Dreams of Shadows - Patrick Sean Lee (ebook reader browser .TXT) 📗

Charles threw up his hands in defeat.

“Ah, I got bored. I told Jerrick to keep an eye on things for a sec."

Lashawna, “WHAT?”

“...That whatever it was musta’ turned. All the sudden it started gettin’ smaller. You know, like it was headin’ east insteada’ west.”

“I say we throw him out,” Cynthia said.

More arguing and cat calling ensued, until a few moments later Peter returned with the good news.

“I don’t see any sight of the landing craft, if that’s what it was. It’s gone.”

“Well, did you bother to look around to see if maybe it was below the lens line?” Charles asked rather acidly. Peter glowered at him.

“I sure as hell did…Charles! Nothing anywhere that I could see. Why don’t you go out and freeze your butt off scanning the sky?””

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry.” Charles calmed down somewhat after Peter took him down a notch with the answer. He looked down at Mari again, and then rose and walked toward the open front door. The chill of the night air had begun to roll in already. “One of us has to watch, just in case,” he said, stationing himself just outside on the porch deck. Jerrick had by then wandered up to join us, but he stopped when he got to Charles. They spoke, but in voices too low for me to hear. I returned to question Mari once again, who, I hoped, would shed some further light on her strange new dual personality, if nothing else. She sat silent, glaring at me, and I realized that even if she did try to explain what all had happened, none of us would likely understand it. She was what she was, cruelly connected at the hip, now, with the invaders. Her role in that new world? She probably didn’t have a clue about it anyway. At least the cat was out of the bag finally.

“Tell everyone exactly what happened this afternoon, Mari, please. It’s important. They have a right to know. Tell us what you experienced, hon.” I did something that surprised even me. I knelt down, placed my hands on her cheeks, and then kissed her forehead softly. “You’re still our Mari.”

She heaved a small breath, and a tear formed at the corner of her eye when she looked into my face. “I shouldn’t even have told you. Now I’ve disobeyed them.” She hesitated, and then began to cry openly. Lashawna and Cynthia rushed forward and joined me at her feet.

“It’s okay, Mari, we love you. No matter what happened, you’re still one of us. We won’t abandon you, even if they do. You didn’t betray them, because no matter what they did, you’ll always be Mari. Try to tell us.”

She composed herself with great difficulty. I could see the contempt vanish, and the little girl began again to relate how, when the horrid men surrounded us, a cloud of sorts encircled her mind. The words needed to adequately explain the phenomena simply weren’t in her vocabulary, however. How do you paint a vivid picture when you don’t even have the right brushes or paints? We sat and stood there listening anyway. At various points in her narrative, Peter broke in with questions, which she answered as best—I thought—that she could.

Charles and Jerrick finally wearied of the cold. It was pointless of Charles to stand and peer out at the sky shivering, and so the two of them came back in and shut the door behind them. Wherever the aliens had gone, whatever was on their agenda that night, it was beyond our ability to control.

“Nothing,” Charles said. “It’s as quiet as an abandoned church out there.” He blew breaths of warm air into his hands, hands that finally had nearly healed completely. Munster laughed at the comment.

“Learn anything new?” he asked. We shook our heads, and Cynthia was beginning to say something, when the frantic sound of Jack’s voice exploded from the bedroom end of the hall upstairs.

“Something’s wrong! Help! Something’s happening to Ash!”

We snapped our heads in unison. Peter was the first to bolt to the stairway, followed in a mad rush by the rest of us. Amid the clatter of feet I could hear Mari’s tiny voice behind me. “Oh no, no, no…”

When we arrived at the bedroom door, the reason for Jack’s cries became apparent. Ash lay on the bed under a blanket, his arms thrashing and his body jerking violently.

Everyone except Cynthia entered, banging into one another, gathering in a ragged semi-circle inside the room at the foot of the bed. She ran to the side of the bed nearest the window and lay hold of his arms, trying to hold him down amid the exclamations bursting like firecrackers all around me.

“He’s havin’ a fit!”

“Oh God, a seizure.”

“Someone help her…”

“What do we do?” Peter’s voice was a desperate high pitch. He ran to the opposite side of the bed and tried to help his sister, which only seemed to make Ash’s torso and legs jerk more violently. Lashawna grabbed hold of her brother, burying her head in his chest, whimpering.

“Mari, help him! Do something,” I screamed over the din, but she stood helplessly beside Charles with her mouth open, shaking like a leaf in a storm. “Call them! Call them!”

I knew she would. I know she did, thinking back to that night. Standing there beside Charles, who seemed locked immobile, and rooted at the foot of the bed, she closed her eyes and mouth as if in deep concentration, or a reverent prayer to a pantheon of disinterested gods.

