There Are Limits Read online

  The only scents were the bitter tones of her vomit and stale disinfectant.

  She’d had a service clean the house, after. One of the local reporters had gotten a copy of the report they’d provided and detailed all the places that had needed sanitizing and scrubbing. There had been too many to fit on a single paper, and behind the droning voice of the man on camera, it just went on and on, scrolling from the bottom to the top of the TV screen in an endless litany of pain. She’d watched, weeping until the shirt she’d worn had been heavy with it all.

  The station manager had called, after, and apologized. “We didn’t intend to invade your privacy like that—” Then he’d paused, stumbling over what to call her, a confident man seemingly unsure of himself in this moment where someone who reported to him, whom he’d likely hired and mentored, had gone too far in their small community, dragging her over the coals of their ambitions. “Misty,” he’d finished, using her given name finally, and in that, she’d heard the voice of the boy she’d gone to school with. A boy she’d once kissed under the same bleachers that Ellie would later sit on and watch her father play softball.

  “It’s okay, Lawrence,” she’d told him, keeping her words soft so her voice wouldn’t shake. So he couldn’t hear how shaken she was from all this. How crushed everything had left her, damaged in the wake of it all. “It’s okay.”

  Something moved in the hallway, and she whipped her head around, staring at nothing.

  “I wish it hadn’t happened. Had never happened. I wish it couldn’t happen.”

  She could wish for days and nothing would change.

  She had wished.

  Would wish.

  Would never stop wishing.

  She vomited again, wrung out by the force of her body’s betrayal, resting her head on the seat for a moment before she moved to flush, wipe, toss, and fall back on her butt on the floor.

  “I wish.”

  She imagined she could hear them sometimes.

  Laughter would echo up the stairwell and she’d rush to the banister, hanging far over to see the front door, certain in that instant that her children had just come inside. Arguing over whose turn it was to pick the movie, who had to take the garbage out, who had to tell Mom about pictures, or tests, or a party.

  “I wish.”

  Her familiar refrain was the only echo in the house tonight.

  The pictures in the hallway called to her, and Misty paused in front of each, touching their tiny faces held indefinitely behind glass, frozen in these moments she’d felt memorable.

  There were thousands of other images in her cloud storage, but she hadn’t been able to make herself look at those. Her phone had been set to upload them automatically, so there would be ones from the week before, the day before, the morning of—and she didn’t know if she could bear to look at those candid faces, the photos where their personalities burst through like cracks in a frozen river, splintering and toppling anything in their way.

  Curled on the bed, she flipped the pillow and closed her eyes, phone on the charging pad on the table, feet tucked and twined together, knees to her chest.

  “I wish it had never happened.”

  When she woke this time, it was sudden, startling, her body reacting to whatever fight-or-flight signal her brain had given, rolling off the far side of the mattress and to her feet in a single movement. A figure stood in the doorway, shoulders blocking out the light, and for a brief, shining moment, she thought it was Daryl. Misty opened her mouth to shout out something. Then the figure flickered, in and out, and was gone.

  She stared at the doorway until the alarm on her phone finally sounded, the first time in more than a year. A year and a day, and that damn flicker was back.

  Maybe it’s an aneurysm, she thought hopefully.

  Around noon she made her way down the stairs, phone in hand. Instead of her usual calls, instead of accepting the incoming conversations, she sent them to voice mail, responding with a canned lie of On the road. I’ll respond soo. Something her family would expect, right down to the mistake. They’d know it was her and wouldn’t worry. Instead, she made a different series of calls.

  “Yes, I understand I’ll lose my deposit. I will contact you when I’m ready for the movers to come, but cancel the packers scheduled for Saturday.” She stared at the doorway, the flicker of the figure stronger again, lines and shadows of clothing apparent at times. “Thank you.”

  The call disconnected, and whatever it was that had followed her downstairs faded.

