Babich
By Paul Booth
Three a.m. doesn’t belong to us, Allison Thorne thought, as she dragged three old computer monitors in a bright red Radio Flyer wagon across the bumpy floor of the old warehouse. Her parents hadn’t even noticed that she left. “I’ve got your flashlights,” she yelled to Zach and Dave, who had just about caught up to her. She dropped the wagon handle to pass them the torches. We borrow it from some other place, some other world. It’s a time out of joint.
No wonder we can’t understand what happens at three a.m.
Zach Browne’s “this is perfect!” bounced off the immense, rusted machines that littered the floor. The full moon glowed through a hole in the ceiling. The EPS — Electro-Plasmodic Scanner—in Zach’s hands beeped with 8-bit exigency.
“I was right, there’s definitely spectral engagement here,” he said, his voice breaking in the excitement.
“Ghosts! Real ghosts!” Dave Thompson, the last of their trio, grabbed the wagon handle where they’d dropped it and pulled the monitors towards the other two. “Perfect for the ‘gram.”
A human-sized metal claw dwarfed the three teens, and they huddled together in its shadow. Their phantomic breath mingled in the cool air. Zach, cute in a way that only Allison seemed to notice, a meaty teenager with a fleshy, jowled face; Dave, tall, conventionally attractive, with dark skin, a strong jaw, and a piercing gaze; Allison herself, short and bony, all elbows and knees, with a pouty lip and hair as dark as the room around them. Ghost-Finders they called themselves. Those weirdos, to the rest of the school.
A rat skittered past on its nightly rounds, a cigarette butt held between its lips. Allison couldn’t help but laugh at the image, like some old, unkempt man had shrunk down to order Rodentia.
Allison pulled a series of thick wires out of her backpack and dared a glance at Dave and Zach. Dave, a bit guarded, was stacking the monitors from the wagon in a ziggurat while Zach fiddled with the EPS. He looked so intent on the device. Even after all this time, she didn’t quite know what he was thinking...just that he gazed at her when he thought she couldn’t see, with an open, unencumbered grin that crinkled his eyes until she glanced at him and he turned away. She liked that grin. She liked it a lot.
Her thoughts turned inward, and she shivered at the cold, silent night that lacerated her thin shirt; she should’ve worn a jacket. She should’ve done a lot of things. That rat wasn’t quite as funny anymore. Allison pulled the last of the wires from her bag and began connecting each monitor to the others in a pyramid. Time to focus on why she was really here. Three a.m. could be her last chance to uncover the truth, her last chance to change her life.
*
Allison had only ever called the entity Babich. It had never told her its name, but she knew it anyway, like she had remembered it somehow, pulled from some long-buried past.
She first encountered Babich last year, when her parents felt that she was old enough to be left alone—fourteen. She’d been waiting for years. We’ll go to the movies, they’d said, just movies and dinner, and a drink or two afterwards, maybe a nightcap, that’s all. Four hours tops. Maybe five. Six at the most.
She’d been excited they hadn’t used the babysitter, that they might never use that babysitter again. She had hated that sitter, Karryn, the way she used to leer at Allison, her face wrinkling like she smelled rotting fruit every time the two were alone. The way she’d condescended to Allison after her parents were gone, confided that boys wouldn’t like her if she was into rockets and chemistry sets and electrons and battery potatoes. The way she used to put makeup on her, even though Allison said she didn’t want to. The way she put her in dresses and tights, too. And the way Karryn looked at her when she was changing.
But that night, from a dead sleep, she jumped awake when the tap-tap-tapping came from underneath the floor of her bedroom. She checked the clock: three a.m. Where were her parents? Did they come home already? Tap. It could have been a pipe settling, maybe the refrigerator making ice. Tap tap. But no, it was too regular, too insistent. Not a water drip, but more deliberate. Assertive. Someone communicating.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
She remembered her heart matching the beat. If she tried, she could still feel the pressure of it in her chest. Tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump. Tap. Tap. Tap. Back and forth. She climbed out of bed, bare feet on the cold floor, pitter patter little piggies.
