Behold the Void

by Philip Fracassi

  Tom holds his breath. Marcus sounds terrified. But of what? He wipes a hand over his mouth, rubs his eyes, tries to think. His hand caresses the pillow next to his own. Thoughtlessly, he bends over, lifts a corner, smells it, the smell of her.

  “Tom?” Marcus says, his voice desperate again, shrill and scared. Much like he sounded when they were kids—scared of bumps in the night during a sleepover, of a strange rustling in the nearby trees when they would camp in the thicket edging Tom’s backyard. Scared that a girl might leave him. That begging quality. Tom hates it.

  “All right,” Tom says quietly, almost relieved now that he’s decided to face whatever this was, whatever horrible thing had happened. “I’ll come by. When should I come? It’s still dark for chrissake…”

  “NOW!” Marcus screams, the word vicious and spiked with horror. “I need you here right fucking now, man!” Marcus takes a few deep, gasping breaths. “I don’t know how to fix this. I’m afraid, Tom, really afraid. I don’t want to open my eyes. I don’t want to ever open my eyes again, man. When I do…”

  “Marcus?”

  “When I do, bad shit happens, man. Bad shit.”

  Tom drives along the winding black road that twines between the southern edge of the Apollyon Forest and the tip of Sabbath Lake, high up on a ridge that drops into the distant lights of downtown and Marcus’s apartment.

  Marcus and Christine had opted out of buying property for a few years, hoping to rent a while and gather funds for a nicer place off the lake. Tom, meanwhile, lived in his parent’s house, thirteen acres of undesirable land that didn’t get enough water, but offered a nice view and a large, sturdy ranch house his father had built himself. His parents were gone now, both dying younger than they should have, within a year of each other, as was so often the case with couples who were truly, deeply in love.

  Tom smiles, watches the pickup truck’s beams dissipate as he drives beneath the dome of ever-lightening sky, the black a feverish purple now, the stars faded to pinpricks, soon to extinguish altogether in the sun’s all-encompassing gaze. The dream flickers like drifting embers, then vanishes, and he reaches for it one last time, forcing his mind to drift away from the panic of his friend, back to his dream of her. His smile broadens and he nearly laughs out loud inside the cab, happiness surging through his chest like the rising of a warm tide; a gentle tingling in his hands, feet, the nape of his neck. To find true love, isn’t that what life was? Isn’t that its entire purpose? What was the world created for if not to harbor timeless lovers? He thinks about the house, about some fixing-up he’d want to do before… yes, it will happen… before she came to live with him.

  But first this.

  This… whatever this was. This panic. This situation with Marcus. Always so dramatic, he thinks hatefully, his smile sinking into a grimace, lines digging into the skin at the corners of his mouth and eyes. Marcus was an odd boy, all right. Odd when they were growing up as children, right here in town, and even odder as an adult. But they were both in their late-30s now, and a man had to grow out of such behavior. Besides, Marcus was married. Had been for nearly five years. A married man needed to be stable, to protect what was his. To care for what was his.

  Tom shakes his head, presses down the gas pedal, the truck accelerating around a last bend cut into low hills leading to the main road below. He looks down at the town of Sabbath as dawn breaks over the far horizon, igniting the buildings with smeared shades of umber. The heavy shadows on the land turn blue, then soften into hazy grays. The treetops of Lewis Park catch fire.

  His stomach is grumbling and sour, and he wishes he’d eaten something, or at least had a cup of coffee. But Marcus had frightened him and he’d all but run from the house, his mind churning with terrible possibilities.

  Now, as the sun breaks free of the earth, those terrors abate and reality settles in. It didn’t matter—whatever it was that Marcus was up to—it just didn’t matter anymore. What mattered was the future, a future that would soon belong to him and the woman he loved.

  Tom parks in front of Marcus’s building. He gets out and looks up at the second-story windows of the squat four-unit, knowing full well they looked out from the main living room area. The bedroom and master bathroom windows are in the rear of the building; a rickety black fire escape leads up to them from resident parking off the alley. Tom knows it well.

