The Fall of Never (26 page)

She felt herself roll over on her side, then onto her stomach, her face momentarily pressed into the snow. Her head filled with an image of blood pooling in a clear, running brook. She felt her arms extend themselves, her hands grope at the snow, at the frozen earth below. She dragged herself toward the slope of the hillside until she managed to regain control of her body and rise shakily to her feet. Unthinking, she propelled herself toward the sloping hillside and the dense forest below, her eyes fixed on the tangle of darkness between the branches of trees. Again, she caught the momentary flutter of movement beyond those branches, half eclipsed by protective shade, and her legs pumped her forward through the snow. Her wet crotch froze in the wind.

This is your Never-Never Land, Kelly,
she thought.

Then, like a beacon, she saw it: a dull, throbbing red light deep inside the woods, partially inhibited by the tangled network of tree branches. Again, as she walked, her groin convulsed and her knees went weak. Fresh urine soaked her thighs.

“God,” she moaned, her voice impossibly alien. What was happening to her?

That pulsing red light up ahead—she could almost feel its warmth through the freezing air.

She stumbled down the hillside and crashed against a hedgerow at the crest of the forest. Her head rattled. Dazedly, she brought her hands up to touch the bark of the closest tree…
and it felt like a dream,
malleable and illusory.

Just a few feet ahead of her in the woods stood the dog with the injured front paw. It stood unmoving, its piercing blue eyes staring at her through the thicket. Its pelt was speckled with dried mud and frozen with clumps of snow. Some of the snow on the ground beneath it was stained a bright pink. It watched her unflinchingly, and there was thought behind its eyes, Kelly saw, genuine contemplation that was so human it was almost frightening.

She was not surprised when the image of the wounded dog faded before her eyes. Somehow, she’d known it was only a ghost, a phantom, a vapor. The blood-pink snow returned to white. Yet there was something else, something—

The red light had vanished. And on the heels of this realization came a harsh sense of rejection, of refusal, that she could not even begin to comprehend.

Still—something was moving in the woods.

“Help me…” she managed. Her voice was weak, hardly a whisper.

Something was in the woods. Something was coming for her.

Her mind—reeling with nonsense:

(dead animals line the walkway and there is blood trickling into the stream I have a cut on my forehead and the blood stings my eyes there are tiny skeletons on the staircase and where did the staircase come from and there is a pile of garbage hidden in the corner and a pile of old food wrappers that smell like grease and broken plastic forks some of them covered in blood and there is a smell here a smell like dead things and some blood so much blood)

She managed to stumble backward along the wooded slope, her eyes still intent on catching a glimpse of whomever or whatever was quickly approaching. Desperately, she tried to get up, but her legs felt like pipe cleaners and her knees refused to lock. In one unavailing attempt at salvation, she pitched herself backward, arms pin-wheeling wildly, and felt herself slam into the ground, causing her teeth to rattle in her head.

(a glowing red light and trickling blood and oh my god we almost killed that fucking dog and white white white hands coming around me and COLD—)

What’s happening to me? What the hell is going on?

She promised herself that this wasn’t really happening, that it was all some elaborate hallucination.

The snow between her splayed legs was stained yellow.

Kelly’s breath seized in her throat, her vision dispersed into a multitude of sand-like granules, and an unforgiving darkness quickly claimed her.

She never felt her head hit the ground.

Chapter Sixteen

A sudden and ferocious ice storm assaulted Manhattan one evening, coinciding with the arrival of the season’s first full moon. The storm lasted nearly two hours. It struck with unpredictable solemnity, like a fist striking a hard surface, and slowly diminished to a wet rush of sleet and freezing rain once night had completely claimed the city. Unprepared, most pedestrians gathered inside the closest places of refuge. Others attempted to summon cabs to no avail.

