The room was dark when I woke in a cold sweat, whispering her name, Annie. There was a cold dampness in the crook of my neck, as if someone with icy breath had been sleeping next to me. “Yes?” I said, feeling as if I were being summoned.
I thought I heard a slight rustle of the sheets — maybe I was still dreaming, not completely awake — but there was no answer. I rolled over but couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching me. I propped myself up on my elbow and looked around. Nothing but shadows and the blinds brushing against the windows, moving in rhythm with the wind — or someone’s breathing.
I lay back, trying to return to the dream of my boyhood home in Lake Bluff where we lived next to a forest preserve overlooking Lake Michigan. A gravel road ran through it to the overview where people came to gawk at the sunrise and the vermilion sunsets that dyed the water an unearthly, bloody red.
That road was a childhood path through an enchanted forest where I chased my little sister Annie to the precipice which dropped over a hundred feet to the rocky lake shore. She’d run to the edge and stop, waiting for me to catch her, her eyes warm, adoring. I was her older brother, her protector at school, her hero. Then we’d sit and watch the cold waves crash onto the rocks below.
Annie was the favorite child. My dad’s princess, my mom’s precious gift from God. I loved her — and hated her. Sometimes I loved her so much I’d almost melt in her presence. Other times an angry fire consumed me, but she always smiled until that fateful night when death took her away.
A year after she died, the dreams began. Each night Annie took me to another land, more real than my own life, where she was thin and cold, a slip of light, a swirl of wind, a rustle of leaves. One night she took me to a mountain top, made me look over the edge of a cliff, told me to find her heart, telling me I’d stolen her heart and she was frozen solid until I returned it.
“I didn’t take your heart,” I moaned.
“You did,” she hissed, pushing my head down. “Find it. Give it back!”
“You’re crazy. Leave me alone.”
She bent my head even further until I felt like I was going over the rim, and then I woke, sweating, damp and clammy, a giggle of derisive laughter slipping out the door and down the hall.
“It’s only a dream,” I told myself.
But in the morning, at breakfast, my wife said, “You have scratches on the back of your neck.”
“Do I?”
“Yeah, like someone grabbed you.”
“No, nothing like that happened. I must be blotchy from the shower.”
“Really?” my wife asked, looking at me with a raised eyebrow.
“Yeah, really,” I answered, ignoring her skepticism as I checked my phone with shaking hands. I could almost feel Annie’s hand on my neck, almost hear her derisive laughter.
“You’re white as a sheet,” my wife said.
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Is there someone else?” she asked, sitting back, eyeing me suspiciously, her arms folded, a slice of cinnamon toast growing cold on her plate.
“No,” I insisted, “no one else.” How could I tell her it was Annie, Annie come back from the dead, Annie with the accusing eyes which blamed me and promised her revenge? You don’t talk to an intelligent woman like my wife about ghosts and another dimension and Annie’s cold, cruel contempt without her thinking you’re an ass or you’re lying. I got up and went to work.
Each night after that Annie returned to my dreams, demanding her heart. When she died we buried her in the family plot and I’d gone back to my life without a second thought, not wanting to think about her laying in the ground, next to my father, a mean man who found me appalling and pushed me away when I tried to climb on his lap to watch TV. But he always had room for Annie, his princess, kissing her hair, cooing in her ear.
My mother was there too — the woman who spent most of her life in bed with her dentures on the nightstand, her eyes closed, her fingers telling the beads while her thin, gray lips moved silently. Annie brought her food from the kitchen, cans of tuna, packs of crackers, almonds and dried fruit, but hated being her servant.
Mother died falling down the stairs after Annie ignored her cries for food. I found Annie at the top of the stairs, staring down.
“What happened?” I asked.
“She fell.”
“An accident?”
She looked at me with those hard black eyes. I thought she smiled before she said, “Yes, a horrible accident.”
When I told her I was getting married, she stiffened and stepped back, her black eyes cold and grim. “You can’t. I won’t have it.”
“You have nothing to say about it.”
“But I do.”
“I don’t belong to you.”
“Yes, you do. You know you do. You can’t marry.”
“Watch me,” I said.
Two days later she stole Maura’s engagement ring. Asked to see it and when Maura handed it to her, she ran to her car and roared off. I followed with screeching tires. We sped through the forest, down the road to the precipice, Annie looking back over her shoulder, her eyes black with hate.
She never slowed. Sped over the edge into midair. Her car hung there momentarily, then dove to the beach, nose-first, impaling Annie’s thin, frail chest on the steering column, driving it through and snapping her spine, her face still painted with hatred.
We buried her and I tried my best to forget. I married, tried to have a child, but Maura’s womb was as barren as the sands of the Mojave. I sometimes sat at the lakeshore and looked to the heavens for help, staring at the crimson sunset clouds, a mocking cackle distant and barely audible. I told myself I was just hearing things.
Three months ago, when Maura flew back to care for her ailing mother, things began to mysteriously move around the house, seemingly on their own. My keys from the rack by the door. My book from the nightstand. My wallet from the top of my dresser. I found it on the kitchen table. “Did I leave it there?” I wondered. I picked it up. It was cold. I put it in the back pocket of my slacks. My skin shrank at the chill.
I went to the living room and sat in the dark. It was a raw, moonless night. I’d closed my eyes to calm myself when I heard Annie whisper, “My heart, my heart, return my heart.” Her voice was soft, quiet, insistent, but it left me trembling with dread and uncertainty.
I got up and went to bed. I lay in the dark but she wouldn’t leave me alone. “My heart, my heart, return my heart.”
“Go away,” I snarled.
“My heart, return my heart.”
“I don’t have your heart,” I was shaking with fear, near tears.
“You took my heart, that night in Rome, return my heart.”
“That was a mistake, a moment. You wanted it too,” I protested.
“Return my heart,” she insisted in the crook of my neck with her icy breath.
I threw off the covers, dressed, and ran to my car. I drove wildly, not knowing where I was going, her voice in my ear, “My heart, my heart, return my heart.” I turned blindly into the gravel road that ran through the forest preserve. I floored it, her voice louder, my fingers white with fear and frozen to the wheel as I roared down the road, through the barricade — yes, she said, you’ll find my heart — and then I was over the edge, flying through the dark, a strange, thin, cruel laughter filling the car until I crashed at the bottom.
They pried me out of the wreckage, took me to the hospital, surprised I hadn’t been drinking. As soon as I recovered, I drove to the cemetery, stood over Annie’s grave, and pissed on it. “You bitch,” I said. “This is all you’ll get from me.”
Then I drove home and made love to Maura, but there was a cold breath on my neck, as if someone were behind me, watching, laughing, waiting…
Chuck Kramer taught reading and writing in Chicago’s public schools for thirty years. He’s also worked as an advertising copywriter, a public relations writer, and the theater critic for the Oak Leaves newspaper. He currently cohosts the Weeds Poetry Open Mic every Monday night and is a freelance photographer for the Windy City Times. His poems and short stories have appeared in many publications. He’s written two unpublished novels and is currently working on a third.