Twisted Tales Read online

  He only hoped that he could convince the next man to stay away from her, before it was too late.

  Flight 463

  As soon as the Boeing 757 started roaring down the runway for takeoff, Mya, Sean’s wife of barely more than forty-eight hours, reached into his lap, grasped one of his hands, squeezed her eyes shut, and started praying.

  Sean, always embarrassed at public prayer anywhere outside of church walls, looked around to see who might be watching them. They were seated on the right-hand side of the plane, and had the three seats to themselves. On the other side of the aisle, a teenage girl listened to an iPod, bobbing her head to the beat, and a businessman perused The Wall Street Journal. No one paid attention to Sean and his wife.

  The aircraft began to ascend into the morning sky.

  Mya bowed her head, her long black hair falling over her cinnamon face. “Lord, as we embark on this honeymoon to celebrate our marriage, we ask that you grant us safe passage to and from our destination in Hawaii. Send one of your guardian angels to watch over us, dear Lord, and keep us from harm. We put our abiding faith in you, Lord; our welfare is in your unchanging hands. In Christ Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.”

  Sean moved his lips to say, “Amen,” but didn’t voice the word. The same way that he lip-synched hymns in church.

  Unaware, as always, of his deception, Mya glanced out the porthole—she’d insisted on having the window seat—and looked back at him. She smiled tightly.

  “I love you,” she said. “My hubby.”

  “Love you, too.” He kissed her forehead. “Wifey.”

  The airplane steadily climbed. Atlanta’s skyline began to recede in the hazy distance.

  “I wish we were already in Maui,” Mya said. “This is going to be a long trip.”

  “No kidding. Five hours to LA, then five more to Kahalui—we’re gonna be beat when we finally get to the hotel.” He admired her figure; petite and shapely, Mya wore khaki shorts and a pink halter top. Sean sighed with regret. “I doubt we’ll be consummating our marriage tonight.”

  “We’ll have plenty of time for that.” She grinned.

  They were booked for six nights at the Westin in Maui. The honeymoon would cost them a small fortune—and since Sean was an elementary school teacher and Mya was a nurse, they weren’t exactly the Rockefellers—but it was, Sean hoped, the first and only time he’d ever go on a honeymoon. Mya was the love of his life, and he’d resolved that they would splurge on occasions that mattered to them. Their honeymoon mattered.

  “I wish your grandma had been there,” Mya said, admiring the sea of clouds outside the airplane. “It wasn’t the same without her.”

  “She was there in spirit,” Sean said.

  He had to believe that, or else he would go insane.

  They’d had a small but elegant wedding at New Life Baptist, Mya’s family church, and a reception afterward in the fellowship hall. Only forty family and friends had attended. Although it had been a beautiful, joyous affair, it had also been melancholy, as the person who had been a major part of Sean’s life was missing: his grandmother, who’d raised him by herself since he was a baby. Grandma had died six months ago, and every day Sean felt her absence, poignantly.

  And bitterly, he thought. A stroke had felled Grandma, turning the woman who had once been the epitome of a strong black woman into an adult-sized child unable to speak without saliva dripping from her mouth, unable to feed herself, unable to take care of her own bodily functions, and worst of all, barely able to remember who he was. She’d spent the last two years of her life in a nursing home, gazing vacantly at ugly wallpaper for hours at a time and silently enduring her humiliating condition, seeming to care only about the old, thick Bible that she kept in her lap—like a child clutching her favorite blanket.

  Her attachment to the Good Book struck Sean as ironic. What had happened to Grandma was God’s fault. Grandma had been a devout Baptist, in church three times a week, always ready to feed the hungry and clothe the homeless. She’d spent her life serving God, but God had deserted her in her hour of need. Did a loving, compassionate God allow his children to suffer?

  Sean had decided that the answer was: No. God was neither loving nor compassionate. God didn’t give a damn. You might as well worship the sun or the moon. At least you could see them.

  Mya pulled Sean’s hand close to her heart.

