Seed
: Chapter 4

The day Jack’s parents suspected there was something wrong with him was the day they found a stray cat hanging from the tree in the front yard.

The cat had been a nuisance from the day Gilda and Stephen had parked their trailer on that land. Stephen had been trying to scare the thing off their property longer than Jack had been alive, and Jack had learned from his father that when that cat showed its face around the Winter estate, all was fair in hunting felines. Stephen made it clear: he didn’t care how Jack got the damn thing off their property just as long as it was gone.

Before Jack started school, he spent scorching afternoons chasing that stray across their two acres, wielding a stick as big as he was in case he managed to catch up with it. When he hit first grade, Stephen bought him a slingshot for his birthday. Jack spent an entire month nursing his new obsession. He taught himself to shoot rocks as well as Robin Hood, preparing for the next time that roving cat crossed his path.

He never did catch up to it. After years of poaching, he’d secretly grown fond of the trespasser that drove his daddy crazy. By the time Jack entered the fourth grade, he was leaving milk in a shallow dish behind the lot’s furthest tree. He didn’t dare risk placing it any closer: he knew that if he was caught fraternizing with the enemy, he’d get the beating of his life.

The year he went soft on that stray was the year he started visiting the graveyard more and more often. The cat, which had grown fond of Jack as well, crept through the tall grass, watching the boy through slit yellow eyes while Jack sat among the headstones for hours on end. It kept its distance, venturing closer as the days wore on until, one afternoon, that feline found itself sitting next to Jack as compliantly as a lifelong pet.

Jack patted the animal on top of its head, his eyes fixed on a point beyond the trees. For a brief moment, two sworn enemies found solace in each other, enjoying the spring breeze that rustled the leaves and bent the grass to the earth in gentle arcs. And then, with his hand stroking the cat’s back, Jack saw those black bottomless eyes in the shadow of an oak.

His fingers tensed, biting into the animal’s fur like a pair of jaws. The stray shrieked and bounded away, then stopped to glare at its old enemy. It didn’t like what it saw. Reflexively, it arched its back, fur bristling with agitation. Opening its mouth as wide as it could, it exposed its fangs with a hiss, then turned and dashed out of view.

On any other day he would have shrugged it off and forgotten the whole thing, but that particular day wouldn’t allow Jack to let bygones be bygones. The way the animal’s back bent into an S-curve, the way it had bared its teeth—something about it made his blood boil. Rage curdled in the pit of his stomach. His fingers dug into the soil. All at once he was on his feet, running after it, determined to catch it once and for all, to string it up like he should have long ago. Years of effort burned in his lungs like oil; all the hours he had spent hunting.

The cat was mocking him. It had tricked him into bringing it milk, scratching behind its ears when nobody was looking.

Jack’s nostrils flared. He ran harder. He could see it ahead of him, dashing toward the trailer like a fur-covered missile. Jack slowed when Stephen stepped onto the sagging porch, aimed his BB gun, and fired as the stray bolted by him. It was a miss.

“Son of a bitch!” Stephen barked. He turned to his ten-year-old son, the kid winded and gulping for air, dark hair plastered to his sweat-covered forehead. “You think you’re gonna catch ‘im with your bare hands?” he asked.

Maybe not with my bare hands, Jack thought to himself. But I’ll sure as hell catch him.

That night, long after Stephen and Gilda had gone to bed, Jack snuck out the front door with a saucer of milk. He crossed the front yard with careful steps and placed the bowl at the base of his Momma’s oak—a huge old tree that shaded their trailer from the burning Georgia sun. Armed with a spool of his father’s fishing line, he tied a slipknot onto the end and looped the line along the ground, leaving that saucer in the middle as bait. Then he climbed up into the branches of that tree and waited, the end of the line held tight in his hands.

Gilda was the first to see it. She was stepping outside to beat the kitchen rug with a broomstick when her eyes snagged on something swaying in the shade of the tree. Squinting against the sun, she couldn’t make out what it was. She stepped off the porch, walked a few dozen feet, and saw the swinging sacrifice for what it truly was.

