A Latent Dark (27 page)

She looked up at Harry as if he had materialized in front of her. She jumped and screamed, waking Francine who suddenly began coughing blood. Harold shoved the miserable girl out of the room, yelling at her never to return. A day later, he told a sobbing Melissa that Skyla was no longer welcome in their house.

*

Unfortunately for Harold, that was not the end of it.

The machinery that had kept Harold Montegut’s life making perfect sense began to grind as if lubricated with sand when Francine would no longer wake up. Her face became slick and pale. He knew Melissa was still spending time with that bewitched little street urchin, but there wasn’t much he could do about that.

Until one day, his daughter ran into the house crying. Harold had rushed down the stairs and held her in his arms. Warm tears soaked his shirt.

“Oh Daddy,” she said through muffled sobs. “You were so right. Her mother is the scariest woman I’ve ever met. She… she
knew
mom was sick. She
knew
. How could she know that?”

“I’m sure Skyla told her.”

She shook her head and pulled away from him.

“No,” she said. “Skyla was just as surprised to see her. She was at the door.”

“Wait,” he said grabbing her shoulders. “You went to their
house
?”

He didn’t know whether to hug her or slap her. He held her in his terrified gaze.

“I wanted to see where she lived,” she said in a small voice, so innocent it made him ache.

He took a deep breath, swallowed his anger, let her continue.

“She was just… there. She looked at me,”—Melissa paused to take a staggering breath—“and then she
screamed
, daddy. She screamed that now I ‘knew where they lived and now anyone could know’ and then she stopped,”—Melissa wiped her cheek—“and she just stared at me. Then she said that my mother would die soon… and…”—her words were becoming a mix of crying and speaking that was difficult to decipher—“and that
so would I
. She pointed right at me and said that she could see it in my shadows. Oh Daddy, I was so scared.”

She completely broke down at that point and Harry held her until the sobs stopped. He swore that if he ever saw either of those two again, he wouldn’t be responsible for his actions. In fact he was pretty sure no court would convict him.

He tried to get Melissa to tell him where they lived but she refused. He wouldn’t know that answer until the newspapers reported that the house had burned down. By then it was too late for Harold to save anyone.

*

Melissa’s recovery was even better than Harry could have hoped for. She began spending more time with the Barkley’s daughter. Her manners had improved as well as her grades. Harry had never been happier.

The same could not be said for Francine, who seemed to be little more than a corpse in living skin. The coughing lessened, but in its wake was a hard lump that formed just between her ribs. The Physicians, in their beaked masks and tinted goggles, smelling of spice, gave her very little time.

The night Melissa disappeared Francine woke up. Her eyes were lucid, but she only stared at the ceiling without blinking. Harry was in the room when it had happened, and he almost thought he was imagining it.

“Where is she?” Fran asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Melissa might have stayed for Mass. I can go walk her home if y—”

“No.” Her voice was wet and hoarse. “The other girl. The one who spoke to me in my sleep.”

Harold felt tiny baby fingers of fright climb up his neck.

“I don’t know—”

Francine gripped his wrist. The skin on her hand was so tight he could see the veins standing out like a road map.

“You know who I mean,” she said through a wet cough. “You know—”

But her voice was cut off in a fit of hacking that lasted for almost an hour. Harold wiped her brow and waited until she was asleep before he left the room. He drank downstairs, waiting for his daughter, but she never came home. Probably at that Skyla’s witch house. He got very little sleep that evening.

*

The next morning, he had an important meeting with a man from out of town. The Pope of the South they had called him, a title he waved away with shallow modesty. The Reverend Summers had big plans for Bollingbrook and if Harold could help him, it meant big plans for him as well.

As the numbers began to roll onto the books and through the difference engines, Harold began to realize that it was, in fact, a mountain of money. The Reverend had certified notes. Piles of them. He brought them in day after day in a briefcase, each one verified not only by the Georgian banks but also by the Vatican. It was an unprecedented display of wealth, and he was in charge of ushering it all into Bollingbrook.

“What this city needs is a good war,” the man in white said through a cigarette. “A good war for a good cause, I always say.”

They transferred money all night at an almost dizzying pace. The telegraph lines in Bollingbrook had never seen so much activity. By the end of the evening, both his and the Reverend’s hands were stained blue from all the signatures.

“You’ll see a good portion of this, Harry,” he had said. “I hear you’ve got a sick wife.”

Harry only nodded.  A lump jumped into his throat, keeping him from answering.

“Well, you’ll be able to buy her the treatment she needs, I’m sure. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always faith healing.”

“Pardon?”

“I’ve been known to do it in the past. Would be happy to come by and help out some day.”

“I’m... I’m sorry,” Harry said, a little choked. “I’m afraid my wife doesn’t have long.”