Tap. Tap. Tap. She could feel it now, under her feet, that minute pressure of someone trying to get out. Or someone trying to get in. Strange, that tap felt comforting, like a warm washcloth. There wasn’t that crawling sensation down her back, like when she watched those Amityville movies at a sleepover. Curious, how she wasn’t scared when she felt the floorboards against her ear to listen. How the feeling was warmer, like she was in the bath, just drifting off in the hot water, just so tired in the...
“Allison...?” The voice was clear in her head, but she wasn’t even sure she’d actually heard it. More like, felt it. Learned it.
“Yes?” she mumbled.
“Are you...Allison...?” She felt her name through the boards. Was the voice actually there? The voice had a pleasing, soft tone that reminded Allison of butter melting over pancakes. The words were a hug that blanketed her. She felt sleepy—as if she’d been reading but couldn’t keep her eyes open to comprehend the next sentence.
“Who is this?”
“You know who I am, Allison.”
And suddenly, she did know. “I...know...you,” she heard herself say; no, not heard, more like, felt herself having said, like it had happened without her participation.
“I’ve watched you, Allison.”
“What do you want?”
“Why, I want you, Allison. Don’t you know that?”
“You want... me?”
“I do. And I’m the only one who will.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want you so badly, Allison, and no one else will ever want you like that.”
“You...what?”
“Look at yourself.” And she did. And she saw what the voice meant without anyone having to tell her. So skinny, just bones and skin. She ran her hands over the top of her chest, down her belly, to the tops of her thighs where her pajamas bunched. No curves where her friends had them. Where she wanted them. She felt her face. Red pimples at the bottom of her chin, ugly, inflamed, pulsating. She looked down at herself and saw what the world would see: just a dumb baby girl, just a dumb baby. No one would ever look at her, no one would ever think about her, just so dumb and skinny.
No one would ever love her, not like the way she looked, not ever.
“You’re right, Allison,” the voice continued in a whisper. “No one will ever look at you like I do. No one will ever make you feel the way I will, Allison.”
And then she felt warmth spreading over her. It started in her belly, no deeper than that, lower than that, in a place secret inside her that no one knew about, not even her, not really.
“No no no no,” Allison put her hands on the sides of her head, trying to block out the melodic voice. A name flooded her mind: Babich. It wasn’t spoken aloud, but it came to her as a stray thought, an errant idea, a lost memory.
“Be my Allison! I’m the only one who sees you. I need you, Allison, I need you!”
A loud noise from the kitchen, a slammed door, footsteps approach. The tapping under the floorboard—the voice—ceased. No more sounds in the room except the ticking of her clock and her heartbeat throbbing in her ears. The lights flicked on in the kitchen. “Honey, we’re home! Sorry we’re late. Are you in bed already?” her dad yelled absently, then dropped his keys on the floor and laughed. Then, “Shhh....”
“We misshed you, Ali!” called her mother, a giggle barely audible.
Allison heard the words her parents said and understood what they meant, but now they glowed a different color. Light in new patterns. Did they really miss her? Did they really love her? Those words echoed hollow; they were clouds. She felt alone, but not in the same way as before; now, abandoned. A ghost in her own house. She didn’t even want to go into her room but every night, every time her parents put her to bed, she had to return to the voice, to the soothing, soft, velvet voice that ushered her into whole new realms of awareness at three a.m. Her parents, they didn’t notice; thought she was moody and hormonal. Just normal teenage angst. Your teen years, they laughed and rolled their eyes so far back in their sockets they looked blind. Still, they trusted her. You’d never hurt a fly, they said, and went out—renewed their relationship, they told her. Thank god they can trust her, they said. And all the time, Babich whispered from under the floor. “It’s not god you can trust,” it said. “Trust me.”
Outside of her bedroom, she knew, intellectually understood, that Babich was wrong. That there was something good and kind in the world. But every night, when she had to go to bed and she trudged back to her room, when that otherworldly time approached, the voice would start up again. And, despite herself, despite knowing it was wrong, she couldn’t help but trust Babich again. It just felt...so good. To trust Babich. To let Babich in. Just for one more night. Then she’ll be done.
Just one more night.
*
But who was Babich? And why had it come to her?
