Recurrence

Jackie automatically reached a hand toward her face to push her glasses back up the bridge of her nose, sure as anything that they had inched down like they always did. Except now, her hand was met by only the beads of sweat rolling down her face. She hadn’t worn glasses since her sophomore year of high school, when the combination of the coke-bottle thick, plastic rimmed eye wear and the metal gleam off her braces had made for one truly horrific yearbook picture. She lowered her hand and shook off the memories. There were too many of those here, and not many of them happy. Everywhere she looked, everything she touched sparked some memory that had been repressed for years. And here she was in the basement, a place she had actively tried to avoid as a kid. She couldn’t be sure if she had heard something or if it was a trick her mind was playing on her. 

           Twenty long years since she had been in her childhood home, but somehow, it felt like yesterday. When she had entered the house, she was seven again. She was thirteen. She was seventeen.  Memories pinged around in her head at random, and at any given point, if she had looked at a mirror, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see herself as a knock-kneed, skinny, genderless kid. Barefoot, dirty shorts, a sunburn across her cheeks and shoulders. 

           She propped the broom against the washing machine and turned to go back upstairs.  She was trying to do too much too soon, that’s all. It was bound to take a minute to adjust. She decided to give herself some grace and take it easy for the rest of the day. She was about halfway up when the noise stopped her, her blood running cold in her veins. In addition to her own footsteps, another sound echoed behind her. A sound her mind recalled from deep, deep in her memories, from a nightmare she used to have as a kid, every summer. The sound of hoof beats in the far-off distance. Something coming. For her. She dared not look behind her. Her whole body shivered, and she hurried up the remaining steps and slammed the basement door locked behind her. 

           She spent the rest of the evening busying herself with smaller chores. Organizing paperwork and going through bank statements. She found the folder with all the important papers that she would need for the lawyer in the coming days as what there was of the estate was settled. At last, she felt as though she had accomplished something, and she sat back in the desk chair, sighing deeply. She moved from the office to the den that had been converted to her mom’s sick room. They hadn’t come for the hospital bed yet, and she pulled some clean sheets off the shelf nearby and simply wrapped them around her, collapsing onto the bare mattress. She was asleep at once.

           In her sleep, in her dreams, she saw her parents. They were younger, the house was newer, but she was still her nearly thirty-year-old self. Her Mom was cleaning. Her Dad was paying the bills. They were, as usual, ignoring her. She went to the basement to get her bike and did her best to ignore the crawl space that sat shadowy and deep up under the front part of the house. Her kid self knew not to go anywhere near that darkness. 

           A noise came from the crawl space. The noise she remembered from before, not just earlier that day, but from all those years ago as well. In her dream, she was a kid again, and she knew what that noise meant. It was coming for her. Part of the terror of the dream was the routine that she had to undertake. Every time she had the dream it was the same. She would be in the basement, about to take her bike out, when she would stop at the first notice of the hoofbeats in the distance. The sound of a horse galloping somewhere within earshot. Which made no sense because they lived in a city, not out in country. 

           All the same, the sound of an approaching horse would stop her in her tracks. She would turn toward the sound, realizing that it was coming from behind her. From the crawl space under the front of the house. She would turn toward it, cold chills traveling up and down her spine, not wanting to do it, but feeling powerless to stop herself. As she faced the crawl space, it would no longer be the dark empty void, but a brown, dusty landscape that disappeared into infinity. The dust moved as if blown by the breeze that was coming in through the garage doors. She could see nothing but this sepia mist, but she knew in her heart that the approaching horse and its fearsome rider were coming from the deeper brown distance. It was just a matter of time until she would be able to see them, and once she was able to see them, it would be too late. 

           As she always did in the dream, she ran up the stairs and found Dad in his office. She pulled on his arm and cried as she begged him to help her, but she knew that all he heard was her asking him to come play with her in the basement. He told her that he had things to do and that she should go to her Mom. She reluctantly let go of him and moved more slowly to the kitchen. The routine was the same. The same tears, the same begging, but also knowing that all her parent heard was a bored child asking them to play with her. The same excuse of having too many things to do and that Jackie should just go find her Dad or go entertain herself.

