“I’m so glad you’re here,” she says. “Now you can see them for yourself.”
~~~~~
The expression on Zach’s face scares her. He holds out his hands to help her up, but when she makes no move to take them he crouches beside her and says, “Luba, what’s wrong? Why are you out here?” The rain running down his face beads on his glasses and he wipes his sleeve across them. “Why are you talking to yourself?”
She glances back and forth between him and the creatures. “You don’t see them?” she asks, registering the loud plop plop that follows her question. Zach’s eyes track the sound, squinting at the subtle movement of water on the surface of the nearest standing pond. For a second she thinks she’s about to cry, but she takes Zach’s hand and lets him pull her up. “It’s okay. They did what they were supposed to. I used to think they wanted the sun.”
“Luba!” Zach grips her by the shoulders and shoves his face into hers. “What’s going on? What are you talking about?”
She pulls back as far as she can inside his clinch and takes a deep breath. “That,” she indicates with her head.
He follows her motion and his expression grows darker when he sees the door to the crawlspace. “Why is that open? Did you open it?”
“Yes. There are no more snakes.”
As if realizing how tightly he’s holding her, he lets go and brushes away the hair that’s fallen over her eyes. “How do you know that?” he says in a voice she can tell is carefully controlled. She smiles at him.
“They helped me get rid of them. It’s why they were here.”
“You’re not making sense.” He turns and jerks one of her arms toward him. “We’re going inside. And we’re drying you off. And if you’re still not making sense—”
Luba plants her feet in the slush and pulls her arm back. “I’m not finished yet.”
“Talk to me inside, then!”
She makes an impatient sound. “I’m not finished here.” She lumbers up the little slope toward the crawlspace, sodden clothes dragging at her small frame. At the entrance she stoops and calls to Zach with her hand. “This was always Gary’s. No one was allowed in here. Except I didn’t know that at first. You don’t have a flashlight, do you?”
“No.”
The air is cool and fresh with the scent of green things nourished by the rain, and Luba takes a deep breath before facing the entrance again. She feels Zach’s eyes on her as she enters the crawlspace. What used to feel like a mysterious cavern now resembles a confined and smelly chamber full of insects that dart and wriggle on the wet earth and cobwebs that graze the top of her head.
“Please don’t go in,” Zach says. “Luba. You don’t know what’s in there.”
“Yes I do.”
“What if there’s a nest—?”
“The snakes are gone, I told you.” The heavy gloom under the beams muffles her voice, and when she looks back she sees her husband poised at the doorway, his face puckered as he peers into the dark. “There were two of each, but I think only one of them is hers. I don’t know the other girl.”
Zach ducks inside and grabs hold of her sweater, but she wrenches it out of his grasp and moves farther into the murk, into the airless, opaque bubble that seems to open up around her and push between her and Zach, who sinks to his knees and gropes blindly against the light from the door.
“Luba!” he calls. “Why are you doing this? Let’s go back upstairs.”
“I know you heard them.” Again her voice is swallowed into the pitch as she shuffles in an awkward squat. “They’re here somewhere, Zach.”
She detects a sigh behind her.
“Please come out, Luba.” In the stagnant air Zach’s tone is high and thin and more distant than it should be.
“I need to be here, Zach.”
“We can get the police, Luba. We don’t have to do this ourselves.”
“I need to do this.” She pushes on through the shadows, her hand coming down on something whiplike and desiccated and she brushes the palm against her pants and continues heading for the farthest corner. “Zach?”
“I’m here, Luba. Where are you?”
“I’m making a right.”
“Luba?”
His voice is faint and she doesn’t bother replying. After advancing another few moments she realizes she is completely disoriented. The house above them can’t possibly be this big. Circling on her hands and knees, she cannot see Zach or the light from the doorway.
