Grotesquerie

by Richard Gavin

  Among the jar’s blackened leavings was a scrap of paper that had not succumbed to the flames. Will recognized Julie’s handwriting.

  Again, he called his brother’s name. The only response was the patter of rain that was beginning to strike the windows.

  *

  Will hadn’t intended on falling asleep. He’d only retired to the living room sofa because there seemed to be little else he could do. He’d tried to watch television, but the storm had knocked out the satellite signal. The day’s paper was a jumble of meaningless words. There had been no sign of Dylan.

  He’d closed his eyes and had felt a soothing numbness passing through him. He’d watched distorted memories of his own boyhood in this very house pass across his mind’s eye.

  Had he always felt this way about his brother, he wondered? Always brimming with such jealousy over the ease and comfort with which Dylan’s life seemed to have been blessed? Had it not been his own decision to leave home at sixteen and allow himself to grow estranged from his kin? Not even the successive deaths of both his parents was enough to lure Will back. It took discovering that Dylan had inherited the house and was now enjoying a happy marriage.

  Will had learned of this turn of events through his obsessive, covert searches on social media. He was grateful for the technology that allowed him to keep tabs on Dylan cheaply and easily. It was this same medium that had allowed Will to watch Dylan’s life dissolving. Ever a sponge sopping up attention, Dylan posted regular updates about his crumbling marriage, which gave Will the privilege of watching his brother’s life crumble in real time. Only after a particularly fatalistic-sounding post about how Julie had left for good did Will finally attempt to reach out. Dylan had positively gushed over his brother’s first communication in two decades. He’d immediately invited him back to the old house. Little did he suspect that what was driving Will’s actions was not empathy but schadenfreude.

  His sadistic pleasure was short-lived. Within hours of arriving home Will found his brother’s state of mind…disquieting. Whatever heartsickness Dylan had been detailing for his online friends seemed to have been replaced by a form of mania. Will had even wondered if the whole drama had been nothing more than a ploy to bait him back to this suburban trap. But to what end?

  Will’s reverie was violently disrupted by a phone ringing. Blindly he fished out his cell from his shirt pocket. It was turned off.

  Across the room, Dylan’s cell phone rattled upon the dining room table. Will rose and shuffled toward it.

  The caller I.D. consisted of a smiling selfie of Julie, along with her name and a tiny heart icon glowing beside it. Will took up the phone and wrestled with the idea of answering it. It went still and silent before he could decide.

  Will turned and began to search the house for his brother, but his efforts were in vain. Only after he’d stepped outside to check the backyard did he spot Dylan. He was stepping through the gate at the far end of the yard. From the vantage of the back deck, Will could see beyond the wooden fence to the elegiac creek that rushed ahead in search of eventual immersion into Baintree Lake.

  Dylan crossed the yard. He was soaked to the skin. His shoes were slathered with mud. As his brother climbed the deck stairs, Will was able to see that Dylan’s eyes were glassy, were fey.

  “Where were you?” he asked.

  Dylan pressed past him. His passage through the house left earthen footprints on the carpet. Stopping in the living room, Dylan began to peel away his dripping clothes. They plopped onto the floor. Stripped, Dylan shuffled down the hall toward the bathroom. Will heard the door click shut, then the telltale sound of running water.

  Dylan finished showering and returned to the living room, dressed in socks and a terrycloth robe. He toweled his hair absentmindedly, staring at the wet stains on the carpet.

  “I hung your clothes on the rack downstairs,” Will explained, “and I tried to scrub the footprints out of the carpet as best I could. Mind telling me where you were all night?”

  Dylan’s mouth hitched into an unsettling half-smile. “What, you taking over for mom now that you’re back?”

  “I’m not back. And I’m not resurrecting mom. I’m just worried about you.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about, truly nothing.” Dylan chortled weirdly.

  “Julie called your cell just before you came in.”

  These words choked off Dylan’s meandering laughter. They also drained the blood from his face.

