Chapter Nine

I stepped off the train to find myself, to my surprise, standing nearly on top of the Keys' front porch steps. I'm not sure why I was so shocked; after I thought about it I realized that it made more sense than having our phantom train stop at a train station.

It was early evening, the sun just beginning to disappear in a red and orange slow-motion explosion behind the mountains. The house looked much the same, save for a few loose boards and a long dead and withered garden out under the living room window. No, that wasn't quite true. There was something different about the building—a feeling that permeated the structure, oozed through the boards and cracks, a sort of dark aura, a stale vibration in the ether.

No sooner was I just beginning to get a whiff of this ineffable temper, than did the front door burst open and, stepping from the darkness inside, did Rebekah Keys stand on her porch, looking out, and through our ostentatious mode of travel as though it were not there. She was heavily wrinkled, with deep and dark recess under her eyes. Her hair was graying and frayed. But her eyes were vibrant and alive and she carried herself with a powerful and almost intimidating confidence.

"How long's it been?" I said to Kaci, who was at my side.

"Charlie's got to be about nineteen, now," she said.

Nineteen? That would mean only eight or nine years had passed, ten at the most. Yet Rebekah looked as though she had aged twenty years or more since I had last seen her weeping on the floor of her basement. She appeared frail and weak, as though even her tiny, wrinkled body was a burden too heavy to bear. She seemed confused, too, as she shuffled back and forth and mumbled to herself as her spider hands crawled over and against one another. Yet, again, I could not escape that there was something about her eyes, something terribly alert and competent that defied her physical mien. My mind flashed to me those finals scenes of my last visit with her, her cry echoing in my skull, and I could not help but look upon her now with a certain private compassion. She began to cough violently into a handkerchief she pulled from her pocket, and I could see the little specks and stains of red, both dried and fresh blood, that spotted the white cloth.

As she spat blood into her palm, my vision was suddenly darkened and blurred as a figure passed—not next to or near me—but right through my carnival-freak-show form. I shudder and started in surprise, though there was actually no physical sensation to accompany the figure's walking through me. Rebekah stopped shuffling and looked at the figure, her face an iron mask of dissatisfaction.

The young man hopped lithely up the steps of the house, and put a steady arm on Rebekah's shoulder. "Come inside now, Ma," he said.

Charles looked nearly exactly how he had when I had first met him, albeit somewhat more solid. He had the same coal-black hair which he slicked back over his scalp in a showy, brazen style; the same disgustingly charming and self-confident grin; and the same particular, breezy way of holding himself that suggested something secret about him. He did look slightly thinner—less muscular—and the fatigue in his eyes, though still undeniably present, was either less pronounced or simply of a different temperament. I wasn't sure which.

"Charles," his mother croaked with displeasure, her voice a sandy tremble. "Back from that tramp's house so early?"

"She's not 'that tramp,' Ma. She's my tramp," Charlie said with the same grin he had given me (or would give me?), "And she isn't feeling well, so I let her sleep. Come on, let's get inside; I think it's going to rain."

Rebekah murmured something to herself too quietly for me to hear, and turned to slowly enter the house.

"After you," Kaci said from beside me, with a childish giggle. As I started at her little pale cheeks, dimpled and framing a neat little smile, I realized very suddenly that this poor child had died. What circumstances led to such an early demise, I began to wonder. What forces combined to end the life of such a precious little girl?

"Hold on, Kaci," I said. "Let me ask you something…"

She sighed. "Oh, not now! You don't want to talk for the whole train ride and now you're suddenly Mr. Chatty? Give me a break, Mister!" She skipped off into the house, disappearing behind the front door.

I climbed the steps and entered behind her. The house seemed darker now than it had nine years ago, though it may have just been the clouds that were forming above. What did surprise me, though, was that the house was indisputably cleaner. Dust-free furniture was neatly and logically arranged along impeccably spotless rugs, pillows were fluffed and propped up carefully, and all the accents to the room—the books and lamps and glass paperweights, et cetera—were just where the ought to have been. The semi-squalor of years gone had vanished.

"Let's sit down now." Charlie was helping his mother into a comfortable looking chair in the living room.

"I can do it myself," she said, and wrung one of her stick-thin arms away. She sat down. "I don't like it when you're gone all day, Charles. What if I need you while you're off at that whore's house?"

"Ma, she's a waitress, and she works very hard. And nothing is going to happen to you. Don't worry." He was picking up a few pages of a newspaper from the corner of the room, which he folded up and placed neatly on the large table. "Can you please try to be a littler neater, Ma?"

"I don't remember putting that there," she said. "And you don't have to do all the cleaning. I used to keep this house in order all by myself." That answered my question of how the house was suddenly so tidy.

"Here," Charlie continued, "let me get you some more water." He picked up an empty glass from the stand next to Rebekah's chair.

Rebekah narrowed her eyes as her son turned towards their kitchen, and I thought I saw her make a slight wave with her hand. "That glass is full," she said. "Now stop trying to get away from me."

"No it's not, it's empt—huh? That's so strange. You know, I would've sworn that this glass was completely empty." He turned back around and put the glass back which was, indeed, brimming with clear liquid. He shrugged. "Anyway, I'm not trying to get away from you Mom. Believe me, if I wanted to do that it wouldn't be very hard; you don't move around so quickly anymore."

"I get around better than you know," she said grumpily.

I wondered how Charlie hadn't noticed the bizarre change in his mother. She seemed to me an entirely different creature, under which was only the faintest lingering of Rebekah Keys. Charlie seemed to be treating her just as though she were just an aged parent who had reached her condition naturally. I guessed that the metamorphosis must not have been as striking to Charles, who watched it occur gradually over the years, as it was to me, jumping form one point to another.

"Your father would never have left me home by myself in my old age," Rebekah called to her son who had disappeared into the kitchen. "He would have made sure that I was looked after when I need it."

"You aren't that old and you don't need it!" Charlie's voice floated in from the kitchen. "You've gone this long without burning the house down. Anyway, Dad is gone and there isn't much point speculating on what he would or wouldn't have done." I thought I caught a slight strain in his voice, a sort of irritated tug in his vocal chords of annoyance more than sadness or regret. "So let's try to stop doing that, okay?"

Rebekah silently sneered in her chair and folded her arms.

"Godamnit, Ma!" Charlie stomped into the living room. "Were you down in the basement again?"

His mother opened her mouth as if to speak, but then shut it again with a puzzled look, as though she had forgotten what she was going to say.

"I said, were you down there? Don't pretend like you don't remember, Ma. Were you down in the basement again? I thought we agreed you were going to stop all this. It isn't good for you. I want you to stay out of there. How did you even get the lock off? I have the only key!"

Rebekah mumbled something about it being her house, and Charlie stormed out of the room with a loud, overstated sigh of frustration. "Fine! Go back to your little whore of a girlfriend!" his mother shouted to him as he left.

"Things are going well in the Keys' house," I remarked to Kaci, a little embarrassed at having witnessed a family fight, even if they couldn't see me.

Kaci just smiled, more than a little mischievously. "You have no idea," she said.