She had to get away. Marie didn’t move, couldn’t move.
The monster spoke. Its sinuous words linked together and created visible chains of power that writhed through the air. It gestured and they reached for her. Marie screamed. Wrapping her cloak about her like a shield, she ran. The chains lashed out. She swooped and swirled, dodging the coils. The chains missed and fell empty to the floor.
There was a promise of pain if they caught her. She knew it would hurt. Mama had screamed so terribly as the chains dragged her away. The monster had shown no mercy. At least Baby Boo had gone quickly, too little to struggle.
The chains rose up again as more heavy, grating words fell from the monster’s mouth and the power swelled. They reached out like long, twisted fingers.
Fear twisted in Marie’s stomach. She whirled around, searching desperately for an escape. The monster ground out more evil words and flung acid at her. The liquid stung everywhere it touched.
Marie dove out the bedroom window. Broken glass lining the window frame sliced through the tatters of her cloak. The monster was too large to follow her out the window. She hoped anyway.
Safe for a moment, Marie searched for something, anything that might give her a chance. She had to hide. If the monster couldn’t find her, it couldn’t steal her soul.
What would Mama do?
Weather-beaten shutters rattled in the breeze. The attic. She could hide up there. It would give up soon. It had to.
Pushing aside the loose shutters, Marie crept into the deep gloom. The old attic was huge. Heaps of musty junk offered several hiding places. She ignored them. Too obvious. She went higher. Huddled up on a rafter beam, Marie shivered so hard she nearly vibrated off the high perch. What to do? The monster was strong. Far stronger than her.
Footsteps stomped below.
Thump. Thump, thump.
Like a granddaddy clock keeping time until the final toll.
Thump, thump, thump.
It wasn’t giving up.
Marie sobbed into her knees. She wanted Mama. She didn’t want to be eaten. If the monster’s chains caught her, she’d disappear forever. Her soul would never return. She’d seen that happen so many times already. It had eaten everyone’s souls: Mama, Big Brother, Baby Boo. Papa had gone first while trying to protect them all.
Why couldn’t it just leave her alone?
Thump, thump, thump.
The footsteps came closer.
Marie stared wide-eyed at the trapdoor. How did it keep finding her? She sensed the monster’s malevolence as it oozed through the house, aimed solely at her. Fierce determination gripped her. She had to do it. For everyone. It had to go, even if it took her with it. At least then it couldn’t hunt down anyone else. Marie crawled along the rafters, searching for an idea.
Black mold drew her attention. There was a weak spot in the floorboards where the rain always leaked in from the holey roof. Marie knelt on the timbers above it. In the darkness, the floor appeared strong and whole, but she knew it really wasn’t. It had to work.
Across the attic, the trapdoor flipped open. The monster was coming up. Marie swallowed another wail and scurried to the farthest end of the attic. The chains came up first, like an escort of serpents guarding their demon king.
The monster churned out more of his hateful words and drove the chains into the depths of the attic, but the monster’s power fell short. It climbed all the way into the attic.
Marie huddled into the darkest corner. She held her breath, damming up the terrified scream in her chest. Her fingers and toes turned blue from the effort of not making a sound. A strange frost grew over the windows as the monster stepped closer. Its head swayed back and forth as it searched.
Thump, thump, thump.
Closer. She was suffocating with the need to scream, to let it out. The attic floor creaked. Closer.
Thump, thump, thump.
It was almost here. The chains writhed across the floor. Marie curled her toes as the chains slithered too close. The monster stomped into the center of the attic. The floor groaned and shuddered under its solid mass.
Now.
Marie flew out of the shadows. She wailed with all her might. The attic windows shattered from the pitch. Blood gushed from its ears, the monster roared in pain and covered them with its hands. The word chains disintegrated as it stopped chanting. Marie screamed harder. She used all of her fear and grief and pushed with willed, violent force. Rotten timbers gave way, and the monster fell through the floor. It yelled a useless sound of shock. She heard its body land with a wet thud and a sickening crunch.
