The Orphan (23 page)

‘What does that mean?’ Darren said. ‘Dark how?’

Tommy’s cheeks bunched up again. ‘I don’t know, exactly, you just saw it. She was short, built like a brick shithouse, big boobs and hips, and she was wild-looking, with dark black hair and dark eyes, but there was something else. She dressed in these weird outfits, vests and skirts, a lot of dark eye shadow. Everyone said she had a way of turning fate on people she didn’t like. Making people sick. The family was into occult stuff, bad stuff.’

‘What, you mean like Ouija boards?’

Tommy didn’t smile. ‘No, I mean like rituals. Satanism The real deal, if there is such a thing. Remember this stuff, though? This was the late Seventies. In Boulder, it was like the Sixties never ended. Town was full of drugs, ski bums, rich kids playing bad. Alternative living was standard. Still is. But the Burketts were… well, whatever they were, they were different. Mrs Burkett wore moccasins and homemade tattoos, sometimes on her face. Brad Cader asked Adam about those once and he said they were symbols. “Whattya mean?” Brad asks, and Adam says, “You know, symbols, for calling on spirits and channeling energies.” Like this was normal, everyone did it. He had been raised in a household where this stuff was normal.’

‘That’s interesting,’ Darren said. He did not want to know more.

‘There were other things. Rumors of séances, curses. One time, I guess another family had a birthday party there at the clubhouse, in the trailer park, and all the parents went bananas because Adam’s parents showed up loaded and started teaching the kids how to put spells on each other. Telling them Satan was real, he wore human masks, and he would be their friend if they would open their hearts to him. I’m sure there’s more I don’t remember, but you get the idea.’

‘Satanism and drugs,’ Darren said. ‘Nice.’

‘And abuse. Physical, probably sexual. Or definitely sexual.’

Neither man spoke for moment.

Darren said, ‘Anything else worth knowing about this wonderful tribe?’

Tommy licked his lips. ‘Sure, if you really wanna know. I guess I could tell you about the scariest thing I ever saw. And I do mean in my entire life.’

Darren thought about leaving then. He wished he would not have come out here. But he was here now, so: ‘I probably better hear it.’

Tommy wiped sweat from his face and began to tell it.

‘You remember Adam’s sister?’

‘That doesn’t ring any bells,’ Darren said.

‘I forget her name, but she was a little creep. Thin as a stick, skin that malnourished pale color, so white it’s almost gray. Ratty blonde hair. She hardly ever came to school, used to pee her pants on the playground all the time. Adam didn’t attend much either. They were those kids who always had a broken wrist, pink eye, some kind of problem. Seemed like Mrs Burkett was always dragging one of them out of class. One thing that I never forgot, she always wore these little rainbow barrettes in her hair. Same ones every damn day, year around, like they were the only ones she ever had. Something beyond sad about those rainbows in her unwashed hair.’

‘She was older or younger than Adam?’

‘Two grades ahead, but three or four years older,’ Tommy said. ‘Underdeveloped, stunted. She hated her brother, but she hated everybody. She was a mean girl, like they were training her to be nasty. After she made it out of Crest View, they tried her at Casey Junior High, but that didn’t last more than a few months. She was “home schooled” from then on. She freaked me out, man. Shannon? Was that her name? Sissy? No…’

‘What was scary about her?’ Darren said. ‘What was the thing?’

‘Right. So, Cader takes me by their place one Saturday night. This would have been sixth grade, fall, after we ruined his bike. Adam would have been a fifth-grader, which would’ve put his sister around fourteen, but like I said she was stunted. Looked three years younger and rumor was she was still wetting herself in public.

‘Anyway, this night we went up there, I remember it was Halloween or a few days before. Maybe it just felt like Halloween. We were out riding bikes after dark. I knew I was supposed to be home two hours ago but Brad talked me into going up there. “You gotta see this,” he told me. “You gotta see Adam’s sister.”

‘I remember riding up there curious but not really afraid, because I’d never been to their place and I didn’t know if everything we’d heard about them was true. By the time we get up there it’s dark dark, and the trailer court had those streetlights, but not much lighting in some of the smaller cul-de-sacs. We ride around for a few minutes, until we find the Burkett place. And maybe it’s just my memory working too hard, but soon as I saw it, I knew something was wrong with it. All the other trailers, they were pretty much clean, some of them with little yards, a fountain, the grass mowed. Adam mowed lawns to save for his bike, come to think of it. He probably mowed fifty yards in that little dump to make a hundred bucks, but the point is, these were decent people, most of ’em. You know Boulder. The worst part of town, even back then, wasn’t like some kind of ghetto. The other trailers were homey, quaint. Not the Burkett place.’

Darren was beginning to feel a little queasy himself. He pointed to the picnic table in the shade. ‘You want to sit down? Get out of the sun?’

‘Yeah, I think so.’ Tommy lumbered over, straddled one of the picnic benches and plopped down with a sigh.

Darren sat on the other side, turned sideways to keep one eye on the car. What the hell was Adam doing in there?

