Going Under

by La Guera

Donald Flack, Jr. has beaten back the darkness from the streets of New York for seven years, and he has done it well but not every darkness can be banished, and so once a year, he revisits his own.

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Jerry Bruckheimer, Anthony Zuiker, and CBS. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only. Diana Flack belongs to me.

Inspired by "The Fall" and the terse conversation therein between Flack and Officer Moran about Flack the Elder.

Donald Flack, Jr., wunderkind of the NYPD, knew about the things that came out after dark. He had seen evidence of them in the messes he cleaned up in the pale New York dawns and in the eyes of the scum that paraded through the precinct like Hell's coterie. He had caught glimpses of them in the battered, swollen faces of hookers too stupid to leave their pimps and of wives too terrified of the monster beneath the three-piece suit to leave their husbands. As a rookie, he had seen it in the burned, mottled face of a toddler whose junkie mother had shoved him face-first into a pot of boiling water because he wouldn't stop crying.

And when he was sixteen, for one fleeting, terrified instant, he had seen…true darkness. Not the darkness of Gothic novels or the romanticized shadows about which long-dead poets had rhapsodized ad nauseam, but the dark beneath the dark, the blackness that settled in the bones and throbbed in the teeth like the beginnings of a cavity. He had seen it and understood everything in a single roundhouse slap of numb comprehension, and though his waking mind had painted over the knowledge with the comforting panacea of guns and bullets, ballistics and psychological profiling, the truth still came to him in uneasy dreams to shake him from slumber to white-knuckled wakefulness.

He sat in his Taurus and stared at the house through the windshield. It was twelve degrees outside, and his breath fogged the glass with each exhalation. On the radio, the weatherman was cheerfully predicting snowfall of up to ten inches, and beneath his jocular admonition to stay inside and bundle against the cold, he sensed a rancid, salivatory glee that spoke of old people and small children frozen to death and carried from their tenements by grim-faced officers. He jabbed the OFF button with one leather-gloved finger, and the car was silent save for the low throb of the idling engine.

The house sat on a patch of barren earth littered with beer cans, burger wrappers, and old condoms, an old Colonial that had once been white, but was now a dull and leprous grey. Most of the shutters had fallen off, and the one that remained sagged forlornly against the rotten clapboard, a diseased eyeball dangling from the socket. The windows were broken, and the door through which he'd once fled with a scream on his lips was gone, exposing the gaping maw of the beast he had so narrowly escaped.

When he was a kid, the house had been the subject of gossip and teenage speculation, the derelict ruin that the neighborhood children had christened the Whisper House, and where legions of goblins, bedsheet ghosts, and green-faced witches had gone every Halloween to prove their bravery by knocking on the door to tempt what walked there, only to scuttle to the waiting safety of their friends, giggling behind candy-sticky fingers.
He had gone there himself as a boy. His parents had forbidden it, of course. Too dangerous, they'd said, full of rotten floorboards and rats and asbestos. But he had been ten and stubborn as his father before him, and so when his mother had taken his younger sister to the mall to trick-or-treat and his father had been on patrol, he had succumbed to the lure of the untouchable and sneaked out of the apartment.

It wasn't just the rats and the asbestos they feared. Every building in New York has generous helpings of both, including the apartment you lived in. You should have known that, would have known that if you had been a few years older, but you were ten then, and your father was a policeman, and his word was law. Besides, it never occurred to you that he might lie. You took the harshness of his voice and the aversion of his eyes when you asked why not to be the arrogance that was the right of every father. It was only later, long after your sister was sleeping beneath the carefully manicured lawns of Mount Pleasant Cemetery, that you began to understand, and by then, it was too late. The damage had been done.

When he had become a man and followed in the formidable footsteps of his legendary father, with his badge gleaming over his breast and his head and heart filled with the swagger of adulthood and polished academy training, he had told himself that had he known the truth, had he understood the stakes, he would never have gone. Not that night, and not that terrible night six years later, when he had fled this house with his pants cold and clinging to his skin for the piss that drenched them, and his comfortable worldview forever shattered.

It was a noble thought, a reassuring thought, and it was bullshit, all bullshit. The boy he had been knew the truth the man he was refused to admit by the light of day. He would have gone had he known. The laws of New York boyhood demanded it, bound him by dint of the dire consequences awaiting those deemed "chickenshit" in the baleful, merciless, ever-seeing eyes of their peers. The name he carried had given him no choice but to go.

Hell, you did know. That first trip told you more than you needed to know about what lived within those crumbling moldering walls and the secrets it tended. You felt it in the air, wet and cloying despite the fall chill that sank its serrated teeth into your cheeks and nose outside the wrought-iron bars of the fence that surrounded the house. It was rank and greasy on your tongue, and it soured the candy in your mouth. It was a Now and Later-your favorite-but you spat it out all the same because instinct told you it had been corrupted.

You left it there, wet and glistening in the dry grass, and when you seized a rock to hurl through the window, your palm recoiled from the stone. It was too smooth and impossibly heavy in your suddenly unwilling hand, and it radiated a sickly, cancerous heat that made your fingers ache. You threw it because not to throw it was to show yourself for a pansy, but there was no clandestine glee in the shrill tinkle of breaking glass, only a nauseated, swooning relief that the blighted rock had left your hand, and unwritten law of boyhood or not, you turned and ran, the breath frozen and sweet in your lungs and blessedly cool on your burning face. You ran to beat the Devil because you thought he was behind you, and when you got home, you scrubbed your hand until it was red and raw to keep the taint from following you to bed.

So, you knew. You knew about this house, and you went back anyway. And you brought her with you.

She had always been the tagalong, the pestering, yammering bundle of frenetic energy that followed him wherever he went and set his teeth on edge with her insatiable curiosity. When he was fourteen, he had persuaded Mallory Devan to meet him in the Pitkin Park, and he had been rounding second base and heading for third when she had come bounding along in her red parka, beaming from ear to ear and bellowing his name at the top of her lungs.

(Donnie! Hey, Donnie! What'cha doin? Ya wanna go down the deli for some grinders? I got babysitting money.)

He could still remember her face when she'd realized what he'd been doing, the perfect circle of her mouth as she'd taken in the sight of his mussed hair, untucked shirt, and his hand up Mallory's sweater. She'd been rooted to the spot, crumpled dollar bills clutched in her fisted fingers. Her eyes had been wide as pie plates. It would have been funny had he not been so mortified, and he could only mouth soundlessly as Mallory Devans had rearranged her clothes and retreated without so much as a goodbye.

(Dammit, Diana, why you gotta be so stupid? Why can't you ever leave me alone? I don't wanna hang out with you)

That wasn't all you said that afternoon, was it? Gleefully accusatory, a spiteful child armed with illicit knowledge.