  Any good vibes Tom has been holding onto vanish when he looks up at those windows. Perhaps it’s a trick of shadows cast against the dusty yellow glow of the rising sun, but the windows appear… misshapen, elongated, the white frames strangely curved.

  Tom takes a step back into the two-lane avenue, still empty so early in the morning, and studies the roofline above the windows. It seems straight as ever. He scratches his head, thinks that his lack of sleep combined with the lack of his usual morning coffee is catching up to him. He must be more tired than he realized.

  Laughing at himself, he walks inside, through the small white-tiled foyer and up the chipped wooden stairs, taking them two at a time. The second-story hallway is quiet and empty, filled with sleepy shadows that twist up walls and lay smeared along the floor; the light from the small dingy window at the end of the hall casts strange golden geometries into the white passageway.

  Tom feels the slightest chill go through him as he approaches 2B. He’s walking softy, almost tiptoeing in his worn boots, not realizing that he’s holding his breath until he stands before the warped wooden door. He feels his face grow hot.

  “Glory be, I’m a fool,” he mutters, and lets out the hostage breath.

  He knocks on the door.

  “Yes!” The voice comes from deep inside the room, so harsh and invasive in the soft morning that Tom jumps a bit. “It’s open, Tom.”

  Tom squeezes the knob and twists, pushes the door open, and steps inside.

  The room is smoky dawn gray, the lights off; the only illumination the daylight shooting through narrow blinds, steeping the gray room in soupy mustard yellow. It takes Tom a moment to adjust to the dim, but when he does his jaw falls open, his knees buckle and he nearly collapses in a heap to the floor, falls backward instead.

  “What…?” he gasps, not registering the door clicking shut as his back collapses into it, one hand already reaching for the knob, his face twisted into the ugly shock of seeing something unreal, something impossible.

  The large living room is a canvas of madness, as if Dali had run amok with his paintbrush and made the real world as surreal as those inhabited by his bizarre mercury creatures. Instead of drooping clocks and flaming stallions, however, these are real things, real things that could not possibly appear as they do.

  He looks around the room with jerky glances, trying to take it all in, trying to understand so his mind can stop skipping along the fragile surface of sanity, each taut bounce threatening to pop that protective bubble and send him reeling downward into broken psychosis.

  Everything in the room is… changed. Distorted. Warped. The dining room table, made of solid oak, is twisted like a pretzel, a knotted rope of wood eight feet long. The sturdy chairs sit recklessly on either side of its length, their legs bent into smooth U’s and V’s, chair backs faced skyward and downward and slant-wise like a still-picture of dying soldiers on a hardwood battlefield. Along the wall, picture frames and canvases are stretched into elongated forms, melting into one another to create distorted, amoeba-shaped art. One large gilt-framed painting of a horse that Christine owned as a child is pulled vertically, as if it had melted down the wall and settled into a puddle along the floor, giving the horse the look of a brown giraffe, its head separated from its body by three feet of neck, its legs lost in a pile of liquefied wax limbs. The couch, a brown suede monster that takes up an entire wall, is arched upward like a tunnel entrance, the leather dripping off its frame, frozen in mid-ooze to create the illusion of hanging ivy.

  But what throws Tom’s brain into a real fit are the windows.

  He’d been right about what
he’d seen outside. The window frames had shifted into quadrangles, the one on the right shaped like a slanted diamond. Perhaps more amazing is that the glass panes aren’t cracked. They’re smeared flawlessly into their new shapes, as if custom-made to fit the window frames of a funhouse.

  “I told you I was in trouble,” the voice says from the other side of the room.

  Tom tries to ignore the bizarre surroundings, focus on the voice. He can see a dark shape huddled in the far corner, beyond the pretzel-shaped table, hiding in the dark. Tom steps deeper into the room, moving slowly toward the slouched figure he now recognizes as Marcus.

  “Marcus? What… god, what happened?” Tom says, trying to keep the shaking out of his voice. But lord, he’s scared, and he has half a mind to turn and run and never come back, to get in his truck and drive, drive fast and far and forget this madness forever. But… But.

