Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (2 page)

“Oh God,” she wept.  “Oh God, no!  No, no, no, please God, noooooo!  Nooooooooo!”

Kaley finally began to thrash, and when she did, she felt something swelling inside of her.  It was like a tight knot, something that yearned to get out.  Like vomit, or diarrhea, it would not be stopped.  But, also like those bodily projectiles, their direction and intensity could not be controlled.  A portion of it went up and down her spine, into her bowels, then up into her head and rested behind her eyes to create a splitting headache, brief but intense, before it traveled to her hands, her knees, her heart, her lungs, bouncing all around.

A sickness was rising, one she hadn’t felt since…

A trembling.  Something from all around.  The walls of the cityscape began to crumble even more now.  Enormous chunks of stone and even gargoyles plummeted down into the water, smashing into parked cars and sending them into the foaming fury.  The ground bucked, cracked, then raised, stone riven from stone.  Kaley felt herself take in one quick, panicked breath, and then, the thing that was inside her that was waiting to be vomited, was vomited.

There was a tear, somet
hing forcing its way out of her…

All at once, she was somewhere else.  Kaley had merely blinked,
and felt propelled by the same force that was churning inside of her.  It was like the feeling you get on a rollercoaster, a tingling up the spine, your stomach rising high into your chest, a sense of being lurched.  It was over in an instant, the hands were all gone and she stood standing in her living room.  She could still hear her alarm clock going off, but farther down the hall in her bedroom.  “Take my tears and that’s not nearly alllllllll!  Tainted love…ooohhh, tainted love!”

Was this a dream, too?  Or was she sleepwalking? 
The living room seemed perfectly fine.  Unpacked boxes still clung to the same walls as before, and the outdated Xbox was sitting in front of the equally outdated Sony big-screen, amid a rat nest-like tangle of wires and surge protectors.  There were shelves set up for books or homey ornaments, but so far left bare.  The single mounted picture of Jesus was beside one black-curtained window. 
Mom thinks it’s a talisman, a ward against more evil
.  Kaley shook her head. 
She has no idea
.

Kaley sighed…but it was strange, because there was no air to breathe. 
S’funny
.

Then, she
heard something.  Whimpering, and close by.  She turned, and for a moment she didn’t know what she was looking at.  Huddled in the corner, garbed in nothing but her Powerpuff Girls shirt and underwear, a tiny girl had retreated, arms over her head as though she were trying to drown out noise and all the terrors of the world.  “Shan?”

“Kaley,” Shannon whimpered.  “Get back.  Get back inside before the monsters find you.”

“Inside where, Shan?”  She took a step towards her sister…and noticed that the carpet felt…slippery?  Kaley looked down.  It was all perfectly normal, the same puke-brown carpet of their new apartment.  Kaley had told her mother how very depressing that carpet was, but Jovita Dupré had said nothing.  Unless it was a rebuke, her mother didn’t say much of anything these days.  “Shannon, what are you talking—”

“Kaley,” Shannon whispered.  “Hurry back inside.  They’re coming.”

“What do you—”  Then, she remembered. 
Oh no, it’s happening again
.  The dream was always the first stage, and then came the next stage, what she called the “false awakening,” when she thought she was up and moving but she wasn’t.  The slippery carpet, the lack of oxygen all around her.  She tried to take a breath, but there was none to be had.  She didn’t need it in this state, though.

“
Get her!  That’s it!  That’s it!  Don’t let her go!
”  The hands.  They were back!  She felt them pawing at her, wrapping around her legs and ankles, arms and wrists, now her neck and hair, now her waist—

“
Get her!  That’s it!  Almost got her!  Almost!
”  The same voice as before, the same hungry, desperate voice that always commanded the others.

“Let me go!” she screamed.  “Let me go!”

“Don’t touuuuuch me,
please
!” shouted the alarm clock.  “I cannot stand the way you teeeeeeease!  I love ya, though ya hurt me so!  Now I’m gonna pack my things and go!  Tainted love!”