Marie drifted to hover over the new hole in the floor. The monster sprawled, broken on the floor below. It was dying. Lifeblood pooled under its body, leaking steadily from a crushed skull and staining the embroidered purple silk draped around its snapped neck.
She had done it. Relief made her fluttery. She had beaten the monster. Marie let herself float down through the hole to study the poignant death. This was the moment of her evolution. She was not weak anymore. She was the hunter, not the hunted.
The glass vial of clear acid rolled from its fingers as they spasmed. Marie pressed a single finger against the vial, and ice crawled across the glass until the hateful, blessed water within was solid. It couldn’t hurt her in containment.
Only one thing marred the pleasure of her victory. The book, with a golden cross stamped on the leather binding. It scalded her eyes to even look at it. She lifted the book with a mere thought and cast it out a window. That abomination she would not suffer in her house. The human monster couldn’t use the book’s words to bind her soul anymore. She was safe.
Triumph gave her a new strength. Her soul was secured here to this place now and forever. Marie let out a victorious wail that shattered all the remaining glass in the house. The old house was hers now. A cold wind rippled the transparent edges of her cloak.
All fell quiet; neither a clock ticked to keep the time, nor a heartbeat of life.
Silence.
Marie smiled.
It’s days like today when I’m reminded of something my father once said. The family was seated around the dinner table enjoying a glazed ham on Easter Sunday when my father looked at the empty space above the table and proceeded to shout.
“Goddamnit, stop dancing in the mashed potatoes!”
We were all very confused but nervously laughed it away. A couple of days later, we had him committed.
Why am I reminded of that today? Because as I sat at the breakfast table twenty years later, a spoon filled with milk and cereal, I saw the unmistakable sight of Adolf Hitler tea-bagging my Cheerios.
Within the next twelve hours, I’ll have lost my house, my job, my friends, and my life. But for now, all I lost was my appetite.
“Aren’t you going to finish?” Hitler asked in a German accent as he did little squats, raising his unfortunately hairy scrotum out of the bowl before dipping it back in.
His tone was cheerful, not angry like one would expect from a man whose name is synonymous with evil. It struck me as the sort of tone a comedian might use if doing a parody of Hitler. It was like an audible tea-bagging to go along with the visual tea-bagging.
I tell myself it’s just another strange day in New Haven. We have a very colorful, odd town. The founder of our town was arrested after some very public acts with the neighbor’s dog. We were all horrified, and yet oddly proud when the account of it was published in Playboy. My great-grandpa died after getting into a shouting match with a plastic tree over the validity of the Earth being flat. The last time anyone saw him, he announced, “I’ll show you!” and started walking. We’re unsure what side he took in that debate, or where he ended up, but we like to joke he fell off the edge of the world.
I forced myself to put the spoon in my mouth, knowing full well where it had been. I felt if I could be the master of my mind, prove to my senses he was not real, that he would go away. It wasn’t until the spoon was in my mouth, and I could taste a
difference, that I realized Hitler was translucent. I’ve seen plenty of pictures of the German dictator, and I can’t recall one picture where he was translucent. That was the second clue that there was something off about my morning.
Unfortunately, I had no time to play detective. I was supposed to open the pizzeria today and had wasted my breakfast time staring at the saggy, hairy scrotum of Adolf Hitler. I scooped the bowl up and poured the remainder of the milk and cereal down my gullet, choking briefly at the cereal clogging my throat.
I suppose I should mention a thank you to Hitler for performing the Heimlich maneuver.
At least, I think that’s what he was doing back there.
Because the Pizzazz Pizzeria, named by the CEO Zanzibar Zotz, was just a few blocks down the road, I walked to and from it every day. Some say he’s obsessed with the letter Z; I say he was born into it. Anyway, the pizzeria being so close was a good way to get a little exercise, fresh air, and to stay connected to friends and neighbors.
