Something was amiss, had been amiss for weeks.
Her mother had changed. Her face had grown gaunt, haggard, her youthful beauty ravaged by some unseen enemy. Jude’s father bounced between apathy and fervor, one moment staring in silence at some impossible puzzle and the next seeming to find the perfect piece. Jude had theories: illness, adultery, depression. Sometimes she logged them in her journal, once an emotionally charged depiction of girlish enterprise, now a scrupulous recording of her two uninformed subjects. On the flimsy pages of her dime store diary, the lock a cheap silver clasp, laid the minute details of her parents’ lives.
Jude loved her parents fiercely, and sometimes considered herself their protector. They both had a dreamy quality that frightened her for their place in the big bad world. They kissed and laughed. Sometimes they lay in the yard with Hattie on her back between them looking at the stars, or the clouds, or even allowing the rain to fill their mouths. Jude rarely joined in such sensory adventures, but she secretly delighted in her parents’ way of living. Her mother painted wild pictures of blazing sunsets or fields of flowers and Hattie would sit next to her smearing splotches of paint on the green grass in their backyard.
Except, that summer they had not done those things. One afternoon the fizzy lightness of their little life seemed to pop and rush into the sky allowing a darkness to slip in.
Jude yearned to talk to Peter, her twin, her second soul, but High School had severed the invisible umbilical cord that slithered between them. Peter now lived football, football, football, and girls. His hormones raged so constantly that Jude felt them within herself, and could not deny at least a portion of her fuming sexual desire was born directly of his loins. He had beat her to sex because he was a boy and would, in the course of their futures, beat her to most of the things she would claim as her own.
Peter had slipped away, into the strange world that teenage boys vanished into, and Jude could not follow.
Knowing she must forego the shower, Jude slipped on a pair of silk bottomed pajamas and matching top. They were a gift from her parents the previous Christmas. She fumbled around her nightstand, pulling open a drawer. A bible sat inside and though Jude rarely prayed, something unsettling gnawed her once the lights were out. She touched the bible, and whispered her own prayer, made up weeks earlier when the darkness had first settled on their home.
“God, please fix it. Please make my mother well if she’s ill, bring my father back from the edge. Just make us whole again. Amen.”
Putting the bible back, she hurried to the bathroom to brush her teeth before bed.
Hattie
Hattie slipped down the hallway on tip toes, the home stretch, the walls rising up on either side like a vice that might begin its slow crank at any moment. Hers was the room at the end of the hall, the last door on the left. A long blank wall stretched between the kids’ bathroom and her bedroom, for hers was the largest of the children’s rooms and the most isolated.
The first was Peter’s on the right. The heavy air could not stifle his tattered snores; she imagined his thick neck bulging with each escape of breath.
Next came the vacant room. Gram Ruth called it the playroom though it held no toys, only a big mahogany desk, long jagged scratches left in its shiny face. The drawers held old notebooks, some pages filled with stick figure drawings, others just arbitrary notes made by long forgotten hands about long forgotten tasks.
Halfway down the hall, a muted scuffling invaded her delicate ears. Hattie stopped and clutched Felix as though he were her father’s firm torso, not a long dead cat taxidermied into modern existence. The sound was quiet enough, careful enough to be unnatural, not the accidental sounds that belonged to old houses - floor creaks and such. No, it struck Hattie as foreign, ominous, terrifying.
Her heart rate doubled; tripled, sped towards the red panic zone - insisted she run, scream. But she did none of those things, only cringed, her small indulgent face crumpling into the frozen O of horror she saw in Peter’s horror comics. She held Felix up like a shield, a garlic wrapped crucifix for the vampiric monster waiting to devour her.
Ahead a door creaked open.
Hattie screamed loud and piercing, a sound that sliced the old house in two, that might have woken the dead, brought Felix back from cat heaven or hell. A scream Hattie felt in her muscle and her bones.
Another scream accompanied her own.
Jude’s voice ripped through the previously silent hall.
She stood in front of Hattie in the darkened hallway soon to be awash in fierce yellow light. Her big sister’s face must have matched her own, so twisted in shock and horror that Hattie might simply have been staring at herself, instantly aged nine years for time took those allowances. Age came not from the passage of minutes, but how much terror and strain clotted those minutes.
The hallway light flicked on, the small crystal chandelier drenching them in brilliant sparkling light.
“Whoa, cut the gas,” Peter’s voice joined the fray. Peter with his tousled auburn curls, his rumpled white t-shirt, his boxer shorts sagging to reveal soft white belly and the scrawny black hair of puberty’s first appearance, stood in the hallway. He had stepped between the two sisters; sleep caking his squinted eyes, hands on his soft hips.
Jude pulled her hands away from her face, frozen in terror for barely a second before light cast away the demons, and her mouth became an angry red line.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jude snapped. She snatched away the cat. Hattie started to cry out, but Jude had already stuffed the cat into her dark bedroom as Gram Ruth’s sleepy and worse, angry, face appeared at the top of the stairs.
Chapter 3
July 12, 1955
Jude
Jude strode into the kitchen still flying on the previous night’s activities. It wasn’t a love thing; she always floated high after a night sneaking out with a boy. She never did those things at her own home, only at Gram Ruth’s. At home, she didn’t feel the need to rebel; her parents gave her plenty of freedom, but Gram’s house was different.
“We’ve been robbed!” the scream pierced the early morning quiet and Jude dropped the porcelain mug of coffee she’d just poured. It shattered on the tile, shards streaking in every direction, hot coffee splattering her bare legs.
“Damn, ouch, ouch,” she spat, dancing away from the heat.
Footsteps pounded through the house. The housekeeper Camille hurried into the kitchen grabbing a rag and dropping to her hands and knees to wipe the mess.
It had been Gram Ruth who screamed, and Jude heard the grounds-keeper, Frank, talking to her in the parlor. Jude went to the freezer and pulled out a tray of ice, rubbing a cube on her inflamed skin.
Camille looked up as she wiped coffee from the floor.
“You okay, honey?”
“Yeah,” Jude grumbled.
Peter walked in, hair mussed, and took a glass from the cabinet.
“Why’s Gram having a cow?” he asked, holding it under the faucet.
Camille pursed her lips and lifted an eyebrow.
“You two don’t have any idea what happened to Felix?”
Jude groaned and dropped her ice in the sink.
“Hold on.” She ran up the stairs two at a time and pushed into Hattie’s bedroom. Her little sister was lost in a sea of pink blankets and didn’t stir. Felix was propped on the pillow at the head of the bed.