Beyond the Veil

by Mark Morris

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

Beyond the Veil is the second volume in an annual, non-themed horror series of entirely original stories, showcasing the very best short fiction that the genre has to offer, and edited by Mark Morris. This new anthology contains 20 original horror stories, 16 of which have been commissioned from some of the top names in the genre, and 4 of which have been selected from the 100s of stories sent to Flame Tree during a 2-week open submissions window.

FLAME TREE PRESS is the imprint of long-standing Independent Flame Tree Publishing, dedicated to full-length original fiction in the horror and suspense, science fiction & fantasy, and crime / mystery / thriller categories. The list brings together fantastic new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices. Learn more about Flame Tree Press at www.flametreepress.com and connect on social media @FlameTreePress.

Release date: October 26, 2021

Publisher: Flame Tree Publishing

Print pages: 256

Sample

The God Bag

Christopher Golden

I never knew where she got the idea for the God Bag. In the waning days, when my mother’s memory turned into a source of constant pain and confusion, I asked my brother and sister about it, but neither of them knew the origins of the threadbare velvet thing, or even when she started stuffing prayers into it. The earliest any of us could recall Mom mentioning it was shortly after she and Dad divorced. I guess I’d have been around seven years old, which means my brother, Simon, would have been nine and Corinne, our sister, about fifteen.

“I’ll put it in my God Bag,” she’d say.

I remember the look in her eyes when she talked about it, as if she assumed we all knew exactly what she meant. I honestly don’t recall if she ever explained it to me or if I figured it out through context clues, but the gist was clear – when Mom was troubled, wrestling with something in her heart, or when she’d lost something and needed to find it, she’d scribble a prayer on a scrap of white paper, fold it up and stick it into the God Bag.

Reading that, you might assume we were a religious family, but I wouldn’t go that far. Corinne, Simon, and I attended Catholic schools from first grade up through high school graduation, but we were never regular church-goers, not even when our parents were still married. Dad’s religion was self-indulgence; bars were his church, women and alcohol his communion. Mom had a more eccentric sort of faith. She burned St. Joseph candles, had psychics read her tea leaves, was devoted to the predictions of her tarot cards… and she had her God Bag.

Years passed the way they do, and occasionally I’d remember the existence of the thing, but only as a funny anecdote from childhood. College came and went, I built myself a sustainable career as a graphic designer, I married Alan Kozik and we found a surrogate to carry our baby, which made us dads. Being gay complicated my relationship with my mother, but I’d heard worse stories and we all survived the turmoil. She loved Alan, and she loved our daughter Rosie even more. Her first granddaughter – it meant everything to her. Yes, my siblings were older, yes they’d had their own weddings, yes they’d had children of their own, and Mom loved each and every one of them. But Alan and I had the only girl, the only granddaughter. Any resistance my mother had to the idea of me being married to a burly, bearded guy who liked to hold my hand just about every minute of the day… that went out the window when Rosie came along. From then on, Mom acted as if she’d never had an issue with me being in love with a man. I still nurtured some resentment, but I let it go the best I could. Why fight the tide of joy?

Joy.

It never lasts.

We began to notice Mom’s memory failing a year or two before the dementia really dug its claws into her. For a long time, her lapses seemed mundane enough, but when it began to really fail, there could be no denying it. One week it manifested in simple things like misplacing her phone or forgetting plans we’d made, but soon after she would finish a phone call with Corinne and then call her back half an hour later with no recollection of the earlier conversation.

Mom despised going to the doctor. She hated for her children to know her personal business, including her health. She held on to this weird intimacy as long as she was able, but eventually Corinne insisted she be allowed to accompany her to the doctor, and the news was grim. Smoking had done more damage than we imagined, and in ways we had never anticipated. Yes, Mom did have a tumour in her lungs, but it was small and slow-growing and far from her biggest concern. She also had COPD and end-stage emphysema, as well as vascular dementia. Decades of smoking had narrowed the blood vessels in her brain and in her extremities, and the blood that did flow wasn’t carrying nearly enough oxygen.

Every day, it would get a little worse. Eventually, either the constricted blood vessels in her brain would cause a stroke or her blood oxygen level would fall so low that a heart attack would kill her. She would stop being able to draw in enough breath to keep herself alive.

