The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home

by Joseph Fink

  “True, but we are acting. Edmond is managing the operation. Our mercenaries are in place. All that can be done is being done. Nothing about either of us being there or not being there would change how this will turn out. The only thing it could change is the length of our lives.”

  Still I could not be convinced, and what I felt was shame. I felt that my father was a coward, and that he was forcing me also to be a coward, while others did the brave work of preserving our lives for us. My father, seeing this resentment in my eyes, led me to the window, from which we could see where my mother was buried, a view neither of us ever acknowledged or talked about. But this time he gestured toward her.

  “I have a responsibility,” he said. “And my responsibility isn’t to be the most wealthy, or cunning, or brave. It isn’t to conquer the world. It’s to see that you flourish, not as a criminal, nor someone indebted for life to criminals, but as a good woman. That is what I owe your mother, and what I owe you, and what I owe myself. Maybe you don’t understand this now. Maybe you never will, and you will resent me forever for my caution. But none of those things will change the truth of my debt.”

  He turned me away from the window.

  “Now,” he said, “what should I make for dinner?”

  Of course, that night I went. Quietly out of my bedroom, and quietly through the house, and quietly out the door and then, abandoning quiet, tearing through the grass toward the shore cliffs and the ambush point ahead. It would happen soon, perhaps that night, and I needed to be there. It’s not that I didn’t understand my father’s warning. It’s that despite my understanding, my faith in what was right would not let me do otherwise.

  The night was warm, summer peering over the horizon of spring. Bright too, a full moon turning the nighttime into a slightly faded day. I could see the coast for a mile ahead of me, and the white caps of the waves breaking against it. If I had thought about it, I would have realized what a strange night that would have been for the Order of the Labyrinth to attack, when the cover of darkness wasn’t dark. But I was not thinking; I was believing.

  I believed in my father and his righteousness. I believed in Edmond and his ability. I believed that our plan was foolproof. I believed in myself and my cunning. And most of all I believed that my time had come. Too long I had been a child, hiding behind the work of my father. It was time for my name to be known. For my face to be remembered. I would be my own person in this world of smugglers and thieves, and they would know who I was.

  All of this went through my head as I, a child still, ran barefoot through that night until I arrived, panting, at the shoreline where Edmond stood, hands on hips, waiting to see if tonight was the night he would face attack.

  He turned at my approach, his face passing through confusion and shock and worry.

  “What are you thinking?” he said. “You must get home at once.”

  I was already speaking, already pleading my case. “. . . my legacy too. And when I’m old and looking back, do I want to have been hiding in my bedroom? It’s time for me to take responsibility. It’s time for me to help. You think so too. You said so. And I’m just doing what you said. But also I’m doing what I choose to do, because that’s what it means to be grown up. And I am grown up. And I can help. I have sharper eyes than all the rest of you. I’ll be able to see them coming from farther away. Please let me stay, Uncle Edmond. Please.”

  It had all sounded so much more dignified and eloquent in my head. Within me was a great general, surveying her troops and speaking stirring words, and it made me cringe to open my mouth and hear a child whining for approval. But Edmond heard the noble foundation under my mewling words, and he nodded thoughtfully. Or more likely he looked back at the night-shrouded coast and thought through the calculus of sending a child back on her own versus keeping her somewhere safe nearby.

  “Okay,” he said. “You can stay.” He pointed up at a cliff well out of the way. “But up there. You keep an eye out and shout the moment you see ships.”

  I did not understand, or chose not to understand, the rationale of keeping me out of harm’s way, but I nodded sternly, a soldier on a mission, and I ran, grateful, and ashamed of my gratitude, up to the cliff.

  The night would have been the kind of quiet, beautiful night that I liked to watch from the window of my bedroom, the hiss of the waves and the wind through the trees harmonizing, and the world turned by the bright moon into a softer, bluer version of itself, permeated with the smell of night-blooming flowers. But now there was a sense of threat and danger under all of the beauty and it felt like the ocean itself was pounding as hard as my own heart. I strained my eyes watching the seas, determined that if I was to be relegated to this cliff, then I would certainly be the first one to see the oncoming ships, and it would be those few minutes of extra advance notice my young eyes provided that would make all of the difference in setting up our ambush. The line between success and failure would be drawn by my decision to come out this night. If another lookout saw the ships before me, then it was true that I was only a nuisance, an extra concern for Edmond on a night when he already had more than enough.

  But try as I might, I could see no ships at all on the calm sea. The men sat around a fire on the beach, laughing and chatting. Edmond stood apart from them, staring at nothing in particular, with his arms crossed, frowning. He occasionally looked up at the moon, tracking the progress of the night. He was more worried than I had expected him to be, and it occurred to me that perhaps I had underestimated just how dangerous this position was. Perhaps I should return to my bed. But no, I was not a coward. And if I wanted to be counted in this world, then I needed the courage to stand up and be counted.

  Hours passed. I could feel myself start to waver into sleep. There were no ships coming that night. Perhaps the ships would never come. Perhaps they had found a more worthy target, and we could go back to our usual business, and years later think back and laugh about this week where we all became so worried about a great attack that never came. This thought made me happy and I smiled sleepily. Then I shook my head and stood to wake up my body. Now was not the time to fantasize about what could happen. Now was the time to focus on what was happening.