  “You sound a little freaked out, man,” Marcus says quietly, sounding slightly amused. “Well,” he says with a heavy sigh, “I suppose you have every right to be. I mean, I’m barely holding it together myself, you know?”

  Tom is a few feet from Marcus now, can see him plainly. He’s hunched into a corner, his legs sprawled out from his body in a V, his chin sunk against his chest, his arms splayed at his sides, palms up.

  He looks like a dead man, Tom thinks. Like a man who’d been shot in a cowboy movie, stumbled back into a corner and slid down a wall, leaving a smear of blood to mark his downward path; but Tom doesn’t see blood on the wall, and Marcus’s chest is rising and falling, the phone on the floor next to him. It was the one he had called from, screaming and hysterical, begging him to come, come now, something terrible…

  “Place looks crazy, right?” Marcus says, and Tom nearly jumps out of his alligator-skin boots. Marcus lifts his head, nose pointed slightly away from where Tom is standing. His eyes are closed. Tightly. “Where are you?”

  “I’m right in front of you, Marcus,” Tom says, eyes twitching around the room, the outlines of the distorted furniture beginning to glow warm with the incoming morning light. “Why don’t you open your eyes?”

  Marcus laughs at that. Laughs, but not with any real humor, like a man who’s been told a joke while standing on the gallows, the coarse burlap death sack scratching his cheeks, waiting for the floor to drop out.

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea, Tom,” Marcus says quietly, and nods his head toward the room. “I managed to turn off all the lights, so I could at least sit in the dark, keep from changing anything. But it’s getting light out, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Tom says, keeping his eyes on Marcus, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. His worry, his fear, is near a boiling point. “Listen, are we alone or…”

  “Oh, we’re alone,” Marcus says quickly, his lips curling into a tight smirk, a look Tom knows well and doesn’t much care for. “Christine’s long gone, man. See, we had the fight to end all fights last night, I’m talking a real door-slammer. A fight you don’t come back from. The kind of fight that ends things, you know what I mean?”

  Tom does but doesn’t say so. What the hell was this? He turns to look down the dark hallway that leads to the master bedroom, debates checking it out. As he turns to do so Marcus’s hand clamps tightly around the denim of one shin. Tom yelps and kicks, and Marcus draws his hand back, laughing for real this time. An old laugh.

  “Sorry, sorry!” he says, lifting his hands defensively, closed eyes looking up at Tom eagerly, like a blind beggar might look at a rich man jingling a purse of coins. “I was just trying to find you, man. I’m… I’m so glad you came. I really appreciate it. Things aren’t, uh, aren’t going too well.”

  “No shit,” Tom says, catching his breath. “Besides, I didn’t have much choice, you were screaming bloody murder, crying like a baby. Scared the hell out of me.”

  “Well, as you can see,” Marcus waves his hands toward the large room of grotesque objects, “I had reason to be upset. This ain’t exactly normal, is it, Tom?”

  Tom bends his knees, comes face to face with his friend. “Marcus, tell me what’s going on here. Where’s Christine?”

  Marcus settles back into the corner, lets out another heavy sigh. “I told you, man, we fought. It’s over between us. But that’s beside the point. What matters is the fight itself. That’s what matters.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “Sit down, man. Just sit down a second and let me tell you something. Then everything will make more sense… at least to some degree. Cool?”

  Tom takes another stabbing look toward the dark, silent hallway, then sits slowly down on the floor, crosses his legs, rubs his face with his hands. The weariness and stress are seeping in now. His bones feel rubbery, his thoughts thick as black treacle. The strangeness of the room makes things impossible to wrap his head around, and all he can do is sit and listen to whatever his friend has to say. Sit and wait for things to make some kind of sense.

  “Okay, remember that old television show we used to watch when we were kids? The one where something really strange happened every episode? Sometimes there were monsters, sometimes devils, puppets would come to life, or a ghost would haunt an old lady, whatever it was. Remember that show?”

  Tom did. He and Marcus used to sit in his basement and watch his crappy television, foil-wrapped antennas enhancing the picture just enough to make it watchable. He never cared much for those shows, found them odd and often silly, but Tom never did have a taste for the supernatural. He preferred cowboys and bank robbers to ghosts and goblins. But Marcus had been crazy for them, and Tom hadn’t minded sitting with his friend while the strange stories unfolded in black and white.