Meanwhile, the dementia ravaged her in other ways. She had never been a healthy eater, but now she tended to forget or lose interest in anything but draining cans of Diet Coke and crushing butts out in the same stainless steel elephant ashtray she’d been using for forty years. Loose, dry skin hung from her arms and legs and her hair remained in constant disarray. Her moods had always been mercurial, and now they ranged from near-catatonia to pure joy, from loneliness to rage, sometimes in the space of minutes. She had delusions, mostly harmless, a way for her unconscious mind to fill in the vast, empty spaces in her memory.

“Oh, it’s up on my bed,” she’d say of the memoir she claimed to be writing, or a book she thought she had given you, or records of some improvised bit of personal history. Photographs of a trip to Ireland that I’d taken – a trip she insisted she’d been on with Alan and me. She had photographs to prove she’d been there “up on my bed”.

She’d never been to Ireland in her life.

On a Tuesday morning in late August, I took the day off work to bring her for an MRI. We knew what the results were likely to be, but in order to get Medicare and the local elder services to give her the coverage she needed, we had to jump through the hoops. I hated doing it, but not as much as Mom hated having to go. Even at her most confused, even when her memory turned to smoke around her, she still understood that visiting doctors at this point was futile. Nothing we did could keep the train she was on from crashing, but we had to keep Mom going to her appointments and try to remind her to take her medications, because that was the only way to be sure Medicare would cover the costs of what was to come.

My mother wanted to stay in her home, to live out her last days there, and we were doing everything in our power to grant that wish. Soon that would change. Something would happen, some household accident, some injury or emergency that sent her to the hospital, and then the whole paradigm would shift.

But that Tuesday had been quiet. Just me and Mom. I brought her a couple of glazed doughnuts – one of the few things she would eat – and then drove her to the MRI appointment. She didn’t complain, even seemed in good spirits, but then she had always loved the summer and the sun. Eighty degrees, windows down, I drove her to the doctor’s office and checked her in. As I sat in the waiting room reading the historical novel I’d brought along, I kept losing my place on the page, worried by how long it was taking and whether the staff might be having difficulty keeping her on task. But when it was over, the nurse walked my mother out to me and the two of them seemed to have become fast friends. As horrible as she could be, Mom also knew how to charm strangers when she felt like it.

We drove home with the music up loud and the sun shining. Shortly after two o’clock, I pulled into her driveway and killed the engine. She’d gone quiet, slipping into that numb, hollow mood that came over her so often now. No matter how bad her memory might be, how confused, she knew that arriving home meant I would be leaving soon and the shadow of that knowledge darkened her features.

I helped her up to her room, cracked her a fresh can of Diet Coke, and chided her when she tried to light up a cigarette. I had always hated the damn things, and now more than ever. For twenty years she had remembered not to smoke in front of any of her children, but now even that was slipping. She crinkled her eyes and gave me a pouty look, but she put her cigarettes aside.

“I wish you didn’t have to go,” she rasped in her gravelly voice, pausing every few words to catch her breath. “I get so lonely.”

The words were familiar now, but no matter how often I heard them, they carved my heart out.

“I know. But I’ll see you again in a few days. Corinne’s visiting you tomorrow, and tonight you’ll see the nurse. Who’s on Tuesdays? Sylvia?”

“Yep, Sylvia. Yes.” She nodded, brows knitted gravely in an attempt to communicate confidence. I knew the expression well – it meant she had no idea which nurse would be working tonight, helping her bathe, keeping her company, keeping her out of trouble.

The bedroom wasn’t hoarder-level disaster, but it was close. Stacks of books and documents everywhere, pill bottles, a hundred antique knickknacks that would have to be sold eventually but none of which my mother would part with, even now. Especially now. Her queen bed looked more like a nest, with too many pillows, blankets, and two different comforters, both of them with stains I didn’t want to think about, no matter how many times they had been washed.