Despite not being the squeamish type, she couldn’t help the scream that punched its way out of her lungs. Stephen stumbled out of the trailer to see what his wife was screaming about, spotting his arch-nemesis strung up like a hate crime. Rather than exhaling a laugh, he gave his son a startled look.

“Holy Mary Mother of God,” he said. “Boy, what the hell have you done?”

Despite Charlie’s improvement in health, Aimee wouldn’t let it go. As soon as they stepped through the front door, she strode down the cramped hallway, stopped in front of Jack’s old piano, and fished a phone book out of its bench seat.

Jack watched her from the doorway, holding the screen door open for Nubs, who was making a mad dash for the front yard.

“What’re you doing?” he asked.

Nubs lost his footing on the wooden floor and nearly crashed into the wall, but righted himself just in time to leap on to the front doorstep.

“Looking for a second opinion,” Aimee said flatly. She dropped the phone book onto the piano’s bench with a crack. A puff of dust exploded from between the pages, catching the sunlight that filtered through the curtains, setting the dust particles afire with a supernatural gleam.

“Give it a day,” Jack suggested. “You’re wound up.”

“And you’re busy getting ready to take off to New Orleans,” Aimee said. “I’m sorry if you consider at least one parent being concerned as unusual.”

Jack glanced to his guitar, nestled snug in its case, crammed between a wall and a bookcase. Aimee flipped through pages, and Jack found himself wondering what letter she was aiming for: P for psychologist? Or maybe E for exorcism?

“At least let me pick up a new directory,” he said. “We’ve had that one since we moved in. It’s completely useless.”

He had a point, but he was also trying to stall her—throw her off her groove.

Aimee stared down at the phone book, fighting an internal debate. Eventually, she looked at Jack, rolled her eyes, and relented.

“Fine.”

She turned to leave the living room when Jack stopped her with a question.

“Hey, Aimes?”

Exhaling a sigh, she turned to face him. Her arms hung at her sides in defeat. For a moment, she looked like the girl Jack had met a decade before.

“Watch a movie tonight,” he said. “Pop some popcorn. You deserve it,” he said. “Just like old times.”

Despite her mood, a shadow of a smile crawled across Aimee’s lips; but she wasn’t done being angry. Crossing her arms over her chest, she smirked at him.

“Just when everything is falling apart, you have to say something romantic.”

Then she turned and wandered toward the kitchen, on a secret mission: wade through the pantry in search of popcorn.

By the time Reagan arrived, Jack had ordered the girls a pizza, made sure they were in their pajamas, and readied them for bed with an old Ren and Stimpy rerun. Aimee had been granted the entire afternoon off and was all smiles when Reagan turned up.

“Hi, Reagan,” Aimee greeted while nursing a beer.

“Hey, Aimee. Getting drunk?” Reagan plopped himself down on the floor and put an arm around Abby, while Charlie climbed into his lap with a giant smile. “Hey, Charles. What’s the word?”

“Nothing,” Charlie said.

Abigail climbed onto the couch behind him while Charlie poked a finger through the round spacer in Reagan’s ear.

“I heard you were sick, man.”

“I was,” Charlie said. “I had to go to the doctor and everything.”

“You did?”

“Yup.” She sprawled out across him like a queen on a settee. “I had to go today because mom was totally freaking out, like…” She pulled at her hair and made a wild face.

Abigail giggled from behind them. Aimee smirked and took a swig of beer.

“So what happened?” Reagan asked.

“The doctor’s incompetence happened,” Aimee muttered.

“Clean bill of health,” Jack corrected, hefting Charlie off of Reagan’s lap by her ankles. “Right?”

Charlie dangled upside down with a squeal, struggling to reach the ground with her hands.

“Oh God, Jack, put her down,” Aimee said. “That’s the last thing she needs. I mean, really.”

“I’m gonna barf!” Charlie warned. “I’m gonna do it all over Uncle Reagan!”

“Do it,” Reagan dared her. “If I show up to the show with barf all over me, I’d be totally hardcore.”

Jack put Charlie down, and she immediately crawled back into Reagan’s lap.

