The Fall of Never(105)

“Kellerella,” they both breathed at the same time, and a flood of memories suddenly burst through the dam of her mind, and she—

(this is what I can do this is what I can create you don’t believe me but watch what I can do I can make things be real)

—saw herself standing up here with Mouse, telling Mouse that she can make things be real, that she can create things from her mind just by thinking about them, and that these were real things, and the only way to prove it was to stand there and open the closet and show Mouse, to show her those two dead girls, materialized into reality from the sheer power of her mind, and they were real and they could do things if they wanted and if she didn’t make them vanish again, and that was what happened at home, was what happened in the woods with Simple Simon the Pie Man, and that she had a power—

In her head, she heard the whizzing sounds of iron bolts fired from the framework of her mental dam just as the dam itself gave way, crumbling against the pent-up force of her memories, which now came crashing down around her.

She remembered.





Chapter Twenty-Three


Marlene Kellow thought of the baby as a beehive inside her, buzzing and bustling with life. With a hand to the gentle swell of her belly, she was certain she could almost feel the bees pulsing within, thudding blindly against the inner walls of her womb with dizzying stupidity. When standing, she could feel the weight of the hive in her gut, held there as if by invisible hands, pressing against her body, her flesh. And at night, lying on her back and barely breathing, she could make out the rise of her belly in the darkness, and would swear it was the shape of a beehive. Listening during those late hours, she could even hear the perfect buzzing, the unmistakable drone of thousands upon thousands of bees swarming around inside her.

There is no baby inside me. This thought haunted her constantly, most often in the quiet hours of a sleepless predawn. I don’t know what it is, but there is no baby inside me.

Not a baby; an infestation.

She found herself suffering from a barrage of nightmares. In one, she imagined her baby to be a goat-faced ungulate, a devil-child with glowing red eyes and a head swarming with stinging, angry bees. It would come out mewling like a pig, stabbing its hoofed legs into the air, hungry for human flesh. In another dream, she was being pursued through a field of wild sunflowers by a ravenous greyhound. And although the dog never caught her in these dreams, it would just get closer and closer over time…eventually to the point where she could feel its bristling muzzle pressed into the tight flesh of her shins as she ran.

There were times when she entertained the notion of killing herself and, inevitably, the hive inside her. She considered this act with the same sense of dispassion one might feel upon crushing a lizard beneath a steel-toed boot. She thought of pills. She thought of the poison fumes pumping from one of the cars in the garage. She thought of jumping out a window—quick and painless, over and done with.

But she never did any of those things. In the end, Marlene Kellow carried the baby to term and was rewarded with a quick and uncomplicated delivery. Kelly Kellow was born. The name had struck Marlene in a dream: the name of a fairy tale princess, of something she knew—she felt—her daughter would truly never be, no matter how much money her father made nor how many princes came knocking at the castle gate. Because Kelly, then still unborn and unnamed, would be different; Marlene knew this in that certain mystical way mothers tend to know things.

Infestation. She would tremble.

In the delivery room, when the child was handed to her, Marlene accepted it with passionless disinterest, not really wanting to touch it. It had lived inside her for nine months, and now here it was again, back again, and it weighed heavy in her arms. She despised herself for these feelings, yet she couldn’t deny them. And it occurred to her right then and there that she was actually afraid of the child…that all these confused and acrimonious emotions had welled up within her, augmented by a steadily mounting horror. It wasn’t fear for the child; it was fear of it.

It, Marlene thought. It.



Kelly Kellow spent her childhood mostly alone. Though her parents performed their requisite parental tasks from time to time, the young girl quickly became accustomed to the strange hands and cradling bosoms of a collection of live-in nurses and housemaids. There had been a young teenage girl named Sandy who would take Kelly to the park in town on the weekends. But eventually the trips to the park stopped, and one morning Kelly overheard Sandy speaking with her mother in the kitchen.

“She never plays with anyone,” Sandy told her mother. “She sits by herself in the sand, or by the woods, or in a tree, and she never plays with any of the other children.”

“Maybe she doesn’t like the other children,” her mother responded coldly.

“I don’t think I’m going to be coming around anymore, Mrs. Kellow.”

“Because my daughter won’t play with strange children?” There was spiteful humor in her voice.

“I just don’t feel comfortable around Kelly,” Sandy replied.

The absence of Sandy did not affect Kelly. Neither did the repeated abandonment of many other sitters throughout her early years. If she needed to be taken care of, Glenda was always around, always pleasant. In fact, Kelly was just as reluctant and solitary around the babysitters as she was around the other children from the neighborhood. Because she was different. The neighborhood children didn’t understand her, didn’t know her like she knew herself, and even at a young age Kelly understood this.