Back at the apartment, Lucy shivered and clacked her teeth, pulling filaments of herself, unwilling, into the open air, where they froze and cracked like the thinnest of glass.
Her skin split, no protection from the chill, and fingers like ice crawled through her.
A bump swelled on the back of her head where she’d cracked it against the earth or some other hard object in the fall. No blood though. She winced and dabbed at it, testing its peak and perimeter.
It took some finesse to convince Samay and Alani to release her into her home instead of taking her to the hospital, but she wore them down. She told them she felt fine and promised to visit a doctor in the morning. She was tired though. Exceedingly tired. She didn’t tell them that.
She mulled over Whit’s performance as she patted the wound and fussed. Sylvia and Erin would have to find some type of permanent care for him now. After the show he put on at the funeral, nobody could doubt the need for it.
I shouldn’t have come back, Lucy thought, giving in to regret and guilt. The pressures, the memories I stirred up were at least part of the problem. She used to tease Whit about having a steel pole rammed up his ass. But she saw now how discipline was a vital part of Whit’s make-up. Some people weren’t made to bend.
She lay back on the bed, considering next steps.
“You caught that shit show at the funeral, right?” Lucy asked the empty room for Blanche’s benefit, hoping the pale girl was lurking, maybe scheming an unknowable plan that would fix everything.
She closed her eyes, placed a hand on her chest and one on her stomach, began box breathing. Just forget everything, she told herself. It worked, briefly, and she drifted off to sleep only to jerk herself alert seconds later. Her thoughts drifted back to Whit.
She hoped he was at the hospital by now. They’d have to medicate him. Then hopefully, find a way to get him over this hump. He might recover, she thought, with therapy and other treatments. Hell, what did she know about it? It was possible.
The scene at the funeral could be a one-off and he’d be back to his old self before long, she thought. Maybe it was a disease or a brain chemical imbalance and once they discovered what caused it, he’d be OK. Maybe he just needed a needle or two of something. That was her hope.
I should have tried harder when Sylvia and Erin told me he was slipping, she thought. But she saw no spirits entangled in Whit. Not a hint. No shimmer, no stench, no wispy fingers, no wailing anguish.
Her phone chimed.
“Lucy?” It was Sylvia. “Whit didn’t show up at your place, did he?”
“What? No. What are you talking about? Aren’t you with him?”
“He got away from us. I’ve been trying to reach you for a while. We went to the Gold Rush hospital and we were getting him checked in, filling out forms and stuff, and the nurse came back from the room where we had left him and said he was gone. We’ve been searching for hours.”
Lucy shook her head. That made no sense. She’d just plopped down on the bed moments ago. She shook her head. She felt drugged. She checked the clock on her phone. It said 9 p.m.
Was that right? she thought. The last time she remembered checking, her phone said five o’clock.
A shroud crept over her thoughts. She slapped herself awake. Focus, pay attention. What was happening?
“I don’t know what to do.” Sylvia’s voice brought Lucy back to reality. “I’m sick about it. We’ve been calling everybody, hoping somebody has seen him but we’re out of places to look.”
“Jesus. I haven’t seen him, sorry Sylvia.” Lucy pulled herself upright and sat on the edge of the bed.
She left the room, still groggy, and shambled through the hall into the living room and opened a blind. She looked vacantly out over Main Street. There was a voice on the phone in her ear, but she didn’t understand what Sylvia was saying.
An unfamiliar voice rose from deeper down. It urged her to rest. Lay down. Don’t bother. It has nothing to do with you.
What was this? Lucy, alarmed, pushed this new voice aside and thrust her consciousness to the surface. She spoke into the phone.
“What can I do, Sylvia? Is everybody out looking? I could help them look. Is there somebody that can swing by and pick me up? I can help. I could walk around downtown here. Do you think he might have jumped on the autobus and got back here? Have you got anybody looking here?”
“Thank you, Lucy. That would be great, actually. We could use another person to scour around down where you are. The last time we checked downtown was about three hours ago. Who knows where he might be by now. We pounded and buzzed on the door downstairs earlier, but you didn’t answer. We were getting worried.”
“I must have fallen asleep. Sorry, I don’t know what happened.”
Three hours ago? She still felt sleepy. Something was pulling her under. Is this from that whack on the head, she wondered?
“Shit. OK, I’m on my way out the door. I’ll take my phone.”
Lucy set down her phone. She pulled on her jacket and shoes and shuffled down the hall to her bedroom and laid down, telling herself she would lie back just for a few seconds.
“Lucy get up!” a voice shrieked.
