The Stranger: Chapter 6 · 4:38am Apr 12th, 2014
The Stranger
Chapter 6
Sara woke up with the faint impression of hearing a door slamming. She looked at the clock, to see that it was 9:45 am, far earlier than they planned to leave.
“Jeff!” she cried out, rushing to open the front door while still in her pajamas. She closed the door with a frustrated sigh after seeing his car driving off too fast for her to intercept.
“It’s a bright sunny day in Gold Rush Park,” the voice of Bethany Kangagnu informed her from the living room television. “And a large crowd has gathered early to witness the historic...and rather unsettling...visit from the cast of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.”
Leaving the TV on, Sara went to her room, got her phone, and called Jeff, but he didn’t answer. “Probably because he’s busy driving,” she said to herself. She got dressed, styled her hair, and put on the hoodie, nodding at her reflection in the bathroom mirror in satisfaction. Her hair was now electric blue in color, frosted and spiked. The hood of her hoodie was adorned with a blue-outlined embroidered unicorn horn, the pockets had Vinyl Scratch’s cutie mark on them, and as the final touch she put on the pair of oversized purple reflective sunglasses she had ordered from the optometrist. “Now we’re talkin’,” she said to the mirror.
Walking out of her room, she saw that Jeff’s bedroom door was once again open. She stopped for a second to think. Pulling out her phone, she tried to dial her brother once more, and was again met by no answer. “Oh, well...” she said with a smile, and walked inside.
She headed for the computer desk. Seeing the stuffed animal before her in its usual place, she frowned and brought up her phone’s web browser to find out more about it. “That’s funny,” she said to herself, “according to this, there’s no such character as Professor Spike. But if that’s the case, how come I know what it’s—”
She stopped in shock on seeing that the stuffed dragon was now facing her, his embroidered eyes looking at her with a seemingly beseeching look. Curious, she reached out and lightly touched its snout...
...And was propelled back unto the bed by a powerful bolt of lightning that sprang from dragon muzzle to human hand with a roar. Sara’s head jerked back violently as her eyes glowed white, and foreign impressions forced themselves upon her senses...
I looked down contemptuously at Jeff Scribner as he tapped away at his keyboard. He was hunched over like a paranoid vulture from the perpetual perch of his office chair.
Catching my glare of disapproval, he stopped to look up at me. “I know what I’m doing,” he addressed me.
I did not give him the satisfaction of an answer.
“It’s the only way,” he continued. “I betrayed our friendship over that last story of mine.” He gestured at the screen, as if the person being referred to lived within it. “He was trying to hold back to keep from hurting my feelings, but I used emotional blackmail to force him to tell me the truth. I had to break it off with him after that.”
I think he could tell from my expression how much I believed that excuse.
“If I just told him the truth, then he would have been forced to forgive me, out of a sense of decency and compassion. I couldn’t do that to him.” He repeated his words as he looked beseechingly up at him: “I couldn’t! I had to hurt him so much that he’d never have anything else to do with me again.” He hung his head. “It was his only hope of ever being happy again. I poison everything I touch.”
This was too much. I wanted to tell him how much he meant, to me and those around him, but he would have none of it.
“Shut up!” he screamed, jumping to his feet and reaching for my face...
Sara took in a lungful of air with a gasp, feeling like she was returning to life. She sat up and looked about her wildly. Across the room was the Professor Spike doll, sitting in the exact place that the scene she had just experienced must have been witnessed from. “What was that?” she asked herself in equal parts fear and awe.
With some care she raised herself to her feet. She walked over to the computer desk and got a close look at the stuffed dragon. There was nothing to see that she hadn’t already seen about the hand-made figure, other than the fact that its expression could possibly be interpreted as disappointment, especially from the viewpoint of somebody sitting in the office chair. With extreme hesitation, she reached forward and touched the muzzle of the stuffed animal once more.
This time, nothing happened.
She experimentally prodded the dragon in a few other places, to a similar lack of results. She even picked it up and shook it a little. Finally, she put it back. She was going to leave the room when she saw a picture frame face-down on the carpet. She guessed that it must have once rested on top of the dresser beside the bed, and that it had been knocked down when she had had her vision. She reached out to pick it up, only for a bolt of lightning to spring between it and her hand. A familiar sensation of somebody else’s memory overwhelmed her once more...
