Hannah Nakova

By Coyla Coblentz

On the surface Hannah Nakova is unremarkable. If you asked her to describe herself, she’d have nothing to tell you, except a vague description of her job, realizing that you probably didn’t want to hear her answer anyway. The truth is she was never very good at letting people in, even if part of her is desperate to be seen and understood, to connect with someone else.

Below the surface, however, Hannah is anything but unremarkable. She carries a secret with her, Wall Puppets as she once called them, shadows, hallucinations that have followed her since childhood, that have made her life difficult but bearable until now. Now they’ve cast off their troublesome (but safe) all-in-her-head status and have taken on a physical form, violent and deadly. But they've met their match in Hannah Nakova. They just don't know it yet, and neither does she.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coyla Coblentz
• Release date: Jul 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310722493

Book preview

121

Hannah Nakova

By

Coyle Coblentz

Copyright © 2013 by Coyla Coblentz

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Cover illustration by Trung tin Shinji

https://www.fiverr.com/shinji2602

Chapter One

Bleach Cleaning

At the age of six, Hannah Nakova stopped speaking. Not for life, mind you, not once she understood the problem of overcorrection. But she stopped speaking, because everything she said was making her life more difficult and complicated.

Almost a year earlier, at the age of five, she told her mother and father of the Wall Puppets. They weren’t really puppets, but she didn’t know any other way to describe how they danced and moved over her walls in such an unnatural way, as if pulled by an invisible string. She would have called them marionettes if she’d been able to say the word without sounding silly. But she wanted to sound serious, so Mom and Dad wouldn’t nod and smile at each other as if something were secretly funny. Hannah needed to be taken seriously on this account, because she was sure that the Wall Puppets were more than just scary. They were dangerous.

Her parents did not smile or nod at what she said, not this time. Mom did at first, but once she saw Dad’s face, she grew rather serious. Mother told her they were just bad dreams and not real. Father told Hannah to never speak of the Wall Puppets again.

So Hannah obeyed her father and kept quiet about them until she entered kindergarten. Then, encouraged by the other children revealing their deepest and darkest secrets, like the girl who’d taken a dollar out of her mom’s purse, or the boy who had peeked at his Christmas presents two weeks early, Hannah did something very foolish. When her turn came, she told them about the Wall Puppets. She even drew pictures for the children around her who simply refused to understand.

Soon the children stopped listening, some of them sneaking off to talk to other children, and a few going up to the teacher and whispering something in her ear while pointing at Hannah. The teacher came over to Hannah, found her drawings, and then Mom and Dad learned of Hannah’s mistake.

That evening, Mother spoke to her in a kind voice, telling her that she was showing signs of being a disturbed little girl. Hannah did not know what she meant by disturbed little girl, but the idea frightened her. Father was stern and impatient, giving her a firm lecture on what it means to disobey your parents and how angry he was with her, which Hannah expected. What she didn’t expect was to see her father so afraid. His hands trembled, and he paused at odd places when he spoke, stumbling over his words in a way that reminded Hannah of some of the children at school who’d needed speech class.

When Mother left the room to answer the phone, Father leaned forward and took Hannah’s hands. It’s time to start hiding, he whispered. Hannah realized, with his face so close to hers, how different his eyes were from Mother’s. He kissed her on the forehead with such tenderness she started to cry, then sat back and continued with his lecture as if nothing had happened.

Hannah decided then to obey him completely, since she could not live with his fear and disappointment. And she understood what he wanted of her. She didn’t crawl into closets or scoot under her bed, but she still managed to hide, right out in the open. She did this by watching the people around her and adopting their characteristics. This is how you look when happy. This is how you look when interested. This is how you look when sad. This is what you don’t say.

And then she stopped talking altogether, because it was too much of a burden to talk with all those thoughts running through her head. And she was dreadfully afraid that the words she spoke may affect others like they had affected Father.

But this did not work as she hoped. Her silence led to long hours of therapy instead of recess at school, and evenings spent with her mom doing repetitive and time-consuming social exercises. Eventually, however, Hannah learned the word overcorrection, understood the mistake she’d made, and settled into correcting—but not overcorrecting—the problem. And she started speaking again, almost like a normal child.

* * *

Two and a half decades later, Hannah had given her Wall Puppets a new name. She now called them Shadows in her head, and they were not real, just figments of her imagination. This is what she told herself, at least. They were nightmares or hallucinations. She could never touch them or see them, not if she looked straight at them. They stayed safely in her periphery, always just a little out of sight, which was not as dangerous as they had seemed all those years ago.