Lucy jolted awake, scrambled to her feet and stood, steely alert, next to the bed. She studied every dark corner of the room. What the fuck was that?
It was nothing, a voice calmed her. Don’t care. Need sleep.
She woke again, who knows how much later, confused, facing the front window overlooking Main Street, the blinds open from wall to wall. Someone was humming. She could barely hear it, like a distant echo. She knew the tune, but couldn’t for the life of her place it.
A movement down below in the street caught her eye. A dark thing, could be a person, lifted its head and looked up at her. Was that Blanche? Lucy wondered.
The universe blinked and Blanche appeared shimmering inside the apartment, tumbling her hands, urging Lucy to do something Lucy couldn’t understand.
It doesn’t matter, Lucy thought. She was going back to lie down.
Another flash, Blanche jumped, fastened onto Lucy’s shoulders, burrowing into her once more. Lucy slammed her body around the living room, knocking over tables and lamps, but Blanche had won almost the instant the struggle began.
Lucy’s universe flashed again and she was back at the run-down cabin. The beetle chittered and fled the instant it saw Lucy. It squeezed through a tiny knot in the floorboards. Lucy tried to run in the opposite direction but Blanche, Blanche, Blanche compelled her forward.
No, no, no, she thought, but her body was no longer hers to control.
She and Blanche tap, tapped their way along the floorboards in an awkward, scraping gait toward the hole. Infinity opened and Lucy’s heart froze in fear at the solitary forever beyond it.
She dove into the impossibly small hole and slid easily to the ground beneath the cabin. She poked her head out from under, into the gloom beyond and saw a thin tree glowing white a short distance away.
Lucy crept toward it. The branches were constructed from the limbs of a man, a scrawny, broken man. Lucy discerned his tumorous body meshed within the trunk. It had the head of an ox.
It snorted for Lucy to come near. Lucy wanted nothing less. Her deepest desire was to leave it hanging in the dark, to let it slowly putrefy from the inside out.
But that wouldn’t be enough. She needed to end this for good.
She scowled at the ground, fists clenched. The beetle scuttled close and she was surprised at how easily she trapped it underfoot. It flailed under her heel, chittering as it died, its sides bulged under the pressure of Lucy’s boot. Lucy pressed harder. The creature’s skin split, its insides exploded.
Emboldened, Lucy pressed her own body forward, not waiting for Blanche, and approached the shape in the tree. The air hissed, her skin sizzled and the sky caught fire.
Lucy gripped the man-thing in the tree and ripped it loose. She threw it to the earth, its open, black maw twisted and gnashed as its thick, leathery skin burst into blue flames, singeing away the skin of the ox head. A human skull rose from beneath with empty eye sockets and a dark void for a nose.
It swung its head and ground its jaws in agony so deep the sight nearly struck Lucy blind. She felt its sinew and muscles squirm. She felt its molecules writhe and the twisted strands of its existence unwind and fall apart. She felt it boring into her, its searing fever, its incomprehensible anger.
Lucy threw pity to the burning sky and gripped the skull in both hands and wretched the crooked, cancerous tree with body entwined, free from the earth, roots and all. Here at last, the final transmutation of Harley.
Harley the skull, the thing in the tree, clacked, a sound originating worlds away. Lucy pushed the skull to the ground and scoured it back and forth on the dirt, the thin body still entwined with the tree madly flailing behind. She stood, raised a boot, let it hang for a second, then stomped with all her strength onto Harley’s neck.
She pressed, harder and harder until the veins on Harley’s neck bulged and burst. Grubs sprang from the wound and from the empty-socket eyes and swarmed to enshroud her boot. She ignored them and pressed harder.
She grew numb to empathy and gave one great final push. Harley’s skull split, spilling its soupy meal onto tiny green shoots, soaking into the only spot where the ground wasn’t dead.
Lucy paused to catch her breath and in an instant, she was back in the apartment, dazed, searching for Harley, the tree, the fires, the gore.
Nothing, only the apartment. Standing to one side of the room, smiling, stood Blanche.
“Shit,” Lucy said exhaling.
She shook herself, ran to the kitchen and splashed cold water on her face.
“I know, I know,” she said. “We have to go.”
* * *
Bonus material
Check out bonus material, including back stories to the characters in the novel Three Lives of Juryat the link below.
The Underworld Vents also contains short stories of alternative/historical fiction with The Wagon People series.
Check out the new additions with the Tynoffer Common series, humorous flash fiction in bits of letters, bulletins and bureaucratic paranormal madness.
