A Fractured Conjuring Page 5

  …like those who lit the fires...and worse still, that other leering and somehow sad face pressing through the widening crack of a doorway, a doorway that would never again be closed…

  She squeezes her eyes shut. For a moment the other flickering faces are there with their dead eyes and darting tongues and vile intent, for the space of a breath only, and then they are gone. She doesn’t know what her eyes think they saw, what her mind showed her over or beneath this man’s face, but she knows they are not from here, not from now.

  Although…it feels like they are part of why I am here now…

  Her eyes open to slits, then all the way. Mr. Junker’s face is merely a face, worn and grizzled and wearing only a mask of bristly whiskers.

  Just a man…but so were the others, especially that last…

  Mr. Junker sits before her with a grunt, placing the lantern between his knees. He looks at her steadily for several moments. He seems to be waiting for her to do something but she doesn’t know what.

  Since leaving the labyrinth of alleys and entering this building he seems more sure of himself, more there.

  This is his special place. He knows these gloomy corners and this crumbling wreckage like it’s a part of him. Maybe it is. Maybe this is all he knows; maybe he was as surprised to find himself outside as you were; maybe…

  She grits her teeth until her jaws begin to ache—anything to still that voice that she knows is not completely hers. That voice that belongs to someone who knows things, someone addressing her as I in one mental breath and You in the next. She hugs her knees tighter.

  “My feet hurt,” she says, realizing only in that moment that she feels pain, that her feet have been throbbing since she collapsed onto the mattress.

  Mr. Junker nods. “I’ll just bet they do. You remember where you lost your shoes?”

  “I don’t remember anything. Just running…to get away.”

  And that is only partly true—she doesn’t know why she was running, or from whom, but she remembers more and more every second, even if she doesn’t know what it is she remembers or what any of it means. She is steadily regaining a host of what feels like memories—flashing images and sounds and smells—none of which make the least bit of sense.

  Since first coming awake her fogged-out awareness continues to come into sharper focus, connections being made between what is happening now and some earlier knowledge from…before.

  She does know things. Or maybe her body knows things, or is being told things. Whatever it is, there is that constant inner voice informing her. This voice is different from the now stilled howling voices, those tortured shrieks of rage and despair, each overlapping the other until her head swam from the blaring discordant choir. Unlike those jarring voices, this internal voice quietly suggests, whispering silent encouragement like a patient mother teaching a child to take its first steps.

  Mr. Junker stands and walks to the far end of the chamber, footsteps echoing. He begins to rummage through a huge mound of trash, whistling a tune she almost recognizes.

  His voice echoes off the high ceiling. “Who’re you runnin’ from?”

  She straightens her legs and pulls the ruffled lace skirts over her knees. “I don’t remember.”

  She realizes the inaccuracy of this even as the words leave her lips—she doesn’t remember because she never knew. With this thought another doorway in her mind cracks open and it becomes clear that she is not actually being pursued, she is being watched, observed. She shakes her head as that mental door cracks wider and her mind continues to illuminate.

  No, not observed…manipulated.

  If I wasn’t running from someone, then why was I running? And the nonsensical answer, seeming to come from outside her awareness but spoken in what she has begun to think of as her own voice: Because there was nothing else I could do...I had to run. Being still no longer worked. Being apart—being separate—was no longer necessary. Her breath quickens. I had to run toward the very thing I was running away from in the first place…a long time ago. It’s what I was born doing, this time.

  Being apart? This time?

  Something in this last revelation feels…overlapped. One string of thought expressing two epiphanies, separate but somehow linked.

  She tries not to show how disoriented she is beginning to feel as Mr. Junker shuffles back to the mattress. “All dressed up like a little baby-doll, running from ghosties with no shoes to protect your little baby-doll footsies.” He holds out his find. “Here, try these. I guess they’re just sort of galoshes but they’ll do the job.”

  She pulls on the plastic boots, dingy yellow with peeling green flowers.

  These aren’t mine, she thinks, he brought me the wrong shoes.

  She flicks the thought away with a toss of her head.

  He sits beside her on the mattress, one grime-caked hand resting next to her knee. “So. You know my name. What’s yours?”

  My name. I have a name.

  He raises his eyebrows at her hesitation. “Do you remember your name?”

  “Yes,” she says, the name suddenly there, unfolding in script behind her eyes, letter by letter. The word is there and she almost utters it aloud…until it begins to evaporate and another name takes its place.

  She does not look up from her knees. He is sitting too close but she doesn’t want to show how it frightens her—and this thought prompts another bit of new information:

  I am afraid…is that the right word? Yes, I think so…afraid…but not of what he might do to me. Not anymore.

  She frowns, shakes her head again to clear the unbidden thoughts.

  Mr. Junker pokes her knee with a finger. “Anybody in there? Anybody with a name maybe?” His mouth is the only thing smiling.

  Like someone whispering from just over her shoulder, she hears—or senses—the words, You smile back.

  Her lips twitch in what she hopes serves the unfamiliar function. “I’m here. My name is…Kimberlina.”

