A Strange and Savage Garden Page 6

  She walked through the foyer and into the living room.

  Mrs. Spitler sat on the couch, coffee cup halfway to her mouth, eyes open and staring. Next to her, Mrs. McCowan had her teeth into a roast beef sandwich, but she didn’t bite off a piece, didn’t start chewing. She just sat there, food to her mouth, statue-still. Pastor Albaugh stood over by the piano, leaning over to glance at a page in the open songbook. Like the others, he was still and unblinking, a wax figure copy of the real pastor; he didn’t even look as if he were breathing.

  Lauren shook her head. She wasn’t seeing this…it was another hallucination, brought on by the combined stresses of returning home, saying goodbye to her father and struggling with her unsettling flashes of memory, or whatever the hell they were. These people might well be here—Mrs. Spitler, Mrs. McCowan, Pastor Albaugh—but they weren’t frozen in a moment of time, insects encased in invisible amber. They were talking and eating, moving and breathing normally. She just couldn’t see it.

  She felt like shouting, screaming, running through the house, grabbing and shaking people until one of them moved, spoke to her, asked her what was wrong, reassured her that everything was going to be all right. But she stayed where she was and concentrated on keeping her breathing even. The last thing she wanted to do was freak out now and upset her mother and grandmother even more than they already were. She hadn’t told anyone in her family about her current mental health “issues”, not even Mark, and she’d rather not broach the subject by having a full-fledged psychotic break on the evening of her father’s burial day. She needed to find a place to sit for a few minutes and wait for this episode (if that was the proper term) to pass. The kitchen, she decided. Grandma always used it as her base of operations when she entertained, and she kept everyone but family out. Perfect.

  Lauren backed out of the living room and headed down the hall toward the kitchen. She passed Mark, a bottle of Sam Adams held in his hand, one foot raised as if he were in the process of taking a step. She almost spoke to him, reached out and touched him, but she didn’t. Better to sit as soon as possible before whatever was happening to her got worse.

  She had to pass through the dining room in order to reach the kitchen, and there she saw her mother holding a tray of assorted Pepperidge Farm cookies. She was leaning over the table, frozen in the middle of serving the guests. Various friends and neighbors sat at the table, completing the tableau, several looking up at the cookies as if they couldn’t wait for them to finish their interrupted journey to the table. Fat Mr. Kendricks, the pharmacist at Walgreen’s, was reaching out with piggy fingers to snag a cookie before her mother could set the tray down. Photograph-still, every one of them.

  Lauren moved past slowly, back pressed against the wall to keep from accidentally touching any of them, as if they were no more substantial than bubbles and might pop any second.

  In the kitchen, she found her grandmother. And despite the fact that she too was still—sitting at the table, head resting on crossed arms, eyes closed, breathing softly—Lauren felt a wave of relief upon seeing her. Throughout Lauren’s life, Grandma was the one who took care of things, who made it all better: strong, decisive, always in control. Just being in her presence was instantly calming. She—

  Wait a minute. Breathing softly?

  She walked over to her grandmother, hesitated, then reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. The old woman didn’t burst like a bubble, didn’t so much as stir. She was warm, though, and Lauren could feel gentle movement as she breathed in and out, in and out. She wasn’t frozen like the others; she was asleep.

  “Grandma?” A gentle shake of her shoulder, then a bit louder, “Grandma?”

  The old woman’s eyes opened and rolled lazily before focusing on Lauren. Her head snapped up, and she pushed herself to a standing position, knocking her chair over in the process.

  Shock, anger and fear fought for control of her face, but she forced a smile and said, “Guess I’m getting old, taking a nap when—”

  She grimaced, took in a hissing breath of air and doubled over. Lauren forgot about the thing in the woods and the guests-turned-mannequins as she hurried to her grandmother’s side.

  She put her arms around the old woman to keep her from falling, told her that it was okay, everything was going to be all right. She started to reach down, intending to set the chair upright so Grandma could sit, but then her grandmother cried out in pain and clutched her side…

  …and the kitchen changed.

  One instant it had been the way Lauren remembered it from her childhood—pinewood table, oak cabinets, wooden floor, framed samplers on the walls, refrigerator, dishwasher, stove, microwave—and then it had become a cramped little room with yellowed, cracked tile covering the floor, a card table and folding chairs (one of which had been knocked over), an ancient toaster oven on the single counter, and a small brown refrigerator on the floor, like the kind college students used in dorm rooms. The sink was filled with dirty dishes, the tiny square window above it streaked with grime, and both the counter and tile floor were covered with stains. It looked as if the place hadn’t been cleaned in years, maybe decades.

  Madelyn Carter appeared physically the same as she had a moment before, but now instead of the powder-blue suit, white blouse, hose and black shoes she had worn to her son’s funeral, she had on a faded housedress and her feet were bare and dirty.

  Lauren let go of her grandmother and stepped back, shaking her head. “This isn’t real…it isn’t!”

  “Oh, sweetheart…” Grandma stood with her hand pressed to her side, teeth gritted against the pain. She sounded weak and tired, but also deeply sad. “Who’s to say what’s real?”