  “What?”

  Nonplussed, Will reached for Dylan’s cell phone and displayed it, like the bearer of proof in some grand epistemology. “Looks like she left you a voicemail.”

  With a quaking hand Dylan slid the phone free. He had noticeable difficulty manipulating the keypad, but eventually he held the phone to his ear.

  From where he stood, Will could just discern the mousy rasps of a shrill voice.

  Dylan’s arm dropped. His phone clunked against the floor.

  “What is it?” asked Will frantically, “what’d she say?” He scooped up Dylan’s dropped phone and slid it into the pocket of his trousers.

  Wordlessly, Dylan advanced to the master bedroom. Will followed, spitting out a string of brief and frantic questions, none of which were answered.

  Now dressed, Dylan stepped back into the hall. He was breathing heavily. “We have to return it,” was all he said before charging downstairs.

  He resurfaced bearing the iron casket. Will wrested on his shoes and tried to keep pace with his brother, who was already unlatching the gate at the rear of the yard. The creek was positively roaring as Will struggled to stay at Dylan’s heels. The rain was intensifying, portending another storm.

  “Where are we going?” he cried.

  “Not far,” Dylan replied. “I’ll put it back. I’ll make it right.”

  Together they traipsed the back of Baintree Common. In boyhood Will had played endlessly along these leafy banks, both with friends and with his brother. Though the housing complex had not appreciably changed over the years, its present aura seemed threatening.

  “Here it is!” declared Dylan. “Help me with the fence.”

  “Whose house is this?” Will rasped as he gripped one of the fence boards. He watched his brother reverentially slip the woven coffin through the gap and then painfully wriggle himself through. Will followed. It was obvious that quizzing Dylan was futile.

  The backyard of this home was far better maintained than that of his boyhood home. Will halted when he saw Dylan approach the sliding glass door. He waited to see who would answer his brother’s rapping.

  But Dylan did not knock; instead he set the casket down on the lawn and yanked at the door, throwing his weight into the task until the lock gave.

  Aghast, Will began to feel as though he was watching a movie rather than experiencing the present. He saw his brother calmly take up the casket and slip past the ruined door. Panicked that he might be spotted, Will found himself following.

  The strange house was immaculate in both upkeep and solitude. Standing in the kitchen, staring at the stainless-steel appliances and the polished floor, caused Will to suddenly become heartsick for his mother.

  Dylan was noisily moving through the lower chambers. Will rushed to the descending stairwell. Once there he made note of a trio of framed photographs that hung in the main landing. Wedding photos, enlarged and richly coloured. The groom was a stout man with a crew-cut hairstyle and slender glasses balanced on a slightly bent nose. The bride was blonde and rather pretty.

  Will’s hand felt for the stair’s railing. He gripped it and forced himself to breathe.

  The bride in the photographs was Julie.

  Will hissed his brother’s name, for his throat allowed for nothing louder.

  “I think it came from here,” Dylan called back. “Come see.”

  Will’s every step was reticent. His heart was thudding loudly. His saliva tasted of metal.

  The chamber in which Dylan stood was scarcely broader th
an a storage closet. An old-fashioned laundry tub stood against a wall built of cinderblocks with yellowing mortar. A cold draft lifted tufts of cobwebs from the grey brickwork. They lapped at the air like spectral tongues. The tiny room was uncharacteristically neglected and decayed compared to the rest of the house.

  “Look!” cried Dylan. He pressed the chisel forward so that his brother might inspect it. The chisel’s blade was caked with bluish wax. “This is what they used to sculpt it! And look down there!” Dylan pointed to the concrete floor, which had been stained barn-red. The paint was bubbled and peeling. Moving nearer, Will smelled flowers and something like old potatoes. There was a drain grill set into the floor. “I’ll bet you they just lifted this grate and sent that thing downstream toward our house. Listen! You can hear the current through the grate. I watched this house all night from the banks, just waiting for them to leave for work. I knew it must have come from them. I knew it!”

