Deep in the Darkness (33 page)

"Michael? What's wrong?"

I looked back at them. "Farris...he was on to something."

"Who? What are you talking about?"

"I don't want to talk about it now. They're probably in the woods, listening to us." Heart pounding, blood racing, I ran back to the minivan, opened the rear passenger door and scooped out the dead Isolate. It felt like a heavy bag of potatoes, thick and misshapen. It tried to slip through my arms but I clutched it tighter, then walked back to my family, looking over my shoulder the entire time.

"What the hell are you doing, Michael?"

"Let's go home. Then we'll talk."

T
he walk back home went as quickly and uneventfully as we could've hoped for; most of the short journey had been spent in silence, sniffing the cold damp air and peering at the lifeless patches of woodland peeking out from beneath the thin layer of snow. A mere thirty minutes after the mini-van had slam-tackled the ash tree, we found ourselves safely sequestered behind the locked doors of 17 Harlan Road, seated around the kitchen table and drinking cold water. Christine still had the blanket wrapped around her like a shroud, I still had my injuries about me, and Jessica looked much dirtier under the fresh light than she did an hour ago at the witch's house. After our bellies had some food in them, we decided it best to wash up now and attempt to clear our bodies and minds of the toils of the morning. Two of us stood guard with kitchen knives in the upstairs hallway while the other one showered, and in thirty minutes we were all clean and seated back at the kitchen table, ready to discuss the past, present, and future of the Cayle family.

The living room clock tolled twelve noon. I found it hard to believe that everything this morning took place in a span of less than three hours, from the moment I hid in the car to this very minute. Talk about time standing still; it'd felt like a week passed by.

"Does Jessica need to hear all this?" I asked Christine.

Jessica remained silent in her seat, eyes wounded with dark circles and tears. Christine said, "Jess, honey, you can stay and listen, and if there's something you think Daddy and I should know, then tell us, okay?"

She nodded weakly, sipping her water, seeming not to care one way or the other.
Yep, that's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder settling itself into her brain, nice and comfortable.

I went first. I took a deep breath, then told them everything. From the encounter with Rosy Deighton in her bedroom on the first day we moved in (I'd told Christine about this before, but felt the need to begin with that again, for Jessica's sake, I suppose), to the confrontation with the deer in the shed. Then, I detailed the incidents with Lauren Hunter, my dream with Page, and all the circumstances surrounding Phillip Deighton, of how he'd tried to set me up, of his details of Rosy's death, and how he ultimately died at my hand. I spoke of my meeting with Old Lady Zellis and Sam Huxtable and how my conversation with him was the catalyst for me to determine how the rest of my family might be involved in what I dubbed as The Grand Scheme. I detailed all my experiences within the den of the Isolates, how I'd been coined their 'Savior', and described in as much detail as I could the adversities I'd been forced to endure. When I told Christine about how I slipped into the car, determined to find out exactly what she was up to, I looked at the clock and saw that an hour had passed since I'd begun divulging the whole extraordinary tale.

"As it turned out, I was right. You were as much a prisoner as I was."

Christine frowned, then said, "The only difference is that I really didn't know I was being manipulated. Up until the moment you came into the basement, I was undeniably convinced that I'd been visiting the doctor all along. It just appeared that way to me, everything, the house we were in...to me it looked just like a doctor's office. Never once had I seen past the delusion."

"I too fell into her delusion once she discovered me in her house. She appeared to me as a beautiful siren. An otherworldly angel. I was instantly captivated. I couldn't move, speak, nothing. It was as though I'd died and gone to heaven and my angel was there to usher me in through the pearly gates. If you hadn't stabbed her with the broomstick, I probably wouldn't be sitting here with you right now."

"You never felt any sort of entrancement with the creatures?" Christine asked.

"No...well, except maybe in the dream."

"So...is it possible that only the witch possessed this kind of ability?"

I nodded in agreement. Then, a sudden realization crept up on me, and I asked, "How often did you go there?"

