The Rascal (6 page)

Chloe collected herself. She had to tell Jeff about her new ‘feelings.’ He had to know. This was dangerous. They were in danger.

Jeff saw her and stopped, his arms loaded.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. Everything he said these days sounded accusatory.

“Nothing. I mean… I was just going for a run. Jeff, I saw something that—”

“Through the woods? A run? In those clothes? Doubtful.”

That tone. That tone made her blood boil. Maybe this wasn’t the right time to tell him. Maybe she could wait until later. “What did you get in town?”

“Things. Stuff. We’re going to get you hooked up to the Internet.”

***

Anyone brave enough to weather the winds of Bad Luck Hill late at night might, on certain evenings, chance upon quite a sight in the big house’s garden. Anyone daring to get that close might well deserve the rights to tell the story of what they saw. And if the moon were just right, what a show!

Anyone watching would see a woman shedding her garments as she danced around a one-winged angel. They would see her arms gesture in artistic echoes of a dance. Something unchoreographed, but beautiful just the same. When her last piece of clothing would fall to the ground, it would be with elegance, not shame. Anyone watching would see her touch the angel’s face, cradling it tenderly. They might even hear her low humming of a private melody, though it was doubtful her voice would carry above the winds.

They would not know of the henbane, the mandrake, or the deadly nightshade she used alternately. They could not see the face of the angel distort to become that of a little girl or an angry man, then change again to something altogether demonic and damning. They could not know this was why she would suddenly collapse and cower in fear before the statue, completely naked, and cry “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!” until sleep took her. They could not know, nor would they care, that her heart broke every evening. No. They would not be able to see this. And things unseen matter very little to those but the seer.

Ethan

Thank God for the Internet, that invisible savior of the bored and lonely, of the sleepless and lost. The invention that had kept Chloe company on many nights this past year proved its worth yet again while Jeff slept behind the closed door of the bedroom.

Chloe was wrapped in her favorite blanket with a cup of hot tea steaming on the kitchen table beside the laptop as she net searched and occasionally chatted with faceless friends. She needed those friends on nights like this. She missed them, especially now that she lived in so remote a place. Here, not even turning on every light in the cottage could hush the shadows. Whether it was the wind or not, the night noises of the little place scared her awake, making her insomnia even worse. But she had not heard the fiddler this night. Thank God for that. She trembled at the thought of him—the white eyes, the haggard face, and the emotionless invitation with the bow. She dared not look out the windows. There were dark forms against the night out there, maybe worse than the fiddler. Shadows and silhouettes that could not be seen in the daylight. They were watching. She could feel them as she had felt them on the drive up the hill that first day. Things she could not see. There were things she could not see all around her: her friends on the Internet, the forms in the dark, Jeff’s love…

Jeff’s love was so invisible, so barely there as to be nonexistent, maybe the one true myth of all the invisible things. As she wandered the Internet, she found herself pressing each key with extra force whenever she thought of Jeff. Every Backspace was hit more emphatically than the last. Every Control, every Shift, every Escape was an angry plea. He had made her hate herself so, and that instilled in her a rage toward him that was only seen in the loneliest hours—another invisible thing.

She had tried to embrace him once in bed. That was a few months after he had relented and agreed to try and save their marriage. He shrugged the embrace off, though. Truthfully, Chloe knew the marriage was already past saving, but what else had she to cling to? He was the physical manifestation of all her life’s mistakes now. His disappointment in her was her own.

The boring white light of the web page she had wandered upon was interrupted momentarily by a little box that popped up in the corner of the screen. Ethan had signed on. He most likely saw that she was on the messenger as well, though he would never invite her to chat. They never messaged one another but kept each other on their contact lists just the same. With the Internet, there was the luxury of only being seen or heard when one wanted. Unlike real conversations, a person could avoid an awkward pause on the Internet without seeming rude. Jeff and Ethan were masters at avoiding each other now, both in the real world and the cyber world. Ethan had been out of Jeff’s life for nearly two years. That was something Chloe thought was for the best. She sighed and pulled her blanket more tightly around her.