  That’s one of my names. The other one…the other one went away. Maybe that was someone else’s name, or the name of another…me.

  “Baby-doll name for a baby-doll cutie.” He stands. “Well, Miss Kimberlina, I s’pose…” He clears his throat and rubs a hand through his oily hair. “I, uh, guess we oughtta figure out what to do with you.”

  His voice has taken on an edge, a strained sound that makes Kimberlina’s skin prickle, not with fear but with some distant recognition, some faint and long-ago wisp of memory.

  In her mind, she hears a door open; rubber shoes squeak across a polished floor as the door closes and a latch is turned. These simple sounds clog her throat with an abrupt and nearly blinding terror.

  Those sounds are not here with me, not now. They are from before. They can’t hurt me, not anymore.

  She blinks, looks around the room. Those things were never a threat, not to me. I’ve never actually been here before. Her head swims with the final impossible revelation: You’re not really here now.

  And in this here and now, in the central chamber where her eyes have become accustomed to the gloom, she begins to look around again, taking in the detail. The sink along the nearest wall; the small bowl that might have once been a toilet; the rusted frame supporting the mattress on which some version of her now sits, and the frayed remnant of a strap dangling from the rail just to her left, lantern-light glinting dully off its tarnished buckle.

  These are all things that meant something before. Not something you need to be concerned with at this moment. Right now—

  The low horn moans again, far off, and her stomach suddenly lurches.

  Seasickness…that’s what this feeling is. Yes, but again, it’s a borrowed feeling, not yours at all—

  Mr. Junker lays a trembling hand on her shoulder and squeezes. “Miss Kimberlina?”

  Something in her mind shifts and clarifies, snapping her back to the immediate present. That inner voice again that is not solely hers, this time cautioning that Mr. Junker is a menace, b
ut only a potential menace. This Mr. Junker—this time—she can tip one way or another, depending on what she does, what she says, how she acts. What this lower knowledge tells her is that he is dangerous, but he doesn’t know it yet.

  Doesn’t know it? Or doesn’t remember? No…doesn’t want to remember. Or, is not allowed to remember until—

  She shakes her head back and forth, tries without success to disrupt the internal chatter. The voice—shifting between the other’s and the one she thinks of as her own—continues to inform, bringing into focus what seconds before had been nothing more than intuition.

  Whether past tense or future, something in him is getting closer to that unknown or deliberately forgotten or withheld knowledge. In his world (this bed, the straps?) there is only himself, his needs—and his desires. He has no one and has long since decided no one wants him. Anything coming into his circle of experience is either fuel or delight, and delight is a rare commodity.

  But he was someone before.

  His voice has softened. “You okay, missy?”

  Head lowered, she turns her eyes up and looks at him.

  Yes, he was someone before. Another someone who no more belongs in this room than you.

  He wasn’t born this hollowed-out person in this burned out building. He’d been…yes, a long time ago he’d had his own…

  Kimberlina’s pulse accelerates. How do I know these things? And the answer, coming from someplace else—some when else:

  It doesn’t matter. But you can appeal to the one aspect of Mr. Junker’s character that will sway him from desire to protection...at least for now.

  She lifts her chin and looks at him straight on, the tears brimming in her eyes only partially contrived, her words feeling almost like her own. “Thank you for helping me, Mr. Junker. You could have left me out there, but you didn’t. You treated me…you took care of me like I was your own little girl.”

  Mr. Junker’s eyes widen. He opens his mouth, closes it again into a deep frown. Tears shine in his eyes as he releases a held breath in a whistling sigh. He nods, his lips twitch in a pained smiled as he clears his throat again, and then he turns and walks away.

  . . . . .

  Junker sits in quiet stillness, watching the girl by lantern light as she fidgets in her sleep. She’s dreaming, maybe still running from her pursuers, or maybe something else altogether. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care.

  Something not right about this one. Something…off.

  And it isn’t just how she seemed to see into him, through him and back to someone he used to be. There is something else. Something in her voice—no, not the voice, the words. He searches through his memory for the correct term.

  Diction. Yes, her diction is too crisp for a child of her apparent age, almost as though she is reading lines off a page, but lines she has never seen before, that she is just at that moment reading. Yes, and that’s another thing—it is as though every moment for her is a discovery, every expressed thought only then becoming clear to her.

  A chill washes over him as he remembers how it was for him earlier, trying to tell her what his name meant, and how his brain had seized up, his mind shutting down as though he were a thief trying to pry open a door to a restricted area.

  He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes and thinks: My name is Junker. I’ve always been Junker.

  He smiles and opens his eyes. No problem so far.

  Everyone calls me Junker because…

  And now the fog rolls in, thick and heavy. And not just over his efforts to remember how he came to be called by that name; no, this time he realizes he can’t think of a single person who has ever called him Junker; can’t, in fact, remember interacting with anyone, ever. He knows he has acquaintances outside this building, but no matter how hard he tries he can’t bring a single face to mind; this void in his recollection causes his heart to pound, his breath to come short.

  Beads of icy sweat pop through the pores of his forehead and neck, trickling down, as his vision begins to tunnel his view of the chamber to a shrinking circle with Kimberlina at its center.

