Ariel Murphy was totally alone. She was cold, sitting in the dark, shivering.
She wanted to cry, to scream, to yell, but she had done all that before and it brought the thing, got the attention of the thing, and that was worse than sitting in the cold dark alone, so she remained silent.
What her eyes could see was large in front of her, like she was sitting in a movie theater in front of a big IMAX screen. But she was a spectator, had no control, couldn’t even blink the eyes she looked through, could not stop the legs that took small creeping steps along the side of a rock wall on a chilly October evening that smelled of mums and burning leaves.
Ariel watched, trembling, wondering what awful act the thing had planned for her body to do.
She saw on the screen a car pull into a parking space at the Maple Tree Inn Motel. Two men got out of it, one of them leaning on a crutch. He must be the man Rusty Willis had stabbed in the courthouse, an attack that had sent the police out looking for her.
Oh, how Ariel wanted the police to catch her, to stop the creature that controlled her from using her body to do terrible things. The monster was watchful now, though, on guard. He had brought her here to spy on the outsiders and he would make her run away before anyone could catch her.
The police were looking for Cassidy Davenport, too, and Ariel knew the monster in her would do anything to keep her from being caught.
A third person got out of the backseat of the car at the motel then, a little girl who glowed with a white light that hurt Ariel’s eyes. The thing that controlled Ariel’s body recoiled in horror from the light! Ariel staggered back, tripped and fell into the side of a rosebush, its thorns ripping her arm and back. The thing couldn’t feel the pain, but Ariel could.
The light upset the thing—confused it. Frightened it. Yes, the thing was afraid of the light that lit the world around the little girl! It had never been afraid of anything before. Not once since that nightmare afternoon when she, Rusty and Cassidy had gone looking for their soccer ball, the day a beast came into her head and body and shoved her aside and took control—not once since that day had Ariel ever felt the beast fear.
It hated. She felt the hate that pulsed out from it at every living thing, every good and beautiful thing. It loathed all creation, from the smallest flower to butterflies and birds. And people! They sent it into such a rage of revulsion it sometimes pounded her fists on the ground until they bled.
The beast constantly raged in a barely controllable anger that sent it into bouts of destruction where it used her hands and body to break dishes, hurl chairs through windows, uproot flowers or unleash spiders in a Sunday school class.
And kill. The thing lived to kill. Killing gave it a thrill that Ariel felt run up and down her spine. When it used her hands to choke the life out of puppies, it was full of an emotion, an elation, Ariel did not know existed. When it used her fingers to slip the switch on a lighter to set a gasoline-soaked cat afire, it laughed a maniacal laugh that tore at her ears and wounded her deeper than the agonized wailing of the murdered animal.
The thing watched people, waiting for an opportunity, and Ariel knew sooner or later it would come. Eventually someone would make a mistake, would leave a baby or small child unattended near her and…
Ariel told herself she would stop it. She would not let it use her body to…But she knew she wasn’t strong enough to stop it. She had tried a time or two—had taken back power over her own limbs for a time—a moment, had spoken or cried out. It was stronger than she was, though and it always wrenched control back out of her hands and screeched at her inside her head until she felt her ears and nose bleed.
But now it was afraid. Of the little girl filled with light. That lone thought warmed Ariel Murphy. A spark of hope glowed in her deepest heart. If it was afraid of the girl, the girl must be able to harm it. Maybe the girl was stronger than it was.
Ariel watched from the rosebush, her thorn-scratched arms and back bleeding, as the three stood together in front of their rooms, talking. Then the little girl who glowed had gone into the room on the right with the big black man, and the bald man with the crutch had gone alone into the room on the left. After that, it was quiet.
Ariel would go now, she knew, but she didn’t want to! She wanted to stay here, near the shining girl who had some kind of power so strong it frightened the beast. Then the door to the motel room on the right opened and the little girl appeared. She held something in her hand, punched a button and the car beeped. She went to it, opened the back passenger-side door, climbed in and then back out again, holding an iPad. She swung the door closed and—
Ariel cried out. She didn’t mean to, didn’t intend or plan to. That was probably why she got away with it. The cry just burst out of her lips. She had caught the thing when it was distracted and somehow got the words out past it.
“Help me! Please! Get it out of me! Make it go away.”
The thing turned on her in a rage. Shrieked at her in a rumbling howl that was so overwhelming she could hear or see nothing else. The cry of rage echoed as if off stone walls until it multiplied all around her, fracturing and shattering, and her aloneness increased, her otherness grew larger, and she felt herself shoved farther back down into the dark depths of herself so deep she might never climb out again.
From a great distance she saw out her eyes that the little girl had stopped and turned her way; then Ariel’s body was running, the thing in a seething rage that burned white hot but did not warm the cold where she hid, down deep in the depths. He was screeching inarticulately at her, the cries opening up great fissures in her head, cracking her open, and she closed her own eyes, buried her head in her lap and tried not to respond to anything at all.
Ariel didn’t really feel it when her leg broke. She knew that it hurt, but somehow knowing it hurt and feeling the pain were two different things, and she’d been shoved so far down in the bottom of herself that she could only know and not feel.
She had been running through the woods, away from the little girl she’d seen at the motel, running like a deer, leaping over bushes or rocks or anything in her path, and she could hear the frantic pounding of her heart, knew she shouldn’t be able to do the things her body was doing, but she’d been watching her body do things she couldn’t really do for…how long? She had no idea. It was growing harder and harder to remember a time when she wasn’t hiding here in the dark, terrified, cold and alone. Harder to remember the people she could see out the eyes she didn’t control anymore. Harder to remember what feelings there were except terror and pain.