I politely asked Mrs. Cahill how her flower garden was going as I passed, and then waved to the Miller children across the street as they ran and jumped through the spray of a garden hose. You’d think the latter would be a precious sight to see on a hot summer day, but the Miller children were in their thirties and legally retarded. I didn’t know it was possible to be illegally retarded, but their painted-on bathing suits made me question if their particular brand of retardedness should have been illegal. But that’s the kind of town we lived in.
You’d think seeing Adolf Hitler dipping himself into my Honey Nut Cheerios would have been concerning, but in New Haven, it didn’t even rank in the top ten oddities I had seen that week; I mean, maybe twelve or thirteen. I hadn’t decided where to rank it, given Mayor Bugenhagen recently crashing his dirigible The Queen Mary into the town square. I think I softened on it when he admitted there was more time and cost efficient means of getting to city hall.
All right, Hitler Nut Cheerios ranks twelve, just higher than the sinking of The Queen Mary.
I reached the block where the Pizzazz Pizzeria called home, stepped over remnants of The Queen Mary dirigible, and opened the restaurant. It was early morning and we don’t get much traffic at this hour. As it turned out, our breakfast pizzas were not a hit with the locals.
Oatmeal and sausage pizza was voted in the newspapers to be the worst atrocity in New Haven since that one nerd at the high school crossbred rabbit DNA with bacon. The streets were filled with people stripping live rabbits to the bone for their tasty, tasty meat flesh. It was also voted Science’s Most Delicious Mistake. So there were some upsides to genetic engineering. There were no upsides to our breakfast pizzas, however.
I spent the morning alternating between wiping down the tables and pressing my face against the front glass, begging people to try our orange juice & prunes pizza to no avail. I thought I saw one of those bacon rabbits at one point, but it was just Mayor Bugenhagen’s son climbing out of the wreck of the dirigible, still smoldering from the crash.
I was in the middle of figuring out which office supplies could be deep-fried—all of them, for the record—when our first customer walked in. And what a looker, too. Six-inch ruby-red high heels, a little French beret, a plunging neckline, and a dress so short it left little to the imagination.
I really wish Adolf Hitler would wear more appropriate clothing.
“Guten tag!” he said, throwing his arm out at a forty-five-degree angle and then waving.
“I cannot deal with you right now, I’m busy!” I said.
Hitler, still striking his weird salute/wave, looked around the restaurant with just his eyes. All right, he had me. There was no one else in the building, and I was just dicking around until eleven when we stopped serving breakfast.
“I’ve got … things in the deep fryer,” I said. “Important things. I can’t let them overcook.”
The importance of the franchise manager Abraham Schmitt’s desk nameplate notwithstanding, I was hoping the dictator wouldn’t know how long something like that was supposed to be cooked. I sure didn’t have an idea of when it was overcooked or undercooked or just right. That’s the sort of thing Goldilocks might know, but I do not.
Pouting, Hitler turned and goose-stepped out of the pizzeria.
And not a second too soon either, as I heard the back door open and Schmitt greeted me.
Moving quickly, I pulled the desk nameplate out of the deep fryer, cursed loudly, and wished I had used a pair of tongs or something before returning it to his desk.
Schmitty and I—he hates it when I call him Schmitty—have a long history of pulling pranks on each other. It started with the old unscrewing-the-salt-shaker ruse and then graduated to the old sugar-in-the-gas-tank routine. I remember fondly the time I used the old set-his-pants-on-fire rigmarole. He got me back with the old run-your-mother-over-with-a-big-rig-and-then-repeatedly-bludgeon-her-with-a-baseball-bat-at-the-funeral rib.
We both agreed that one went a little too far.
“How’s it hanging?” Schmitty asked as he walked in. “We get any customers?”
It had been a huge disappointment to Schmitty that the breakfast pizzas weren’t selling better. The old convince-your-boss-of-an-amazing-marketing-gimmick-that-is-really-a-stupid idea gambit was working wonderfully. I hadn’t figured out when it was going to pay off, but it would.