It was on Sara’s fourth birthday. I told Henry that it was a mistake, that we should just have a regular holiday/birthday, but he just wouldn’t listen.
I made the trip down to Carquinez in a sulky silence from the passenger seat, while Henry entertained the children with stories of past Thanksgivings with the family they had never met. Sara got out her sketchpad and crayons, and started scrawling what she thought Grandma might look like. At her age it was nothing but a vaguely circular blotch of blue, but frankly, I’ll take any artistic talent from my children I can get.
At one point Jeffy saw what I was doing, and tried to cheer me up with a “Knock-Knock” joke. I pretended that it worked.
Finally we arrived at the house, the smell of rotting fish in the air. It wasn’t foggy, but a noticeable clamminess hung in the air nevertheless. I got the kids into their candy-themed jackets while Henry went to the door. He knocked and knocked and knocked, but got no answer. All while the smoke continued to waft out of the chimney.
Jeffy and Sara were beginning to pick up on their father’s growing desperation, so I distracted them with my camera. I got a really good picture of them in front of the house, and I’m pretty sure I saw somebody peeking out at us from behind the bay window’s curtain.
Henry got into the car, and started honking the horn. “Come on!” he cried out. “You always said anybody was welcome at Thanksgiving!”
“Mommy? When are we going to see Grandma?” Sara asked.
“Grandma’s sick,” I explained. Quietly, so Henry couldn’t hear. Seeing the neighbors begin to open their doors to see what was going on, I started to walk away. “Now who’s gonna catch me?” I asked eagerly.
“Me! Me!” my children cried out in unison.
“I’m pretty fast...” I said, slowly increasing my pace.
“I’m the fastest!” Sara cried, trotting after me.
Being older, Jeffy was easily able to pass her. He caught up to me and pushed, and I allowed us both to fall down on the grass. Jeffy’s laughter tinkled like little silver bells in my head. Sara caught up and fell on top of us, causing even more laughter.
Meanwhile, the door of the Scribner home had finally opened, and a crooked old woman emerged, her weight supported by a sturdy cane, and the rest of her supported by the Bible clutched in one claw-like hand. Henry, delighted that his childish scheme had worked, jumped out of the car and ran over to his diminutive mother. She made up for her size with the volume of her voice. “You God-forsaken wastrel!” she cried out for all of the neighbors to hear. “Why do you dare to introduce that papist Wop to this blessed home? Put her aside, son, and return to the light of the true faith!”
Jeffy stood up. “Why are we here?” he asked me, suddenly afraid.
Why were we here? Why were we in this intolerant backwater instead of Los Angeles? Why weren’t we back somewhere where I wasn’t hated for the color of my skin or the faith I had left behind? Back where I could do what I loved, instead of doing accounting for an ignorant woman who considered herself superior to me only because she had a million dollars to her name, and I did not. Why did I let myself get stuck with a man who could only stand up to his mother when he was two hundred miles away from her, and who ran back to her at the first opportunity regardless of the consequences?
“Mommy?” “Mommy?”
Because of those two, that’s why. No matter how much I’ve given up, I swear by whatever deity that may exist that I will see them succeed where I have failed.
“I bet her precious Pope ordered her to kill me today! That’s why she’s here, isn’t it? Isn’t it?!”
I grabbed Jeffy and Sara’s hands roughly with one hand and dragged them over, then Henry’s hand as well. “We’re going,” I said to him, in no uncertain terms.
I got us all in the car, and started to drive away.
“No child of a papist can be saved!” the witch screeched from the street, her Bible-clutching fist shaking in the air. “They’re damned for all time! Damned for all time!”
Sara shook violently as she recovered. She felt like her innards had frozen solid. She looked down at the photograph, to see that it was the same one from her bedroom that depicted herself and Jeff as young children. The ghostly face of a vengeful old woman was visible glaring outward from behind the drapery.
Sara blinked a few times, shaking her head until the image of the angry old woman was revealed as a figment of her imagination. “It didn’t happen that way!” she told herself firmly. “And she never let her faith get in the way of her love. It’s a lie!” She looked out the door of the room with concern. “Jeff, what have you done to yourself?”
