Dark Surge Read online

  “You have a tummy ache?”

  Frowning, Emily complained, “I can’t catch them all!” She pointed with more vigor at the toilet and Tess moved to it, lifting the lid, expecting she didn’t know what.

  The white porcelain bowl was full of flies.

  Tess gasped, resisted the instinct to step back, the instinct to scream.

  Most of the flies were alive, paddling uselessly, floating on top of the clear water. There were probably fifty of them; maybe more.

  “You have to help me, Mommy,” Emily repeated. “I can’t catch them all. Some of them are too high.”

  Looking back at Emily, Tess swallowed what felt like a lemon in her throat—sour and painfully huge. “Did you put these in here?”

  Emily nodded, tears finally spilling from her eyes and down her flushed cheeks. “I didn’t want to kill them. You told me not to kill bugs, but there’s so many of them. I didn’t want to go outside alone at night and…and…” Unable to control herself any longer, the little girl began to cry, her breath hitching in and out, her tiny chest heaving beneath her Spiderman pajama top.

  “It’s okay, baby.” Tess stooped and took her daughter into her arms, felt her trembling little body and almost began to cry herself. What the hell was going on?

  She stroked Emily’s back for several minutes, ignoring the occasional fly which would swoop into the bathroom, bump itself into the overhead light fixture several times before buzzing back into the hallway again.

  When it seemed that Emily had cried herself out for the time being, Tess asked, “You caught all these flies and put them in the toilet.”

  Emily nodded against her mother’s shoulder, but said nothing.

  “How?”

  The girl’s only response was a loud, snotty sniff and Tess decided not to push the subject just yet.

  But it was so bizarre. The thought of her daughter running frantically around the house in the middle of the night, scooping up flies in her little fist and depositing them in her favorite toilet before slamming the lid down, ensuring that none of the filthy things could escape.

  Filthy.

  The word caused Tess’s eyes to widen and she gently pushed Emily away from her. “We need to wash your hands, okay, sweetie? Come on, let’s wash them downstairs.”

  Once again, Emily only nodded, seeming to have lost her voice for the moment, or at least the desire to speak. Tess bent down and did something she hadn’t done for probably a year, though she knew Josh did it frequently: she picked Emily up. Picked her up and carried her out of the bathroom with its suddenly too harsh light and close, constricting walls. Holding her tight, Tess carried her daughter down the stairs and into a more open space where she could breathe. Where, she hoped, they both could breathe.

  CHAPTER 8

  Josh lay staring up at the ceiling, his naked body covered in a thin sheen of sweat, Gillian’s head on his shoulder.

  “That was amazing,” he said, still panting.

  Gillian chuckled mildly, teasing his left nipple with her index finger. “As always.”

  “Umm hmm.” He shifted slightly, placing his free arm under his head, stroking her shoulder with the other hand. “I’d still like to know where you learned to do that with your tongue.”

  “That would spoil all the fun, wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. Would it?”

  She laughed again, gave his nipple a tug, hard enough to make him wince. “I have no idea what you’re implying, mister, but you need to tread carefully.”

  “Ouch! Okay, okay. I was just playing.”

  “Besides, what do you care? No matter where I ‘learned it’, as you so eloquently put it, you’re the one reaping the benefits now.”

  “I suppose you have a point.”

  “You suppose?” She lifted her head and looked at him. The candle flickering across the room on the dresser caused the bones of her face to appear as if they were shifting beneath her skin, ever so slightly warping her features out of proportion and then changing back to normal again. The sight was vaguely disconcerting and Josh closed his eyes against it, preferring to think of her face as it was when she was on top of him, her long blonde hair sweaty and glued to her cheeks and neck as she rocked up and down, head tilted to one side, breasts bouncing.

  Gillian continued, “Well, then, I guess I have to suppose I might have a headache the next time you’re in the mood to get your dick sucked.”

