Horror Stories

by Liz Phair

  In my dream, I’m walking up the side of a mountain. The dense foliage makes the trail ahead hard to see. It keeps winding around and doubling back on itself. I’m starting to feel out of breath as the incline tests my fitness. I see Ethan in a clearing about twenty feet up the hill. I wave to him. He has a strange look on his face, like he’s sneering at me. I’m suddenly uncertain, unsure of myself. I’ve never experienced him making fun of me before. I become shy, hesitant, and I loiter on the trail.

  “Hi.” Ethan appears right next to me on the path. I jump back. How did he get here so quickly? I look into his eyes and see it isn’t him. Whoever this is, he looks exactly like my manager, but he’s vile, lurid. He has evil, crazy eyes.

  “Who are you?” I back away from him, terrified. Ethan doesn’t answer. He keeps creeping toward me with the most sadistic, wicked smile on his face. He’s enjoying my fear. He’s intentionally prolonging it. I turn and run, going as fast as I can, whipping around corners and jumping over roots. Low branches whip my face, twigs scratch my skin, but I can’t slow down. Ethan is the most frightening creature I’ve ever seen. I have to get as far away from him as possible. I finally stop to catch my breath, bending over and clutching my knees.

  “Hi,” the foul voice whispers in my ear. I scream, falling backward onto my ass. I scramble away from him, but no matter which way I flee, he is right there beside me again, taking pleasure in my panic. I cannot describe in words the depth of the evil in his eyes. No language can convey such cruelty. The more fear I show, the wider and more psychotic his grin is. I’m crying in my sleep, heaving, because I can’t get away, because it looks like Ethan, because I’m too afraid to speak out loud who I think this is.

  The Devil lets me make another run for it, lets me think I can get away. As far as he’s concerned, we can do this all night. My terror is sexual pleasure for him. His look implies that we’re going to be doing this together for a very, very long time. I know thoughts of escape are futile. I know what sin I’ve committed to bring him here. But I have no choice. I have to continue the cat-and-mouse game. That is part of the punishment. The Devil likes to mete out a little bit of hope and then snatch it away. That is the diversion he’s brought me here to play.

  So I run back and forth while he pops up and blocks me. I cry out to God. I recite the Lord’s Prayer, but before I can finish, he jumps right in front of me with a face like a Maori warrior and a voice that seems to come from inside my head. “You’re mine, now!”

  Cracccckkkkk­kkkkk­kk! At that exact moment, my husband and I are awakened from a dead sleep by the sound of an explosion inside the house. We sit up in bed for a second, frozen, listening, looking at each other in the dark. I can hear Nick’s steady breathing coming through the baby monitor. He’s still fast asleep.

  “What the fuck was that?” My husband is on his feet, heading toward the hallway door.

  “Wait.” I jump up after him, too afraid to be left behind. We creep ahead cautiously. He flips the lights on. I’m clinging to his back as we inch forward in tandem. There isn’t anything obvious that fell over or could have made such a deafening sound.

  “I’m going to call the police,” I say, running back toward the night table to get the phone.

  “No, wait. Elizabeth, come here.” Jim motions for me to come next to him. “Holy shit.”

  We both stand in the doorway of the bathroom with our mouths agape. The huge floor-to-ceiling glass backsplash for the shower has shattered in place. It’s a very heavy pane, two inches thick. The weight of the settling house must have snapped it at the exact moment I was having my dream. It’s still breaking, more fissures slowly spreading outward toward the edges, a giant spiderweb consuming the once-transparent sheet. It sounds like ice-covered tree branches tinkling against one another in a breeze. I’ve never seen anything like it. Jim is mesmerized. I can’t tell him what just happened. I can’t tell him what it means. He wouldn’t believe me anyway.

