Ashes of Another Life Read online

  Flames spread over her sleeve as she cupped their red-hot hands. She didn’t flail around or attempt to extinguish it. There was no escaping Father’s vengeance, and either way she was going to burn, so she pressed on, clutching their tiny hands, palms blistered from their smoldering touch.

  It was a struggle but she managed to pull them away from the fire as family members reached for them with ghastly arms, black stick figures silhouetted by the fiery backdrop. She was heading toward the plum tree when Father’s voice boomed, “Susie!” The fire grew hotter. It spread wider, consuming half the lawn. It sizzled her shirt and seared into her back. It caught the collar of her shirt and climbed her neck, singeing her hair.

  “Jackson! Susie! She’ll lead you astray. Straight into the arms of perdition!”

  The anger in Father’s dark eyes made Tara Jane gasp. Her pajama pants caught fire. Jackson and Susie looked up at her with hollow, expressionless eyes, but she could sense their fear. She fought the pain and limped on, the thin fabric of her pants disintegrating into orange embers which floated, weightless, in the blustery air.

  Mother had stopped weeping and was reaching out for Tara Jane, unable to cross some sort of invisible divide but desperately trying. The concern in her eyes made Tara Jane realize these might be her mother’s final moments.

  Flames were everywhere, searing into Tara Jane’s back and all over her legs. She was burning from shoulder to fingertip. It inched up her face, and she could smell her own lips roasting.

  She didn’t know if she could walk another step, and in that moment, she heard a song. It played in her mind exactly how it used to sound coming from the speakers of the old cassette player, all treble and full of static.

  Hey, where did we go

  Days when the rains came?

  Down in the hollow

  Playing a new game,

  Laughin’ and a-runnin,’ hey, hey,

  Skippin’ and a-jumpin’

  In the misty morning fog with

  Our, our hearts a-thumping

  And you, my brown-eyed girl,

  You, my brown-eyed girl.

  Tara Jane remembered the good times with her mother, and her grief propelled her forward. She gripped the hands of her brother and sister and pulled them the rest of the way to their mother, but just as the children reached a hand for the mournful blue ghost, huge flames burst from the ground and knocked them back.

  Father came at her, so fast, like a fireball from Hell. All she could do was attempt to crawl away, but the fire hurt so bad she could barely think. She was vaguely aware of Mr. McKelvey yelling into his car radio, “I need back up at 307 Dunn Lane!”

  Father fell on top of her. All she could see were his flames. All she could feel was his heat and his heavy weight atop her and his hands reaching for her neck, squeezing, burning her face. All she could feel was his rage, and then nothing.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The pain was gone when Tara Jane came to, cheek pressed against the cold, gritty earth. She was surrounded by tall weeds, which for a moment seemed like yellow flames dancing in the wind. She gasped. She could still feel Father atop her, pinning her, ready to finish the job, but as the world came back into focus, she realized he wasn’t there.

  That’s when she noticed the grass didn’t smell like grass. It smelled like burned flesh. She lifted her head and glanced around and saw no sign of her family, or Randall Sykes or the McKelveys. Just her, the night breeze, and an off-key symphony of nocturnal critters.

  Something was wrong. The crickets sounded wrong. Their chirping had a pressing monotony which hit her ear drums with an unpleasant sense of urgency. She sat up and realized why. She was in the place of her nightmares. Tara Jane had finally come “home.”

  She stood, brushed the dust from her clothes and frowned to see that her comfortable jeans had been replaced by the long underwear, pantyhose, and prairie dress of her past. Hand-sewn from a carnation pink cotton, the dress was the nicest one she had owned back in Sweet Springs. Now it felt like prison attire. She was itching to take it off, but somehow she knew she needed to play along. She wasn’t sure if she was dreaming, dead, or crazy, but one thing was for sure: They were playing by Father’s rules, not her own.

  The blackened husk of a house stood several yards away. The lawn was overrun by weeds and dotted with trees that—once upon a time—had offered shady comfort on hot summer days. Now their shadows seemed to reach, like greedy beggars, for the narrow stretch of a path lit by the moon.