"To the witch's house?"

I nodded.

Tears filled her eyes. "Every day, since Jessica started school."

The truth made me wince. "God, Christine, didn't you bring Jessica to school at all?"

Christine gazed at Jessica remorsefully, then nodded and said, "Every day up until last month. But the doctor—well, the witch, I mean—she insisted that I bring her to our sessions. I felt no choice in the matter but to do so. It was as though something terrible would happen if I didn't."

"That was definitely another part of her induced delusion. Which makes me believe that the Isolates also utilized some form of mind-control against me. I'd been utterly convinced that any conversation I initiated with you or Jessica would result in your deaths. That's why I maintained such a strong silence over the last few months." Frustrated, I ran a hand through my hair. "Jesus, for all we can assume, there's a great deal more than just blatant threat keeping this town at bay."

"The people I saw carrying the dead body into the house. They looked like zombies. They didn't appear to be acting on their own accord."

I nodded in thought, trying to imagine the eerie scene playing out as Christine described it that afternoon. I looked at Jessica. She was focused hypnotically on the grain of the kitchen table, perhaps closing herself out to the unpleasant conversation taking place. I asked her, "Did the old lady do anything to you, honey?"

"No."

"Nothing?"

"No," she said, then added, "The whole time I thought I was in a waiting room. I never saw anything."

"Did the old lady ever threaten you?"

"No," she answered.

I turned back to Christine. "What the hell did the witch want with Jessica?" Of course there was no inherent answer to this question, at least one that we could come up with. At this point, Christine didn't even know what
she herself
was doing there.

It's all insane logic. Some kind of self-fulfilling hocus-pocus. Think about it: the Isolates act and react based solely on self-preserving motivations.

Christine said, "I don't remember much of anything, yet I can recall some conversations I had with what I presumed at the time to be the doctor. I remember her telling me that she was a long-time local, and that her mother used to live in the house with her but was now buried in the backyard. For some reason, this piece of information sticks in my mind."

"Because it's true, I saw the grave."

"So then what the hell was she? A human? Or one of those things from the woods?"

"Some kind of half-breed, I guess. Half-Isolate, half human. With some extraordinary prescient abilities above and beyond those of the Isolates themselves."

Are you certain about that, Michael? Well, then how do you explain the dream? Or their hold on you? Was it all some kind of fluke experience? Or were you indeed subjectively influenced by the Isolates?

"The only explanation I can come up with was that the witch had placed both of you under some form of hypnosis, one that'd effectively enabled her to cloak her real intentions, whatever the hell they were."

"Did you see anything Michael?" Christine asked, her voice thinning out. "In the basement. Did you see her doing anything to me?"

For a moment I actually considered divulging everything I saw, but quickly decided against it. Some things were better left untold (like when you cheat on your girlfriend, or park boogers under the sofa). Telling your wife that she had a witch-claw in her vagina would be one too.
 

You sure about that, Michael? The witch had to have been doing something purposefully intentional at that moment. Insane. It might be best if you told her. It's her body, after all. And your baby.

Dear sweet Jesus, she was doing something to the baby, wasn't she?

"No, all I saw was the old lady bathing you in that stuff."

"The leaves."

"Leaves?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "She made jelly out of these weird leaves, I remember her grinding them in the barrel with a wooden pestle."

"When I went down into the basement, I'd smelled a pungent odor...it'd struck me as being very familiar. Then I realized what it was. The tea. Those weird leaves, you grew them in the garden and brewed them to make that tea you were drinking, right?"

Tears filled her eyes. She placed her head against my chest, suppressing her sobs. "How could I have been so stupid!"

"You didn't know. You didn't know."

"I trusted Rosy."

"And I trusted Phillip. But at the time there was no way we could've known what was going on." I rubbed a gentle hand against her back and peered over her shoulder at the kitchen counter, to the few things we removed from the freezer when we first got home.