  “I hope we enjoy a long life together,” she said. “Full of kids, grandkids ... great-grandkids. I want us to share all of those things, sweetie.”

  “We will.”

  “You sound so sure. I wish I had your confidence. I worry too much sometimes. Like about this flight ...”

  “Hush now,” he said. “It’ll be fine. You said a prayer, remember? Have faith.”

  “Do you have faith?” She looked at him, full on.

  “Of course I do. Why would you ask me that?”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder, that’s all.”

  He felt the heat of guilt warming his face. Mya knew the truth. He hadn’t fooled her.

  But he said only, “I have challenges every now and then, like everyone else. Does that make me an atheist?”

  “I didn’t say you were an atheist. Why are you so defensive?”

  Why the hell are you asking me about my faith? he almost snapped. But he checked himself. They were on their honeymoon. This wasn’t the time for an argument.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I’m tired, a little irritable.”

  “I’m tired, too.” She yawned. She’d taken a Dramamine before they boarded, and the effects were probably kicking in. “I’m gonna take a nap for a little while.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  But as he watched her close her eyes, her question rebounded in his thoughts. Do you have faith?

  He had faith, of a certain kind. He had faith that God was heartless and cold and would abandon you when you cried out His name. He had loads of faith in that.

  But he could never be bluntly honest with his wife. He put on an act, for her benefit, because she wanted to believe, and it would be cruel to tell her the truth about God. She would learn, in due time, on her own.

  Yawning, Sean picked up the in-flight magazine. He started to read.

  Several minutes later, the captain announced that they had reached a cruising altitude of thirty-three thousand feet, and switched off the seatbelt sign and gave them permission to move around the cabin. Sean rose from his seat and walked down the aisle, toward the lavatory.

  Halfway there, the aircraft hit a stomach-tossing patch of turbulence. Sean pitched forward and braced himself against a seat, breaking what would have been an embarrassing fall.

  When he looked up, he found himself staring at the occupant of a seat a couple of rows ahead. An elderly black woman.

  She looked exactly like his dead grandmother.

  Staring at the woman, Sean’s spine went as rigid as a steel pole.

  This can’t be Grandma. Your mind is playing tricks on you, Sean. You’re thinking about Grandma because of what Mya said and you’re imagining that this old lady is her.

  But the resemblance was uncanny. The woman had smooth walnut-toned skin, hair as white as cotton, a generous mouth, full lips, and large copper-colored eyes. She wore a navy blue dress. Her large hands—Grandma had strong hands because she’d spent her youth picking cotton in Mississippi—gripped a giant, tattered Bible. It was just like the Bible that Grandma had owned.

  But Grandma’s been dead for six months. This isn’t her.

  “Excuse me, sir,” came a woman’s voice from behind him. “Are you going to the lavatory?”

  “Uh, yeah, sorry.” Sean gave an apologetic glance to the woman, a flight attendant. He forced himself to walk forward. It felt as though his shoes were cast in concrete.

  The old black woman stared straight ahead. Sean braced himself to walk past her.

  If I hear her talk and she sounds like Grandma, I’m going to lose it.

 
; But as he brushed past, taking extra care not to touch her, she didn’t say a word, and she didn’t look at him. She slipped on a pair of bifocals that lay on her bosom, opened her Bible, and began to read.

  Sean got into the lavatory and used the toilet. He splashed cold, purifying water on his face.

  “Get a grip,” he said to his reflection in the mirror. “It’s coincidence. Everyone has a twin, remember.”

  He’d heard the theory many times before, had actually advanced it himself when someone that he was meeting for the first time said that he reminded them of someone they knew. “Well, everyone has a twin, you know?” he would say. “There’s five billion people on the planet. Chances are, a few of us look a lot alike.”

  But there was a major difference between a strong resemblance and a replica.

  He loathed walking down the aisle again and passing the woman. But obviously it was the only way back to his seat.

  He left the lavatory. Ahead, he spotted the top of the woman’s snow-white cap of hair. His heart hammered.