No, it wasn't. Disappointment and thwarted libido had sharpened his tongue and made him harsh, and he had loosed his frustration upon her unsuspecting head. She had smiled at first, serenely certain that his anger would fade quickly as it often did, but when the tirade continued and the shouts grew louder, her smile had faltered and been supplanted by confusion, and near the end, when he had been apoplectic with rage and hoarse with fury and the barrage of insults had struck her exposed flesh like carefully chosen stones, her face had crumpled, and she had wept, tears streaming down her bewildered face.

(Why ya so mad, Donnie? What'd I do? Donnie, stop it, just stop it. I won't tell Mom and Pop, I promise, if you just please stop yelling.)

You didn't stop yelling. You were too far gone, and in the dim recesses of your mind, you enjoyed the pain you saw on her face, the stark, uncomprehending misery. It was retribution for your humiliation in from of the divine Miss Devans and payback for all the times she had butted in where she wasn't wanted and incovenienced your dreams of teenage popularity with her irritating presence. She had always been too eager, too playful. She had once barged into your room while you were looking at skin mags with your friends and asked if you wanted to build a snow castle with her. Your pals had hooted with mocking laughter, and all your hard-earned credibility had vanished in an instant. So you avenged yourself, and with every savage hit you scored, you told yourself that it was dignity regained.

Familiarity bred contempt, and your cuts and barbs were unerring. She was bawling when you finished, standing on the sidewalk with snot dangling from her nose like spidersilk. She wouldn't look at you at the end. She stared at her shoes and sobbed, chest hitching beneath her tucked, cowed chin. That was how you left her, with snot in her nose in the middle of Pitkin Park. It was your finest hour of bastardry.

Oh, the guilt came eventually, hot and gnawing in your belly. You were two blocks away when the first pang of shame cut through your cocoon of righteous indignation. You almost went back for her, then. You wanted to, but you were proud and stubborn, and you overrode the impulse by telling yourself that she had to learn that you weren't her nanny. She was thirteen, you told yourself, old enough to take care of herself, and you kept walking.

She made it home ten minutes after you did, hollow-eyed and silent, and went to her room without a word. She was so quiet and pale at dinner that your parents thought she was sick, and across the table, you studied your fork so you wouldn't have to see her wan, listless face, white as milk and brittle as old china. She barely touched her food, and your appetite wasn't much better. You pushed your peas disconsolately around your plate with a pained scrape of your fork, and your mother, accustomed to having her food devoured faster than she could spoon it out, fluttered anxiously around the table, feeling foreheads and prodding armpits.

It was your father who came within shouting distance of the truth. The instincts that would one day earn him the mantle of legend and you the burden of unattainable expectation sensed the undercurrent of tension between you, and his unsettling gaze darted between your faces, keen and unwavering as a searchlight.

(What's the matter with you two?)

(Nothin', Pop, nothin. I'm just not hungry.)

All innocence and frantically scraping tines and broken-voiced sincerity, and he knew you for a liar as soon as you opened your mouth. He surveyed you over his spoon, lips pursed in contemplation, and you felt him prying at the clumsy edges of your fragile composure. So deft, those searching fingers, and you fought the urge to drop your gaze and squirm in your seat because if you surrendered to either urge the game was up. You swallowed with an audible clicked and licked lips dry and burning with confession.

The words were so close, inevitable, but suddenly, he wasn't looking at you anymore. His attention had shifted to Diana, who sat rigidly in her chair, a doll in some madcap child's tea party. That hard face softened; there were no expectations for her, no footsteps in which she must follow except her mother's down the aisle, and when he spoke, his voice was soft, cajoling.

(How 'bout you? How's my girl?)

That broad hand, so quick to cuff your ears when you smarted off, reached out and ruffled her bangs. She smiled and idly twirled her fork in her mashed potatoes, and with that smile, you were convinced that she was going to hang you out to dry, take her vengeance as you had taken yours in Pitkin Park. One word of your shenanigans with Mallory Devans and your subsequent tantrum, and you'd have been scrubbing the fire escape until the pleasant simmer of muscular exertion deepened to throbbing, infection-heat agony under your sweating skin. No more stickball in the alley behind Fleischman's deli, no more taking turns shooting rats with Bobby Vinatello's airgun behind the Chinese place on 23rd. Just night after night of scouring the fire escape with lye soap and learning each hairline crack in the age-blackened iron in intimate detail.

Why shouldn't she rat you out? It's exactly what you'd have done had your roles been reversed.

"So much for sainthood," he muttered to no one in particular, and scrubbed his face with his gloved hands. "She thought about it, though. "I know she did."

Of course she did. She was a Flack, and far from stupid. She knew she had you over a barrel. Part of her savored that knowledge, if the gleam in her eyes was any indication. But just as she opened her mouth to cast her indictment and seal your fate, a shadow passed over her face, fleeting as a woodsmoke in the wind. The mischievous gleam faded, and when she spoke, her reply was barely audible over the creak of your father's chair as he shifted.

(I'm fine, Daddy. I just don't feel so good.)

And then, she vomited into her plate with a loud, ratcheting burp, a liquid splatter that made your own stomach lurch in its moorings.

Whether she'd done it because she was really sick, or because she was astonished at her brazen hubris for lying to he whose word was law, you never knew, but whichever it was, it effectively ended the interrogation because your mother dropped her fork with a clatter, scrambled from her chair, and chivvied Diana to the bathroom, cooing indistinct sounds of maternal comfort. The upchuck spared you from further questioning, and the next morning, you went to school, and Diana went to the doctor, and life went on at Casa Flack. Pitkin Park was never mentioned again.

It might never have been mentioned, but it had seldom been far from his thoughts-still wasn't. Every time duty called him to the park, he would see her there in his mind's eye, all awkward angles and gangly limbs, too small for the world into which she had been introduced, cowering as libido and unthinking, adolescent cruelty ruled his tongue. The image had only grown sharper in the years since her death, and he suspected that it would be the last sight he saw as his eyes closed for the last time.

It's not the only sour recollection you carry in your heart. There are others, and they all nestle beneath your heart like cherished children, suckled on guilt and the whiskey sours that coat your tongue on Christmas and New Year's and a birthday that hasn't been celebrated in eleven years. Sometimes you wonder what Sheldon Hawkes will find when he unzips your guts with his gleaming scalpel. You wonder if they'll be there, all your private pressing stones, tucked inside your pericardium like priceless treasure.

It's the eyes you remember the most. How can you not? They were the same eyes you see in the bathroom mirror every morning-blue and clear and full of secret mischief. They follow you everywhere you go. You see them red-rimmed and brimming with tears and the dull indifference of emotional self-preservation, yes, and you see them as they were at the dinner table that night, shadowed with the certainty that every word spoken in anger was true, but you also see them as they were in better times, when they were full of wonder and childish joy and you had not yet fallen for the myth that the fulcrum of the universe resided in your Jockeys.

(Ohh, lookit, Donnie, lookit! C'mon, help me catch the pigeons.)

(-don' wanna…pigeons got diseases anyways. You know what Pop says.)

(C'mon, pleeaase?)

(-can't you go away…ruin everything…stupid…never been born…need you around anyway…)

These are your memories. These, and the impossibly loud, wet snap of her slipping through your disbelieving hands.