But they were still her burden, even if the burden was considerably less than it had been. Hannah had expected her Wall Puppets to evaporate completely once she reached adulthood and started living adult realities. But they hadn’t, not fully at least. What came now were reminders, shadows, if you will, and they appeared in waves, in episodes which often overwhelmed her. Real or not, the repercussions of an attack were real enough.

During an episode, which often lasted a week or two, sometimes a full month, Hannah usually dealt with an irritatingly small amount of sleep. This last attack had gone on for over a month and had nearly pushed her to the brink.

It was late afternoon, almost evening when Hannah realized it was over. There was no clear signal ending this attack, but she was familiar enough with the episodes to know when they had ceased. This one felt like a fog lifting off her brain, where she could step forward and be of some use to herself rather than watching her deterioration from a distance. Her first step was nothing remarkable. She climbed off the couch, turned off the TV, and stood there waiting for the heaviness to clear from her head. She needed a beginning, and this was her beginning.

When the Shadows came, they affected every moment of her life. She could manage work, basic toiletries, but nothing more than that. Her house suffered. She subsisted on junk food, sweets and sloth, pampering herself in order to find comfort. But that sort of comfort just made her feel out of control, then guilty, then ashamed. And that became the groundwork for a rather elaborate trap from which she could never seem to escape without backing all the way up to the beginning and starting over.

She walked into the kitchen and found dishes piled in the sink, trash filled to bursting with empty junk food receptacles, and a thousand different varieties of candy bar wrappers, ice cream containers, and pizza boxes. This wasn’t the only consequence. Traces of mold grew along the base of her walls, creeping into existence in toxic blooms of gray and black.

The mold had followed her as a child, and it followed her now. She didn’t consider it a mere coincidence, unless she’d been unlucky enough to grow up in a home with a mold problem, then stupid enough to buy a home with a similar problem. In both instances, calling in a mold specialist had done nothing to resolve the issue.

Hannah brushed herself off and began to wash the dishes and clean the counters. That would be a small step towards normal. It was unremarkable, yes, but necessary. Next would be the mold. She knew she wouldn’t complete that in a day, but if she got the bedroom clean, it would give her a safe place to sleep, at least. It was a beginning.

It took her an hour of work in the kitchen to clean it fully, and then she made her way to the bedroom. For every inch of mold that disappeared, she felt as if she was restoring a part of herself. The heavy smell of chlorine worked like a balm. It was clean. It burned the inside of her nose, but it felt like purification.

That night, she slept deeply for the first time in a month, waking up in time to start on the bathroom before getting ready for work. Another beginning. She made a list of health foods she would buy, promising herself that she would log everything she ate from then on. She needed to maintain control of every element or her life. She could not afford distractions.

Up to that point, she had accomplished very little, much less than the women around her. She owned a house and had a job. She had a small savings and an IRA. But she had no social life and very few friends. She might have been thinner, taller, wealthier, and prettier. She might have gotten married, finished college, and had kids. But she always felt like a social outcast, like everyone in the world belonged to something, and she was standing on the outside trying to find the way in.

She wondered if others felt the same, but she had settled on the idea that her internal failings were too unusual to be familiar to anyone but herself. This left her secure in her loneliness, and she was comfortable with it most of the time. Sometimes, however, she wanted to break free from it, because she felt as if she might be drowning.

Later that day, on the way home from work, Hannah stopped at the gym. She promised herself she would go there every day and rekindle her exercise habit. It didn’t go well, however. She spent an hour walking on the treadmill, then worried she hadn’t worked hard enough, but that didn’t motivate her to stay longer. Instead, she cleaned up and changed clothes and left feeling guilty for not doing more. If only guilt burned calories.

She stopped at the supermarket before heading home and filled her shopping cart with healthy, colorful, natural foods, taking pride in how her cart compared to everyone else’s. She also bought another bottle of bleach, since her supply at home was dangerously close to being reasonable.

She returned home to a warm afternoon. In Indiana, September meant a dramatic temperature swing from one day to the next. It was ninety today and would be 50 degrees by the weekend. The dry, hot summer had blighted the grass, leaving everything yellow and lifeless, devoid of color or variety. This was always a depressing time of year.

Hannah pulled into her driveway and grabbed her gym bag and purse, intent on opening her front door before getting the groceries out of her trunk. She remembered reading an article about the negative effects of carrying a purse or bag on the same shoulder all the time, so she tried the opposite shoulder, proud of herself for a small effort towards self-improvement. It almost made up for her post-work-out guilt.