  “From who?” Will managed. “Dylan, whose house is this?” He lifted his hand. “Up there. Up there I saw…” He swallowed. “Dylan…what happened to Julie?”

  Dylan was already crouching down to pry the grill from its nest. He looked up at his brother. His expression was one of shock. “There is no Julie,” he said, as though it was the dullest of facts. “I made her up.”

  “But her pictures…upstairs there are…”

  “I know. I copied all her photos from her social media account. Her real name is Chantal. She and her husband have lived in Baintree for a few years now. I’ve never met her, I just like the way she looks, so I made her my wife.”

  Will shook his head. “But there are all those photos of the two of you on your profile,” he protested. “And with other people as well.”

  Dylan shrugged. “Photoshop. None of those people exist. The names of all my friends on social media? They’re all fake accounts that I created. In fact, you’re the only real person out of any of my online friends. The others are just stolen pictures and fabricated names.”

  Will bent over. It was as if his brother’s revelation had struck him in the solar plexus. “Why?” he whispered. “Why, Dylan?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to go this far. I never thought you’d actually come, even if I did post news about my wife leaving me. You shouldn’t have come back here.”

  “Neither of us should be here, not this house. This is crazy! Now let’s go. Let’s go home. We’ll talk about it there, not here.”

  “Not until I see if this is how they sent it downriver. Help me lift this grate up.”

  Will was stock-still. A revelation had caused him to seize up. It took a great deal of willpower just to bring his hand to his pocket and free his brother’s cell phone.

  “What is it?” Dylan spat.

  “She called you. Julie called you. You heard her voice. Let me hear her message. Dylan? I want to hear that message.”

  When his brother refused to yield from jimmying the grate in the floor, Will began frantically thumbing and scrolling about Dylan’s phone.

  “What are you doing?” Dylan shouted. He stood and lunged for the phone. The grate slipped from his fingers and clanged down viciously upon its frame. Before Dylan was able to yank the phone away Will had managed to bring up ‘Julie’s’ number from the call history. He pressed the Dial icon. A purling noise leaked through the phone’s speaker.

  A beat later this noise was overpowered by a hideous buzzing that seemed to be emanating from inside the iron coffin.

  The brothers were paralyzed. They stared into one another’s fear-widened eyes. Neither of them could bring themselves to face the buzzing casket. Again and again the phone rang. Even after Will dashed his brother’s device against that decaying red floor and saw it splinter, the casket continued to hum.

  Dylan eventually gripped the coffin lid. It hit the floor noisily.

  The bluish thing was wriggling. Dylan took up the homeowner’s chisel and began to tear the thing to pieces.

  “No!” screamed Will, though he was unsure exactly why. Rushing up alongside his brother, he peered over the rim with its arcane etchings and looked at the pristine mutilation.

  The livid wax curled back in ugly whitish rinds and rained down in clumps as Dylan continued to slash and twist and gouge. Though merely an effigy, its autopsy made Will’s stomach flip. He watched the torso part and smear as his brother fished out the vibrating phone, which went still and silent the very instant it was freed from its host.

  Now it was Will who began wresting free the floor grate. Dylan simply shuffled past him. Though he averted his eyes from the carnage, Will dutifully collected phone, carcass, and casket, dropping each in turn into the pipe. He heard them splash when they struck the watery base that was churning somewhere below.

  He then ran as he had never run before. Outside the rain flailed and swept like great shapeless wings. Will wended the length of the raging creek, his feet puncturing the sucking clay that seemed to be slipping into the moving current moment by moment.

  His relief at spotting Dylan up ahead was immense. He shouted his brother’s name, but the storm swirled his voice into its cacophony, muzzling it. Dylan was leisurely sauntering along the bank, whereas he was running full measure. Will could not seem to close the gap between them. Time and again he cried out for Dylan but received not even a backward glance.

  His frustration and fear ascending, Will took up a rock and hurled it at his brother’s back. But before the stone could strike him, Dylan veered dramatically to his left.

