Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity Read online

  “Please...” he cried. “Please, David please. Let me out.”

  But there was no one outside to hear him, no one to release him.

  In the basement of the old house, both inches and worlds away, he was alone. David was gone. In the last dappled rays of the summer light sat the old trunk, a single railroad spike pushed through the metal hoop latch.

  There was no one to hear him scream into the endless void.

  PART ONE

  Mr. Glass

  HE AWOKE WITH a spasm, his chest heavy, skin dotted with sweat that left a salty taste in the cool breeze of the autumn air. The last words of his dream still hung in the darkness of the bedroom. They had been screams from a boy forgotten long ago, echoing backward through time, unanswered for decades.

  He rubbed his forehead. The wounds of that day had faded, and only a few scars remained, one of which was currently dulling his thoughts and blanketing the world in a migraine fog. Behind his eyes, buried deep beneath his skull itself, sat an invisible shard, a souvenir from the shadow and those twilight times in the Midwest.

  Mr. Glass, he had called it long ago. Mr. Glass, his old visitor. Some people named their body parts, some even named their periods. He named his affliction, his migraine machine. Only the pills, the Imitrex that sat behind the mirror, silenced his old visitor these days. Yet tonight it seemed Mr. Glass was drifting back to sleep, too tired to whisper to him, and that was a good thing.

  Dan looked around the room. In his dream he had called out for his brother, but there had been no answer. Only now, as the dream faded and color bled back into the world, did he remember that there had never been an answer, that there never would be. That name he had called out for had been silent for years.

  “Mmm... bad dream?”

  The voice came from his right side, beneath the sheets and down comforter of the warm bed. It was kind and loving and anchored back him to reality. It filled in the corners of his surroundings, sending the sharp edges of the dream curling back to where they came from until they were harmless memory. The voice was that of his wife, Linda. Her hand found his back among the curves and shadows of the comforter. He felt the warmth move down his spine. Her skin, especially her hands, had always been soft.

  “Yeah, bad dream babe.”

  “Want to talk about it?" she mumbled.

  He looked around the darkness and remembered: this was real. The room, the woman at his side, the late August breeze through the open window, even the warm comforter, all of it: real. This was his life. He was thirty-nine years old, married, and safe at home.

  “Huh?”

  “Your dream. You were shouting.”

  “Was I?”

  “Mmm-hmm. Kept saying: ‘Let me out.’”

  “No, I don’t...” Dan trailed off. There had been his brother, the trunk, and the throbbing glass. “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, you’re safe now. Come back to bed.”

  Linda could feel his smile in the darkness. Ten years of marriage, a year of dating before that, had taught her these things, the sounds his body made, even his smile in the shadows. The headboard give a reassuring creak as he settled back into his side of bed. He reached out for her beneath the sheets. That warm skin, inviting.

  “Honey... what are you doing?” she asked.

  His hands traced the curve of her hip, finding that place that gave her shivers with a single, gentle touch. He felt her soft skin, that stomach that had once been so firm, even after two births, but had somehow lost its tone in the last two years. She wasn’t fat, his wife, far from it. Rather, that once slender build that rendered her elegantly athletic had settled with age. Edges and indentations and a firm tone had given way to small curves beneath her ever-warm skin. But in the darkness she could still have that body he remembered in the black cocktail dress years ago.

  “Shh...” he said, his lips finding hers in a kiss, feeling her smile.

  “It’s early...” she said.

  “It’s never too early,” he replied, kissing her deeper. Her body agreed and came alive.

  He rolled her onto her back with a quickness that made her gasp. He pulled her leg around his thigh. Between the kisses he felt her breath grow deep, felt the warmth coming from her. How long had it been since they’d done this? Months? A year? There had things between them, worries, concerns, bills to pay and meetings to attend, and before he knew it he couldn’t remember the last time he’d made love to his wife.

  He kissed her cheek, her ear, and that spot on her neck that made her sigh. Her fingers worked on his underwear, pulling them down in short awkward tugs, a task she’d never been good at.

  “Mommy?” called a voice from the darkness.

