Reversals

Halloween, 2003: Two sisters find that, on at least one night of the year, darkness brings changes far beyond the mere absence of light.

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Transcript

NARRATOR

Halloween Special: Reversals.

(Sounds of wood creaking)

NARRATOR

Britton Kincade drums her fingertips impatiently on the steering wheel, peering into the darkness of the Gardner yard. This is the last stop before they leave the little hamlet of Millwater and return home, and she was ready to be done an hour ago. The possibility of making it over to her best friend Kat’s house for horror movies and gossip and maybe a couple of purloined cigarettes has already passed, and her little sister Shayla’s sugar-fueled exuberance has worn on Britton over the course of the evening.

The Gardner place sits on the very edge of Millwater, and beyond the reach of its paltry two streetlights. The dwindling little Scotchman’s Creek flows nearby, and the ancient cottonwoods that grow along its banks overhang the property heavily, casting it in expansive shadow that deepens throughout the afternoon. A low, heavily drooping branch obscures view of the Gardner porch from where she has parked, and Britton begins to feel a nagging sense of illogical worry.

Then Shayla appears in her butterfly costume, the one which Britton finds so inappropriately cutesy for the holiday. The white plastic bucket in her hand, printed with a cartoonish ghost’s face, threatens to overflow with candy, and Britton feels a slight surge of jealousy. She is sure that almost every house they have visited has given Shayla just a little more candy than the other trick-or-treaters. Adults always seem to find Shayla utterly adorable, far more than they ever did Britton – even while they comment on the strong similarity in the sisters’ features.

Britton shakes her head in disgust at herself, telling herself that she is sixteen and far too old to be upset over such childish things, but even her self-judgment only further sours her mood.

Shayla opens the passenger door of the third-hand 1992 Accord, sliding onto her seat carefully to avoid damaging her wings of polyester and plastic. At once, as though there had been no interruption, she takes up her breathless talk about her favorite Pokémon again. All the talk of Bulbasaurs and Squirtles and Oddishes leaves Britton utterly lost, and she is tempted to snap at her little sister and tell her to shut up, but instead she focuses on the road ahead of her. Fog, unusual in this part of the world, has begun to spill over the fields and pastures, hanging heavily in the hollows between the rolling hills.

Halfway home, a thought crosses her mind – a somewhat reckless one. Kat’s house is not far out of her way, and she knows her friend’s mother, like their own parents, will be out late tonight. Coming to the intersection, she slows to a crawl, and then takes the left turn that leads away from their house, and toward Kat’s. 

Shayla is too absorbed in her continuing tirade about the relative merits of Grass Type versus Water Type to even notice the variance in route for half a minute. When she finally remarks upon it, Britton tells her that if she lets her stop by and talk to Kat for just a few minutes, and doesn’t mention it to their parents, she will buy her an extra bag of candy tomorrow.

Really? Shayla asks in mingled disbelief and delight.

Britton nods, unable to suppress a smile.

Pumping her feet in excitement, Shayla pulls out her Gameboy Color and tells her sister to take her time.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Kat is smoking when she opens the door, though Britton noticed the slight shifting of the drapes betraying that she did glance out the living room window beforehand. Still, the feigned nonchalance on her friend’s face is so convincing that Britton cannot help but feel that surge of admiration and affection she so often feels in Kat’s presence.

What’s up? Kat asks around the bobbing cigarette.

Britton asks if her mom is still out, to which the other girl nods. Then she asks if Kat has an extra smoke, and Kat beckons her inside.

Carpenter’s The Thing plays in the background as they sit on the sagging couch. The little country house smells strongly of boiled potatoes and Marlboro smoke, a smell seeming both comforting and a little slovenly to Britton, whose parents are strict non-smokers and whose mother seems to believe that all carbohydrates are on par with cyanide.

