The Four Before Me

by E H Night

  Betty’s smile became more and more toothy until it was obvious that she hadn’t been smiling at all. A long animal-like whine escaped from the space between her teeth — a single unwavering note that could send chills down the spine of the devil, himself. If pain had a sound, surely this was it. When it came time for her to inhale, she snorted and snotted while wiping away at her own face. Her heart sang its song once more, and she buried her hands into her hairline.

  Alice gasped and pulled her in for a long hug, or as much of a hug as she could manage with the car’s center console in the way. She pat Betty’s shoulder, working as a metronome for her whine.

  Thump Thump Thump Thump

  Alice felt her mind wandering back in time. She envisioned Grandma Susan holding her on her lap, rocking her, telling her that everything would be okay. This was a scene that she escaped to often, mostly when she needed comforting of her own though. Perhaps she wasn’t trying to calm Betty as much as she was trying to calm herself.

  Betty broke away gently from the embrace and wiped the rest of the depressing goo off of her face. She reached for another cigarette and lit it with a more confident hand than before. As she exhaled storm-clouds into the dashboard, she stared ahead, seemingly at nothing in particular. She appeared as if her mind had completely left the world.

  Alice reached over to Betty’s hair and began to unpin the rollers, letting a few small curls bounce away from her grip, defying gravity. Each one sprung around like a metal slinky, toppling over one another clumsily. The short ringlets glistened from an over-use of mousse, and contrasted greatly with the rest of her straight fine hair. “If you’d like to come back in, I can redo these for you. I don’t think the ladies will say anything else today.”

  Betty shook her head and looked down at her lap. “No, not today. I’ll try to come back later in the week. Actually, I should really be going.”

  Alice nodded. “I understand. Well, I’m here most days. If you ever want to talk —” she stopped herself abruptly after feeling a shift in the air.

  Betty tossed her still-lit cigarette out of the window and grabbed Alice’s hand with the both of hers. She held it there, gripping it tightly as she stared into her eyes. Sanity seemed to have left her skull, as if it had leaked out of her tear-ducts during the crying fit. She leaned in closer to Alice, squeezing her bones even tighter when she felt a slight resistance. She pulled her arm toward her chest and then gripped Alice’s wrist with a surprisingly strong fist as she feathered her fingertips across her acrylic nails. A few fresh tears fell from Betty’s eyes onto Alice’s cuticles, followed by a long stream of mucous that had escaped from her nose.

  “Your hands are all dirty, Sarah,” Betty said in a sickly-sweet baby voice. “Let’s get them cleaned up. We wouldn’t want to scare any handsome princes away, would we?”

  Alice wanted to jump back, to scream, to smack — anything, but she was frozen from disbelief. Her muscles relaxed, and she was unable to find the strength pull away anymore.

  “Come on. Let’s paint your nails again, sweetheart.” Betty grabbed the clear polish that had been resting in Alice’s lap and unscrewed it with her molars. She sat the open bottle down on the console and began brushing it all across Alice’s fingers, not even bothering to acknowledge where her nails were located anymore. “I’ve missed you so much, Sarah.”

  ◆

  Alice walked somberly to the bathroom and turned on the shower to wash the day away. The faucet let out a long squeak, and the sound of Betty’s wailing raped her ears once more. She shook the memory from her mind and stepped beneath the hot stream of water. She scrubbed at her arms and hands, peeling away little plastic-like pieces of polish that had coated her fingers like a toxic pastry glaze. The fragments glittered and reflected light back toward her before they finally met their demise in the drain. She stomped her feet over the metal to assure herself that they wouldn’t be coming back.

  After she was finished, she wiped herself off with a towel, put on some clean pajamas, and started to dry her hair with the blow dryer back in the bathroom. The steam finally dissipated from the mirror, and she was able to see her reflection more clearly. She stared at herself, expressionless, while she brushed through her shoulder-length hair. She didn’t bother styling it or fluffing up her bangs like she usually would in the mornings. She just wanted it to be dry and finished.

  Unfortunately, the house was older, so the electric wasn’t very reliable or predictable. That particular bathroom outlet couldn’t handle the blow dryer being on a hot setting, and it caused the breaker to trip. Alice jumped from the sudden silent darkness, but quickly realized what had happened. With damp hair, she made her way down to the basement, and found the breaker box. She flipped the switch and heard the blow dryer kick back on upstairs.

  “Ugh. I should have turned that off before I came down here,” she thought, annoyed with herself. She turned around quickly to dart back up the stairs, but noticed a cardboard box in the far corner of the room under the laundry folding table. She crept over to the box and lifted the lid. It was covered in cobwebs, and appeared to have just been shoved under the table and forgotten about for at least a year, or even more. As she examined the contents on top, she discovered a few photos stacked together, and started to go through them. By the second picture, it became very obvious that she was looking through Sarah’s belongings. Alice stared at the girl in the photo, realizing that Sarah was probably the last person to have touched the contents of this box. Her features were a lot more clear in these particular photos than they had been in the blurry black-and-white photocopied flyer at Medley’s. An uncomfortable mixture of clarity and anxiety filled her body as Sarah’s face smiled up at her from the glossy paper.“Whoa… we really do look alike...”