“What’s hardcore?” she asked.

“You don’t know what hardcore is?” Reagan gave Jack a look of disapproval. “Jack, seriously, what aren’t you teaching these girls?”

“I know what hardcore is,” Abby said.

“You do, do you?” Aimee raised a curious eyebrow and waited for her eldest to define the term.

“It means awesome,” Abby said.

Jack puffed out his chest with a grin. “See?” he said. “It means awesome.”

“That’s right.” Aimee shook her head, a bemused smile playing across her face. “Because it’s awesome to show up at a gig with vomit all over yourself. That’s the definition of awesome. Abby hit that nail right on the head.”

“What does it mean then?” Abby asked.

“It means awesome,” Reagan assured her.

Charlie jumped to her feet excitedly. “Uncle Reagan, I barfed all over my room last night.”

“She did,” Aimee said.

“That was hardcore, right?” Charlie asked.

“Wrong,” Abby cut in. “That was totally gross.”

Reagan: “You barfed all over your room?”

“You should have seen it,” Aimee muttered. “It was like The Exorcist in there.”

“Impressive, little buddy.” Reagan held his hand up for a high-five. Charlie slapped his palm and spun around with a laugh.

“I’ll do it again, too!” Charlie said, bouncing around.

“Over my dead body, kid,” Aimee warned. “Next time you pull something like that, you’re sleeping outside with Nubs.”

“In the dog house,” Charlie laughed. “Like a dog. With fleas.”

“And barf,” Abby added from the couch.

“And dog food,” Charlie said.

“And we should go,” Jack interrupted, grabbing his guitar case out of the corner.

Reagan stood, instinctively dusting off the back of his jeans. “Okay, ladies,” he said, “the hardcore dudes must depart.”

“Have a good time.” Aimee forced a smile. She was still not thrilled with the idea of Jack leaving. Not after the fiasco with the doctor, and certainly not after what had happened the night before.

Jack put an arm around her and whispered into her ear. “I’ll be home soon,” he promised, then pressed a kiss to the corner of her mouth.

“Bye, Daddy,” Abby said.

“Bring me back a toy!” Charlie called after them.

And with the latch of the door and the slap of the screen beyond it, the house went silent save for the sound of Ren and Stimpy, and a faint scratching against the wall.

He remembered his mother screaming. Sitting in darkness so black he was sure it wasn’t real, Jack stared at the slit of light that shone from beneath his bedroom door—light that leaked into the pitch blackness of his bedroom, too weak to penetrate the lingering shadows.

Gilda’s screams were wounded, primal, tearing themselves from her lungs with guttural rawness. She sounded like she was dying; that’s what Jack remembered most. Her cries, her wails, her indiscernible pleas in the arms of a man who couldn’t understand what his wife was saying. It all sounded like death throes of a woman at the end of her rope; like a final gasp rattling inside her ribcage before it was indefinitely expelled.

Jack could see their shadows dancing outside his bedroom door. Gilda was gasping, choking on her own saliva as she wept like a woman with nothing to live for. The longer it went on, the more Stephen raised his voice despite trying to stay calm. But after a while he started to yell, his own panic taking control.

“Stop it,” was the first thing Jack could make out. “Stop it, Gilda, stop it.” He imagined Stephen grabbing his mom by the shoulders and shaking her like they did in the movies—shaking some sense into her while shaking the chaos out.

But Gilda was inconsolable. Stephen raised his voice. She babbled even more. He grabbed her by the arms and she crumbled against his chest. Typically a strong woman, she was little more than a quivering mass of maternal emotion.

“There’s… something… wrong.” Her words came in gasps, caught between sobs and desperate gulps of air. It was that frustrating moment between hysteria and control; she was ready to talk but those emotions continued to claw at her composure, pulling her down, drowning her in her own instability.

“Something wrong,” Stephen echoed. “Something wrong with what?”

The question pushed her over the edge. She wailed again—a sound that Jack had never heard come out of his mother in his ten short years.