  Through the roof’s many holes, moonbeams lit the windows. She focused on those as she took a few timid steps forward, wondering if she might catch a glimpse of anyone inside. Broken glass glistened in the fire-ravaged frames, like the drool-covered teeth of a carnivore.

  The front door was gone, mixed with the other rubble on the porch, dark, broken pieces of unrecognizable things. A gust of wind stirred the sooty remains of the patio furniture. The shadowy opening called to her—not aloud, but silently. She felt it tugging her, pulling her home.

  A chilling wind swirled around her as she walked toward the house. Her skin was riddled with goosebumps, but she forced herself to keep moving. She heard weeping in the distance and spotted someone near the back of the house, watching her from the garden. She saw a hazy blue light glowing from behind the withered vines. It shined brighter with each passing sob.

  A flash of lightning streaked the sky. Thunder rattled. Tara Jane longed to catch the scent of rain, to smell anything but the stench of burned flesh, a sickly odor which grew thick at the back of her mouth, morphing from a scent into a flavor. She hated to swallow, hated to breathe, hated to let such a repulsive thing into her body. But more than that, she hated watching the ashes on the breeze and wondering if they belonged to her family.

  She took a cautious step onto the sagging porch and peered into the darkness. Her loafers kicked up rubble as she gulped and crossed the threshold, entering the front room. She knew the space well. It had been the family room. A large black lump lay where the sectional couch used to be. The ruins of a sewing table formed a small pile in the corner.

  Pictures hung on the wall to her right, and as she approached them, she found them eerily spotless, untouched by the fire or debris. In the photos, which dated back to her great grandfather’s family, generations of Brewers beamed at the camera with empty smiles. Dozens of faces crowded each scene, too many for Tara Jane to count, and at the center of each picture was a man, surrounded by his wives and children.

  The newer photos had black X’s over some of the faces, and she recalled how Father had taken a pen and crossed some of his older children out as they were excommunicated from the church. It hadn’t been easy on him, to shun his own children for their sins, but standing here, observing the lineage of Brewer history preserved in these photos, it all made sense to her for the first time.

  The night I found him crying… that was after Matthew got sent away. It must have pained him, deep down.

  She remembered well, though she hadn’t thought about it in a long time. She’d come outside for a breath of fresh air after a long day of breathing in the smell of old diapers and dirty laundry, which she’d have to wash in the morning. He hadn’t noticed her standing there at first, lost in his own sobs, sitting in his rocker in the moonlight with his hands over his face.

  His shoulders had stiffened as if suddenly aware of her presence, hands dropping from his face but head still hanging low.

  “I’ll go,” Tara Jane had said, reaching for the door to go back inside.

  But Father had only wiped his cheeks with a rag from his pocket, leaned back in his chair and said, “No, stay,” nodding towards the full moon in a black, cloudless sky. “It’s a nice night.” He had stopped his tears just like that, and Tara Jane had almost forgotten she’d seen them at all.

  Now, she looked at the photos, and saw him clearly for the first time, an outsider looking in. She saw Father as a boy, surrounded by his forty-something siblings, four mother
s, and proud father. He had been a small boy once, lost in a sea of so many faces, it had taken Tara Jane a moment to pick him out in the photo. His whole life, that’s all Father had wanted—to live up to this picture-perfect image; to emulate his own father and make him proud; to be god-fearing, to have an obedient family to adore him and populate his kingdom.

  She pictured him in his porch rocker, shamefully hiding the tears he cried for his son. He couldn’t help what he’d become in the end, or the mania that had grown in his brain. This lifestyle, this obsession with perfection, it was a recipe for disaster. He’d once been a boy, just as Tara Jane was a girl. All he’d wanted was a picture-perfect family, but of course, that had never been the case.

  Then she noticed something that puzzled her. Two of the photos had changed. She was certain they’d been different just moments ago.

