It was after sunup, the earliest of the golden hours. The parking lot was empty of cars and surrounded by bright, living summer. The air was cool and fresh with mist from the falls. Rainbows danced above the bridge that spans the outlet of the upper pool. Eve and Ivy were eagerly looking out the tinted windows at the trees and ferns that ran from the mossy slopes of granite right to the pavement.

Stan Sanders got out of the car and went around to Ivy's door to let the girls out. The twins hadn't had an episode for a month. As a treat; Stan brought them to Multnomah Falls, just a few miles up the gorge from River City. Being out in nature was usually a safe bet. The girls were always at ease out here.

The moment he stepped out of the car, the woods were working their magic on him as well. The move from Chicago to the green of the Northwest had been a big help for all of them. The warm green and gold of the springs and summers here set all their nerves to rights.

 “Okay, girls.” Stan said as he opened the door. “No running off for a while. Let's walk together and see what's around.”

“Okay, daddy.” They responded in unison as Ivy hopped to the ground. It always gave him a shiver when they did that. Eve climbed down from the seat a moment later and the pair bounced off up a narrow path with Stan following behind.

There was no one to see most of the day. Stan let the girls go off by themselves after a little while. He spread out the blanket in a little clearing by the edge of the falls. His thoughts drifted with the river, back to Chicago and Tiffany. The warmth of the sun and summer in his lungs were medicine enough for that old darkness.

When the momentum of his thoughts lagged, he watched the water roll by. Stan couldn't say for how long, but after a while he looked around at the path behind him. He raised children for nine years. That was long enough to know when things were too quiet for too long. He tore himself from the peace of the water tumbling by and got up to look for the twins. In fifteen minutes of searching, there was no sign of them.

Panic was beginning to needle at his calm. He called their names as he wandered the trail, but there was no response. His mind raced with grotesque fantasies of what may have happened. Then, as he wandered past a clearing he was sure he'd passed before, he saw a patch of white blouse through the leaves of the bushes to his left.

Stan went to look, settling down when he saw that the girls were in one piece. They were kneeling in the depression left by a fallen tree, staring into the knot of its roots with imperturbable attention. Their heads were cocked, as if they were listening to a far-off voice.

The needles of anxiety returned with a vengeance. He had to get them back home before they had an episode. “Ivy, Eve. Come on girls, we have to go.”

“Mommy is in there.” Eve said, pointing at the dirty root-ball before them.

“No, sweetie, mommy is in heaven.”

“That's not what she says. She sounds mad.” It was Ivy this time. Oh yes, all signs pointed to trouble.

“We have to go now, girls. Come on, let's go back to the car.”

“Aww. We wanna talk to mommy. Can't we stay a little longer?”

“It's getting late,” he began, in a firm tone. “Don't you want to watch Nicktoons?” The promise of cartoons was a litmus test. The farther away from normal the girls got, the less television mattered.

“No, we want to stay with mommy!” They said together. Their eyes returned to the tangle of roots. Stan looked for himself, but saw nothing.

He grabbed them each by the arm and began to pull them away, the fear of the impending trouble shoved his better judgment aside.

“Come on girls, we've got to go. I think it's time for a little quiet at home.”

“Let go, they're mine.” The girls spoke in unison, a stereo broadcast of their mother's voice. It was too late. Trouble had arrived.

“Not now, Tiffany.” Stan said.

“Ha! You don't you fuckin' tell me what to do.” Her voice was deep and fierce, full of unearthly wrath. The next moment the baleful glare left the twins' eyes. Her tone softened to a purr, as if someone flipped a switch. “I missed you, sweetie. Have you missed me?”

He looked down in silence. Four eyes looked up at him in soft adoration. Two little smiles reflected the same. Their mouths turned down and the baleful voice returned. “You want to go home so bad? Get the fuck out of here. Leave me to myself.” Tiffany said, in stereo.

“Why can't you leave us in peace? We were happy.” Stan was beside himself having to deal with Tiffany in such an uncontrolled environment. His mind raced to find a way to get her, them, in the car. He yelled. “You're ruining our daughters' lives.”

“You never understood. They are my life.” Both of the girls glared at him, sharing the same baleful smile. Their resemblance to their mother was never clearer than in their furies. “Thanks to you,” the girls finished.

Seeing it cut Stan deeply. “Here we go again. You know, you never gave a shit for anyone but yourself.”