  * * *

  —

  The aircraft is sitting on the tarmac, waiting to take off. I’m still thinking about last night. I’m on my way to meet Ethan in Miami for our romantic weekend. I know I should call it off. I know I should stand up and demand to get off the plane. I will never receive a clearer signal that heaven and hell are real and I am in danger of losing my mortal soul. But in broad daylight, under these ordinary circumstances, it sounds so preposterous, so impossible to believe—even though I witnessed it with my own eyes. I’m also brimming with lust at the thought of seeing Ethan again, and being in his arms. I can’t rise above this. I’m not strong enough. I already know what I’m going to do. Just as the Devil knew. I take a deep breath. “Well,” I murmur, “I guess I’m Satan’s mistress.”

  We’re in Miami. It’s an oceanfront room. I got my period on the way down, but Ethan doesn’t care. He gets towels from the bathroom and lays them out on the bed, doubling them up so the sheets won’t be ruined. Our precautions are ineffective. We finish our lovemaking in the middle of a crime scene, tiny splotches of bright red blood everywhere. I don’t understand how we could spread them so far beyond the boundary of our bodies. I feel terrible for the maids. We put fifty dollars on the desk and ball the bedding up under the sink. I leave my shame and my ecstasy on the art deco tiling.

  We’re on a red-eye flight to New York. The plane is empty. Ethan and I are under the blankets together, stretched out lengthwise in a row of seats. My hip hurts where our weight presses down against the raised seat rest, but it feels amazing to be intimate like this: bold, secret, tender, and slow. My hand barely moves as I rub myself until I come. We freeze and pretend to sleep when the flight attendant unexpectedly passes by, her department-store perfume lingering in the air around us. In the darkness, Ethan’s eyes appear to glow. He whispers something funny in my ear, and I tell him he can come inside me. I have a bunch of cocktail napkins ready to catch any spillage. I sit up immediately afterward and stuff the paper wad inside my jeans. I’m proud that we’ve been tidy.

  It’s one of life’s great ironies that the unattainable fruit, once in hand, starts to rot almost immediately. Once it’s no longer connected to the life-giving vine, it’s no longer quite as impressive as before. The same holds true for people and objects you desire. Their context is half their appeal, and once removed from that, they quickly lose their allure. Conquer the challenge, and you may savor your own dissatisfaction. What is meant for you comes easily, so improve yourself if you’re dissatisfied with your circumstances. Once you are great, then the great things will naturally be nearby. I didn’t know any of that when I was younger. But once I gave into Ethan, I realized I’d become just another woman he now had responsibility for. And that was never what he wanted. He wanted what Jim and I had.

  * * *

  —

  It’s a year later. We’ve both moved to California, but we don’t live together. We barely see each other anymore. Ethan had a party at his rental house up in Cold Water Canyon and didn’t invite me. He’s been acting shady lately, and I suspect he’s been cheating. Not with anyone noteworthy, I’m sure; just whatever chick he falls into bed with at the end of the night. I drive up and park in his driveway. His friends are helping him put the house back together, picking up beer cans and stuffing them into Hefty bags.

  I wait for Ethan in the living room while his interns rearrange the furniture. Everything had been pushed to the perimeter to create a dance floor, apparently. When it comes time to move the couch back into place, I’m so pissed that I don’t bother to get off. I raise one eyebrow and, with my arms folded and my legs tucked up underneath me, let them pick up the sofa with me lounging on it like Cleopatra and carry it to its usual spot in front of the fireplace. Some of the guys laugh, but some of them are blushing and sheepish. They know there is going to be a fight after they leave.

  It honestly isn’t one of our biggest confrontations. I have no control over the sit
uation anymore. Ethan’s stopped pretending this is even a relationship. We’re both sick of it. It fell so far below our expectations. I wrecked my marriage, and he wrecked his—essentially for nothing. We hurt our spouses, our kids, our reputations, for nothing. Empty lust: a cardinal sin. Adultery. Immaturity. Escapism. They should expand the Bible for our modern age. We both wholly and totally suck as human beings, and we know it. All we’re left with are some good war stories, of which you, the reader, are the lucky recipient. Oh, and eternal damnation. Sorry, I forgot about that one.

