Page 12 of Now You See Him
“What the hell?” she mused. She scanned the surroundings, saw the sink filled with dishes and the small table shoved into a corner, stacked with mail. When she moved towards the table, she felt like she was walking through a fog.
She reached the table and bent to pick up one of the envelopes, except her fingers passed right through the paper.
Her heart began to thud at an erratic rate.
“No, no, no, no, no,” she chanted to herself as she spun in a circle, her surroundings blurring at the quick movement. When she noticed the calendar hanging on the back of the basement door, she crossed to it and tried to make sense of the messy handwriting and the blue ink squeezed in tiny boxes.
October 21. The date was from a year ago. Damien’s dentist appointment.
Damien.
Tina scrubbed her hands over her face. This couldn’t be happening. This was just a terrible dream that was bizarrely realistic. A dream where she knew she was in a dream.
There was a thud from upstairs, and she jolted.
A moan. A hard thud. Then another. A shriek of laughter. The thudding became insistent. Persistent. “Oh yes, baby. I love you. I love you so much.” It was a woman’s voice. Someone was…having sex? Vigorous sex, from the sound of the headboard banging against the wall.
Tina didn’t know what to do. Whether she should continue to explore the house in this fucked-up dream of hers or just wait until the show was over. Just as she was about to enter the hallway to head upstairs, because, hey, she might as well find out who was fucking in her dream, the front door opened.
“Honey!”
That voice. That was the voice from the basement. It was Derrick’s, yet different. She quickly exited the kitchen and rushed down the hallway towards the entrance. There were so many more walls, so many more sectioned-off rooms. One had wood paneling, another had a fish tank and two armchairs.
She reached the entryway in time to see the back of a very tall, broad-shouldered man halfway up the stairs. His hair was dark and long, curling over the collar of his shirt. He filled the hallway in such an eerily familiar way.
“Honey?” he called again.
Tina watched him from the bottom of the stairs as he turned a corner.
There was a shriek, and Tina’s stomach dropped. The man started yelling.
There was another male voice. Was this one familiar, too, or was she imagining things?
“You fucking bitch!” the man yelled.
The woman shrieked again. “No! No, Damien, please no, don’t! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
Glass breaking. There was the sound of a struggle. Of a punch. All of the voices and noise were muffled. It was as if Tina were underwater, unable to breach the surface and listen to each and every word that was being hurled like a knife.
She watched in terror as two bodies rolled into the hallway. One naked, and one fully clothed. A woman clutching a sheet to her chest stood behind them. Her face was obscured. Tina couldn’t make out any of her features from a distance, but one thing was certain. She was still screaming.
Then Damien got to his feet and grabbed her wrist. He dragged her down the hallway, ignoring her cries for forgiveness. Tina was desperate to get a good look at his face, to see the man who had been with her so intimately in his afterlife. She wanted to understand whether or not he was someone that she would ever want to know if he were alive, as twisted and fucked-up as that sounded.
“Get out of my house, you bitch. Whore!” His words were clipped and quick, barely audible in the fuzzy, dreamlike vision.
“No, Damien, stop, stop, stop. I’m sorry, please!”
He pressed the woman up against the hallway wall, and Tina could almost make out his profile from the angle he stood and her position at the base of the stairs. “Do I not fuck you good enough? You have to go to that fuckwit pretty boy? You want me to fuck you good? Is that what you need? Let’s show him how I fuck you.”
Tina pressed a hand against her mouth when she saw him reach between them and unbuckle his belt. The woman struggled as he held her immobile with a hand against her throat. She was still obscured. A mirage.
“No!” the woman screamed.
That’s when the naked man, who was still faceless, blurry, and unrecognizable to her, charged Damien. There was a struggle, the two of them at the top of the stairs. Then Damien got to his feet, and before Tina could scream out a warning, the naked man and woman shoved him.
He fell backwards down the stairs, the sound of a sickening crunch of bone. Another shriek from the woman.
Tina watched in horror as he flipped like a pancake, his neck cracking and bending at an unnatural angle. She scrambled back until she hit a wall, then sunk to the ground, hugging her knees to her chest. Her heart was in her throat.