“Something wrong with what?” Stephen repeated, more urgently this time. “Gilda, I can fix it. Just tell me what,” he said. “Just tell me what it is and I—”

“With Jack,” she shrieked. The way his name slithered through the walls and under the door made Jack’s skin crawl. There was terror in it: a distinct pitch of absolute dismay.

“What’s wrong with Jack?” Stephen asked, but he didn’t wait for her to answer. He let her go and made a move for his son’s bedroom instead.

The door swung open and hit the wall, bouncing off the cheap particle board that made up the walls of the trailer. Stephen blinked into the darkness that faced him. He took a reluctant step forward, pushing his hand into the shadows. His palm slid across the wall in search of the light switch.

The light snapped on and the room was revealed. Jack was sitting silently upon his bed. Stephen turned to Gilda with confusion, shaking his head, ready to tell her he didn’t understand. But she beat him to the punch.

When she saw her boy sitting there so calmly, her eyes went wide. Her hands pressed themselves against her mouth and she stared at him as though not seeing him at all—looking though him, beyond him, at something behind their son that Stephen failed to see.

“I’ve lost him,” she choked. “I’ve lost my Jackie, oh God, I’ve lost him…”

Stephen looked back to Jack, his expression riddled with such intense confusion it verged on rage. Jack shook his head, silently confirming that he was just as clueless as his dad. And that was mostly the truth.

But in the back of his mind there was a slight glimmer of understanding, a tiny shard of remembrance. When Gilda had opened the door to bring in Jack’s laundry, he remembered seeing her not right-side up, but upside down. What he couldn’t recall was whether his mom had been walking on the ceiling, or whether he’d been standing on his head.

Despite his promise to come straight home, Jack decided to hit Bourbon Street for a few minutes after the show. It was tradition, and tonight that ritual seemed even more important to uphold than any night before. Every time he left home for a gig, he brought Charlie a toy. It started out as guilt but blossomed into a custom he and Charlie bonded over.

That wasn’t to say the tradition was easy to uphold. Finding a toy for a kid on Bourbon was as easy as finding a nun in one of its bars.

Reagan stayed behind at the club while Jack scoured the strip in search of an appropriate gift for a six-year-old. Unless he was willing to settle on a t-shirt that read ‘My Daddy’s big and my Mommy’s easy’, he had an idea it would take some time to find. He had already bought her a key chain with her name on it, and she’d already collected so much Dias De Los Muertos stuff Aimee threatened to pack it all up and leave it at the Goodwill. Once he’d found her a tiny wooden pig that, according to Voodoo folklore, was supposed to bring the owner good luck. Aimee hadn’t liked that so much either: the sentiment was there, but she wasn’t big on bringing Voodoo into the house.

A few minutes of stalking down uneven streets and a few close calls with the sludge-filled gutter, he found himself in front of an open door, its tiny shop window jammed with colorful odds and ends—candles and Tarot decks and shrunken heads that claimed to be authentic. Inside, there was a wall dedicated to African masks. Another wall was lined with tapered candles of every shade of the rainbow, hanging two-by-two by an uncut wick. Tiny stickers were tacked beside each color, distinguishing which candles were to be used with which spells.

Despite Aimee’s distaste, Jack was drawn to these shops. He had Voodoo sonar. Every time he strayed off Bourbon, he’d end up in a cramped little store selling spells and herbs. He was comfortable among their overcrowded shelves. It may have been the scent of incense, or the way the shopkeeper never stalked or nagged the customers. These were sacred pockets of silence among a sea of debauchery and chaos. Jack was drawn to them, drunk off their mysticism. Tonight he was drawn to the back of that long, skinny shop. He paused at a red curtain, a sign safety-pinned to the fabric: Reading in session, quiet please.

“She’s almost done if you want one,” the girl at the counter said.

Jack glanced over his shoulder at her. “Sorry?”

“A reading.” The girl nodded at the curtain. “She won’t be long.”