She remembered when Ethan had called and told them about the adoption he and his husband, Kelton, were going through. How they needed Jeff to speak for Ethan’s personal character at some type of hearing. She remembered how the thought of a man having a husband and those two husbands adopting a child had disturbed her.

“I’m so happy for you,” Chloe had said even as she felt a tug somewhere deep inside. A
feeling
. Something dreadful, something deadly, yet somehow different than her other ‘feelings.’

She and Jeff were on their way to the hearing when Chloe couldn’t keep quiet any longer. Every day since Ethan’s call, the feeling had gotten stronger. At the halfway point on the drive, it was screaming in her head. They were getting closer and closer to something she could not place and yet threatened her with promised poison. It wasn’t the fact that Jeff was going to speak on behalf of two gay men to adopt. It was something more akin to a warning of ensuing danger. When they stopped at a gas station, she finally told Jeff that she, at least, could go no farther.

“My brother needs me,” he said in between boxes of cereal and bags of potato chips.

But she pleaded with him. Her shaking had worsened and he held her tight to calm her as those in the store stared. That was when Jeff had loved her. That was when he would do anything for her. He led her back to the car and they headed home. It wasn’t until later that night that they heard the Buskeaton Bridge, which was on their route to Ethan, had fallen, causing the deaths of twenty-three people. Jeff gave her a strange look when he heard.

“I didn’t cause this,” she said, curled up on the couch. “Did I? I didn’t cause this?”

Now she sat at the kitchen table and posed the same question for a different circumstance to the empty room. Her own voice brought her back. She looked around, grasping for light, but avoiding the windows.
Never look out the windows.

Beside the keyboard lay the group of photos she had found days earlier minus the one that had been whipped out of her grip and over the cliff by the wind. She wondered where it would eventually end up. Where would the wind take that photo? The photograph that caught her eye now was of a little girl in the very room they called their bedroom. She was alone in the black and white photo, staring at the camera in an annoyed manner as if it were disturbing some important conversation she was involved in. Indeed, she sat on the floor, toy dinner place settings for her and an invisible guest.

And yet
not
invisible.

As Chloe focused more intently on the photograph, she noticed a definite outline of something just across from the child. Like a dark sliver of moon floating just above the other place setting. And under it, written on the photo in a child’s scrawl, was the nearly completely faded word
rascal
.

Chloe stared for a moment, wiping at the scrawl with her thumb. She leaned over the keyboard intently. She needed more information. What could she type into the Internet—that modern oracle—to find out more about this little cottage? What set of words would bring back to her the information she wanted? All the answers in the world were out there to any question ever asked, but they were all invisible unless one knew how to call to them.

The house creaked, and from its walls and the kitchen floor came a sound like a low moan. So low that Chloe hardly recognized it at first. Then the silence of the cottage slinked away and let the moan grow. She could not explain it away as “the noises an old house makes.” She could not explain it at all. She clutched tighter at herself in the blanket and began to shake, not daring to look away from the screen, feeling the moan crowd around her and up from the floorboards, both heartbreaking and heart-stopping. She covered her ears to drown out the sound and wish away the fiddler before he even began. She wanted to cry out for Jeff.

The computer screen turned black, and all the lights around her first flickered, then expired completely. The moan continued to grow until she could not take it anymore. She flung the blanket from her shoulders and raced to the bedroom. The moan followed her, echoing off the walls and mingling with her own cries like a wild nightmare.

She fell into the bed with a piercing scream. At once, Jeff woke up, sitting and staring at her in frightened anticipation. “What? What is it?”

She was shaken by the utter silence around her now. The lights were on again as if nothing had happened. But she knew something
had
happened. The thunder of her heart was proof of that.

“What’s wrong, Chloe?” Jeff repeated. He did not reach out for her to comfort her.

Nothing. There was nothing she could say to him. She was too aware of this place. He was too accepting of it.

