The Closet

***Author's note:** read the previous chapter here.*

I think my sister was seriously worried about me by the time I’d finished harassing her with questions.  Apparently, an estate agent had been around some weeks before, right after Alicia moved back into the house.  The two of them had started talking, and the agent said she was working for the heirs of Louis Carlyle - that was Colonel Lewis’s real name.  Poor Mr. Carlyle dropped dead of a heart attack.  His sons planned on selling the property.  The house had been abandoned since the coroner dragged the body away.

“Ans, you’ve been taking your meds, right?” Alicia asked, using her mom voice.

I rolled my eyes.  “Yes, I’ve been taking my meds.  I always take my meds.”

I had been.  And I knew what I’d seen.  A little girl with ice-blonde hair and a pink dress, standing in the backyard of an abandoned house.  A little girl who could appear and disappear into thin air.  A little girl Alicia hadn’t seen, even though she was looking right at her.  But that wasn’t even what bothered me the most.

What bothered me the most was I knew I’d seen that kid before.

I reminded myself, again, to call the LA-based psychiatrist my doctor in Miami recommended.  I tried to take my mind off it.  I unpacked some of my things, then headed out to go shopping.  I’d had hallucinations before - when I was under pressure, when I needed to tweak my Haloperidol dosage - and I knew dwelling on them would do me no good.

There was something going on at the house across the street.  A young blonde guy, dressed in board shorts and a tank top with a picture of Morticia Adams, pulled cases of beer and wine out of the back of a Prius.  He noticed me and waved.  I waved back.

I went to the nearest Ralphs my GPS found.  It was the same one my mom had shopped at when I was a kid, which I would have been fine with, had I not realized something fairly disconcerting as I pulled into the parking lot.

The Ralphs shared a parking lot with a strip mall.  And the closest empty spot was right in front of what had once been Atomic Videos.

The space was empty now.  I could see the outline of the huge sign that had announced the last occupant - GNC Health Foods.  The plate glass front was covered with brown construction paper.

I bought what I needed from Ralphs, shoved the bags in my car, then found myself drawn to the tenantless storefront.  I’d spent many afternoons there with my friends.  Kevin Gideon, an unapologetic nerd, kept old arcade games.  Micah held the high score in Centipede.  Once, Tommy, Luke, and I snuck into the locked, adults-only “back room.”  I didn’t quite remember how we managed to do it.

A patch of the construction paper had torn.  I walked right up to it, put my eye to the glass, looked through the hole.  Blackness, a half-finished counter, and some tools.

I thought about Micah’s favorite red sweatshirt.  I wondered if he’d died wearing it, and imagined how Kevin Gideon had done the deed.  Had he driven Micah to his apartment in Eagle Rock, given him a bowl of strawberry ice cream laced with Rohypnol, then strangled him before toweling off?  Maybe he hadn’t even left - he could have pulled his Civic around the back of the store and, in the dim little room where we’d once laughed at “Camp Circle Jerk III” and “Slutty Nurses: Down and Dirty,” took what he wanted and disposed of my best friend.

They’d found the red sweatshirt in a tight crawlspace between the ceiling and the roof.  I mused over Micah’s final resting place, wherever that was - maybe in some other little cavity, somewhere behind the pane of glass I peered through.  I cringed at the cruelty of it.  Micah had been terrified of small, enclosed spaces.

“You know, it’s cursed.”

For the second time that day, I whirled around and yelped.  This time, I found myself looking at the blonde boy in the Morticia Addams tank-top from across the street, a bagful of chips and red cups in his arms.  He was grinning.

“Sorry,” he said.  “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s cool,” I replied.  “I’m Ansley, I think we’re neighbors.”

“Travis.  You just moved in, right?”

I nodded.  He put on a serious expression.

“Well, there’s some things about this town you should know.  A pedophile used to own a candy store at this very spot.  He’d lure little boys with video games, then strangle them and hide their bodies under the floorboards and in the vents.  When he died and they gutted the place, they found hundreds of tiny bodies.”