‘It was a double-wide, with dark brown siding, nothing odd really, except that it looked darker and dirtier than all the others,’ Tommy continued. ‘The front windows had newspaper for curtains. I’m telling you I got the worst headache of my life within sixty seconds of sitting outside their trailer. Felt fine all day and minutes before we got there, but sitting there on our bikes, no more than thirty feet from that place, my head felt like someone had pounded a couple of four-inch nails into each temple. The front of the trailer was dark, no lights on, and you think, okay, nobody’s home. But he swore they were. Brad just knew it. Said you could always tell ’cause of the headaches, like that was a normal occurrence for visitors.

‘‘‘We shouldn’t be here,” I says to Brad. ‘“Let’s get the hell out. My mom’s gonna be pissed.’’

‘‘‘Won’t take long,” Brad says, “Leave your bike here a minute.’’

‘So we laid the bikes down on the sidewalk, real quiet. Brad goes first, telling me we’re going to look in her bedroom window, the sister’s. Why can’t I remember her damn name? Sabrina? Sadie? It’s right there on the tip of my tongue. I asked him what the big deal was, were we gonna see her naked or something?

‘‘‘No, it’s crazier than that,” Brad says, but he’s excited like a kid who’s just found a stash of nudie books, and I admit I got kind of excited too. Rumors of cult shit, the mean dad, and the creepy mom, all that was there, but I wanted to see her, whether she was naked or not. We had our bikes close by and you remember how it was, we’d spy on people all the time. We knew if they saw us we could get away fast.

‘Brad creeps along the side of the trailer, down the little sidewalk, to the back side, and I was a few steps behind him. There was a little chain-link fence about two feet high, made to keep toddlers in the backyard, which was really only a square of dead grass about six feet in either direction. One big cat litter box. That family had all kinds of cats. And Brad finds a milk crate or something along the way, so when we get near the window all the way at the end of one side, he sets that down and steps up, takes a quick look. He was only up there for a few seconds, but he came down and looked at me and he was grinning, but he looked like he was gonna be sick too. “Your turn.”

‘‘‘Tell me what it is,” I says, because maybe I didn’t want to see. But Brad shakes his head, no. “You gotta see for yourself,” he whispers. “I can’t explain it.”

‘‘‘Is she in there?”

‘He just walked on behind me to wait on the sidewalk. So, I took a deep breath, tiptoed over to the crate, and stepped up to have a peep. I was shorter than Brad so I had to balance on my toes. My fingertips were hanging on the windowsill. At first I couldn’t see anything through the window. There was a screen on the outside and it was dark inside, but not too dark, because I could see shapes, like in a bedroom, with a small bed and a dresser on one side. I pressed my nose up to the screen and focused. I didn’t see anything else, except then I did, and realized I’d been lookin’ at it all along.

‘She was on the bed. Laid out stiff as a board. I couldn’t see her at first because she was covered in black. Not black clothes or a robe. She was black on her skin, like tattoos all over. Only her face and a few streaks along her belly and legs were white, pale between the black marks. Her dark blonde hair was down, straight and long to her shoulders, and those pretty little rainbow barrettes were gone. She was naked, I realized, but you couldn’t see anything because they had drawn these black symbols on just about every inch of her skin. Circles, spirals, upside-down crosses, arrows, and a bunch of wacko stuff I didn’t recognize. It was like looking at an Egyptian tomb painting, except on a fourteen-year-old girl. Her eyes were closed. She didn’t move. I thought she might have been dead. Maybe they were preparing her for burial or some damn thing.

‘I can’t imagine I was able to look at her for more’n ten seconds, but it felt like ten minutes, or longer. Even as weird as the symbols were, I didn’t feel scared at first. She looked so peaceful, like she was resting. No expression on her face. Hair down around her shoulders, and as crummy as this might sound, she looked prettier than I’d recalled, probably because she was always scowling or crying over some incident. But right then, she looked real blissed out. So it wasn’t so bad, until I saw what was really happening.

‘She wasn’t lying on the bed. There was no bed. The floor was empty, there was only the dresser on the opposite wall. Adam’s sister wasn’t lying on the floor, either. It just looked like she was on a bed because she was floating two feet off the floor. Nothing between her back and the carpet but empty space.’

‘Come on,’ Darren said. ‘That’s not possible. You must have been mistaken.’

Tommy glared at him. ‘I know what I’m talking about, pal. I saw it. That girl was floating, perfectly still and level as a beam, and whatever was holding her up, it was alive, a force, real and dangerous as electricity. I kept looking for ropes or wires or something that could explain it, but there wasn’t anything. And here’s how I know.

‘About two seconds before I stepped down, when I was already imagining myself running away but still too scared to move, two things happened very fast. Wham, the bedroom door flies open, and then the lights flick on. And for a second that girl was bathed in light. There wasn’t anything under her, or around her except air. She was floating, hovering, and those black symbols all over body? They were moving, crawlin’ over her skin, writhin’ like snakes, and I’ll take that to my grave. Word of God. Also, there wasn’t anything or anybody at the door.’

