A Fractured Conjuring Page 2

  As they continue she sneaks glances over her shoulder, away from the windows and back toward whatever may be coming up fast, slinking in shadow along the soiled bricks, waiting for the opportune moment to snatch her from behind.

  Nothing follows—nothing she can see—and she breathes a little easier, willing the internal voices into silence even as her understanding of their language sharpens and the razor edge of her fear begins to dull.

  Into deepening night and darker gloom they press on through an endless loop of backstreets.

  But no matter how many doorways they duck through, no matter how empty the alleyways behind, she feels invisible eyes tracking their progress.

  3

  In the House of Broken Corridors

  By Chloe Sender

  Part One

  He waits just outside my door.

  In the long hallway that never ends. In the broken, smelly corridor that leads only to this room.

  I come to this room on squeaky wheels. Sometimes on my own feet. Around corners and corners and more corners, until it feels like I’m going in circles.

  Down intersecting dead ends and back again.

  Sometimes I get lost, but I always find my room.

  Or my room finds me. It wants me to be here.

  Again and again. The long, twisting hallway always leads to this room.

  My room.

  He’s always here.

  Sometimes I am here first.

  Sometimes he is waiting.

  But he always comes.

  There are other rooms. I’ve seen them.

  I’ve looked inside them, through the smeared windows.

  I’ve seen the faces.

  Faces of people who don’t know their own names. Maybe don’t even know they are supposed to have a name.

  They watch me walk by, roll by, rush by, float by.

  Something in them knows they’re different because they are inside and I am not.

  It’s in their eyes. The confusion. The envy. The sparkle-glimmer that they might be someone too.

  And all because they see me as I go by.

  Sometimes on my own feet.

  Sometimes by my own power and sometimes not.

  Sometimes I wave to them, easy-breezy tra-la-la, my arms swinging free those times when they’re not strapped to my body in a dirty white coat.

  Their mouths drool, moving with questions or maybe secret songs.

  Maybe prayers.

  Maybe not real words at all. It doesn’t matter.

  Everything you need to know is right there in their eyes, shining through the dirty wire-glass. Even if they can’t say the words, they only have one question. They only want one answer. An answer that will help their broken minds understand why they are locked within and I am not.

  Why I am free like Big Bird walking down Sesame Street; why I am free to come and go as I please.

  One simple answer, to one simple question: Who are you?

  And maybe a second question:

  Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?

  But that’s in the other rooms. The ones with windows. The ones with faces.

  My room doesn’t have a window. My room is special.

  I’m not like them, because I choose to be here. With my Dolly.

  Not the first time. No Dolly back then. Just me.

  Someone made me be here then.

  But that’s when I found out.

  That’s why I came back.

  Maybe you’d come back too, if you knew what I knew.

  Ha, I’m a poet and don’t know it.

  Outside. In the hall.

  He paces in front of my door, dragging his fingernails against the painted metal.

  Scraping and then tapping.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  He’s restless. Humming a tune with a familiar melody. A melody that made me smile the first time I heard it.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  I pull the covers tight to my chin, tight to Dolly’s shiny chin.

  I watch the thin line of light under the door.

  The shadow moves from left to right, right to left. Then a pause in the middle as he stands before the door.

  I hear him breathing.

  Humming.

  Tap-tap-tapping.

  I wonder if the others—in the other rooms—are watching him. I wonder if they dare ask him the same question, or if they already know the answer: Who are you?

  I wonder if he will visit them. And if he does…

  Will they understand?

  No. I don’t think so.

  They won’t understand.

  Can’t.

  And he won’t visit them. Not like he visits me.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  I hold my breath, watching the doorknob, watching the shadow, waiting for either to move.

  Hold.

  Listening.

  Watching.

  Not breathing. Like Dolly doesn’t breathe.

  My head pounds from not breathing. Fog from under the bed wraps around me. A throbbing fog, pulsing in time with the throbbing in my head, with my heart, dark spots pounding in my eyes.

  Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?

  The under-door shadow drifts toward the left.

  Exhale.

  I have to remind myself to take the next breath. Sometimes that happens. The breath leaks out, and out, and out. I become still.

  It feels good. Like awake sleeping.

  The room gets fuzzy with more fog and that’s when I remember to breathe in. It only takes a few ins and outs to get it going again on its own.

  I’m sure it happens that way with lots of people.

  Probably you do it too.

  Do you like it?

  Who are you?

  Left to right, right to left, goes the shadow.

  Tap-tap-tap go the fingers.

  Hum-dum-dee-dum-dum-doo-dum-dee-doo goes his voice.

  I can get out of this bed and open the door if I want. He can open it too.

  It’s not locked.

  It’s never locked.

  Unless he’s inside.

  But he wants me to open it.

  I wonder if I want that, if I want him to come in again, to come all the way in and…

  I know I will invite him again. It’s why I’m here.

  I also know he’s not really out there and that I am not really in this bed.