Jack looked back to the curtain with a smirk. A framed price sheet sat at eye level, perched on a shelf. He’d gotten a reading a few years back. It had been on a rare Quarter visit; the band had an unusually late gig and had decided to shack up in New Orleans for the night. After a few too many Hand Grenades, Jack and Reagan ended up stumbling across a tiny Tarot reader’s shop. The guy who took Jack’s money was an awkward Dungeons and Dragons type. He wore a hooded blue velvet cape over an AC/DC t-shirt. Rather than enlightened, Jack was left feeling stupid, duped out of sixty bucks.

“Thanks,” Jack said. “I’m just looking for something for my kid.”

The girl shrugged and looked back to her paperback.

“Any suggestions for a six-year-old girl?” he asked, hopeful that his time would be saved by a thoughtful customer service rep.

The girl stuck a bookmark between the tattered pages of what she was reading and motioned for Jack to come over, tapping the glass case beneath her elbow.

“Kids go nuts for these,” she said, pointing to a display of mood rings. “They’re made-in-China crap, but like a kid is gonna know.”

“Do they work?”

The girl shrugged again. “I guess. They work off of body heat, so they change color like they’re supposed to. It doesn’t have anything to do with mood, but like a kid is gonna know that.” She flicked a strand of dyed hair over her shoulder.

“I’ll take three,” Jack said, reaching for his wallet.

With the rings tucked safe in his pocket, he stepped out of the shop. In his rush to get back to the club, he crashed into a big guy trying to make his way inside.

“Shit, sorry man,” Jack said, holding out a hand to steady himself.

The big guy tipped the brim of a trucker cap at Jack in acknowledgement. He smiled a wide, toothy grin—a smile that gave Jack the creeps.

“No problem, chief,” the big guy crooned, then slipped inside the shop.

After the kids were asleep, Aimee popped a bag of microwave popcorn, selected a flick she couldn’t watch with the girls around, and decided to have her own girls-night-in just as Jack had suggested. With the lights off and the television throwing blue shadows across the room, she tried to relax and forget all that had happened in the past couple of days.

It was futile: her mind wouldn’t shut off. That incessant scratching was getting louder; loud enough now to make her wonder if it would wake the kids. She grabbed the remote and paused her movie, abandoning her popcorn on the couch cushions, ready to track down that damn scratching once and for all.

At first it seemed like it was coming from near the front door, but as soon as Aimee approached the area, the scratching shifted to another part of the house. What she was once sure was an animal clawing on the outer walls of the house suddenly became an impossibility. The noise was coming from inside the walls, creeping along the arteries of their home, burrowing its way into random corners. Her search eventually led her to the kitchen. As soon as she pinpointed where the noise was coming from, it was back in the living room. If this was an animal, it knew it was being followed. It was playing games.

Eventually losing the noise’s location, Aimee shook her head in exasperation. She had wasted a good half hour chasing rogue scuffing, as though finally cornering the noise would make it disappear. If she wanted that scratching gone, she’d have to knock a hole in the wall first. She grabbed a can of diet Coke from the fridge and padded back to the living room, stopping short of the couch.

Her jaw fell slack at the mess. The popcorn she’d left on the couch was now all over the floor. Nubs was happily cleaning it up, crunching salty kernels with the wet smacking of his chops.

“Nubs!” she whispered with as much authority as she could without waking the girls. “Goddamnit.” Waving a hand to shoo him off, she snatched the metal mixing bowl off the couch and dropped to her knees, scooping up popcorn she’d eventually end up pouring into Nubs’ bowl.

“Stupid fucking dog,” she muttered to herself. “Last bag of popcorn too. I swear to God, if I was just a little meaner…” She looked up from the carpet to see Nubs sitting not more than a yard from her stripe-socked feet. “I thought I told you to get out of here,” she said, waving her hand at him again. “Get.”

But rather than sulking off into the shadows of the hallway, Nubs lowered his muzzle, looked at her with sad eyes and whined. Aimee peered at him. It wasn’t like Nubs to be so pathetic. He was an obedient dog; dumb, but not a troublemaker by any stretch. Some days it was almost impossible to move him from his napping spot, as though he hadn’t slept in weeks when, in truth, he slept a good sixteen hours a day.