He dropped back to the pillow, shaking his heavy head in irritation.

***

Ethan saw Chloe’s name and icon pop onto the computer screen. It took him aback. Her cartoon icon resembled her to such a degree that it was like coming face to face with her. Ethan’s sense of unease was growing. His skin had been crawling for the last hour, and he couldn’t help but think it had something to do with his brother, Jeff, though he hadn’t the vaguest idea why.

Kelton was asleep. He had been up most of the night before taking care of their son, Malcolm, so he had gone to bed early tonight. They called Malcolm “Bug” because, as Kelton had once said, “He’s as cute as a bug.” Bug had been ill for the past few days and only now was sleeping soundly. Kelton was the one who usually took care of things. He had always been the more maternal one. Ethan was so busy with work.

“You need to spend more time with Bug,” Kelton had said on numerous occasions. “He’s growing up fast and you’re going to regret not being around.”

“I have to work, Kel,” Ethan would say. “I don’t have the luxury of working from home like you. Things will settle down soon. I promise. Then the three of us will have plenty of time together.”

“You promise?”

“I promise, baby.”

Ethan had volunteered to look after Bug tonight so Kelton could rest. He had just spent an hour getting Bug back to sleep after an illness-induced nightmare. Those were the worst, and Ethan knew it from experience. When he and Jeff were younger, Jeff got sick quite often. His nightmares would set him to screaming. Ethan often wouldn’t sleep at all, waiting for Jeff to scream and their parents to go rushing into Jeff’s room to care for him. Ethan envied the attention given to Jeff. He envied the sound of his parents’ running feet as they made their way past his own room and to Jeff’s. Everything was always about Jeff. He was the Golden Boy.

Now where was Jeff? Hours away, and Ethan suspected he was quite happy there with Chloe. Ethan’s anger had subsided over what had happened between them. The adoption had gone fine, after all. But the fact that Jeff didn’t show up and all Ethan got was a phone call telling him that Chloe didn’t “feel right” put him at a loss for words. That was, until he got back home and raged his indignation to Kelton’s sympathetic ear.

Still, despite what had happened and the two years that had passed, something in Ethan’s gut told him to get in contact with Jeff. The darkness of the study around him pressed him to do so. Chloe was, after all, right there for the asking. It was that simple. He only had to say “How’s Jeff?”

His mind drifted, though, to his parents. To his father and his mother arguing from one end of the house to the other. They had argued all the time. The house was on edge constantly, though it hadn’t always been that way. There was peace once, but that was before his father was told he had a tumor, something dreadful and genetic that was easily passed from generation to generation. Something that could not be tested for until later in life when it was all but too late. One did not need a degree in psychiatry to see that their mother had blamed their father for possibly passing the disorder down to one of her sons. Possibly even the favorite one. There was a current of raging animosity for years. The house was thick with it. Even Ethan felt the brunt of its force once or twice, when he would catch his father or mother watching him, he knew they were thinking, “Why not him instead of our precious Jeffrey?”

The boys could not see the illness in their father. The man looked as solid as he ever had. “Any illness worth its salt knows to stay hidden,” he’d said. “It’s like oxygen or love, but mean and angry.”

Like oxygen or love
… or guilt.

Ethan was tested for the disease when he was older and on his own. The disease had skipped him. He supposed it had skipped Jeff as well or else his brother surely would have told him. But that good news came too late for the family. Their father, years earlier, had killed himself, running the car he was driving into an old oak tree while returning from a dinner date. Their mother was in the passenger seat and she survived. She was still in a coma at a hospital a few miles from where Ethan now lived with Kelton and Bug. Though Jeff had at the time of the accident just become of the age to legally care for Ethan, who was but two years younger, he decided not to do so. He did not even tell his brother of this decision, but instead one day just left. Ethan spent the next two years in state care, visiting his comatose mother often. When Jeff finally did return, he brought Chloe with him. Her face went white when Ethan introduced Kelton, whom he had met while in state care, as his husband.