Kat says that her mother will probably be home in an hour or so, and Britton admits regretfully that she can’t stay long. She just wanted to stop by and say hi, since they hadn’t gotten to have the movie night they’d hoped for, she explains apologetically. Kat simply shrugs and says shit happens, with a detachment that Britton again thinks is affected.

Britton lights up, and for a moment all that passes between them is exhalations of tobacco smoke. Then, her demeanor suddenly changing, Kat sits forward and asks if Britton wants to do something “spooky”, in her words.

Sure, Britton smiles.

Kat dashes out her cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table, then darts out of the room. The sounds of quick rummaging reach Britton’s ears, and shortly Kat returns, holding a pack of cards in her hand. As she settles back onto the couch, Britton realizes that they are not familiar playing cards, but a tarot deck.

Kat grins, affecting the warbling, airy intonation of a stock character mystic as she fans the deck upon the coffee table before them.

Let the cards speak to you, she says. Draw the three that call out to your hand, one for past, present, and future.

Laughing at her friends mock earnestness, Britton draws the cards carefully, trying despite their shared disbelief to let her intuition guide her selections. She lays them out as she draws them: Six of Swords, Ten of Pentacles, The Tower, the first two lying upside down. To Britton, the cards mean nothing, but she sees Kat’s eyes narrow in concentration, then her brow furrow slightly.

Is that bad? she asks, after the quiet stretches just a little too long.

Not necessarily, Kat says at length, in a soft and slightly too-measured tone that tells Britton that she definitely thinks it is. Still, she waits for her friend to explain further, so long that she begins to wonder if Kat is not going to elaborate at all.

And just when Kat begins to speak, there is a knock at the door. Both girls jump at the unexpected interruption, and only when the knock is repeated does Britton recognize the soft, irregular tapping as that of her little sister.

Rolling her eyes, she gets up and throws open the door. But when she sees Shayla in her colorful butterfly wings, looking small and timid on the wooden steps, she bites back the sharp words that sprang to her tongue. Shayla apologetically explains that the batteries in her Gameboy died, and that she was getting creeped out sitting alone in the car.

Ruefully, Britton turns toward her friend and says that they should probably get home now. Kat nods slowly, mumbling a robotic goodbye as though she has barely registered what is happening; her attention is fixed once more upon the cards. As the sisters step through the door, Kat looks up and calls out a few more words of parting, asking them to be careful on their way home. As they pass through the dark yard toward the Accord, Britton cannot help but think how unlike Kat, usually so heedless of possible danger or ill fortune, those final moments truly were.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The way home is not long, yet the country darkness under the now clouded-over sky is so absolute, and the deer so thick this year, that Britton feels compelled to drive much more carefully than usual. When at last they reach the old two-story farmhouse, seven miles outside of Millwater, they find it still unlit, the driveway empty aside from the newly arrived Accord.

Something about the sight makes Britton’s heart sink. It is hardly the first time the girls have come home to an empty house, or that she has been compelled to cook them dinner, or even that they have gone to bed before their parents return. What it is exactly about the lightless windows and front door that looks so bleak, so hostile, she could not say.

Shayla, however, does not seem to pick up on whatever it is that her older sister does, and she simply gets out of the car and races up the walk toward the door. Britton follows more slowly. The jack-o’-lanterns they carved Tuesday night sit upon the cement steps, their candles long since burned out. As she draws near, Britton realizes that her leering, evil-faced pumpkin has switched places with Shayla’s goofy, happier one, something she can make little sense of unless one their parents for some reason came home briefly in the time since the sisters left for trick-or-treating.

Then the unpleasant possibility occurs to her that someone else has visited their home, and her earlier apprehension grows. She is about to call out for her sister to wait before entering the house, but Shayla is already opening the door and turning on the light.

The switch clicks under Shayla’s fingers, but the bulb overhead does not respond.

Come back here, Britton hisses, too late. The door closes behind Shayla, though the younger sister did not seem to move it.

