Seven
The night time jungle took form about Becky Marple.
She recognized the cat that howled at her from the underbrush. It was
Pywacket. The cat belonged to her parents. It bit and scratched when
petted.
All Becky could see were the eyes of the cat in the
underbrush. Yellow orbs glowed in the darkness and made her think of
Halloween. The howling of the cat naturally blended with the moaning of
the wind in the trees.
A rain of dead leaves fell to the ground. The trees
became gnarled fingers standing against the star-lit sky. The chilled
wind blew the carpet of dead leaves away until the ground, too, was
barren.
Becky stood shivering in the dark autumn chill,
trying to remember why this was happening to her.
"Hi, Becky."
She turned, overjoyed by the sound of Bobby
Randolph's voice. What she saw standing behind her sent her staggering
back in horror.
She could see through him, all but his feet. His
feet were missing, trailing off into a white mist. Bobby stood by a
gravestone, his own gravestone.
When she had been twelve years old, Bobby Randolph
had been her best friend. He had died of leukemia the summer of the
incident at summer camp.
"Surprised to see me?" Bobby said.
Becky didn't know whether she should be or not. "My
mother told me you went to heaven."
Bobby grinned. "Did you believe her?"
"I knew you died. What are you doing here?"
"I came back to help you," Bobby said. "You look
like you could use a friend."
"You were my first friend," Becky said. "And my
last."
"That's not such a good thing," Bobby said solemnly.
"There should have been many others."
Becky stared at the ground. "I didn't want others."
"I know." Bobby looked sad. "But look at what
you've gone and done to yourself, Becky Marple. You're practically a
ghost yourself."
"I feel like one," Becky said.
"It's hard to feel like a real person when you have
nobody to talk to except machines," Bobby said. "Machines don't care.
They don't feel."
"I know." Becky shrugged her helplessness.
"Do you want to come with me?" Bobby Randolph said.
"I can show you the safe way home."
Becky balked at the invitation. "I don't want to go
home. I'd rather be a ghost like you."
Bobby shook his head. "It's not what is best for
you."
"What is best for me, may I ask?"
"It would be best to face your fears and resolve
them."
"I'm afraid of everything. I wouldn't even know
where to start."
Bobby pointed to a part of the landscape that was
pitch black. "Start there."
Becky studied the mysterious blackness darker than
spilled India ink. "Why is it so dark?"
Bobby shrugged. "The dark represents the unknown."
"Bad things happen in the dark," Becky said.
"The things that take advantage of you spring from
the darkness, but the darkness is only your ignorance. Every time you
grow, you must venture into the darkness and the unknown to learn
something new."
In another direction, a golden light on a distant
hill caught and held her attention. "What's that over there?"
Bobby studied the light. "Past memories. Bad
memories. The reason for the way things are."
She recognized the amber light. She had a memory of
being strapped in a car seat and watching that warm light approach. It
was home.
She started through the trees to investigate. Bobby
followed in silence.
The light was a log cabin in the woods. She failed
to recognize it until she peeked in a window. Inside, her mother and
father sat at computers at opposite ends of the room. They stared at
their multicolored screens in the darkness, tapping at keyboards and
murmuring their commands to the CPU.
A playpen had been shoved against the back wall.
Within, a baby lay on a bare plastic mattress. It was crying. It had
been crying for so long that it's voice had gone hoarse. A branch beating
against a window had frightened it earlier in the evening. Its fear had
long since faded to a dull ache.
Things had never changed. Even now, school let out
in the afternoon. Her parents often worked until the late evening hours.
Like her parents, she spend long hours alone at a computer screen alone,
programming a machine to be her very best friend and say all the things
she wanted to hear.
"I don't have anything to go back to," she told Bobby
hovering gray and pale among the trees. "Why shouldn't I be a ghost like
you? Nobody knows I'm alive anyhow."
"Ghosts live in the past," Bobby told her. "To be
alive, you must move into the future."
A glimmer of understanding and then confusion. "But
the future is always dark."
"The future is the unknown," Bobby said.
Becky gave a shuddering sigh of despair. "Then I'm
trapped here."
"Your fear has trapped you here."
She turned to him. "What about you? Where do you
come from?"
Bobby pointed to a gray fog among the trees. A pale
glow illuminated the haze from within. "I come from there," Bobby said.
Becky hurried among the trees to where the fog rolled
across her feet. Tombstones protruded above the glowing mist. "You're
buried here," Becky said.
"Other things are buried here, too," Bobby said.
"This is the past."
"What things?"
"The worst of your memories. The source of your
fears of the dark and the unknown."
"Mother took me to a psychiatrist once," Becky said.
"His name was Michael Oppenmeier."
"I don't remember that," Bobby said.
"That was just after you died. Michael said he would
help me remember bad memories so that I would be free of them. He
failed."
"He failed. You were stronger," Bobby said.
Becky thought about it. It was ironic. "A little
girl stronger than a grown man."
"Strength born of fear, but strength needed to
penetrate the dark and the unknown and to grow."
Becky preferred the graveyard. She stepped closer,
thinking that death would be a place of unending comfort, knowing nothing,
fearing nothing.
"Do not be so foolish as to imagine what death may
be," Bobby warned her. "Better by far to challenge the darkness."
Becky did not have the courage. She did not have the
will. She walked to the gravestone.
"Be careful, Becky. The past, too, can be part of
the darkness you fear."
The ground gave way beneath her. She fell, not into
a casket, but into a dimly lit room hardly much bigger than a casket, the
utility closet of the Day Dreams Child Care Center. When she recognized
the room, she would have been less terrified had the ground opened upon a
tomb of skeletons.
A gnarled old man grasped her ankle. Becky clawed
raw earth, screaming. She had forgotten. She had not wanted to
remember. Not ever again.
"Come visit, little girl," his gravely voice
murmured.
He reached up under her dress as she slid into the
earth, dragging her down with his rough hands on her bare legs.
"Come on down, China doll, to your good friend Mr.
Peters!"