After all that time, she had no answers. Only a disquieting void spreading inside of her. So she did what any smart girl good at science would do. She formed the Paranormal Investigation Club. The club started after a supposed burst water main shut down the school for two weeks. Classes cancelled; no one allowed in or out for fear of mold and stagnant water. The popular kids used that time to mess around, probably giving each other hickies or something. There wasn’t much else to do in Haver Hill. The local Super Wal-Mart had never seen such action.
But two weeks was all she needed. Allison contacted Dave and Zach, invited them over to her house one Friday evening. She’d been casting for partners, and both fit the part. Everyone knew everyone at Haver Hill High, but she recognized them as fellow ghosties.
“I thought you said this was a party,” Dave had said after she escorted them to the basement. Zach beelined for the three EPS devices that Allison had left out on the table. Two antennae emerged from each futuristic transistor radio, and the EPSs buzzed at a frequency only dogs could hear. Sparks of lightning zipped between them, Tazers on steroids. “What are these?” he asked as he inspected one.
“I’ve asked both of you here tonight for very specific reasons,” she announced, and gingerly lifted the EPS from Zach’s hand. Her fingers lightly brushed his and she couldn’t tell if it was the EPS or the contact that made a spark. “Dave, I saw you at lunch last week—reading A History of Ghosts. I love that book.” Dave leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “And Zach, I know you love Ghostbusters and The X-Files and Ghost Hunters and all those shows, like me.” When she said that, he looked away, shyly.
She didn’t mention what else she saw. The reflection of Babich in Dave’s round burn marks on his arms, which always appeared after a bad algebra test. The way Zach, like Allison, flinched too overtly when a teacher shushed him during homeroom.
“That’s why I’ve invited you both to join the Paranormal Investigation Club, to investigate the spectral, the weird, the odd. Our task,” she continued, as the boys exchanged glances, “is to study the undetectable, to explore the unexplainable! I’m sure you’ve noticed all the eerie goings-on around Haver Hill. Our school closing mysteriously? Street signs swapping places around town? We can find out what’s really haunting us.” She didn’t mention her other purpose. She didn’t tell them about Babich.
“I dunno...” said Dave, as he moved towards the door. “This whole thing seems weird. I mean, no offense, but this really isn’t—”
“And,” Allison cut him off quickly, “you can be in charge of our social media.” She’d seen him in class, playing on his phone. Everyone knew his not-so-secret desire to be an influencer. Without a sound, Dave sat back down next to Zach, who hadn’t moved an inch.
“I’m in,” Zach said, with a cockeyed grin that reached all the way to his forehead.
And that was the start: they met at Allison’s house, close to the school and easy to get to after classes restarted. And her parents were never around. She had the finished basement, a single room with a table in the middle, a white board against one wall, and four or five swivel chairs. Allison never invited them into other rooms. She certainly couldn’t show them her room, couldn’t risk them finding out about Babich. They’d never want to see her again. She talked about ghosts with the confidence of a professor. She came to the meetings with fresh ideas, ancient texts to research, and an insatiable curiosity about the occult. She was invigorated, and in turn, invigorated them.
And, to conclude each meeting, a solemn pledge Allison had taught them: verum ex tenebris.
Truth out of darkness.
Her passion drove them. She noticed Zach’s research on the ghosts in Haver Hill, and encouraged him to explore the abandoned warehouses just outside of town. He came back one afternoon. “Allison’s EPS went crazy in Warehouse 13,” he announced at the meeting. “We’ve got to go back there and check it out.”
“Yes, but how do we catch them?” asked Allison. She swiveled in her chair to face him, thought she looked cool like Captain Kirk. “So far, we’ve only been able to locate them.”
“Yeah, that’s the question.” Zach swallowed his words as Dave walked into the room carrying a computer monitor. “Dave, what’s that you’ve got?”
“This, my friends, is how we’re going to catch a ghost.”
Allison squeaked un-Kirk-like as she leapt from the chair. “How does it work?
“If EPS can locate the ghosts, then this case will trap them. I’ve been playing around with it. I think it works best in the early morning for some reason—”
“—probably something about consciousness?” Zach interrupted.