She blinked once more, and took in a quick lungful of air. She seemed surprised to still be on the ground holding the picture frame. It took a couple of tries, but eventually Sara was able to rise to her feet and put the photo back on the dresser.
She stood still a few moments as her heart rate came back down to normal levels. She reached out to the door handle in order to leave, but stopped herself, staring fearfully at the metal knob.
After a moment’s thought, she sat back down on the bed and looked carefully around the room. Her eyes were almost instantly caught by the NetFlix DVD on the desk. Her lip quivered as she remembered the sounds of Jeff crying last night, almost certainly as the result of something seen on that DVD. She brought her hands up to her mouth, blowing hot air over them in a vain attempt to warm herself up. She lowered her head and sighed, saying, “I’m such a glutton for punishment.” And then, finally, she reached forward and tapped the DVD with one finger.
The vision filled her eyes...
The first and last time I had a significant conversation with Sara’s best friend Marie, it was when she was fourteen and I was sixteen.
I never really talked to Sara’s friends, except when we were playing D&D, and even then, I never talked out of character with them. They were girls, see, and I was far too nervous.
Marie was that, and so much worse. Below the neck she was absolutely gorgeous, and as a straight male of that age, of course I noticed. But above the neck was a monstrosity that would give the painter of Guernica nightmares. There had been operations of course...so very many operations, to the point that the scar tissue crowded out what she had been born with.
I wasn’t supposed to stare. Not below the neck, and most certainly not above it, either.
Sara and I were at her apartment that Saturday afternoon, helping her clean up the place. Her mother was very busy, with two jobs to raise enough for all the operations, so she wasn’t there to do any cleaning herself. Her dad’s alimony helped, it helped a great deal. It would have been better if he was actually there, but he was an obsessive-compulsive neat freak like you wouldn’t believe, somebody who could not stand slobber of any kind without having a nervous breakdown. And his daughter had been born without a complete mouth. I wonder sometimes, if God exists, if He considers us nothing more than the punch lines to His cruel jokes.
This happened a lot, cleaning up Marie’s apartment. Usually it was just Sara helping out, but my parents had gotten it into their heads that an adult was needed to supervise two teen girls, and as they were unavailable, I would just have to do.
The cleaning by this point was pretty much done, or at least done enough that we could take a break, so we were plunked down in a couch, watching Part 1 of “The Daemons” from Doctor Who. It was Marie, then Sara, then me. That way I wouldn’t be caught staring.
Suddenly Sara jumped up with a very embarrassed look on her face and said she had to use the bathroom. We both looked at her oddly, then Marie gestured her assent, and Sara was off.
Several minutes passed. On the television, Jon Pertwee’s Doctor and Katy Manning’s Jo Grant are trying to reach the cursed town of Devil’s End before the televised opening of an ancient tomb awakens an even more ancient evil. Roger Delgado’s Master is involved, as he always is, leading a secret Satanic cult while posing as the village priest.
An uncomfortable number of minutes passed. I wondered if Sara was having her period. This was an intensely uncomfortable subject for me to bring up, so I said nothing. I looked around me, at the cheap reproductions of Romantic Era paintings of damsels and knights, unicorns and dragons, that hung on the walls.
# # #
“Stop!” the Doctor on the television cries out as he runs across the moors. “Stop that dig!” Jo struggles to keep up.
In their underground crypt, the coven mutters their incantations, wreathed in incense. “By the power of earth,” the Master intones, “by the power of air, by the power of fire eternal, by the waters of the deep, I conjure thee and charge thee, Azal! Arise, arise at my command!” The group join voices to shout: “Azal! Azal! Azal!”
At the dig, the Doctor rushes into view. “Stop! Don’t pull that stone!”
But he is too late. The stone falls free, the earth shakes, the air fills with unseasonal snow. The camera crew at the site flee titanic winds and a deafening roaring. A spotlight topples over and is extinguished. The Doctor and archaeologist fall to the ground, seemingly lifeless.
Across town, the Master laughs in triumph, as the crypt shakes and candle flames gutter. “Azal!”
