Grotesquerie

by Richard Gavin

  *

  The New Year’s Eve dinner Mrs. Whitlock had prepared was sumptuous, but Maxine’s troubled mind forbade her from enjoying it. She had to choke down her serving just to save face. When Xavier muttered to her, asking what was troubling her, Maxine drew upon her dramatic training. She mimicked the authentic revelry of her fellow diners, even joined them in a raucous countdown to midnight. Mr. Whitlock uncorked the magnum of champagne and poured the foaming liquid into the waiting flutes.

  The festivities extended into the wee hours of the morning. Everyone, including Mrs. Whitlock, consumed a shocking quantity of spirits. By three a.m. some of the couples had slipped off to their rooms. Mr. Whitlock was dozing in his overstuffed chair. Others danced mellowly to the strains of waltz music.

  Maxine was unfazed by these sights. Her attentions were focused on two tasks; the first was struggling to fight off the effects of too much drink (she wanted very much to keep her wits about her), and the second was to find out where Mrs. Whitlock had disappeared to.

  It had been well over an hour since she had eased her husband into his favourite chair and collected the champagne flutes. She’d escaped into the kitchen but had yet to return. Maxine almost managed to trick herself into believing the foolish theory that the old woman must have retired for the night. She recalled the shape in the cabin, the dirt, the heat, the misshapen mirror…

  “Why don’t we turn in,” Xavier whispered to her, pulling her attention from the kitchen door that she’d been waiting to see swing open for the entirety of their waltz. “Let’s go have our own party upstairs.”

  Maxine looked at her husband, nodded, kissed his mouth. “I’ll be right up,” she growled.

  Xavier gave her his usual telltale grin. He began loosening his tie before he’d even exited the sitting room. He bade none of his family goodnight.

  When she was reasonably confident that everyone remaining was either too tired, too distracted or too drunk to notice her, she pushed against the swinging door and moved through the darkened kitchen.

  Again, there was light guttering from the little cabin in the hedge; again, there was a manic fluttering of shadows, like a murder of crows in flight.

  Maxine exited the great house and snuck up on the cabin.

  Peering in through the dirty window exposed her to a sight so startling, so raw, that Maxine’s brain could only process it in fragments. The flame of the lone candle jittered from the motions occurring in the room it illuminated. Mrs. Whitlock stood bent at the hips, naked as she’d been at birth, gripping the sides of the floor length mirror, which had also lost its covering. The old woman appeared to be watching herself in the glass. Her silver mane now hung loose and flowing. Sweat glistened on the soft padding of her back. Her pendulous breasts swung in rhythm with her rutting.

  As to the other, impossible aspects of the scene—the numberless bodies of shadow that positioned and repositioned themselves around Mrs. Whitlock to hungrily knead and caress her body, the tongues of cobweb that licked her or pressed against her own jutting pink tongue, the dissolving faces of grit that leered at the action like a gaggle of phantom voyeurs—all of these details Maxine would later tell herself were simply born of her own imagination. Her brain, so shocked by the matriarch’s act of indulgence (or was it one of release?), created a tableau of Id-soaked images to punish her…and perhaps to protect from the even harsher truth about this scene.

  Sheepishly, Maxine backed away from the cabin, plugging her ears against the curses and the cries that filled the otherwise silent night in the virgin new year.

  *

  New Year’s Day slipped past like a dream. It was plain to Maxine that her mother-in-law was either unaware of her spying or was unfazed by it, for the old woman was every bit as congenial, conscientious and clean as she’d been all weekend. As she had no doubt been all her adult life.

  Maxine was unspeakably grateful that Xavier had booked them an afternoon flight back home. Their departure in the great marble foyer was filled with hugs and wishes for safe travels. Maxine hugged Mrs. Whitlock especially close. She thanked her for such a wonderful time.

  “I hope this year brings you every happiness,” Maxine told her. Her sincerity was absolute. She looked her mother-in-law directly in the eye when she spoke these words, and then she hugged her again.