  Of all the things her grandmother might have said, this scared Lauren more than anything that had happened since she had left California. Because Grandma was acknowledging that the kitchen had changed, that Lauren wasn’t merely imagining it…and if this transformation was real, then there was a good chance that all her other “hallucinations” had been, too. But instead of feeling relieved by this, Lauren was more terrified than ever before. As awful as it was, there had been a certain comfort in knowing that even if she were crazy, at least the world around her was normal, stable, rational…but now she was faced with the possibility that existence itself was insane, and that was the most horrifying thing of all.

  Lauren turned and fled the kitchen, ignoring her grandmother’s plea for her to stay, that she could explain. There was no dining room now; the kitchen opened into a small living room containing only a couch covered with a dingy sheet, an old rabbit-eared TV sitting atop a couple cinderblocks, and a battered recliner with the stuffing peeking out here and there. There were figures in the room as well—not people, they didn’t qualify for that distinction, though they were vaguely humanoid in their shapes and proportions. They were conglomerations of earth and wood, mud and twig, soil and root, all standing still and silent. She remembered the glimpse she’d had of her mother earlier that day in the kitchen, when for an instant Lauren had seen her like this, like one of these…things.

  From the kitchen, her grandmother shouted her name, and then, “Stop her!”

  And the figures began to move.

  Of course they’re moving, she thought. Everyone in Trinity Falls listens to Grandma. She knew she was on the verge of hysteria, but there was nothing she could do about that; all she could do—all she wanted to do—was keep running.

  She dodged broken-stick fingers protruding from clumped-earth hands and flung herself out the front door (a screen door now, not wood) and fell to the ground, slamming into her side. She turned to look, saw there was no longer a porch, no longer stone steps, but instead a simple set of wooden steps sitting in front of the door. And the house (the place where she had grown up, the place that had been and always would be her home) was no longer a house, but had become a trailer covered with corrugated metal instead of brick.
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br />   Lauren’s side hurt like hell and she struggled to pull air into her lungs, but she knew she couldn’t lie here in the grass until she recovered. Those things, whatever the hell they were, would be coming outside any second. Coming for her.

  As she started to push herself to her feet, her hand came in contact with something dry and hard—a rock—and she heard a voice whisper through her mind.

  Pick up the rock and put it in your pocket.

  It was the voice of Johnny Divine.

  The screen door banged open and the first of the earthen figures began to descend the wooden steps with awkward, lurching movements of its thick legs. Lauren didn’t have any time to think: she grabbed the rock, stuffed it into her dress pocket, got to her feet and started running.

  She almost thought she heard Johnny whisper, Good girl, but it might just as well have been the sound of her own ragged breath wheezing in her ears as she fled into the night.

  The quarter moon was high in the night sky when Lauren heard the first rustlings that indicated someone—or something—was approaching. She thought of the rock in her pocket. It was the only weapon she had, but she doubted it would be of any use against one of the stick and dried-mud creatures. Besides, she didn’t feel like fighting right now. She was too confused, too numb. Whatever was coming, let it come, and if it killed her, so be it. At least then it—whatever it was—would be over.

  “Lauren?” His voice came to her in a half whisper. She couldn’t bring herself to answer.

  A moment later, he came into sight, walking up the hill toward her. There wasn’t enough light for her to make out his expression, but she knew he would have a sad smile on his face, a kind, concerned look in his eyes. And would he have a mustache this time? Maybe, maybe not.

  “I thought I’d find you here.”

  She sat cross-legged on the ground next to a small trickle of whatever that wasn’t quite big enough to be called a creek, or as folks said in this part of Ohio, a crik.

  He walked over and sat down next to her.

  “Where else would I be?” she said. “It took me a little while to find the place, though. It doesn’t quite look like it used to.” All through her childhood, whenever she had wanted to get away and think—sometimes alone, but just as often in the company of Stephen—she’d come here, to the place that had given Trinity Falls its name.

  Three large streams had once converged here, becoming a river that flowed over the edge of a cliff and splashed into a small lake below. The lake was deep enough to swim in, especially after a good rain. Sometimes she and Stephen brought swimming suits. More often, they swam naked.

  There was no cliff, now, no pond below and no converging streams. Just this pathetic excuse for a creek. But she knew this was the right place—some landmarks remained nearby, chief among them an ancient oak that had been split down the middle by a lightning strike when she’d been a kid (a tree she and Stephen had taken to calling “Hangman’s Tree” for reasons she could no longer recall). But more than the landmarks, there was a sense inside her, a certainty that this was her special place, this was Trinity Falls, no matter how much it had changed.

  “It helps if she has something to base her creations on.” Stephen nodded toward the creek. “Even something as small as this. It…gives her something to work with.”

  Lauren didn’t have to ask who her was. “I suppose it’s the same with those earth and wood things.”

  “Yes. She can give them a semblance of life, but they’re little more than puppets which she dresses in an illusion of humanity.”

  She didn’t turn to look at him, instead she kept her gaze fastened on the creek, on the way the light from the quarter moon slithered and danced on its surface. “Once I saw through her illusion—however that happened—I never saw the people as people again. Just as those things.”