  Part of Josh inwardly flinched. He still wasn’t completely used to the way Gillian talked. He’d been raised to believe only sluts and whores talked that way. God knew Tess never had.

  Of course, there was the other part of him, the part that liked the way she spoke to him. Loved it, in fact. That part was mostly between his legs and stirred ever so slightly as he lay with his eyes closed. He tried to ignore it, was actually a bit sore from their last go-round. “I wouldn’t want that to happen,” he said.

  “That’s right. You wouldn’t.” She lay her head back down on his shoulder and fell silent, giving Josh the headroom to wonder just who it was that wore the pants in this relationship. And the more important question: did he even care?

  The thoughts were still tickling his mind ever so gently when he drifted off, sleeping the sleep of the well-spent and satisfied. But the tickling remained…whispery little legs walking through the hair on his forearms…tingling across his collarbone and up the side of his neck…prickling over his eyes lids, tangling in his lashes…

  He came awake slowly, raising a hand to his face, flapping the tickle away, but there was something else. Some sound that wasn’t right. Didn’t belong.

  Licking his lips, he swallowed, tried to focus and opened his eyes.

  The room was black now, the candle having burned out at some point. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness but there was still that sound…that buzzing…

  He turned his head, was able to make out the shape of Gillian beside him, asleep on her back. With every exhalation, she snored quietly, much like the way Emily snored when she was especially tired.

  Josh blinked, rubbed grit from his eyes and sat up on his elbows.

  The buzzing was louder now and the answer came to him like a sudden blow to the solar plexus, knocking the air from his lungs and he fumbled for the lamp on the bedside table, finding the switch and twisting it, somehow knowing what he would see, but at the same time not knowing, not knowing until he heard himself scream.

  The light came on and he saw the flies covering Gillian as she slept, hundreds of them, moving with sluggish sleepiness over her face, neck, chest…completely covering her until she was no longer visible beneath the living blanket of black.

  Josh recoiled, tried to back away, fell out of the bed, screaming as he hit the floor.

  Gillian jolted awake and the insects took flight, all of them at once, a black cloud rising towards the ceiling and Josh tried to scramble to his feet, discovered his feet were tangled in the sheet he’d dragged off the bed with him, tripped and fell, bashing his head hard against the corner of the night table.

  The room grayed for maybe twenty seconds and he could hear Gillian shouting his name from the opposite end of a long tunnel. He groaned, momentarily forgetting the flies in favor of the piercing pain in his skull. When his vision cleared, Gillian was crouched naked on the floor beside him, her face fraught with concern, still repeating his name.

  Josh’s breath came and went in great wheezing gasps, his eyes bolting from her face to the ceiling, clutching the tangled sheet in his sweaty fists.

  There was no sign of the flies.

  They were gone. Vanished.

  He looked back at Gillian, made himself speak. “Flies,” he croaked. “Hundreds of them. All over you.”

  Gillian’s frown deepened and she touched his face. “What?”

  “There were flies! Covering your whole body!” He didn’t mean to be shouting, but nevertheless, knew he was. “Hundreds of them!”

  Her green eyes cleared with
understanding and she shook her head. “You had a bad dream, Josh. That’s all. Just a bad dream.”

  “NO!” he cried, tried to pull out of her reach. His back hit the night table and he drew his knees to his chest, cowering. “It wasn’t a dream!”

  “Josh, you hit your head. I heard the crack. Let me look at you.”

  “It wasn’t a dream,” he repeated desperately, becoming aware that he was hysterical, acting like a child terrified of the bogeyman. Disgusted with himself, he took a deep breath and then another. “Wasn’t a dream. I heard them. They woke me up!”

  “Okay, fine. They woke you up. Now let me look at your head. You’re bleeding, for Christ’s sake.”

  Confused, Josh lifted tentative fingers to the back of his head. They came away red and dripping. “Jesus,” he whispered.

  “Yeah, Jesus. Now, come on. Let’s get you up and into the bathroom so I can get a good look at that wound. You might need a trip to the hospital.”