He dropped his voice, smiling lecherously.  “In the last six years, four stores have been here.  All of them went out of business.  They say it’s because the ghosts of the murdered boys are still around.  I have a friend who used to work at the GNC.  He said that, at night, he heard kids’ voices sobbing, begging the bad man to stop hurting them.  But he was all alone.”

Travis paused dramatically, eyes open wide.  I snorted.

“I’m serious!”

“You’re full of shit,” I said.  “I grew up here.  Yeah, there was an *alleged* pedophile who used to own a *video store* in this spot.  But he only ever killed one kid, and they never actually proved it.  I know that.  I knew the kid.”

Travis’s face fell.  “Fuck.  I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

“It’s fine.  It was a long time ago.  Nice try.”

“Well, I still feel like an asshole.”  He smiled apologetically.  “Hey, I’m having a party tonight.  It’s kind of a reunion for my high school friends.  You should come by if you’re not doing anything, you and your roommate.”

“My sister,” I said.  “I’ll think about it.”

\*\*\*\*\*

I wasn’t actually going to go to Travis’s party.  I’m not a big drinker - alcohol and Haloperidol don’t pair well - and I didn’t want to run into anyone I’d gone to elementary school with.  But Alicia was seeing a movie with a friend, and I didn’t want to spend Friday night alone with my phone, either.  The little girl I’d seen in Colonel Lewis’s backyard still freaked me out.  If I sat around overthinking, I’d get paranoid.  If I got paranoid, I’d start hallucinating again.

I needed a distraction.

Travis hugged me when I walked through the door, his cheeks apple-red.  He introduced me as “the girl I tried to scare earlier, and failed epically” to an Asian guy with a side part I later learned was his boyfriend.  My apprehensions about running into old classmates ended up being unfounded - only a dozen or so people turned up, most were considerably younger than me, and I didn’t recognize any of them.

Travis told me he’d moved into town with his parents six years before.  He was a rising senior at UCLA, majoring in psychology.  He’d been a self-described “goth brat” in high school, obsessed with horror; there was a definite abundance of black eyeliner and skinny jeans amongst the party-goers.  At some point during the night, Travis procured an Ouija board.  A group of them messed with it.  I politely declined.

I had a drink, and then another drink.  Travis’s boyfriend was bartending, and he must have poured the hard stuff liberally, because after two drinks I was stumbling through a blur.  More people came, I think; everything was suddenly louder.

I wandered down a hallway to get some air.  Travis’s house had been extensively remodeled, but not bulldozed.  I recognized the shape of the windows in the bathroom.  I’d been there before - we’d known the family who used to live there.  They had a boy and a girl.  The boy was in Alicia’s class.  The girl was autistic…

I stumbled to the backyard and found myself staring into familiar eyes.

The party had spread out; a few kids passed around a joint.  Someone had fallen into the pool.  A boy was talking to someone in a corner, noticed me, grabbed my arm.

Silvery hair.  Square jaw.  Harry Potter glasses.

Luke.

The last time I’d seen Luke Andersen, he’d been a scrawny twelve-year-old with spiky hair, a horsey, angular face, and thick glasses.  Ten years had done him good.  He was tall, at least six feet, slim, and toned.  The Harry Potter glasses well framed his grey opal eyes.

“Ansley fucking Vasquez,” he said to me.

I took a long swig of my third rum and coke.  I might have hugged him.  I half-remember his hand in mine, leading me into fuzzy grey warmth, as the alcohol in my bloodstream wound its way into my brain, turning reality to mush.

\*\*\*\*\*

I woke up lying in warm sand.  I sat, blinking sunlight from my eyes.  I was in Allister Park, right in front of the play structure.  The park was empty.  It was early morning.  I could see the sun rising over the forest.

Rising over the forest?  No.  My mind oriented itself - the forest was to the west.  It was dusk, and the sun was setting.

I should have worried about what transpired during the time I’d blacked out, or wondered how I ended up unconscious in a children’s playground.  I should have been hung over.  But I didn’t, and I wasn’t.  Somehow it all seemed natural - me, the park, the dusk.