  Chapter 5

  “Total Eclipse of the Heart”

  The sky was darker than usual that evening. Anyone who looked up for too long, whether searching for the moon or for the stars, was pulled into its depths. It was as if the sky was some kind of a black hole. It wanted company badly as it hovered above Wintersburg, looking for lonely eyes.

  Betty glanced up from her canvas and stared out the window, taking notice of the uncomfortable lack of moonlight. Usually, she would be able to paint while watching an array of sparkling reflections dance across the lake, but tonight there was only blackness. The lake might as well have been a giant lump of coal. Unenthusiastically, she reached across the table to a small antiquated lamp and turned it on before resting her paintbrush inside one of the plastic cups in front of her. She picked up a matching cup and poured herself another generous helping of cheap wine. Her feet kicked at an empty bottle that sat sideways on the floor. While she had every intention of finishing this second bottle as well, she was too set in her ways to sip straight from its narrow neck. From paint to alcohol, pouring was what she did best.

  She turned back to her canvas, mixed a shade of red, and added a few brush strokes here and there. She carefully outlined and then filled Sarah’s lips before dipping her brush back into the water cup to rinse it off. The water swirled around and then turned crimson from the concentrated pigment. She set her brush on a paper towel and glanced at her palette, unsure of what to do next. The drinks had really started to kick in, and their poison was starting to hinder her talents.

  Betty sighed heavily and reached for her cup of wine once more. She took a long and loving gulp as she sat there resembling an open-mouthed baby bird. She hadn’t been much of a drinker in her previous years, but alcohol had recently become as necessary as oxygen for her to go about her days.

  A second gulp went down her gullet.

  And one more.

  On the fourth gulp, her nostrils awakened and her taste buds sensed that something was wrong.

  “Paint.”

  She gagged and choked several times before she involuntarily produced a bright red liquid from her throat. She tried to hold it in, and even made an admirable attempt to cover her mouth, but she failed.
The colored water sprayed out from between her fingers like hot lava. It tainted everything within five feet of her with what could easily be compared to blood droplets.

  She retched again and realized that she’d confused the two cups.

  Her body felt hot and heavy as the contents of her belly danced up the crevices of her esophagus, tangoing around potential ulcers. An angry froth began to swing from her dangling uvula before it finally made a grand entrance into the world. The paint and water twirled together and her head felt as if it were spinning along to the same gurgling song. The contractions led, and Betty followed. More spasms encouraged her to buckle over, so she dipped, and her head snapped toward the canvas. In one huge finale, one beautiful ending to an unconventional performance, Betty’s mouth sprayed everything like a rusty garden sprinkler. She splattered Sarah’s image with a glorious polka-dotted pattern that resembled one of her favorite dresses.

  Betty’s lively eyes met Sarah’s empty gaze, and she sobbed. She reached toward the canvas and started smearing the paint all around beneath the weight of her palms.

  “Stop bleeding! I have to stop the bleeding!” She yelped like an injured dog and her mind briefly wandered back to the time that she had hit a beagle with her car. She had been driving Sarah to a sleepover one evening, a decade prior, and was still unable to forgive herself for the accident. The cries haunted Betty each time she saw a dog, no matter how happy or healthy it was. She couldn’t forget the way that it had looked up at her from the wet blacktop, the way that it had cried out to her, begging her — the one whose distracted mind had caused its pain — for help. It seemed only fitting that she was now the one crying from the ground, covered in crimson.

  The neighbor’s mutt howled in the distance at the moonless sky, and Betty’s yelping turned into long chilling moans of the same key and volume. She sang along with it for quite some time as she continued to wipe away futilely at the canvas. The penciled sketch smudged around, infecting the paint with charcoal, and Sarah’s face muddied under Betty’s paws.

  Betty became rabid.

  She lifted herself from the ground and pushed both hands into the slippery table to steady her weight. She stood there with a curved spine as she supported herself with locked elbows. Drool dripped from her lips, still slightly blemished from the paint, and she stared blankly at the cup of wine.

  She lifted the cup and drank, taking a moment to fully acknowledge the flavors of only the first gulp before she burped everything back out onto the wet floor. Her stomach was too irritated to take in any more fluids, but she was too drunk to realize the problem. She tried once more to fill herself with the wine, but gagged before even a drop was able to touch her tongue. She slammed the cup back onto the table, crinkling the plastic from the tightness of her grip, and picked up the glass bottle.

  Betty raised it in the air like a drunken pirate and stumbled backward a few paces while still managing to stay on her feet. She began to mock and scold the family portraits that were hanging from the walls, calling out almost-comical obscenities between belches and hiccups.

  “Roger, you fat piece of shit!”