  Enough of them had chased her after she’d fled Grandma’s house. No, not house. Her trailer. The house where Lauren had grown up, the only place she’d ever truly considered her home, didn’t exist. It was little more than an overlarge tin can.

  The mud-things had been so slow that evading them had been easy, even though there was no longer any place to hide in the “town”. The buildings were gone, replaced by small mounds of earth and wood that resembled crude versions of dollhouses, outlines of windows and doors scratched into the dirt along with, strangely enough, street numbers. The roads were now small footpaths, with rocks at each intersection with street names painted on them in white letters—letters she recognized as her grandmother’s handwriting. The church—the center of town, its very heart—was a circle of rocks in a clearing in the middle of which was a wooden bench..

  “Your grandmother is sick. Her mind and her will are as strong as ever, but her body is failing. It was all she could do to maintain the illusion for you as long as she did since your return.”

  Hearing that her grandmother was sick—assuming it was true and not some sort of trick—should’ve upset her, but it didn’t. Right now she had no idea what to think or feel about Madelyn Carter. She wasn’t even certain now that the woman was truly her grandmother. If everything else about Trinity Falls was a lie, maybe their familial relationship was too.

  Lauren looked sideways at Stephen. “What about you? You still look…” She struggled to find the right word. Real? Human? “Look like yourself. How come?”

  “In many ways, I’m as much your creation as I am hers. I’m as real as you can get without being real.” They were close enough now that she could make out his smile—and see he had no mustache. “If that makes any sense.”

  She surprised herself by smiling back. “Not really.” Then the full implication of what he’d said hit her. “You mean I can—”

  “You’re her descendent,” he said simply.

  She thought of the way the windows in the church had opened and closed by themselves, of Stephen’s appearing and disappearing mustache. If what he was saying was true, then she had made those things happen. Or rather, seem to happen. But she hadn’t been able to sustain those changes, and they’d snapped back to the way they’d been. That, or her grandmother had changed them back herself.

  “If I reached out and took your hand right now, what would I feel? Warm skin or cold earth and dry wood?”

  “Whichever you chose to feel.”

  The thought was a disturbing one that she didn’t want to pursue right now. “If it’s all the same to you, I think I like you better this way.”

  Another smile. “Me too.”

  They fell into silence then, just sitting and listening to the soft burble of the creek and the songs of the night insects all around them.

  After a bit, Lauren asked, “Why did she bring me back? Not for my father’s funeral. He was just as unreal as everything else about the place.” Which explained why she’d never felt close to anyone in her family other than Grandma. On some level, she must have sensed they weren’t real. “He was just a puppet whose strings she cut and used as a prop in whatever play she’s putting on.” Tears threatened, tears for a man who’d never truly existed, for a childhood that had been one great big goddamned lie.

  She remembered Johnny Divine’s words.

  You’ve been a good daughter and granddaughter, hear?

  How, Johnny? Considering my parents weren’t real and my grandmother is a lying witch.

  Despite her pain and confusion, Lauren refused to cry. Whatever was happening here, she sensed she needed to maintain control of her emotions if she hoped to deal with it. There’d be plenty of time to cry later—if she got out of this alive and, more importantly to her, sane.

  “Like I told you, she’s sick. She hasn’t been to a doctor. The most contact she has with the outside world is to drive to Ash Creek for supplies.”

  “Which she no doubt pays for with illusory money.”

  Stephen ignored her. “But she has some ki
nd of cancer, and it’s spread. It’s hard to say how long she has left. Months, maybe just weeks. She always thought that you’d return on your own someday, if she just gave you enough time. But her time had run out, so she had to find a way to bring you back. So she decided to have your father ‘die’.”

  Lauren had a thought then—could Johnny Divine and Joe’s Gas & Gulp both have been another illusion cast by her grandmother? But just as quickly as the notion occurred to her, she dismissed it. It was obvious Grandma’s powers were confined to this area, and she was too sick to maintain her illusions here, let alone create them out in a desert hundreds of miles away from Ohio. Besides, her instincts told her that, however strange her rest stop at the Gas & Gulp had been it—and Johnny Divine—had been real.

  “But that still doesn’t explain why she wanted me to come home so badly.”

  Stephen paused then, as if trying to decide how much he should tell her, and she wondered if he were speaking for himself—if he even had a self to speak for—or if he were merely saying what her grandmother wanted him to say.

  “There was a child.”

  Images flashed through her mind: a huge, hairy beast slathering over her…an open hole in the ground, just big enough for the still blue form she knelt next to, soil caked beneath her fingernails, tears washing clear trails on her dirt-smeared cheeks, blood drying on the front of her dress.

  “No.” It wasn’t really a statement of denial, more a child’s wish that a cruel reality was just another bit of make-believe that could be easily dreamed away. But whatever powers she’d inherited from Grandmother—and how could she have if she hadn’t had a real mother and father anyway?—she knew this was one fact that she wasn’t going to be able to make not-was through mere wishing.

  “You remember now?”

  “Not everything, and not clearly, but I remember enough.” She turned to face him now, anger and betrayal in her voice. “You raped me.”