It was bedlam for long minutes as Cynthia and Peter tried in vain to stop the boy from jerking, Jerrick offering useless instructions, the rest of us running aimlessly around like chickens under attack by a fox. But as suddenly as the seizure had grabbed hold of Ash, it stopped. He shuddered violently one last time, and then fell still. Peter reacted by throwing his ear onto Ash’s chest, his hands grasping the little guy’s shoulders.

“What, Peter?” Cynthia blurted. “He’s alive, right? He’s ok now?”

Peter didn’t respond to her question, merely kept his turned head on Ash’s motionless chest for several more seconds. He finally raised himself up and shook his head.

“Nothing,” he bleated.

Charles rushed to the bed, shoved Cynthia aside, and began CPR. Over and over and over he pressed down with his hands, stopped at intervals and blew into Ash’s mouth, urged the boy to come back, until at last he realized the futility of it all.

Ash was dead.

And Unto Dust...

“They’re evil. They caused this,” Lashawna cried openly the following morning.

Peter and Munster had finished digging the grave for Ash beside his playmates and their mother. Of course we all shed more tears. During the long night, clouds had crept in, and now there was a light misting of rain, adding more misery to the new day. I didn’t sleep much after we exited the bedroom. I don’t think any of us did.

“They’re gone now,” I tried to console Lashawna, who stood beside me, Ash in a blanket wrapped around him in front of us on the wet ground. “I hope the cruel aliens sent them all to a burning hell.”

“I’m not talking about the men who beat him! I’m talking about them! If they hadn’t come…”

“Hush, Lashawna,” Charles drew her to his chest and whispered.

The solemn ceremony surprised me on one hand, but brought fresh confusion to me on the other. Munster leaned on the shovel above the fresh opening in the earth as Charles uttered a few words—the usual benedictions—and then he laid the shovel aside and jumped into the pit. He raised his arms to Peter, who without a word gently picked Ash’s body up, and handed it to Munster. With Mrs. Conklin and the other two children a month before, Peter hand laid two ropes out beneath the bodies, and then he and Munster had lowered them in, tossing the ropes atop them. There was something altogether more personal, more…loving about this morning’s laying to rest of dear little Ash. Not a body decomposing, but a real soul we’d grown close to.

The other thing that struck me was Mari’s disintegrated composure throughout the terrible but necessary task. She stood beside me, openly crying. Somehow I’d expected her to maintain an aloofness. A respectful silence once the shock of his death had set in. Something mirroring her new half-alien nature. Obviously none of the new masters of the planet had answered her pleas for help, and maybe that had awakened her, the half, anyway, that seemed lost after they’d resurrected her? Her real humanness overcoming their callously bestowed nature?

We finished the heart-wrenching job, and then went back inside, out of the wet and dispiriting weather to begin again the task of living.

“I’m sick of this!” Cynthia cried in the living room. “I’m sick of hiding. I’m sick of lousy vegetables and canned meat. I’m sick of living in a bubble, not knowing what’s happening in a real, live world. I’m sick of wondering and dreading what those horrible creatures’ next surprise for us will be. I so miss my old life, my friends, my…my…I wish they’d killed me along with the rest of everything and everyone I loved.”

It was Mari who threw an unexpected wrench into the equation. “Maybe it wasn’t them who caused the catastrophe. For all we know they simply arrived after the fact to help the remainder of us to pick up the pieces.”

Peter bristled at her comment. “You’re dreaming, Mari! Two and two still equals four. Who or what else could have decimated civilization?”

She looked up at him from her place on the sofa. The look in her eyes wasn’t anger or disbelief, rather deep sadness after his reply. Silence fell on us until Mari stood, walked to the coat tree beside the door, grabbed her winter jacket, and then began to leave.

“Where are you going?” Munster shot at her back. She stopped, one foot outside, the other on the threshold. She slowly turned her head and answered him.

“Goodbye. Don’t follow me, and stay away from the gift they left.” Then she turned again and walked across the porch into the wet and cold of the morning.

“Stop her,” Charles said.

Mari heard the command. She wheeled around with a cold look in her eyes.

“Don’t even try,” she said directly to Charles.

Peter had jumped to his feet and was halfway to the door when she said this. He came to an abrupt halt, as though some invisible force had yanked his collar. If the look on her face when she’d turned was cold, her words were ice.

“You’ll die out there!” Lashawna pleaded with her, but I knew, Peter and Jack and Cynthia and Charles and Jerrick—each of us knew otherwise. Mari walked down the steps, out onto the drive, and then made her way slowly and purposely toward the gate in the distance, not looking back. Her last words to us before she disappeared that morning were, “You’ll be much better off without me. I’m not one of you.”

Chilling, but I, at least, should have expected a warning and eventual goodbye like that. She was a light bulb that one second was all aglow, and then without warning went dark after someone flicked the switch from far