  Hic

  “You fat Big Bird piece of shit!” She turned to face the opposite wall. “And you!” she snarled, pointing at a black-and-white photograph of an elderly woman. “You said that everything would be okay. You lied to my face!”

  Betty tossed the wine bottle at the photo, and missed, of course. A few large sharp chunks broke off, but overall it maintained most of its recognizable shape. She stumbled forward and leaned back into the table. As she looked downward, she chuckled quietly. More stretchy drool escaped from her sour mouth, re-wetting the foamy corners of her lips. “She’s not gone,” she said flatly. “She just isn’t feeling well. I should take some soup over to her house.”

  Betty wobbled toward the kitchen and fumbled with one of the knobs on the gas stove. It clicked at her several times, but produced no flame. While smacking her lips back at it mockingly, she turned the knob a few more times, but still had no success. She fumbled around in a drawer nearby, and eventually found a long lighter. She held it near the burner and clicked it one more time. As soon as she heard the sound, a bright and agitated flame erupted into a blazing lion’s mane, but quickly settled itself back down into a blueish ring. She stared into it as if it were a singular eye staring back at her.

  She placed a warped and discolored pot onto the burner and feverishly cranked away at a tin can of store-bought chicken soup. Each crank of the can opener was an obvious struggle for her disobedient joints and muscles, but she persevered until she had created enough of a space for the soup to escape. She bent the lid back, and just barely missed slicing her finger open. The metal grazed softly across her skin, as if it was warning her to be more careful next time, but it caused no wounds.

  Betty poured the soup and some sink water into the pot, and then stirred it all together until it was a fragrant yellowish mixture. She dropped the empty can on the floor, but was too focused on maintaining her balance to retrieve it. She continued to stir for a few seconds until deciding that the soup was probably warm enough. It wasn’t, but that’s not what mattered.

  She poured it into a marinara-stained plastic container, attached a lid, and sat it on the counter while she retrieved her jacket. “Sarah will love this,” she mumbled, still smiling through partially-crystallized snot and tears. “She will absolutely love it.”

  ◆

  Alice sat in her living room, watching the TV at a lower than reasonable volume. She wasn’t really paying attention to any of the shows’ plots as much as she was just leaving everything on to maintain a sense of companionship while she winded down from the workday (and while trying to forget the uncomfortable encounter with Betty). Hearing the actors’ cheerful voices and seeing their excited faces provided a sense of calmness and company for her. She didn’t need to know why the characters were happy or what they were doing. She was perfectly content to know that they were just there, nearby, and almost tangible.

  She stood up to fetch another slice of pizza from the kitchen after she had reminded herself that the food would be getting cold soon. Cold pizza was great for a quick breakfast, but definitely not for nights spent alone. She opened the delivery box again and scooped a fresh warm piece onto her already-greasy paper plate, and then took the remaining slices over to the refrigerator.

  “I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t buy too many groceries yet,” she thought. “I can fit the whole box in here for tomorrow.” Her mind wandered to the dried slices that Sarah had left behind, and she soon found herself wondering what other things might have been lingering around the house, or even in that cardboard box she’d found in the basement earlier. As she imagined little trinkets and hidden diaries, she leaned against the counter and took a very generous bite of her slice. The sauce and cheese were like heaven to her taste buds, and her tongue was awakened even more by the fizzy cola that she chugged to wash it all down. Kirt’s Pub might have been a little trashy, but the staff certainly made good food. She made a mental note of that.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of footsteps near the backdoor. There was an uneven stone path that led from the sidewalk up to the kitchen. It was littered with stray pieces of gravel and rock that would grind loudly under the shoes of anyone who used it. Alice stayed still, almost forgetting to breathe, as she listened to the crunching sounds. Whoever it was, was trying to stay quiet, because their steps were slow and deliberate. They knew to avoid stepping off of the path. The grass was patchy, and the ground was deceptively soft. Even the weight of a squirrel could leave a print in the mud that surrounded the stones. This was a person who knew the property and didn’t want to leave a trace. There was silence for a handful of seconds — seconds that felt like minutes. Every muscle in Alice’s body tensed, and her ears began to ring from the nervous increase in blood pressure.

  The door handle turned.

  Crash!

  Alice jumped up and bum
ped her elbow on the edge of the counter-top. She grabbed her arm instinctively and turned her head to face the noise. Someone was outside of the front door now, but was being a lot less careful than whoever had crept up to the kitchen.

  Behind her, she heard the trashcans by the stone pathway fall over, and the large crunching steps of someone running away. Adrenaline finally kicked in, and she quickly locked the back door in case that person decided to return later. She grabbed a chopping knife from a drawer, and ran into the living room. Her index finger pulled slightly at the blinds, creating a space just large enough to see through. Alice gripped the handle tightly, and leaned in to take a look.

  “Betty?”

  Confusion filled her mind as she loosened her grip and fumbled with the door’s deadbolt. She opened it quickly, and dropped the knife to the ground, just barely missing one of her naked feet. The concrete porch felt like ice beneath her soles, contrasting with the heat that radiated from her cheeks.