The trembling returned, this time far more sickening, and vastly more painful.  It gnawed at her insides, tore her intestines to shreds, swam through her guts and dove into her bladder.

Whatever it was, it came out from her fingertips, her eyes, her nostrils and lips, her toes and toenails, her privates and her ears.  Out of everything.  It was an immense expulsion of something grotesque that was rotting her insides, and when it happened, the hands tore away from her, almost painfully…

All at once, she was sitting straight up in her bed and her hand went flying towards the alarm clock.  And it went flying from her nightstand, smashing against the floor and skipping over to her small bookshelf, knocking off a low-lying copy of
The Lightning Thief
.  Soft Cell finally went silent.

Kaley sat upright
, panting, the sweaty sheets falling from her chest as tears fell from her face.  She was sobbing uncontrollably.  She felt…warmth.  A warmth on her bottom and between her legs, like something slithering…

“Oh God!” she screamed, and reached down to rip the sheets off of her.  But
this time it wasn’t bloody hands reaching up from an abyss.  It was urine.  She had peed herself, and was still peeing.

Kaley let the urine flow.  She let it flow and flow, and never tried to stop it.  It felt too good.  Like a person that had suffered through a night of food poisoning
and survived, she didn’t care what else her body did, as long as the pain was gone, as long as she was safe and secure and there was no more pain.

With trembling hands, she reached up to wipe her face.  Kaley then looked around her room to survey it.  All was right, except…
The nightstand
.  Something about it was wrong.  It took Kaley a moment to realize what it was. 
It’s so far away
.  In her nocturnal thrashing, Kaley had somehow wriggled away from her side of the bed and was now on Shannon’s side.  The nightstand was on
her
side, out of arm’s reach.  Then, she looked at the alarm clock on the floor. 
How did I reach that?

A mental fog had grown all around her.  All sorts of blockages, brought on by fear and disorientation, muddled her thinking.  And like tumbles in a lock, one by one, those mental blockages were lifted and another door of realization was opened.  Kaley realized tha
t if she was on Shannon’s side…

“Shannon?” she hollered at once, trying to hop out of the bed and nearly falling on her face.  The sheets got tangled around her ankle, and for a terrifying moment her mind made it the hands from her dream.
  But it hadn’t been a dream, had it?  At least, not all of it.

Kaley was up and searching for the light—at seven o’clock in the morning it was still dim inside their little apartment, especially with the black curtains that Shan insisted they needed.  “To keep the monsters from seeing inside,” she had said again and again.

Kaley never found the light, and instead stumbled out of her room and down the hall.  She made it into the living room, feeling that atrocious, old, flattened brown carpet beneath her feet.  The same as always, no longer slippery as slime.  The living room was exactly as she’d found it moments ago, the unpacked boxes stacked not quite neatly against the walls, the picture of Jesus beside the black-curtained window, the denuded shelves, the tangle of Xbox and TV wires on the floor.  And Shannon, squatting in the corner exactly as Kaley had seen her moments ago.  “Shan?” she said, on the verge of tears.  Urine was still streaking down her leg.  She’d clean it up in a minute, after she checked on her sister.  “Shan, can you hear me?  You all right?”

“Kaley?” she said, sniffling. 
Timidly, Shannon glanced over her shoulder, almost too afraid to find the truth.  “Is it…is it you?  Did you make it back?”

Now with sleep in full retreat, Kaley had her wits about her again and knew what Shannon had meant.  “Yeah, baby.  Yeah, I made it back.”
  Shannon stood at once and rushed into her arms.  They clung to one another like they were sinking, and each of them was the last piece of driftwood that would help them stay afloat.

“They gonna keep comin’,” Shannon
lamented, sniffling.  “The Others are gonna comin’ in your sleep, ain’t they?”

“I don’t know, girl.  And that’s the truth.”

“I don’t want you to go!  I don’t want them to take you!”

