Dead Reflections (13 page)

But Linda remembered one time when she’d walked home from school alone along that path. It had been autumn, late October, and the house had risen up in view, stark against the backdrop of half-bare trees, its many attic windows peering in all directions, their glass and frames staring at her like an ephemeral beast. She’d paused to stare, curious about the house, but afraid of it. It had been one of those times when the house had sat empty between its last fated residents, waiting for another sucker to purchase it. She’d stared at its vacant windows, wondering about its empty rooms; how the shadows would elongate as the sun slid past them on its apogee from dawn to dusk. How anyone’s footsteps would echo through its corridors and against the starkness of its high-ceilinged, empty rooms. Its basement would be a damp whisper. Its attic would be a held breath. She and the house watched each other. Ridiculous, she’d thought. Houses can’t stare.

But this one could.

She’d felt its eyes on her and she’d picked up her pace, moving past it, glad when its trees finally cut it off from view. She’d crossed the road to keep her distance from it, but before it had fallen out of sight, she’d glanced back. She’d seen an old man’s face framed in one of the upstairs bedroom windows, watching her. He’d smiled and waved.

She ran home, sobbing, because she’d recognized the man in the window. His name had been Jeffrey William Hopkins, and he’d been born in that house. He’d lived and married in that house. He’d killed his daughter Madeline in that house for trying to run away with a man whose character Jeffrey hadn’t liked, but he’d had money and power as one of the town’s bankers and his jail sentence had been relatively light. He’d also been involved in gambling and criminal elements, and he’d owed debts to questionable characters, one of whom had gone missing shortly before Jeffrey had died. His wife had disappeared and he’d told everyone around town that she’d left him. Her body was later found buried beside her daughter’s, beneath soil inside the barn, five feet beneath one of the animal stalls. He’d perished in that house, falling down the long set of stairs leading from the second story to the main floor. She knew his face because her parents had talked about him, the stories around him; they had kept newspaper clippings with his photographs.

He’d been dead for over twenty years on the day Linda had seen him smiling at her from that empty upstairs bedroom window, and when he’d waved, she’d felt the scratching dry skin of his fingertips linger against the nape of her neck, a gentle pulling to come over…come visit.

She’d not walked that way to school again and, years later, she’d almost wept when her own husband had purchased this house, on this street, just up the road from
it
. He didn’t believe her story. He said she’d probably seen some real estate agent checking out the condition of the house, and nothing more.

“It’s just a rambling old house with a bad reputation, thanks to Hopkins,” he’d told her.

“Why do bad things happen to all the people who move in there then?” she’d demanded.

“I don’t know,” he’d shrugged. “Shit happens to people.”

“In the same house?”

“Maybe it just draws unlucky people. It’s not our problem, Linda. We don’t live in it.”

“Thank God for that,” she’d whispered.

Linda picked the book up off the bed and set a loose piece of paper into it to set the page location, then laid it on Gina’s desk. She stood in front of the window, and glanced into the brilliant morning yard, her mind on the gardening she still needed to do out there. She saw both swings on the swing set move back and forth, except they moved in opposite directions from each other. Then they gradually stilled. She felt a burst of sour panic cut through her stomach.

“Gina?” she called through the open window. That same melancholy feeling crept back to her, the kind that always made her want to cry whenever she thought of Gina growing up and moving away from home--this idea of somehow losing her daughter to the world out there. She was growing up, her little girl was. Almost a teenager. She had to cut her a little more leeway. As for the swings, maybe a storm front was coming in, pushing hot air ahead of a cooler system behind it. She peered at the sky, which was a transparent blue. The bad feeling wouldn’t go away.

“I love you,” she said into the room. Okay, time to stop being weepy, as her husband would call it. Go downstairs, wash the two glasses and decide what she would make for supper. Linda headed back down, noting that Bobbins now crouched beneath the living room sofa, his eyes wide, dark orbs, watching her. He hissed again.

