“It’s too dark in here.”
The words came from the hallway, but I don’t even roll over. I know who it is.
It wasn’t a week after Sonia died that I started hearing from her. She only ever says the one thing. When it began, once I decided to believe it was happening and not just something caused by my grief, I had her body exhumed. I thought that might be what her words meant. She didn’t like being buried. But it didn’t help. She kept on talking. I begged her to tell me what she meant but I couldn’t get her to say more. I kept longer hours at the storefront because I wanted to be around other people. When I’m alone I can’t drown her out.
“It’s too dark in here.”
She’s come down the hallway now and joined me in my room. She’ll go on like this all night.
~
A week later I get a walk in first thing. It’s a middle-aged white guy, which is pretty unusual for me. He’s standing on the sidewalk when I show up at nine. He asks for me by name. I bring him in and ask him to wait. I slip in the back but when he’s looking at the bookshelf I take a moment to part the curtains and snap a photo of him with my phone. At least if he kills me the cops will find his picture. This might seem paranoid to some, but I don’t care. It strikes me as a completely rational thing to do. I’ve had more seeing-eye dogs in here than lone middle-aged men strolling in.
I look at myself in the mirror, but this time I don’t chant, not trying to charge myself up for a fine performance. Maybe he’s a cop, that’s the kind of energy he’s emitting. They still do undercover operations on storefronts. Two years ago a guy gave away over $700,000 to a pair of psychics in Times Square. I won’t put on a show for this one, that’s what I decide. No scarf draped across my head and neck. He won’t see Cleopatra, only me.
When I get to the table he’s already laid out the ten-dollar bill. There’s something insulting about seeing the cash before I’ve done anything. It looks new. Maybe he went to the ATM right before he showed up. Immediately I wonder how many more fresh notes are waiting in his wallet then I feel angry at myself for being so easily enticed.
His hair is white and thinning and slicked back and his sharp nose slopes down until the tip hovers above his top lip. He doesn’t seem to blink even as I sit there quietly watching him. There’s something predatory about him. Like he’s a bald eagle and I’m a fish. I’m used to people looking at me like I’m a fraud, but not like I’m a meal.
“You’re an early riser,” I say, trying to be chatty.
He holds my gaze. “Where’s the cards? Don’t you people use cards?”
“We can,” I say. “We will. But I like to talk first. It puts my visitors at ease.”
He hasn’t moved. Still hasn’t blinked. His hands are flat on the table but that doesn’t make me feel any safer.
“What kind of things do you say? To put visitors at ease.”
I look up and count how many steps it would take me to reach the front door. Seven maybe and I can’t say I’m in any shape to run. The backroom has a bathroom, but there’s no emergency exit. I could lock myself in the bathroom and call the police, but how long would it take for him to smash his way in?
“What did you say to Abby, for instance?”
He says the name with emphasis but I admit I don’t know who the hell he’s talking about. Do you know how exhausted I am? I hardly sleep at night. At this point I just lie there with my eyes closed listening to Sonia. How am I supposed to think of anything else?
For the first time he moves, crosses his arms and leans forward in his chair.
“You don’t even remember her,” he says. He almost sounds happy about it, like I’ve confirmed his worst intuition.
“Abby,” I say. Then I repeat it. I’m trying to get the gears of my memory to catch. When they do I snap my fingers. Maybe I look like a child who’s happy to have passed a quiz. “She came into my store a few weeks ago.”
“One week ago.” He breathes deeply and his crossed arms rise and fall.
His eyes lose focus and he stares down at the table and the posture is exactly the same as Abby’s had been. That’s when I recognize him. It’s not their faces but the way they hold their bodies.
“Who is she to you?” I ask.
“One week ago,” he repeats.
I calculate my path to the door again. Maybe I could make it in five steps. This old girl might have one more sprint in her.
“What did you say to my daughter?” he asks.