The only thing that gave me pause were my hands.  They looked small.

I saw two little boys a short distance away, silhouetted by the large orange sun.  I squinted.  One was Asian, tall-ish, wearing overalls.  The other was white, small, and swallowed by an oversized red hoodie.  The Asian kid moved towards me, plodding across the sand.

Except he couldn’t have been, because the sand in Allister Park had been replaced with spongy rubber foam.

First, I realized I was dreaming.  Then, I realized who the little boy was.

Tommy.  Tommy Liu.  Twelve-year-old Tommy.  Which would make the other kid…

“Ansley, come on!”  Tommy chirped, through the wide-mouthed gape he’d develop when he was nervous.

I looked at my hands again.  They were child’s hands.

Then the sun was gone, and dim moonlight washed over the trees.  Tommy turned and hurried towards the forest.  I followed him, led by some force that wasn’t my own will.

“Hurry, Ansley,” Tommy shouted.

I looked for the boy in the red sweatshirt, but he was nowhere to be found.  I’d stopped moving.  Tommy sprinted ahead of me.  Then I felt the tug on my ankle, and something warm.

I stumbled.  My stomach dropped in terror.

A smooth yellow worm, thick as a roll of toilet paper, protruding from the sand, was wrapped around the leg of my jeans.

I screamed and struggled, but the thing kept hold.  And then there were more of them, extending like spaghetti out of the ground, rapidly reaching for me.  One grabbed my other leg, pulling me off balance.  I fell to the ground, catching myself with my right hand.

A third worm wrapped itself around my bare arm.  I’d expected cold and slimy; instead, the banana-yellow rope was hot.  And there must have been something in its skin that reacted badly with mine, because stinging pain shot from my elbow to my hand.

They were pulling me.  Fast.  I felt the rough sand against my side.

Then wet droplets on my back, and then stillness.  Tommy stood over me.  He’d doused the worms with something out of a spray bottle, and they’d retreated.  I clutched my numb right arm.  The yellow worm left nasty red welts where it had connected with my skin.

“Come on!”  Tommy was yelling.  But I was looking at something else.

From the ground, I could see into The Forest.  And, standing at the foot of the thick oaks, was the little girl with the ice-blonde hair from Colonel Lewis’ yard.

Still in the same pink dress, still flawlessly clean.  She was staring at me.  A smile broke across her porcelain-pale, round face.  She turned around and walked nonchalantly into the trees.

I blinked.  In her place was the little boy in the red sweatshirt.  I could see his face, and my suspicions were confirmed.  It was Micah.

Behind him, amongst the blackened trees, was a pair of huge, hungry orange eyes.

As everything bled into grey, I heard him screaming.

“Help me, Ansley!  Save me!”

\*\*\*\*\*

My eyes snapped open.  I was somewhere warm and dark.

BANG!

The loud noise jolted me to full consciousness.  As my eyes adjusted to the dark, the features of my bedroom came into focus.  I was lying on the mattress-and-boxspring, wrapped in the blanket I’d haphazardly unpacked.  Moonlight streamed in through the blinds, throwing grey-and-white stripes on the closet door.  My head throbbed.  My right arm was numb; I’d been sleeping on it, cutting off the circulation.  In a second, I’d feel pins and needles.

I took a breath and lurched.  Nausea bubbled in my throat.  Something in the room reeked - a rotting, earthy stench with a tinge of unwelcome sweetness.

BANG!  BANG!

I jumped.  Was someone at the…

BANG!  Scratch, scratch.

No.  It was coming from somewhere in the room.  I wrapped the blanket tighter around myself.

Scratch.  Scratch, scratch.  BANG!  BANG!

The sound was coming from behind my closet door.  It was a hallucination.  It couldn’t be real.

Not real.  Not real.  Not real.

The last thing I remember was pressing my eyes shut, watching the neon shapes change behind my eyelids, praying for nothingness as the pins-and-needles sensation in my arm dulled and the rotting smell became hypnotic and I heard, one last time -

“Ansley!  Help me!”

