“CHARLIE?” MOM SAYS from the shadows. “Baby? Are you there?”
“M-Mom?” My throat has gone dry; the word comes out as a dusty record scratch.
“I missed you, baby.” Mom’s from Louisiana. Her voice has a slight Southern lilt to it. The sound of it has always brought me comfort, even in the worst of her drug-induced fogs.
“I’m so scared, Mom,” I say. My eyes fill and spill, tears dripping off my chin. I realize that I’m just talking to a black opening in a doorway and that the thing I’m talking to is most definitely not my mother. But I don’t care. Her voice sounds perfect and genuine, and I want to fall asleep while she sings me “Folsom Prison Blues.”
“I know, sweetie,” Mom whispers in the dark. I almost, almost, think I can see a wink of light in her eyes, staring out at me. “Come here, Charlie.” Something in her voice warps a little, and my name sounds deeper, rougher. “Come give me a hug.”
Something slips inside my head and presses the go button on my legs. I take one of my lurching steps forward. Then another one.
“Wait,” I say. “Wait, no. Stop. Gabe. Gabe! Gabe, help me!”
My body surges forward. I try to will myself to stop, but my arm lifts my crutch, sets it down, and I do the work to hobble ahead. I can feel it, the anomaly, squirming around along the nerve endings of my brain, pulling at wires and resetting gears, trying to change me, trying to empty me out. The closer I get to it, the wider the back door opens. There’s still nothing but empty blackness on the inside, not even a faint glow from the front windows of the store.
“Jesus Christ, somebody help me, please!”
“It’s okay, sweetie,” Mom says. There’s no body to go along with the voice. It sounds like the entire doorway is a mouth, and it’s speaking to me in an almost perfect imitation of my mother. Almost, because every so often, her tone dips, and that beautiful singsong accent drops a few octaves, turns sour.
My legs, broken or not, keep pulling me closer. There’s nothing I can do to stop it.
“You’ll be safe in here with me, Charlie,” the doorway says in my mom’s voice.