“Sure. Anyway, I figured out how to connect this with a couple of others. We need two more and I’ll show you, form a sort of fence around them...”
“A Faraday Cage?” Zach asked with a smile at Allison.
“Sure, I guess, but I call it a Plasmodic Cage.” Dave set the computer monitor on the table and grabbed Zach by the shoulder. “We’ll be able to trap a ghost, man. Can you believe it? The ‘gram will explode!” Ignoring their laughter, Allison ran a hand over the monitor and gazed into the deep black screen. Her own eyes stared back at her in silence.
*
It took them fifteen minutes of fiddling in the dark warehouse, but eventually, they set up the three Plasmodic modulators in that triangular pattern on the floor. Each modulator—in reality, a personal computer purloined from Haver Hill High’s computer lab—was placed thirteen feet from the other two. In the triangle’s center sat a Masonic Eye of wires. A repurposed mixing board connected to flashing lights of blue, green, and yellow. Dials and wheels pockmarked the modulators. The whole getup had been meticulously planned by Allison, who had brought to their last meeting a series of magazine clippings and photocopied library books on summoning rituals. Dave worked the controls. Zach operated one modulator. Allison shifted between numbers two and three.
“Zach, set Amplitude to 25! Get ready for alliance.”
“Affirmative, Dave.”
“Allison, is Set 15 in Diurnal or Corpuscular Mode?”
“Diurnal mode.”
“Set it to Corpuscular. We don’t want to miss this because of an outlet swap!”
The three sweated despite the freezing darkness in the warehouse. That night, the air hung heavy, the only sounds their breathing in the cold: even the insects had gone to sleep. Dave misted the control board. He pulled out a cell phone to snap a pic for the ‘gram.
“Dave, ready on one!” yelled Zach.
“Ready on two!” Allison ran over to the other module. “And three!”
“Alright guys, this is it!” Dave pocketed the phone and flicked the switches on the control panel. Blue turned to yellow. He hit a button and pulled a lever. Yellow turned to green. Flashing lights burnt in the darkness, a disco for the dead.
The modulators glowed.
“This is it!”
A deep pulsing, deeper than sound, throbbed in their bones.
“It’s coming!”
Modulators warmed. Boxes flashed. Their faces glowed eerily in the dark, illuminated by the flickering light. In the dancing shadows, their eyes pulsed, unearthly gems in the inky night. The pop and crackle of electricity in the air sizzled across the warehouse floor. The rusted machine creaked and groaned. Zach screamed as the sound intensified.
“I can’t control it!” His hands on the dial strained against the pushback, and he wobbled against the wheel’s drag.
“I’ve got you!” Allison yelled against the pounding wind, her voice faint in the room’s open echo. She held onto his hands as the wheel urged forward. Her hair whipped around the wind tunnel, wild and unrestrained.
“It’s here! It’s here!” Dave yelled, triumphant, his hair standing on end and arms flailing. In the center of the triangle, a small bulb of movement fluttered. It couldn’t have been more than a smudge. Then, a movement of shadow played against the machine’s fingers. It could have been a blink. A cloaked apparition grew in front of them, a being made more of cloud than light. Dave gasped and reached for the phone in his pocket. Zach let go of the wheel. Allison grabbed onto Zach. The figure approached them all, arms outstretched, mouth agape in a silent scream. It approached the Plasmodic Cage, both arms held out with hands open, pleading. The teens couldn’t tell if it was inviting them in or warning them away. It hung at the edge of the triangle, unable to cross the Plasmodic wires.
Allison didn’t recognize the being. It wasn’t Babich.
“Tell us who you are!” she asked. The figure’s eyes widened in panic, but the sockets kept going, and the skin stretched thinner around the hollows and the eyes ripped away from its face. It had fire there—cold, dark, empty fire, devoid of heat. Its eyes were orbs, hung in the air, baubles in blackness. The air quivered. The specter screamed, piercing, loud, intense; one sharp, severe knife: “Allison!” It stared at each in turn, eyes penetrating them, skewering them. “Dave! Zach!”
Allison stared defiantly back at the cloaked figure in front of her. It wasn’t Babich, she knew that much. “I ask again, who are you?”
