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

It wasn’t age, it wasn’t the Parkinson’s, nor anything else in her mother’s mind that had degenerated to bring this on. It was her . Just her. She’d always been this way, only by this point she was off her game, no longer the least bit convincing in prosecuting her case.

So think of all those whippings that hadn’t needed to be administered after all. Casey had never counted, but by the time she’d advanced to middle school—too big to spank now, and needing to be punished in other ways, because privileges had come to mean more than pain—it must have happened two hundred times or more. A conversation going off the rails and she hadn’t even known how, other than that she must not have rolled over in complete submission like a dog baring her throat to the alpha bitch. Maybe she’d asked to do some chore later, rather than sooner. Maybe she’d protested some minor domestic injustice. Even if she had been a smart-mouthed kid at the very beginning, she was a quick learner, and figured out how to neutralize her voice for the sake of peacekeeping.

For all the good that did. Matters always ended up at the same go-to: “Just wait until your father gets home.”

Protests and seeking clarification— What? What did I say? —only made things worse. Okay, she’d been slow to learn that.

“It wasn’t what you said,” her mother would tell her, “it’s how you said it.”

Come evening, though, the replay never sounded anything like the original. As for Dad, well, who was he going to believe, beyond his belief in the power of the belt to set things right?

So thanks, Mom. Thanks for teaching me dread. Thanks for showing me how a master works, to really sell the lie. Thanks for teaching me self-doubt, that no matter how much care I’d taken with each and every syllable, decibel and inflection, I still got it all wrong, but surely that was to be expected from somebody who couldn’t do anything right. That’s how we roll.

And thanks, most of all, for teaching me to mistrust my own memory, my reality.

You can’t imagine what an asset that’s been over the years.

Occurrence tally, only four, but emerging as the hot new trend: “I don’t know why I’ve made it this far. Nobody needs to make it this far.”

She might have had a valid point there, actually. Maybe the human species wasn’t supposed to, and medical science had gotten overzealous to the point of godhood. All that hardy pioneer stock you heard about, from whom they supposedly descended? Those folks were done in long before now:

Here lies the body of Jedediah McGee

Died at the ripened age of 50 and 3

Maybe cholera and bear attacks were overdue for a big comeback.

Mom was wearing her pleading face. “Why can’t you help me with this? Just hold a pillow over my face. They do it on TV all the time. It shouldn’t take long. I won’t fight it.”

“I’m not smothering you, Mom.” Casey huffed a sigh. “It won’t look like you died in your sleep. Can you promise me you won’t rupture the capillaries in your eyes?”

“Yourself yourself yourself, that’s all you ever think about.”

“You’re goddamn right I’m thinking of myself! It’s called matricide. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison for it. But if I did, I’d have a lot of friends there, because ninety per cent of the other women on the cell block would understand.”

Of course she hated herself for it, and would for the rest of the night. Maybe all day tomorrow too. Self-loathing was a strange way to keep yourself sane, but better the verbal outbursts than an aneurysm on the inside.

Sometimes she could almost have fun with it, once she let herself start playing with the contradictions.

Loop tally, twenty-nine: “He’s trying to kill me,” her mother would confide. “You have to stop him.”

“Who?” Even though Casey knew damn well who. There was only one root of all evil under this roof.

“Your father. Who else? Your father’s trying to kill me.”

“Mom, you don’t have to worry about him. He’s been in the memory care unit for a year and a half. They don’t get out. So he can’t be trying to hurt you.”

The aggrieved face. “I know that. Don’t treat me like I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

Mom directed her to the chair across the room and had her run her fingers along the back edge until, ow , she drew back with a slice gouged into the pad of her finger. She wrestled the chair around for a look and found the culprit: an upholstery staple that had worked itself loose.

“He set booby traps before he went. How am I supposed to sleep, not knowing what else he may have done around here? And if you think he doesn’t sneak out, you’re just being naive.”

Early on, Casey could never decide which would be the better way to handle things like this. To play along, so her mother felt heard? Or try to set the record straight so she wasn’t reinforcing the delusions? Eventually she realized it didn’t matter. Either way, her mother had achieved master level status in taking whatever was there and using it to paint everyone involved as the worst human beings in the world.

“Mom, he’s not trying to kill you. He’s always loved you. You’re going to have to trust me on this.”

“You don’t know your father. You’ve never known who he really is. He’s a liar and a cheat. Even if the truth would save his life, he’d lie just to see if he could get away with it. He’s cheated half this town. There are all kinds of things I could’ve told you, but I never did. I didn’t want to hurt you. But you should hear the truth for a change. He wants to kill me for what I know.”

Fun times? Why not: “Then why are you endangering me by bringing me in on this? What’s to stop him from coming after me, too?”

Wrong tone, as usual. It wasn’t what she’d said. Must’ve been how she said it.

“You’re doing it again. Treating me like I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

Fun times, option two: “Listen, if you’re this tired of living, why not let him do it. Then you both get what you want.”

“I don’t want to let him win. My terms. I want to die on my terms.”

And who could argue with that? The sad thing was, there didn’t seem to be any such thing as my terms left anymore. She proved it every day.

“Mom… it’s not Dad. It’s the Parkinson’s. It’s just…” Delusions , she stopped short of saying. It was such a cruel word, a hard-edged word. “Remember the doctor telling you how it might put funny thoughts in your head?”

Mom sat with this awhile, staring straight ahead and down, seeming to try to process it, as though there was enough of a rational side in there to grapple with the matter, push back, assert some dominance. After a couple minutes, she turned back with a sidelong look that curdled into a sweet-and-sour smirk.

“Parkinson’s is hereditary,” she said.

At last the carnage along the highway began to wane. The end of rut season was near, plus maybe the stupid, reckless deer had all been killed off by now. Midway through the trip, Casey spotted a highway crew scraping up another godawful mess into the back of a truck, and wondered how the guys felt about the end of November. If they were relieved, sick of the blood, or if there was job security in it and they missed the overtime.

You could miss anything.

For sure, she missed making this trip in her own car. But in this instance it was safer to borrow from a friend, in case anyone checked later. Her license plate wouldn’t show up anywhere on surveillance video for the weekend, and with a big enough hat and sunglasses and coat, neither would her likeness. Whatever she bought, she would pay for with cash, so forget about a debit card trail.