  On impulse, she opened a music application, selecting the first recommendation. As the music started—a soothing modern something Daryl would have hated and she couldn’t say she liked overmuch—the figure’s outline strengthened. She turned the volume up, and the edges became more defined.

  Seated on the third-from-the-bottom stair, she fiddled with the phone, playing a video on an internet browser while the music app droned on, and the figure, now standing in the middle of the living room—a place where she hadn’t been able to make herself go for a year—solidified more. With the volume far up, so loud that if she’d been talking over it, she would have had to shout, she watched as the man’s face filled in, brow furrowed in what looked like frustration, jaw tight, mouth moving as if he were speaking without making a sound.

  She tweaked things again, then found a third app that would share the phone’s speakers with the other two, and the cacophony of sound was so loud she thought perhaps her neighbors would hear. Unlikely, as they’d never heard anything before, none of the sounds she’d imagined her family making even registering for them.

  If their statements were to be believed, the entire atrocity had been conducted in silence, something even the detective she didn’t like had found annoying enough to shake his head at. So now, her attempt to channel whatever spirit or apparition had found a place in her home through the electronic noises conducted from her phone would likely have them dialing the police. She wondered if they’d come in quietly or with sirens blazing as they had the morning she’d called, voice hoarse from screaming in the upstairs hallway when the responding officers had been barreling up the stairs, guns drawn.

  With a snap and a buzz, the figure stopped flickering, ceased being a shadow, and started casting one instead, and she sat frozen as a string of nonsense syllables burst from his lips. “So biocac aire tamma, parehat enyd rebme cedrebme vonrebot, biocac aire eriferus ruof sseccus.” With the last pair of sounds still rolling around the room, he settled back on his heels and pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes, then his ears, then his eyes again in what looked like a ritual. “Biocac aire tamma.” He bowed slightly, the barest of inclines of his upper body, not towards her but the wall to her side. “Aire sseccus.”

  Heart pounding, Misty breathed in slowly, deliberately not making a sound, not afraid per se, but not confident in the least. After all, she’d appeared to conjure him out of thin air using nothing more than electronic static and sound. Perhaps sound would drive him away again, and she wanted—needed—to know what he was, why he was here. Maybe he was here to answer her prayers?

  I wish it had never happened, her mantra for the past three hundred sixty-six days.

  His mouth moved, and sounds burst from him—out of sync with the shape of his lips, but somewhere along the edges of the noise were words. They got closer and closer, bending back into shape until it was like listening to someone with a thick accent. A listener would know they spoke English of a sort, but their version or dialect was just out of range of what the brain expected.

  That frustrated expression rode his features hard, bristling eyebrows pulled together over his deep-set eyes. For a brief second, everything snapped back into alignment, but instead of words, he repeated something from before. “Aire sseccus.” With a slow breath in, he closed his eyes and faded somehow. She’d have been hard-pressed to explain what it looked like, but then again, she’d be hard-pressed to tell anyone about this conjuration, so maybe it didn’t matter.
“Aire eriferus ruof sseccus. Biocac aire tamma.”

  “I don’t understand.” Unbidden, her mouth moved, spewing words that had him upright and at attention in an instant, his eyes flashing open as he stared at her.

  “Aire sseccus.” He gestured towards her, then lifted his hand to his mouth with a rolling motion. “I don’t understand.” The words were unsynchronized again, and she could have sworn on a stack of Bibles that his mouth hadn’t made those sounds. “I don’t understand.”

  “Who are you?” There went her mouth again, but this time, it was at least a question Misty wanted answered. “How did you get here?” That was the first real question she’d asked, and finally she felt in control again. “Are you an angel?”

  “I don’t understand.” He spoke, then paused and blinked at her. When she didn’t respond, he continued his parroting. “Who are you? How did you get here? Are you an angel?” She assumed that last word had been angel, but the sound he’d made hadn’t registered as a word, instead sounding like the claxon bell of an alarm. She flinched at the cacophony, and he tipped his head to the side, studying her. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Misty.” She pointed to herself. “Misty.”