With one hand, the being pointed towards the corner of the room. Then it jumped at them—the three teens stumbled backwards—and exploded in a cold burst of energy as it hit the Cage walls and dissipated. Where the specter had pointed, off to the side, hidden in the shadows, they saw a wood paneled box.
“What is that?” Dave asked.
“Has that always been there?” Zach responded. The boys looked at each other.
Allison didn’t know. “I don’t remember seeing it before, but it is pretty dark back there.” She approached the box, reached out a hand to stroke the side. “It’s an old TV?” her voice went up, a question rather than a statement. The wood paneled box in front of her had a 12-inch screen embedded in it with two dials underneath and a wiry antenna poking up from the back. “It’s one of those old TVs from the 50s. Like, I Love Lucy or something?” She twiddled a knob. Nothing happened. Dave and Zach got closer. Allison turned around. “I don’t think I saw it before?” she said, again, asking.
“Yeah, me neither,” said Zach. He picked up the cable laying on the ground. “Should I plug it in?”
Before anyone could answer, an uncanny, sunken face flashed on the screen. The features were ...off... somehow, as if a wax sculpture melted in the sun. “What the...?” Allison jumped back from the machine.
“Who is that?” shot Dave. “Zach, did you turn it in?”
Zach held up the plug cable in his hands. “No way, man. There is nothing connecting this to the wall at all.” The eyes on the television jumped from kid to kid. “Is he looking at me?” asked Zach, moving from one side to the other. The face’s eyes followed.
“It definitely appears that way.” Dave dug his EPS from his pocket and flipped it on. The machine beeped like a Geiger Counter at Chernobyl. “Oh man, this is off the charts!”
Allison couldn’t speak; she just stared into Babich’s eyes, and they stared right back into her’s.
The harrowed face creaked open its tiny, rat-like mouth. Rows of pointed teeth lined the sides. Trails of dark spittle clung to the sharp tips. No sound emerged as the mouth kept opening—wider and wider it gaped, until it became impossibly wide, wider than the teens could imagine. It could swallow a baseball. The jaw should’ve broken, snapped in two, but it kept going, broader than a hand. Wider still — a basketball now. It was inhuman, painful to watch. Despite the silence, Allison thought she could hear the tearing of flesh, the rending of bone and sinew as the mouth pulled itself apart. The gaping dark hole at the mouth’s center filled the frame. The blackness around the face matched the blackness within the mouth until all that was visible were the pudgy, dark lips, the gleaming teeth, the wet tongue, a hideous parody of a mouth, a nightmare drawing.
Then, from inside that mouth, that gaping, dark maw, a dot of light appeared. One pixel on the screen, where the mouth should be. The pixel of light expanded, grew in the darkness. It was an amoeba dividing itself. Two pixels; four; eight. No, not an amoeba, a cancer, a cancer in the middle of the screen—sixteen, now, 32—and they lost count, the being growing faster than they could keep up.
All throughout the warehouse was silence: the silence that only happens at three when the world is neither slumbering nor rising, mid-breath, paused, poised, ready to exhale. Suspended like a droplet in an amber moment.
Seconds later, the pixels took on a shape: As it grew, it developed arms, legs. A head. It was a growing fetus. The light brightened as the figure developed, growing more brilliant as more being took up space in the television set.
The teens stepped back from the box. Allison’s eyes widened, eager and terrified.
It was Babich. She’d never seen it before, but she knew. The bright being, larger than the mouth now, continued to grow. It filled the screen. It inched a leg forward, outward and down. It was walking towards the teens. Then it stopped and peered out at them from behind the screen. It knocked on the glass from the inside.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
It waited. Its brightness hurt her eyes, but she couldn’t look away. She didn’t want to look away.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
It smiled and waved. “Knock knock,” it said, its voice melodic in the gloom. “Let me in, let me in.”
Dave placed himself in front of Allison and Zach. He rubbed his arm, the movement subtle in the shadows. “What the.... Are you...?”
The figure winked wetly at Dave. “I’m not here for you—yet.”
“This is crazy, man!” Zach yelled out, his voice echoing. “Don’t let it out!”
