Тим Леббон - New Fears 2 - Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

How many more Saturdays of this to look forward to? She really wanted to know, like right now, but dared not take a hand off the wheel to grab her phone from the console, much less take her eyes off the road. Plan B, then:

“Hey Siri, how long does rut season last this year?”

“Sorry, Casey, I don’t know the answer to that one.”

“Hey Siri, what the fuck good are you?”

“Your language!”

“Hey Siri, you sound like my mother.”

“You’re certainly entitled to that opinion.”

Brought that on herself, hadn’t she? The wiring was old and the roots went deep.

There was a time, when she’d left home twenty-odd years ago, that three hundred miles away sounded like the optimal distance. She could drive it in a few hours when she had to. Fly it in less, in case of emergency. Still far enough away, though. No drop-in visits, endured or expected. No “I was just in the neighbourhood.” Yet it was close enough that it didn’t look like she was trying too hard. It wasn’t a thousand miles. It wasn’t the nuclear option of clear across the country, on the coast. It wasn’t Seattle, or LA, I’d keep on going west but there’s this ocean in the way.

Now, though? Now it was starting to feel like a trap she’d set for herself without realizing it, one that didn’t snap shut until it was too late. Yes, three hundred miles was a haul. But it was a doable haul, so there really were no excuses.

If you’d get up early for a change, you could be here before lunchtime. That would give us most of the weekend. We don’t know how many more weekends we have left, do we?

No, Mom. We don’t.

Proof? Just ask the deer. These poor, single-minded deer.

As always, she stopped to see her father first, because it was on the way in, practically right there as soon as you took the off-ramp from the highway. When she’d moved away, after college, there was hardly anything out here, just gas and greasy food, but the town had gradually shed its oldest, northernmost skin and oozed south to straddle the interstate.

The place they’d moved him to was nice, as assisted-living facilities went, but even here he was under an extra degree of sequestration. The memory care unit was… not solitary confinement exactly; more like Death Row to a prison’s gen pop. Dementia, Alzheimer’s… nobody here was going to get parole. Just getting in to visit family took a staffer with keys. These were the folks at risk of wandering off, who might keep going until tragedy found them.

While they were under twenty-four-hour lockdown, they at least had TV. That kept some of them occupied. The rest contorted themselves into chairs, at strange angles for reasons even they wouldn’t know, staring into space without seeming to see a thing.

“How are you doing, Daddy?”

He was one of the occupieds, watching TV, sort of. He knew it was on but appeared not to care, knowing only that he was supposed to watch it. And he knew her, once it penetrated that Daddy meant him. As the recognition swam up to register in his eyes, he broke into a big, slow smile. Just the sweetest man, still, now that he’d run out of reasons for anger. Something about him had begun to look soft, sexless.

She hugged him, and he smelled okay, better than before he moved out here. They reminded him to wash and kept his clothes clean. They helped dress him, although he still looked like a ragamuffin, dishevelled and diminished, forty pounds lighter than the man who used to pilot the family car and yell for quiet from the back seat.

He asked her how she was. He said he was doing well when she asked him. He spoke with a lisp now, four of his top front teeth gone, having darkened and chipped away after he started neglecting to brush.

“How’s David doing?” he asked.

Casey patted his hand. “David’s fine. He’s keeping as busy as ever.”

Daddy told her he was getting on well here, that there were friends to have coffee with in the morning but they were asleep now.

“How’s David doing?” he asked when the next commercials came on.

He remembered David, had always liked him. He never remembered the divorce.

“He’s doing great,” she said. “He’s training for another marathon.”

That made her father happy to hear.

It was easier, making this visit first, like a warm-up act. It came with fewer expectations. Daddy just seemed happy to see her, and while the past was all he had, he didn’t seem inclined to dig around in the worst of it. The past was all he had, but he lived in the moment, because the prior moments kept crumbling behind him.

“How’s David doing?”

He asked about David eight times while she was there, and each was like the first. Until she kissed him on the cheek and told him she’d see him again soon, and it made him happy to hear that, and when she left, the countdown started again, how long it would take to slip his mind that she’d been there at all.

That was what it was like now, with both of them. Her parents’ existence had become a series of loops. There was no such thing as forward motion any more. Their health had banked into a downward spiral, while the rest of their lives circled back and back again to the same territories whether they liked it there or not. Her father’s loops were smaller, tighter—that was all.

Her mother? Still in the house, under the same old roof, after a few brief detours. She’d tried the ACF route as well, three times, but it never lasted for longer than seventeen days. She had standards, you know, and once she got somewhere, always found reasons why the place didn’t measure up to them. The people weren’t nice. The food was bland. The apartment was too small. The shower curtain wasn’t pretty.

There was no place like home.

Casey had the keys so she could let herself in. Every time, it hit her anew that 3,500 square feet was a tremendous amount of house for one person. The atmosphere still felt as brittle as it ever did when Mom was getting around normally, able to infuse each room and hallway by direct contact. The vibe was a lesser version of wartime killing grounds: People once fought here.

Maybe it was sustained indefinitely by the same looping mechanism that regulated so much of what her mother had to say.

Innocuous Opening #1: “Hi, Mom. How are you getting along?”

“Ohhh… it just goes from bad to worse here.”

Thirty-eight times for that one, word-for-word, since Casey started keeping a tally. Phone calls counted.

Casey said she was sorry to hear that. She was always sorry to hear that.

Mom spent most of her waking hours in a single room now. As went the house, so went the family room, far more square footage than she needed. She interacted with the TV, the sofa, the coffee table… and that was about it. Everything else, from paintings to candle sconces, was just there, stored in place for some eventual estate sale.

Her mother struggled first to sit upright, then to get comfortable. She’d gained the weight Daddy had lost, and then some.

She’d never exercised. Casey couldn’t think of a single time she’d seen her mother exert herself for the sake of exertion. Some gardening, but even that was leisurely. She never so much as went for walks. A lady doesn’t sweat —that was her credo. She meant it, and lived by it. She’d drive around a parking lot for ten minutes to find a spot close enough to spare herself two minutes of walking. And that was when she was thirty-five. A lady didn’t sweat.

Well, now a lady could barely stand up straight. Now a lady was more bulbous than she’d ever been in her life—a neat trick for someone who claimed to go days without eating because there was never any food in the house.