           Eventually dream Jackie gave up. At this point, the dream had her return to the basement steps, resigned to what she had to do, and slowly take the stairs back down to meet her fate. As she moved back down the stairs, the sound of the horse was so loud that it was clear it was about to come out of the crawl space and into the basement. She looked to the landscape that occupied the area where the crawl space had been and waited at the bottom of the steps for the inevitable. She never saw the horse, or the rider, but she knew in her heart what they would look like. The horse would be huge, black and spectral, with bone showing in places, and eyes that would glow red. The rider would be dressed in black as well, with parts of his clothing rotted and full of holes, like the skin of his face and hands. She knew his head would be little more than a skull, with just remnants of skin and hair showing out from under a wide-brimmed hat. She shuddered to think of the first view of his toothy, lipless smile and she looked back up the stairs considering what to do. 

           Jackie awoke with a start just as she had felt something try to scoop her up in its arms as it galloped past her. She was sweating and tangled in the sheets she had wrapped around herself when she had laid down. She grew frustrated and felt herself on the verge of tears just before she was finally able to free herself from the sheets as she tumbled out of the bed onto the floor. She collapsed where she had landed and worked to still her heart that was thumping hard and fast in her chest, fighting back the tears and panic that had welled up in her from the dream. 

           Eventually she got up and made her way to the kitchen for some coffee. It was early, the sun just starting to show in the east, birds just starting to sing their morning songs. She leaned against the countertop and wondered what her therapist would have to say about all this. She thought she knew, but maybe the woman would surprise her. Maybe she would surprise herself. One thing she knew for sure, though, was that she would not spend another night in this house. As she sipped her coffee, she thought back to another time that she had made that same declaration, two decades ago.  

           She remembered harsh words, things said in the heat of anger and a sense of betrayal. Things that she and her mom had both tried to apologize for but couldn’t ever quite seem to get over. And now, it was too late. Neither of them had learned the lesson when her father had passed, and now her mom was gone too. The tears she had fought back from the dream threatened again, for very different reasons now. And then, a sound from below her. 

           Surely, she wasn’t still dreaming. But if she wasn’t… what was happening?

           Slowly she approached the basement door. Unlocked it. Opened it. Stared down the steps and saw a dusty bleak brown floor where the concrete should have been. That shouldn’t be there – not in her waking life, not at the foot of the steps, not at all. She heard a horse, not far off in the distance, but close enough that it must be just out of sight at the bottom of the stairs. It huffed and stomped and rattled its saddle and rein. The leather creaked and moaned as the rider shifted in his seat atop the horse. His bones clattered together with each movement. All this she knew, somehow, inexplicable as it was, but she knew as surely as if she was standing next to them, watching. 

           But she wasn’t. She closed the basement door and locked it once more. She had to remember that she was no longer that scared kid who felt alone in the world. She had no idea exactly when that dream had started, but she knew when it had stopped. She had never had it after she had moved out. Having it again now didn’t surprise her, being back home and being smack dab in the middle of all those memories. But this, being awake and knowing the thing from her dreams was now in her waking life, this was crazy. Was she being punished for not coming to help her Mother? Was this some kind of hallucination?  She ran to her bag and checked her pill container – all were accounted for, so she didn’t think it was the pills.   

           It was a small house, so even from her position, she could hear the creak of the basement door as it swung open. She had grown up here, she knew the noises of the house well. She heard new, impossible sounds. The sound of a horse slowly stepping through the kitchen. The clattering of bone against bone. Suddenly, the morning grew dark. Everything around her took on a brown hue. She dropped her bag and lids of the pill container popped open, pills scattering around her on the floor. She was affixed to the spot where she stood. It had tried to come for her as child and had never been successful. It was here for her now and she was powerless to stop it.  