\*\*\*\*\*

***June 6, 2017***

I opened my eyes, and immediately wished I hadn’t.  Bright sunlight streamed through the blinds.  It was late, and it felt like someone had taken a drill to my cranium.  I untangled myself from my blanket.  My shoes had been discarded by the door, and the green party dress I’d fallen asleep in was wrinkled and bunched around my waist.

SLAM!

I jumped.  I heard my sister’s voice cursing from somewhere outside of my room as disjointed memories of the previous 12 hours flooded my consciousness.  I’d had a really screwed up dream.  I’d dreamed there was something in the closet, slamming against the door.  Allister park.  Tommy and Luke were there.  Micah was there. I’d seen the little porcelain-skinned blonde girl.

No, I could swear the knocks at my closet door had been real.  There had been a horrible smell.  The knocking woke me from my blacked-out slumber.  How much was a dream?  Had I actually been in the park?

When I saw the red welts on my right arm, I almost screamed.

I remembered the thick yellow worms.  How strong they’d been, how much it hurt when the thing wrapped itself around my bicep.  Then reality cut through my hungover fog, and I saw the welts for what they were - numbers.  Seven digits, written on my arm in shaky red marker.  The first three: 6-2-6.  Our area code.

I threw on sweats and a t-shirt, plugged in my phone, and met my sister in the kitchen.  Alicia was sitting at the little tin table that functioned as our dining area, sipping coffee and looking over her slab-like study guide for the bar exam.

“Sorry if I woke you,” she said when she noticed me.  “I dropped my book.”

“It’s fine." I poured myself a cup of the coffee she’d brewed.   I sat across from her.  She looked up from her reading.

“Ans, if you get a chance, can you go through that pile of mail in the living room? The tenants kept on getting our stuff, and a couple envelopes had your name.”

I shrugged. "Sure. I'll do it today."

I took a long swig of my coffee. “Hey, did you hear anything weird last night?”

Alicia shook her head.  “A couple loud people leaving your party, that’s about it.”

“Because I could swear someone was knocking on our door really hard.”

Alicia frowned.  “Well, it didn’t wake me up.  And I don’t think anyone would be banging on the front door in the middle of the night.”

She was right.  Besides, it hadn’t even been the front door; I distinctly heard loud knocks from inside my closet.  My tiny closet, which couldn’t fit a being large enough to produce sounds that violent.

“Did you call the shrink yet?” Alicia asked, as though reading my thoughts.

“I will today.”

Something else from the night before came to mind.

“Hey, Leesh, do you remember the family that used to live across the street?”

Alicia’s stern look melted.  She smiled almost kittenishly.  “Yeah, the Koperskis.”

I recalled a pot-bellied man and a small, birdlike woman.  They’d had a skinny teen-aged son with a round face and the longish, wavy, emo-boy haircut that was popular for about a minute in the 2000’s.  I read into Alicia’s schoolgirl smile.

“You had a crush on the guy.”

She giggled.  “Andy.  We… sort of dated for, like, two months.  Right before we moved to Miami.”

“Ohhh, so somebody ignored Dad’s ‘no boyfriends until you’re eighteen’ rule.”

Alicia snorted.  “Yeah, like you waited.”

“I did!  Drunken make-out buddies don’t count as boyfriends.”  I laughed.  “I can’t believe you fucked the kid across the street.”

“We didn’t go all the way,” she said shyly.  “We were sneaking around; I’d run over there when Mom and Dad were out.  His parents worked weird hours.  The only person who knew about us was his sister, and it’s not like she was going to tell anyone.”

Something kicked in my brain.

“You remember the sister, right?”  Alicia asked.  “Mathilde.  Cute little blonde girl with autism?”

A sensation like lava trickled from my shoulders to my toes.  I suddenly felt extremely heavy.  I did remember Mathilde.  She was small, round-faced, and delicate-featured.  Because she preferred to play alone in her room, her skin was porcelain-pale.  Her favorite color was pink.

The little girl from my hallucination.  The little girl from my dream.  Mathilde.

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Read the next chapter here.

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*Written by NickyXX

Content is available under CC BY-SA*