The bag didn’t stay in place like she hoped. It slid off her shoulder, and when she leaned down to grab it, she dropped her keys on the ground. She reached down to pick them up, stood back up, and noticed a dark figure standing in her living room, staring out at her from the window, a stark black shape against the pools of sun tracing through the house.

Hannah stared at it for a long moment. She was not frightened. The rational part of her brain always emerged during those first few seconds of thought. But the remainder of her reasoning caught up with her, enough to remind her that her house had been locked. No one had a key. It was either an intruder or something worse.

The figure stayed put for a few seconds, staring out at her, undaunted.

Time slowed for Hannah. She felt no fear, only a sense of calm and certainty of what she would do. She moved to the front door, pulled open the screen door, and then opened the lock. Her hands were steady.

She pushed open the interior door and stepped inside, moving quietly to the living room.

It was empty. The space in front of her window was empty.

Hannah closed her eyes to adjust to the darkness of the house. After a few seconds, she blinked them open and studied the living room. It was still empty. She checked the living room closet, behind the couch, the kitchen, her room, under her bed, the bathroom, the shower, and the yard.

She then checked the windows to make sure they were locked. She could find no signs of entry, no broken windows, and no tampering of the locks. She ran through every step in her head, making sure she hadn’t missed anything. She had not.

There was nothing left to do, nothing to occupy her mind. Hannah was now free to panic. It had not been an intruder, not an actual, living, breathing one, that is. So it had to have been a trick of the light, maybe her imagination. She allowed herself the comfort of that explanation, because she couldn’t stomach the idea that the shadow standing in her living room had been connected in any way to her Wall Puppets. They could not start appearing in broad daylight, when she felt awake and alert, not now, not after all the work she’d done to keep them away.

Hannah refilled her bleach bottles and finished cleansing her house of mold. Logical or not, it was therapeutic, as if she had just taken back her home, as if the lingering smell of chlorine would somehow keep her safe from external and internal forces.

Chapter Two

The Cistern

Hannah studied her face in the bathroom mirror for a few moments. She did not like what she saw, and she wondered if other women felt the same. But then, no other woman had her face and the unpleasant shape of her nose and forehead mixed with her skin tone and limp, thinning hair, so Hannah couldn’t imagine they would feel half as displeased as she felt. Or maybe they did.

It had been three weeks since Hannah’s last episode, but her bathroom had developed a new ring of mold, climbing up from the floor like an outbreak of pox. She had cleaned it two days ago, but it was determined to endure.

She grabbed a bottle of bleach and sprayed the area a few times before she finished fixing her hair. She’d intended to do something more elaborate with it this morning, but it never wanted to cooperate. Instead, she pinned it into a bun she hoped wasn’t too dowdy, picked up her bags, and left for work.

She arrived a few minutes later than usual, aware that her pants hadn’t gotten any looser, despite three weeks of dieting. Eventually her metabolism would age to the point of not really doing anything, and she would gain another twenty pounds to add to a frame that was already frumpy.

As she stepped out of her car, she noticed five or six brownish white dots forming on her trousers. Several droplets of bleach had floated through the air to land on her pants and effectively ruin the only pair she had left that didn’t make her look like a dumpling stuffed in pinstripes.

She stomped to her office in a fury, catching a brief glimpse of her reflection in a window, which didn’t help matters. How did other women manage to look put together? What was she missing? Her mother hadn’t been around long enough for those kinds of lessons, how to dress, how to put on makeup, how to fix your hair and iron your clothes. And her father had never been concerned with clothing or fashion or proper color coordination.

Hannah dropped her bags once inside her office, took a moment to organize her desk, and started up her computer. The end of the month was coming, and she needed to have everything added and accounted for by the start of October.

Shari Atreides stepped into her office as she often did at this time in the morning. She always carried a giant mug of coffee with her. It had a Hard Rock Café design on the outside, and she’d owned it for years, taking it with her everywhere in the office, as if she’d lose her identity without it.

Some of the girls are going out Saturday night, Hannah, Shari said. You’re invited to come.

The company president, a few notches above Shari Atreides, maintained the attitude that the company was a family, a friendly work environment of individuals who were equally valued. It meant the cutthroat business of running a successful company was hidden behind a façade of pleasant smiles and agonizing passivity.

Shari, at least, had not bought into the idea completely, but she was dedicated to the notion of the business being a family, which made her overly concerned about the private lives of everyone around her.