  “Yes,” is all he says, hoping Marcus will start making sense of things.

  “They were the best shows ever, the very best,” Marcus says with a grin that makes Tom think of him as a twelve-year-old again. “I was nuts for that stuff.”

  “What’s your point, Marcus?” Tom says, getting more and more creeped out listening to his friend talk while his eyes stay shut, giving his pale face a ghastly, mask-like appearance. “And why don’t you open your eyes?”

  “Just wait, I’m getting there,” he says, like he’s setting up a punchline. “Okay, well there was one episode of that show, one of the first ones we saw. I can’t remember what it was called, or really what happened in the story, but it was about a guy who had telekinetic powers. You remember? In one part of the show, he used the powers to bend a spoon, right in front of his wife, to prove, you know, that he could do it? And then, I think, he went insane or something. The rest is a little blurry...

  “Anyway, ever since that episode, including that very night, I wanted to have those powers, just like the guy in the show. It was an obsession, man, a real obsession with me. Every night and every morning, religiously, I would… hell, it’d almost be embarrassing if not for… anyway, I would spend a few minutes, twice a day, just staring at a spoon, trying like hell to bend it with my mind.”

  Tom studies his friend. Something tickles in the back of his brain, some distant memory. He can visualize Marcus’s bedroom, and wasn’t there always a spoon on his nightstand? There was, but Tom had never thought anything of it. So he had a spoon in his room, so what? But now that Marcus is telling him… yes, it was there, all right. Every time he was in that room, that spoon was right there by his bed.

  “What are you saying?” Tom says, nibbling worms of horror writhing in his guts. “You learned to bend spoons?”

  “No! That’s just it, man! I never did it. It never worked, not one time,” Marcus howls, his face unmistakably happy, gleeful almost, and Tom wonders what happened to the hysterical, terrified Marcus from the phone call. Had that been an act? Or was this the act?

  “Okay,” is all Tom can think to say. “So what then?”

  “Right, so the spoon thing, okay? It became, like I said, an obsession. But then, as I got older, it was more… hell, it was more like a ritual. Like a form
of meditation. It was just something I did, you know? Like I couldn’t sleep unless I spent a few minutes at night working on it, couldn’t really start my day unless I did the same thing in the morning. I suppose it sounds stupid, but I guess it was sort of my equivalent to morning and evening prayers. Except instead of praying to an almighty god, I was praying to this stupid metal spoon. Dumb, right? But it was so calming… I guess what meditation must be like. And that’s why… shit, man.” He stops a moment, swallows, and his voice comes back hoarse. “Here’s where things get bad.”

  Marcus reaches a hand toward Tom, and Tom finds himself pulling back, pulling away from that touch. “You there, Tom?” he says, almost whispering now, a ghoul in the dark. “You listening?”

  Tom rubs his stubbled chin with trembling fingers, his mind racing. “Okay, so you tried to bend this spoon, twice a day, every day… since you were twelve years old.”

  Marcus nods. “Been doing it almost twenty-five years.”

  “And it never worked.”

  Marcus shakes his head. “Never. Not a once.” Marcus’s head goes still, his closed eyes fall to the floor, and Tom thinks he is seeing that smirk again. “Not until last night.”

  Tom feels chilled fingers crawl up his spine. Suddenly, he doesn’t want Marcus to open his eyes. Suddenly, he has a bad feeling about all of this—beyond strange, beyond impossible. Dangerous.

  “And so we come to it,” Tom says finally, trying to sound… what? Stable. Tough. In control. He’s none of these things. His eyes fall to the twisted table, the light pouring in through the funhouse-shaped windows, and he considers the power it must have taken to do what had been done. The table is eight feet of wide, thick oak, twisted and gnarled as if by a giant from a fairy tale, but worse. Worse because there are no splinters, no breaks in the wood, no violence. The wood is curved and seamless in its new form, as if the molecules had been rearranged into something new. Monstrous.