I don’t understand where this is headed. Is he back to ask for her fee? All this over a few dollars? The story of an overprotective father scrolls before me, the kind who won’t ever let his child become an adult. I’m insulted on her behalf.
“She’s a grown woman,” I tell him. “What I said to her is confidential.”
He drops his arms and slips one hand below the tabletop so I can’t see what he’s doing. Reaching into his pocket maybe.
“You’re not a lawyer,” he says. “You’re just some scam.”
The words settle on me heavily, a lead apron instead of a slap. I find myself needing to breathe deeply so I do but it hardly helps.
“Did she report me or something? Are you here with the cops?”
He pulls his hand out from under the table. He’s holding a tiny flashlight, like a novelty item, a gag gift. There’s a bit of fog on the inside of the protective glass, where the bulb is.
“I gave this to her years ago,” he said. “It was still on her keychain when her body was recovered.”
The blanket across my chest feels even heavier now. I think I might get pulled down, right off the chair.
“What did you say to my daughter!” he shouts and he throws the flashlight at me. It flies wild, goes over my shoulder and into the back. As soon as it leaves his hand he looks horrified and chases after it. He sends his chair flying sideways and it knocks into the shelf. A few of the books fall to the carpet. He hurtles through the curtain and he’s in the back and suddenly I’m alone. I get up to run for the door. I’m sure I can flag down a cop car on the street. But then I hear her.
“It’s too dark in here.”
Now I plop right back down onto the chair, can’t move my limbs. My mouth snaps shut and so do my eyes. What did I say to his daughter?
Yes. There is more.
He steps back through the curtain and he’s got my scarf in one hand, Abby’s flashlight in the other. I wonder if he’s planning to strangle me with the scarf and, for a moment, consider that I’d deserve it. The death of my child was already my fault so why not his as well?
“I thought you would’ve run,” he says quietly. He stands over me, holding the scarf and the flashlight as if he’s weighing the two.
“There’s nowhere for me to go,” I say.
He sits on the ground right there beside me. It’s strange to see a man my age cross-legged on a carpet.
“I won it for her at the Genesee County Fair,” he says of the flashlight. “It’s funny what kids hold on to.”
Now I understand why he grabbed my scarf. He’s patting at his face, his tears.
“Maybe I said something to her?” he asks. The words come out so quietly that I my first instinct is to lean in closer but he isn’t talking to me. I need to get an ambulance for him. I rise up from my chair and slip my cell phone out of my pocket.
“I’m going to call someone for you,” I say and he nods softly. Now I’m surprised I thought he seemed angry, when he’s only delirious with despair.
After I call I crouch down beside him and wait for the sirens. This makes my knees start hurting instantly, but I can endure it. I grasp one of his hands between two of mine and I remember the way I touched his daughter when we spoke. They have the same delicate wrists.
I’m afraid to tell him what I said to her but not because I fear for my safety. Instead I wonder if Abby thought
I meant something hopeful when I told her there was more to existence. If she lost her mother, if she missed her mother, maybe she thought I meant the woman waited for her across the veil, that they’d be reunited in a better place. Why wouldn’t she think that? It’s the story people prefer. What if I told her father the same thing now? Would he be tempted to try and join Abby? I couldn’t be responsible for such a thing so I say nothing and simply hold his hand.
The EMTs arrive and help Abby’s father to the ambulance. After taking some information from me they drive off with him then I go back inside the store. For the first time I can see the place like so many others must: the silly dim lighting, the bookshelf of mystic texts. It’s such a cliché. No wonder my visitors viewed me as a fraud.
I go to the back and make myself some tea. While the water boils I lift the chair Abby’s father knocked over. I gather the books that fell but instead of putting them back on the shelf I got in the back and drop them, one by one, into the trashcan. I find the scarf and leave it in the garbage with the books.
My work changed after Sonia died. There is an afterlife and it’s worse than the world we live in. That’s what I know. I don’t understand why I kept the news to myself.
“It’s too dark in here.”