Mom slept alone on the left side of the bed, the right side piled up with bags of Cheetos and mini-Reese’s cups, cigarette cartons, her chequebook and bills that Corinne would take the next day to make sure everything was being handled properly. Left to her own devices, Mom would either not pay the bills or overpay someone she didn’t actually owe. There were notebooks she had scribbled in, some DVDs Simon had brought for her to watch, and sticking out from beneath a dirty pink sweatshirt, a familiar faded blue velvet with gold tassels.

“Mom, is that the God Bag?”

The question confused her. She frowned as if remembering what the God Bag was to begin with, then she glanced at it and nodded. “Of course. I have a lot of prayers these days. If I’m going to die, I want to make sure I get a good reception on the other side.”

I laughed, but it wasn’t funny. Once I would have reassured her, told her she wasn’t going to die anytime soon, but even she knew her time was limited.

“I didn’t realise you still had this,” I said, studying the bag.

It was a royal blue, faux-velvet, drawstring thing with obscure origins, but I assumed it had originally held a bottle of fancy scotch or brandy. Mom’s generation had given bottles of alcohol as holiday or housewarming gifts when they couldn’t think of anything more personal. The drawstring was a golden, corded tassel. The God Bag had seen better days, but it still served its purpose. The latest couple of notes jutted from the overfilled bag.

“Are your prayers ever answered, Mom?”

I don’t know why I asked. Truly, I don’t. The words skipped over the thinking part of my brain, went right from the impulse to my lips, and the moment I spoke I wished I had kept silent. If the prayers she put in her God Bag had been answered, she wouldn’t be lying in her bed waiting to die.

But her eyes widened a bit, glinting with a clarity I hadn’t seen in them for months. “Always,” she said, laser-focused on me. “They’re always answered. You’re happy, aren’t you? You and Alan and Rosie?”

Her voice didn’t rasp or falter. Her gaze felt sharp, her focus weighted. She almost never remembered Alan’s name now, didn’t mention him until I mentioned him first. I didn’t think it was her old Puritanism returning, just the rockslide of her memory carrying Alan over the cliff into obscurity. Right then, though, I could see she remembered everyone, everything, with utter clarity.

“You prayed for me and Alan?”

“Of course I did. I wanted you two to have a family. I wrote it down and put it in my God Bag, and I got my only granddaughter.”

She smiled when she mentioned Rosie. As she always did. Her life had been a series of resentments and vendettas, a terrible example for me and my siblings and for our children, but in her imagination she and Rosie shared a bond, and I never had the heart to shatter the illusion.

“Well,” I said. “I’m grateful.”

I started to open the drawstring. “Maybe I should put my own prayers in here.”

Mom ripped it from my hands. “Get your own God.”

I held my breath, worried she would topple over into one of her rage moods, but once she had the God Bag tucked against her chest, she seemed comforted, and in moments her eyes glazed over again. Whatever had prompted her outburst, it had passed.

“I’m going to get you something to eat. Some of that chicken salad from yesterday.” I had been perched on the edge of her bed. Now I stood and left the room, her words echoing in my head. Of course she had meant to say “Get your own God Bag”, not “Get your own God.” She missed words all the time, or mixed them up, and that was obviously what had happened here. Even so, I felt a cool prickle at the back of my neck as I went down to the kitchen.

Get your own God.

The joke was on her. I didn’t believe in anyone’s god, and I certainly didn’t have one of my own.

I went down to the kitchen, which held its own nightmares. It felt like a relic from another age, maybe the galley in a ship found adrift at sea with all hands lost. When had she last been down here to get some food on her own? Some of the plates were set out on the counters. Several knives crusted with dried peanut butter were in the sink. There was a home health aide that helped with such things, but it wasn’t fair to always leave it to her, so I reminded myself to run the dishwasher before I left.

I fixed Mom a chicken salad sandwich – on a hot dog roll, because it was easy for her to handle and she wouldn’t have eaten an entire sandwich anyway – and carried it upstairs on a small plate with a handful of grapes. I hadn’t been gone much more than ten minutes, but I could smell cigarette smoke and she had turned up the TV nearly to max volume.

“Your lunch, madame!” I announced as I entered the room.

The cigarette had already been stubbed out in the ashtray. She’d taken maybe three puffs. She lay in bed, her head slightly tilted, mouth open, eyes closed. If not for the wheezing labour of her breathing, I would have thought she had died.