Bile rising up her throat, Britton now runs up the steps, the doorknob feeling unnaturally chill and slick under her touch. Barely has she lain her fingers on the cold brass before it is opening, and she tells herself that it is only because her little sister did not close it properly, trying and failing to dispel her feeling that the house is waiting for her.

She steps through into the pitch black.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The house is not as they left it – even in the abject darkness, Britton is sure of that. She calls out softly to her sister, but she hears no sound in reply. She flips the switch on the left on and off, on and off, knowing that it will not respond to her any more than it did Shayla.

Abandoning that, she runs her hand along the wall, letting it lead her toward the living room. Twice more she calls out to Shayla, daring to raise her voice just a little, but still she receives no response.

Britton pauses in confusion when she comes not to the large cased opening that should mark the transition into the living room, but the small door that opens into the kitchen on the opposite side of the hall. For a moment she stands there in the darkness, trying to mentally work out how she could have accidentally switched walls without realizing it, before she finally decides it is simply not possible.

Feeling a sudden, overwhelming rush of disorientation and terror, she slides down the wall until she is on all fours, feeling somehow a little safer that way. She tries to call out to her sister once more, but her voice refuses to leave her throat.

At last, she manages to force out a grating squeak of her sister’s name. Her eyes pop, so intent is her listening for any kind of response, and at last she does hear something. It is a faint, harsh sound, like a hoarse whisper, but if there are syllables in it, they are so garbled that Britton cannot make a single sound out clearly.

She moves in what she judges to be the direction of the sound, crawling in the pitch. When her hand touches something soft and warm, a strangled cry tears itself from her throat before she can arrest it.

There is a small whimper from what she has touched, and Shayla’s voice asks shakily if Britton is the real Britton.

Britton doesn’t even consider the question at once, reaching out and wrapping her sister in a blind, fumbling embrace. Tears of relief begin to stream from her eyes as her hands brush against the fragile plastic and polyester wings.

Even as Shayla hugs her back, her little arms shaking, she repeats the question: Are you the real Britton?

What other one is there? Britton asks, trying to laugh but instead ejecting a weak choking sound. Shayla does not answer. Instead, she asks if they can leave.

Yes, Britton replies, even though she doesn’t know where else they can go. She desperately wishes, as she has not wished in many years, that the door would open, announcing their parents’ return.

Instead, there is a strange shifting in the house, unlike the usual nighttime settling of old timber and plaster, but more alive, somehow, more liquescent.

The thought comes to her of returning to Kat’s, of explaining at least what little she can to her friend and likely Kat’s mother by the time they get there, that they did not feel safe in their house. And with this possibility, she feels a little bit of renewed hope.

Standing, Britton tells her sister to keep a good grip on her hand, and feeling her way along the wall with her left, she leads them carefully back the way she has come. She moves slowly in the dark, careful not to trip over any unseen obstacle. One minute passes, and then two, and still, they fumble their way in the pitch black. After five, Britton knows that something is very wrong, and yet she knows she cannot merely have gotten turned around – they should have reached something recognizable by now.

As if in answer to her unspoken thoughts, Shayla whispers tremblingly: This is not our house.

Britton opens her mouth to deny it, but she does not speak. It cannot be anything but their house, and yet, it is not their house.

Finally, they come to a corner, and shortly thereafter, Britton’s fingertips trace the outline of the door. She reaches for the doorknob and turns it, eases the door open slowly, unsure exactly from what she is trying to conceal their escape, but feeling compelled toward concealment nonetheless.

The door opens onto blackness as pure as that within the house. A wind blows in, chill and damp and smelling unpleasantly of damp growth, like the breath from a stagnant pond. The sisters stand at the threshold, staring out for any sign of the distant farm lights that should twinkle somewhere out there in the distance, but there is nothing but the dark and the cold and the wind.

At length, Britton takes a tentative step outside, finding the surface under her feet soft and slightly spongy, with a hint of slickness under her sole. Just as she begins to place a little weight on that foot, it shifts beneath her, as though recoiling.