  After the interns leave, I take him upstairs and fuck him in this strange, territorial “this is my man” kind of way. And he loves it. His eyes are glistening. He feels wanted again. I think, for the last six months, he’s seen nothing but disappointment in my face.

  “Promise me you’ll always fuck me like that.” He looks so handsome as he says it, dopamine-drunk. I’m going to miss him. I always know when it is really and finally over. It’s one of my gifts.

  My ex-husband is moving out here next week, and we will co-parent like adults. I’m ready to deal with my life and not run from it. There isn’t anywhere to run to anyway. The grass is never greener once you’re on the other side of the fence. I still have Rob’s Bible, and I study it. I don’t know if it will do me any good, but I try to absorb its wisdom, which seems universal, untainted by organized religion’s obsession with status and control. Mostly, I just try to get my mind right. The only way I can keep the demons off me is to manage my intentions. I still make colossal errors in judgment, but 99 percent of the time, I mean well.

  * * *

  —

  Nick’s kicking his feet under the table. He’s almost finished with his spaghetti, and he wants to watch television. He gets an hour and a half every day as long as his homework is finished. We go over the words he has to memorize for his spelling quiz.

  Even now, seven years later, the impact of my infidelity reverberates in an ever-widening circle of collateral damage. The cracks are just smaller, less obvious than before. The other day, I heard my son claiming to take responsibility for my divorce. He remembers me asking him if it would be all right for us to move to California, and because he said yes, he thought that the split was his decision. No matter what I say, how I explain the timing, and assure him that his father and I are better friends when we’re not in love, and that our separation had nothing to do with him, he refuses to accept that his actions played no part.

  I hate how much pain I caused everybody. Ethan and I never asked anyone to lie for us or cover for us, but it happened sometimes, because we were so damn sloppy. Looking back, it was almost as if we wanted to get caught. When you expect to be punished but you’re getting away with it, it feels worse than nothing happening at all. You start unconsciously looking for a higher power to step in and restore balance to the world. Otherwise, everything you’ve been taught and everything you believe in are meaningless. Life is random. There is no justice. And that, as it turns out, is psychologically unacceptable.

  So you don’t believe in the Devil? That’s good. I’m happy for you.

  I stride the length of the subway platform, moving purposefully, like I know exactly what I’m doing. I’m a grown woman, it’s 2010. I don’t want the other riders to know how scared I am, or think they need to worry about me. Somebody really should, though. If anyone watching this performance knew the truth, they’d see that I was blithely walking off the end of a gangplank, dropping feetfirst into a roiling sea.

  The people behind me aren’t talking, although they are clearly together. It’s unnerving, just the three of us here in this empty station in the middle of the night, trudging silently along in a pack. There were only a handful of people on the entire train, as far as I could see. I shift my bag over to my other shoulder, pretending there’s nothing unusual about tonight, that it’s just the end of another long day. Judging by the way I’m dressed, you’d think it was November, not February.

  I stop to consult a street map posted above the turnstiles. I don’t give myself enough time to memorize the route. I’ve got a natural sense of direction, and I’m pretty sure I’ve taken a good mental snapshot. Before I’ve even gone ten steps, though, I’ve already forgotten it. I’m running on pure adrenaline. Instead of turning around and checking the map again like a sensible person would, I decide it doesn’t matter, that I can figure it out along the way. I’ve had to fight so hard just to make it this far, I can’t risk losing momentum, or I’ll also lose my nerve.

  This is how I’m adulting now. I throw myself forward through sheer force of will, without the necessary wisdom that’s supposed to come along with it. I’m new to this whole “take charge” thing. But so far it’s been working. Besides, the grid is pretty straightforward in Manhattan. Avenues run vertically, streets run horizontally. How hard can it be? Back in Brooklyn, when we plotted my strategy, Eliza said to get off at Twenty-third Street and walk west. I can’t remember the name of my hotel, but I know it’s somewhere in the area. It has a very distinctive shape, like a triangular wedge of cheese or a giant slice of wedding cake. It’s famous.

