I am her special person, now. I can make her happy. But…those fantasies and dreams…

  His face flushed. The fantasies he had involving Kaya would have to go. He would have to banish them. She was family.

  From now on he would be a stone man, impervious to the strawberry smell of Kaya’s hair, the newfound sway of her hips. She would be able to sit in his lap, hug him, express affection in all the ways a daughter might need to do with her father, and he would be able to return that affection without feeling hot, and sick, and excited.

  Curtis hoped it would be as easy as making the decision to change his attitude, but feared it would not.

  He’d just have to make the effort, and if he failed from time to time, he’d have to keep trying. As long as he didn’t make Kaya uncomfortable, he figured he’d be doing okay.

  Now, if the police didn’t dig too deeply into his life, then everything might turn out just fine.

  For him.

  For Kaya.

  For what they were becoming together.

  ~~~

  Curtis was allowed to take Kaya home the next day. Miss Martinez explained that he was expected to make her life as normal as possible and make sure she got to and from school. She also gave him a schedule of when she would be checking in on Kaya.

  Curtis wanted to get across the street and do a little painting in Colleen’s bedroom—there were stains on the wall beside her bed that shouldn’t be seen anymore. And while the paint dries, I can watch some of our old home movies. But Miss Martinez had told him that the police would not allow anyone over there for a minimum of three days while they processed the scene. He just needed to keep Kaya from going over there until he could get the painting done.

  Curtis found it difficult to wait that long. But on the morning of the fourth day, after taking Kaya to school, and after he’d seen Officer Burke come and rip down all the yellow crime scene tape, he couldn’t get to Colleen’s house fast enough. His hands were shaking with excitement as he opened the front door to his family’s house.

  Chapter 7: Dawn Over Monahan

  A sheen of sweat coated Angie’s skin, but it didn’t cool her. Instead it felt hot and sick and stuck to her like the late evening’s humidity.

  She walked quickly through her old home town, trying not to reminisce as she passed the old shop fronts and garage-sized bars that littered the suburban sprawl.

  She couldn’t help but stop for a moment in front of Radeker’s Pharmacy. She saw someone moving around inside.

  The boss is at work awfully early this morning.

  A glance through the window confirmed that little had changed. The same collection of greeting cards, useless trinkets, beauty aids, and medicine littered the shelves, showing little semblance of organization.

  Not that Clancy Radeker needed to keep the place tidy to turn a dollar. He made a decent load of cash milking old ladies for their Social Security and offering deals on pills that weren’t necessarily prescribed. Colleen had often sent Angie here on errands, always asking her to pick up a couple of little things on top of her dope. Angie had bought bubble gum, and Christmas ornaments, and tiny porcelain dolls that cracked too easy. It was her first experience in drug dealing, and she dug the kickbacks.

  Seeing a new SUV the size of a small elephant parked beside the pharmacy, she smiled.

  There’s my fucking college money. Thanks, Colleen.

  She spit on the hood of the rig and kept walking.

  A few cars passed her, as the muggy evening crept toward dawn, but nobody slowed down or recognized her. As she rounded the corner of Marker Way and Pierce Street she heard two cats screeching at each other in someone’s backyard. She knew how the heat could do that to animals. People, too. The heat made them crazy. It clicked over a little switch in people’s brains so that it was now possible for them to do that wrong thing they’d just thought about before.

  The dawn felt ugly, filled with animal tension. She let it into her system, breathed hot air in hard and exhaled a shaky breath. She clenched her fists. Sweat rolled down the cleft of her lower back. She threw an ugly look at a passing hatchback, causing its passenger to rapidly avert his glance.

  Anything that keeps the voices down is fine by me. Even if I have to be angry for the rest of my life.

  Angie passed a bar with red doors and a glowing neon OPEN sign in the window. The old neighborhood layout was clearer to her than ever. She was two blocks from home.

  Home. Jesus, is that what it is?

