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The Human Touch

Chapter Eight

David listened from the sanctuary of his bedroom to his father and Joyce Blair talking, first from the bathroom and then from his father's bedroom, the room that used to be a utility room with the washer and dryer. The appliances had been moved to the kitchen. His father had locked the master bedroom where he and his mother had slept and never went inside. David decided not to panic as long as Joyce and his father weren't going to sleep in his mother's bed.

David was scared. He had a vague idea of the kinds of things men and women did when they were alone together. It angered him that his father might forget his promise and do those things with Joyce. But when he listened closely, he heard his father telling her about Portland and how they weren't right for each other.

He relaxed as he judged the evening's excitement finished. Joyce would be gone in the morning. If he did anything to make his father send her home too soon, Roy might come back and hurt her some more. He didn't want that to happen. Joyce had always been nice to him. His mother and Joyce had been friends for as long as he could remember. The sound of their soothing voices talking for hours on end in the quiet house was an important memory of his childhood.

He lay in bed in the dark with his covers pulled to his chin thinking about the way Tony Doran and Steve Farley pushed him around. He vowed never to be mean to anyone once he had gotten his new heart valves. His only concern was whether he'd live long enough to see it happen.

"I wasn't going to hurt you," Jackie Kahl said softly.

Emptiness like cold ice flooded into his mind. His eyes flew open to the dark.

"Come outside and play with me, David Hartman."

His heart tried to pound its way out of his chest. She was just outside his window. He could feel her there waiting for him. He rolled out of his bed and crept to the window to check. He parted the curtain just enough to see.

She stood in the moonlight at the edge of the yard. Her pink dress did not stir in the brisk wind blowing up the slope. How, he wondered, could he have heard her soft voice from so far away?

A dark shape fluttered down from the sky and settled on her shoulder. David backed from the window with a gasp. Three big black cats stood at her side. The ground at her feet seethed with tiny insect and animal life, and the speckled starlings still circled overhead like a dark halo.

David's knees failed him. He dropped to the floor and tried to call for help. His voice came out sounding like a small frog.

Jackie giggled in the night.

David rose on wobbling legs ran with mincing steps through the connecting halls to his father's bedroom. He threw the door open.

There was only one shape in the bed. It wasn't his father's. He went to the downstairs den to confirm that his father was sleeping on the cot by the computer.

"Come outside and play with me!" Jackie called to him on the inside of his head.

Her voice could follow him anywhere.

He hovered over his sleeping father, but dared not awaken him. The thing that had once been Jackie Kahl would lure him to the mirror if he went outside to look.

Still, he felt secure near his father. He sat cross-legged on the rug thinking that he'd lose it for sure if she came into the house after him. He waited for the sound of her voice again. In time, he curled up on the rug and closed his eyes. It had been a long and hard day. Despite his terrible fear, he drifted to sleep.

His father tripped over him in the middle of the night. A bare foot struck hard across his back. John stumbled forward and caught himself against the wall. He flipped the light switch and looked back in astonishment.

"David! For the love of God!"

David said "ouch" and rubbed the sore spot on his shoulder where a toenail had gouged skin. His father reached down and hauled him to his feet by one arm. "What are you supposed to be, the family dog?"

David's eyes brimmed with tears. "I'm having bad dreams!" He sobbed with despair, knowing he'd never be able to communicate the exact nature and extent of the danger. He didn't understand it himself, and he didn't dare endanger his father regardless.

John took him by the shoulders and shook him until his teeth rattled. "You'll make yourself sick! I don't know what you think happened today, but you're going to tell me about it! I need to know what to do for you!"

David had no choice but to relent. He couldn't hope to go it alone. "Jackie is trying to get me to go outside," he said in a quavering voice. "It's a trick, Dad. She's not real. She's like the hawk and the cats. The mirror got her."

His father stared at him without expression. "You're dreaming, kid. It sounds like a real doozy."

David opened his mouth to protest, then clamped it shut. His dad's next challenge would be to put up or shut up. They'd go outside together to see, and if Jackie Kahl managed to trick his father into going into the trees...

David refused to think about it.

"Jackie Kahl, you say?" His father raised an eyebrow. "Orville Kahl's kid? Do you play with her?"

"I didn't know her name," David said, sniffling back tears. "She was just the nasty girl. Tony Doran and Steven Farley said her name was Jackie Kahl."

"David, do you know who Orville Kahl is?"

"You said he bought Spruce Valley."

"And you're having a problem with his kid?"

A problem? David's teeth chattered. "She wants me to go outside and play with her," he whispered, and realized that he had completely failed to convey the horror of his predicament.