Seconds after the storm hit, a throng of soaked people rushed at the main entranceway of Macy’s department store. In the commotion, it would later be discovered that a young girl with a heart condition collapsed and died, her body carried along on a wave of frantic civilians for several yards before someone acknowledged her lifelessness.

At the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 34
^th
Street, two suited businessmen accidentally slammed their cars into one another. In a fit of rage hardly lessened by the violent storm, both men hopped from their vehicles, their faces as red as twin stoplights, their eyes large and disbelieving.

“What is it with you friggin’ maniacs?” one of the men shouted.

“You goddamn—” began the second, the rest of his words muffled by a sharp right hook thrown by the first man. Before the brawl was over, both men would be bumped and bruised, their cars still just as dented.

Carlos Mendes watched the storm die down from his office window at the hospital. He’d been off the floor for over an hour now, yet he’d procrastinated leaving. At one point during the night, one of the duty nurses had spotted him in the hallway and shook her head.

“Dedication only goes so far, Doctor,” she told him. “Beyond that, some people are just crazy.”

After a while, the ice pounding against the window turned to sleet and Mendes knew he couldn’t stay in the hospital for the rest of his life.

Home.

No—home was not necessary. He took the subway to Times Square, his mind occupied with a number of abstract thoughts. And with Nellie Worthridge.

Keep walking the streets. I can be like a vagrant—a doctor doubling as a homeless person.

For some reason he felt he couldn’t go home, couldn’t face Marie. His anxiety was wearing her out, he knew, and he hated himself for that. Home. The brownstone was too small and silent, too conducive to lengthy bouts of rumination. And that was the last thing he wanted. His thoughts frightened him. And the longer he sat and pondered the old woman’s words, he understood, the more he believed them.

Or perhaps he was just slowly losing his mind.

Strong winds whipped sleet at him and he walked with his head down, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his coat. Disinterestedly, he paused beneath a glowing street lamp to consider the peculiarity of the weather—the brutal winds and freezing precipitation. It was bizarre, something out of one of those fact or fiction television programs he’d enjoyed as a child. He shook his head and shivered. Moving down Broadway, his eyelashes accumulating sleet, he paused again: this time beneath a theater sign. He considered seeing a late show. Maybe it would help get his mind off things.

You’re a coward,
a voice whispered in his head.
You’re running away from ghosts, Carlito. That’s all they are: just ghosts.
It was Marie’s voice.

Disgusted with himself, he shook his head, icy water running into his eyes. What was he doing to Marie? Spending longer hours at the hospital and then disappearing into the din of the city—anything to keep him out of the house…and keep his mind off his unborn son. But was that fair to Marie? Sweet, pregnant Marie? About-to-become-a-mother Marie? His
wife,
for the love of God? No—he hated himself, hated his inability to overcome such cowardice.

Ghosts,
he thought.

He walked a few blocks over, leaving the confusion of the theater lights behind, and dipped down a darkened alleyway. A chill passed through his body.

These things happen, sweetheart,
he thought.
Sometimes these things happen. But I still love you and it’ll be all right. I promise.