  Their car hadn’t yet reached the four-lane highway when Maxine frantically urged Xavier to pull over.

  “Do you feel sick?” he said.

  “Just pull the car over, please.”

  Xavier carefully edged the vehicle onto the side of the road, fearful that he might sink them in a ditch. He shifted the gear into Park.

  He was half-confused, half-elated when he saw Maxine wriggling her underwear down her legs and over her shoes. She undid his seatbelt, his trousers. She mounted him.

  Their coupling was surreal, exotic, intoxicating. For Xavier, terror of discovery mingled with the ecstasy of taboo. He looked at his wife, radiant in the bright winter afternoon. He caught glimpses of the vast open fields and the nearby houses, the birds that perched in the leafless trees.

  “Promise me something,” Maxine said once the deed was done.

  “After that? Anything!” Xavier breathlessly replied.

  “Promise me you’ll never keep anything from me. Anything. Promise me you’ll always tell me everything, no matter what it is.”

  Xavier was visibly confused but he nonetheless nodded his head. “Okay,” he said. “But only if you promise to do the same.”

  “I will.”

  *

  In March of that year, a hurricane that had begun stirring in the Caribbean made its way up the Eastern Seaboard and reached Ontario. The storm felled many structures, including the tiny cabin on the Whitlock grounds. The great house escaped unscathed.

  Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Whitlock began to lose weight at a rate that alarmed her husband. Eventually, she was hospitalized, but by this time the cancer in her uterus had metastasized. She succumbed on the 21st of June.

  As per her Last Will & Testament, Mrs. Whitlock was cremated, and her ashes were divided into separate urns and sent to each of her sons. For the better part of a year Xavier kept his portion of his mother on a table in the living room. But the sight of it, the very idea of it, disturbed Maxine. Eventually Xavier acquiesced and allowed Maxine to move the ashes to a spare room closet, where they sat for a long time in neglect.

  Until one wintry day when Maxine was left alone while her husband was away on business. An ice storm had been ravaging the area for nearly thirty-six hours. Many houses had lost power; Maxine’s included. It was while she sat shivering in the unlit, vacant house, that she decided to liberate Mrs. Whitlock from her perch.

  A single candle lighted Maxine’s way as she ventured into the neglected room and freed the urn from its cobweb-laden nook.

  The dust it held seemed ever-so-faintly to sigh as Maxine turned it gently in her hands. She sat within the candlelit chamber long into the night, holding the urn, listening. She allowed her mind to drift into buried fantasies, ones that heated her insides with shame, with delight. Maxine waited until these sensations became almost unbearable, then she extinguished the candle.

  Cast Lots

  “I’m the clerk, I’m the scribe, at the hearings of what cause I know not.”

  — Samuel Beckett, “Texts for Nothing”

  She finds herself inside a lilting cottage. Gales test the twisted nails that hold the planks of this most humble abode consecutive, firm. The wooden walls creak, as does the bowing cot she rests upon.

  The winds are cold and smell of yeast. They insinuate themselves between the slats, snuffing out the low-burning kerosene lamp. There is no moon.

  Shifting in a strange bed, with its prodding springs and coarse blankets, the woman is suddenly alerted to…what, a premonition, a memory?

  Knowledge; direct irrefutable knowledge that a great peril is encroaching; growing keener, vaster, nearer.

  The cert
ainty of this danger rouses in the woman an all-consuming terror, one that reaches a critical mass once she hears the bleating sound that rides the forceful wind. These noises come rhythmically. They penetrate the cottage as surely as a spear.

  Flinging back the bedclothes, the woman charges for the door. She is thoughtless in her panic, but is intent only on fleeing, on racing down the first causeway she encounters.

  She freezes mere paces outside her door.

  There are no roads to tread, for this tiny cottage, she discovers, stands upon a tiny island. The mainland is clearly visible, its dunes baptized in a strange kind of manufactured light, but a raging channel stretches between it and the woman. She studies the choppy surface with its whitish peaks. It is like a horde of ghosts floating past her, endlessly.

