A Fractured Conjuring Read online

  A Fractured Conjuring

  Martin Reaves

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  First Electronic Edition ©2015 by Martin Reaves

  Second Electronic Edition ©2017 by Martin Reaves

  Cover art by Neil Jackson

  Afterword by M.L. Roos

  Discover Other Titles by Martin Reaves:

  Relative Karma

  Relative Sanity

  Dark Thoughts

  Rosebud Hill, Volume 1: Searching for Willoughby

  Dedication

  As always, this is for Charla.

  She reads my work and has not yet opted for separate bedrooms.

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  AFTERWORD: CHLOE, FRACTURED AND ONE

  CONNECT WITH MARTIN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  No work of fiction emerges whole from a vacuum. But this one seems to have done exactly that. I can of course thank Google for helping me find my way, and I am also thankful to the Feds for not knocking on my door in the middle of the night in response to some very questionable internet searches.

  And I have to give a nod and salute to whoever named the Kimberlina Solar Thermal Power Plant in Bakersfield, California. If not for a quick glance at the freeway exit sign bearing that cute kiddie name Kimberlina, A Fractured Conjuring would never have happened.

  Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to Chloe Sender for trusting me with her story. It was her voice—in ways I still don’t understand—that called to me from that freeway sign. It was nearly two years later before I had the confidence to speak in her voice.

  This is her story.

  “The maid of desolation

  Who causes the hearts of men to go astray

  And appears in the dream of the night

  And in the vision of the day

  Who burns and casts down with nightmare…”

  Persian Incantation

  “…when Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden, it caused sexual awakening…

  This was the awakening…that caused evil to become its own entity, capable of expression.”

  Rabbi Isaac ben Jacob ha-Kohen

  1

  Chloe stops midway down the long dark hallway, listening.

  Midway. The beginning is behind her but catching up. The end is still a long way ahead, but not as far as it was. Both truths—past and future—creep toward the center, to her, where she waits, asking her questions. The answers are buried equally in that long-ago beginning and yet-to-be-known ending. She is what ties the two together. If she blinks or misses some relevant detail, the corridor will dissolve and she’ll be forever adrift in a limbo of ignorance and oblivion—a vacuous place where none of the previous pain mattered; where it will prove to have been misery for misery’s sake.

  She can’t let that happen. She has to know why. There has to be atonement, and atonement can only come with understanding. Knowing is the only thing that matters.

  Midway down the hall, in shadowed pause, breath held, the only sound the imagined whisper of blood sluicing through her arteries. That, and the person or monster or whatever it is behind her.

  A glance over her shoulder. Still there, humming a tune with no discernible melody. Every few seconds it taps the hardwood floor in rapid little bursts. She feels as though she should know what the tapping means, as though it is some veiled message or Morse code. Whatever or whoever is back there stops when she stops, moves when she moves, breathes when she breathes—the only constant the brittle tapping.

  The doorknob of the door on her left makes a small click, as if someone has laid a hand on it from the inside, preparing to turn the knob and yank open the door if she gets too close.

  Not that room, she thinks. Not yet.

  Chloe shuffles slowly down the hall, some unknown source of weak silvery light allowing her to see only a foot or two in front of her.

  Behind her a deliberate inhale, a sliding of creaking limbs and raking of nails across the floor. And that lilting tune she almost recognizes as the melody takes on shape.

  The next door on the right, closed like all the rest. She places her ear against the door, listens, tuning out the humming and tapping behind her. She rests a hand on the knob. Cold. Like ice. From within, a muffled cry of pain. Or maybe pleasure. Or both.

  She pulls her hand away.

  Not this one, either.

  She chances another glance over her shoulder. Still there. Its form only slightly darker than shadow, swaying slightly in time to the tune. Somehow, though she feels she’s been walking and being followed for hours, the figure remains down at the far end of the hallway. But she knows it is following her, moving in time with her own halting steps, waiting for…

  Waiting for what?

  For a door to be opened. For the right door to be opened.

  Squinting at the figure, she can almost make out a face; a gauzy, faintly flickering paleness in the center of the shifting shadow.

  She turns, continuing forward. Another door, this one on her left, a faint sound of creaking bedsprings from within. She places her hand on the knob. The creaking stops, then one sharp creak and a shuffle of footsteps as someone approaches the door.

  Is this the one?

  A quick look behind her. The shadow. Crouching, swaying. Tapping clickety-clack.

  Hand still on the knob, she strains to see more than the pale oval that might or might not be a face. “Who are you?” she whispers and immediately hears the question from the other side of the door, someone inside with their lips against the wood.

  She jerks back from the door.

  The voice. It is Chloe’s voice…and it isn’t.

  And suddenly she knows: I’m dreaming. But this knowledge—if knowledge it is—brings no comfort.

  She draws near again to the door, soundlessly, the shape down at the end of the hall suddenly motionless except for a single repetitive click-click-click on the floor, as if marking time.