  They paused, frozen against each other, waiting for a repeat of the voice that had stopped them.

  “Dad?” it asked again.

  “Yeah buddy. That you?” Dan answered.

  In an instant the adults decoupled. The shape of their nine year old son, Tommy, stood in the doorframe. His finger was digging into the patch of sideways hair, and his eyes held a confused glaze, as if he too had just awoken and was trying to recalibrate his reality.

  “Is Mom okay?”

  “Yeah honey, I’m fine. What’s the matter?”

  “What were you doing?” he asked.

  “I was--”

  “Your mom lost a contact,” Dan interrupted.

  Linda coughed to stifled a giggle. “That’s right,” she said, clearing her throat.

  “I can’t sleep,” Tommy whined.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Ginger keeps making noises.”

  “Tell her to go downstairs,” Dan said.

  “She doesn’t listen,” Tommy sighed, as if the notion of being bested by a dog embarrassed him.

  “You want to me to put her out?” asked Linda, as she slyly wriggled back into her underwear.

  “No, I got it,” Dan answered. He liked being asked to help, to play the hero, even if it was only hero to a nine year old.

  “To be continued,” Dan said, and he gave Linda a kiss. He climbed out of bed and ruffled that chestnut hair atop his son’s head. “All right. Let’s go.”

  “What’s to be continued?” asked Tommy.

  “It’s grown up speak. Come on, let’s wrangle up that beast of yours.”

  The beast, Ginger, sat at the base of the bunk bed he had bought his children two Christmases ago. Her wet nose was buried in her crotch. Enthusiastic grunts that seemed vocally impossible for such a small dog came from her curled shape. Dan was repulsed in an instant.

  “Ginger, stop that!” He gave her a nudge with his foot, but she didn’t stop. There were few words he could say that would correct any erratic behavior the dog had once set upon an intended course, which in this case was cleaning her crotch with her tongue.

  “Come on,” he snapped, and gave her a sharp nudge that caught her attention.

  Dan hated that dog and everything she symbolized, including the price he’d paid for her on his daughter’s fifth birthday. He had wanted to buy a regular dog, a Lab, or perhaps a Border Collie. Something he could wrestle with and take on hikes and walk off the leash without fear it would run beneath the nearest speeding truck.

  His kids vetoed that decision the moment they spotted Ginger at the breeder’s yard. To Dan, Ginger belonged in the purse or arms of a rich socialite, flaunted about as an accessory until it was no longer in fashion. She was the very definition of uselessness; she was a beast without a purpose. Nonetheless, she made his daughter smile, and true to Jessica’s promise she had taken care of her, washed her, walked her, cleaned up after her, and pampered her with bow ties and ribbons, several of which were now dangling from her absurd top knot.

  “C’mere you,” Dan said, scooping the dog up with one hand. “You keeping them up?”

  Ginger replied by licking him across his face. He sighed, too tired to even be offended.

  “There you go champ, all clear.”

  “
Dad?” Jessica asked. She was awake now, blue eyes peering out from the top bunk among a dozen different dolls all arranged like some Greek chorus.

  “I’m scared,” she whispered.

  “What? Why sweetie?”

  “What if the kids don’t like me?”

  “Why wouldn’t they like you?”

  “I dunno,” she sighed. “Because.”

  “Because what?”

  “Just because.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Me? Well... my first day of school was different. But yeah, of course I was scared. And you know what?”

  “What?” she asked, leaning over the rail.

  “I just thought of all the other kids, having talks like this with their parents, and I realized they were all scared too. So, if everyone’s scared, it’s not that scary, right?”

  She nodded. “I guess.”

  “Good,” he said, ruffling that golden hair of hers that looked so much like her mother’s. In secret he saw little of himself in either of his children, and he was thankful for this. Thankful that they took after the best parts of their mother, and not the worst parts of him.

  “Now go to bed, okay? Both of you. Big day tomorrow, no zombie face in the morning, okay?”

  Tommy groaned like a sleepy cadaver as Dan gave Jessica a kiss, tucking her back beneath the Yo Gabba Gabba comforter.