It was a scenario he’d already started to consider: Marie, pumped full of sedatives, staring blankly from her hospital bed in the delivery room, a drying stain of blood on the sheets. Her eyes unfocused and nearly sightless, staring at—or through—the far wall. He’d go to her, console her, try and touch her. Powerless, he would feel like a child. He’d say words—just stupid, meaningless words—and place an awkward and shaking hand on her small shoulder. And she wouldn’t look at him, her eyes still so distant and void of life, and he’d know she was thinking about the baby they’d lost, the baby that she had been carrying inside her for so long now. Dead things. He’d know because he’d be thinking about that, too. And what else was there? That stillborn creature was supposed to be the rest of their lives and now it was gone. And he’d try to say more words—
These things happen—
but he’d find himself slipping away too, his throat beginning to constrict, his eyes—like Marie’s—steadily losing focus and sailing off into some painless oblivion. And what was to happen from there? They’d return to a house that never seemed emptier, and his mother would be there sobbing silently in her bedroom behind a closed door, and there’d be cold soup on the stove and cold coffee in a pot. Marie would disappear into the bathroom for twenty minutes at a time and he’d most likely step out onto the back porch to smoke, his eyes grazing lazily over the cornucopia of blacktop graffiti down below: EAT YOUR YOUNG and SATAN’Z PLAYGROUND and BE LIKE VEAL. And then there’d be sleep…and maybe—
blessedly—
the dreams would have run themselves out, perhaps because his subconscious could no longer handle the anxiety of them, or perhaps the object of those dreams had been delivered stillborn and such foreboding dreams no longer served the dreamer any purpose. Then there would be several weeks of uncomfortable noncommunication, which included his arbitrary attempts at stimulating his wife’s return to normalcy through banal conversation, followed by his zealous immersion into his work, keeping longer hours than he’d ever known—once again, anything to keep away from the house. As if there were a disease within the walls, slowly blackening his lungs and killing him with each breath he took.

That’s how it would be, he knew. He could imagine it so clearly.

He suddenly found himself standing outside Nellie Worthridge’s apartment building in the dark, his shoulders soaked with sleet. He stared at the crossword of illuminated windows with bitter resolve.

The old woman lives somewhere inside that building,
he thought.
I should stop being such a coward and finally go speak with her.

But what could he say without sounding insane?

He felt eyes on his back, heard dull footsteps on the wet concrete. Turning, he saw a figure emerge from the darkness of a street corner and move towards him. The neon lights of the all-night diner across the street played circus colors across the approaching figure’s face. Mendes only stared. It was a young man. And to his amazement, the man stopped directly in front of him, causing Mendes to pull reflexively back against the face of the building.

“Doctor?”

Startled, Mendes uttered a jumble of nonsense.

“It’s Joshua Cavey,” the figure said. “We met at the hospital, remember? I was the one who—”

“Yes,” Mendes managed. Despite the cold, his hands were sweating in the pockets of his coat.

Josh glanced up at the building, his long hair wet and hanging in loose strands in front of his face. He then looked back at Mendes. “I know,” he said.

Mendes was confused. “I’m…sorry?”

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it, either,” Josh said. “Something’s been tugging at me.”

“What are you talking about?”

Josh looked around and spied the diner across the street. He jerked his head in that direction. “Come on,” he said. “I’m freezing my ass off out here.”

Josh ordered a plate of scrambled eggs, toast, hash browns, and burnt sausage links while Mendes only sipped at a cup of lukewarm coffee. He watched the younger man rub his hands together before shaking an obscene amount of salt onto his scrambled eggs, then shovel some into his mouth. When Josh offered him a slice of toast, Mendes only shook his head.

“I figured you’d show up sooner or later,” Josh said from nowhere. “I even thought about calling you at some point. Figured you might be going crazy. You feel it, right? Like we’re being drawn here.”

“I don’t know.” Mendes’s hand was shaking, causing his coffee to ripple. He let go of the cup and looked up at Josh with tired, searching eyes. The young man’s face was all the evidence he needed to see that this young man too had not been sleeping for quite some time now. Also, Mendes thought he recognized a trace of fear.

“Listen,” Josh said, “I’ve learned some things. But—and I’m going to sound crazy here—but I need you…I mean…”

“I’m willing to consider anything you have to tell me,” Mendes said. “I’m in no position to scoff at theories, believe me.”

Josh nodded, not taking his eyes off him. “Yeah, all right.” He leaned over and unzipped his backpack that he’d rested on the seat beside him. He withdrew two textbooks from it, placed them on the table. “What do you know about telepathy, Doctor?”

Mendes just stared at him. “You mean like psychic powers?”

“I mean the whole gamut. And these books are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s been studies done, been actual documented accounts. Recently I’ve been reading up on it and I’ll tell you, some of this stuff blows my mind.”