  The corridor is empty.

  He’s not there.

  I’m not here.

  Dolly’s not here.

  I’m somewhere else, awake-dreaming, not thinking these thoughts, not remembering.

  Pretending I’m not here and never was here.

  But I think I want to be here.

  It would be easy enough to make myself be here again.

  I just have to be brave enough to do the thing that makes me go back.

  It hurts, this thing.

  It makes me dizzy and tummy-whoopsy sick.

  But it’s the only way.

  The only way to get back to this room, back to Sesame Street.

  Watching the shadow that isn’t there, I pull Dolly closer, pressing her cool porcelain face against my cheek.

  I whisper, “What do I do?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  She almost never answers.

  4

  Chloe jerked awake, heart hammering, a scream clogging her throat. The sheets were sweat-drenched, twisted into tight knots in her fists. All around her lay an oppressive darkness and a silence disturbed only by her harsh breathing. She lay still for several minutes, a heavy sorrow pressing down on her. Waiting for her body to come back to her, for the dream to fade…

  But what dream? Had she been dreaming? She released her grip on the sheets, reached for the nightstand lamp without looking and flipped the switch, simultaneously creating a host of shadows and sending them into the corners where they belonged.

  No, it wasn’t a dream, it was a voice, like someone shou
ting in a giggling whisper up against her ear.

  Which means it had to be a dream, because there’s no one else here. She frowned and shook her head. And people don’t shout in whispers.

  She drew in a deep shuddery breath, felt a sudden sting of tears at the corners of her eyes.

  And why do I feel like I might burst into tears any second?

  An overwhelming sadness had followed her out of the dream, wrapping itself tightly around her chest and filling her throat. This sadness seemed to be comprised of equal parts fear and loss and…shame. But there was no memory or detail from the dream that could explain that feeling. It was just there, suffocating and total.

  She closed her eyes against the inexplicable mix of emotions, held her breath, listening, desperate to prove to herself that there truly was no one else in the apartment. And to dispel that mournful feeling of near hopelessness.

  Her pulse slow-thudded in her ears, a liquid thrum, but nothing else stirred.

  A glance at the cobalt-blue numbers on the digital clock showed 1:27 a.m. She sat up, looked to her left at the expanse of empty bed—Dray was working late again—and threw back the covers.

  Another held breath, listening, sensing. The loft lay quiet around her, a thousand square feet of rent-controlled silence. But…was it too quiet? Or was she being paranoid?

  No, I am not being paranoid. It may just be sleep-fuzz, but this is more than normal middle of the night stillness. And this fucking melancholy feeling isn’t helping things. I feel like I have cotton stuffed in my ears, like I’m experiencing everything from another room.

  …I feel like I’ve been locked out, locked in, listening for something that’s out there…something that is not here yet but that I know is coming and will shamble to the other side of the door at any—

  Her breath caught, she stifled a gasp. She felt as though she had stumbled backward into a nightmare, or a memory, but someone else’s memory—like reliving some dark moment that did not belong to her.

  Did I just nod off? Locked out? Locked in? Listening for what? I was listening to how quiet it was…and then I was listening for…what?

  She shook her head again, realizing how little sense she was making, even to herself.

  Even to myself? Of course it was just to myself, there’s no one else here. And there is no other room, just the bathroom—everything else is connected, all the same room.

  Against her will her eyes moved to the bathroom door, the only other door in the loft that did not lead into the elevator vestibule outside. The door was pulled almost to, a vertical two-inch slice of darkness revealing nothing of what might be waiting inside.

  “Shit,” she whispered, smacking herself lightly on the cheek. “Come on, wake up, girl.”

  She deliberately looked away from the bathroom, brought a hand to her ear, snapped her fingers and heard it clearly, not muffled, not nightmare-muted or distorted. She breathed deep, decided maybe she was being a little paranoid and that her disquiet was simply a product of an overactive writer’s imagination combined with the nightmare dregs sticking to her, refusing to be sloughed off.

  I need to wake all the way up, that’s all.

  She stood and stretched to get some blood flowing. Nothing stirred or scuttled away as she moved.

  She made herself look slowly around the loft, a long defiant stare at the bathroom door before allowing her gaze to move on, taking in the familiarity that was not a haunted landscape with crouching horrors waiting to catch her off-guard.

  Dray’s canvases littered the eastern third of the loft, most of them nudes or semi-nudes of Chloe, all of these showing her hair straightened and reaching to the middle of her back, sometimes blond, sometimes beet-red or her natural carrot-orange. The slovenly condition of Dray’s workspace comforted her. Dray’s art seemed almost exclusively dedicated to creating tenderly erotic images of Chloe.

  A distant despair tugged at her gut. I don’t want to lose you, baby. I can’t lose you.

  Her breath caught again. Where did that come from? There was absolutely no reason to believe their relationship was in danger. Then why…?

  The fucking dream.