  “Misty,” he agreed with a softening of his features. Then he pointed at himself. “I wish it had never happened.”

  She froze in place, every muscle locking up until she wasn’t certain she was even breathing. “What?”

  “I wish it had never happened.”

  There it was again, proof that he’d heard her pleas spoken on the open air in empty rooms.

  “I wish.” Another gesture towards his chest. He nodded, the barest dip of his chin towards her. “Misty.” Forefinger pointed towards where she sat. “Misty.”

  Neither moved for a long moment. Misty let her eyes close, lids drifting down, down, down, bringing darkness with them as bile rose in her throat. She swallowed convulsively as saliva flooded her mouth, her body reacting to the mental overload. Her stomach rolled, and a clammy sweat chilled her skin.

  Without opening her eyes, she uttered her timeworn phrases again. “I wish it had never happened. I wish it couldn’t happen. I wish.”

  Deep, resonant, a voice spoke from directly beside her ear, more a demand than a request, and she couldn’t understand what he wanted, but the events from more than a year ago raced through her brain. Every connection within her brain felt flung wide open, flooding her with memory after memory.

  “Tell me what you wish. Tell me what happened. Give me the burden.”

  Memories and pain

  She braked hard, just short of her turn, and looked at the vehicles arranged in the driveway, then backed up so she could park in the street, grousing the whole time about the long walk up to the house. Dusty’s SUV stood at the top of the driveway, with Ellie’s car parked behind, and that was a warning all its own. Her daughter should have already been out of the house and off to theater practice, because this morning was the dress rehearsal for Ellie’s performance tonight.

  Inside the garage, she stumbled to a stop when she saw Daryl’s car. He shouldn’t be there, wasn’t expected home for two more days, the conference not ending until Sunday. That was why, when the hospital had called Misty in unexpectedly, Dusty had offered to stay over with the kids. “Dammit. He could have called.”

  She hoped he wasn’t ill, but her focus had to be on making sure their daughter kept up with her commitments, so Misty was already calling out when she finally forced her way into the house, the door from the garage unexpectedly locked, which meant she’d had to dig for her keys. “Ellie, you’re late. Up and at ’em, honey.”

  It was silent in the house. Her children were never quiet. She and Daryl often joked how they’d had trompers and stompers instead of ninjas. A silent house usually meant the three parts of her heart weren’t home, whether off to school or on their biannual weekend spent with grandparents. Neither could be the case today. “Ellie, get up, sweets. You’re late.”

  She glanced in the living room and saw Dusty’s hair tousled and ruffled around her head where it was burrowed into a pillow. Misty called quietly, knowing her yells would wake her sister eventually. “Sorry, sis, but she’s gotta be up.” Dusty would complain and whine a little, but a cup of coffee would be all the reparation needed. They were unlike in that regard, with Misty the morning person growing up and Dusty the night owl.

  She kicked off her shoes at the bottom of the stairs and pelted up, still calling out to Ellie. “Baby girl, you gotta get going.” There was a stain on the rug in the middle of the steps, and whatever it was soaked through the bottom of one sock, leaving it unpleasantly cold and wet. “Oh, Jesus. You couldn’t throw a towel down?” Without turning, she called back to Dusty, expecting her to be slowly waking. “Was one of the kids sick last night?”

  No response, but Misty was in the hallway now, so she kept moving forwards. Chad’s door was closed, which wasn’t normal, because he preferred to be able to hear the rest of them, even in his sleep. Maybe he was the one who’d been sick on the stairs. Misty shook her head and continued on, passing Michael’s door, too. Silence from inside his room instead of the raucous video game music he preferred and seemed to play nonstop. He’d probably set a timer and the playlist had run out, or Daryl might have turned it off when he got home. He wasn’t a fan of the night-long concerts Michael regularly treated them to.

  “Ellie,” she said as she rapped twice with the backs of her fingers. Pushing open the door, she told her daughter, “You’re late.”