* * *

Mrs. Dylan dragged the section of garden hose along the side of her house towards her back yard, her head tingling with a headache that had come on suddenly while she’d watered flowers in her front yard. For a reason she could not explain, the day had become
different
at that moment, as if the air had thinned and had denied her enough oxygen. She’d felt the passing of a pocket of cold within the humidity, an anomaly of temperature so out-of-place that she had been unable to swallow for a moment. She would have sworn she had heard someone call her name. It had been the voice of a child. Then the cold passed and the heat of the day flooded back. She continued watering, trying to place the owner of the voice. A child…a girl.

“Gina Dewar,” she said. “That’s who it was.” The voice had sounded as if it had come from right beside her, and yet the girl had not been anywhere in sight. Mrs. Dylan had glanced up at the Dewar house. The girl must have called a greeting as she had passed by a window. As for the cold pocket, who knew?

She reached her backyard and started the hose again, determined to get the remainder of her flowers soaked before the sun peaked at high noon. The sound of creaking swing chains from the Dewar yard caught her attention. Ah…the girl was out back, playing before the day became too hot.

Mrs. Dylan went to wave hello to Gina. She saw two swings moving on the set, one lifting high, rolling back, lifting higher, then back again in a steady arc. The other spun around like a top, paused, then retrograded in the opposite direction. She saw dust kicked up from the ground where feet may have dragged, had children actually played there. Yet the swings moved by themselves. She gripped her hose, feeling its hard rubber press into her palms. That acute stab of cold air returned, enveloping her like a cloying bubble. A miasma of something rank, a placid yet definite stink of something gone
off,
drifted past. She thought she heard children giggle. The swings continued to move despite the breathlessness of the day.

“Oh my,” Mrs. Dylan uttered. Nausea hit her hard in the gut. Colors faded, bird calls muting. Then, the swings slowed and came to a stop. The day held its breath. She sensed movement ease past her and with it, the cold trailed out again. She stared at the swing set whose seats hung like nooses from their chains. She had not fainted in years, but she felt the blackout coming with the speed of a train. The last thing she saw before everything went dark was the detail of her lawn rising up to greet her face; the minutia of grass blades, some yellow and parched, some green. She hit hard.

* * *

Mrs. Dylan paused in the yard and stared at them, but didn’t say hello. She seemed to look through them.

“What’s with that old lady?” Cory asked. “Is she not all there?”

“She’s usually friendly.” Gina raised a hand and waved, then used her feet to dig into the lawn to stop her movement. Mrs. Dylan didn’t acknowledge her.

“Maybe you should tell your mother.”

“If she sees me, she’ll want me to stay in. She thinks I’m at the library. She won’t let me go back to your place. We should go before my mother sees us out here.”

They ran alongside the yard, past Mrs. Dylan. Gina waved again and the woman still refused to acknowledge her. She stood there, gripping her hose, her eyes focused on the Dewar back yard.

Cory laughed at this. They hurried towards his house.

“Let’s try to just go back to your place,” Gina said.

“All right.”

They reached the mid-part of the road; Cory hit something that felt spongy, like slamming into a volleyball net, only cool, sticky. It sent him sprawling backwards, his arms looping to regain his balance.

“What the hell?” Cory said. He could
see
the road clearly, and yet something in the air would not allow him to pass beyond this section of the sidewalk. Gina stopped beside him, her face curling with unease.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I just walked into something.” He put his hands up and felt the air grow thick and solid despite its transparency. It felt like he was pushing his hands into cold, wet steak. He pulled his fingers back and they were coated in a translucent slime. “What’s going on here?”

Gina put her hands up now too and the look on her face told him that she felt the same thing. They moved over onto a lawn and the clamminess followed them like an invisible border.

“It won’t let me go past it.” He glanced at her and felt fear for the first time. They could see the world around them, yet could not reach anything beyond this point. A woman moved towards them on the sidewalk, walking a small dog. When the woman and dog got to within twenty feet of them, the dog, a beagle, went crazy. It yanked back hard on its leash, howling and shrieking as if it had been attacked. The woman cried out in surprise.