Christ, he didn't want to think of this anymore. It scraped hidden scars inside his heart, opened wounds he had counted long sealed, if not healed. The festering infection they held was safe in its pocket of numb denial, so why did he insist on driving to this godforsaken wreck every year and revisiting the decently buried past, an addict picking obsessively at the track marks on his ruined, emaciated arms?

Because the past isn't decently buried. It shifts uneasily beneath the earth and speaks of a time not spoken of even in whispers. You're the only one who tends this bit of earth anymore. After it happened, your parents didn't speak to you for three days. It wasn't because they wanted to punish you and drive the relentlessly twisting spike of guilty grief into your heart; they simply hadn't the strength to speak. It cost them what little energy they had to shamble from room to room in an apartment that was suddenly barren and far too big, and when they did open their mouths, all that emerged was a reedy whisper or the guttural, animal lowing of loss.

During the day, your father put on his uniform and pretended it never happened, and at night, he came home and shut himself in his bedroom with old photo albums, still dressed in his blues, with his hat on his knee and the collar of his shirt unbuttoned. He never spared you so much as a sidelong glance as he stalked from the front stoop into the bedroom and shut the door. He had eyes only for a daughter he could no longer see.

Flack snorted and ran his fingers through his hair. His father's inattention had hardly started with Diana's death. As far as Donald Flack, Sr., was concerned, the child that bore his name and so much of his face was a trophy upon which to hang his name and his genetic legacy, and by the time Diana arrived two years later, he had abandoned all pretense of fatherhood in favor of the admiration of the precinct boys and the thrill of the chase. Birthdays and baseball games went unattended, and by the time he was five, he had taken his father's absence as a matter of course. By the time he was ten, he had liked it that way. With his father gone, there were no impossible expectations.

The truth was, he had never really seen you at all. Diana's death had simply given him the excuse for which he had always been looking. He could shut the door and shut you out, and when the pangs of conscience needled his heart, he could shake his head and use the muffling quilt of bereavement to quell them. Who had time for the son when the daughter was gone?

You always wondered what he was doing behind the door that had forever closed on your chance to be the son he had always wanted and never had. In your bitterer moments, you suspected he was not so much grieving for Diana as studying her, trying to discover who she was through the pictures your mother had so dutifully preserved behind the tacky, plastic sheeting of the albums.

If your father's grief had been a matter of form, your mother's grief was raw and paralyzing and scalding as steam against your skin. You looked into her lost, ravaged face that had aged twenty years in forty-eight hours and wished with all your soul that you could take it all back, put all the broken pieces back together again with a snap of your fingers or the magic word. Your father ignored you, but your mother had always loved you, her golden boy who could do no wrong, and who would someday justify all her blind faith. But you couldn't. Magic words had been Diana's ken, and even if you had known them, your tongue was stupid and impotent inside your mouth.

You found her in Diana's room the night before the funeral, do you remember? The door was ajar, and through the crack, you saw her making and remaking Diana's bed with desperate single-mindedness. Her hands pulled and tucked the linens and the comforters with manic precision, and her breath came in frantic puffs through her nose and half-open mouth. Color flared in her cheeks like the beginnings of fever, and she murmured to herself as she plumped the pillows.

Got to make it nice, you heard her say. Got to keep it comfortable.

Over and over again, she stripped the bed and remade it once more, smoothing and tucking and patting as though she could reform her dead child from the outline pressed into the mattress by fourteen years of occupation. You watched the ritual in dry-mouthed, miserable silence, and your nails bit into the soft flesh of your palms and left crescents in their wake.

She was on the fifth pass when she saw you, and when you saw her face, you wanted to cry. It was blotched and puffy from crying, and there was a runner of snot dangling in a pendulous arc from the end of her raw nose just like the one on the end of your sister's nose on the day you left her for mugger bait in Pitkin Park.

(-never been born…don't need you around anyway-)

(Stop it, Donnie, just stop it, please)

The glistening strand of mucus was a reminder of your secret shame, and it was too much to bear. All of it was too much-the palpable wall of grief, the stony silences punctuated only by the tink and chink of cheap cutlery on cheaper china, and the accusatory, ulcerated emptiness of Diana's room. You wanted to retreat to the shadows, slink away to nurse your own wounds, but it was too late. You stood, pinned and helpless, beneath her bleak, naked gaze.

Oh, Donnie, she said, and swiped her forearm hastily beneath her dripping nose. It was such a graceless, unfeminine gesture that you blinked. I didn't see you there. Her fingers tightened convulsively around the pillow she held.

It was your chance to do something-anything-other than stare at your parents' closed bedroom door and amble aimlessly through the sepulchral rooms in search of a place to hide. You could be the good son, the strong son who guided his mother through her anguish while your father wallowed in his. But in the end, there was no Lifetime miracle moment. You mouthed like an idiot, jaws aching and cramped with a sorrow you could not voice, and studied the toes of your sneakers so you didn't have to look at her. Sixteen and still a spineless pissant. But then, Diana could have told you that.

I was just-just straightening up, is all, she had said, and flapped a hand at the immaculate room as though there were still the disorganized clutter of a fourteen-year-old to be found and not a terrible, blank sterility. I want things to be all right for-

But she never finished the sentence. She clapped her hand to her trembling mouth and sank onto the bed with a wrenching mewl. She doubled over, arm pressed against her stomach as though cradling a child long grown, forehead pressed to narrow knees. The strangled sob went on and on, and you wondered how such a guttural sound could come from such a small frame. It was obscene, voyeuristic, but you could not look away.

Ma, you managed diffidently, and started into the room on stiff, ungainly legs, determined to do a son's God-writ duty. Ma.

But the moment you crossed the threshold, she was up and swiping at her blotchy face with the backs of her hands, turning away from your outstretched arms as though they carried not comfort, but pestilence.

It's all right, Donnie, she had murmured hastily as she spun away and began to pat uselessly at an imaginary crease in the comforter. It's gonna be all right. I just have some things to take care of in here. Why don't you go to your room or watch some TV?

Ma-

Go on! Shrill and brittle, and you flinched. She must have known how it sounded because she looked up and offered you a conciliatory smile. It was a rictus, too wide and stiff, and in her overbright eyes, you saw the unspoken corollary. You've done enough.

(Oh, Donnie, what have you done)

(Stop it, Donnie, stop it, please)

(a snap wet and muffled and too loud amid the hoarse shouting and jostling and the frantic scrape and shuffle of descending feet and the ominous thud of flesh on rotten wood cool air on your face and breath hot and sour on the roof of your mouth four bodies standing in the dead grass not five not five like there should have been oh god where-)

It'll be all right, Donnie, she had called after you as you slouched out with your hands thrust into the pockets of your jeans to hide the trembling and your stomach a hot, greasy stone in your throat. It will be all right. You'll see.