  Red paint had splattered up the wall beside Ellie’s bed and dripped fat circles onto her pillow and sheet. Her hair was matted on one side, clumped strands drawn over her face as if she were wet with sick sweat. Theater makeup had smeared across one cheek, leaving a swath of cherry color behind. “Oh, honey. Are you…”

  That final word didn’t make it past her lips because the blue sheen of her daughter’s skin sank in, bringing everything to a screeching halt. Her brain couldn’t take in what she saw, sloughed it aside as a mistake, kept trying to make sense of it and twist it into a scenario where Ellie sat up and laughed, telling her practice was called off, she didn’t have to get up early, that she was right on time.

  Misty absently noted a downward-angled depression in the wall next to the head of the bed, the concave angle looking as if something heavy had impacted the surface with force. Moisture glistened from the surface of the dark brown rug where Ellie’s shoes lay, kicked off as she’d gone to bed. The one tipped on its side was half crimson now instead of white.

  Silence ruled the room, darkness leaking down around the edges of Misty’s vision. Ellie’s chest lay still, fingers curled into relaxed shapes on the comforter. Misty heard a soft plop from the floor and saw another droplet of red gathering on the fold of a sheet. Draped over the edge of the bed, the threads reflected the dye patterns of a field of poppies, but she knew it to be a solid, neutral cream. The drop grew and grew, growing fat with pain and denial and fear. Then it lost its grip and fell. As if her vision had turned into a highspeed camera, she imagined she could see it flattening, elongating in unnatural directions before impacting the puddle of ichorous red creeping from underneath the bed.

  Misty whirled and stepped back into the hallway, sounds of her labored breaths filling the space between the walls, oxygen seeming in short supply as she tried to pull in air, failing faster and faster. She rushed back towards Michael’s door and flung it wide, willing to bear the burden of his embarrassment if she caught him in a private moment.

  Nothing of the sort was going on, nothing at all. He was crumpled in a tangle on the floor beside his bed, like a puppet discarded mid-play. A blanket covered him loosely, hiding the awkward shape of him from view. She dashed towards where he lay and yanked at the blanket, but it stuck, and instead of the fabric slipping off, it rolled him. His body—a body, because it wasn’t him anymore, not her gorgeous, sweet boy, this was a shell of him—was stiff and the motion looked unnatural, as if h
is elbows and knees were glued into place. He thudded to his back, clothing soaked burgundy and stiffened into a flattened mold of the braided rug. It looked as if he’d been taken by surprise, trying to get out of bed, and was cut down where he stood.

  She screamed, loud and long, high notes bleeding through her throat with the words torn away.

  Into Chad’s room next, and she couldn’t find him at first. She fell to her knees and yanked up the bed skirt, tearing at the covers draped over the edge of the mattress, praying to see his frightened face peering at her from under the bed, but there was only a lone shoe, missing its pair, much as his room was missing its occupant.

  His closet door was opened slightly, and that was as wrong as his bedroom door being closed.

  Closets were meant for monsters, he’d told her more than once, and only closing the door kept little boys safe. Her son, her baby, her youngest child was wedged into the back corner, facing the door. He’d seen death coming for him, her baby, and faced it as best he could. There was a hole in his chest large enough she could put her fist inside if she wanted, and at the thought, she shuddered, turned aside, and vomited, the first time of many.

  Dusty’s stillness on the couch returned as a memory, and Misty suddenly understood she’d lost so many people she loved. She straightened and turned, ignoring her sodden sock trampled half off her foot, ignoring the red stains on her pant legs, ignoring the pained sounds pouring from her mouth. Slowly she made her way to the hall, headed towards the master bedroom. A place of solace from which she could call someone, the authorities, her family…anyone who could help carry this with her. It’s too much, she thought, and stumbled. Her hand slapped against the wall and left a smear of blood behind.

  Who would do this? Why would they kill my family? There hadn’t been any sign of theft, nothing in the lower part of the house had appeared disturbed. Who would do this?