  He marched forward.

  As he passed the woman’s seat, she spoke.

  “Hey, mister. Hold on.”

  She sounded like Grandma: a soft, raspy voice with a thick Mississippi Delta accent. No one could imitate that voice.

  He clamped his teeth against a scream. Slowly, he turned.

  The woman was studying him. She smiled. Her teeth were large, and very white. Dentures.

  “Yes?” he asked, his voice cracking on the word.

  “I was sitting here thinking,” she said. “You look like my grandbaby. Called him Sonny Boy. Raised him myself ’cause his mama died giving birth to him.”

  Sean couldn’t speak.

  Sonny Boy was Grandma’s nickname for him. His mother had died in childbirth.

  Coincidence! his mind shrieked.

  The woman’s brow creased. “I’m kinda worried about Sonny Boy. He done lost his way, blaming God for things that was just meant to happen. Saying he don’t need God and all that mess. When we do that, you know, sometimes God’ll let you see what it’s like when He ain’t around. Leave you out there all alone in the darkness.... And you know who dwells in the darkness, don’t you?”

  Sean began to move away. His knees shook, and he had to grip the seats to keep from falling.

  “You’s all alone, Sonny Boy,” she said. She grinned. “God ain’t around to hear them phony prayers of yours no mo’.”

  Sean spun around, in his haste nearly knocking over a man, and raced back to his seat.

  His frantic return awakened Mya.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  You’ve no idea, he thought. A wave of demented laughter bubbled at the back of his throat, and he clamped his mouth shut, worried that if he allowed the laughter to escape, it would never stop.

  Who did I see sitting back there? It wasn’t Grandma. Could it have been ... ?

  “Sean?” Mya touched his hand.

  “I’m okay,” Sean said. Greasy sweat streamed down his face. He lifted the edge of his shirt and mopped away the perspiration.

  Mya watched him with a skeptical gaze.

  “Want a Dramamine?” she asked.

  “No.” The last thing he wanted was to become drowsy, not with that

  (devil)

  person sitting a few rows behind him. He couldn’t afford to be anything less than one hundred percent alert.

  “You don’t look good,” she said. “Are you going to be okay?”

  He was about to tell her to stop asking him questions and shut the fuck up. But he kept his mouth shut. She was only concerned about him, as a wife should be. He had to get his shit together.

  The first step in doing that was proving that his grandmother—or something impersonating her—was not sitting on the plane. He wanted to prove that he was hallucinating. Although such an intense, disturbing hallucination would open an entirely different Pandora’s box.

  “Can you do me a favor?” he asked Mya.

  “Sure, honey.”

  “Walk to the back, to the lavatory. Let me know if you see anyone familiar sitting around row fourteen or so.”

  “Who?” She frowned.

  My dead grandmother ...

  “I’m not sure who it is,” he lied. “But it’s someone we’ve seen before, I think. The person’s name slips my tongue.... You know how I am with names.”

  “Don’t I know it. You barely remembered my sister’s name at the wedding.”

  He forced himself to smile, indulgently.

  “And they’re sitting in row fourteen?” she asked.

  “Yeah, around there.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  She rose out of her seat and clambered over him. If he was in his normal, playful mood, he would have groped at her breasts as she passed by. Now, he kept his sweaty hands knotted together in his lap.

  Mya walked down the aisle. He waited. Wondering whom Mya would see sitting back there.

  You know who dwells in the darkness, don’t you?

  Coldness spread from his spine through every point of his body. He snatched the blanket from the seat next to him and covered himself with it. Still, gooseflesh rose on his arms.

  Mya came back. “You must be imagining things, Sean. There’s no one back there that I know.”

  “Who was in row fourteen?”

  “No one.” She slid into her seat and buckled her seatbelt. “The entire row was empty.”

  “That can’t be.”

  “Check again for yourself.” She looked at him, intently. “Who’d you see back there that you recognized, anyway?”

  He faltered. He was too shaken to conjure a plausible lie.