  The tunnel splits off in two directions. I take the staircase to my left, hoping that exit will bring me aboveground on the north side of the street. I’m not familiar with this part of Manhattan. I climb the stairs with poise, still a little bit onstage in my mind. It can take hours after playing a show to come down from that high. I’m the star of my own movie, the maker of my own destiny. I can accomplish the impossible.

  My confidence at this point is priceless. I’m in denial up to my eyeballs. There’s a blizzard raging outside, a full-scale, governor-declared state of emergency, and I’m that idiot trying to navigate hazardous conditions by myself at two in the morning. You read about people like me, stubborn assholes who blatantly disregard official warnings, thinking they can outsmart a hurricane or outrun a tornado. I’m determined to be reunited with my luggage, sleep in my own bed, and make my flight out of LaGuardia tomorrow morning.

  The thing is, I’m on tour. I’m busy and tired. It is crucial to me that I show up for all my gigs, give my fans a performance they love, and collect my pay. Nothing—not illness, injury, or an act of God—is going to stand in my way. This isn’t some playground on wheels or bacchanalian circus in the sky. This is business, and I take my job very seriously. I don’t have time for the weather to fuck up my itinerary.

  I’m also a mother. My son is entering high school. I need to be there for him, to make sure he’s supervised and has someone to talk to during this vulnerable transition into adulthood. If I have to be out on the road, I’m going to make sure that my time away from home counts. I’m going to crush it every night and leave the audiences cheering.

  We accomplished that goal at our show tonight. We rocked the house, played the hits, unearthed some rarities. People were hanging over the balconies, singing all the lyrics. It was a total madhouse backstage. That was only a few hours ago, and yet it’s hard to believe any of it was real now that I’m out here by myself braving the cold, dark night. The rock-and-roll lifestyle trains you to withstand extremes. One minute you’re partying in a mansion, the next you’re parked in a urine-soaked alley. But the fact that I’m determined to go through this ordeal to get back on track with our schedule goes beyond dedication. It borders on self-punishment.

  I could have avoided this situation. Or handled it differently. We all knew the storm was coming. The news anchors talked of little else over the course of the last twenty-four hours, predicting that a wide swath of the United States would likely be severely impacted. The North American blizzard of 2010 was dubbed “Snowmageddon” and “Snowpocalypse” by the talking heads, who described its size and power with breathless reverence. The beast swirling in the air above our heads was so big it had nicknames.

  “Expect to see accumulations in excess of twenty inches in some urban areas,” the meteorologists predicted, “
with conditions spawning isolated instances of thundersnow.”

  No, that’s not AC/DC’s new single about snorting cocaine off a woman’s thighs. It’s a rare and dangerous weather phenomenon that produces unusually heavy snowfall, gusting winds, and lightning and thunder. Real Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer wrath-of-God stuff. It scared the crap out of me earlier, while we were slipping and sliding our way through Brooklyn on the way to the subway station.

  Those innocent flakes I saw fluttering in the air this afternoon were just a premonition of what would become a cataclysmic finish. I was grabbing dinner with the legendary music manager Danny Goldberg before our show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg when I got my first inkling that trouble was brewing.

  “Look. It’s starting to come down,” Danny said, pointing to the fluffy white tufts swirling around the pedestrians as they walked past the window. He apologized for not staying to see our concert and advised me not to delay my departure, to have a car ready to go as soon as I got offstage.

  I thought he was overreacting—that success had made him a hothouse flower—but I took his recommendation. I thought I had everything under control, until I found myself standing in the middle of the lobby after our performance with pandemonium breaking out around me. Frantic concertgoers streamed out the front doors, fleeing into the night like they were racing to board the last helicopters out of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. Because of all the activity, snowdrifts formed on the floor in the entryway, wedging the front doors open. Frigid blasts of air blew straight into the building. How had conditions deteriorated so rapidly in the hour and a half that I was onstage?

  Greg, my guitar player, came running up, his eyes wild. “The car company canceled,” he said. “No one’s allowed to drive back into Manhattan. The bridges are closed. We’re staying out here. Do you want to stay with us?”