But it was not all right, not ever again. The next day, you sat in the church in a suit borrowed from your uncle and shoes too tight on your feet, and stared at the casket that held pride of place. The starched collar of your shirt chafed your nape, and the tie you wore throttled you. It took every ounce of restraint you possessed to refrain from digging your finger between the offending strip of cloth and your tortured skin. You didn't quite dare because you knew that everyone was watching, waiting for yet another sign of failure from the son too stupid to protect his little sister when it mattered.

"Fuck them." He had intended it to be a defiant snarled, but it emerged as a weary croak in the stillness of the car. "Fuck them," he repeated. "They didn't know shit. None of 'em." He reached out and idly flicked the keys that dangled from the ignition.

He hadn't been defiant back then, either. Grief and confusion had robbed him of his customary braggadocio, and he could only muster a sullen, guttering resentment as he hunched in the pew with his elbows propped on his quadriceps and his fingers loosely interlaced between his parted knees. Though the ceremony had ostensibly been to remember Diana, who slumbered in a bed of polished, lacquered pine, he had been the true center of attention, and the weight of their speculative, avid gazes had settled over his shoulders and the small of his back like a blighted poultice.

He had hated them all, even his parents, who sat, unblinking and still as wax figures, in the pew beside him. Each sniffle and muffled sob had grated on his raw nerves, ground glass in an infected wound, and he had ground his teeth to stifle the howl of rage and the torrent of invective that danced seductively on his tongue.

He had envied them their easy, unfettered mourning. His had been forfeited four days before, when he had met his whey-faced father at the door of the Whisper House on unsteady, boneless legs and pointed mutely at the crumpled form of Diana, lying like a broken doll at the foot of the staircase. To his father, that pointing finger, white as bone against the darkness of the house, had been an admission of guilt, and according to Donald Flack, the guilty deserved no mercy. There had been no pity in his eyes as he had shoved past him into the house to stand over the corpse of his daughter, only cold condemnation.

And disappointment, of course. Surely no son so weak and disobedient as he could hope to carry on the hallowed tradition of the boys in blue, a tradition that had stretched, unbroken, through four generations and eighty years. The upholding of the law was for the noble and the just and those who knew how to obey and respect authority, and in that he had proven an abject failure. After all, hadn't he been admonished a thousand times-once that very morning-not to come near this house? He had done just that, and the wages for his folly had been death.

So there had been no forgiveness from his father, whose word was law. And since his father had granted no pardon, neither had anyone else. Even his mother had been aloof and distant, and his father's fellow officers, usually so gracious with the son of a living icon, had given him a wide berth and spared him the brusquest of nods as they moved to shake his father's white-gloved hand and tip their hats and murmur condolences to his shivering mother.

Denied his sorrow, he could not cry, though the urge to do so lodged beneath his breastbone, a hot coal against his lungs and heart. He could only sit with his hands fisted in his lap while distant relatives and complete strangers wailed with theatrical fervor over a girl whose face they would recall but dimly by week's end. Nor could he honor her the way he had wished; he had wanted to carry her to her final resting place, but his father had brushed the offer aside with a curt slice of his hand.

(You've done enough, boy)

He should have. He should have defied his father and taken his place beneath her coffin. Whatever else had passed between them in the Whisper House, he had known her most intimately and loved her the best. He had been the one to walk her down to the deli after school on warm spring afternoons for a pastrami on rye or down to the arcade so she could convert her pocket change into the merry boop and jingle of a video game or the rumbling thwack of skee ball. He had grumbled and groused and sworn that he begrudged her every quarter and every minute of his wasted time, but in his heart, he savored the unabashed hero worship he sometimes saw in her eyes, and he had often slipped more quarters into her stack when she wasn't looking. Taking her on one last walk had been not just his right as her older brother, but his responsibility as a man, and he had failed spectacularly.

Besides, resumed the narrator of memory inside his head, it wasn't as if you hadn't carried her before. You were a cop's son, and your head knew that you shouldn't disturb the scene, but your heart didn't give a damn for procedures and protocols. Your vision had been blinded to everything but the small, impossibly twisted figure sprawled at the foot of the stairs, facedown in the dust and grit, one thin arm outstretched and reaching for you. Eleven years had fallen away in twelve steps, and she was three years old again. If anyone had asked you, you would have sworn under oath that your feet never touched the floor as you closed the distance between you, but the photos taken at the scene belie you. Every year, you take them out of the evidence locker where they gather dust and the quiet pathos of forgotten antiquity, and they always show the same truth-a set of footprints in the dust.

Do you even know what you meant to do when you bounded back into the house with your pounding heart in your throat and her name on numb lips? I doubt it. It was instinct and terror that led you back into that house after your narrow escape, and when you saw her there, you dropped to your knees and lifted her up.

She was so heavy, heavier than she had any right to be. You pulled and tugged until she was cradled against you, desperate to feel the flutter of her heartbeat against your chest or her breath against your chin, but there was nothing. She did not shift in your encircling arms, did not turn in response to the sudden warmth of familiar contact. She simply lay against your chest.

And her neck…

Such a terrible angle, wasn't it? It was a Lovecraftian angle that hurt your eyes and made you recoil. Boneless and lolling and too sharp beneath the skin. She clicked when you shook her, castanets in a burlap sack, and your stomach heaved because no live creature made such a tenebrous, grating sound, not even the beetles and other scuttling insects you studied in biology. That furtive click was unassailable proof of death, and you could only gag and stare in sloe-eyed stupefaction while she cooled in your arms and your friends shouted plaintively for you to get the hell out of there.

Just like old times, he thought as his gorge rose dangerously, and then he was scrabbling madly for the door handle, teeth clenched against a wave of sickly sweet bile. He flung the door open and leaned out just as another spasm forced his jaws open, and he vomited onto the frozen pavement with a racheting gurgle, fingers convulsed around the doorframe of the car. There was a second heave, and then a third, and he was sure his jaws were going to dislocate with the strident pop and searing pain of displaced ligament.

Bet it will sound just like your sister's neck, sneered the malicious voice inside his head.

He gagged again, and the world was plunged into absolute silence as his eardrums bulged. Black spots bloomed before his eyes, and there was a furious flush of heat as blood rushed to his head.

Cop Dies While Vomiting on Pavement, he thought giddily. That'll make a great headline for The New York Post. I'm sure someone'll be down here to take a picture of my corpse, facedown in a congealing puddle of puke. That'll be fun for Mac and Stella.

The grim humor of the idea was not lost on him, and he would have laughed if he were able, but he could only vomit ceaselessly in a bitter, green splatter onto the pavement, folded in on himself while his mouth stretched impossibly wide and an iron fist coiled its hot, coaxing fingers around his insides.