  She reaches for the knob, grips it. It begins to turn in her fist. She removes her hand and steps back. From beyond the door a soft giggle, echoed from the thing down the hall, as well as…from her own throat. She slaps a hand over her mouth and the giggle is immediately muffled.

  From down the hall, once again in bright bursts of sound: clickety-clack, clickety-clack.

  Chloe turns forward again, facing into the darkness.

  Sometime later, impossible to tell how long in the dark unending hallway, she comes to a door that cracks open an inch as she reaches it.

  From within, a voice sing-songing at the edge of laughter: “Dance for me, little girl.”

  This is not the giggling voice, not the voice that is
and is not her own. This is his voice.

  She frowns in the darkness. His voice. The thought scares her—nearly terrifies her—yet she has no idea who he is.

  No, that’s not true. It’s not that I don’t know who he is, it’s that I don’t know which he. That’s one of the things I have to figure out: Which he, which room…which me?

  She shakes her head, suddenly dizzy.

  I can’t be dizzy. People don’t get dizzy in dreams. The dizziness is just in my head.

  She giggles, hears the echo from behind her and immediately stifles the sound by chomping down hard on her lower lip.

  From the open door, the second word drawn out, rising and falling as though the speaker is calling Yoo-hoooo: “Little miss?”

  Yes, his voice. Their voice. I can hear both of them, overlapping each other with every word, like two people speaking at once.

  Dreaming. I’m dreaming.

  She begins to back away, then stops when the dual voice says, “Come in. We want to show you something. This is the room you’re looking for.”

  A small bark of laughter. Then: “They are all the rooms you’re looking for.”

  Behind her doors begin to open, one by one, knobs turning, hinges creaking.

  And the crouched thing…it has finally caught up with her, she can smell it now.

  This is the past, or at least part of the past.

  The smell of unwashed sex, the rancid odor of menstrual waste—a young girl’s soiled panties stuffed between the mattresses after her first period because she doesn’t know what has happened to her. Drawing near, this young soiled thing with the pale face and tapping fingers. The tune suddenly clear, a tune she knows. A tune she has always known.

  The final door opens behind her even as the one before her swings wide and the voices begin to whisper in unison.

  A child’s hand finds her fingers and grips them. The familiar sour reek—no smell in dreams, not possible—rises in intensity along with the humming.

  And the unified whispers, from the door before her and every door behind. All with one simple question: “Who are you?”

  2

  The child snaps awake at a dead run, lurching into consciousness out of a vast shadowy emptiness. From a pitch-black void into glaring illumination, she is thrust into a cacophonous now, running away from or toward something unknown.

  She has no knowledge of what came before, only that she is here and she is running…and she is terrified. As her mind awakens it becomes clear that she has been running blind and deaf, sounds and sights and smells blossoming around her in flashing bursts of sensory information: the stinging slap of bare feet on slick pavement as her legs piston beneath ruffled skirts; a confusion of muted artificial light, tortured screams, and river-rot stench.

  The world coalesces around her, odors sharpening, shapes defining. She begins to understand that while most of the attack on her senses is from outside herself, the screams are in her head, and they are many; she does not know if the screams are her own and does not care.

  This is a kind of panicked birth. Dragged forth out of an unconscious nowhere into a foreign world, unprepared and unequipped to cope with the assault, the pure glut of information.

  Inarticulate at first, the screams in her mind gradually clarify, taking on shape and horrible anguished meaning; although it is somehow a silent meaning, communicating more on an atavistic level than an intellectual one. As she runs, the agonized voices in her head continue to rage, their cries mutating into sentences, but in a language beyond her ability to understand. Probing, questioning, hissing and demanding with fury or fear or both:

  “A’er b’ khalaloukh!”

  “Mun ihtau shmokh?”

  “Khahba!”

  “Layko ozel at?”

  “Jinda!”

  “Daryana mila brishakh!”

  Guttural ranting, each unintelligible cry overlapping the next. Meaningless or not, the ancient pain in those cries she knows, can almost taste, and this primal knowledge adds to her own terror.

  The child squeezes her eyes shut, spraying tears of fear and frustration. Teeth grinding, she lowers her head and pounds her feet against the pavement, sprinting—away from the unseen, away from the awful shrieks—and collides full-speed into a pile of musty, foul-smelling clothes.

  “Whoa, tiny thing, watch where you’re goin’.”

  Rough hands grab her shoulders; rough, but not intending harm—she knows this, although she doesn’t know how she knows it.

  She opens her eyes, slowly, a newborn squinting against fierce reality. Everything in shades of grayish black: the man’s clothes and lips and eyes, the oil-glistening pavement, the distorted metal buildings with gaping toothless doors and windows, the tilted lampposts and traffic signals sluggishly blinking their bilious light through a swirling gray fog.