She dozed off fairly often in those days. Fifteen, twenty minutes, sometimes as much as an hour. I glanced at CNN on her TV to check the time and decided I would wait for her to wake. I hated the idea of disturbing her almost as much as I did the idea of her blinking back to consciousness and finding herself alone. Would she even remember that I’d been there? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to leave without being able to say goodbye. Just in case.

I set the plate with her chicken salad roll amidst the debris on her nightstand and turned the volume down. My phone lay dormant in my pocket and I knew I could kill time on Twitter or playing Wordscapes, but I figured I would just sit in the chair at the end of her bed and watch the news for a while, let my mind rest.

Then I saw the God Bag again. Such a strange artefact from our family history, as if someone had dredged up a long-forgotten photo album. I knew it was private, and yes, it felt like an intrusion even when I was reaching for it, but my mother was dying and soon enough we would all be rooting through the detritus of her life. Her mind, the person she had been, was already being erased, and given how tenuous our relationship had often been over the years I could not help myself from wondering.

I dug in, sifted around at random, and pulled out a folded piece of white paper. When I unfolded it, I found her familiar scrawl and realised this one had to be at least a couple of years old – written long enough ago that her handwriting remained crisp, with the confident loops and flourishes I associated with the younger version of my mother.

A better job for Simon, she’d written. Just those five words, and the date – 10/11/17. I smiled as I studied the words, barely a prayer, more of a wish. I tried to remember how long ago my brother had quit working for the German company whose CEO treated his employees like they were competitors in some kind of reality show, where they were judged on loyalty, forced-enthusiasm, and the ability to come to work and feign good health even when they were sick as dogs. The job had been withering Simon’s soul, but he’d been afraid to talk to headhunters for fear someone would tell the boss and he’d be fired. Now he worked at a Boston tech firm whose office culture was the polar opposite and I could see the difference it had made in him, both physically and mentally. I wondered when he had gotten that job. Early 2018, I thought, and it made me smile again as I realised Mom would have taken the credit. She’d put the wish in her God Bag and it had come true. That would have made her incredibly happy, to believe she’d had a hand in changing Simon’s life for the better.

Mom’s breathing grew worse as I sat there. I glanced around in search of the inhaler she was supposed to use twice a day, but it was nowhere in sight. The nurse would find it later, but as I watched my mother I was reminded of the first weeks after we’d brought newborn Rosie home from the hospital. Alan and I had put her cradle in our bedroom and I remembered lying awake at night, listening to her breathe, terrified that she would stop.

It’s strange the way life echoes. Strange and terrible.

When I felt confident Mom wouldn’t die in the next five minutes, I dug back into the bag and pulled out more of the folded prayers. Family trip to Florida was in there. So were three versions of I want Corinne to move home, from back in the days when my sister lived in Arizona. Someone to paint the house was among the more mundane wishes, along with A better car and I pray for my back to feel better.

Some of them were a bit more vindictive. Mom had a history of suing people for just about anything, particularly if she herself had done something wrong and decided that pretending to be the injured party would get her out of it. There were negligent injury lawsuits and real estate lawsuits. When my grandmother had died, she’d ended up in a legal fight with her siblings over the will. As I dug through the God Bag, I found half a dozen notes wishing for victory over her enemies. Some of them were court cases but there were other, more petty disputes.

Kill the raccoons. That one made me catch my breath with its cruel brevity. There had been raccoons on her property for ages. Sometimes they became brave and rooted through the trash or found a way into the garage and clawed at mouldy old boxes of things Mom should have discarded decades ago. For that, she had prayed for God to kill them.

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered, staring at that single creased sheet of paper.

I folded the raccoon-murder-wish again and tucked it into the God Bag. There were so many of them. The dates ranged over the course of many years. Nearly all the prayers had been written on white paper, but I was intrigued to find that some of them were red. No other colours that I could see, only white and red. I began to unfold the red ones.

A kidney, said the first one. It had been written in black marker, the lettering somehow shakier than the others. Thick and blocky, though. Determined.

My diamond.

Annabeth.

The cottage.

Cosmo.