You used to do this all the time after Diana died. If you couldn't cry, then you would find another means by which to purge your sorrow and all your secret sins. The day after her funeral, you spent the morning in the bathroom, kneeling at the porcelain altar and offering penance with every greasy lurch and twist of your stomach. Breakfast came up, and then dinner from the night before, and when your stomach could send nothing else into the water beneath your feverish face, it churned up clots of bile, long, gelid strands that clung to your lower lip and chin like spidersilk, cool against your burning face. Your head throbbed in sympathy with your tortured gut, and the toilet seat was comforting against your forehead. Hail Mary, full of grace…

You were there again the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that. It became your ritual, as much a part of your morning toilet as brushing your teeth and combing your hair, a gastric rosary you said every morning inside your confessional of tile and grout. Your retching often awakened your mother, who came to the door in her faded, tatty, terrycloth bathrobe and curlers, eyes solicitous and full of weary anguish.

After two weeks, your throat was ragged and raw, and your abused vocal cords showed their displeasure by producing little more than a laryngitical rasp, rusty nails and sandpaper against your esophagus. Your mother took you to the doctor, who found nothing despite his tests and the revered White Coat of Esoteric Knowledge. There was no inflammation, no infection, no malady to explain the revolt of your digestive system. In the end, he hemmed and hawed and prescribed a course of antibiotics, antacids, and milktoast.
None of it did any good. How could it? The root of your illness was not in your stomach. It was in your head and heart, winnowing beneath your skin, stealthy and unstoppable as Ebola. It simmered at the base of your brain, and each time you poised yourself over the bowl in stiff-necked anticipation, your ears rang with the brittle snap of bone.

But you could not tell a doctor such an intimate detail, nor would you if you could have done. It was painful and exhausting, but it was also undeniably yours, the one avenue of mourning that your father's condemning silence could not wrest from you. So you kept your counsel and nodded your head in all the right places, and the very next morning, you were prostrate at the feet of your Cyclopean idol.

Who knows how long you would have gone on making obeisance and forfeiting your breakfast if they hadn't so thoroughly and unceremoniously expunged her from the familial record? You came home from school one afternoon to find her room stripped bare and her pictures removed from the hallway. The mattress was as bare and cold as an autopsy slab, divested of the lavender sheets that had made you shudder for their girlishness, but that were somehow irrefutably her. They were folded neatly inside a cardboard box along with her teddy bear and her collection of My Little Ponies that she had always meant to throw away, but never had.

Her books were in another box, dog-eared and forlorn without her to turn the pages. Someone-your mother, like as not-had placed the rosary she had been presented at First Communion atop the narrow spines of the books, and it was its lonely solitude that finally drove home the realization that Diana was truly gone. She would never walk through the door and pick it up again, never twine its small, black beads through her fingers and nibble absently on the topmost nib of the cross while she flipped idly through the pages of a magazine. It would be there forever, gathering dust and waiting for a retrieval that was never to be, and one day you would find it and wonder how it had come to be there.

The epiphany of always struck you like a hammerstroke, and you stared at the rosary in delirious fascination, swaying drunkenly on wooden feet. You wanted to sit, to sink to the floor and grope for your frayed equilibrium among the splintered wouldn't boards, but your presence in Diana's room was strictly verboten, and if your father came home and found you profaning it, the voice that so rarely spoke anymore would be raised in anger. So you turned and scissored from the room and vomited until your chest ached and the muscles in your back were sprung and bruised.

The next morning, your father collected the boxes and delivered the sorry contents of your sister's life to the Goodwill on the way to the precinct. If he noticed that one of the boxes was short by an ounce and a half of beaten pewter, he gave no sign, and its absence was a secret you gladly kept. You watched him walk out the door, and you rejoiced in the knowledge that the rosary was tucked inside a cigar box beneath your bed, separated from your stash of Playboys by a worn cardboard lid and a rumpled t-shirt you had tossed there and then forgotten. And you hated him.

Of course he had. Three months after her death, it was as though his sister had never been. The only evidence that a child named Diana Flack had ever existed was the rosary he sometimes clutched in nerveless hands and the evidence box down at the precinct with her name written in a thin, scrawling line. She was not spoken of, especially during the holidays, and the few times he had tried to broach the subject, his father had stared at him in stony silence and gone for the bottle of bourbon he kept in the den, and his mother had retreated to the humid refuge of the family kitchen.

Out of sight, out of mind.

She had never been out of his mind. She had always been just beneath the surface of conscious thought, a reflection cast upon rippling waters, remote and wistful and never quite in focus. The rosary he had filched from the box of belongings consigned to Never Were and Never Again had traveled with him through eight apartments and three promotions, and no matter where he had hung his hat, it had always occupied the same place of honor-the corner of his bedroom mirror. He saw it every morning and every night, and once a year, he gently lifted it from its resting place and bore it to St. Patrick's, where he lit a votive candle and let the polished beads drip through his fingers while he repeated the Hail Mary until they were spent, knees throbbing to the cadence of his penance.

Hail Mary, full of grace…

"She was here," he said bitterly. "She was real, and she was here."

"I still am," said a voice from the passenger seat. It was soft and furtive as the skitter of dead leaves on frozen pavement.

Startled, he spun his legs back into the car and groped for his pistol. His left ankle smashed into the running board, and he swore at the bright, prickling explosion of pain. "Fuck!"

From the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of red and brought the pistol up. "Don't move!" he barked.

The figure in the passenger seat merely blinked at him, and as the adrenaline haze began to clear, he realized that it was a child. She sat in the passenger seat with her hands folded in her lap and her ankles crossed. She was small and thin, and the red parka she wore nearly swallowed her. All that was visible of her face were her eyes and her sharp, feral chin. Her legs, he noted with a twinge of concern, were bare despite the near-freezing temperature.

He let out a long, shuddering breath and lowered his weapon. "Jesus, kid," he muttered. "What the hell are you doing in my car, and don't you know better than to go getting into some stranger's car? I could be a pimp for all you know, or a child molester." He holstered his weapon. "What's your name and where do you live? I'll take you home."

It was a long moment before the girl replied, and when she did, it was in that same oddly resonant whisper. "You know my name. And I am home." The girl turned to gaze at the crumbling ruin in the watery beam of his headlights, and he sensed the subtle upturning of her unseen mouth. "Well, as close to home as I'm going to get."

He snorted and ran his fingers through his hair. "Cut the bullshit, kid. Nobody's lived in this dump for sixty years. Local teenagers don't even like to neck out here."

She turned to look at him once more. "You did. When you were sixteen. You and Jimmy Bratzzi and Carmine Gianelli and Mike Flannagan."

His mouth went dry, and he was suddenly too hot inside his skin, as though he had contracted malaria. "How do you know that?" he demanded, and groped dreamily for the support of the steering wheel.

But he thought he knew. It was in the parka and the fierce chin and the brilliant blue eyes. It was in the gangly limbs and the scabby knees and the feathery wisps of brown hair that had escaped the smothering grasp of the parka's hood. It was in the set of her bony shoulders and the dowdy pair of lavender socks that drooped dispiritedly around her ankles.