The figure narrowed its eyes at Zach. Its index finger pressed against its wet lips shush. Zach flinched. Then, it moved its glance towards Allison. Its fingers splayed on the glass back.
“What about you, Allison? Do you want me to come out?”
Allison moved closer to the screen.
“Allison, what are you... no, stop it!” Zach yelled. “This isn’t right. We shouldn’t have done this!”
Allison reached the screen, bent down until she was face to face with the glowing being. “I’m going to find out...” She slowly reached out a hand and touched her fingertips to the being’s on the glass.
“Allison, no! What are you doing?” Dave yelled. “It’ll burn you!” He rubbed his arm again as the glass shimmered and melted. Fingertips touched fingertips. A shiver pierced Allison’s spine.
“Yes...yes...” the being licked its lips and caressed Allison’s fingers.
“I...heard...you...” she stuttered.
The figure screamed as if in pain. Its hand slowly lurched out the screen, grabbing hers. She instinctively pulled away, rubbed her hand with the other. The being froze, with its hand plunged out of the screen and the rest of its body stuck behind the thick glass. The pathetic hand waved in the air like a tattered cloth. But its arm clenched taut and sunk back into the television screen. Bending backwards, it grasped its own head and pulled on its body, yanking it forward and out of the screen, plucking itself into being.
It was birthing itself. The contortionist hand gripped its head and extruding itself out of the screen by twisting its own torso. The horrible wet crunch of bones snapped echoed sickeningly in the warehouse. The being flipped upside down, both arms out now, and it breached the screen, the body spawned. The head reversed up over the television set, and the legs emerged next and again the feet, all of it tumbled, flopped, plopped onto the ground, a stomach-churning wet thwap on the concrete.
It panted in the cold air, no trace of steam.
Zach and Dave inched closer. Allison turned back to the being, cupped its head in her hands. It was no bigger than a baby. After a second the being moved, turned its eyes towards her. She cradled it against her breast.
“You....you freed me.”
Allison stroked its face, hesitantly.
“I’ve been trapped, trapped in there so long. I...I can’t tell you.”
Dave and Zach bent down, the trio reunited around the being. It glowed brighter, sucking away the darkness in the warehouse, ingesting it, nourishing itself. It panted, licked the air greedily, and turned its head around to grab Allison’s fingers in its mouth, where it sucked wetly on them, rolling them in its mouth, tonguing them, a calf suckling milk from a cow’s udders. Dave and Zach could hear the being’s thick lapping tongue, wet and tumescent, steps away.
Allison jumped back. “Ow!” She shook her hands in the air. The being, now suspended, floated free of Allison’s grip. It rose, glowing, arms outstretched.
“And now you’ve freed me, Allison...now, I am out. I am me again.” It flew above them and smiled an ugly clownish grimace. The floating fetus laughed. “It’s been a long time, Allison; it’s good to see you. What an...unusual location.” The being chewed over the vowels. “I’ve missed you.” It stared through the glass at the three teens, eyes flicked between them. “I’ve missed all of you.” Strange, staticky lines vibrated on its face as it spoke, like it was broadcast from an old television network long, long ago. It continued: “I came to each of you in the moments you needed me. Allison, so lonely. So vulnerable. So pathetic. Your parents not there to protect you, to save you from that babysitter. They couldn’t love you like I could love you. And I did! I loved you when you called out in the agony of her hungry touch.” Allison gasped and felt her chest tighten at its words. Babich spun toward the muscular Black teenager next to Allison. “Dave, the strong protector, the man; concerned with his future but unsure about his past. I was there. I was there when you cried in the dark after the bruises, the burns. After the smell of your own charred flesh hit your nose.”
Dave shuddered and rubbed his arms. “Babich...” he muttered, under his breath.
Babich spun again, this time facing the chubby boy with glasses, and Allison felt her heart race when it started to speak. “Zach, a believer, one who spends time in other worlds without contemplating this one. I was there for you when the snap of your arm echoed in your dreams and your father said he was sorry you were so noisy so sorry so sorry so sorry so so so sorry.” Babich’s baby voice echoed in the empty space. Zach’s breath caught in his throat and a tickle ran down his cheek.