  “And Mister Bun?” she asked, holding out the stuffed rabbit Linda’s parents bought her the day she was born. What was left after six years of hugs resembled little more than a sock puppet with sprouts of fur, stitching, and two loose eyes re-sewn countless times. Despite its age and decay, Jessica refused to sleep without it and, upon several occasions, cars had been turned around and vacations delayed only to retrieve it.

  “Kiss,” she said again.

  He gave Mr. Bun a kiss, tucked his children in, and walked out into the hallway. Ginger struggled and squirmed in his arms the whole way.

  “C’mon, go sleep in the kitchen,” he said, depositing the dog at the base of the stairs. Perhaps sensing he would have been happier with her had she been a Labrador, Ginger had never taken to him the way she’d taken to the kids. As a result he held a paranoid suspicion that she intentionally targeted his belongings, or simply disobeyed him out of spite.

  Sure enough she scampered between his legs, back up the stairs and into his bedroom. There, he found her doing what the kids called ‘a snail dance,’ a series of a half dozen circles in the same spot before laying down. “Like a snail shell,” Jessica had once said. The spot Ginger chose tonight was Dan’s pillow, and when she completed her dance she sat down and resumed licking her crotch. Linda lay asleep beside her and was, Dan presumed, quite uninterested in picking up where they’d left off.

  “Great,” he mumbled, as he climbed back into bed.

  Back to School

  SEPTEMBER WAS AN unremarkable time of the year in Northern California. The seasons blended, the transitions were subtle, and it was only in hindsight that one could pinpoint where summer had ended and autumn began. The fog came as it usually did, rolling over the foothills in waves, crashing into San Francisco, chilling the air and earth and stone well into the morning. Yet it never strayed more than a dozen miles south down the peninsula, preferring the grey of the city to the greenery of the suburbs.

  There, south of the city, the mornings were warm, the skies blue, and there was no shortage of trees lining the quiet, mostly affluent streets of Alder Glen. Arbor Day Tree City USA, 33 Years! declared the sign at the city line south of the freeway. Oaks and maples, willows and elms, gingkoes and liquid ambers and the occasional red alder, after which the city was named, all battled for sunlight, creating a canopy above and, in the autumn months, a mess of leaves below. Leaves that changed from green to yellow or, in the case of the maple tree covering half their front yard on Greer Park Lane, a violent crimson red. Those changing red leaves made gauging the seasonal shift somewhat easier for an old midwest boy like Dan.

  He thought it ironic that the very maple Linda had fallen in love with, which in turn drove them to sign a mortgage they shouldn’t have on a house a little too large, had proved for every autumn since to be the very thing he despised the most about the property this time of year. How a single tree could shed so many leaves he didn’t understand, and that morning he really didn’t care to think about. He filed the raking and bagging away for the weekend among a dozen other chores he’d probably forget to do.

  Stepping off the porch, his foot found Ginger’s starfish rubber squeak toy and, on the dewy grass, it sent him sliding forward and almost into the box hedge with an absurd squeak.

  “Jesus freaking--” Dan grumbled, glancing around to see if any cars had seen him. None had, but the sound of the toy alerted Ginger, who appeared as if from the thin air, and seized upon his slipper with a pathetic growl.

  “Ginger, no! Stop it! Stop it now!”

  As usual she paid no attention to him, continuing her crusade against his offending slipper.

  “Daniel!” called a voice from next door. “A word please.”

  The voice belonged to Marty, who stood at the neighboring fence with a rake. He was a man of indeterminate age somewhere between retirement and death who, Dan suspected, had lived next door for decades, holding a deep grudge for anything that changed his quiet street. He was active in the Greer Park Neighborhood Home Owner’s Association, had fought to ban roller hockey in the street, and harbored a litany of complaints dating back to the day Dan and Linda had signed the mortgage and gotten the keys.

  “Morning Marty,” Dan said with a nod that elicited no friendly response, only the curl of a beckoning finger. Ginger continued her attack on Dan’s slipper, refusing surrender despite being dragged with each step.