I then looked over at the freezer, and realized with dread and uncertainty that the dead Isolate crammed inside would be our only hope and prayer for escape.

T
he frigid afternoon moved forward with a dusting of snow. One of the three wooden boards had fallen (or had been torn) from the upstairs window and was now lying on the grass ten feet away near Christine's dying herb-garden.

I sifted through the trash on my office floor, realizing that this might very well be the last day I'd ever set foot in here, which was just fine with me. A million thoughts raced through my head, and if all went as planned, we'd be out of here in a day or two. I hoped.

I'd explained my discovery to Christine, along with my intentions. She appeared enthusiastic, yet skeptical. I told her that I saw no other alternative, that we could either attempt to finish what Neil Farris had started, or wait for the Isolates to come after us, which in my estimation would be tonight. She nodded an agreement, realizing that there'd be no other option but to carry out my immediate plans to fight the evil breed known as the Isolates.
 

I told Christine and Jessica to prepare for an immediate departure, and they both went upstairs to pack up some things, only necessities I told them, such as clothes and food. The minivan had never exploded, but was totally undriveable, so my campaign against the Isolates would have to be 100% successful if we were to walk part of the way out of Ashborough. I remained convinced that along the way we could probably take someone's car without much resistance.

The dead Isolate I took from the backseat of the minivan was still sufficiently wedged inside the freezer—I'd had to break its thigh bones to get it in, having no choice in the matter since we chose not to weather the horrid stench of the thing, which in turn would send up a giant red flag to its relatives.

I went to the freezer, opened it up. The creature's skin had adhered to the icy walls and made a velcro-like tearing sound as I pulled it out. It left flagrant patches of dirt and blood against the snowy interior, like abstract paint smears.

With a shiver, I hauled the body into my office and laid it out on the patient's examining bench. Perhaps four feet in length, the monster rested messily, its legs and arms twisted into near impossible angles, dangling from the table's edge like the limbs of a strewn marionette. Its face had a furry coating of ice on it, like a beard. It could've passed as one of Santa's elves gone to hell and back.

I spread the body out (like a patient, I suppose), the bones making hard white snapping sounds as I wrenched the limbs back into form. Smears of slimy deposits and muck saturated the pure white paper sheathing the table.

The clock in my office tolled four. Darkness crept in like a murderer's hand. Soon, I knew they would be coming for the body. Which meant I had only one chance to get it right. And not much time to do it.

I could hear my wife and daughter pacing about upstairs as they prepared to flee this God-forsaken town. I wondered for a moment if the Isolates were out there right now, perching against the barricaded windows and monitoring our actions: obtaining a handle on our intentions. There'd be no telling. I could only pray that they didn't find out right away—their heedlessness acted as our only prospect for freedom.

As I went about mentally preparing my plan, curiosity got the best of me and I took a moment to study the body more closely. Its face was horrible, like that of a child's stricken with Progeria: skin pruned, teeth overgrown and terribly misshapen. Wispy strands of hair lay straggled atop its warped head like cobwebs. Its rib cage was sunken, the stomach cavity ripped with sinewy muscle, limbs long and gangly and broomstick-thin. So different than us—yet so genetically similar.

So genetically similar...

In this abstract moment of thought I considered the fact—a single tidbit of information culled from my years at Columbia—that only one singular gene differentiates man from the apes. And yet, gazing at this creature, it can be readily observed that all primates vary in much greater inhuman-like detail than the Isolates.
Was it possible that these golden-eyed demons were in fact some unique race of homo sapiens?
If one could assume for a moment the theory of evolution, then their bi-pedal status would undeniably confirm the Isolates to have branched off from no other mammal than man. But then what of the glowing eyes? I could only premise them to be the result of an adaptation to their subterranean environment. And the feet? Five toed, yes, but more reptilian in nature than those of common bipeds, something unexplainable by evolutionary standards. Dozens of suppositions existed that could be studied. It seemed they would have to remain unanswered for now.