“What’s wrong with you?” Aimee asked him with a scowl. Nubs answered by exhaling a sigh. He flattened himself out on the carpet, assuring her there was no way he was moving from that living room. Squirreling her mouth up into a cockeyed smirk, Aimee continued to pluck popcorn off the floor.

“You’re kind of freaking me out,” she told him. “Do you need to go out?”

Picking up the last bits of mess, she slid the bowl onto the coffee table and got to her feet, moving to the front door to let Nubs into the front yard to do his business. But Nubs, who was typically out-of-his-mind-excited at the prospect of going outside to pee, didn’t move from his spot. He didn’t even lift his head, only following Aimee with his eyes. He watched her put her hand on the door knob and whined before looking away.

Aimee furrowed her eyebrow and shook her head. “Whatever,” she said. “If you pee in the house…” She paused, sighed. “I’m talking to a dog. I’m having a conversation with a dog on a Saturday night.”

Collapsing onto the couch, she grabbed her soda off the floor, pulled her feet up, and unpaused the movie.

Less than thirty seconds later, a crash from the kitchen had Aimee on her feet in wide-eyed panic. Nubs jumped as well, growling at the darkness, his teeth bared. Aimee’s heart slammed itself against her ribs like a bird trying to free itself from a cage. Her first thought was, Someone’s in the house. Someone’s broken in and is going to kill me and the girls, unbeknownst to Jack. He’ll arrive home to a gruesome murder scene. Her eyes flitted around the room in search of a weapon. She lunged at Jack’s old piano and grabbed a candlestick off its top.

“Hello?” she called out. She tried to sound imposing, but her attempt at confidence only made her sound that much more frightened.

Nubs backed up. He plopped his butt down on the rug and watched Aimee approach the dark hallway, double-fisting a piece of home décor. Despite the intensity of that crash, neither Charlie nor Abigail stirred, as though the noise that had nearly stopped Aimee’s heart had somehow failed to infiltrate the thin walls of the girls’ room.

She wavered at the border of light and darkness, scared to cross over even if it was only a few feet to the light switch.

“I have a gun,” she warned. “I’ll blow your fucking head off.” But what was intended as a genuine threat sounded comical when it was whispered. Aimee eventually grew tired of her own apprehension and marched into the hall—suddenly a woman with no fear—and flipped the switch.

The hall lit up. Light spilled into the living room on one end and into the kitchen on the other. It was there, in the now hazy shadows of the kitchen, that Aimee spotted the culprit. Flipped over onto its top, the kitchen table rested on the floor with its legs pointing toward the ceiling.

She stared at the table for a long while, unable to look away from it as her mind tried to piece together how it could have fallen over. Every answer was improbable, every solution was ridiculous. Even if Nubs had taken a running start and jumped on it like a dog training for an agility contest, that table wouldn’t have budged. It was an old relic, made of solid wood, heavy enough for Aimee to need Jack’s help to move it. Sliding it across the floor, let alone lifting it and flipping it over, was impossible.

She turned away, unable to look at it any longer. Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to keep calm. Nubs watched her doubtfully as she stepped back into the living room. She stopped dead in her tracks for the second time, her breath wavering a bit, the fingers of her free hand trembling while the other continued to cling to the candlestick.

The mixing bowl was exactly where she left it—dead center in the middle of the coffee table. But it was empty. The popcorn was scattered across the room from wall to wall.

Aimee met Jack at the door the second she saw Reagan’s headlights cut across the living room window. Trembling, she pulled him inside before he could say a word and grabbed the bowl off the coffee table, on the verge of tears.

“It won’t stay in,” she insisted. “I keep picking it up but it won’t stay in. And this…” She caught Jack by the hand and led him down the hall, stopping at the mouth of the kitchen.

Jack blinked at the overturned table, confusion shifting to worry shifting to dread.

“Did you put the chairs like that?” he asked after a moment.

She hadn’t noticed it before. The table was upside down, but none of the chairs had been disturbed. They were all standing in their designated spots.

Startled, Aimee stood in the hallway with her fingers pressed to her mouth. Jack touched her shoulder, and she burst into tears.