  Her pace slowed. She smelled barbecue and lawn cuttings. The cats had ceased their yowling.

  This was never my home. I don’t belong here.

  Angie remembered the looks the neighbors used to give her when she would play in the permanently yellowed front yard. They looked at her with disgust; they aimed it toward her; as if she could help the way she lived; as if she had wanted to wear a dirty blue jumper every day; as if she had wanted her hair to be matted; as if she were the reason her mom lay around the house all day popping pills and leering back at them.

  Colleen, in her finer moments, used to call the neighbors Purity Pollys and Church Club Cunts. Colleen said, “Let them lose a husband, you know, just let them lose a husband. Then they’ll know.” She used to grin at the sentiment, as if she just couldn’t wait for the next widow to be made.

  Maybe she could invite the neighborhood women over for gin and nembutols! What a social club that would make!

  One block’s distance from her old house, Angie found she could barely step forward. Even the thought of Kaya, hands outstretched for help, didn’t move her. She’d been running for so long, and now, just moments from the concrete front porch of her childhood home, she stopped.

  The sun was coming up and the pink-orange streetlights overhead were clicking off. Moths still flocked to the bulbs. Angie could hear their soft bodies bumping into the lights above her, a muffled percussion. Angie could see her house in the glow of the morning sun.

  What am I doing here? What the hell am I doing here? What am I going to do, walk in and tell them the truth?

  “Oh, hey, Colleen, hey, Kaya, a couple of days ago I was drugged and raped by a sociopath, and then I almost got sucked into the soil by some evil trees in the middle of the fucking forest. Anyway, after all that I got this weird feeling... okay, it was a vision, really, and I thought maybe Kaya was in some kind of trouble so I hitched my way out of the woods, robbed an old acquaintance with a fork, caught a bus, and decided to drop by. Oh, and I’ve been talking to myself, saying all kinds of weird shit, but it’s not really my voice so please just ignore that if you could. So, how’ve you guys been?”

  Angie laughed, at last, and though nothing felt real enough, she felt like maybe she was moving toward something good. Maybe she could just drop in and be with her family again, and make things be all right. It was the first time she’d felt this way since she’d purified her blood and mind in the tiny room at Stacy’s house. She thought of Kaya’s delicate feet wrapped in pink ballet slippers, both of them dancing together, spinning.

  Angie smiled.

  She began walking again.

  Yeah, maybe things will be okay. An unexpected sense of relief washed through her, the first clean feeling her body had known in months.

  The relief was quickly washed away by the pain that hit her chest as she crossed the street toward Colleen’s house. She felt warmth spreading from the sharp pain on the surface of her skin.

  You are never alone. Never hidden. We are in you. We are waiting. We need you.

  Angie unzipped her hooded sweatshirt and saw the blood spreading from the tattoo on her chest. Standing there on the sidewalk she was confronted by the knowledge that nothing, absolutely nothing, was right.

  Her lips moved.

  Come home.

  She turned her head toward the roof of Colleen’s house. The light coming from the rising sun blurred in her peripheral vision, took on a rainbow hue. Ice spread through her belly. She felt thorns at her chest. She heard skin and fabric tearing in unison.

  No. This can’t… I just let the anger go for a second… I mean…

  She hunched over on the sidewalk, trying to remain standing, although the slight weight of her backpack almost toppled her.

  Colleen’s house stood to her left. Shapes moved to her right. A big, black Labrador knocked over a trash can.

  She turned toward the sound and saw half of a child spilled in the street, sprawled in pieces amidst the empty juice bottles and greasy fast food bags. The child tried to crawl toward her, making awkward progress on garbage arms and brittle stick legs of different lengths.

  Angie turned her head away.

  This isn’t real. This can’t be real. It’s just the acid, still just the acid.

  She turned toward the house and tried to become angry, tried to close her eyes and beat the visions out of her head and think (just think) like she had been doing.

