3.
Mother died on March 23rd. Charlie knew she was dead when he went into the kitchen and saw that the coffee hadn’t been made. Mother always made the coffee at 6:30 in the morning, just like she had when Charlie’s dad was alive and Charlie was rushing off to elementary school. Without fail Charlie was greeted, every morning, with the aroma of Mother’s strong coffee. It was a welcome scent and the absence of it that morning stopped him cold.
Hurriedly, he went about making the coffee himself, as though it could revive the dead. He knew it was hopeless, but it was like the whole house was lopsided and insane without that scent. Once the coffee was on, maybe he could think a little bit. Maybe it would get some of those cobwebs out of his head.
While the coffee brewed, he crossed the house to Mother’s bedroom. The door was slightly ajar. It was always slightly ajar when she was in it. It came from pushing the door against the frame but not hard enough to make it click shut. The slight unevenness of the old house caused the door to creep back into her room.
Mother was slightly cold to the touch. He watched her chest for any rising and falling. He checked her pulse. He held the back of his hand against her nose and mouth. Nothing. She was right, Charlie thought. She knew she was going to die. It was just a couple of nights ago she had warned Charlie about her black dreams—black cars, black curtains, black horses, and black seas. Shadow children calling from outside her window, wanting her to come out and play. And now the blackness had settled over her. It had drowned her and it wasn’t going to cough her back up.
Charlie went to call the hospital and then decided not to. Maybe he should have some coffee first. Smoke some pot to calm his nerves. Pick up the house a little bit. Mother would hate anyone being in the house when it looked the way it did.
Later that evening, Charlie went to the phone again. This time he figured he’d better call the police but, picking up the phone, he couldn’t do it. He was too drunk and high to handle the house being filled with cops and paramedics.
He went back into his mother’s room. It felt colder than the rest of the house. Outside, the March winds rampaged, slinging icy rain against the window. Charlie pulled the quilt, something his mother had made herself, up to her chin. He sat down on the edge of the bed, put his face in his hands, and cried. For some reason, he couldn’t see her as completely dead until she was in the ground. He imagined her spirit stuck in some kind of middle-ground, trying to reach her beautiful place. He hoped she could find it. He didn’t want to leave her side. Not that night anyway. He went to her nightstand and rummaged until he found the only two books she ever read. One was the Bible and the other was a beat up historical romance paperback. Alternating, he read her passages from both of them. There were times when it felt awkward, reading the romance passages to his mother, but it was better than trying to think of something to say.
Some time just before dawn, Charlie got tired. He put the books on the nightstand, kissed his mother on the forehead and, pulling her door tightly shut, he went out into the living room to fall asleep in front of the television. He wouldn’t open her door again for nearly a month.
4.
He woke up the next afternoon and contemplated calling someone about Mother again. Before he even got up to go to the phone, Charlie realized that an interesting sort of paranoid paralysis now crawled through his veins. If he called someone, wouldn’t they know how long his mother had been dead? And wouldn’t they find it peculiar he hadn’t called them yesterday, as soon as he found her? Wouldn’t it be considered gross abuse of a corpse or something? Christ, he didn’t want to go to jail.
Eventually, Charlie settled down into a fogged routine. Every day, he tried to forget he was ignoring the fact that something had to be done about Mother. He woke up, made the coffee and took a daily trip to Hapsburg’s Corner Store to buy wine and cigarettes. At first, he just bought one bottle of wine but then he found himself going for three and then four. He smoked five packs of cigarettes a day.
All day, he sat on the couch in front of the television, ripped on wine and laughing like a madman, a cigarette always burning between his fingers. The morning after he woke up with headaches and a persistent cough, wondering why he felt that way and proceeding to do the same things over. He didn’t turn on any lights save the flickering glow of the TV. He didn’t open any blinds. He couldn’t recall eating anything. For nearly a month and it really felt much longer, it felt like the only life he knew, Charlie lived like this.
5.