  Out here the bleating sound is that much louder, that much closer. Peering out across the roiling divide, she pinpoints the source of the noise. Standing on the far shore, planted in the sand like an incongruous tree, is a payphone. Fixed to a stout wooden pillar, the phone is of a style the woman has not seen in years. The metallic clang of its bell is painful, panicked, like the mechanized scream of a maimed creature…

  *

  Joyce Felton lifted her eyelids slowly, then immediately closed them again. Though the dream had dissolved, its significance lingered, spiting the daylight that had only just begun to brighten the blinds. Tears slipped from the corners of her eyes. Breathing had become a chore. Joyce knew she had to muster sufficient courage in order to face whatever changes might have been wrought during her sleep. She also knew that there were questions, difficult and delicate questions that needed to be asked.

  She sat up quickly and forced herself to see.

  The bedroom was as she had left it, complete with the half-drained water glass and an overfilled ashtray on the nightstand. Though these sights might have on any other morning reassured her, Joyce could not ignore the fact that she had endured a disturbing dream, a nightmare where every detail seemed to sweat menace, to shine with fell purpose.

  She rose and began to walk, to scrutinize, to hunt for signs of transition.

  In the hallway, pale carpet met smartly with moulding.

  Walls ran upright. All the light fixtures were functioning.

  The number of steps on the main stairway had neither swelled nor diminished. The mums in the vase on the foyer stand had not withered.

  A cursory check of the kitchen proved that the milk remained white in its container and that the water still drained clockwise in the sink.

  Joyce had almost managed to convince herself that her lot in life had survived this most recent experience in the nightmare-realm, but her confidence crumbled when she chanced a glimpse through the laundry-room window that looked out into the back yard.

  The lawn was strewn with the bodies of birds—crows, thrushes, sparrows.

  At first Joyce was struck by the awful scenario of the creatures having suffered some epidemic that had stolen their lives. But this theory was usurped by the worse reality once Joyce noticed that many of the birds were still stirring and twitching. Their feathers were fluffed, bills were tucked under wings, tiny eyes were closed.

  The knowledge, such as she had undergone in her nightmare, was flushing through her now, in the heatless light of the waking state.

  This was how the change always came: a Hand of Death caressing those it had cursed. In Joyce’s case, for reasons she could never ascertain, the change had always staked its claim through slumber. It rode in like a Horseman on a mare, spectral and marauding in its pursuit of her.

  Sleep’s reach, Joyce had learned, was vast. Though this was the first time she had ever seen evidence of it pulling birds from the sky and stunning them into an almost unshakable rest, she was not shocked by this development. Her past experiences had left her utterly consumed by the mounting unreality of oneiric shifting. It grew around her like a rising tide, dragging in any sentient creature that happened to be anywhere near Joyce’s prostrate form. Anything lost in this undertow often floundered. If they did survive, they awoke to find themselves inside a wholly different life, a wholly different world.

  Joyce hoped, prayed, that these winged creatures were too slight and frail to impact her to any degree.

  But she then discovered that the birds were not the only creatures to have been sucked into this dream-mire: a man must have been passing by her yard at some point in the night. Had he been trying to break in, Joyce wondered? No matter, for his punishment was to become a mere pawn in an enterprise that was beyond the ken of anyone.

  The man was floating face up in her swimming pool.

  All strength drained from Joyce’s legs. She slipped down between the laundry tub and the dryer, which, she noticed, needlessly and inopportunely, had a thin scab of rust at its base. It was not fear that buckled her, but an exhaustion that is specific to this psychological torture. It was happening so soon after last time. Had it ever truly ceased? Even its respites seemed somehow to be punishments.

  Pulling herself erect, Joyce childishly hoped that the man on the water had evaporated as dreams are supposed to do in daylight.

  He was no longer in the pool. He was now at the window.

  His features became distorted as he pressed his face to the pane. His movements left a greasy trail on the glass. Joyce looked at his face and was offended by its slackness, by the way the eyes jittered beneath their drooping lids. Through the glass she could hear the wet flutter of the man’s snore.