The kettle whistles in the other room but I can still hear my daughter. I suppose that will never stop. I make my tea then I sit at the table and wait for visitors. From now on whoever comes to see me is going to hear the truth.
Ode to Joad the Toad
Laird Barron
Interesting times came to the city of many names, namely the Old Capitol.
King Mingy’s bastard son, Larry, mounted the throne on the second Friday of the Month of the Dead—nine days of state mourning after the old king succumbed to advanced years and a white-hot iron shoved up his ass.
Long live the King!
Sunday evening, a buxom maid tended the royal instrument while two of her cohorts pinned young Larry’s skinny arms. A fourth sawed off the head his Majesty should’ve been using more assiduously.
Long live the King!
Monday afternoon witnessed a blaze of trumpets and the flourish of banners to commemorate the ascension of King Richard Creely IV to the Lion Throne. Fresh graffiti in Ball Cutter Alley declared, Dick is King! Something few would argue. Except for whomever had scribbled, Off with his head! and Kick against the pricks!
Two figures lurked at the far end of the alley; a popular rendezvous for nefarious sorts. A short man, and a tall, toad-ish, something-other-than-man, at least a broadax haft wide. These worthies regarded the Piss Wall and its timely message.
“The maids are dealt with,” the small one said to the wall. Sneaky Bob wore a raggedy cloak and boots, but a fancy doublet and hose beneath. He’d come directly from his apartments above one of the city’s finer brothels, which, not coincidentally, had provided the “maids” who ushered King Larry into the Underworld.
“How dealt is dealt?” Walther Neck said. Words emerged from the wattles of his throat as a rusty blade grinds forth from its sheath. As a consequence, while he often spoke at length, he seldom raised his voice and seldom needed to do so.
“Bottom of the bay, chained to an anchor,” Sneaky Bob said. “Cut ’em and dumped ’em over the side myself.” His smirk projected the idea that he didn’t favor women despite, or because of, his close association with them.
“This is good to hear.”
Neck’s physiognomy appeared toadish because he was in fact an Ur toad, which meant he was a venerable exemplar of toad-kind, yet infinitely more. The gods had gifted Ur (supreme among animals) with speech and reasoning, and empathy toward humanity that did not necessarily equal love. Possessed of the relative mass of a grizzly bear, Neck moved slowly and ponderously, except for those moments when he didn’t. He favored a moldering black coyote pelt (skinned from Prowl, King of the Coyotes) and horrid cork boots of amphibian leather, though he required neither furs nor boots. He also carried a notched khopesh forged from a petrified slab of wood. Equally unnecessary unless he wished to fell a small tree or quarter an elk, which he sometimes did.
At the moment, he regarded his human companion and waited with patience honed from eons of cautious observance. Ur were savage as any beast; humans were masters of treachery. One could never be too safe around a man, especially a man who despised his fellows.
Many hands made light work of a coup d’état. Sneaky Bob’s mitts had gotten particularly dirty. He’d arranged the most intimate details of the royal assassination and several others that followed. High lords decreed the time and place; Bob had selected who and how. Meanwhile, Walther Neck’s task in the grand scheme of political reorganization was to resolve delicate personnel matters—mainly overseeing the severance of certain employees. Bob was the last name on Neck’s list.
“I pray the seneschal is satisfied.” Sneaky Bob referred to the King’s right-hand hatchet man, Seneschal Geld. The Seneschal owed Sneaky Bob a knapsack of golden lions for services rendered. Which meant, as the seneschal’s agent in this matter, Neck owed Sneaky Bob a knapsack of golden lions. Forebodingly, there was neither knapsack nor gold on Neck’s person.
“The Kingdom is grateful for your sacrifice.” The Ur toad’s thin-lipped smile broadened. He rotated his unnervingly prodigious cranium to orient upon his tiny compatriot.
“Twas nothing,” Sneaky Bob said. Between one breath and the next, he was nothing.