His father gave him an affectionate punch on the chin and a flash of white teeth. "Sounds like you've caught yourself a live one. I guess that means we've both got problems with women."

David couldn't help but grin a little himself from the depths of his overwhelming love for his father. Even if it was his father's fault that his mother had died, at least he had been strong enough to survive and take care of him. But there was nothing his father could do about the mirror in the stand of trees. He understood that now.

His father scooped him into his arms and carried him upstairs to his own bed. The excitement had awakened Joyce. He listening to his father and Joyce Blair talking in shushed tones for a while longer. Even after they had gone back to bed, he imagined whispering coming from every corner of his room.

He waited until the dim gray light of dawn until he gathered enough courage to peek out of the window again and see if he had gone away. She hadn't moved an inch, but she didn't look so threatening in the daylight.

David cracked open his window a few inches.  "Go away and leave me alone!" he whispered into the gloom.

Jackie Kahl strolled a little closer, rocking to and fro with her hands clasped behind her back. She was smiling at him. She looked real enough, but he saw a moth flutter right through her.

"I know what you are," David said, keeping his voice low so that it would not waken Joyce and his father. "I saw the mirror. I saw what it was doing."

Jackie frowned and looked genuinely confused. "You won't tell my father, will you?"

So close to him, her voice sounded real, and she looked as real as anything else in the world. As for telling anyone, who would believe him?

"Then you won’t tell?" she said.

She sounded worried that he might. "What if I do?"

"I know what makes you afraid, David."

In response to her threat, the ground stirred at her feet.

"Dead things coming out of the ground," she murmured.

Terror lanced through his body like electricity. "I'm not going to tell anybody!" he cried. "You'll just trick them like you're trying to trick me!"

She studied him for a quiet moment and frowned deeply. "Be my friend and I'll be nice to you."

Shapes like smoke stirred in the air. Patterns of light and dark and shape and color grew more intense. He began to see shapes emerging, like things imagined in summer clouds. They turned themselves into pictures as he watched.

He saw the green curve of his father's car fender, the white sweep of a gull's wing against a patch of blue sky. He could hear the surf roar and even smell a sharp tang of salt spray. He saw images from television. He watched a jet roar off a runway, and a cheetah bound across a flat grassland with herds of wildebeests turning this way and that like a school of fish.

A canary fluttered down from the sky and landed on his window sill. He thought it was an illusion, so the canary flew away, but a white dog came around the side of the house and sat panting outside his window with its pink tongue hanging out.

"Leroy?"

David burst into astonished tears. Leroy had been hit by a car. An image of the dog's bloodied body was cut short. "Sorry," Jackie Kahl said. "Bad memories are for punishment. Good memories are for reward."

A kitten appeared instead, but not outside the window. It sat looking up at him at his feet inside his bedroom. David remembered the kitten just as vividly as Leroy. His mother had gotten it for his birthday. No more dogs, but kittens were fine, even if dogs were best. It was like a stuffed toy except that it was alive with soft white fur, big blue eyes and a pink nose. Nothing bad had ever happened to the kitten. It was big now. Old lady Bernice down the road fed it so much it hardly ever came home anymore.

Puzzled by a memory of something that had happened years ago and the reality of the moment somehow mixed together, David sat cross-legged on the floor and reached for the kitten to test its solidity. He touched soft fur and cradled the feather-weight animal in his arms. It stared up at him fearlessly, purring so hard in contentment that it vibrated against his chest like a machine.

He ran a finger across the kitten's belly. It attacked playfully with unsheathed claws, then scrambled upright and pounced upon his shoelaces. David looked at his hand where the kitten had raked his skin in its thoughtless play. When had he last dreamed and actually felt pain?

The golden sun rose to the east and burst through the bedroom window. Motes of dust spun and flowed in the misty glare of warm light.

"Don't let it scratch now," his mother said with a smile in her voice

His mother?

David's breath caught in his throat.

A dark shape moved to block the morning sun. He refused to look up. It couldn't be. His mother was gone. She could never come back. It was a reality that could never be undone.

"David?"

It just wasn't possible. He sat rigid, not daring to acknowledge the reality of what was happening.

But the dream wouldn't go away no matter how afraid he had become. His eyes widened with both fear and desperate hope. It couldn't really be her, could it?

She squatted in front of him. He could smell her. The warm sun poured over her, and David looked furtively up into her pretty face and the halo of her golden hair.

Marlene Hartman smiled down upon him like a living angel.

"David? Is something wrong?"

He lunged for her. It didn't matter that he was dreaming. In the lucid dream, he hugged her neck desperately. Weeping bitterly, the nightmare of the past year drained away in the warmth and the golden light of dawn and in the softness of his mother's arms.

He vowed never to let go of her ever again.

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