She reels back with a cry of shock, pulling her little sister with her. Shayla cries out as well, asking what is wrong.

Don’t go through the door, Britton says shakily, after gathering her jolted wits for a few seconds. It’s not the way out.

Shayla’s trembling has become more pronounced though, and in the quiet, Britton can tell that her sister is crying again, though the younger girl is trying to conceal it. She wants to reach out to her, cradle her little body and comfort her, but something is happening to Britton. A paralysis of fear is slowly crystallizing in her limbs, hypothermic lethargy saturating her mind.

The door swings closed, as though of its own accord. The sisters stand, trembling, in the black.

(Eerie music)

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

After another forty minutes of hesitant, blind exploration, Britton realizes that the house – or whatever the structure has become – is more or less a mirrored version of their erstwhile home, though some of the proportions have shifted in unnatural and inexplicable ways. Some of the passages seem, impossibly, longer going one way than the other, and some of the rooms curl back in on themselves though the walls and corners seem square.

In the living room, she finds the cabinet where their parents keep the flashlights and candles. The first flashlight she pulls out does not respond at all when she toggles the switch, but the second offers a wan, flickering beam that the darkness seems to swallow thirstily. The candles feel cold and greasy under her touch, and when the flashlight reveals that they have gone a sickly mottled yellowish grey that reminds her of putrefying flesh, she abandons at once her thought of taking a few as a secondary source of illumination.

The worst, though, is when Britton’s fingertips slide over the smooth glass of the living room window. She stops and shines the flashlight through it, expecting to see nothing just as she had when she looked through the open door that did not lead outside. But after a few seconds of staring at the black glass, she sees the shapes moving over the exterior, and a strangled cry of revulsion bubbles up out of her throat.

Thick, tubular things squirm and ooze over the window, like gigantic slugs or sea cucumbers. But on their undersides, around what she takes to be sucking mouths, are osseous structures like tiny, malformed human skulls.

Britton averts the flashlight beam, but from the whimper that escapes Shayla’s lips, knows that she is already too late to spare her sister this sight.

Where are we? the younger girl breathes. How did we get here?

Britton has no answer and offers none.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The flashlight illumines only a few square feet in front of them. The floors and walls revealed by its ailing light are only a little changed from that of the home they know, looking more aged and soiled, but otherwise familiar. Yet when Britton turns off the light to conserve the battery, she cannot help but sense that the space somehow stealthily changes as soon as the darkness returns.

As they move through the house, they can hear the ceiling creaking overhead, as though someone walked on the second floor above them. And though for an instant Britton is tempted to call out to whomever it may be, she does not, remembering how her cries went unanswered when first she entered the dark house. Remembering her sister’s earlier question, she asks again what Shayla meant when she asked if she was the real Britton.

Shayla says that there was someone else who called to her softly in the dark, someone whose voice sounded so much like Britton’s that at first she answered. But when that voice drew closer, she noticed that it was different, and that there were no footsteps, but a wet, dragging, sliding sound that accompanied it’s approach.

She had grown very afraid then, Shayla says, had tried to hide as best she could in her complete disorientation and remain absolutely quiet, no matter how the voice that was almost her older sister’s cried out to her.

As Shayla relates this, Britton’s hands and neck go very cold, and she shivers violently. When her little sister has finished, she says that they must find a way out of the house, and should avoid going upstairs at all costs. Shayla accepts this, seeming reassured by the firmness in her older sister’s words, though Britton herself has begun to doubt there is any way out of this hellish place.

They begin to move then toward where the back door should be, accustomed to the house’s strange reversal of layout, if not its incomprehensible defiance of spatial geometry. Every few moments, just to assure that they have not gotten turned around in the dark or missed some new and unguessed danger concealed within it, Britton turns on the flashlight and casts the beam around for a few seconds. Each time, it seems to her a little weaker than the last.