Come rosy-nippled dawn, Neck expelled shreds of a raggedy cloak, fancy doublet, and hose into the gutter of Eyebolt Passage. This alley bored into the mountain spine. The mountain carried the city upon its back. Stalactites oozed evil rainwater. Friezes depicted leering amphibian horrors (exceedingly toad-like) that once dwelt Below. Primitive tribes of men carved them, and worse.
Wind gusted through the alley. Dead leaves from the Royal Park whirled around his shoulders and added their number to the bed of mulch and slime and the fossilized skeletons of animals and men. He waddled forth to get drunk at a tavern and cogitate upon what he suspected to be his own imminent doom.
~
The Jackdaw Tavern was one of a baker’s dozen similarly designated establishments scattered around the Old Capitol. This being the Month of the Dead, and thus against custom to sally forth sans costume, the proprietor assumed Neck’s awful visage to be an artfully crafted mask. Neck rented a cell on the second floor. He licked a vat of curds and pleasured himself desultorily. The curds were fermented from the tainted blood-milk of rats that dwelt in the sewers. The rats surfaced at night to steal garbage and strip inebriated vagrants to the bone.
Neck was old as the Ur measure such things, perhaps old as rocks and trees measure such things. He recalled but fragments of his voluminous history. Had his existence always been so squalid? He committed an array of dirty deeds for meager pay. Hatchet jobs. Murder. Mayhem. Skullduggery. Prostitution. He made a terrible prostitute. His Bidder’s Organ followed its own star and Neck was down to mate whenever the opportunity presented itself. Alas, altering sex taxed the Ur-toad and he usually went into hibernation upon accomplishing the deed.
He squatted before a minor altar to Joad, patron deity of toads great and small, and other, less savory creatures of the bogs and swamps. This was a wooden effigy, nothing akin to the colossal mural in the Hall of Doom that depicted insatiable Joad as a behemoth, its tongue drooling down to the dirt, scores of men caught fast in its barbs like flies dying in amber. Not a popular deity, to be sure.
Hours burned away as Neck stoically awaited word from Seneschal Geld as per his instructions. The two had met in the flesh but once, many years gone by when the seneschal swam with the little pollywogs at the court of good King Mingy. Oh, how times changed. A man of Geld’s current status did not treat personally with mercenary scum, lest it be by dead of night and in the presence of numerous heavily armed guards. Therefore, Neck anticipated contact with a trusted e
missary of the seneschal; i.e., a professional murderer. That’s how the great web and its functionaries worked—one man to arrange assassinations and then to murder the assassins; another man to liquidate the first fellow; and a third to take care of him.
Where would it all end? With a knock on the door and an envenomed dagger stabbed through his slow-beating heart, is what Neck suspected. Seneschal Geld preferred loose threads to be snipped. The powerful always did.
Shadows of clouds moved against the window. The gray gloom of his niche blackened at the edges and curled inward until only the last trace of light glimmered in the pitiless rhinestone eyes of the idol.
Where will it end, indeed? The altar of Joad whispered from many directions at once. That voice, like the creak of sun-whitened leather, sounded as familiar as Neck’s own. For you, it ends in a pot of bubbling oil and seasonal spices unless divine providence intervenes. Have you been keen? Have you said your prayers? I haven’t heard from you since that sticky incident with the Croatoans.
Neck had been neither keen nor faithful. The only prayers he attended were those of his victims who occasionally babbled for mercy before their pitiable souls were snatched into the Underworld. He also attended the gurgling of his bowels where damned souls occasionally simmered and stewed.
You’ve done it now.
“The oppression of Mingy had grown intolerable,” Neck quoted the sentiment of nobles and peasants who’d chafed under the old king’s increasingly burdensome yoke.
But why, small fry?
“May as well ask why a man peels a scab. It’s an impulse.”
You’re no man.
“Yet, here I squat in his rude habitation observing his customs. Digesting his humor and habit, no less.”
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