She looked like Little Red Hood every time she wore that, he thought dimly. It was too big, but she loved it. She was wearing that outfit the day I made an ass of myself in Pitkin Park. She was so small, and her eyes were impossibly huge peering from the engulfing shadow of the hood. I remember how green the dollar bills were against the red of the parka, a contrast so sharp it made my eyes hurt. And how clearly she stood out against the endless landscape of grey, blood on stone. Oh, God.

"You took me with you," she answered at last, and the breath lodged in his solar plexus like a cramp.

It can't be, insisted the strident voice of logic inside his head. You know it can't. Diana has spent the last eleven years returning to the dust from whence she was formed, and the dead don't saunter out of their graves to hold late-night chats with grieving relatives. It's not sane, not natural, and people who say they do usually wind up selling their stories to that John Edwards kook or The Star.

All of that was true. As a rookie beat cop, he had often taken reports from crazies who had insisted that aliens had landed behind the deli on Seventh Avenue, or that Elvis had been spotted working the trucks in the fashion district, but none of his prior experience with the delusional citizens of New York could explain the fact that his late sister or a doppleganger wearing the outfit with which his memory had always associated her was sitting in the passenger seat. He reached out to brush the concealing hood from her face.

You don't want to do that, warned the gruff voice of his father. You don't need to see what's under there, Don. Leave it be. It's stress, that's all it is. You've been pushing yourself too hard, working too many cases. Hell, you might even be having a stroke or a seizure. Put down your hand, start the car, and get out of here.

If it's just stress, Pops, what difference does it make? he wondered, and grazed the top of the hood with trembling, clumsy fingers.

He had thought she would be cold, this sister-revenant that stared at him with inscrutable eyes, cold and yielding as a rotten melon, but she wasn't. In fact, she seemed to have neither temperature nor texture. The pale flesh beneath his dazed fingertips was smooth and hard as marble, the exquisitely detailed mask of a porcelain doll. He winced in surprise and made to recoil, but long, spidery fingers curled around his wrist. The grip was light, almost fragile, but unyielding as iron.

"You can't-you're not supposed to be here," he managed. It was a bewildered, throttled gasp.

Diana's lips twitched in a fleeting, sardonic smile, but when she spoke, her voice was gentle and amused. "Yes, I am. I've always been right where I'm supposed to be, and right now, I'm supposed to be here. You called me here."

The fingers holding his wrist unfurled, and she pressed his limp hand to her cheek and nuzzled her lips into his palm. It was affectionate and tender, but her lips were as lifeless as her cheek, bone china in his cupped hand, and he flinched.

She offered him a rueful smile and released his hand, which hovered stupidly in mid-air. "Not pleasant, is it? I did the best with what I had to work with."

"What you had to work with?" he heard himself say, and his mouth was awkward and heavy. He wasn't sure he wanted to know. Visions of Diana's reanimated corpse shambling through a mist-shrouded graveyard in search of fresher flesh in which to dress her naked bones danced in his head, and he shuddered.

"Energy. There's usually not enough of it to take corporeal form, but with all the holiday cheer in the air, you got lucky." She brushed a wisp of hair behind her ear. "You can put your hand down now, you know."

He blinked. "Huh? Oh. Oh, right." His hand sank onto his lap. He groped for a conversational foothold. "You, uh, haven't changed much."

Oh, spectacular, Flack. With incisive wit like that, it's a wonder you're not a crack investigative journal. There's a spirit from beyond the veil of all knowledge in your car, the spirit of your long-dead sister as a matter of fact, and that's all you can think to say. Bravissima. Good to see you haven't exceeded your teachers' expectations for brilliance.

"Death has a way of arresting the aging process."

He bit back a wild bray of laughter. "Christ, that was a shi-bad pun." He drew his palm over his face and curled his fingers around the reassuring solidity of the steering wheel, the better to anchor himself to the wildly teetering fulcrum of reality.

"Maybe; but we're not here to discuss my verbal genius. We're here to talk about you, Donnie."

Donnie. The childhood appellation was a rapier slash against his unmanned heart, and the urge to laugh was replaced by the urge to weep. He let out a long, ragged breath and swung his legs out of the car. The soles of his shoes scraped the pavement as he stood and began to pace to and fro alongside the car, fingers laced behind his head.

"Shit, oh, shit," he said thickly, and a grief he had long buried filled the hollow of his chest like rancid cream. "Oh, oh, fuck."

A single, barking sob escaped him, and then he was swallowing great lungfuls of icy, scouring air to smother the rest. He bent and rested his palms on his knees in a desperate, futile bid to regain his macerated equilibrium.

Donnie. No one has called me that since she died, not even Mom and Pops. It was always "Don" or "son" after that. Donnie was a mark of innocence that I lost on the floor of this godforsaken house.

"You're stepping in your puke," Diana observed matter of factly, but he scarcely heard her for the pounding of blood in his ears and the hummingbird beat of that name at the base of his skull.

Donniedonniedonniedonnie

(stop it donnie stop it)

"Donnie," she said again.

"You're not supposed to be here!" It was a beseeching, furious shout, anger and exasperation and suppurating grief. "You're dead. I watched them bury you in that fucking casket in front of those stupid bastards who barely knew your name, and in case you've forgotten, I was there when you fell down the stairs and broke your neck. For eleven years, I've been going to St. Patrick's and saying the rosary for you, and I don't even know all the damn words."

He stopped, panting. It was cold outside the car, and his breath plumed from his nose and mouth, white steam. There was no sound from within the car, not even the furtive rustle of Diana's parka against the vinyl interior. He stepped forward, and his eyes strained to pierce the shadows for any sign of her-the bony jut of an elbow or knee, a glimmer of red in the milky illumination by a sodium arc street lamp, the gleam of her blue eyes, but there were only puddles of darkness pooled on the floorboards and the dim outline of an empty seat.

Smooth as ever. You chased her away. But then, that's been a running trend with you, hasn't it? When she was alive, you ground her beneath your heel just because she ruined your chance to bag the neighborhood kiss-and-tell, and now that she's made a return trip from the grave, you pitch another juvenile fit. You've come a long way, baby.

She was never there, insisted his father. It was just your imagination and your guilt talking. It always cuts the deepest this time of year, when families without gaping holes in their midsts wander the streets with joy shining in their faces and their mittened hands filled with jolly old Christmas consumerism. A girl in a parka will pass you on the street, and you'll see Diana in her face and long to touch her just for a moment. You wanted to see her there, so she was, and she will be as long as you keep looking for her.

"She was real, Pops, you son of a bitch, and she was here," he said to his pinched reflection in the rearview mirror.

"I still am."

She was in the passenger seat again, eyes solemn and owlish inside her face. He blinked in surprise and retreated a step.

"How the hell did you do that, and where did you go?" he demanded.

"You needed a minute. You're stepping in the puke again." She pointed at the rapidly hardening pool of vomit at his feet.

"To hell with the puke, all right? I'm a detective. I've stepped in worse."

"Do you want me to go?" It was soft, plaintive.