When they reach the back door, she once more turns on the flashlight, and they find the door changed. The white paint is cracked and peeling, and the wood badly warped, as though from extensive water damage. More than that, it bows dramatically inward, as though from some great external pressure. As though whatever presses against it senses their presence, the bowing of the door intensifies with an awful groaning and damp crackling from the overstressed wood.

Without a word, Britton reaches out and pushes her sister behind her, and begins to slowly back away. Only when the door is well out of sight, and she has confirmed that there is no further sound from that direction, do they speak again.

Front door? Shayla asks softly, uncertainly.

Britton doesn’t reply at once, trying not to let her sister see how shaken she truly is. The question of what was beyond the back door keeps gnawing at her thoughts, tearing at the weave of her mind.

Yes, she says at last, merely because she can think of no better option.

Feeling their way along the walls, they once more find themselves in the living room. At once, the feeling of a new presence prickles on Britton’s skin, seeming to emanate from somewhere near the center of the room. Terrified, she points the flashlight in that direction and presses the switch.

A feeble, broad beam falls upon something that Britton cannot quite understand. There is no mirror in the living room, and yet she gazes into her reflection, wondering at how pallid, how feverishly slick and shiny her face has become. Then she notices the dark spatters across that other face, and it splits into a grin and steps forward.

As Shayla screams, the flashlight beam falters and dies.

(Doomful music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Run, Britton hisses at her sister, through the jarring pain of her botched landing. The glass of the living room window has scored and pierced her right forearm and left a jagged slash over her left brow, and she does not know how much of the wet, squelching mass beneath her is the sodden earth and how much the crushed bodies of the slug-things. The thought of their dark, unknowable innards mingling with her opened bloodstream flits through her mind, exacerbating her panic, but the knowledge that she mostly sheltered her sister’s body from injury, and the sound of Shayla’s obedient flight, is some small comfort.

Behind her, from within the broken window, a wet and rattling voice not wholly unlike her own calls to her jeeringly, telling her that all roads lead home.

Britton forces herself to her feet, ignoring the scream agony in her arm, and runs after her sister. Twice she stumbles, and twice rises again. There is a strange whispering around her in the dark, but whether it is the cold wind which smells of a freshly opened swampy grave, or something else, she cannot guess and does not care to try.

With her longer stride, she catches her sister soon, and for a while they hold hands as they race through the featureless dark plain, until it becomes too awkward and tiring. There is a flash behind them, and they look back to see two yellowish lights swimming in the blackness, washing them in a gelid light. They are the headlights of a car, Britton thinks at first, but there is something uneven and unnatural about their motion, something almost organic, not at all the way that car lights should move.

Distantly, the voices of their parents call out to them. To Britton, they sound just a little wrong, too low and wet and warbling, but beside her, Shayla’s feet slow and then stop.

Keep running, Britton manages to bark through her breathlessness.

But… Shayla begins to protest, then her voice fades again into silence.

Trust me, Britton gasps.

Shayla begins to run again, but not as quickly as before, and Britton knows that at any moment, the younger girl might turn and run back the way they have come. What she does not know is whether she can catch her sister, if Shayla’s faith in her wavers.

Where are you? the voices of their parents – or whatever pretends to be their parents – follow them on the corpse-wind. Where are you, girls?

There is no way to measure time or distance in this strange, gloomy hell. Britton’s lungs burn and her breath tastes faintly of old coins, of blood, but still she runs blindly over the ground that is spongy and moist and reeks of cold rot. 

She wonders if she is right to run from the sound of their parents’ voices, which so sweetly promise safety and familiarity, or if she has led them farther from the sunlit world. She wonders if there is indeed any escape from this change, or how far this pitch black stretches, and toward what horizons. She wonders what the morning will bring… if morning ever comes.

(Bleak music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

I hope you enjoyed today’s story. Thank you so much for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]