  I’m having an anxiety attack. I’ve always been prone to those, haven’t I? Yes, now there’s something I remember about myself. Okay. Just breathe, in and out, nice and slow. It’s her. She’s doing something to me. Laying there with her cream skin and perfect cheeks, so round and…

  She mumbles something in her sleep, a mischievous smile twitching on her tiny cupid’s-bow lips.

  Junker listens for a few more moments as his heartbeat decelerates, eavesdropping on her internal struggle, watching and listening for anything that might give him a clue as to who she is, where she came from, and how much trouble he might be in.

  Her dream-scuffling has caused the lace skirts to ride higher, flickering lantern-light making a flashing peepshow of her baby-doll legs, upper thighs so small he is almost certain he could encircle them with one hand.

  A spark of dull light off the dangling strap buckle and—

  His pulse again quickens, his breath beginning to hitch, and he grasps his head between his hands, clamping down tight, attempting to press the thoughts away.

  I was just trying to be helpful, get her off the streets and away from whatever hell she’d escaped.

  Yes, that’s all. A small child in trouble, a tender little...girl. He shudders. Soft and unspoiled and dropped almost literally into my lap…

  A cramp of hot nausea twists at his gut and he doubles over, moaning softly.

  “No…” he whispers, “I really just wanted to help her. She was scared and needed my help. That’s all, I swear. I don’t want it to happen.”

  But why was I out there in the first place? How did I get out there? What was I doing before?

  And spoken in his own voice, from his own lips, but seeming to come from somewhere out in the hall: How did I get here? What is this place?

  It’s where he used to…no. It’s where I did…something. So many, many times.

  For a moment, like a cheap double exposure, he sees himself from above, in two places at once: Junker on the floor, lantern between his legs; and Junker in the hallway, standing motionless, something in his stance making him appear taller and thinner.

  Anxiety swarms back into his head and chest like a swirling cloud of dark hornets and he wraps his arms around himself, as if attempting to keep his intestines from spilling out, the nausea swelling in measure with the anxiety and awful self-realization.

  Which one? Which…it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t fucking matter.

  Tears well and spill over as the wall he built through years of denial crumbles, denial of the one truly horrible thing he is, that thing that he knows will always surface, and always in the presence of one who needs him most.

  This one thing I can now remember clearly—this one shameful thing about myself is perfectly, sickeningly clear. I can’t let him in—the one out in the hall—please, God, don’t let him come all the way in. I know now, I know what he’s capable of. But…why am I Junker? What kind of name is Junker, and why is that knowledge hidden from me?

  “Jesus,” he whispers through gritted teeth, “help me.”

  He holds himself, rocking slowly, not daring to look at Kimberlina’s sleeping form until the tremors subside.

  And slowly, leaving behind a residue of self-loathing, the ugliness drifts away, and it is just Junker and Kimberlina in a dark spacious limbo of dirt and waste and loneliness. This child who ran in fear, straight into a man living in fear—an unconscious fear of the day his demons would find him cowering in his hiding place, and find their old dwelling swept clean and ready once again to be inhabited.

  He allows himself a glance at her prone body, feeling only a wretched emptiness.

  She is quiet, still clearly experiencing something behind her trembling eyelids, but with nothing more to say.

  Until later, when he himself is on the verge of sleep, at the very threshold of dreams. Then one mumbled word escapes her lips, dragging him bac
k up into wakefulness…and with the word, he can almost hear a smile. The word is nothing more than a soft exhale:

  “Atonement…”

  8

  In the House of Broken Corridors

  By Chloe Sender

  Part Three

  Papa likes taking us to the park.

  He used to like it.

  Before he started laughing at nothing.

  But I like remembering it how it was. I pretend it’s like that now.

  Will you come with me? To see how it was? None of the other ghosts will notice if you stay quiet.

  See us? Just over there, under that big tree. I’m the little one on the left side. That’s Sissy on the right with all that hair. Sissy is harder to see. All ghosts are harder to see. You have to really want to see her. You just have to imagine her green eyes and red hair. See her now?

  Papa’s in the middle. See how he smiles at us?

  He takes us to feed the pigeons. And to throw coins in Washington Square fountain.

  Sometimes we throw coins at the pigeons. See how they flap and jump?

  Papa doesn’t like that.

  That was a long time ago. Before the Bad Man came.

  Before the Bad Thing happened.

  But we’re pretending it’s now. I forgot. I’m sorry.

  Papa likes Washington Square Park. Listen to him: “It’s small,” Papa says. “Not like that big lumbering monstrosity, Central Park. Hell, you could lose your way in there, wander in and never be heard from again. No, Washington Square is the real deal, a park for daddies and their precious little girls. A park for lonely ghosts and not-so-lonely lovers. It’s got a scruffy little city charm that just makes you wanna grab your honey—” (Or maybe somebody else’s honey, he says with a wink) “—and pinch her bottom until she’s red in the face from giggling, telling you to stop even though you know she liked it and would be just as pleased as punch if you gave the old tushy one last little tweak.”