“Look!” cries a terrified cultist.
And the stone statue of the demon turns to look at the camera, its eyes glowing like coals.
# # #
“That was good!” Marie said as the credits rolled and the familiar theme music played. “What did you think?” And then she grabbed up a paper towel to clean up the drool.
Of course, she didn’t really say those words. Not in any intelligible sense. Sara could understand her perfectly. I had far less experience, so I just made my best guess as to what she meant to say.
“Oh,” I said, trying desperately to look anywhere but at her. “Yes, that was rather effective, I suppose.”
This was it: our first genuine conversation. I thought that she might be interested in me, by the way she looked at me when she thought I wasn’t looking. But then, I was quite convinced at the time that I was the center of the universe, that I had been epically wronged by my oppressors, but someday I’d show them all and end up rich and powerful...but not famous, because I always felt funny when people looked at me for too long. So of course I assumed that every woman who didn’t run screaming from me was secretly in love.
She started going on in some detail about what parts of the show interested her, interrupted by frequent clean-up sessions, and involving a three-ring binder that I noticed she kept by her a lot. It was decorated with daisies that I think Sara might have drawn for her. As near as I could tell, she was comparing the plot of the episode we had just seen to some stories that she had written. And by the fact she was presenting the notebook to me, that meant she wanted my opinion.
Well, this had to be nipped in the bud as soon as possible. This was my chance to turn her life around. “Fiction’s a waste of time,” I told her bluntly.
“What?” she replied. That word at least I was very sure of.
“It’s all lies, isn’t it?” I asked, gesturing at the screen, which at that moment displayed a bank of PBS volunteers holding Part 2 of “The Daemons” hostage until they raised $32,000. “No matter how entertaining the story, it isn’t true. That’s why I don’t waste time on fiction. History, biography, science—those are the things worth reading. I’ve got the complete Cosmos on videotape—captured it all myself. I’ve pretty much got the whole thing memorized.” I continued on in this vein.
And meanwhile Marie looked around her, at the binders of stories, at the paintings, and in her mind’s eye at the elaborate dresses her mother sewed for her for when they went to Renaissance Fairs, one of the few times when she was among a group that didn’t mock her for her appearance.
And because I dumped on them, she decided that they were all worthless. I saw her drop her binder into a garbage can, and I beamed.
“That’s the spirit!” I said.
At this point, Sara finally emerged from the bathroom. She looked like death warmed over. “We’re going home,” she said. “Now.”
I jumped up and put my coat on. “See ya, Elephant Girl!” I said gaily on the way out.
Yes, I actually said that.
We never spoke again, and two years later, she was dead.
Nowadays I read and write fiction as if they are my only salvation, but everything I write is crap, and nothing I read fills the emptiness in my soul.
And I’ve never been able to make it to Part 2 of “The Daemons”.
# # #
Sara staggered out of Jeff’s room, doorknob be damned. She grabbed her embroidered hoodie from the dining room chair where she had left it. She looked over at the DVD player’s clock to see that it was 10:39.
The TV was still on. An exasperated Bethany Kangagnu was standing on some worn-down grass near a busy street. The object of her exasperation was Armando Maldonado, who was standing beside her.
“We have had no word that the ponies have been sighted anywhere in Roseville, Citrus Heights, Fair Oaks or Rancho Cordova,” Bethany reported. “Despite the fact that they will have to go through one of those locations to reach Gold Rush Park from Placerville.”
“Something has to be done,” said Maldonado. In contrast with Bethany’s exasperation, his tone was disgust. “Hasbro has been manipulating the public for far too long. I predict that something is going to happen to reveal what kind of people this company attracts.”
“Please, Armando,” Bethany begged. “You’ve been saying this for three hours now. Our viewership is very impressionable.”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” Maldonado hissed. “Somebody listening to my words is going to die today, and when they do, Hasbro and every show and product they produce is going to be doomed. That is an order!”
Sara looked back in the direction of Jeff’s room. Jeff had left for Gold Rush Park right after he turned the TV on.
After he had gotten his marching orders.
Question; you knew that by putting this up in a public space, someone (me) would read it and try to interact with you over it; what contingency plans had you formulated for such an occurrence?