  “But, Gillian, there were flies.” He sounded pathetic, even to himself.

  “Well, if they were here, they’re gone now.” She straightened up, leaning over and gripping his upper arm. “I’m not going to be able to lift you. Help me out here.”

  Josh rose shakily to his feet, kicking aside the sheet, putting more weight on Gillian than he would have liked. Together, they moved around the bed and made their way across the room to the master bath. Gillian flipped the light switch and sat Josh down on the toilet. “Boy, that must have been some nightmare.”

  “I think I’m gonna puke,” Josh said. He was shivering and could feel the trickle of blood rolling down the back of his neck. “Maybe faint.”

  “You’re not gonna puke or faint,” Gillian told him firmly, rummaging in the medicine cabinet for bandages. “You’re gonna be fine. Remember, I used to be a nurse.”

  Slowly, Josh’s stomach began to settle, as did his nerves. Gillian tending to his head wound gave him something else to concentrate on, his breath hissing out from between clenched teeth as she cleaned it with alcohol and held a washcloth against it for several minutes.

  “It’s not that bad,” she said after a while. “I don't think you need stitches. Here, hold this.”

  “Thanks,” he said, feeling embarrassed now. “Fuck! It was so real!”

  “Yeah, some dreams are like that. What happened at Tess’s house must have been floating around in your subconscious.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Okay, let go.”

  He did and winced when she pressed a gauze bandage to his head. “Ow!”

  “Be quiet, ya big baby. You’re lucky I’m not shaving your head, but when it comes time to take this tape off, you’re gonna wish I had.”

  The pain made him queasy again, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. Just like he wasn’t about to tell he that he was not convinced the flies had been a nightmare.

  But, of course, that was crazy thinking. There were no flies anywhere now, proving the whole incident must have been a dream.

  And yet…he wondered.

  CHAPTER 9

  The two girls sat cross legged on the grass in the early afternoon sun.

  “This is black tourmaline,” Mick said, holding her hand out for Speck to see the little black beads nestled in the cupped palm. “It’s good for protection.”

  “Pretty,” Speck said.

  “Yep. And with the quartz and silver beads, we should be all set.” She had convinced her friend in the Wiccan store to give her a few bags of beads and a small spool of hemp twine with the promise of paying for them over the next few days. Speck was impressed that Mick knew how to fashion homemade bracelets and watched with fascination as the other girl’s fingers expertly tied off knots, braiding the natural-colored hemp strings together and using a pair of tiny scissors that she’d also begged from the hippie woman.

  “Where did you learn to do this stuff anyway?”

  “My step-mom is a witch. She taught me how to read Tarot cards too.”

  “Wow. All my mom ever taught me was how to duck a punch.”

  Mick looked up from her work with a raised eyebrow. “Nice,” she said sarcastically.

  “Yeah. She’s a real psycho bitch. Really good at head games.”

  “I think a lot of women are good at head games.”

  Speck lit a cigarette, gazing around at the other park dwellers. “I guess head games are better than being a punching bag, which is what I was for my dad.”

  “You too, huh?” Mick had returned her attention to the bracelets. “Why are so many men such shitty human beings?”

  “A lot of them sure are shitty fathers.”

  “It’s all that testosterone. Fucks up their heads.”

  Speck snickered. “You think?”

  “Yeah, all that chemical is good for is making people aggressive and growing body hair.”

  The two of them laughed.

  “I’m serious, though,” Mick insisted. “All you have to do is watch the news to see that men are more fucked up in the head than women are. They commit something like 99% of all crimes! Especially violent ones.”

  “Maybe they should be neutered at birth.”

  Dobie came strolling across the grass towards them and the sight of him made the girls crack up even more.

  “What?” he asked when he was near enough, stopping and looking down at them warily. “What’s so funny?”

  Mick shook her head, smiling, head bent, eyes still on her craft project.

  “Well,” Speck said. “Basically we were talking about how the world would be better off without testicles.”

