air, floating over her head, swallowed up by the sheet of darkness reigning above.
She moves toward the house, paying the souls no mind. They speak to her in different tongues, some of them coherent, most of them not. She ignores the warbling of their combined voices and pushes forward, up the steps and onto the porch. The front door stands ajar and little effort is required to swing it open, as if someone opens it simultaneously with her touch. She steps into the living room, her eyes immediately glancing down at the vase stuffed with old, wilted flowers, blackened petals matching the cold, dead sky above. She makes her way across the carpet, toward the kitchen.
A shadow waits for her.
A hip-high shadow with no face, and a name she has so desperately tried to forget, forced out of her memory. But the name sticks. And she knows it well.
Ma-me, the faceless shadow says in that familiar tone. Ma-me, home.
Tears leave her eyes, roll down her face. Music plays from somewhere in the distance, something harmonic and keyed, something ambient. It’s like a movie score, she thinks, the soundtrack of her life and death.
Ma-me, the shadow speaks, stepping into the light. Ma-me. Where-go?
She musters enough courage to tell the shadow she hasn’t gone anywhere; that she’s right here, and God, she’s not leaving. Not ever. Not again.
Ma-me. Where-put-me?
Invisible hands wring her heart. She can almost hear her essential organ breaking in her chest.
Ma-me, love-me?
The boy steps into the living-room light.
It’s not the same boy she remembers. His skin is dirty, mottled with patches of missing flesh. Maggots squirm in the craters of his carved muscle, teeming out of the wounds, falling onto the floor by the handfuls. He’s missing one eye, and the other is covered in a film of milky white. Deep lacerations have been cut into his face, trenches of glistening red. His hair is caked with dirt, disheveled, mussed with mud and other earthly sediments. The clothes he’d been wearing on the day he left are torn and ragged, soiled beyond distinction, but still, she knows they are the same clothes.
She knows.]
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
“Is it him?” Terry asked. “Is it my boy?”
“William…”
[I thought you loved me, Ma-me.
I do, son, I do. She says this over and over again, her reassuring mantra.
Follow me, the boy-who-is-not-William says.
He walks backward until the darkness of the kitchen wraps its shadows around him, concealing his grotesque figure. Something pushes her ahead; one foot follows the other, and, before she knows it, she’s in the kitchen, looking out the back door. Outside, the-boy-who-is-not-William hops off the bottom stair, his feet landing in the wet dirt. She follows him out the door, down the stairs, planting her feet on the surface, allowing her toes to sink into the overturned earth. A chill rises up her legs, corkscrewing her bones. Her flesh hardens, breaking out in raised bumps as the fear settles in the base of her spine, propelling her along at the daydream’s command. The boy points to the shed in the corner of the yard; beyond it lays a wasteland of dug-up earth and scattered human bones.
The left shed door sits slightly ajar. She catches a glimpse of something moving in the space between the doors, slithering like a snake in midnight shadows. She realizes it’s a hand. Dark green flesh mottled with black spots, reptilian-like smoothness. The night’s natural lighting—which is minimal—gleams off its cold skin. Curled fingers topped with hooked nails, perfect for slicing and dicing the fleshy surface of its enemies. A single finger rises from the rest, waves, beckons her, and invites her inside.