“Shhh, I ain’t goin’ anywhere.”

“What do they want with you?”

Kaley kissed the top of her head.  “I don’t know, baby.”
  But that wasn’t true.  Kaley had a suspicion, one that she didn’t want to voice, lest she give power to the notion.

“I wish they would go away,” Shannon cried.

“Me too, girl.  Me too.”

For several weeks now, it had been like this.  First came the dream of some unknown place, the things and the people inside of
them were obviously conjured up by her own imagination.  This seemed to be the way the Others found their way in (she and Shan had resorted to calling them the Others, for what else would you call them?).  With her mind relaxed and at play, they poked and prodded ever so gently, and when they were right upon her, she felt the explosion of…of…some
force
that took her away.  In those moments, she wasn’t exactly her.  She was both in her bed and yet somewhere else, too, in a kind of state where she could be seen, yet she couldn’t interact with the world around her.  When Kaley was in that state, everything was slippery.

Sometimes at night, Kaley found herself adrift in the halls of their new apartment, trying to touch the walls and yet watching her fingers slide right off.  There was no air, and none necessary.  Actually…that was wrong, wasn’t it?  There
was
air, she even felt it on her face sometimes, like when the air-conditioning cut on, it was just that she had no lungs.

“A spirit ain’t got no use for breathin’,” her Nan had told her once.  Kaley had asked some question about angels, asked how they could die.  She had asked about chopping
off their heads or drowning them.  That’s when Nan had told her.  “Spirits ain’t got no use for breathin’, chil’.  You find that out one day, too.”  Kaley had assumed Nan had meant someday when she died, when she too became a spirit ascending to heaven.  But had Nan meant something else entirely?  Did she have first-hand experience?  Or had she known how far the charm could carry Kaley?

There had been a few times when Kaley found herself walking through the house alone, touching things experimentally, feeling the slick, soft surface of things.  It was almost as if she could pass through them if she wanted.  One night, while asleep and fleeing the arms of the Others, Kaley had sud
denly appeared in the kitchen—it was a reflex, it seemed, a way of escaping the Others.  Her mother had been up getting a late-night snack, her back to the dinner table, hunched over the sink, weeping.

When Kaley had softly said,
“Mom?” Jovita Dupré had nearly leapt out of her skin.  “What the hell are you doin’ there?  Ain’t you s’pposed to be in bed?  Get’cho black ass in there—”  She’d cut herself off when she saw Kaley staring at the thing in her hand.  “Don’t’choo judge me, now,” she said.  “I’m livin’ under pressure you don’t understand!  I’m tryin’ to survive!  Keepin’ this family together ain’t easy!  Gawn now, get in the damn bed.”  But Jovita had stormed off, leaving her daughter’s spirit standing dumbfounded where she had found her.

“The laughing man brought them, didn’t he?” said Shan presently.

Kaley looked down at her sister.  Pity poured to and from Shannon in an endless cycle, one sister assuaging the other. 
The laughing man
, she thought. 
She still can’t even say his name
. 
She’ll call him anything else
. 
The monster
. 
The mean man
. 
The laughing man
. 
Anything but his name, even though she knows it full-well by now
. 
She’s seen all the news stories about him that came after, and she still won’t say his name
. 
As if it somehow gives him power, like saying Bloody Mary in front of a mirror
.

In fact, that’s exactly what it was
for Shannon, and Kaley knew it, because she could feel the emotions and surface thoughts of others, sometimes their whole mind, and none more so than her sister’s.

Kaley pulled away from her sister and touched her face, wiping the
warm tears away from her cheeks with her thumbs.  “Listen, this is something you and I have to deal with on our own.  We can’t tell Mom, ’kay?  She won’t believe us.  Nobody will.  Just like they didn’t believe us when we told them about…about all that other stuff.”

“He ain’t comin’ back, is he?”  Shannon
said fearfully.  Her face contorted, her eyes shut automatically and her lips curled into great rolls as tears began to pour again.