“Babich?” he wept.
The three teenagers glanced at each other and saw the recognition in each other’s eyes. They didn’t need to speak; they knew the truth.
The being they all knew as Babich spun, twisted in the air, and brushed the ceiling. It grew, now the size of a man, two men, three. Dave leapt to his feet; Zach followed. The wind of its ascent pushed Allison to the ground, returned her to the television set, which was now dead, empty, the glass cracked, covered in dust, like it had been there for decades. Zach reached down, held out a hand for Allison.
“Allison, come on, we’ve got to get out of here!”
She stayed on the ground, unsure. She knew she should be feeling scared, should be uncomfortable, should fear this being, but a part of her felt at home here ... felt like Babich was all she deserved; like Babich was her past, her present, her future. After all, Babich loved her. No one else would.
God, she was so dumb. So dumb to think this could work. How stupid stupid stupid to think that Zach would even think about her like that. Babich circled the air in front of the trio but stared only at her. Zach, the one with the wild grin and crinkled eyes, opened up his hand to her. Her stomach plummeted to the ground. She turned from his outstretched hand and clutched it in pain. She closed her eyes against the darkness. Was this what she deserved? Was Zach? Did she even deserve love at all?
She blinked up at Zach, at the panic in his eyes. The glowing being, three sizes bigger now, hovered in the gloom like a cloud of gnats—dancing silently in the empty warehouse.
“Allison. It came to us all. But that doesn’t mean we have to let it in.” Maybe there were others. Maybe she could find herself in the maze of her memories. She made her choice. Verum ex tenebris. Zach might eventually let go, but at least she could pull herself up.
Truth out of darkness.
Allison grabbed Zach’s hand and hoisted herself to her feet. The pair ran back to the modulators.
“Oh man, what a freak!” Dave yelled to them. The being flew by them toward the exit.
“Turn it off! Unplug it!” Allison yelled. “Destroy Babich!” Wind came from nowhere, a tornado in the warehouse dragged the teens away from the equipment.
“No!” The being screeched as it approached the warehouse front. “You can’t stop me!”
Zach spiraled into the machine’s front. It fell on its side and sparks crackled from the casing. The being above flickered in the dark; static in the air.
“That’s it—We’ve got to destroy the modulator! Dave, do the next one!”
Dave pushed and strained against the wind to reach Modulator 1. He slammed into it and felt the Modulator to the ground. The being’s light wavered.
“Nooooo!” it screamed, while Dave thrust a fist into the air.
Allison spun. Without moving her eyes from the specter, she kicked at the third Modulator, which sparked briefly before it spun to the ground. She put his finger to his lips, shushed it. Without a word Babich flickered out of existence.
It was silent in the warehouse, the only sounds the teens’ heavy breathing. A long bashfulness submerged them. After a pause, Dave spoke: “Oh no, I forgot to get pictures for the ‘gram!”
Allison and Zach laughed, and Dave soon joined them. The silence returned for a few moments until Allison said, “So, you all got Babich too?”
Zach’s relief spilled onto his cheeks. “It’s so good to talk about it.”
Dave grabbed Zach with one hand and Allison with the other, brought them in close. “I can’t believe she talked to you too.”
Allison buried herself between her two friends, her cheeks wet with the knowledge that she was finally free.
The three grabbed their bags and left their busted equipment on the floor. They didn’t need it anymore and the school probably wouldn’t miss it. The sounds of their footsteps echoed as they walked to the door, each lost in thought. Allison grabbed Zach’s hand, pulled it close to her. Her voice was sonorous, amid the tension: “We did it, I can’t believe we did it,” she said. Dave patted Zach on the back and ushered him forward to walk next to Allison.
They had a lot to talk about, a lot to share. But not now. Tonight, they were going home.
Allison turned back around to check the room one last time. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw a light flicker from the back corner. Probably a trick of the light, the early rays of morning. Probably nothing.
The impenetrable, unknowable three a.m., she thought. What wonders you may yet hold. She turned away from the old television set and, hand-in-hand with Zach, headed into that crowning dawn.