  In the most recent photo, taken not more than eighteen months back, a scribbled “X” occupied the spot where Tara Jane’s face used to be. She was barely recognizable as a person, but she knew (from looking at the photo before) that the face hidden beneath the big, black “X” was her own. The one beside it was the same. Taken four years prior, the face of a younger, much more innocent Tara Jane was lost beneath a menacing “X.”

  A voice whispered around her, as if floating on a breeze. She froze. An icy bead of sweat paused halfway down her spine. She took a deep breath and focused, trying to hear the words.

  A floorboard creaked down the hall, then another. The sound of distant weeping wafted through the front door, carried from far off. Inside the house, there was the sound of shallow breath whistling in and out of charred lungs. “Help me, sister.”

  She stifled the fit of manic sobs that wanted to burst from her chest. She dug her fingernails into her palms.

  If this is a dream, I want to wake up now.

  The voice returned, accompanied by another. “Help us,” the tiny voices said. The words filled her eardrums, blocking out all other sounds as if funneled straight into her head. The air, the walls, the house itself seemed to shudder as a little boy and a little girl begged, “Help us, sister. Please help us.”

  Her pulse quickened. The walls rattled slightly with each thump of her heart as if she were connected to this place, like the house itself was a part of her, a biological extension. She knew better, though. It was the other way around. She was a part of it. It hungered to be whole again.

  Just a dream, just a dream, she repeated in her mind. She couldn’t escape the fear that she had died and this place was her eternal prison.

  She heard the crackling of the fire before she smelled the smoke. It curled into the room from the hallway. Thick and gray, it reached the far wall in a heartbeat, swirling into every corner.

  A clock near the photos chimed 8 times, and every off-key note sounded even more sour than the last. Each slow torturous stroke of the hour was like a fresh punch to the gut, for Tara Jane recognized the time. 8 o’clock. It was time for nightly prayers.

  A creak echoed from down the hall, then the sound of shuffling feet on ashy floorboards. She backed away as her family filed into the living room, one by one. Her toes curled, anxious to run, but she couldn’t. Not because her body wouldn’t allow it, but because she had nowhere to go.

  They shuffled in on pencil-thin legs. Huge portions of roasted flesh showed through the torched rags of their clothing, and for the first time since arriving, she was thankful for the shadowy gloom. She would never grow accustomed to seeing them this way—blistered faces, hair singed to the scalp. Even if she were forced to spend eternity here, she’d never stop detesting their gore.

  A slow procession of corpses packed the room as Tara Jane backed into a corner. No one looked at her. No one so much as glanced her way. Their empty sockets and melted eyes held no trace of acknowledgment.

  They took their positions in the prayer circle, locking hands in a standing position. Some of the furniture had been reduced to what looked like coal dust, but she knew they would have remained standing anyway. Everyone stood until Father said otherwise. That had always been the way.

  All at once, they hung their heads solemnly and waited, though for what she didn’t know. Curiosity burned like fire through her veins, and she had to remind herself to keep breathing.

  Nightly prayers hadn’t always been dreadful. She bit her quivering lip. On most nights, when no one’s behavior needed correction, they would sit and chat together, and those moments had been pleasant, even warm. But there were other nights when Father had reminded them of what it meant to be God-fearing people. That’s what permeated the atmosphere in this ghostly home, choking everything in sickly smoke and swirling ashes—the sadness of a family torn by duty, a well of sorrow like no other, a hellish trap where once had been love.

  She spotted Jackson and Susie at the edge of the circle, heads bowed, and she was thankful not to glimpse their ruined faces. It always seemed they kept to the edge of the sullen, resurrected family, most of whom stared blankly ahead with a dazed look of absolute surrender, like Father’s mindless puppets.

  She had loved them once, each of them in their own way, and it pained her to imagine their final moments and, even worse, their eternal unrest. Fond memories pulled at her from one direction. Fear pulled from the other. She dug her fingernails into her palms again, but this time she wasn’t trying to wake up. Her fists were clenched so tight her knuckles had no color.