  The man kneels before her to be at her level, a smile on his cracked lips but not his eyes—those eyes flick left and right, never fully settling on her face, and maybe those eyes intend something his hands do not. But his gravelly voice is kind.

  “What’cha runnin from?”

  Her own voice, feeling rusty and unfamiliar, surprises her with its strength: “They’re after me. I have to hide.” This, too, is new information—she is running for a reason, though she has no idea who they are.

  The man frowns and stands to his full height. She comes to just past his knees. I’m little, she thinks, and files this information away.

  “Well, tiny thing, I don’t know who they are or why they’re after you, but ain’t nobody knows the back streets of The Village like old Mr. Junker.” He releases her shoulders and wraps her small hand in his grimy fingers. “Come on.”

  She hesitates, unsure whether to follow or stay put. She awoke terrified, some inner intelligence instructing her to run even before her mind had a say in the matter. She knows—or thinks she knows—someone is after her, but she still doesn’t know who they are or in what form they might be. The voices are still with her, not as overpowering but still there, babbling incoherently.

  And, perhaps the most insistent problem of all, bubbling up out of her subconscious and bearing its own cargo of dread:

  Who are you?

  From the hissing murmur in her mind one voice seems to press through the others, grating on her inner ear: “Mun ihtau shmokh?”

  The man’s hand lightly grips her fingers. He frowns down at her; the weak light from the streetlamps is insufficient to tell if he is angry that she isn’t moving, or maybe just confused.

  And why shouldn’t she follow? She opens her mouth to speak before there are any words to utter, and then her tongue is forming the syllables and she is aware of them only as she hears them break forth into existence in front of her lips:

  “Are you going to hurt me?”

  “Oh, hey now.” He crouches before her again, his smile stretching cracked and thin over stained teeth. “You got nothing to worry about with old Junker—that’s my name by the way. Mr. Junker. At least it’s what people call me.”

  “That’s a funny name,” she says, not realizing it was funny until her words told her so. “Why are you called that?”

  “Well…” His smile slips. For a moment he looks almost scared. “I…I guess I don’t really know why they call me that, it’s just the name I’ve always had.”

  His eyes go blank, then he jerks slightly as if awakening from an unexpected doze. “Funny thing. Damned strange. For a minute there…I don’t know…Did you just…? No, silly, of course not…”

  He releases her fingers and she holds her hands tightly to her chest, watching him, unsure if she should turn and run while he is confused and rambling. Something in his manner suggests he is sharing her experience of mental lethargy, of seeming to become aware of the next conscious thought a split second after the thought has already presented itself in words.

  He looks at his empty hand, seems surprised to find it empty, and holds it forth, open and inviting. “I only mean you well. M
y place is just a few alleys away. I just wanna help you, sweetie.”

  “Why do you want to help me?” Again, the words come into her understanding only as they are voiced, her mouth and tongue apparently activated by unseen forces, delivering her lines independent of her will. She doesn’t remember wanting to know why he is helping; it almost seems to her as though the question was uttered purely to give him something to respond to.

  I’m improvising, she thinks, and then: No, someone is improvising for me. But who…and what does…

  “Mr. Junker, what does improvising mean?”

  He blinks several times. “What…?

  Her mind quickens with understanding and she answers her own question with an example as she says, “I asked why you want to help me.”

  His gray tongue scrapes across his lips, moistening nothing. His open hand begins to shake, from holding it out so long, or from confusion, or maybe some other unknown malady.

  He clears his throat. “Well…what kind of question is that, silly? Because you need it. You say someone is chasing you and I want to get you safe before they find you.”

  That makes sense, she thinks. And then, from somewhere slightly outside her own consciousness: It makes too much sense. His being here right when I need him; his being kindly and protective and having a nearby place to go.

  She shakes her head as if to dislodge the other voice.

  But was it another voice, or was it mine?

  Who are you?

  Then she tunes back into the ranting voices, the howling cries, still there, still in torment—

  “Daryana mila brishakh!”

  —and she remembers the sudden blossom of knowledge that she is being pursued. She looks around at the buildings, the darkened inhospitable geography of this new place. And finally nods. “Okay.”

  Mr. Junker smiles. “Atta girl. Now we’ll go kinda slow, but we don’t wanna dawdle. Let’s get you to my safe place where nobody can get at you.”

  Then they are moving, not quite running, each random alleyway a gritty copy of the one before. Grimy windows flit past, some with distorted, runny faces pressed tight to watch her pass by—faces she thinks she recognizes, or maybe that recognize her—and other windows empty of eyes, thin membranes between her and the gibbering laughter and screams and menace behind them: from beyond this window the crack of a hard slap and the resultant cry of pain; from behind another a shout—“Khahba!”—and the bright sound of breaking glass; from still another the sharp pop of a weapon being fired followed by a spray of dark droplets against the pane. None of the ashen light issuing from the windows does anything to illuminate their progress.