(why you always gotta ruin everything)

(stop it donnie stop it please)

"No," he answered abruptly. Then, more calmly. "No. I-I'm glad to see you. It's just-," He trailed off and threw up his hands in consternation. "Why are you here? Why now? I've been comin' here since you-," He fell silent, reluctant to finish the thought.

"Died?" she supplied helpfully. "I know. I've seen you."

"Yes, died," he snapped. "Don't say that."

"Why not? It's true, and the truth is seldom pretty."

He snorted. "What are you now, a damn fortune cookie?"

"I'll answer all your questions, but you've got to get in the car and shut the door. The air is bad out there."

His brow furrowed in confusion. "What do you mean it's 'bad'?"

"You know what I mean," she answered flatly, and her eyes darted to the façade of the house.

She's afraid, he thought suddenly, and the realization raised hard knots of gooseflesh on his forearms.

As a ghost, the world of the living should hold no more fears for her, and yet, there she sat, rigid as a tentpeg and sparing the house wary, sidelong glances. Her hands kneaded compulsively at the raggedy hem of her skirt, and she chewed her lower lip, a dreamy, undulating saw of her two front teeth that made him wince.

He jerked his head in the direction of the house. "What is it? What's in there that bothers you?"

"Hurry," she hissed, and beckoned frantically for him to get into the car. "It's tainted."

He opened his mouth to ask her what she meant, then closed it again with a snap.

No need to ask. You feel it, that same diseased, oppressive air that you felt as a ten-year-old, the cancerous heat that radiated from a stone and made you scrub your hand in the bathroom sink until it was red and raw and the nerve endings tingled and prickled in protest. The same festering swamp heat that at sixteen warned you to run as quickly as you could from this place and brush its dust from your feet.

It's cold out here beyond the borders of the lawn, but it might not be for much longer. The poison is waiting, lapping at the edges of the scrub grass and the leprous patches of dirt with an eager tongue, and if it gets the chance, it will gladly extend its pestilent reach to the pavement and your ankles. It will coil around your legs and wend its unseen, noisome tendrils around your thighs in a lover's embrace. It will find its way into your skin and your mouth and your nose, and once inside, you will never be rid of it. It's already started.

His mouth filled with the taste of ozone and greenbark, acrid and noxious, and he scrambled for the car as quickly as he could. His heart triphammered inside his chest, and hackles rose like minute quills on his nape. He slid into the driver's seat and pulled the door closed with an authoritative clunk. When that was done, he sagged bonelessly in his seat and licked dry lips.

"What the fuck was that?" he asked conversationally and turned his head to study Diana's gaunt profile in the dark.

Diana made no answer.

"Do you mind if we talk somewhere else, then?" He reached for the ignition.

Her wooden, textureless hand stayed his. "I can't. I am bound here."

He straightened abruptly. "What? Are you telling me there is no heaven?"

A thin, mirthless smile, and she shook her head. "Oh, there is, but not for me. That was part of the agreement.

"Agreement?" he repeated blankly.

"Yes. Between me and the Creator."

"Creator? God?" He twisted in his seat to study her. "God refused you entry?"

"God is one name for Him, yes," she acknowledged. "And no, He did not refuse. I forfeited it."

He was hopelessly lost. He had always assumed his sister had gone to her reward or succumbed to the sleep of ages. It seemed the only right and just end for her. After all, she had been little more than a child, and whatever sins she might have committed in the naivete of youth, he was certain none of them had been cardinal. That she was doomed to wander the rooms of an accursed house so foul that the junkies avoided it staggered and horrified him.

"How could you forfeit your right to heaven?" he asked, and the fulcrum of the universe as he understood it shifted beneath his feet.

"Those were the terms of the covenant. I agreed to remain here, bound to this house and one other place."

"Why?"

She turned her gaze on him, and in the dim light, she was at once ancient and perpetually young, a changeling child playing with his sister's face. There was love in her face, and pity, and a dreadful, secret knowledge that burned in her belly like a candle flame.

"Why do you come here, Donnie?" It was a whisper, lace against his skin.

To revisit my unexpiated sin, to confess without speaking the truth that I could not-and still cannot-tell to the white-collared priest in his Pandora's Box of vicarious vice. To remind myself that you are not here and never will be again. To sit here in this Ford Taurus and play a forlorn game of what-if until I can't stand it anymore and the beat cops on patrol are giving me the stinkeye because my car hasn't moved in three hours. What if I had caught you on the stairs? What if I had listened to my fabled gut and fled when I laid eyes on this place? What if I had stayed home with you and played Parcheesi?

He shifted uncomfortably. "I don't know," he said diffidently. "This is the last place you were."

She gave a sardonic huff. "You come because you think it's your fault."

"It was."

"No."

"Don't bullshit me, Diana," he snapped. "It was my fault. Everybody knows it. Even dear old Pops. I should never have brought you here. I knew better. I knew, and I brought you anyway. That makes it my fucking fault."

"You brought me anyway because that was the way it had to be." She was silent for a moment. "And Pops is an asshole," she added cheerfully.

The profanity startled laughter from his throat, and he suddenly found himself on the verge of tears again. He turned away from her searching gaze and studied the twinkling, pinprick lights of the skyscrapers on the distant horizon.

"Like father, like son," he murmured without looking at her.

Her hands were on his cheeks, turning him inexorably towards her. "No," she said implacably. "No. Do you know why they call it the Whisper House? It's because I am not the first to walk there, and I won't be the last. This house is a bad house, a tainted house. It claims people. It meant to have one of us; the only thing the Creator left open was which of us it would be."

"What does God have to do with this place?"

She shrugged, her face still captured between her hands. "It is a tool of His will, just like everything else."

He did not find that a particularly comforting thought. "So it chose you?"

"No."

He did not understand. And then he did. Comprehension came in a roundhouse slap that drove the breath from his chest, and for one spasming heartbeat, he was certain he was having a heart attack. A passing patrol would find him slumped over the steering wheel, gape-mouthed and blue-lipped, and after they shook their heads and speculated about the drugs that must have flowed through his veins to have caused a heart attack in one so young, they would bury him with full honors in beside his sister.

No need for that. She's right there.

"You chose, didn't you?" he managed weakly, and drew the back of his hand over chapped lips. "You chose to go. That's what you were doing up in that room when I came looking for you. Sealing the deal."

A single, dreamy nod.

It was dark in that room, dark as pitch. You'd never seen darkness like that before, and you haven't since. It was malignant and foul, rancid molasses on your tongue, and as it slipped down your throat and coated your tongue like ash, you were sure it carried with it the killing spore of tumors. It clung to your pores in sticky tendrils and was treacle on the soles of your shoes. You wanted to turn back, knew you should turn tail and flee, but every time your ankles and calves twitched with the impulse to run, you saw Diana in her red parka and lavender socks, small and helpless in a landscape of concrete and leaden sky, and you kept going. You would not be a coward a second time.