  She looked away from the scorched remains of her loved ones and caught a glimpse of herself in the oval mirror on the wall. Heat had cracked its surface and warped it around the edges, but she saw herself reflected in its fragmented pieces. She hadn’t realized it until now, but in this place, her hair was how it used to be—untouched by scissors in all its years. Tight braids were gathered at the back of her head, and she frowned, feeling the weight of them.

  She stared at herself. She wondered if anything had really changed in the twelve months since she’d left Sweet Springs. People in her new life said she was “strong” and a “survivor,” but in her reflection she saw only the face of the scared little girl she’d always been.

  Father appeared in the doorway behind her. Resentment wrinkled his putrid face, reflected a dozen times in the broken mirror. He wasn’t aflame, but wisps of smoke rose from his clothing and red hot embers fluttered through the air as he pointed an accusatory finger in Tara Jane’s direction. She jumped and spun around.

  “I tried to save you, but you are hopeless. Just like your mother.”

  Seeing her father without his fiery veil, she found herself wishing the flames would return. At least then she wouldn’t feel trapped in his cold, dead stare. She wouldn’t have to try to ignore the way his melted lips caused one half of his face to grin despite his rage-filled expression.

  He lowered his hand and swaggered to the center of the group. No one but Father locked eyes on Tara Jane. All heads remained dutifully bowed. Father’s stare never wavered, his unblinking eyes challenging her to speak against him.

  Though he whispered his next words, his voice echoed around her, so much deeper than before and more depraved. “You’re not one of us, Tara Jane. It’s time to let you go.”

  He stepped back and took the hands of his two eldest wives, completing the macabre family circle. He finally broke his stare with Tara Jane, bowed his head and led the prayer:

  Vessel of Satan,

  evil unto death,

  Apostate,

  birthed in dishonor,

  Thou art banished to a place

  where the worm dieth not

  and the fire cleanses thee,

  never quenched.

  Everyone repeated. Everyone but Tara Jane.

  Vessel of Satan,

  evil unto death,

  Apostate,

  birthed in dishonor,

  Thou art banished to a place

  where the worm dieth not

  and the fire cleanses thee,

  never quenched.

  A sizzling heat ros
e as the floor erupted in flames. The fire lapped at her shoes. It melted the soles and sought her toes with sinister purpose. She looked down, whimpering at the thought of going through such pain again.

  She scooted out of the corner, sideways along the wall. Her teeth chattered with anxiety as she watched the fire follow and reach out for her. It licked at her ankles, climbed her legs. Her skin blistered, and she kicked at the flames in a mindless gut reaction. The family’s prayer rolled over her, a nauseating wave of ceaseless, chanting voices, each word condemning her.

  “Jackson,” Tara Jane called out. He didn’t look up. He continued to pray, his burned face angled to the floor. “Susie,” she cried, but Susie only scooted closer to Jackson and trembled as if frightened.

  Pain consumed her. It made her want to give up, to run away, but she didn’t know where to run. If she had died on the McKelvey’s front lawn after escaping Randall and attempting to defeat Father, if this was her afterlife, she needed to take control. She was bound to spend eternity regretting her cowardice if she failed to get the upper hand now.

  I’ve lived an honest life, God. I’ve done my best to follow your word. I didn’t mean to let my brother and sister die. Surely, this is not my punishment. Surely, I don’t deserve Hell. How can I escape him? Please, God, help me now.

  Her eyes brightened as she recalled the blue glow, the weeping voice from outside the house. She stood as tall as she could manage and looked at Jackson and Susie. “Please… I’ll take you to mother.”

  Father’s head popped up. He flashed a look full of venom that might have buckled her knees as a child, but he didn’t scare her any more. At least, that’s what she kept telling herself.

  She approached the zombified flock. Their brittle fingers laced together like gnarled tree roots. Electric energy pulsed from the circle, lifting the fine hairs on her arms and neck. Jackson chanced a sideways glance in her direction. Father grunted, and the boy dropped his gaze.

  Tara Jane licked her lips and spoke louder, spurred on by Jackson’s curiosity. “You were going to be free. I was going to return you to mother.” She looked at Susie and saw her lower lip tremble.