She knew as she ran that the creature that controlled her was feeling something she’d never sensed in it before. It was terrified. It was maybe as scared of that little girl as Ariel was of it. That was a wondrous thing—incredible—but the fact of it wouldn’t change her existence. She couldn’t make her body go back to the place where she’d seen the little girl and she was certain the creature would take her as far away from here as possible.
A vine slapped her in the face as she ran and she swatted it out of the way, but it covered her vision for a moment, long enough that in the shadowy evening light she didn’t see the drop-off a few feet ahead in time to stop. She fell probably twenty feet—not straight down. She bounced off the cragged face of a rock, hit it twice before she landed at the base of it in what was probably a creek bed when it rained. She came to rest with her right leg twisted beneath her and the cracking sound it made when it shattered was so distant and otherworldly Ariel didn’t respond in any way.
Then she tried to stand, but the leg would not hold her weight and she collapsed on her butt with her back against the rock. She looked out through her own eyes that she could not control and could see the leg now stretched out in front of her. But it looked more like a sack of marbles than a leg, which she supposed meant it was broken in more than one place, too badly damaged to use even if the creature demanded it.
She felt the creature’s rage like a blast of hot air in her face and then felt her body begin to crawl, dragging her right leg behind her like a snail. The jagged rocks quickly tore the skin on the palms of her hands and on her belly where it dragged across the rocks. She was making no progress at all. She’d fallen into a crevice between two ledges. It was blocked at one end by a tree and the other by a rockslide. The only way out was to climb back up the way she’d fallen. Ariel couldn’t do that, but the creature was determined that she try. So she felt her body haul itself up across jagged rocks, tumbling back down again and again until she lay on her back, looking up at the sky, and all the anger and determination of the beast that controlled her could not make her move. She was totally spent.
Ariel looked up through the tree limbs as darkness stole the bright red and gold fall colors from the leaves. The sky grew black and the first sprinkle of stars began to twinkle and she wondered what it would feel like to die. She wasn’t afraid of dying—she welcomed death! Though she didn’t know anything much about heaven and hell, she did know that when you died, your soul left your body—which meant she could escape the creature that held her hostage. And no matter where she went after that, it would be better than here.
Andi waited until she had heard Uncle Jack gently snoring before she slipped out of the bed and changed out of the candy-striped pajamas Daddy had packed for her and into her jeans and T-shirt. She pulled a hoodie over her head and carried her shoes with her to the door. Achingly slowly, she opened it, just far enough—the key!
She stopped and hurried to the desk where Uncle Jack had put the credit card thing you inserted in the door to open it. If she didn’t take it with her, she’d have to knock on the door to wake him up to let her back in. That would be a problem. She didn’t want him to know she’d been gone at all, wanted to slip out and away and then back while he was still asleep.
If she woke him, he wouldn’t let her leave and she had to go! Uncle Jack wouldn’t understand, but she had to. That little girl by the fence…there was a slimy thing, like the green larvae of some insect, on her shoulders—and she’d cried out. Only it was the little girl. Andi didn’t know how she knew that, but she did. It was the little girl who had called for help, not the thing on her shoulder.
She had sounded so scared, so alone and desperate. Andi had to go, had to find her somehow. Had to help. She thought she could do that—help. That was another thing she didn’t know why or how she knew, but she did. She thought she could help the little girl and she had to try—even if Uncle Jack got mad about it. Even if Daddy grounded her for a week.
Daddy.
Where is Daddy?
She snatched up Uncle Jack’s car keys, too. She’d need them to get into the car for the flashlight in the glove box. There’d be no way to find that little girl in the woods without a flashlight.
Then she stepped out into night air that smelled of bacon frying from the Waffle House next door to the motel. And roses. Mommy had planted rosebushes around the front and back doors of their house in Harrelton, and every time Andi stepped outside, she inhaled the sweet aroma and her mother’s face swam before her.
It did that now, an image of her mother smiling. A lump came up in her throat so big it hurt to swallow back the tears. Mommy. And now Daddy. Gone.
She didn’t sniffle, though, didn’t make a sound, just eased the door closed behind her and rested her forehead against it, feeling hot tears run down her face. It only lasted a moment, though. Then she straightened up, squared her shoulders and turned around.
Princess Buttercup was standing a few feet away, watching her.
Andi couldn’t help it, she rushed to the blonde woman in the pale blue shirt with little yellow flowers, threw her arms around her waist and began to sob. The more she cried, the more she wanted to cry, until she was sobbing so hard her chest hurt. On and on she cried as Princess Buttercup held her, patted her back, brushed her hair off her face and rocked gently back and forth.
It seemed like a long time before the crying jag ended, and when it was over, she couldn’t seem to breathe right. The air hitched in and out almost like the hiccups. Andi had nothing to wipe her face, so she used the bottom of her hoodie to clear the tears off her cheeks.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m doing out here?” she asked.
“I know what you’re doing out here,” Princess Buttercup said.
“You don’t have to be Princess Buttercup, you know,” Andi said. “You can be…well, whoever you are. I’m not a little kid anymore.”
Princess Buttercup smiled. “One day, you’ll see who I am.” Her smile turned into a grin. “But I do like these jeans better than that peasant dress. Don’t know how those people ever got anything done dragging those long skirts along in the dirt behind them.”
It occurred to Andi then that the angel had come to stop her like Daddy or Uncle Jack would. Andi couldn’t let that happen.
“There was a little girl over there by the fence and she called out for help and it was her calling not the green thing on her shoulders. I’m going to get a flashlight out of the car and look for her in the woods. I have to find her.”
She said it all in a rush, hiccupping air in and out as she spoke.
“Of course you do,” Princess Buttercup said. “But you won’t need a flashlight. I’m going with you.”