  I concentrated harder on searching the sea, hoping that this would keep me awake. And it was in this sweep from my vantage that I happened to turn and look back in the direction of our estate. I cried out, not anything as useful as words, but the strangled, grunting shout of someone who has been unexpectedly struck in the gut. Where the estate was, a thick black column of smoke rose into the bright night sky.

  8

  Edmond and the rest must have heard my cry, but I did not wait to see their reaction or consult with them on what to do next. By the time I understood what I was doing, I was already flying across the edge of the cliffs, a headlong sprint toward my home. The closer I got, the more unmistakable it was that the smoke was from our estate. And where was my father? I wished I could run faster, that my spirit could fly from this too-slow body, and I could transform into a being untethered to the physical world.

  But on that night I could only move on the length of my awkward teenage legs.

  When I rounded the last turn of the coast and the trees fell away, and I saw my home burning, those legs almost gave out on me. I stumbled and fell, my nose slamming painfully into the ground. I pulled myself up, tried to keep running at the same speed but my ankle was twisted and I could only manage a limping jog. I cried out my father’s name, over and over, and then I saw him. He was hunched over, perhaps hurt, but he was alive, and I began weeping out of sheer relief.

  “It’s you, it’s you,” was all I could manage, and I came up to him but by then I had already realized something was wrong. This was not my father. This was a familiar lurching figure, the one I had seen three times before. The figure turned toward me.

  The man’s face was completely pale, his eyes and mouth twisted into a look of absolute shock and pain. The front of his shirt was wet with blood. He ga
sped but couldn’t seem to form words. There was something wrong with his throat, or his lungs. He could only wheeze. I stumbled backward. He reached out one hand toward me and I ran around him, stifling a scream, toward my burning home. By the time I thought to look behind me, the man had disappeared.

  The attack had been swift and total. Doors kicked in. Windows broken. The inside of the house was a pure inferno, and try as I might, I could not even get close to it, let alone inside. Drawn in ash over the hollow, flame-filled entrances was an emblem I recognized very well. The sign of the Order of the Labyrinth. I called and called for my father, stumbling around the fields and the orange trees and the cove, but there was no sign of him, only violence everywhere I turned. Even the orange trees had been hacked at and burned, although their wet leaves and living wood only smoldered and smoked rather than cradling the bright bursts of flames the attackers must have hoped for.

  In despair at my inability to find my father, I stopped in a field and looked at the moon, the same bright, mute moon that had watched me run from this house just hours before. And I had a thought that drove me further into darkness. I started toward my mother’s grave atop the small hill overlooking the cove. Soon I came across a blood trail in the grass and I started to run faster. And then, some twenty feet from her grave, I found the body of my father.

  9

  Here is what my father’s death smelled like.

  It smelled like blood, which smelled like metal and panic. We have evolved to find the scent of the inside of our bodies upsetting. We recognize the smell of shit and snot and piss and all of the other fluids do not belong to the natural healthy order of a civilized society, and so they repulse us. But a smell like blood goes further than that. In this much quantity, where it fills the air, the smell floods us with adrenaline, and so it is not so much a smell as an experience of the flesh. My father’s death smelled like blood and so it smelled like tingling hands and a dry mouth and a scalp two sizes too small and skin that twitched.

  My father’s death smelled like smoke, which, combined with the blood, almost smelled like the preparation of a meal, but the disconnect between what I knew to be true and what the smell reminded me of caused an emotional motion sickness, and I staggered away from his body to throw up. Then his death smelled like my vomit, which smells like acid and disease.

  My father’s death smelled much like his life. It smelled like his clothes, and it smelled like his skin, which smelled exactly like his skin when he was alive. It smelled like his hair, and his hands, and the sharp peppery note of the grass he was laying on. The night breeze in from the sea still smelled like ice and salt and a deep organic undercurrent that was the combined smell of all things living in it. In other words, my father’s death smelled most of all like any other night, like any other time that was not the end of everything I had ever known. There was nothing in the smell to indicate just how deep and terrifying was the reality, and that was the worst part of the smell of all.

  That is what my father’s death smelled like.

  Edmond arrived soon after. He put one arm around me and one around my father’s body. “What have we done?” he said. “What have we done?”

  He cried. I had never seen him cry, and the surprise of this startled me out of my stupor for a moment. I reached up and wiped one cheek.

  “I was foolish to think we could have set a trap for the Order of the Labyrinth,” whispered Edmond through his weeping. “They instead set a trap for us. Drew me and my men away from the estate, and then attacked, following the same principle we had thought to follow. Strike first and strike so viciously and completely that no response is possible.”

  He shook his head and waved vaguely at the devastation behind us.

  “I am a fool and a failure,” he said.

  His defeat roused action in me.

  “We must go,” I said. “We must go before they return. There is nothing for us here.”

