A-Sides

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  Jean was disturbed from a light doze that very night by the ringing phone. She had been dreaming of her father, looking old and drawn, speaking longingly and lovingly of the Ruby he had known. The phone trilled again.

  Jean’s first thought was of Lance in the next room. The phone hadn’t awakened him. Her sleep-heavy eyes grudgingly focused on the digital clock next to the telephone. Its red numerals seemed to float and vibrate in the pitch blackness. Three thirty am. A dreary March drizzle fell outside. It made a stealthy sound, not like the rain that pounds on your roof and makes you feel buttoned up inside your home, but the kind that produces a mist that drifts up from the ground and slips its foggy fingers around your window frames. You could never know all the things concealed in the mist, hiding just beyond the eye’s ability to discern. The chilliness of the night made Jean shiver as she stuck her arm out from beneath the covers to answer the phone.

  “Hello?” Jean’s voice was a fuzzy croak.

  “Jean?” the voice on the other end whispered. It was like a song, satiric and badgering. In the background, Jean heard a sound like many voices sighing together. Jean’s skin was suddenly alive with the sensation of a thousand electric centipedes crawling over it, each of their legs delivering its own needling voltage.

  “Jean? It’s me. Ruby.” The voice continued in its sneering, mocking way. “Did you think I would go and leave you with the only thing that I ever loved? I get what I want. Have you checked on Lance lately?” A chorus of voices babbled in the background. Jean heard a moan, futile and damned, then something like a scream.

  “I’ll take him from you, Jean. A year at a time, a piece at a time until he’s all mine. I’ll take him down with me to a place where you’ll never see him again.”

  Jean’s heart pounded like a pile driver. She was afraid that if she looked towards the window she would see the makers of the voices outside the hazy panes, peering in and laughing at the scared, solitary woman answering a phone call from hell.

  Then she was running, a bitter laugh screaming at her from the abandoned phone. She had a terrifying instance of second sight as she bolted down the hallway to Lance’s room. He would be impossibly sitting up in his crib with huge eyes the size of bed knobs, grinning at her with sharpened teeth and saying: See what Ruby brought you, mom? She loved you. She brought you a present.

  She ran through the door of Lance’s room. He lay in his crib, asleep on his back. She stood frozen to the spot for a moment with total, agonizing relief.

  She staggered across the room like a punch drunk fighter. Lance’s chest rose and fell rapidly. He had writhed out from beneath his blue, cotton blanket. Jean pulled the covers back over him and placed her palm on his forehead, frowning. He was deathly cold.

  She rolled up one of his sleeping eyelids. It came all the way up like a peeling decal, and Jean’s heart stuttered as if it had been pierced by a hammering railroad spike.

  Lance’s eye rolled around and fixed directly on Jean. It glowed a uniform, liquid red in the darkness, smooth as a cue ball. There was no soul in those glowing pits, only blind chaos.

  Jean sagged halfway to the floor, catching herself on the crib’s railing. She pulled herself upright and took Lance from his crib. He awoke and began to cry and Jean was relieved to see that the hellish glow in his eyes had vanished.

  She took him into her bedroom with her and stayed awake all night, clinging to Lance as if she would never let him go.