I confess that at first none of them made sense to me, not because I didn’t understand the references but because they broke the pattern. Mom had fought uterine cancer years ago and during surgery the doctors had discovered that one of her kidneys had been badly damaged. I couldn’t remember the details, but I knew they’d had to remove it. Had there been damage to her remaining kidney? Had she feared she might need a kidney transplant, which would explain her wishing for one?

About a dozen years before, she had lost her wedding ring on the beach in Florida, so that one made sense.

Annabeth had been her closest friend for nearly forty years before they’d had a falling out and Annabeth had moved to New Mexico to be with her son and his family. Warm and funny, with a wicked sense of humour, I’d always loved Annabeth and had been sad to see their friendship destroyed. Shortly after she had moved to New Mexico, she’d had a bad stroke. Annabeth survived – as far as I know she was still in New Mexico – but the stroke damaged the language centre of her brain, making it virtually impossible for her to have an ordinary conversation. She could still write, though not with the eloquence she’d once had, and had sent letters to Mom several times. Whatever had happened between them, it must have been awful, because my mother never even opened those letters. She put them in the garbage.

The cottage had to refer to the one up in Maine. My father had inherited it from his parents, but Mom had gotten it in the divorce – she said because we kids loved it so much, but we all knew it was just one way for her to hurt him. He had it coming, of course, but from that point on I could never feel completely comfortable there. When she’d reached her early seventies, Mom had started to falter financially. She made bad decisions, took risks, got into a few real estate deals with men she should not have trusted. Without telling us, she mortgaged the cottage until it was underwater, ended up in a court battle to try to save it. That would have been around 2009.

Cosmo had been her dog. An adorable little terrier who mostly liked to sit on the sofa next to her with his head on her lap. She loved the little fellow, scratched behind his ears, fed him, even took him out for a stroll up and down the sidewalk in the days when she could still manage that without having to stop every twenty feet to catch her breath. A UPS truck had struck him. The injuries had been enough to kill him, but not quickly. When Mom had been told he might linger for days, she’d had to make the tough decision to put him down.

I stared at the red prayers, trying to figure out what I found so odd about them. Yes, they were even more succinct than the wishes written on white paper. Instead of Save Cosmo, she had just written his name. Instead of Let me find my diamond and Help Annabeth get well, she’d written only My diamond and simply Annabeth.

I started opening white prayers again and when I came to one that said A happy and healthy baby girl for Tom and Alan, I swore softly to myself. Obviously her wish hadn’t been the reason we had Rosie – Alan and I had wanted a baby, a family – but I had thought it was entirely a delusion when she had given herself credit. Yet some part of her dementia-stricken mind had remembered writing this prayer down, and she certainly had asked God for a granddaughter. No wonder she put so much faith in the ridiculous bag.

I stared at that prayer again, touched by the kindness of Mom’s wish but also deeply frustrated by the way it had fed her constant need to be in control. I loved her, but her narcissism and passive-aggression had been poisoning that love since the day I was born. As I folded the paper and began returning the various wishes to the bag, the answer struck me – the reason the red prayers made me uneasy.

How had she known?

The red prayers had not been granted. If God really was out there listening to Mom’s prayers, able to read or intuit the wishes she placed into her God Bag, then he had ignored the ones on red paper. Actually, much worse than ignoring them, he had done the opposite of what she’d prayed for. You want your diamond back? No. You want to make peace with your best friend? She’ll move thousands of miles away and nearly die. You want your dog to live? How about I make him die in agony instead?

Shuffling again through white prayers, I couldn’t have said if most of them had been granted, but there were certainly some that God or fate had granted her – that family trip to Florida, a better car, and a granddaughter. A happy life for me and my husband and our daughter. I wasn’t ready to credit Mom’s God Bag – or the existence of any deity – for our happiness, but the difference between the prayers written on white versus red paper seemed clear.

I stuffed the others back into the bag, but I held on to a red one. Unfolding it again, I stared at the single word there – Cosmo. Beneath it, Mom had scrawled the date, as she had on all of the rest. The 12th of July, seven years before.

I couldn’t breathe for a moment, staring at the date.

