Dearest Penguin People,
Welcome to chapter 21 of Max and Sebastian. A special thank you to those who read my weird little ghost story/evil kid book every week :)
In the last chapter Eve found out that Max was missing and that someone had stolen her ambulance…Hmm, I wonder if there’s a connection there…
In this chapter we learn more about Leonard.
If you are new to Max and Sebastian, please start here…
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20
As always, a shout out to P.Q. Rubin for little penguin guy up top…
from a previous chapter…
Years away, Max struggled against the current. The boy had her by the arm. Their eyes met. For a moment she thought she saw a flash of regret in that stony face but it quickly disappeared and she almost felt…bad. One last tug and the river swallowed her. Water filled her lungs, pulling her down. The boy became a shadow, one ghostly hand still floundering in the water above.
Leonard hid in the nurses’ break room, an ice pack to his cheek. He didn’t need it, but it gave him an excuse to sit out the post George wreckage. He set the ice pack down on a table and spun it between thick fingers. His mind had been funny lately, but hallucinations were new. A pug-nosed nightmare with moldy spaghetti hair had convinced him to kidnap a child. He stopped spinning the ice pack. Hallucination or not, when he thought of Max, his skin crawled. The dog had only strengthened something he already felt. Did he really want to hurt her?
Of course, you do.
“Who’s there?”
A shadow darted off to his left. He blinked, saw nothing. Then the skitter of furry legs rushed across the table. Slowly, he lowered his gaze. A spider with glowing red eyes stared back.
You hurt her before.
“No.” God, it looked real. He rubbed his eyes.
And now you let her escape.
Sweat pooled on his upper lip. “The homeless guy stopped me.”
Excuses.
“Maybe I’m glad he did.”
The spider crawled up his arm.
“You’re not real.”
But your misery is. The spider dug its fangs into his wrinkled skin.
“Son of a…” Leonard slapped and missed.
The spider scurried up Leonard’s neck and burrowed into his ear. It hesitated; furry legs aquiver. It knew George’s mind, a cavernous labyrinth of passageways, each leading to a memory worse than the next. But Leonard’s mind, small and cramped like a hoarder’s house, defied movement. At best it could delve through the clutter and search for the inevitable dead cat.
The spider began to dig.
*****
A young Leonard tossed rocks at a saggy, rusted chain link fence for no reason other than it was there. The sky matched his mood, dark and brooding from days of rain. As the afternoon wore on more teenage boys in ragged jeans and dirty tees joined him. Their town, small and growing smaller, provided little to do and all the time in the world to do it. They tossed rocks in silence.
A young girl walked up on the side of the road, barefoot in the mud. She watched as they threw rocks in slow tandem.
Leonard couldn’t help but stare. Dressed in flowing layers of red and purple, she stood out like a bruise against the gray sky. She caught him looking and he quickly turned his head.
The girl rocked on her heels. She twirled strands of long, black hair between olive fingers. “What are you guys doing?”
The boys clutched their rocks in grimy fists.
The oldest drew closer. He spat on the ground near her feet. “No one asked you to move here. So don’t expect nothin’ from us.”
The girl grew deadly still. Lips pinched into a bloodless line, she shoved him onto the pavement.
There was a moment of shocked silence, then rocks sliced the air. A streak of red spread across her forehead. She swayed for a moment, then crumpled to the ground like a poisonous butterfly.
“Is she dead?” whispered one of the boys.
Leonard knelt beside her and touched her wrist.
Her eyes, twin sunsets in winter, popped open. She touched her forehead, her fingers coming away red. Looking past him to the others, she began to giggle, a soft hiccuppy sound that burrowed beneath their skin.
“What’s wrong with you,” Leonard whispered.
She turned to look at him, suddenly silent.
Behind them the boys fidgeted and cursed. They reached for more stones.
Leonard grabbed her by the wrist. “Run,” he told her.
And they did. They ran down the rain swept streets, past crooked signs and broken-down cars, away from the sound of bored angry feet on wet pavement. Soon, the pavement turned to dirt and then an open field. In the distance the boys fell off one by one until the only feet they heard were their own.
They could have stopped there, but they kept going, running through a dense thicket of trees, branches slapping their faces. It wasn’t until they reached a river bank, the current spilling over the sides that they finally stopped.
The girl glanced back at Leonard and began to hum. The blood had dried into a blossoming rose across her forehead. She threw a stick into the river. It sped away, only to be sucked below with a sickening slurp.
Leonard hung back, trying to catch his breath. The ground was soggy. It shifted beneath his shoes, pulling him toward the riverbank. The girl remained on the edge, mesmerized by the force of the stream.
“Carmela,” he said.
Her face twisted into a feline smile. “You know my name but I don’t know yours.”
Leonard inched toward her, his shoes squelching in the mud as it sought to rob them from his feet. “Does it matter?” he asked.
“Guess not,” she said.
He had seen her at the five-and-dime. A little brass bell above the door jingled when she came in. The air sizzled as she walked past, the vague scent of burning fields clinging to her like smoky perfume. She looked at him briefly, the disdain evident before she swept out the door again, something clutched in her small hand. The meeting, ever so brief, sparked images of times and places not his own. Blindsided, he stood swaying until the memories disappeared back down the rabbit hole from whence they came.
Looking at her now, he knew she saw it, too.
She took a step forward, one thin arm darting out like a snake. He grabbed her wrist and they stared, neither willing to look away.
Abruptly, the ground collapsed. He fell chest first into the mud, his hand clamped to her slender wrist as the water devoured her. The current twisted and pulled, drowning her screams. He tightened his grip. One good yank and she’d be out. But then another face, one of cruel ivory and spinning onyx eyes, rose from beneath the water, flames dripping from its sockets. It licked the air, hissing as it came. He panicked and let go, watching Carmela’s raven hair spread out in a tangled fan as the river swallowed her.
Hours later, a County worker checking on storm damage found him face down in the mud. He pulled him to his feet.
“What happened, kid?”
Leonard swayed on his feet, his pupils darting like ping pong balls in the whites of his eyes. “She had it coming,” he said.
The man wiped his hand slowly against his trousers, as if wiping off more than mud. Later he would report what Leonard said, but the girl’s body was never found and eventually it was dropped.
But her shadow persisted. She lived in his dreams of which he had precious few.
And now years later, there was this new monstrous child. She had Carmela’s eyes, a sin she would not survive.
The spider dropped unnoticed from Leonard’s ear and scuttled away.
Leonard picked up the ice pack and squeezed it until his fingers burned. If the girl was out there, he would find her.
As a side note…none of this was written with AI and I kindly ask that no one use it for training purposes. Thank you :)
This was so awesome....
The slow and steady build up of his outlook on spiders from previous chapters to "At best it could delve through the clutter and search for the inevitable dead cat." made me feel teleported into his mind. Like in cartoons/movies when you see the fangs chomp down and the camera zooms into the blood stream where you are caught in the flow with the cells.
Hats off!
The mystery deepens as it unfolds...