Max Booth III - We Need to Do Something

“ Help! Heelllp! I’m being held prisoner by a coven of witches! A coven of witches has killed my boy! They’ve murdered my son in cold blood and I am next! Please! Pleeaase! ”

He continues screaming nonsense for several minutes before going limp against the door and passing out. Mom and I don’t dare move or make a sound. Neither of us are in much of a hurry to find out what happens next time he wakes up.

Noise explodes on the other side of the door. Dad jolts awake, snapping his head around the room, screaming. “I can’t see anything! I can’t fucking see! What’s that fucking noise? What the fuck?”

“I don’t know,” Mom says. “Music, I think.” She glances down at me, confused.

Of course I recognize the sound.

It’s my phone.

Someone’s calling me.

Amy.

You’re alive.

Dad reaches through the door opening and feels around the carpet in their bedroom. “Oh, shit, I think I got it,” he says, excited, and pulls my cell phone back into the bathroom with him.

Somehow it’s survived through the rain.

Somehow the battery isn’t dead.

I remain paralyzed across the room, unconvinced I’m not hallucinating again. This can’t be real.

Can it?

Dad answers my phone and presses it against his ear, listening for a moment, and says, “Yes. Of course. Yes. No. I understand. Yes. Of course.”

Then he snaps the phone and tosses the separated halves back through the door.

“What the fuck, Robert?” Mom says.

He starts slowly crawling across the bathroom, through vomit and blood and shit and piss, a lunatic smile carved across his face. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Robert. Stop. Who did you talk to? Who called?”

He nods at me, somehow seeing me despite his recent loss of sight. “She’s the one who caused this, which means she’s the only one who can end it.”

“Wh-what?” I whisper.

“Robert…”

He springs forward, wrapping his hands around my throat and slamming the back of my skull against the wall, screaming.

“ KILL THE WITCH KILL THE WITCH KILL THE WITCH! ”

Mom shouts somewhere nearby and tackles him off me. He rolls over on his back next to the toilet and Mom straddles his stomach, slapping his face with one hand after the other.

“ LEAVE HER ALONE LEAVE HER ALONE LEAVE HER ALONE! ”

The whole time she’s hitting him, he’s laughing loud and insane.

She leans to the side and knocks the toilet lid off the trash can, then flips over the container.

Only a second passes before the rattlesnake strikes out, somehow still alive, starving just like the rest of us, and latches its fangs onto Dad’s left cheek.

He screams, this time in legitimate pain, and throws Mom off him like she weighs nothing.

He sits up. The snake remains hanging from his face. He won’t stop screaming.

No, not screaming.

Laughing.

He’s fucking laughing.

He rips the snake from his cheek and opens his mouth real wide and bites the creature’s head clean off, then spits it toward Mom.

“…kill the witch kill the witch kill the witch kill the witch…”

He stands, holding the decapitated snake’s body, twirling it around like a lasso. Mom tries backpedaling while still on the floor but where the hell is she going to go?

“…kill the witch kill the witch…”

He whips her with the snake, over and over, enjoying the sound of her screams.

Behind them, somehow, I manage to make it to my feet. In one hand I hold the glass shard he used to cut open Bobby’s body, part of Dad’s shirt still wrapped around the handle. The weapon’s covered in blood and other things I can’t dare to speculate on.

I raise it over my head and approach him, body trembling.

Once I begin stabbing him in the back, I don’t stop until my arms are too heavy to lift, and by then he’s long dead.

Mom and I retreat to the opposite side of the bathroom and sit against the wall. Mom’s face is a shredded mess from the snake whippings. Looking at her makes me cry, so I stop looking at her.

We hold each other, shaking, and drift off into some definition of sleep.

I think Mom thinks I’m dead, and I don’t know if she’s wrong.

Eventually she abandons me against the wall and crawls over to Dad’s mangled body. She scoops up the glass shard from his back, then crawls closer to the door and begins stabbing the wood. I don’t know how long she does this. Hours. Days. Years. Time means nothing anymore. I can’t move. I can’t talk. Everything is so weak. If I’m not dead, then it’ll happen soon enough. The glass slices into Mom’s hands the longer she digs into the wood and blood leaks down and her face grimaces and she cries and screams and does not stop digging, and digging, and digging, and her cries are so loud and her blood is everywhere and still she digs, until finally the hole is just wide enough for a small, starving body to slip through.

“I’ll come back, baby,” she whispers. “I’ll come back. Let me just… let me just see…”

She tosses the glass aside and doesn’t waste a second before entering the new door.

A door within a door.

I wake up to something licking my hand. Spot is nestled in my lap, dirty and smelly but alive. I pet him and tell him he’s a good boy and that I love him very much and fall back asleep. I do not ask how he got his tongue back. It would not be polite. When I wake up again, he’s gone but my hand is still wet. I nod off again seconds later.

“Wake up,” Amy’s whispering. So close to my face I can feel her breath. It smells terrible. I open my eyes and she’s in my lap. Nude and covered in dried blood. Her scars are no longer scars but split-open wounds.

Thin black tentacles keep her limbs attached to her body.

“Wake up, wake up, wake up.”

I try telling her I’m awake but it’s too hard to talk. She caresses my cheek. I desperately want her to kiss me.

Instead she nuzzles her face against my neck, relaxing in my limp embrace.

“You did all you could,” she tells me. “Some people, they aren’t meant to be fixed, no matter what you do. Some people are cursed from birth.”

She squeezes my hand and I can feel her tears dripping down my chest.

I want to taste them so bad it hurts.

“None of this is your fault. It’s nobody’s fault. All you did was try to help.”

She sits up again to look me dead in the eyes. The black tentacles slip in and out of her mouth, lifting her jaw up and down to form words.

“The truth is, Mel, you can’t prevent the inevitable. No one can. All you can do is delay it for a little while.”

Then she leans forward and I part my lips just wide enough to inhale her parasites and it’s like we’re kissing for the first time all over again.

Amy.

I love you so much.

Please don’t leave me.

Loud breathing.

Crying.

Mom rushing back into the bathroom, eyes wide, a new energy to her face, tears down her cheek.

Frantic.

She crawls through the bathroom, through the blood and vomit and shit smearing the floor, crawls back to me and grabs me tight and squeezes for dear life.

I don’t know if I’m awake or asleep or alive or dead or what.

Amy’s gone and I don’t know if she was ever actually here.

I don’t think it matters anymore.

Mom rocks us back and forth, refusing to look at the hole, at the door within a door, whispering,

“It’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s going to be okay it’s