“Marty, what’s the matter with you?” the woman admonished the dog, doing her best to drag the animal forward along the sidewalk, but the dog dug in with its paws, its collar cinched into its neck, its skin bulging and its eyes bugging with terror.

“Of all the stupid things,” the woman continued. “There’s nothing there.”

She could not encourage or force the dog any further along the sidewalk. She ceased yanking on the leash and glanced around her for whatever may have set the animal off. She pulled the dog across the road to the opposite sidewalk and, although Marty the dog still balked, his hair bristling along his spine, he allowed himself to be pulled forward from that distance. Once they had moved further up the road, the dog visibly relaxed.

Gina and Cory watched them go.

Gina put her hands up. “It’s still there. Why could that woman walk through it, but not us?”

“She crossed the street.” Cory let a car drive by, noticing it passed through the veil without a problem, and ran to the other sidewalk. He tried to push through and it still resisted. He walked back slowly, running his hand along something unseen yet resilient the entire way.

“There’s a wall between us and there,” he whispered. He turned and ran in the opposite direction, back towards Gina’s house. He got to within the same distance and encountered another invisible barrier. He began to cry. “Something’s wrong. It won’t even let us go back to your place.” The wall of resistance spread across both sides of the road for as far in either direction as they’d attempted to feel it.

“Why did it let me go home?” Gina asked.

“I don’t know. We got there but your neighbor didn’t see us. That woman with the dog didn’t look at us, either.”

Gina’s fists clenched in terror. A young man wearing a set of headphones and pushing himself along on a skateboard started up the road towards them. He passed through the first barrier without a problem. Cory ran towards him.

“Hey, can you help us? Can you bring us up the road there?”

The teenager slowed a little on his skateboard, letting it roll to a stop. He pulled an earplug from one ear and seemed to listen to the day. He didn’t look at Cory.

“Hey!” Cory screamed and grabbed the boy’s right arm. The boy pulled his arm back and stared at his skin, his expression puzzled. He rubbed at his skin, shook his head, pushed his earplug back into his ear and kicked the skateboard back into motion. He passed through the second barrier.

“Nobody sees us,” Cory whispered.

Gina fought tears. “I think it has something to do with your neighbor’s house…by walking through his back door, things have changed. What kind of a secret is it? What does it do?”

Cory felt horror. “It’s magic. It can bring you anywhere you want to go. You just have to think about something and you’re there.”

“But the world isn’t the same as it usually is,” Gina wept. “Everything’s different. Nobody sees us. I want to go home. I don’t want to play anymore.” She went to run back to her house and hit the invisible wall. She tried to run across the road several times, only to be bounced back by something she couldn’t see.

“Let me go home!” she screamed, hysterical. She stamped her feet, her arms rolling, her fingers clawed and tearing at nothing. “I want to go home! I
want-to-go-home
!”

“Okay, okay!” Cory reached her and grabbed her. She spun and slapped him hard in the face. “Why the heck are you hitting me? It’s not letting me out either!”

“This is your fault! You wanted to show me that house. You wanted me to keep this secret. I just want to go home…”

Cory could barely breathe. “You wanted to see my house.”

“And your house is
fucked
,” she shrieked, frenzied. She hyperventilated.

“We’ll go back the way we came. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll just walk by Ruth and go back through the mirror.”

“I don’t want to see that woman again.”

“Just take my hand. We’ll go together. It’s the only way.”

“Who’s Jeffrey?”

“He lives in the house. He’s the one I met first.”

“How does the door work?”

“He never told me how it happens. He just showed me,” Cory said. “And he comes into my house. He walks in any time he wants.”

“That’s not right,” Gina said. “Neither is his house. Do you see their house from here? There’s your place…where’s his?”

They saw nothing beyond Cory’s house.

Jeffrey’s porch door waited in its sunny garden. They approached the door and it swung open to greet them. Jeffrey stood on the other side, his face neither frowning, nor smiling. He watched them.

“You showed Gina the secret,” he said.