  “Go away!” she pleaded, her voice waffling unpleasantly between a whisper and a shrill whine. She checked over her shoulder, fearing that Morgan had been woken, that she would see the shape of all that Joyce had struggled to protect her from ever seeing. “Go!” She enforced her plea by waving her hands in a shooing motion.

  Drool spilt from the man’s hanging jaw, indicating just how deep in the nightmare he was.

  Confident that the rear door was out of the somnambulist’s reach, Joyce unlocked it and stepped out onto the patio. “Get out of here—now!” she cried. The man’s clothes were ragged. He pawed at the air as one love-starved, one desperate for an embrace. He was, Joyce knew, looking to pull her back into last night’s ugly island cottage, with its telephone screeching to be answered.

  The man shambled listlessly to his left, his right. His condition allowed Joyce to guide him on his way with relative ease. She steered him toward the open wooden gate. Pool water dripped from his clothing. Joyce hated the fact that she had to touch him.

  Once he began shuffling down the driveway Joyce slammed and bolted the gate.

  Her re-entry into the house had all the drama of a teen sneaking in after curfew. She broke from tiptoeing long enough to snap the deadbolt on the back door, then she moved to the living room and peered through the sheers of the large bay window.

  The man was staggering like a drunkard down the centre of the street.

  He’d managed to shuffle out of Joyce’s view before the terrible squeal of tires, followed immediately by a thud.

  Joyce backed away from the window, chilled by the sound of the panicked voices and cries from down the way.

  “What’s going on?”

  The voice came from behind her. Joyce spun to see Morgan, who was rubbing her eyes with the heel of her left hand. Her tangled hair suggested a restless night.

  “An accident,” were the only two words Joyce managed to pronounce before she began to cry.

  Morgan moved to her, wrapped her arm around her shoulders, and asked repeatedly what was wrong. When Joyce was unable or unwilling to respond, all at once Morgan knew.

  Her arm slipped off Joyce’s quaking frame. “No,” she said.

  Joyce looked at her, her eyes desperately assessing what, if anything, Morgan might have pieced together.

  The girl’s expression and demeanour were frustratingly blank. They prevented Joyce from any insights at all. Morgan made her way to the breakfast nook with melodramatic slowness. The padded bench huffed when
she slumped down upon it. The girl sat like one mesmerized. She lazily traced the table-top’s grain pattern with one finger.

  Resignedly, Joyce joined her, studying her from across the narrow nook.

  “I want to ask you a question and I want you to answer me honestly. Morgan? Look at me please. I need to ask you something.”

  Morgan kept her head against the crook of her elbow but did respond with “What?”

  “Have you been doing something you’re not supposed to?”

  Morgan lifted her head at last. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean have you been…curious.”

  Morgan’s eyes slowly closed. Her chin rumpled and began to quiver. “I’m sorry,” she squeaked.

  “I told you never to go looking for her, didn’t I? How many times did I say that if you start looking for a castaway, all you end up doing is calling attention to yourself, making the nightmare notice you?”

  A thick wedge of tension was driven between them.

  Joyce ultimately rose to collect the rudiments of breakfast.

  She peered out at the back yard. The birds must have awoken and flown.

  Morgan was unable even to consider eating the bowl of cold cereal that had been placed before her. Joyce smoked cigarettes over her own, allowing the fallen ashes to darken the milk like polluted snow.

  The telephone’s ring jolted the pair of them—Morgan from the unexpectedness, Joyce from its kinship to her most recent nightmare. They let the answering machine take the call:

  “Hello, Joyce? This is Alex from the store. I’m just checking to see if you were aware that you were scheduled to be our opening cashier this morning. Your shift started forty minutes ago, so if you could give me a call back as soon as you get this that would be great.”

  The sing-song tone of her supervisor’s voice both masked anger and betrayed an utter lack of concern for what might have prevented Joyce from fulfilling her retail duties.