Category : Books-Fiction

Sub Category : Suspense/Mystery

CHAPTER ONE Every space in the hospital smelled sterile and sickly except for the waiting room where Dierdre sat staring at a book and chewing her thumbnail. It smelled of coffee and humans and the pizza the family across the row had ordered after sitting for five hours.Dierdre closed her book and placed it into her shoulder bag, one of those patchwork mail carrier ones, and pulled out the hat she had been working on. It was a brioche pattern in two colors and she went to work on it as if nothing else existed in the world. She liked that about knitting. All other thoughts can vanish, even if it's only for a few moments. The thoughts always manage to seep back in, but for a brief time you are free. The rest is therapy. Once the thoughts return they are dealt with in turn and then it's on to the next one, stitch after stitch, anxiety after anxiety. She worked four rounds (two in each color) before the nurse came in to summon her back. Her fingers froze and for a moment she might have been mistaken for a mannequin or a deer in headlights. She had been waiting to find out all this time and now she didn't want to know. Dierdre returned her work to her bag and hoisted it to her shoulder without feeling its weight. The room felt brighter, the light swelling as her head rushed. She felt hot. She could feel beads of sweat forming on her brow only moments from trickling down her bony face. The nurse stood waiting with a sullen patience, clipboard on forearm, wishing she hadn't gotten stoned before this. Dierdre walked to the door, her ear were filled with the tones of tuning forks. The nurse gave a forced but compassionate smile. The tag on her scrubs said Lilith. "She's awake and she's asking for you." The nurse's words didn't seem to match up with the movements of her lips. It reminded Dierdre of badly dubbed foreign films and cartoons from the 90's. Dierdre followed the girl down the corridor where her tennis shoes squeaked on the shiny floor. She always tried her best not to look into the other rooms as she passed. They always made her think too much. Some were empty, some had families talking around Grandpa, one had some old guy named Mr. Killian. She heard the nurses talking about him once. No one had ever come visit Mr. Killian and the old man never said a word. He sat and he read and he wrote in his journals. He burned through books like a wildfire and when he was finished with the lot more would be delivered by some kind of private courier who seemed friendly enough, but he was just as quiet as Mr. Killian was. When they reached her mother's room Dierdre thanked Lilith and entered alone. Her mother lay with her head back on a pillow. Her eyes were sunken holes in her yellow flesh. Dierdre thought it would have taken a special kind of fool not to see what was coming, or at least a special kind of denial. She saw a pair of needles on the table next to her mother's bed, on them was a scarf in a deep emerald heather that was destined never to be finished, gorgeous cabled patterns snaking their way` through it. There was a chart hanging from the foot of the bed with her Mother's name on it and Dierdre could only think to herself how alien Loralie Cochran looked even in this otherworldly place. She could have almost fooled herself into thinking that her mother was simply in make-up some epic film about a plague. "No matter what you believe about this world, God, no god, afterlife or nothin', no matter how much faith or science is rattling around inside your noggin, there will be things that happen in this life that you will never be able to understand." Loralie said without lifting her head from the pillow. Her gaze was locked on her daughter's eyes. "The world is a strange place." Dierdre said. "Stranger than you think, my child." Loralie gestured toward her beside table to a box. "Get that box there and bring it over here to me. There's something I want to give you." Dierdre did as he mother told her. The box was made of wood and it was black like the space between the stars. Absolute. It felt funny in her hands like there was something not quite right about the weight of it. She sat it beside her mother on the bed. Loralie's jaundiced hands made a graceful show of opening the latches and lifting the lid with deliberate patience. Dierdre saw respect in the way her mother handled this vessel, a borderline reverence. Inside the box were several sets of knitting needles. She wouldn't have sworn to it right there, but her best guess was that they were made of bone. They were smooth and white and well taken care of. "These are for you, my dear. I give them to you in mein Lebensabend just as my mother did in hers." "They're beautiful, Mom." Dierdre said as she ran her fingers over the needles. They were definitely made of bone. "They're magic, baby. I know how you think, but no matter what you believe, it's true. These have been passed down for generations going all the way back to the old lands. Sie sind von den alten Hexen." "Please, Mom, not all this about witches and magic. You have sounded more and more like Grandma the older you get." "It's all true, Dierdre. All of it. I've seen what