  He nodded, seeming only an automatic gesture in response to my words. I helped him up, and together we went to fetch a wagon that hadn’t been destroyed in the fire, and some horses that Edmond had tethered back at the planned ambush site. The smell of the still-burning building was a physical pain for me. It would take me many decades, longer than any human life, to come to appreciate the inhuman beauty of the smell of burning. Until then, it only brought me back again and again to that place and that night.

  Edmond refused help from his men and carried my father into the wagon himself. As I was about to follow my father’s body onto the wagon, I saw someone approaching from the woods. I turned, ready to fight, ready to defend, ready to die. But it was Albert. He looked about him with numb shock at the ruined estate, at me with my father’s blood on my clothes.

  “What has happened? Who has done this?” he croaked out. He saw the wagon. “You’re not leaving. Where will you go?”

  Where would I go? I would go with Edmond. I would travel the world and learn the ways of criminals, and live the life of a criminal, and use all of the skills my father taught me, with only one goal in mind: to utterly destroy the Order of the Labyrinth for what they had done to me.

  “Go home, Albert,” I said. Tears streamed down my face, and he began to weep too. I touched his cheek, only to comfort him, only to wipe away his tears, and then I found myself drawing his face toward mine and we kissed then, a long kiss, one that would have to stand in for the years of time together we would never get to have. His lips tasted salty, but his face smelled clean, like linen fresh from water. Finally, the kiss broke off, and I turned before I could begin to waver. “Good-bye,” I said, with my back turned, and got onto the wagon.

  “Good-bye,” I heard Albert respond softly. I did not know if I would ever hear his voice again. I thought that probably I would not.

  Craig

  2013

  You found the letters. I knew you would, Craig. You were supposed to. But I didn’t account for your fretful nature.

  It’s good news though. After two stressful years of threatening letters and calls, Mastercard abruptly sent you a statement showing your account balance of $15,417.71 was paid in full. They also thanked you for your loyalty as they closed your account. I watched you stare at those statements for nearly an hour. I enjoyed how you reached for the phone, like you were going to call them to correct the error, but then you would retract your hand. I could see the moral machinations, and it was a delight.

  Maybe they won’t notice, I’m thinking you thought. Maybe I benefited from a computer error?

  Then you stopped thinking about it for a while, and you looked genuinely happy. I want you to be happy. Genuinely. Craig, I will be with you from your birth to your death. It doesn’t benefit me in any way to have you living a miserable life. Sure there will be misery. There always is. Trust me. But if I can keep you happy while you’re trying to have a family, then I will.

  I celebrated your new debt-free lifestyle by carefully placing tiny spiders along the back collar line of your shirt, where you wouldn’t notice them for hours. Meanwhile your happiness waned, and you came to some internal ethical conclusion about what you should do. I hate that I can’t see inside your mind. I hate that I can’t put my fingers into your hairy little earholes and just poke your pink-gray lump of thoughts until it focuses on what’s important. Ethics are not important. I’m trying to promise you this. Everything here is ethical in the way that anything is ethical, depending on whose decision it was in the first place. And this was my decision. You weren’t doing anything about it, so I did.

  You grabbed for the phone and you called Mastercard. I miss the old days of phones plugged into walls. I could just bite through the cord with my surprisingly sharp teeth, and voila, no more conversation. Or better yet, the old old days before phones, when it was easy to rewrite letters or throw them away before the postal carrier picked them up or, if absolutely necessary, cause a fatal accident for the postal carrier before they could be delivered.

  But these wireless devices, I
can’t do anything about. I know I sound like an old woman, complaining about cell phones, but that’s because I am.

  Devin, your account representative at Mastercard, answered and heard you explain what you thought was a computer error, and that you never paid that amount. You then heard him say he’d have to check with his supervisor. Then you heard a crash in your bedroom. Devin heard the crash in your bedroom.

  Then Devin heard you stifle a scream, which came out as a whimpered grunt.

  Devin tried to ask, “Is now a good time?” but you had already tossed the phone onto the couch and run into the bedroom, where you found a gray fox on your bed. It had knocked your lamp off the nightstand (the crash you heard).

  The fox had only one eye. Its left eye socket was swollen, but not entirely closed. The fur around it was brown from dried blood, which accentuated the two swaths of bright pink flesh hiding dark yellow fluid. The fox was cackling, like a baby laughing at a thought that exists outside of the bounds of language. It was not a sound you ever expected to come from an animal, and you looked frightened. You should have been. Foxes are not aggressive toward humans in the wild, but this little thing was not in the wild. It was cornered, scared, and wounded.

  You stammered and backed up. The fox arched its back and growled. From the living room sofa, where you forgot to end your call, Devin was asking “Sir, is everything okay?” But Devin himself became distracted as the cursor on his computer screen began typing on its own. It wrote out the date and cause of Devin’s eventual death (May 17, 2031. The latch holding up a second-floor fire escape ladder will fail just as Devin walks below it, crushing his skull and breaking his neck.). Then his web browser showed him photos of human corpses with crushed skulls—mostly from auto accidents and deliberate physical assaults, but a few from falling objects like window-unit air conditioners. Devin passed out and broke two of his teeth falling from his desk chair. Broken teeth are unfortunate, although not nearly as unfortunate as the broken skull will be.