  The pain in her chest was spreading.

  No!

  She turned her head upward, refusing to look down at the blooming stain on the front of her shirt.

  None of this is real! I don’t want to see it anymore.

  Come to us. Walk. Behind the house. The woods. Things will be better there. There are already so many of us there.

  She refused to move, refused to listen to the oily-voiced urgings coming from her own mouth. She took a step toward her house with her head upturned.

  That was when she saw the dead body on the roof.

  Oh God, Kaya used to sneak up there to hide and play with her toys.

  Her eyes were transfixed on the body. It was too young to be Kaya, too small and worn away. It was in pieces, rotten. Its head turned toward her, empty eye sockets regarding her without emotion. Its tiny mouth opened wide and black oil began to run from its throat, trickling down the roof. A starling landed next to it, paused for a moment, watching Angie with its one empty, beaded eye, and then began to peck at the roof-thing’s body. A high pitched whine came from the thing’s throat as the last of its oil was vomited across the eaves. The whine crescendoed and began to tremble. The sound became Kaya’s voice in a long and unshaken squeal.

  Angie heard the shuffle of trash across the street, the other shape crawling toward her. The thick reek of old milk and discarded fat floated into her nose and mouth as it crawled closer.

  She felt needles across her arm and envisioned the rose thorns weaving their way down to her wrist.

  The Kaya-scream of the baby-shaped thing on the roof grew louder. She turned back to the half-child on the street. It feebly lifted its branch-like arm and reached out in her direction.

  Angie found the strength to run. She did not move toward the back of the house, knowing in her belly that if she were any closer to the woods she wouldn’t be able to stop her legs from heading deeper into the thicket beyond.

  Angie ran up to the front porch, opened the front door, slid inside the house, and then slammed it behind her and locked it.

  The bleating of the creature on the roof died as if a gust of wind had blown it to nothing. She risked peeking out of the glass arch at the top of the door. She expected to see the garbage creature staring back at her with its one shattered egg of an eye, but it was gone. The black lab was rooting snout-deep in an empty bag of Oreos. The trash around the dog was only trash.

  Angie looked down at her shirt. It wasn’t clean, but the spreading crimson pattern that had covered her tattoo had disappeared.

  Relief washed over her, heavy and fast, and she sighed.

  She breathed for a moment, taking in the new silence, and letting her eyes adjust to the darkness inside the house.

  Then she yelled out, “Hello, is anybody home?”

  There was no answer, only the sound of something shifting rapidly in the den at the back of the house.

  If nobody’s home, then why was the front door unlocked?

  A noise, again, from the den. Whatever had shifted was now settling.

  Angie dropped her backpack to the floor. She took a step forward and felt something plastic crinkle under her shoe. She reached down and picked up the balled yellow plastic. She smoothed it and read it by the dim glow of the streetlamp coming in through the window’s arch. In between the tattered edges it read “INE-DO NOT CROS.”

  Her belly went ice cold again, and looking down the black hallway toward the den, she contemplated turning around and facing the faded acid visions she’d left behind.

  Or maybe I should just head out to the woods and sleep. Things are so wrong.

  Another sound came from the back of the hallway. Like a playing card inserted in bicycle spokes, a plastic sort of ticking.

  Angie pulled Rusky’s fork from her sweatpants pocket and walked down the hall. Adrenaline flushed through her system. Her spit dried up, leaving her mouth metallic. She reached out to open the door to the den.

  A man sat half-naked in the cramped den, resting on an old green loveseat, wearing only a pair of blue jeans. He had shoulder length hair and deep set eyes that were fixed on the wall opposite him, where an eight millimeter projector was casting Colleen’s old home movies onto a sheet tacked to the wall.

  On the makeshift screen, Angie was five and playing with a plastic doll. Her lips moved but there were no words, just the constant flip-flip-flip of the film and the steady breathing of the stranger in her den.