  “Forget about it,” he finally said. “I must’ve been mistaken.”

  She looked at him for a beat, and then shrugged, placed a pillow between the window and her head, and closed her eyes. Clearly, as far as Mya was concerned, the matter was forgotten.

  But he couldn’t forget.

  He sat there, gripping the armrests, gnawing his bottom lip.

  Then, on impulse, he threw off the blanket, grabbed the back of the seat in front of him, and pulled himself upright. He staggered into the aisle. He walked toward row fourteen.

  The row was vacant, like Mya had said. No black woman occupied any of the seats around, either.

  I’m losing my mind, he thought. He was, in fact, not feeling quite like himself. He was hungry; he’d eaten only a granola bar before they’d left the house for the airport, and he hadn’t yet sipped his usual morning cup of java.

  Perhaps one of the side effects of caffeine withdrawal was hallucinations, he thought, a bit crazily.

  But why would he have imagined his grandmother, of all people? Why would he have imagined that she would say such awful things to him?

  Scratching his head, he turned to go back to his seat. As he neared it, he glimpsed that familiar cap of frosty white hair.

  In his row.

  Lead-footed, Sean shuffled back to his seat.

  His grandmother—or whoever she was—sat in the seat closest to the aisle. The middle seat, his, was empty. Mya was in the window seat, fast asleep.

  His grandmother looked up at him. Grinned.

  He noticed bits of a black substance stuck between her teeth, as if she had been chewing on coals.

  “Take a load off, Sonny Boy.” She patted the seat next to her. “Ain’t nowhere else to go. Long way to go to Hawaii.”

  Standing there, gawking at this woman, Sean came up with a completely reasonable explanation for what was happening.

  He was dreaming.

  He was as unconscious as Mya, perhaps had ingested a capsule of Dramamine himself. He was asleep, and caught in this nightmare.

  But what a vivid dream. The smell of hot coffee drifting to him from the food-and-beverage cart ahead. The humming of the aircraft’s engine. The faint taste of the granola bar still on his tongue.

 
No matter how real it seems, it’s still a dream. There’s no other answer.

  Sean moved to his seat, being careful to avoid touching her.

  She touched his hand. Her skin was cold and clammy. “Now we can talk.”

  “About what?” He pulled his hand away.

  “Why I’m here,” she said. “What I got to offer you.”

  “Offer me?”

  She folded her hands together, over the huge Bible. Glancing at the worn black-leather cover, he noticed a strange detail. The gold cross underneath the words Holy Bible was upside down.

  Fear simmered in his chest. Years ago, he’d seen something on television about Satanists. One of the cult’s prized figures was the inverted cross, signifying a mockery of Christianity’s most hallowed symbol.

  As he looked at the woman’s hands, he saw dirt caked underneath her nails, too. Grandma was the cleanest woman he’d ever known, would wash her hands several times a day. This could not possibly be her, and since his imagination had engineered this perversion of her for a dream, he needed serious counseling. He’d obviously lost his grip on his sanity.

  “Lemme make you an offer,” the woman said, in a voice that was still a dead ringer for Grandma’s. “An offer you can’t refuse, like Marlon Brando said in The Godfather. Wanna hear it, Sonny Boy?”

  “No, but I don’t guess that I have a choice.”

  She cackled.

  “God gave you free will, didn’t he?” she asked. “Ain’t that what you used to believe?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  Smirking, she motioned above. “Look.”

  From the ceiling, a flat screen levered down from a compartment. The flight crew used the monitors to show safety instructions and in-flight movies. But Sean had an unsettling feeling about what he would see this time.

  Electric snow filled the screen ... and then faded to reveal a TV newsman seated at a desk. The guy was talking, and his words were as audible as if they were being broadcast over the captain’s intercom. But in the illogical fashion of dreams, only Sean and the old woman paid any attention to the screen and seemed to hear the newsman.

  “... Flight 463, en route from Atlanta to Los Angeles, crashed as it was flying over the Arizona desert. There were only a handful of survivors ...”