“Zach?” she says at last, his name absorbed by the immediate space around her. “Zach!” When he doesn’t answer after several calls, she stops crawling and tamps down the blister of panic forming behind her breastbone. She draws the oppressive air in through her mouth, purses it out again, in, out, aware of her body’s solidness and the hard packed earth beneath her. There is only one thing to do now. She wipes away something crawling on her cheek and forges ahead into the infinite darkness, the sound of her breathing the only thing she hears.
A deep sadness clings to her fear.
After a long time her hand touches plastic sheeting hard with age and powdered soil, and her fingers spring back as if they’ve landed on something diseased. She dares to reach down again and pat the edge along its length, stopping before she finds the end. The sheeting could be any piece of junk here, and yet the tears that overcome her tell her otherwise. Luba sits back on her heels and allows them to flood her, wiping her nose with a gritty hand and laboring for air through the mucus and dust.
The outpour is intense but brief, and as she lifts her head she realizes she is not alone. Her heart squeezes erratically in the warm grateful glimmer that surrounds her, and soon the tingling on her skin reaches into muscle, bone, and sinew and settles in the stygian cavity of her chest, where it starts to dissipate the grief entombed there. Whether it’s the soul of another, or her own regained, she can’t be sure.
~~~~~
She emerges from the crawlspace just as Zach runs toward her from the side of the house, flashlight in hand, slipping in the fresh mud. “Luba!” he cries when he sees her.
Luba stands, feet planted wide, eyes closed, raising her face to the cleansing rain.
~~~~~
~~~~~
Carrie Vaccaro Nelkin's short fiction has appeared in Rose Red Review, Bards and Sages Quarterly, Absent Willow Review, and the anthologies Skulls & Crossbones: Tales of Women Pirates and Hunger: Stories of Desire, Discovery, and Dissatisfaction (the latter released by her writing group). She has had poetry published in Shadow Road Quarterly, Rose & Thorn Journal, Golden Sparrow Literary Review, and Piedmont Literary Review. Her first novel is due out from Permuted Press in late 2015.
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About Fiction Vortex
Fiction Vortex, let’s see …
A fiction vortex is a tornado of stories that pick you up and hurl you through a barn to find enlightenment on the other side. It’s a whirlpool of fascinating tales so compelling that they suck you in, drag you down to the bottom of your mind, and drown you with incessant waves of glorious imagery and believable characters.
Nope.
A fiction vortex is an online speculative fiction magazine focused on publishing great science fiction and fantasy, and is run by incredibly attractive and intelligent people with great taste in literature and formidable writing prowess.
Not that either. But we’re getting closer.
Founded in the 277th year of the Takolatchni Dynasty, Fiction Vortex set out to encourage people to write and publish great speculative fiction. It sprang fully formed from the elbow of TWOS, retaining none of TWOS’s form but most of its spirit. And the patron god of writers, the insecure, the depressed, and the mentally ill regarded Fiction Vortex in his magic mirror of self-loathing and declared it good, insofar as something that gives writer’s undue hope can be declared good. Thereafter, he charged the Rear Admiral of the Galactic 5th Fleet to defend Fiction Vortex down to the last robot warrior.
; Now we’re talking.
Take your pick. We don’t care how you characterize us or the site.
Fiction Vortex focuses on publishing speculative fiction. That means science fiction and fantasy (with a light smattering of horror and a few other subgenres), be it light, heavy, deep, flighty, spaceflighty, cerebral, visceral, epic, or mundane. But mundane in a my-local-gas-station-has-elf-mechanics-but-it’s-not-really-a-big-deal-around-here kind of way. Got it?
Basically, we want imaginative stories that are well written, but not full of supercilious floridity.
There’s a long-standing belief that science fiction and fantasy stories aren’t as good as purely literary fare. We want you to prove that mindset wrong (not just wrong, but a steaming pile of griffin dung wrong) with every story we publish. It’s almost like we’re saying, "I do not bite my thumb at you, literary snobs, but I do bite my thumb," but in a completely polite and non-confrontational way.
We've got more great stories online, with a new story twice a week. Visit our website FictionVortex.com, follow us on Twitter: @FictionVortex, and like us on Facebook: FictionVortex.
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