  His head turned toward her and he regarded her with fear and surprise in his eyes, as if there were no way he ever expected to see another living being at this moment in time.

  He opened his mouth.

  “Hi, um…I’m Uncle Curtis. Oh, God, um…I’m supposed to be here. I’ve just been painting… Are you a neighbor, or with the police or something?”

  Angie felt her legs turning soft. She wavered and had to focus just to stay upright.

  “Who the fuck are you?” She held the fork out. “I don’t have any fucking Uncles. None that will talk to my Mom. And why the hell would the police need to be here?” What she wanted to ask the most was “Where’s Kaya?” but she couldn’t tell what this guy was up to, and if he was part of a home invasion she didn’t want him to know Kaya even existed.

  She realized this guy could be a friend of Cypher’s, or some twisted fuck who Cyph hired to take out her family. Had he already gotten to Kaya? Was this the man whose hands she’d seen bruised into the flesh of Kaya’s neck?

  The man calling himself Uncle Curtis stood slowly, putting one hand to his back and grunting as he rose. He stayed across the room, wary of the fork. Angie noted the fear in his eyes, strange for a man hired to kill her.

  On the screen Little Angie was talking to herself in a mirror. The camera shot jiggled a bit. The operator must have thought Angie was funny.

  The man spoke again, stepping slowly toward her. “Colleen’s your mom? You’re Angie, Kaya’s mom?”

  Shit, he knows about Kaya. “Yeah, and who the fuck are you? Stop moving, right now Goddamnit, and tell me who you are.”

  “Well…it’s weird, but… listen, I don’t know how to explain this to you right now, and you look real upset, and I can understand that, but I’m not here to hurt you. I’m Kaya’s Uncle, Uncle Curtis, and I…”

  “Shut up! What the hell are you talking about? You’re not my uncle, my brother, my anything. I don’t know you. Our family doesn’t know you so you shut the hell up. Where’s Colleen? Off on a bender?”

  Angie watched the man’s eyes, and saw a real sadness come into them. She couldn’t tell if he was acting or not.

  “She’s dead. I’m sorry.”

  Angie snapped.

  This isn’t right. This man killed her. He killed mom, and Kaya, and now he’s going to kill me.

  Angie swung forward, jabbing Rusky’s fork into the man’s face just above his right cheekbone. The man hit the floor and blood welled up from the four punctures and began dripping from his face to the dark green carpet.

  Angie felt a sudden and heavy pressure in her gut as the man rocked up from his position on the floor and threw his left shoulder into her abdomen. The weight of his body pushed her all the way out of the room and she hit the hall wall hard enough to leave a circular dent where her head cracked the drywall.

  She felt plaster tinkling down onto the part in her hair, and tried to steady her vision. She regained sight long enough to see the man calling himself Uncle Curtis run from the den and out the front door.

  Angie wasn’t sure if he was coming back, but she could barely move and felt the throb at the back of her skull grow more insistent.

  Maybe…he’s coming…back. Hide. Hide.

  She slumped forward on the old shag carpet and crawled toward her old bedroom at the beginning of the hall.

  I can get in there. I can lock it. Curl up, hide, be quiet.

  She stopped for a moment feeling the heavy pressure just above her neck and the carpet rubbing her knees as she dragged them behind her.

  My mom’s dead.

  She pushed into her room, which was currently furnished with only an old mattress and wrinkled black sheet.

  Angie reached up to lock the door behind her. She could barely focus to reach for the knob, and after pawing it for a moment and pausing to feel a dry heave rise from her gut, she managed to lock it.

  Safe. Hide.

  My mom’s dead.

  Angie could barely even hear her own voice as it spoke.

  She is with us now, all the voices are one. Join us. You can rest here.

  Angie’s clothes were twisted tight around her from crawling across the floor. She felt as if they were growing tighter by the second, as if the fabric was shrinking against her skin and trying to reduce her. She struggled to breathe and managed to strip down to her underwear before collapsing into the mattress.

  She pulled the thin, black sheet over herself and curled up in a fetal ball on the mildewed mattress. Her chest barely moved, pulling shallow breaths from the air of her childhood home. Unconsciousness took her, and she slept in blackness.

  Chapter 8: Rest & Motion