THE GIRL IS ANGRY
I approached the window. The letters had only recently been written; there were still rivulets of moisture running from them, as though the words were wounds cut in flesh, bleeding their message. Through the gaps in the condensation that they had created, I saw the woods.
I went back outside and stood in my yard, staring at the trees, willing them to emerge, but they did not. Perhaps they were no longer there, but there was a stillness to the night that spoke of watchfulness, and even the marsh grass had ceased its whispering. Then the wind returned from the sea, and it tossed the grass and the trees, and it blew some of the shadows away. I erased the words with my fingertips, touching the places that she had touched as I did so, and I wondered at how a man could be haunted and both love and fear the entities that walked in his footsteps.
I stayed at the window, watching the night deepen, imagining my lost daughter’s voice speaking those words to me, imagining her small, pale form passing beneath the trees, traces of moonlight causing the bare branches to crisscross her body, binding her with lengths of darkness. I thought of that old ghost story about the monkey’s paw, and the couple who wish upon it that their dead son might be returned to them, and their horror when they realize the literal nature of their wish’s fulfillment.
And I wondered, not for the first time, if my grief had willed them back into the world.
I went to bed at midnight, after thinking for a time about the meaning of the words on the glass. They seemed like a warning, but of what I could not be sure. To what girl did they refer? Somehow I slept deeply until three a.m… Had I tried to explain to a psychiatrist how that might be possible after a dead child had written on my window, I might have begun by arguing that when one encounters enough strangeness, then what is strange ultimately becomes familiar. The mind can accommodate itself to almost anything, given time: pain, grief, loss, even the possibility that the dead talk to the living. And I understood, too, that this was all part of a larger pattern, a signpost on a journey whose ultimate destination I could not know. I had resigned myself to what was to come, whatever it might be, and that resignation brought with it a kind of peace. So I slept, and I was grateful for sleep. When I could no longer sleep, then I would know that I was going mad.
At one minute after three, I woke. There were sounds coming from below my bedroom: bangs and crashes and barrages of strings. It took me a moment to realize that the TV was on.
But I hadn’t watched television before going to bed, and I would never have left it on if I had.
Making as little noise as I could, I reached for my gun and slipped from the bed. The room was cold. I was naked from the waist up, and my skin seemed to tighten in the chill air. The bedroom door was open, and the hall was dark, but as I reached the stairs I could see the light from the reflected images on the TV screen dancing on the wall. I tried to control my breathing as the blood thudded in my ears. The banister railings were wide, and I would be exposed as soon as I descended to the third step from the top. If it was a trap, then moving slowly and carefully would do me no good. I would simply be an easier target.
There was another series of loud explosions from the TV, and I used the sound to mask my descent. I went down fast, staying against the wall, the gun held close to my body in my right hand while I used my left for balance, but nobody sprang at me from the shadows, and there were no shots. The security chain was still in place on the front door. To the left of the stairs was my office, but the door was closed, just as it had been when I went up to bed. Ahead of me was the living room, the door standing open, the television visible through the gap. It was showing a Road Runner cartoon. There was only one door into the room. I had no choice.
The living room was empty. The couch and the easy chairs that faced the television were unoccupied. The TV remote was lying on the left side of the couch, close to the arm.
I left the TV on and returned to the main hallway. I checked the kitchen first, but it too was empty and the back door was locked. Finally, I went to my office. I gripped the handle, flung the door open, and waited, but there was no reaction from within. I checked through the crack at the hinges but could see nothing. Eventually, with no other option, I stepped in with my gun raised, but my office was as I had left it the day before, even down to the sweatshirt I had thrown across my desk after coming back from an errand at the grocery store a few days earlier.
Despite the cool of the night, I was now bathed in sweat. I made a cursory check of the upstairs rooms, just in case, but the house was empty. I returned to the living room and stared at the TV. The Road Runner was gone, and a Bugs Bunny cartoon had replaced it. Yosemite Sam was hunting with his big gun. It could have been a power surge, I supposed. I turned it off at the top of the set, and killed the power at the socket, just in case.
I was halfway up the stairs when the TV blared into life again.
I kept the gun by my side as I entered the room. It was still empty, and the remote lay where it had been, but the switch at the wall had been turned back on.
A droplet of perspiration slid down my back. There was a smell that hadn’t been there before, or if it had, then I hadn’t noticed it with the fear and adrenaline. It was a hint of perfume, though a cheap and sickly sweet one, the kind that no grown woman would wear-
The words were not said aloud, and yet I could hear them in my head, a repetition of the message on the window.
‘Daddy.’ My god, my god, my god.
But there was nothing there, or nothing that I could see. I placed my hand on the television and pressed the On/Off button gently. The screen went black, and the indicator light went from green to red. I stepped back and waited. I got as far as five in my head when it came back on again, just in time for Bugs to burst through the drum, munching a carrot, to say ‘And Dat’s De End!’
Except it wasn’t, because the station’s indent flashed and instantly Bugs was back again. I even knew the cartoon: ‘Hare Brush.’ I remembered it from my childhood. Bugs and Elmer switch personalities, so that in the end Elmer wins, but he has to become Bugs to do so. I had laughed and laughed. Even in my teenage years, after my father died, I’d laugh when I caught the cartoon again. It was an escape from a world of black and gray and bright, bright red, an escape from hurt and grief, from the memory of pain: the pain of my father’s loss, the pain of my mother’s sorrow…
I stepped closer to the couch and reached for the remote. The sickly scent grew stronger, and I smelled what lay beneath it: not decay but blood and human waste, because whatever was in the room had stayed as it was at the moment of its passing. It was both a girl and not a girl. The best of it was elsewhere, sleeping, unknowing. What was here was all that had been left behind.
She was on the couch; almost a palpable presence. I couldn’t see her, couldn’t hear her, but she was there. I waited for her hand to close upon me as I took the remote, but it did not. The device was moist to the touch. There was condensation on it, although there should not have been. I stepped back from the couch, the remote in my hand, and the smell came with me. Tentatively, I lifted my hand, and caught the odor of her on the plastic.
I glanced at the TV. The image flickered, the action changing, and behind it I thought that I glimpsed a face reflected in the screen. I walked around the side of the couch, keeping my distance from it. When I was behind it, I raised the remote and killed the picture.
And in that instant I saw her suspended in the darkness of the screen like a soul trapped in the void: a black girl in a torn white blouse seated on the couch, her hands by her sides, palms up, her knees scraped raw; blood on