I considered telling him about Hitler coming in, just to get his hopes up, but I decided against it. He got a big enough ego after a look-alike of Stalin’s brother came in to use the restrooms once. We had the picture on the wall to prove it, until the city demanded we remove it because people said they didn’t want to see a vaguely Russian-looking man being startled at the urinal.
“Are you … all right?” Schmitty asked.
As it turned out, I never answered; I had just been staring while thinking about that photo. I told him no one came in. He teared up and excused himself to his office—his warm, crispy, deep-fried office-supplies-covered office.
We welcomed our first customers not long after. Some snotnosed punks came in and ordered a cheese pizza. I cooked it, served it, watched them eat it, and then they left. I spent twenty minutes cleaning up their snot afterwards.
“Smith!” Schmitty yelled from his office.
I smiled. He’d found the deep-fried everything.
Schmitty burst from his office, a deep-fried stapler with teeth marks in hand and a series of broken teeth in his mouth.
“Did you do this?” he asked.
I tried to keep from smiling but I couldn’t. I always had a problem with smiling when I shouldn’t. I smiled at my mother’s funeral, all the way through Schmitty’s beating. I smiled that time the nuclear plant burped something green and glowing into the sky, and when it rained radioactive acid rain on us for a few days. People always tell me to stop smiling, and I tell them I can’t. Someone drew one on my face with a permanent marker as a child. On the plus side, I’m voted Happiest Man in New Haven every year. It comes with a free coupon for markers. I’d say I’m not amused by it, but I’m always smiling when I think of it.
Schmitty proceeded to tell me it gave him an idea for a new pizza (and a reason to go to the dentist). He proceeded to describe his idea of a chicken pizza, with the hook being deep-fried onion strings scattered on the top.
I thought it was a wonderful idea.
“That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” I told him.
I don’t like making Schmitty feel too good about himself. Might lead him to getting an ego or some self-esteem. That can be a dangerous thing. Someone once told him he had nice eyes, so he spent weeks putting his eyes right up to yours when speaking. It was really awkward at the urinals.
But, I agreed to help experiment. We tried different sauces and meats. Customers asked if they could try a piece. We told them, “No, get out.” So, they got out.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Adolf Hitler standing in the doorway. He had pants on this time. I never th
ought I’d have to specify that I saw Adolf Hitler with pants on, but that’s how this day was going. I saw a look in his eye; one of mischievous contempt. I didn’t know those two things went together.
Schmitty bent over to slide the pizza into the oven. That’s when Hitler tiptoed at an alarming speed behind Schmitty and planted his boot into Schmitty’s backside, shoving him head first into the oven. I watched in horror as Adolf Hitler faded from reality, waving and smiling pleasantly while my Jewish boss removed his head from the oven while shouting obscenities.
“Damnit Hitler,” I whispered under my breath.
“What?” Schmitty asked, furrowing his brow.
It was hard to take his anger seriously. Maybe it was because I was smiling. That usually does it.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I heard you say something about Hitler.” Schmitty gasped. “That was a Holocaust joke.”
I insisted it was not. He didn’t believe me. It’s the smile; I’m telling you. No one believes a guy who’s smiling all the time. Eventually you look insincere.
And so I walked out of the pizzeria with a pink slip and my pants full of hot grease from the deep fryer. I still say he overreacted. Even if I had been making a Holocaust joke, the deep-fried penis gag was unnecessary.
I took a seat on the remains of the dirigible, frightening off a few bacon rabbits that had been hiding under it. Nearby townsfolk panicked when they saw more of these tasty abominations and began chasing them down. I, meanwhile, had something to do.
“Guten tag, again!” Hitler said, taking a seat beside me.
“Go away!” I demanded.
“Oh, you’re not very nice.”
“You killed millions of people …”
“It was the forties, everyone was doing it!”
I lunged at him, trying to wrap my hands around his stupid, translucent neck so I could throttle the air out of his stupid, translucent throat. Instead, I face planted into the ground.
A Haunting of Words Page 17