“Nonsense, Harry. Only once you’ve cleansed the soul of its demons does the body have room to flourish. Just let me know. I’d be happy to do it for you.”

Harold graciously declined.

*

Now, Harry sat before two closed caskets, containing two girls who had, at one time, made each of his days worth waking up for. Everything that he loved in the world was in those cold wooden boxes. The priest who delivered the eulogy mentioned Jesus Christ twelve times by name; he mentioned blood and the cross ten times; he mentioned Fran and Melissa by name only twice. Harold counted.

He was done with the wailing and crying. He had done plenty of that in Fran’s bedroom, then a day later in the morgue. The orderlies tried to restrain him. One of them ended up crashing into a steel tray of instruments.

What had been on that table was no longer his daughter. The machinery that had so precisely directed the course of his life had become a meat grinder. It chewed up the women he loved and spit them out into unrecognizable slabs.

Slabs of meat
, he thought with a chuckle.
We really are all just slabs of meat in the end
.
It doesn’t matter who you love or what you do. We are just walking slabs of meat.

The funeral came and went, taking with it, every person who had ever mattered to him, washing them away like a river. A few relatives had insisted he stay with them, but Harry had other plans.

He sat for hours on the rich golden couch in his empty house. He held on his lap a picture, taken years ago. In the other hand he held a bottle. He drank and stared on into the morning. When the bottle was empty, he delighted in how light and easy it was to throw. It smashed through a vase.
Won’t be needing that anymore
. It reminded him too much of that witch child anyway.

It took Harold Montegut approximately ten minutes to destroy every object in the house with the leg of his wife’s favorite china cabinet. He saw Skyla’s face on everything he smashed.

Chapter 19

She had fallen asleep with the goggles on. That was the only explanation for how strange everything looked.

Skyla stood outside The Hungry Skunk under the light of a black moon. She looked around at the placid, grayscale landscape. The trees, the sky, even the rocks all seemed to exist in a strange duality, a negative overlay. There were the physical objects of course, but then there was something else, something alive and conscious about them. Above her, grey swirling clouds drooped dramatically toward the ground, suggesting the inverse footprints of giants.

Are the Wilds spreading?
she thought.

Movement at the edge of the forest startled her and she took a step back.

“Hello,” she said.

A male figure stumbled out from behind a tree, holding his side. She could see immediately that it was one of the boys from the docks. He was Gripper, the one who had grabbed her, the one she had hit. He limped out of the forest with a hand on his abdomen, blood oozing between his fingers. He stopped as he saw her.

“I know you,” he said. “You were the one who hit me.”

Skyla looked at the wound on his side. “Did… did I do that?”

He staggered closer. “No,” he said. “A bullet.”

Skyla breathed in through her teeth.

“Who shot you?” she asked. Something in her mind told her she had to help, had to fix this.

“A man… I think,” he said and turned to point back to the town.

As he looked away from her, a cone of living shadow sprayed from behind his head, pasting the ground and air with thick moving tentacles and legs. It writhed and twisted. A pale eye stared at Skyla from the center of the mass. Gripper turned back to look at her, unaware as the tangle of limbs and flesh turned with him, disappearing behind his field of view.

“Have you seen Scribble?” Gripper asked. His face was concerned, his brow knotted. “We got separated.”

“No, I haven’t,” she said.

“Figures. What good are you?”

“Let me see that wound. Maybe I can help.”

His eyes narrowed and he moved his hand. “It hurts less now. I think it just grazed me.” A hole as wide as a man’s fist traveled from his stomach to the back of his spine. They both looked at it, amazed that the boy was still standing.

“You’re really hurt,” she said, taking a step closer. “Let me just—”

He recoiled. “It doesn’t hurt… really.” Even he seemed surprised.

As she reached out and touched the wound, she saw his shadow wriggle behind his head, twitching and twisting—forking arms and gnarled claws. The wound flexed and shrank by an inch or two. She smiled up at the boy and saw that he was looking at something just over her shoulder.

“You have wings,” he said, eyes wide.

“I do?” she said, blinking. She turned around but saw nothing. She thought of when she was five, on the porch with her mother.
My shadow? Does he see my shadow?

“I
gotta
find Scribble,” Gripper said and began to walk past her.

As he pushed by her, his shadow flared out from behind his line of sight, filling the air with indescribable organs wrapped in sinew. She reached out and touched it. Her hand came away wet, a blue-black tendril sticking to her finger in soft strands—black taffy. It didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t particularly pleasant either.

As the boy walked off into the distance the tendril eventually dropped from her hand and slid across the ground before being absorbed back into the heap.

Another figure caught her attention, a woman this time. She was burned from head to toe on one side of her body. She walked up to Skyla, unafraid but confused.