It wasn’t until a day in late April that Charlie had his epiphany. Actually, it was like several small epiphanies leading up to one huge revelation.
The day began like any other day. He woke up. He made his coffee, took the pot into the living room with him and sat in front of the television. Shortly after noon, he went to Hapsburg’s. This time he just needed wine. There was still a half a carton of Lucky Strikes back at the house so he wouldn’t need any more for at least a day. He jingled the door open at Hapsburg’s and went along his predestined route, staring down at the tiles peeling back on the yellow water-stained floor. Charlie always wondered how it was the health department never managed to close Hapsburg’s down. Charlie liked it because it was convenient, but he didn’t think he would ever buy any food from there. But it was all right for wine and Charlie loaded up his arms, carrying the bottles to the front counter.
As always, old Hapsburg was there. Charlie had never figured out his first name. Charlie also realized he never made eye contact with old Hapsburg. Usually, the transaction took place with Charlie staring at his chest until the old man held out his gnarled hand to give him change. Today, however, Charlie looked up at old Hapsburg. What he saw made him stumble back a couple of steps, only far enough to where he could loop his arms out and seize the wine bottles.
It looked like Hapsburg had aged to the point of death. His once ruddy complexion was now a chalky gray. His wrinkles had become trench-like furrows cutting through that pallor. And his eyes, when Charlie met them, were a milky white. “Thank you,” Hapsburg said before his eyes turned black, some type of fetid pus rolling out and onto his cheeks, diverted by the wrinkles around his mouth.
Charlie was speechless. Not bothering to reach out for the change, he pulled the bottles in close and charged out the door, his heart beating harder than it had in a long time. He didn’t slow down until he was at the corner and across the street. What the hell? he thought.
Once across the street, he slowed down. On one hand, Charlie was terrified. On the other hand, he felt more alive than he had in years. Adrenaline sparkled through him. His skin felt hot against his clothes. His heart leaped around in his chest.
All around him it was a nice day. The electricity of spring held on. Overhead, a bruised mass of clouds floated rapidly across the sky but, here and there, he could catch the blue behind the clouds and it was magnificent.
Charlie paused at the next corner, looking around at the blooming trees and the early stages of the neighborhood’s gardens. He breathed in the air, a rare fresh and clean scent for Oretown. It was only clean, he figured, because it came from some other place. He imagined the flat farmlands of Indiana. Off to his right, he saw a woman ambling from a few yards away. She pushed a baby carriage and it looked like she had on a short skirt. Charlie found himself vaguely aroused. He had forgotten how good it felt to be in that state, even if it just meant going home and jerking off over the sink.
The woman drew closer. She seemed, in fact, to be coming at a somewhat alarming rate. As she closed the distance between them, the terror Charlie felt back at Hapsburg’s came back. The woman was almost right on him now and he saw that she wasn’t attractive at all. She was emaciated and deathly, tight brown mummified skin wrapped around her bones. Her hair hung in dirty strands and clumps. She smelled like decay. She stopped the carriage just in front of Charlie and turned to look at him. Her eyes were black sockets. Yellow pus oozed from her blunted, truncated nose. She put up a hand to one wither
ed breast and lasciviously rolled her green tongue out to Charlie.
Forgetting himself, he bent over the baby carriage to vomit. Inside was a stillborn, its purple body drawn up, an umbilical cord ascending to who knew where. Charlie let go with the puke, wanting only to be away, and felt the baby’s sinister soft stroking of his cheek.
Charlie uprighted himself and took off running. He was only a couple of blocks from home. Ducking off into an alleyway between two shops, he pulled to a panting stop. Christ, he felt like he was dying.
Looking up at the sky, he saw the sun desperately trying to break free from those heavy clouds, lining their contours with a glaring white gold.
“What the hell are you trying to do to me!” he shouted. He didn’t know if he was yelling at God or Mother or his whole sad life. “What the fuck am I supposed to do?!” The amazing thing was that he felt capable of doing something, anything.