  The gate to their yard was still hanging open by the time Will reached it. He passed through and made his way toward the back deck.

  He was stunned by the sight of figures, just merely visible through the glass doors, milling about their dining room. A peek into the kitchen window, which was veiled by mother’s handmade curtains, revealed similarly obscure shapes shifting, gesturing, talking. Some of the figures were familiar to Will, having seen their photoshopped life moments many times on Dylan’s social media page. The pattern of the lace curtains seemed to pixelate their faces.

  The din of this unbidden gathering was audible even through the storm. The wan afternoon reduced the house’s interior to a cave, but Will guessed that these guests numbered in the dozens. He scaled the steps of the deck. He wanted nothing more than to see his brother.

  Moving to the glass door, Will suddenly stumbled. He looked down to see Dylan’s shoes sitting tidily side-by-side. The downpour had already rinsed away much of the river mud. Will reached down to collect the shoes but discovered that they had been nailed to the wooden deck. The spikes that pinioned them were chunky and black, akin to the ones that pinioned the effigy to its casket.

  The glass door slid back on its own. The susurrus was instantly silenced.

  Something whimpered from the recesses of the house, something that sounded pained.

  One of the figures stepped into the half-light and reached a flickering, blurry hand through the open doorway.

  Will attempted to flee but found that he too had been rooted.

  Fragile Masks

  “Woolf.”

  The word caused Paige to flinch in the passenger seat. She scanned the leaf-carpeted banks of the road, looking for signs of movement.

  “It was Virginia Woolf who took her life that way, not Brontë,” Jon explained, “my mistake. Wait, did you think I saw an actual…”

  “You gave me a start,” she said brusquely.

  Jon’s mouth hitched into a grin, which made him look more pained than amused. “Maybe you have some Halloween spirit after all.”

  Paige made a noise with her throat, then stared out at the drabness that surrounded them. The road was all clay and ugly stones, and the trees that flanked it had lost their foliage. They passed a pumpkin patch, a cornfield, both of which had been gleaned of their growth. Even the sunlight was filtered through strips of gray clouds that reduced it to a vague glimmer, the way the features of the dead grow indistinct beneath the shroud.

&nb
sp; “Any of this look familiar?” asked Jon.

  “The country all looks the same to me.”

  “Oh. Well, according to my phone we’re less than three miles from the bed-and-breakfast.”

  The final bend was riddled with potholes, forcing Jon to slow the car to a crawl. The phone app instructed him to turn left.

  “Hmm,” he muttered, “that doesn’t seem correct.”

  “Why not?”

  “Take a look down there, honey. That lane looks like a footpath. I doubt I could even get the car down there without getting the sides all scratched up by those trees. I’d hate to damage my new present.” He patted the dashboard gently, then touched Paige’s hair. “I know you said these places all look the same to you, but do you remember turning down a little lane like this when you were last here?”

  “Teddy and I didn’t stay at this particular place,” Paige explained, “but it was near here.”

  Jon rubbed the back of his neck. The rush of blood had made him feel hot. “Teddy…” he mumbled, though not so softly as to go unheard.

  She reached to the steering wheel, placed her hand over his. “This can be our place.”

  They made the turn.

  He’d been correct about the narrowness of the lane but had underestimated its length, for by the time they came upon the white two-storey house, the main road was no longer visible. It was obvious that the photos they’d seen of the establishment online had been taken in fairer weather and during better times. The sloping lawn that had appeared so rich and manicured was now a sparse, brownish mat, interspersed with mud puddles and a birdbath of broken stone. Jon did his best to mask his feelings of having been swindled.

  “I guess we just park over there.” He indicated an oval patch of the yard that was inlaid with white gravel. They drove up alongside the beige jeep that was parked there, and then Jon switched off the engine.

  He stepped out and immediately gave the car, which Paige had given him as a spontaneous gift over the summer, an inspection for scratches.