John Connolly - The Lovers

The shrine was close to where the girl was now working, picking up glasses and taking last orders. It had been a long night, and she had earned every lousy dollar in tips. Her shirt smelled of spilled beer and fried food, and the soles of her feet were aching. She just wanted to finish up, go home, and sleep. She had a day off tomorrow, the first day since she had arrived here that would not involve working at either the coffee shop, or the bar, or both. She intended to sleep late, and do her laundry. Chad, the young man who had been circling her, had asked her out on a date, and she had tentatively agreed to go to a movie with him, even though her thoughts were still filled with memories of Bobby Faraday and what had befallen him. Still, she was lonely, and she figured a movie couldn’t hurt too much.

Ken killed the postmatch commentary in an effort to move folks along a little more quickly, and replaced it with the news. The girl liked the fact that life didn’t begin and end with sports for Ken. He read some, and he knew about what was going on in the world. He had opinions on politics, history, art. According to Shelley, he had too many damn opinions, and he was too willing to share them with others. Shelley was in her fifties, and married to an amiable slob who thought that the sun rose when Shelley awoke and that nightfall was the world’s way of mourning the fact that soon it would be deprived of the sound of Shelley’s voice while she slept. He was already seated at the bar, sipping a light beer as he waited to drive her home. Shelley was fair and worked hard, but as a consequence she didn’t like to see any of her “girls” working less hard than she did. She worked three nights behind the bar, sometimes overlapping with Ken if there was a game on. The girl had so far worked for her five times, and after the first night she had been grateful for the comparative peace of the third night when Ken had taken charge and everything had been a little more relaxed, if also a little less efficient and a little less profitable.

There were only two men left in her section, and they had reached that point of near intoxication where, had the bar not been about to close, she would have been obliged to cut them off. She could tell that they were about to progress from melancholy to mean, and she would be relieved when they were gone. Now, as she cleared away the glasses and empty chicken wing baskets from the table to their right, she felt a pair of taps on her back.

“Hey,” said one of the men. “Hey, honey. Hit us again.”

She ignored him. She didn’t like men touching her like that.

The other one giggled, and sang a snatch of a Britney lyric.

“Hey.”

The tap was harder this time. She turned.

“We’re closing,” she said.

“No, you ain’t.” He ostentatiously examined his watch. “We got another five minutes yet. You can see us right for two more beers.”

“I’m sorry, guys. I can’t serve you any more.”

Above their heads, the news story on the TV changed. She glanced at it. There were flashbulbs and police cars. Photographs were superimposed upon the sce Z aupon the ne: a man, a woman, and a child. She wondered what had happened to them. She tried to figure out if it was someplace local, then saw NYPD on the side of one of the cars and knew that it was not. Still, it couldn’t be anything good, not if they were showing photographs. That woman and the little girl were either missing or dead, maybe the man too.

“What do you mean you can’t give us no more?”

It was the smaller yet more belligerent of the drunks. He wore a Patriots shirt smeared with ketchup and wing juice, and his eyes were glazed behind his cheap spectacles. He was in his midthirties, and there was no sign of a wedding ring. A sour smell rose from him. It had been there right from the moment he arrived. At first, she had thought it was because he didn’t wash, but now she suspected that it was a substance he secreted, a contaminant from within that mingled with his sweat.

“Let it go, Ronnie,” said his friend, who was taller and fatter and also far drunker than his buddy. “I got to hit the head.” He stumbled by her, mumbling an apology. He wore a black T-shirt with a white arrow that pointed toward his groin.

The picture on the screen changed again. She looked up. Another man, different from the first, was caught in the glare of the lights. He looked confused, as though he’d wandered out of his house expecting to find quiet, not chaos.

Wait, she thought. Wait. I know you. I know you. It was an old memory, one that she couldn’t quite place. She felt something stir inside her. There was a buzzing in her head. She tried to shake it away, but it grew louder. Her mouth filled with saliva, and there was a growing pain between her eyes, as though a pin were being inserted into her skull through the bridge of her nose. Her fingertips began to itch.

“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” said Ronnie, but she ignored him. She was experiencing flashes of memory, scenes from a series of old movies playing in her head, except in each one she was the star.

Killing Melody McReady in a pond in Idaho, holding her head beneath the water as her back bucked and the last bubbles of air broke the surface…

Telling Wade Pearce to close his eyes and open his mouth, promising him something nice, a big surprise, and then jamming the gun between his teeth and pulling the trigger, because she had been wrong about him. She thought he might have been the one-what one?-but he was not, and he had begun asking questions about Melody, his girlfriend, and she had smelled the suspicion upon him…

Bobby Faraday, kneeling in the dirt before her, weeping, pleading with her to come back to him, as she walked behind him, took the rope from his saddlebag, and slipped the cord lightly around his neck. Bobby wouldn’t leave her alone. He wouldn’t stop talking. He was weak. He had already tried to kiss her, to hold her, but his touch repelled her now because she knew that he wasn’t the one for her. She had to stop him from talking, from trying to act upon his desires. So the rope tightened and Bobby-strong, lean Bobby-struggled against her, but she was strong, so strong, stronger than anyone could have imagined…

A hand on a stove, and the soft hiss as the gas began to seep out, just as it had seeped out decades before in a house owned by a woman named Jackie Carr; the girl waiting for the Faradays to die, one window op Z ane windowen just enough so that she could take breaths of night air. And then noise from the bedroom, a body tumbling to the floor: Kathy Faraday, almost overcome by fumes, trying to crawl to the kitchen to turn off the gas, her husband already dead beside her. The girl had been forced to sit on Kathy’s back, her mouth covered to protect her from the fumes, until she was sure that the woman was no more…

Leaving signs; carving a name-her name, her real name-in places where others might find it. No, not others: the Other, the One she loved, and who loved her in return.

And dying: dying as the bullets ripped into her and she tumbled into cold water; dying while the Other bled upon her, as she slumped forward in the car seat and her head came to rest upon his lap. Dying, over and over again, yet always returning…

A hand tugged on her arm. “You fucking bitch, I said-”

But Emily wasn’t listening. These were not her memories. They belonged to another, one who was not her yet was in her, and at last she understood that the threat from which she had been fleeing for so long, the shadow that had haunted her life, had not been an external force, an outside agency. It had been inside her all along, waiting for its moment to emerge.

Emily raised her hands to her head, pressing her fists into the sides of her skull. She closed her eyes tightly and ground her teeth as she struggled against the gathering clouds, trying in vain to save herself, to hold on to her identity, but it was too late. The transformation was occurring. She was no longer the girl she had once believed herself to be, and soon she would cease to be forever. She had a vision of a young woman drowning, just as Melody McReady had drowned, fighting against the coming oblivion, and she was both that woman and the one who was holding her down, forcing her beneath the water. The dying girl broke the water for the last time and looked up, and in her eyes was reflected a being both old and terrible, a black, sexless thing with dark wings that unfurled from its back, blocking out all light, a creature that was so ugly it was almost beautiful, or so beautiful that it had no place in this world.