He pulled a wine bottle out from his jacket. Rearing back his arm he threw it as high up in the air as he could, aiming it right at the clouds. He heard it pop on one of the roofs. Charlie imagined his blood spewing from the shattered dark green glass.
“Why don’t you let the sun go, you little shits!”
He threw the second bottle. “She could burn you up if she wanted to!” Charlie threw the third and then the fourth before he took off running back toward the house, chasing down the cloud shadows racing along the asphalt.
6.
Once back at the house, Charlie realized he didn’t want to go in. He thought it would be too much like walking willfully back into a coma. The inside of that house was a dense fog of twisted, half-remembered memories.
Bracing himself, he opened the door, went in, and turned on all the lights.
The place looked like a warzone. He was amazed he was able to wreak so much havoc in so short a time. Indescribable stains covered the floor, creating a sticky sheen. More stains were splashed upon the wall. A dank, heavy odor took his breath. Pizza boxes and junk food wrappers surrounded the coffee table and couch, some of them containing a decomposing mass of the original contents. The coffee table was covered in ash and cigarette stubs. A pile of empty wine bottles mounted itself against the back of the couch.
“Christ,” Charlie muttered.
It was at that point he knew what he had to do. He had to get out of Oretown. To stay there was a slow death. But there were other things he had to do first. Things that would free up his mind. First, he had to stop and think—where was he going to go?
He went around behind the easy chair in the living room and grabbed his dad’s old Rand McNally road atlas. It was still there. It was amazing how little certain things changed over the years. Trying not to look around him, he took the atlas out onto the cement front porch and sat down on the top step.
Age had turned the pages of the atlas yellow and crinkly. It carried a musty scent the fresh, damp air seemed to exorcise. Charlie didn’t know where to look first.
He lit a cigarette and started at the beginning, reading the names of towns and cities in each state. Some of them he spoke half-aloud, rolling them around in his mouth to see how he liked the sound.
He sat there for over an hour, hardly moving, letting those names and the abstracted topography of America silence the voices screaming up from his viscera. By the time he reached the end, he had it narrowed down to two places. Going by the names alone, he figured it had to be either Nothing, Arizona, or Sad Clown, Kentucky. Practicality dictated that it would be Sad Clown, Kentucky. Charlie didn’t think the car would make it all the way to Arizona and it was just his luck that it would break down in some place called Centerville or Middletown. Some generic, pre-fabricated place too much like Oretown.
Another Oretown, regardless of how far away, would still be Oretown in the end. No, Charlie had lived his entire life in Oretown, experienced life and marriage and death in Oretown. Charlie was finished with this Oretown and all the other Oretowns in the world.
His mind made up, he tossed the atlas off to one side of the porch and walked around the house to the garage. He pulled the door open and let the smell of the garage hit him—a smell he’d always found unpleasant. It was like gas and rubber and antiseptic cement with a layer of unidentifiable grime. No matter how clean it was, it always smelled that way. Charlie sidled past the car, not knowing why they even bothered putting it in a garage, and made his way to his mother’s gardening tools.
Beside the table covered in flowerpots and old dried bulbs, Charlie found the items he was looking for. There was a small, motorized tiller and a shovel. He grabbed them up and went back to the house.
Before going inside, he looked around to make sure no one saw him carrying these instruments into the house. Later, when the authorities found the house abandoned, Charlie didn’t want one of the neighbors to say, “Well, come to think of it, last time I seen him he was going into the house with a shovel and a tiller.” That could breed suspicion and Charlie didn’t figure it would take people too long to start thinking maybe he had killed his mother. That wouldn’t be fair to either one of them. Charlie didn’t want an exhumation to disturb his mother’s resting place.
7.
Trekking through the wreck of the house, Charlie eventually reached the basement door and skillfully maneuvered both instruments down the stairs. The floor down there was a hard-packed dirt, greasy with age and a virtual lack of sunlight or organic activity. There were the narrow, rectangular windows on three sides of the house, but they were so grimed over that any sun coming through was pale and sickly.