“Fuck you! I gave my life for you. We were supposed to be destroyers, goddammit.” Stan took a step down the path, but Ivy grabbed his forearm.

“Remember the night we killed Gordon? You were supposed to understand then. I will keep on trying to show you until you get it. You owe me, you self-righteous prick.”

Stan turned to walk back to the car. She would follow. Once she'd sunk her teeth in, she was in for good.

“Fuck anybody while I've been away?” The voice of his dead wife was cheery behind him. It brought back not so cheery memories of her asking a similar question.

One night, after they moved back to Chicago to dodge the murder investigation in Longview, he woke up with trouble breathing. The trouble was Tiffany who was sitting on his chest, pressing and eight-inch kitchen knife against his neck. She whispered, “I know you've been fuckin' someone else, who is it?”

He babbled and then shouted refusals, truths of overtime shifts and odd-jobs to set aside a nest egg and to cover her habit ran from his lips. A trickle of blood seeped down his neck to stain the pillow. She was eight months pregnant at the time.

“No one,” he said through gritted teeth as he walked away down the hill. “There never was.”

It was always the same answer, a truth that he felt keenly aware of after nine years. Taking care of his daughters was overtime work. On top of the bookkeeping he did during the day, there was no other time to be found. “Is that all you think about?” Stan asked, immediately regretting it.

“Bullshit!” The girls screamed. A rock whizzed by his right ear. A warning.

He didn't respond, but quickened his pace down the hill. He could see the parking lot from this spot on the winding trail. A Volkswagon beetle was the only other vehicle around. He stared at it, wondering where the driver might be.

A young couple came up the path. The girl was cute and Stan couldn't help but notice. He felt a hot gaze drilling holes in the back of his head.

Eve and Ivy were silent, coming to stand on either side their father as the hikers passed. The hippie girl looked at the twins. “Aren't you two cuties?” She and her boyfriend smiled and the girls smiled back.

A moment later, Stan heard a venomous whisper. “I bet you wanted to fuck her.” He could feel the icy power of Tiffany's jealousy in his stomach.

He made his way to the car in silence. “Well?” She said. “Why don't you go back there and do something about it? You fuckin' pussy.” Stan knew better than to respond when she was baiting him.

He opened the back door to let the possessed girls in the car and went around to sit in the driver's seat. There was the speechless rustle of motion in the back seat. “All in?” Stan's teeth were gritted and his words came out with a sharp edge.

It was all he could do to keep his temper in check. He put the keys in the ignition, then turned around to see an empty back seat. Stan pounded the wheel and got out to round up his daughters.

Stan came around the car and there was no sign of Eve. He looked at Ivy, who smiled up at him. Light flashed across her eyes as something moved above and behind him. Something hard collided with his head. Stan fell to the pavement, his vision blurring as consciousness retreated from the pain in waves.

He saw Eve then, standing on top of the car, holding the tire iron. He put a hand to where she hit his head. The hand came away bloody. Stan groaned at the sight of it, then there was only black.

Dreams of past things came out of the dark. The woods at his uncle's property were brought into stark view. He and Tiffany would go there to commune with her spirits and screw each other's brains out.

 She was lying next to him. He could feel the leaves sticking to his naked back as he rolled over to hold her. She whispered, “Destroyers. You and me.”

“Destroyers...”, the word echoed through his mind. The dream turned. Tiffany was next to him in the cab of his truck in Longview.

They sat in a clearing off the road that the cops liked to use to catch daytime speeders. At night the road was dead. This was the spot Tiffany wanted. As they waited for Gordon's Porsche to come by, Stan was assailed by doubts and his stomach turned. He couldn't remember anything else she said.

They sniffed some of the powder from his bag off the back of their hands. The lights of an oncoming car got brighter. Stan's heart raced and his neck tightened. He looked at her and saw the steel sparkling in her eyes.

The monster eating its way through the stitches tattooed on her right shoulder caught his eye. It seemed to be making progress tonight. It looked at him and winked, assuring him that it would come for him when it was free.

He leaned over for a deep, soul kiss that drove the monsters away. She revved the engine and slammed the truck in gear. The big blue ford lurched out of the clearing as the little sports car came around the corner, going too fast as usual. The silver little racer and the blue workhorse merged at the nose.

Tiffany's head hit the dash, but her seatbelt kept most of the force out of it. Stan was sitting higher than her, holding on to the handle above the door to keep from sliding. He looked out the window and saw the wheel spinning over the crushed front fender of Gordon's car. “Shit,” Stan said in a slurred voice.