  The girls howled with laughter and Dobie stood there shaking his head until their laughter had ceased enough for him to speak. Finally he said, “Damn feminists.” The statement only caused more laughter and he sat down between them with a sigh.

  “We’re sick of men running the world and fucking everything up,” Speck told him and gave his arm a playful slug.

  “Are you two stoned, or what?” he asked.

  “I wish,” Speck said while Mick went on smiling.

  “Oh,” Dobie said, drawing up his legs and wrapping his arms around them. “You guys think women would do such a great job running the world? The second some bitch had PMS, the missiles would be flying.”

  This time it was Mick who assaulted him with an elbow to the ribs.

  “Whatever you say, cave boy,” Speck told him, puffing smoke into his face.

  He waved his hand in front of his face. “You got another one of those?”

  While Speck was reaching into her denim jacket for the pack of Marlboros, he said, “I think I found another empty.”

  “Really?” Mick glanced up. “Cool. I was afraid we’d be sleeping in the park tonight.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good way to get arrested,” Dobie said, accepting a cigarette from Speck. “Anyway, it’s up by South Street. Me and a couple of the guys are gonna go check it out tonight.”

  “I hope it’s not scheduled for demolition,” Speck said, only half joking.

  “Nah,” Dobie replied. “Looks like it’s been empty forever, from the outside anyway. Has about twenty layers of posters and crap on the walls.”

  “Sounds good,” Speck said. “Want me to come? You might need someone small enough to fit in through a window or something.”

  Dobie deepened his voice, stuck out his chest and pounded it with a fist. “This is men’s work, woman! Cave man great hunter! Cave woman make stew!”

  The girls laughed again.

  “Us guys aren’t all bad,” Dobie said, offering up a rare smile. “We’re at least good for hunting.”

  “Yeah, go spear that pigeon, would you?” Mick said dryly. “Maybe catch a squirrel or two for dinner.”

  “You’d shit your pants if I did.”

  “Fucking A I would,” Mick agreed. “I’d be so fucking shocked, I’d probably get my period and not be able to fuck you for a week.”

  Dobie let out a disgusted yell. “Oh
, man! Why’d you have to go there?”

  Mick cackled maniacally. “Because it gets you every time. God, men are wimps. A little blood and you’re all ready to pass out.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s gross.”

  “Oh, brother,” Speck said, crushing the butt of her cigarette out against the bottom of her sneaker.

  “There!” Mick said suddenly. “One down, two to go.” She asked Speck to hold out her wrist and then tied the hemp jewelry around it. When she'd finished, she had Dobie hold out his own wrist for measurement.

  “Thanks,” Speck said, examining the trinket closely. No one had ever made anything for her before, with the exception of her grandmother who had knitted her a scarf once when she was little. “This is awesome, Mick. I’ll never take it off.”

  “Good, because you’re not supposed to. That’s the point.”

  Speck thought that maybe it was Mick who was missing the point, at least the one she was trying to make. That the gift, however small and simple, actually meant something to Speck. Meant a lot. She smiled at her friend and lay back in the grass, her eyes taking in the blue sky and the fine day, feeling the sun on her face and the cool earth beneath her, her mind blissfully empty, for a while anyway.

  CHAPTER 10

  Downing three ibuprofen tablets with a gulp of iced green tea, Tess sat in her campus office, groggy-eyed. She’d been lecturing all day and was exhausted; her feet ached right along with her head.

  She stared at the computer monitor blankly, trying to get herself to focus on the task at hand: making a list of two and five year “goals” for the dean. It was a state requirement and she couldn’t blame the dean for it, but still, she felt the resentment growing in her belly like a vine of wild ivy, threatening to choke everything in its path. There were so many other things to be done. Composing and grading exams, checking the message boards of her online classes, meetings with other instructors and the department head.

  Sitting back in her chair, she felt like a petulant child—knew she was behaving like one—forced to do homework and chores when she’d rather be outside playing hopscotch.