It must have been an old bedroom once. There was a metal bedframe leaning drunkenly against the far wall, and everywhere was the septic stench of mildew and dry rot and moldy goosedown. She was in the middle of the room, a wraith-limbed outline amid the seething blackness, and she was staring at something you could not see. Her head was cocked askance as though she were listening, and she swayed in place, a barely perceptible stiltwalker's sidle that fascinated and unnerved you.

You called her name as you waded through the shadows toward her, but there was no turning of her head, no startled flinch as she was pulled from her reverie. Her gaze remained fixed on a point to which your straining eyes were not privy. The stiff-legged rocking continued, relentless and alien as the beat of a mechanical heart, and as you drew to within arm's reach, you realized that you could see the breath in front of her face, quicksilver and ghost whispers on her lips. Her nail beds were blue.

You screamed her name then, a panicked, quavering bellow, because you were sure that while you had been sitting downstairs with your three buddies and laughing around sips of the beer you had stolen from your father's refrigerator, Diana had frozen to death in the dark, rooted to the floorboards by the darkness. That impression was only bolstered when you seized her wrist. It was cold as frozen beef and hard as marble, a corpse in full rigor, and your still-living hand recoiled. But you could not accept that she was dead, and so you tugged and pulled and swore at her to come with you, and the muscles in your back and shoulders twanged dangerously.

Then, she finally looked at you, and that was when you wet your pants. Her eyes, normally as bright and vivacious as yours, were dull and opaque as whitewashed windows, all iris and pinpoint pupil. There was nothing in them, no Divine animus that marked her as a child of God, born and baptized in the Holy Mother Church. The windows were intact, but the soul had long fled, and the emptiness in them dizzied you.

Then the moment passed, and she was there again, bewildered and woozy, but undeniably present. She blinked and hiccoughed, and the scissoring paralysis broke. Her knees buckled with an audible creak, and she stumbled into you, all elbows and chin and bony pelvis and small, rounded breasts. She was dainty and fragile inside her clothes, china and dust and straw, as though she had been scooped hollow, but you were so relieved that she was whole that you were laughing, laughing as you half-carried, half-dragged her from the room.

Put me down, she mumbled against your shoulder, and then she muttered again, low and indistinct, muffled by the cotton of your clothes. You never understood it, and you never stopped to asked because all you wanted was to get the hell out of there. There would be time for questions later, you told yourself as you lurched from the room with her in tow.

But there never was time for questions. Thirty paces from that room, the world upended with a snap of bones, and you never knew what she muttered with the last breaths of her life. You've wondered ever since, turned it over in your groping fingers on the hot summer nights when sleep won't come and the sheets stick to your body even with the bedroom window cracked to let the night air inside. It was the mystery of mysteries, and if you could decipher it, everything else would fall into place.

Now he knew. It's too late.

Suddenly, he was furious with her, more furious than he had ever been in his life. He rounded on her and seized her scrawny forearms in both hands.

"Why did you do that?" he shouted, and with each word, he shook her, pressing his fingers into that queer, waxen flesh until they found the hard online of bone. "You had no right to do that. I'm your older brother. I was supposed to take care of you."

He was dimly aware that the arms between his hands held no weight, and that there was no creaking of tendon or rattle of teeth as her head whipsawed to and fro. It was silent except for the creak of vinyl as he shook her and the ragged rasp of his breath. He released her with a final shake and collapsed against the driver's side door, bowed and exhausted.

"I couldn't watch you die. Not when I could do something about it." Despite his outburst, she was unrumpled.

"Oh, and you think I could? You think I could just go on, knowing you died because of me?" he retorted hotly.

She shrugged. "It made sense."

"Wh-," he began.

(dammit diana why you gotta be so stupid)

(stop it donnie please stop it)

"Oh." It was a guttural moan, pulled from the soles of his feet, long and scouring as steel wool against his throat and tongue. "Oh, oh, oh." It was the only sound he could make in the face of his epiphany.

Now it was his turn to cup her face in hands numb as stone. Her face was as cold and brittle as the rest of her, and the sparse strands of hair beneath his fingertips were harsh as straw. He swallowed against a lump of regret and nearly vomited.

"Oh, Diana," he said. "Oh-I-you know I never meant-," he trailed off. "Shit." He pulled away and faced the windshield, fingers curled in a white-knuckled grip around the steering wheel.

His soul was being harrowed, and all the bones he had buried in the uneasy soil of his conscience were being exposed without pity. It hurt, this unanesthetized lancing. It was ruthless and cruel and agonizing, and he twisted within its flaying grip. He wanted to bolt, to escape this truth and the blue eyes that held them, but he was too tired to move, and even if he could have run, there was nowhere to go.

"I took you with me that night because I was trying to make it up to you for what I did in Pitkin Park," he said to the windshield.

That was the bitch of it. He had brought her here as an act of atonement for that day in the park, and for a while, it had worked. She had been lighter, livelier than she had been in months. She had chattered and giggled like she had before his adolescent rage had scored wounds long and deep, and just before she had slipped up the stairs to bargain her soul on his behalf-just after he had threatened to relieve Mike Flannagan of his teeth for leering none-too-subtly at her budding breasts, in fact-the light of hero worship had rekindled in her eyes.

And then she was gone.

"I know," she said.

They sat in silence for a long time after that. When he spoke again, it was quiet, despairing. "How am I supposed to live with this?"

"Live well," she replied. "Get married, have babies, become a cantankerous pensioner who bores the young recruits with your war stories."

He shook his head. "I'm not getting married.

"I wouldn't be so sure."

"Oh, yeah? To who? When?" he demanded.

"I'm not at liberty to say. Besides, you wouldn't believe me if I told you." She reached for the door handle.

"Where are you going?"

A wistful smile. "It's time for me to go, Donnie."

"Go where?"

She jerked her head in the direction of the house.

"You can't be serious."

"I told you," she said patiently, "I'm bound here."

He reached for her hand. "Stay. Come home with me."

She shook her head and gently extricated her hand from his grasp. "A ghost in your apartment would put a serious crimp in your sex life. Besides, I'm already there."

He blinked at her. "But you said-,"

"Here and one other place."

"I don't get it."

"The rosary, Donnie."

Then she was getting out of the car, gangly legs twisting away from him and disappearing through the rocker panels. One moment, she was in his passenger seat, and the next, she was outside the car and moving away, shoulders hunched inside her parka and hands stuffed into the threadbare pockets.

"Wait," he called, but she neither slowed nor looked back.

"It'll be all right, Donnie. I promise."

Then she was gone.

He had no conscious memory of driving home, and yet somehow he had, because an hour later, he found himself sitting on his bed in his cramped apartment, his sister's rosary twined in his fingers.

The rosary, Donnie.

He slipped the rosary around his neck, and on the periphery of his vision, he thought he saw a flash of red in the bedroom mirror, but when he turned to look, he saw only his reflection.

"Are you here, Di?" he asked.

There was a furtive rustle of curtain, as though unseen fingers had brushed the fabric, but that was all. He lay down on the bed with his hand curled around the crucifix and watched dawn bleed into the sky.

Just like Diana's parka, he thought, and let sleep take him.