A child sprinting down a desolate street to retrieve his rouge ball. A mother beckoning him inside for supper. A father rolling into the driveway in shining, fresh off the lot convertible. It was the first thing we saw after finding the house.
Toms face turned beat red as he looked out the window of our aging sedan. A swig from a whiskey bottle and incoherent mumbling proceeded. “They’ll regret it all…” He snarled after bashing his fist against the steering wheel, accidentally setting off the horn. The mother of the child was the only one who seemed to notice, and with a rapid flash in her expression she beckoned her son inside hurriedly. Fear. It was clear as day in her eyes. And her sons…. I don’t want to remember that look.
The slam of a door turned my attention to the drivers side of the car, which was now bare. Tom was storming towards the house in what I sensed was an embodiment of Hells wrath. Quickly I popped out of the car and ran up to him. With quick, shallow breaths I grabbed his arm to prevent the bloodbath that would ensue if he entered the house.
“Tommy..”
“I DONT WANT TO HEAR IT, YOU KNOW DAMN WELL WHAT THEY HAVE DONE”
“We can’t change the past..”
“BUT I CAN DAMN WELL CHANGE THE FUTURE”
He wretched his arm away from my grasp and continued his parade of death towards that cursed door. The door to the house that had sent our lives into a spiral of excruciating pain and dispare. The house which now sheltered our son. Or at least what’s left of him.
The day our only chid entered under that forsaken roof is one that neither Tom nor I would care to remember. But every living moment the horrid acts we witnessed loop in our heads.
We had just been glad our little Jack had made some friends. The red flags ran rampant yet we were blinded by our own hands. The sheer fact that not once did we meet the boy he talked about so much…
It was just like any other day, Jack skipped our house completely to hang out with the nameless child. We had grown used to this, as all young kids strive for independence. Boundaries had been set, but they where followed loosely. We told him to call at least once a day if he was away from home. He would call occasionally, which helped blunt the edge of our worries. Then, the calls changed.
Rapid consecutive calls until Tom or I picked up, and radio silence on the other end after doing so. This would happen three or four times a day, until Jack would finally talk on the other line. When questioned about the relentless ghost calls, he claimed to have no recollection of doing such. We chalked it down to a phone malfunction.
Finally, the phone didn’t stop ringing for hours. Hours and hours of constant ringing with the exception of when we answered it. Strange noises could be heard from the other end, but the call would always disconnect after four or five seconds. As soon as it would end, it began to ring again. We grew worried fairly fast, as it was the first time noises could be heard after the so called “glitch” ghost calls.
Jack had mentioned the address of his new friend over dinner a couple days prior to this. It was only a block away, and we grew a false sense of assurance as we reside in a fairly nice part of town. Tom and I finally broke after three hours of the forsaken calls.
With a panic that sunk in deeper with every mile, we finally arrived at the address jack had given us. Relief fell upon us as it was one of the nicest houses in the area, with a playground in the back showing signs of kids. Tom had agreed to just roll by, as we didn’t want to be the helicopter parents you hear so much about. As we turned around to head back home, I decided to roll down the window for some fresh air. After all we had decompress a little. As soon as I did, the car screeched to a stop and we ran towards the house. The screams of our child screaming could not be mistaken.
Medical beds. Scalpels. Sterilized gloves. An IV. Jack looked back at us from across the room, strapped to a table. I blacked out.
Tom told me I had run outside and began to simultaneously throw up and weep upon the yard. Men rushed from the upstairs of the house yelling, brandishing knives of every kind. Jack yelled out to us, begging us to save him. Tom picked me up and ran to the car. We shouldn’t have deserted jack. But the sight of a rat tunneling out of the stump that would be bearing a leg and coolers filled to the brim with bloody plastic bags told us all we needed to know. There was no saving our boy.
The police had arrived about thirty minutes later. The house was spotless, just like the realtor had left it for the showing. There where no signs of life in the inferno that took out son.
Life went on. Tom and I shifted our love to alcohol. We lost our jobs, and moved back in with my mother. Our lives had ended right along with jacks.
Mother forced us to attend a dinner party with some new friends she had made from the church. Her house, her rules after all. Begrudgingly, we got ourselves presentable for the first time in months. Formalities and small talk, but Tom and I remained distant from the chatter. But I couldn’t stop looking at one of they children that had come to the dinner. His eyes….
They where almost identical to jacks eyes. They had the same hazy gray color, with a shifty glance that always looked alert. Tom whispered in my ear and knocked me out of my daze. He directed my attention to the boys sister, whose nose looked oddly familiar. Their fathers hair. The mothers ears. Jack. Our precious jack.
We found out where they lived. I didn’t want to go, Tom insisted. I’m writing this in the car, ignoring the cries of agony that are coming from the house. He’s not letting them off easy. It seems we are getting jack back. Piece by piece.