Charlie knew he would have to use the tiller to break the initial layer and figured he could probably get down three, maybe even four feet before hitting bedrock.
It proved to be a lot more difficult than Charlie had at first suspected. Digging it took him up until nearly dawn. The old dirt had covered his sweaty skin and he felt like he wore a coat of mud. His palms were blistered and bleeding. The bottom of his right foot throbbed from coming down again and again on the metal lip of the shovel. Once he stopped, he didn’t think he’d be able to raise his arms above his chest without wincing. But he wasn’t tired. Not once during the whole night had he felt like going to sleep.
He stood back and surveyed his work, wondering, “Is it a grave if there’s nobody in it, or is it just a hole?”
Sticking the shovel in the pile of loose dirt he’d dug up, Charlie went upstairs and out onto the porch to take a breather. He pulled a cigarette from his breast pocket and lit it, resisting the temptation to sit down on the steps. If he did that, he knew he’d stiffen up and be unable to go back to work. Because, of course, only half of his work was done. But he didn’t really think of it in those terms. This next part was ritual, ceremony, something he should enjoy doing.
It was going to be another mild day. At this hour, the sun merely burned the horizon gold. Low, thick gray clouds rolled slowly overhead. Last night had been a full moon, or close to it, and Charlie felt as much surrounded by twilight as dawn. Off in the distance, a factory billowed its white steam. Muffled by the morning moisture, a train horn sounded, dragging its sad cargo along the cold rails. The world had not woke up yet and Charlie stood there, still, feeling like the possessor of some secret knowledge.
Flicking his cigarette out into the yard, he went back into the house. Still trying not to look around him, he went to his mother’s room and turned the knob of her door. Bracing himself against the fetid smell, he swung it inward and then his breath got caught up in the back of his throat. His throat closed up and his heart hammered against his breastbone—
His mother, crouching in the corner, stood up, moving too rapidly, brushed the wrinkles out of her dress and came toward him. She made a hideous kissing gesture with her mouth and said, through windpipes riddled with decay, “I’m not there yet, Charlie. I ain’t made it to the byootiful place.” And he smelled her rose perfume covering up that fecal urine reek and closed his eyes, waiting to feel her cold cold hands on his cheeks only—
He didn’t feel them at all. Pressing himself against the doorframe and trembling, Charlie opened his eyes.
There, on the bed, just as he’d left her save for looking a little more dead, lay his mother.
“Jesus,” Charlie said aloud, putting a shaky hand to his chest and waiting for his heart to stop trying to explode. He thought about going into the kitchen to get some wine until he remembered he didn’t have any.
Charlie crossed over to the bed and thought, “Well, I guess I have to do this.” This was the part he dreaded most and he found himself questioning the reality of it. The whole thing just didn’t seem like something he ever saw himself doing. It felt like he had become someone else, living some other life.
The smell of death hung around his mother. There was some familiarity in the stink. Charlie had smelled it when they went to visit his great-grandmother in the rest home. He had smelled it in hospitals. It was like the body gone bad, turning like milk or meat or fruit. There wasn’t any other way to think about it.
Charlie went around the bed, undoing the four corners and tossing them toward the middle. Gathering quilt and sheet around Mother, Charlie bent down and heaved her up, slinging her over his shoulder. There was a sickening crack as his Mother met his shoulder with some stiffness before her torso went limp and draped over his back. If it weren’t for having to focus on some level of physicality, that sound and that feel would have made Charlie nauseous.
Cautiously, he crept through the living room and down the stairs as they creaked beneath the added weight. Once in the basement, Charlie hurried to the hole and, as tenderly as he possibly could, turned the hole into a grave. He climbed down in the grave with her. The mounds of dirt were well over his head and he felt instantly claustrophobic. As though he was going to be buried in there with her. He figured he had managed to go a good three and a half to four feet deep with the grave.
Sunruined: Horror Stories Page 8