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Teresa struggled with the screen. When the dog appeared, she gasped and hurried backward into the yard.
A massive fawn-colored pit bull stuck its head through the partially opened screen and forced its way out. It raced toward Teresa, all pink jowls, snorts and snarls, and sharp teeth. Teresa hustled backwards, stumbled, and fell on her rear.
She held her arms over her head, but instead of a horrific attack, the dog proceeded to slather her hands and the uncovered parts of her face with its tongue. She pushed at the dog, but it only caused the canine to double its efforts. Once she finally managed to sit upright, the enormous beast sat in her lap and gazed over its shoulder at her with a goofy jowly grin. Its tongue lolled from the side of its mouth.
“Aren’t you vicious.” She patted the dog’s solid head. A name tag on the collar read Pinky, and why not? The beast was all pink mouth and tongue and nose. Teresa surprised herself with a laugh and struggled out from under Pinky. A tennis ball sat nearby. She picked it up and threw it. The dog took off after it, and Teresa slipped inside the house and closed the glass.
While she was distracted, the zoe line had recalculated like a GPS route and now sat in front of her. Tiffany had crept inside, too. Teresa followed the zoe down the hallway. Outside the boy’s room, she pressed herself against the wall and took a quick glance inside.
Brent Winter, the young man who had captioned the photo about her living in the abandoned funeral home, sat in an overstuffed chair. She could just make him out through the fog.
“Smoking an Israeli joint man,” he said into the headset. “I’m so cheesed.”
She scowled. Tiffany pressed the hypo into her hand. Teresa looked down at her. Tiffany nodded. Teresa took a deep breath and launched into the room. She stabbed the hypo into Brent’s chest. He flailed his arms and pushed her into the side table where his beer tottered and fell to the ground in a fizzy mess. Teresa landed, once again, on her backside.
“Shit. What is this?” Brent held his hand up to the hypo that bobbed up and down with his sluggish heartbeat. He was too stoned to realize he’d been stabbed. Teresa quirked her mouth to the side and got to her feet.
“Just a bad trip.” She didn’t care if trip was the wrong word. Brent looked over his shoulder at the table that held his smoking joint, and Teresa grabbed the plunger.
As she pulled, Brent’s skin decomposed at an accelerated rate. His muscles and tissues disintegrated next, body crumbling to the ground and rotting with the sound of someone squeezing the insides from a pumpkin. His heart remained stuck to the end of the needle until the plunger fully retracted. It plopped onto the floor and burst like a water balloon full of blood.
All that remained of Brent Winter was a small pile of rotting meat and some bone fragments on the carpet. The odor turned Teresa’s stomach.
“Why did that happen?” she asked Tiffany.
The girl pulled a twisty straw from an empty soda bottle. “It has to do with your mind.” Tiffany tapped her temple. “Ruthie shriveled because you thought that’s what would happen when you pulled the plunger. The sheriff blew up because you thought he was fat. You thought Brent was wasting his life, so I guess he wasted away.”
“I didn’t think any of those things,” Teresa said. “I didn’t know what to expect.”
“Your subconscious, Mommy.” Tiffany squatted next to the remains and poked at them with the straw. She peered up at Teresa and shrugged. “At least he won’t chase us.”
“But what do I do with this mess?” She covered her mouth and nose with her sleeve. “The smell.” She gagged.
“Leave it.”
“Leave behind evidence?” Teresa couldn’t. Not with big shot Detective Logan on the case.
“UpNSmoke23? Hello?” A tinny voice came through the headset that had fallen when Brent disintegrated. Teresa looked at the TV where some kind of futuristic battle took place. “Where’d you go, man? We need your help breaching the base.”
Witnesses. Or were they? She didn’t know anything about video games kids played these days, but she knew they played online. Were the other players strangers? Teresa pulled her sleeves over her hands and picked up the headset. She listened in.
“UpNSmoke23, come on, man.”
“Dude, he probably passed out.”
“Yeah, Israeli joints? Jesus fucking Christ—he’s probably blitzed.”
“Should we call an ambulance? Anyone know where he’s from?”
The last was followed by a series of negative responses.
She dropped the headset, stepped over the pile of rot, and took her daughter’s hand. They left through the front door.
The stink of Brent’s putrefaction stayed in her nostrils until she reached the dirt road at the edge of town. She avoided the slushy mud—left after the snow had melted—as best she could. Tiffany hopped from mostly dry spot to mostly dry spot. Everything was a game to her. Teresa wished she could be so carefree.
At the abandoned house, Teresa went inside, and the walls melted as they usually did. But instead of the brown stone, Tiffany’s nursery, the real one—not the basement—appeared. The crib, the rocker, the changing table. All of it. Every piece Derrick had given away.
“Mommy! My things!” Tiffany reached over the crib’s rail and pulled out Big Bear. She held him up and twirled around.
“I don’t understand. How is this here?”
Tiffany twirled. “Yaldabaoth, Mommy. He is glorious.”
Teresa closed her eyes and swallowed. The door opened, and Derrick walked in. Teresa gasped and backed away from him. His eyes weren’t right, though. They were yellow, not dark brown.
“What do you think?” Yaldabaoth’s silky, sensual voice came from Derrick’s lips. He held his arms wide and turned a circle.
Teresa grabbed onto the edge of the changing table and pulled in a deep breath.
“Too much?” The grin was not her husband’s.
Teresa nodded. “I’m not exactly on good terms with my husband right now.”
He moved closer to her and touched her stomach. A pleasant chill ran through her, as if his touch had electrified all of her nerves.
She looked past Yaldabaoth for Tiffany, but her daughter wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
“This is what you want, isn’t it?” He moved closer still, pressing her against the changing table. “Happiness with your husband? The return of your child?” Yaldabaoth’s lips lingered millimeters from hers. His hands roamed to her backside, cupped her buttocks. Her eyes flew open and met his. The spell broke.
“You don’t want me,” she said. “All you want is this.” She slapped the hypo full of Brent’s zoe into his hand and moved away from him. “Stop trying to fool me with your mind games.”
The nursery melted into the cave with the pool. Yaldabaoth tilted the syringe back and forth like a seesaw.
“Four more.” He laughed.