  She forced the feeling of loss down, actually swallowing with intent to cement the image of making it go away. Her eyes were still locked on Dray’s nudes of her, those adoration-and passion-soaked images of Chloe posing for her love.

  None of the canvases showed her as she was now—hair jet-black and cropped spikey-short—because she’d made the change today, watching with panicky exhilaration as ten-inch-long sections of hair dropped onto the floor of the salon. She couldn’t say for sure why she’d made the drastic change, only that it felt right, a kind of purification akin to Spring cleaning. There was actually a brief moment where she had considered shaving her head completely. Sanity had returned just in time. The boyish crop felt right, different enough to make her feel new.

  She’d returned home from the salon and done the color herself, accomplishing the deed naked to keep from ruining her clothes. After finishing, hands stained a deep blue-black, she’d stood before the full-length mirror, strangely excited by the pale, impish creature staring back at her.

  Reliving the day’s normality calmed her nerves further so she allowed more to surface. Watching her new self in the mirror that afternoon—and imagining Dray’s response—she’d taken the opportunity to wax; by the time she was done the youthful black nest on her head was the only hair she had left.

  Dray would like the new look and would pretend to be torn between the desire to paint her or make love to her. Chloe knew it would be both, just not the order. And it didn’t matter—both activities were sensual, and both were done with slow passion, each a form of foreplay for the other.

  Emotion made Chloe’s breath come short, turned her view of the paintings into blurred blobs of color as tears threatened.

  No. No. Nothing can touch us, baby. She blinked back the tears, turned away from those romanticized images of herself.

  In contrast to Dray’s sprawling artistic expression, Chloe’s desk took up a tidy twenty-four square feet of the loft’s west corner. She padded barefoot across the maple floors to the open laptop. The screen was a dust magnet and she made it a rule to always close it when she was done. I must’ve really been tired, she thought and snapped it closed, the click of the latch louder than it should have been in the stillness, the sharp snap causing her to flinch.

  At least my ears aren’t clogged anymore.

  The feeling still lingered that she remained partially in the land of nightmare—sounds now a little too pronounced in the dead air instead of muted, light and shadows oddly inverted, her consciousness slightly outside herself, witnessing rather than experiencing.

  She wandered through the loft, touching things to prove they could be felt, that they would not simply dissolve under her touch. She stopped before the floor-to-ceiling windows, the backlighting from the nightstand lamp showing only her half-naked reflection: silk boy-shorts and nothing else.

  Yes, that’s what I had on when I went to bed, no surprises there.

  As she gazed at her reflection she allowed her focus to shift, giving her peripheral vision a chance to catch any stealthy motion behind her. Nothing moved. The nightmare sense retreated a bit more.

  Pressing herself against the tall glass allowed her to see out, four stories down to Grove Street, empty and quiet. New York may be the city that never sleeps but this section of Greenwich Village liked its rest. The deserted street was as it should be, the cars familiar, the shadows just shadows, none strangely elongated or moving while their physical counterparts remained still. Just a quiet street sleeping, unaware of itself or her or whatever had jarred her awake.

  She stepped back from the glass, blurring the image of the street and bringing into focus her reflection. She turned, drifted to the kitchenette where everything was exactly where it was supposed to be, flicked the switch for the overhead stove light, and put on a pot of coffee, lifting herself onto the
counter to sit while it dripped.

  As always, the easy gurgle of coffee dripping into the pot soothed her. She closed her eyes, inhaling deeply of the increasingly intense aroma, humming silently to herself.

  I love coffee, I love tea. I love the java jive and it loves me.

  She smiled, opened her eyes and looked around the loft again, the comfortable familiarity of their few possessions; the simple, understated furniture. Dray’s art to her left, their bed roughly in the middle, her own creative space to the right.

  The laptop called to her but she wasn’t ready to dive back into the new book just yet, especially with a few threads of nightmare still clinging to her skin like cobwebs. A little caffeine would clear those last threads and maybe then she’d read over her last few pages and try to get a sense of where the thing was going.

  She frowned, realizing that she couldn’t actually bring to memory where she’d left off in the narrative; in truth, she couldn’t remember much about the project at all, only how it made her feel.

  That gloomy feeling. That’s where that came from—my story. Something in those words—my words—is making me feel this way. Then why can’t I remember what it is?

  She shook her head. That’s just sleep-groggy talking. Get some caffeine in you and then take a peek at your pages and it’ll all come back. If nothing else, it’ll kill time until Dray gets home.

  She wasn’t entirely sure how she’d come around to the new book, much less what it was actually about. It wasn’t remotely her kind of story, at least based on the unsettling feeling she had—no doubt her publisher would feel the same—but when your name was Chloe Sender, and you sold as many books as she, you had a little leeway. Her agent had even less a clue what she was working on, but what she didn’t know wouldn’t do her any significant damage. What Chloe knew for certain was that she couldn’t leave this new project alone. It unnerved her; it wouldn’t leave her alone.