  “That dog of yours Daniel,” he said with a flick of his chin in her direction. “She’s been at my fence again. Diggun’.”

  There were a lot things Dan didn’t like about Marty, but on top of the list was the way he said his name. He didn’t like being called by his full name, a name he hadn’t used in years, and he didn’t like the way Marty said it. It rolled off his old tongue like a bad word, elongated into three syllables. Dan-e-ul.

  Dan eyed Ginger with a smirk. “Has she now?”

  “Yup. And when she gets under there’ll be hell to pay.”

  Dan thought of a few of his own complaints, such as Marty’s seasonal habit of raking the leaves at six in the morning, seven days a week. Or the time he saw the old bastard reach over their fence and spray both Ginger and Jessica with a hose when they’d been playing outside in the summer and laughing, perhaps a little too loud.

  Instead, he just gave Ginger a sharp little kick that sent her skittering back to the house.

  “I’ll look into it Marty.”

  “Make sure you do Daniel.”

  “Yup.”

  And that was that, same as it always was between them. Marty returned to the leaves, and Dan returned to the driveway to finish the task he’d set out to do: fetch the newspaper. Ginger, however, had beat him to it.

  Despite the chaos around him and the Shih Tzu sized bites on the front page, he found a brief respite in the newspaper. Not five minutes ago Jessica had been in the throes of what looked like a panic attack, a hysteria that had taken all of Linda’s attention to fix, and resulted in an overcooked omelet that Dan preferred to poke at than eat.

  The panic had been brewing for the last several weeks, growing like a cancer. Jessica had scored poorly on her kindergarten assessment test in June. Linda had spent the summer tutoring her, who had in turn spent the summer alternating between daydreams and Disney coloring books, retaining few of the vocabulary words they practiced. In secret, Dan and Linda both felt she wasn’t ready for kindergarten. Two educational consultants had agreed. Deferred Engagement they called it, perhaps even some slight ADD. It was an idea Linda brushed off as absurd on reflex. Yet, the more Linda tried to bring
her daughter up to speed, the more Jessica grew anxious of the impending school year and all it seemed to represent.

  It was on that morning of her first day, when Tommy had laughed at Jessica’s sparkle hair band, that the panic had erupted in a chain reaction of attempting to undo and redo her entire hair style, culminating in tangled hair and tears. Having dealt with the dog last night and Marty this morning, Dan decided he could sit the emergency out. Linda, after all, had proven to be better at defusing such situations. Five minutes later all was right, and Jessica was smiling as if nothing had happened.

  “And remember sweetie, there’s nothing to be worried about, okay?” Linda coached. “Every kid, they’re all probably just as worried as you are, you know?”

  “I know,” said Jessica with a broad smile. “Dad told me.”

  “Did he now?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Dan replied, folding the remains of the Arts section and finishing the last of his coffee.

  “You look nice today hon,” Linda said, taking his plate.

  “I do?” he asked, checking his shirt for pieces of egg.

  “Is that a new tie?”

  The tie. An overpriced limited edition silk print made by some Italian designer. A gift one of his graduate students had sent him while studying in Florence over the summer. While he had worn it before, he realized it he hadn’t worn around his wife. The ties she and the kids bought him for Christmas, Father’s day, and his birthday, were all variations on a theme of kitsch. There were smiley face ties, Mona Lisa ties, even a tie shaped like a fish, and he often wore them only as far as the driveway before they were removed and tucked into his glovebox.

  “I’ve had it for a while,” he said, rubbing his temple. “Now, who’s ready for school?”

  On that first day of school the crescent parking lot outside Guinda Elementary was a congested mess, just as he had expected. Eco-friendly hybrids idled curbside next to gas guzzling import. NPR echoed out from half the stereos. Fourth and fifth graders dressed as crossing guards escorted packs of younger kids across the street with a resolute determination that bottlenecked traffic half a block back. Tommy ran off to join his friends before the car had fully stopped, but Jessica lingered by the passenger door, hesitant.