           She did the only thing she could think of doing. She knelt, wrapping her arms around her knees and closed her eyes as tight as she could, and then tighter still. She raised her hands to her face and covered her eyes. She whispered repeatedly to the room around her:

           “You’re not real. You’re not real. You’re not real.”

           She refused to open her eyes, even as the horse came into her room. Even as she felt the floor tremble with its heavy steps. Even when she felt the horse and rider were right in front of her. She was crying now, terrified of what was going to happen, but she kept her intonation going through her sobs. She smelled animal and remembered the various county fairs she had been to as a kid and the distinct way farm animals smelled from house pets. That had been a happy, healthy scent, full of life. This was different. There was something underneath the horse smell that made her think of waste and death, like there was something rotting nearby. 

           “Open your eyes, child,” a voice rasped. A smell even worse drifted down to her nose from above.

           “You’renotrealYou’renotrealYou’renotreal!” Jackie fell over onto her side on the floor, in a fetal position, still refusing to look at the demon in front of her. 

           “Oh yes, I most certainly am. And you owe me. I offered you escape from your banal existence. I came for you when you found yourself most wishing of a way out, and each time, you rebuffed me until the final refusal when you left. But now, you’ve finally come home. You are here again, and I’ve come for you. The time you were gone allowed me to grow in strength. I’ve been inside this house many times. I took some measure of what was owed me from your parents. They were so easy to manipulate. In the end they were full of anger of mistrust of each other. They were as miserable as you had felt they had made you. So, in my own way, I exacted some revenge on them for you. And now, I’ve come for what is owed to me. Give me your hand and come willingly, and it won’t hurt.”

           Jackie had moved her hands from her eyes to her ears, trying anything to block out the horrific sound the demon’s voice made. It was like metal scraping on metal. Fingernails on a chalkboard. And all the time, the sound of its teeth clacking together. It echoed in her head as if his words were piped directly into her brain. She had managed to keep her eyes closed, but she had been holding them shut so tight her face was cramping and hurting and she didn’t know how long she could keep it up. 

           “Come, child, rise and give me your hand!” It commanded. She remained on the floor, shaking her head, tears and snot running down her face, into her mouth, across her nose to her ears. She rocked back and forth more and rolled over to her other side so her back was to the demon. She dared open her eyes now that she knew she wouldn’t be able to see him and saw the hospital bed. It was high enough and she rolled underneath it. It wouldn’t be able to get her there. She lay flat and watched the horses’ legs to see what it would do.

The rider cursed and she heard movement but didn’t know what was happening until she saw its boots hit the floor between the horse and the bed. They were black, snakeskin, and dirty. There was dirt in all the creases and stitching, and green mold was in patches all over them. His black pants were tucked into the tops of his boots, but they also were covered in the brown dust and had holes in various places. She backed away from those boots and whatever hellish thing they represented. 

Immediately, she felt an iron grip on her ankles. She screamed involuntarily as she was dragged from beneath the hospital bed. Bright lights made her scrunch her face and narrow her eyes as several more hands grabbed her all over and lifted. Next thing she knew, she was back in the hospital bed, being held down as she struggled to get free. She heard a cacophony of voices around her, but it didn’t make sense. Her Mom was crying. Her Dad was telling someone to Do Something, and someone was saying Hold Her Still. Then, a needle prick in her arm. She turned her head and saw the Doctor giving her a shot. She saw the nurses and orderlies putting the restraints back on her arms and legs. 

Then she looked to the end of the bed. Her parents were there. Dad had an arm around Mom’s shoulders. He looked worried. Mom was dabbing at her face with Kleenex. The hospital room was bright and white and like every other room she had been in. This place was no different, no matter what they promised. She knew it, even if her Parents hadn’t caught on yet. She felt the meds taking her down into unconsciousness. It wasn’t really sleep, even if she did have dreams. Nightmares. Her body felt heavy and her eyelids were the heaviest of all. She felt as if she were sinking down into the bed and hoped it would be a good enough hiding place. As she drifted off, the sound of distant hoofbeats came to her ears.