Tiffany moved when he spoke, unbuckling her seatbelt. “Ha motherfucker,” she said. She got out of the truck and Stan could see her limping as she moved around the rear of the truck to his side.

In a few moments she was standing by the driver's side window. She bent over to look at Gordon's caved-in face. Tiffany looked at Stan, face lit with satisfaction.“You did it, baby! It worked.”

Stan tried the door, but it was crumpled to uselessness. He slid across the bench, discovering that his back was injured in the process, and winced as he started to walk toward her. She was pulling at Gordon's door when Stan came to stand beside her.

He looked at the gore splattered on the dash and his stomach rejected its contents. Tiffany came over to him and rubbed his back. “It's okay. It's over. Let's get out of here.”

The dream turned again and he was back in Chicago. Tiffany came through the door, in the wee hours of the morning. Pregnant, but high. She thought he was sleeping, but he crept out from the bedroom to listen around the corner as she hurried around the main room. He overheard her carrying on a conversation to herself as she walked. “Destroyers...” was the only word he could make out in her muttering.

Stan's vision cleared and the dream faded. The pain in his head reasserted itself. Grunting and holding his wound, Stan rose to get his bearings.

It was dark. He smelled the forest and heard the falls. Stan placed himself after an unsure moment. “Multnomah falls...parking lot...the twins!”

He jerked into a stagger. Across the empty pavement, he could see the young couples bug. Both doors stood open. Stan looked around and settled on the glow of the bathrooms.

Stan rushed to the concrete, L-shaped wall that blocked sight of the doors. A trickle of dark liquid dribbled off the concrete pad and into the dirt as a puddle spread from under the door of the women's side. He knew it was blood by the smell.

Stan opened the door. The hikers' bodies lay naked on the floor in a growing puddle of blood. The young man's eyes and genitals had been removed, but his girlfriend got worse.

Her head was a foot away, placed to face her corpse. A look of agony was frozen on her fleshless face. Her breasts had been removed and between her legs was a mess of gore, from which depended the lug side of the tire iron.

Eve's face was buried in her abdomen. Sucking and crunching sounds could be heard as the little girl chewed. Intestines flopped out as she worked her head further into the gory cavity.

Stan was going to vomit. He turned and moved toward the parking lot, aiming for the dirt if he was going to hurl. He rounded the concrete wall and was face down in the dirt before he could take another step. Ivy stepped from behind the wall, holding a crowbar.

“Lucky find. These kids had good taste in road defense.” Ivy said as she turned the hook end in the air. “She was a bad girl, wasn't she Stan? That little slut had no business looking at my girls or my man.” She looked him dead in the eyes. “Don't you agree?”

Ivy smiled and laughed, in her mother's way. “Isn't it so us, sweetie?” She laughed deeply then and it must have alerted her sister. The blood covered girls looked down at him. Eve held something behind her back.

“I have a special surprise,” they said. Her hands came around and in them Stan saw a butane lighter. “I never showed you about fire, did I?” She flicked the torch to life and approached. “I learned about it in Chicago. You gave up on us when you heard about the girls. I had to keep doing the work myself. You left me a long time before I left you, Stan. I never fuckin' gave up on us.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “We were building something. Together, goddammit! You wanted to get fuckin' domestic!”

Eve brought the torch to his arm and Stan squirmed. She clamped an iron grip and held him until he cried out. Then she smiled and looked at her sister. They nodded.

The girls grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him to the car. They shoved him to the ground and said, “Get in.” Stan shook his head, but Ivy brought the crowbar down on his knee again and Stan heard a wet crack. “Drive.” They said. Stan started to shout for help, but the lights went out.

When Stan came to, he was in his basement. His arms were shackled to the wall, in the very place he'd made up for the girls in their bad times. He looked at his dangling hands. He remembered worrying about this very thing when he'd put the restraints in.

Ivy and Eve...Tiffany stood in front of him. Eve held a kitchen knife, possibly the same one that had put the little scar on his neck. Ivy held a propane plumber's torch. They said, “Maybe now that you're the one locked to the wall, you'll finally listen. I've made a lot of friends since I've been away. Old friends.”

Ivy sparked the torch and set it to an even, surgical looking flame. She giggled as she stepped closer. The flame filled his vision. Stan shook against the chains, but he knew it was no use. “Trust me,” Tiffany said. “You need this. There is so much to see.” When the torch touched his skin, Stan began to scream.

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