Ryan Thomas - The Summer I Died

I heard a moan. And it came from Jamie’s room.

My gut felt like lead, my knees buckled, I spun around and fell to my ass. It couldn’t be. She was dead, I had listened to her die. Oh God, my sister was alive, and I was suddenly so terrified I couldn’t bring myself to go back down the few steps I’d ascended. She moaned again, a guttural, confused tone that reminded me of a cat I’d once seen crawl into the woods and die after getting hit by a car. Then she coughed and went silent.

I sat for a few seconds, slowly going out of my mind once more, losing any sense of control I had maintained to this point. I felt my shoulders shaking and my head bobbing a bit. I saw the waves in California come back like a tsunami, rolling over me with oblivion. At some point, I could feel myself rising and walking over to the door that hid my sister, though my mind was beginning to drift away somewhere else, erecting defense barriers to deal with what I was about to see.

Oh God, oh please God, oh please don’t let it be bad. Oh, Jamie, I’m sorry, please don’t let it be bad.

I stepped into the room. Everything was black, cast in shadows. The windows had been covered with spray paint or marker or something. A putrid smell hit me full on and would have caused me to vomit had I not already been breathing death for so many days. Still, it was stronger in here than where I’d been. If you painted the walls with a thousand years of decayed flesh, that’s the smell I was experiencing.

Through the distant noises from the backyard and the wind blowing by the windows, I could hear the shallow, labored breathing of my sister from somewhere not far away.

“Jamie?” I called. “Please, Jamie, if you can hear me, just make a small noise.”

There was no reply other than her raspy breath. Feeling around the door jamb, I located a switch and flicked it on, but it did nothing. I walked through the room, sweeping the ax handle in front of me in case there were any traps or sharp objects. I cleared a path through a collection of metal objects that littered the floor, some little, some big, all indistinct.

As I got closer to one of the blackened windows, I could hear Jamie’s breathing getting louder. The stench grew more caustic. Paint was flaking off one of the nearest windows, and some light drizzled through enough that I could see her silhouette. Unlike me, she wasn’t chained to a wall but rather lying on the ground. I stopped a few feet away, afraid to see her up close.

For one thing, from where I stood the shape on the ground looked too small to be Jamie.

I took another step.

Candles had been placed on the floor in a circle around her, most of them now burned down into puddles of wax-like Mystery Woman, I thought.

Another step.

My foot nudged something and I caught a flash of reflected sunlight from a small blade. Assuming it was a knife, I reached down to pick it up and felt many more sharp blades resting near my feet. Knives, handsaws, nails, barbed wire, a hammer, a circular saw blade, several blunt objects that were sticky, lots of rags. I also picked up something smooth and light, and held it up into the thin ray of sun falling through the window.

It was a human bone. And that’s exactly when Jamie’s body lurched.

I jumped back and landed on something sharp, cutting open my hand. In front of me, Jamie’s body bounced up and down like a fish out of water, arcing into the sunlight and slamming back down into shadow. Up and down, up and down, and breathing as if a small rodent was trying to run down her throat. Chains jingled and hit the floor while she thrashed, held tight to what looked like stakes driven into the ground. I caught strobing glimpses of her body in the light. It wasn’t human. It wasn’t anything-a creature that had crawled out of hell, asphyxiating on earth’s atmosphere.

With my hands walking over all the blades, I crawled backwards to the door, my breath caught, the whole while thinking there was no way that thing was my sister. Still clutching the ax, I found my way out the door back into the room I had called home for too long, stood up and took it in. The stove, its small door open with the shovel still sticking out, the fire long since dead. The hedge cutters leaning against the wall. The various devices Skinny Man had left on the table. The bloodstained chains dangling from the wall. The pile of gore in the dog dishes at my feet, with Tooth’s jaw sitting like a crown on top. The sticky puddle of skin from Mystery Woman, who had been so close to freeing us, if only she’d had a few minutes more.

The dice. On the floor near the door, sitting in the sunlight. Two red cubes of terror that had saved my life.

I picked them up, held them in my hand. My number had never come up. Was it luck that had spared me? Or something else? Tooth’s father’s words ran around my mind once more: Got to have a purpose in life.

I put the dice in my pocket. I don’t know why, it just felt right, like I was acknowledging something higher than myself, something ethereal. I think maybe I figured they’d protected me this far, it might be good to have them around.

I saw California again. It came in bursts like that now. One minute I’d be staring at so much blood and horror, the next I was watching the Pacific. I couldn’t control it anymore, something more instinctual was taking over. The sensation of sand between my toes, the smell of salty air in my nose, the susurration of waves in my ears-it was all too real. Part of me wanted to sit down and enjoy it, but instead I headed up the stairs. The thing that used to be Jamie was still alive.

I needed to call for help.

At the top of the stairs, I pushed the door open into the tiny alcove we’d first spied from the trees, and threw my hand over my eyes to block out the daylight. Overcast as it was, the natural light threatened to burst my pupils. The fresh air was like a plumbing snake unclogging my lungs. The smell of evergreen trees and mountain wildflowers made me want to rush out the door at full speed and kiss the ground. It was the best smell I had ever smelled, light and fresh, with hints of pine and sap, juniper and wild lilac. It smelled so safe. Briefly, I believed I could open my eyes and find myself back at home, this whole nightmare having been just that: a nightmare.

It took a few seconds for the ache in my pupils to subside before I could see what was around me. To my right I noticed the door to the driveway, and to my left was the opening to the kitchen.

From outside came Skinny Man’s voice: “I’m sick of this shit, we ain’t gonna find it and quite frankly I don’t care anymore. Just don’t expect any more gifts from me, you ungrateful mutt. Get away from that mound! That ain’t for you, you already had your fill of that one.”

The driveway door wasn’t a viable option or I’d be seen. Plus I needed to find a phone, dial 911, and get some authorities out here pronto. Maybe I could call O’Conners’ bar and tell the skinheads a bunch of eggplants were raping white women here? Knowing the police as intimately as I did, the skinheads would most likely get here quicker. Then again, knowing their kind, they’d probably see Skinny Man and join him in a beer.

Stepping slowly into the kitchen, I scanned the walls and table for a phone but didn’t see one. The blinds on the windows, coupled with the drab slate-colored clouds outside, bathed the room in a dark and gloomy grayness. The walls were covered in wallpaper from the disco era, a faded collision of orange and yellow and brown that reminded me of the puddle of filth on the floor downstairs. The counters were buried under flotsam and jetsam of all sorts: books, papers, dirty dishes, silverware, clothing, toys, bottles, and lots of tools like hammers and screwdrivers. A table sat pushed up against the wall, some dirty plates on it and a fruit bowl with a mostly brown banana in it that matched the walls. A puke green refrigerator hummed in the corner with pictures of Butch and the late Sundance stuck to it with magnets. Next to it sat a stove that looked like it had lost a fight with a jar of Ragu. Flies buzzed at the windows looking for a way out.