The Fall of Never(9)
Dumbfounded, Kelly just sat there behind the computer, staring at the monitor, her entire body shaking. What she’d just seen—yes, it had been there, it had been right there on the screen, on the videotape, had been real, damn it, had been real. Maybe not a ghost or a phantom—surely not—and maybe not even a person at all, either. Maybe just something passing in front of the lens, something that, for some unexplained reason, was not there now.
It was a person, that same spiteful little voice spoke up inside her head. You know it was, you saw how it moved. People move like that, not pieces of dust on videotape, not botched patches of an effects-loop on a computer screen. People move like that.
“That can’t be,” she whispered, not realizing she’d just spoken aloud. Something about that pale, ephemeral image passing in front of the camera, quickly moving across her computer monitor…
Is it possible to capture ghosts on videotape? she rationalized. Is it really, genuinely possible? And even if it is, do I really believe such a thing?
Something on the screen caught her eye. Not something moving in front of the camera this time (this thing, if it even really existed outside the scope of her imagination, was behind Josh’s camera) but, rather, an image of something reflected in the tinted black glass of Nellie’s oven door. Again, the image was there for only a split second, hardly conducive to ocular registration, yet for some reason she saw it immediately, almost as if she had been looking for it all along. It was a face. Its reflection was distant and somewhat undefined in the smoked glass of the oven door, yet clearly and undeniably there. Despite the mild disfiguration of its features, it was irrefutably the face of a human being: the deep-set eyes, the rudimentary nose, the slope of a pallid and hairless scalp, the hasty slash of a mouth. The reflected face was only visible for a count of two seconds before Nellie Worthridge maneuvered her wheelchair in front of it, her mouth moving soundlessly on the screen. And in the wake of the wheelchair, the reflection was gone, as if Nellie’s passing had wiped it clean off the glass.
I know that face, she thought, I’ve seen it before. It was different somehow—I don’t quite understand it—but I’ve seen it before.
An image flooded her then: the pale feet of a small child covered in blood, its soles lacerated and oozing. And with that, the faint echo of a young child’s relentless sobbing.
She rewound the video again but this time there was no reflected face in the glass of Nellie Worthridge’s oven door.
Who are you and how do I know you?
Like the dawning of some amazing idea, she suddenly realized what the noise had been that had awoken her from her sleep just a little while ago. Ringing—the telephone.
She stood from behind the computer and turned around. The apartment was still dark and after staring intensely at the computer screen for so long her eyes could only make out the fundamentals of her apartment before her eyes. The phone rested on the half-wall that separated the living area and the small kitchen vestibule. Beside the phone was the answering machine.
Someone had called in the middle of the night.
The red, flashing message light on the answering machine was like a beacon summoning her in the darkness.
Chapter Three
If asked, Joshua Cavey would have agreed that monsters certainly did exist. Just over a year ago, he’d looked one right in the eyes.
He thought about it mostly in the predawn hours of morning, usually while seated outside on his fire escape, smoking a joint and watching the traffic crawl along the street below. This morning, it was unusually cold and he wrapped himself in a thick sweater before creeping out onto the escape, a freshly rolled joint tucked behind his ear. Sitting cross-legged on the grated floor, he slowly rotated his left shoulder—forward-forward-forward, then rotated in reverse. With the cold front that arrived prematurely, his shoulder was already beginning to cramp. It would be a bitter, bitter winter.
Monsters, he thought, watching plumes of steam rise up from the manhole covers and grates on the street below.
The monster in question had been a twenty-year-old kid with greasy hair and chapped lips named Sampers. Just over a year ago, this greasy-haired, chap-lipped monster made a decision to send two burning pieces of lead into Josh’s chest and left shoulder, nearly puncturing his heart. As with most tragedies, it happened without notice or warning (except for that split microsecond when their eyes locked and Josh suddenly knew what was about to happen, yet was powerless to avoid it) and, now that it was in the past and he had survived, the memory of the event was like the memory of some multicolored abstract painting. His mind only allowed him to recall selected visuals: the way the handgun bucked in Sampers’s hand; the dark, scaly-looking rings around Sampers’s eyes; the constellation of blood, more black than red, which arced into the air, seemingly in slow motion. Then there was the pain, which he didn’t think he’d ever forget—the sudden impact of heat, the brief but blessed moment of total numbness, then the burst of flames, abrupt and roaring. The first collision—the one that hit his shoulder—was like being whacked by Babe Ruth’s ash-handle, and the follow up shot—the one that pierced his chest, nearly plugging his heart and turning out his lights permanently—was like a Mike Tyson upper-cut. He went down, and the world seemed to spin before his eyes, to cant to one side, his entire world suddenly consisting only of those things nearest to him in the physical world: Doritos, two-liter bottles of Coca-Cola and Sprite, a streaming waterfall of Lotto tickets, and the tortoiseshell bulb of the theft mirror hanging from the convenience store’s ceiling. In that mirror he saw himself fall, saw the entire cramped convenience store in disproportioned miniature. There were sounds, only now blocked out by giant wads of cotton in his ears, and then there was nothing but darkness and the insanity of his labored breathing echoing deep within his head.