‘What do you mean?’ Darren said.

‘I mean, the doorway was empty. The hall behind the doorway, empty. No one in the bedroom with her. And soon as that door ripped itself open and the light came on, she fell down. Dropped to the floor like someone had cut the wires. I heard her hit, and she immediately started bawling, crying like something attacked her. She thrashed her arms and kicked out her legs. Her eyes opened, and I could swear she knew I was there, but she didn’t look at me. She was wailing and looking around like she didn’t know where she was. That’s when I just about lost my dirt.

‘Jumped down and ran for my life, convinced her parents were gonna come out with a butcher knife and kill me right there. I hurdled that little fence and Brad was already on his bike, pedaling away, because he’d heard her screaming. I grabbed my bike, threw my leg over, and pedaled so hard I slipped the cage and gashed my shin open. Still got the scar.’

Tommy lifted one leg, pulled down his boot, rucked up his pant leg, revealing a long white scar down the front of his shin. To Darren it looked like a fat white worm.

‘I had those Lightning pedals, the ones with the jagged teeth, and they tore the hell out of me. Cut right down to the bone. I didn’t care. I rode as fast as I could, all the way home. I don’t think I slept for three days after that.’

He waited for Tommy to catch his breath. The man really did not look well.

‘And it wasn’t over,’ Tommy said. ‘That girl… she wouldn’t leave me alone. Not for weeks and weeks.’

Darren braced himself.

‘See, the thing is, that night after I saw, when I got home and it was time to get ready for bed, I was taking off my jeans and… damned if one of those rainbow barrettes didn’t fall out of my pocket, onto my bedroom floor. Never got near her, never set foot in that trailer, but sure enough, there it was, with a couple strands of her dark blonde hair stuck inside the clip. Part of that girl found its way into my pocket, see. They made sure of that. Made sure I took her home.

‘I took that barrette straight out to the garage and I was about to throw it in the trash cans when I realized my mom might find it. I didn’t want it near me and I didn’t want to have to explain it, because I had no idea how to explain it. What I did was, I walked down the driveway to the street, and I followed the sidewalk until I came to the next drain to the sewer. One of those wide cuts in the gutter, under the sidewalk, and I chucked her little barrette in there. I saw it go down and I believe I heard the plop in the water. So that was that.

‘The weeks passed. Even when I calmed down enough to sleep a little, I had terrible nightmares, the most realistic experiences, and I kept waking up in the middle of the night not knowing where I was. Sometimes I dreamed I was back at her place, peeping into the trailer, only this time she’d be covered in blood instead of ink, and when I tried to run away my legs wouldn’t work. I’d be concentrating on running as fast as I could but it was like I was stuck in a world made of gelatin, and they’d be coming after me, kicking the door of the trailer open, her dad first, then mom, both of them wearing black hoods with eyeholes cut in them, chasing me with butcher knives. I couldn’t eat much, not for weeks. I felt like I was coming down with a nasty flu all the time. I was edgy, looking over my shoulder everywhere I went.

‘Then it all tapered off, right before Christmas. Maybe I was finally able to let it go, thanks to Christmas, being all excited for break from school and decorating the tree with Mom, all that. So, Christmas came and went and then we had a week left till school started again. Nate and me was getting kind of stir-crazy in the house. This was back when we still had the place on Poplar, the old house up in Wonderland Hills. We’d built enough snowmen and done enough ice skating out there on Wonderland pond, and we were driving our parents crazy. They had a New Year’s Eve party to go to, and even though I was only twelve, Nate would have been eight or nine, they had no problem leaving us home to ourselves for the night.

‘We watched some movies, ate popcorn, and stayed up to watch the New Year’s ball drop. Nate fell asleep on the couch just after midnight, but I wasn’t tired yet, and I guess I didn’t want to leave him downstairs by himself in case he woke up and got into some trouble. Mom and Dad were younger then. They might have stayed out until one or two. I switched the TV off and was about to hook up the Atari when I heard footsteps above me, upstairs on the second floor.

‘The living room was at the back of the house, the stairway right there at the front entrance. I thought I must not have heard Mom and Dad come in, so without thinking too much about it, I hopped up from the couch and went upstairs to see them and say goodnight. But when I got up there, they weren’t in their bedroom, or the bathroom. The hallway was empty. I got a little restless but I wasn’t too scared. When you’re a kid, sometimes you hear stuff or your mind runs away from you. Maybe I didn’t hear footsteps. Maybe I was just expecting Mom and Dad to come home. I decided to go to bed then because I was already upstairs and I was bored. I had some books beside my bed, some
Boy’s Life
magazines my ma kept making me read for Scouts, so I thought I’d sit in bed with the lamp on and read myself to sleep.

‘In my bedroom, I took off my jeans and shoes, and I was about to hop in the sack when I saw it. Sitting there on my pillow, resting in the middle like a hotel mint. A little rainbow barrette, with three long dark blonde hairs stuck in it. I hope I don’t need to tell you I about jumped out of my skin seeing that.