these things can do and I am paying the price for how I used them. It all comes back around." "What does that even mean?" "It all comes back around." Those were the last words Loralie Cochran ever spoke. She closed her sunken eyes and never opened them again. # Dierdre didn't remember driving home. She was sitting in her car in the driveway with tears blurring her vision. The thought of never being able to speak to her mother again weighed on her. A stunned numbness had taken over every part of her. The box sat on the passenger seat. She lifted it as she stepped out of the car into the icy night. She placed the box and her keys on the table next to the door and walked to the living room where she found her father sitting in his usual chair. He was tearing the newspaper in half, placing the two halves on top of each other and tearing them again. At his feet was a pile of shredded scraps that came close to covering his shoes. It was another mess that would need cleaning but one she neither had the strength or drive to clean at the moment. In her bedroom she dug in her top dresser drawer and found the familiar orange bottle she kept stashed there. She dumped two of the pills into her hand and reburied the bottle under her socks and panties. She reached into her pocket and drew out her debit card, laying it over the oblong white tablets on her top of her dresser and pressed down with a twist, crushing them into a powder. She split the pile into four hefty lines and snorted them through a rolled dollar bill. After drawing heavily through her nostrils and checking herself in the mirror for residue, she cleaned up the obvious signs of drug use and returned to the living room to check on her father. He still sat shredding paper. "How was school?" he asked. "I graduated five years ago, Dad. I don't go to school. I was at the hospital." "Well I hope everything is okay." "Everything is fine." She sniffed again trying to get the drip to run down her throat. "Wonderful. That's just wonderful. Fine." He said, still tearing paper. The thought of dealing with anything else was too much for Dierdre to even consider. She left her father and his mess and returned to the table next to the door to retrieve the box. She wanted to knit until she was high enough not to feel. She took the box to her room and placed it on her bed. She opened it and ran her fingers over the needles again. They really were beautiful, she thought. She had never seen a set like them. For a moment she wondered why she had never seen them before if her mother had had them for years, but the longer she thought the less strange it was to her. Her mother had always been a superstitious woman. She had been raised that way. Her entire life she had been told of the witches of the old land and all the magic that was still in the world if you knew where to look and how to use it. Even as sharp as she was, Loralie had never been able to see those stories simply as stories and Dierdre had always been secretly disappointed in her mother for this. How could a woman so smart not see through such silly tales? There was a pair missing from the box. She realized then that it was the pair her mother had been using for her scarf. She had left it there. I'll have to go back tomorrow and get it, she thought. She closed the box without having even picked a pair of needles and sat it on the dresser where she had indulged herself a few minutes before. Her tension was melting and her pain dulling, turning to a not quite complete indifference. He'll be okay in there, she thought. He'll just fall asleep in the chair like he usually does. Dierdre shed her clothes with smooth serpentine movements and slid into bed, switching off the lamp with a quick twist. She masturbated, trying to think of nothing, just feeling herself surrounded by the darkness of the room and embraced by the warmth of her blanket. When she came, she writhed and shook and for a brief moment her thoughts finally did leave her. A blissful silence washed through her mind. She just breathed and the last tingles made their way though her body and then she rolled over onto her side feeling just as high as she needed to be and fell asleep. # It was sometime in the early afternoon when Dierdre woke with her head groggy and her throat swollen from thirst and the snoring she must have done in her sleep. She sat up on the edge of her bed, rubbing her face and then running her hand through her hair. She shuffled to the bathroom and took a piss and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked like Hell warmed over. On her way to the kitchen she noticed her father's chair was empty and that the mound of shredded paper was still on the floor, spread more now from her father getting up, having forgotten that his feet had been covered by it. Shrugging it off she continued to the kitchen and downed two full glasses of water, immediately feeling it's wonderful effects on her brain. The pressure in her head dispersed a bit and her cobwebs were beginning to shake loose. She put on a pot of coffee and made it a strong one. She needed to return to the hospital to get the scarf she had left there. That fucking druggie bitch nurse better not have taken it.