You should come, she said before giving Hannah a chance to answer. It’ll do you some good.

I’ll be busy Saturday night, Hannah said, knowing full well that she would not.

Change your plans and come with us.

There it was, the unstoppable force of Shari’s will. However small she was physically—and she was very, very small—she made up for with a personality that would be intimidating coming from a taller woman. She navigated the world in an exaggerated manner, determined to be seen and heard, and most importantly, obeyed.

Hannah grumbled inwardly, realizing she would not find a way out of this, not unless she mounted an equal defense, which she didn’t have the capacity to do.

What are we doing exactly? she said.

Supper and drinks, Shari replied. We’ll pick you up. We want to take one car, so only one of us has to stay sober.

I’ll drive, said Hannah, mentally adding up the calories in most alcoholic beverages. She was determined not to ruin her diet this early in the game. It hadn’t even been a month.

Sounds great, said Shari. I’ll get you the directions to everyone’s house before the end of the day. It’ll be you, me, Tracy, and Cindy. We might meet a few friends of mine there as well, all girls. Girls night out.

Hannah tried to show some measure of enthusiasm as Shari bounced out the door, but she couldn’t perfect that expression.

She didn’t like to consider herself a recluse, but she did enjoy being at home, with peace and quiet and no obligations. She always felt lost around people, especially those she didn’t know. They were so different from her. Everything they cared about didn’t seem all that important, and Hannah struggled to make the right faces to show she cared. It was like being thrust back into grade school or adolescence, where every genuine part of her never quite fit.

The weekend came quickly, and Hannah planned to spend two hours preparing for the night out. She would put on makeup. She’d fix her hair. She’d wear her best outfit. Maybe she’d learn how to look halfway decent. But the two hours were wasted in frustration. She applied makeup, then washed it off, then put it on again. She eventually decided she looked better without it, because then, at least, all her facial deformities weren’t highlighted. So she washed it off yet again.

She had even less luck finding a good outfit and ended up in a skirt and long-sleeve shirt that was too conservative for the occasion. The other women were dressed in tank tops and short skirts and carried themselves with the type of self-assurance Hannah could only imagine. It left her wishing she had found a decent excuse to stay home.

Most of the women were married, divorced, or single mothers, with the exception of Tracy, who considered herself soon-to-be-engaged to her live-in boyfriend. And that left Hannah, who’d never had a boyfriend in her life but could never admit it in this type of company. It meant, as usual, she was the odd man out, a position she grew tired of filling.

They arrived at the club 30 minutes later, and they were all pretty rowdy, some more than others, which was the usual dynamic in a group of women. Some flirted shamelessly with a crowd of drunken college boys, while others tried to talk over the music, which Hannah felt was a waste of time and effort.

The noise and shouting and constant activity was uncomfortable. Hannah grew weary after an hour and started counting down the minutes until she could be home. She found a corner out of the way of everyone and managed to hide rather well for half an hour, until Shari and Tracy came to tell her they were heading to a quieter place.

It was a change Hannah liked, a small bar pricey enough to keep the college kids at bay, and quiet enough for human conversation. By now, half of the others were tipsy and lively, and Hannah found herself enjoying the food and the talk. There were a lot of both.

Shari, who’d had very little to drink, kept falling asleep at the table, which became a joke after a while, especially since she’d wake up every few minutes and insist she hadn't been sleeping. And Tracy, who Hannah found herself fixated on, seemed to bring the most life to the party. She was pretty, but it was hard to separate physical beauty from the sheer magnitude of her personality. Her face didn’t carry all the symmetry of a beautiful woman, but the way she talked, the way she smiled, how she naturally included everyone, even Hannah, in the conversation, made her seem the most radiant woman in the world.

It left Hannah feeling both inadequate and devoted. She could only dream of ever becoming a woman like Tracy, so clever and vivacious, gregarious and graceful, all at once. Hannah was the polar opposite instead, a gray, insubstantial thing so easy to overlook. Even if her face was symmetrical, if it carried the marks of beauty, it didn’t matter. Her beauty could not have meaning without warmth.

Tracy must have noticed Hannah drifting, because she tapped her on the shoulder just then. Did you see that guy checking you out at the club, Hannah? I think he stared at you for 10 minutes straight.

I didn’t notice anyone.

Don’t be so modest.

You should go back and pick him up, said Cindy, a younger girl, who was quiet but not because of shyness. She seemed to hold her tongue for other reasons, reasons that made Hannah