Alan often teased me about how poor I’d always been at judging chronology. A vacation we’d taken ten years earlier would seem only a few years ago. I knew the year we’d married only because I had memorised it. Some dates stuck in my mind but that 12th of July wasn’t one of them – I might’ve been doing just about anything that day. The next day, though…

The 13th of July was Alan’s birthday, and that particular year had been his best ever because that day we’d gotten the phone call that the agency had found us both an egg donor and a surrogate willing to carry our child. That was the day we learned we were going to have a baby, be a family.

Our joy had been slightly diminished by the phone call I received from my mother that night telling me Cosmo had been hit by a truck, that he’d lingered for hours before she’d had the vet put him down.

I stared at the red paper in my hand and the date on it. The day before Cosmo had been hit by the car. Why had Mom been so worried about him – worried enough to put a prayer into her God Bag – the day before he’d been hit?

“She wrote it down wrong,” I whispered to myself. That had to be it. She’d simply gotten the date wrong.

Her bedclothes rustled. Her legs jerked beneath the spread.

“Put that back,” she rasped – more of a growl.

I snapped my head up and met her eyes. She didn’t look at me, only stared at the red paper in my hand, the bag on my lap. Then she jerked forward, tangled in the sheets, spindle-legs bare as she crawled toward me.

“That’s not yours!” she cried. “Not yours!”

The mad look in her eyes made me think she didn’t recognise me, not in that moment. But maybe she did, and the fact I was her son didn’t matter at all. She thrust out a hand but out of reflex I jerked away from her.

“Give it to me! It’s my God. Mine! Give me the fucking bag!”

“Jesus, Mom,” I said, tucking the red prayer back into the bag and cinching the drawstring.

She snatched it from me with more strength than I’d seen in her for months, then held it against her chest and collapsed at the end of her bed, chest heaving as she tried to catch her ragged breath. When she started to cough, I saw red-flecked spittle on her lips, hideously brown mucus that only hinted at the rot in her lungs.

“I’m… I’m sorry…” she managed to wheeze.

Exhaling, I began to reply, hoping to offer her some comfort, but then I saw her apology hadn’t been meant for me. She’d been speaking to the bag, holding it against her chest as if it were her only love. She’d gasped out her regret, but it had been offered to a faded faux-velvet sack instead of to the son she’d just shrieked at. She’d been talking to God.

Her God, anyway. She’d made clear she didn’t think he belonged to me.

I’d had enough for one day. Pointing out the sandwich I’d made for her, I waited for her to settle back under her covers, confirmed that she had the TV remote control, and made my departure. I needed out of there, away from the smell of cigarettes and my unbathed mother. I wanted fresh air to clear my head, but even when I had gotten into the car and driven away, windows open to let the breeze blow in, my mother’s screeching voice lingered, as did some of the things she had said.

Get your own God.

* * *

Weeks passed. I visited every few days as her mind and body continued to deteriorate. The God Bag had vanished, though I knew it must be under the bed or in her closet. I thought about it often, usually in times when my own mind ought to have been quiet, out for a run or in the shower, but I didn’t search for it. Mom had been deeply upset when she saw me holding it, and I decided there was no point in agitating her further.

But her words still lingered, as did the savage, desperate gleam in her eyes when she screamed at me to hand it over. And the prayers themselves, the folded scraps of red and white paper, and the dates. I never brought it up to Alan – he had lived with me through a lot of the pain my mother caused us both over the years, and now he watched as I had to process the war between empathy and resentment that was going on in my head. The last thing I wanted was to have him think I was losing my mind. What else would he think, after all, if I told him the dark thoughts I’d been having about the correlation between the white prayers and the red ones?

But the dates on those paper scraps – the one about Cosmo and the one wishing Alan and I would give Mom a granddaughter – they made the back of my head itch, and late at night when I couldn’t sleep, sometimes they gave me a chill. I wondered about the other paper scraps, about what would happen if I matched the dates on the red prayers with the dates when she lost her diamond, or when Annabeth got sick, or when she’d lost her court battle up in Maine and the family cottage along with it. I wondered if I looked back far enough, if I could find earlier batches of notes from the God Bag, if I would find red paper scraps where she’d written down My marriage or My ex-husband.