“Well...the picture eventually got clearer, so I could see it better, but I still couldn’t hear nothing.”
“And you saw...”
“Three people all dressed in black. They were carrying a woman’s body, and she didn’t have a stitch on. They laid her down on the ground in that lot...and I knew it was the same lot across the street, ‘cause I could see that wall behind them, with the crazy paintings on it. It was only a few seconds, then the snow came back and everything disappeared...but my damn show didn’t come back for a whole half hour, and by then it was at the end!”
“So just to clarify again...you saw this on TV. Not from the window.”
“Yes! But let me finish! There was something wrong with the people’s heads...all three of them. Looked like...well, when my kids were little they used to play with that Play-Doh, and my son used to tease my poor daughter by putting the Play-Doh on her dolls’ heads and shaping scary faces on them, then he’d leave the dolls around for her to find.”
Sloane barked a single, loud laugh. “Oh wow...that’s sick!”
Seeing the old woman glower at Sloane again, Dill urged her, “Yes, Mrs. Otis?”
“Well, these people looked like that. Like somebody covered their heads in white Play-Doh, with just some holes for their eyes...maybe the mouth, too.”
“So they were wearing masks, then. To prevent people from recognizing them when they left the girl in the lot.”
“Weren’t no masks!” Mrs. Otis blurted, squeezing the armrests of her chair. “That was their faces!”
Sloane shuffled a little closer toward the doorway to the next room, and thus the apartment’s exit. “Okay, Mrs. Otis, then we’ll be on the lookout for three deformed men in the neighborhood. Maybe someone else has seen them; they should be easy to remember.”
“Do you boys believe in devils?” the old woman asked, her ivory-stained eyes gone wide and unblinking. “I bet you don’t! That’ll be the downfall of this world...that’s what makes them strong! The less we believe, the more real they get! And nobody thinks about it, but Hell is down there deeper than the oceans...and if the devils ever want to come up here, they’d have to come through all that water! So it’s no wonder that girl they brought with them was all wet – is it?”
Dill and Sloane turned to face each other silently.
Outside, on the hot skillet of the sidewalk – across the street from the vacant lot – Sloane said, “Well that was a waste of time. Loony old lady.”
“Fred, I think she did see something,” Dill said. “She’s just confused about where she really saw it, and the details.”
“Yeah – details like three mutants with Play-Doh heads?”
“Masks.”
“Maybe they were aliens, huh? Getting rid of their abducted experiment? Dressed all in black, too...so maybe they were Men in Black.”
“You heard what she said as well as I did. She said the girl was all wet. We haven’t released that detail to the public, so how could she know?”
Sloane chuckled. “Daaamn...come on. Yeah, at first that gave me pause, too, but think about it – how many people saw her body lying there yesterday? A bunch. And if you were up close it was clear she was wet...just seeing her hair alone. So this old lady obviously just heard it through neighborhood gossip. Either she’s getting that mixed up with her delusions, or she’s just pulling our leg for a little attention.”
Dill sighed, opened his mouth to protest, but found that he couldn’t defend his intuition that the old woman had seen something legitimate.
As if he felt his partner looked dejected, Sloane stepped forward and slapped him on the arm. “Come on; let’s get our asses over to Bob’s Big Boy for some lunch, huh? I always think better on a sugar rush, and I need my daily shake.”
Dill sat with a black coffee in front of him, watching Sloane talk on his radio and jot notes in his spiral pad. Beside that, Sloane’s chocolate milkshake stood half finished. Or half unfinished, Dill thought.
When Sloane set down the radio, he grinned proudly at the younger detective – as if he himself had uncovered what he was about to reveal – and said, “We have an ID on our girl who drowned in a vacant lot. Angela Renee Turner...a runaway from Philadelphia. Arrested at seventeen-years-old for drugs and theft, then ran away from the rehab center they had her in.”
“Ran away when?”
“Four years ago.”
“Whoa; four years. Well, looks like we better talk to people in Philly...see if anybody knew she was heading to Los Angeles, and if so, where she might have been staying. Who she knew out here.”
“Too bad for the parents, when they hear about this.”
Dill lifted his coffee mug for a sip. “Yup.”
“But we’ll need to contact her folks, see what they might tell us.”
“I want to speak to somebody at that rehab center, too, and find out what they knew about her.”
“Well, if it was drugs that got her in trouble in Philly, then I reckon it was drugs got her in trouble here.”
“That’s a fair bet. Got in with the wrong crowd.”
Sloane snickered. “Yeah...apparently a gang of drug dealers who snort Play-Doh.”
Afternoon was winding down and Sloane was on the phone with yet another person in Philadelphia, so it was Dill who took the call about Phyllis Otis – the elderly woman they had interviewed that morning.
“What’s going on, Terry?” Dill asked.
“Thought you guys might want to know: that possible witness you interviewed today is dead.”
“Dead?” Dill hissed. “Who found her?” He had been under the impression she lived in her apartment alone.
“Some kids walking down the street. She was lying there in that same lot where your former Jane Doe got dumped.”
Dill didn’t want to interrupt his partner...nor be discouraged by him...so the moment he got off the phone he grabbed his jacket and strode for the door.
Dill learned the woman’s body had already been removed, but when he heard a few details about the scene he stayed on course for the lot to see for himself. While driving, he asked into his radio, “Is it looking like foul play, Terry?”
“Nope,” was the reply. “What they’re saying is heat stroke.”
“Her body wasn’t...she wasn’t wet, was she? Like she’d been submerged in water?”
“What? No, I didn’t hear anything like that.”
“Okay...okay...I’m coming up on the scene now. Thanks.” And Dill set his radio down on the passenger seat as he pulled his car up to one of the two curbs that bordered the front of the empty lot.
In spite of the recent activity in the lot, Dill was alone here now. Even the yellow crime scene tape had already been torn down. He stamped across the dusty grass, kicking up scraps of litter, until he neared the high concrete wall that formed the lot’s rear boundary. Even before he reached it, however, he could smell the fresh paint...and see the damage Phyllis Otis had done to the colorful mural.
The old woman hadn’t been tall in life, so she hadn’t been able to reach the tops of several of the painted images, but she had still covered up much of what had been there. A bucket of white latex paint and a paint roller pan rested in the scrubby grass, while a paint roller lay where it had apparently been dropped in mid-stroke. Even with evening approaching, the air was still baking hot. The paint was already nearly dry, even though she had applied multiple layers in irregular areas. Some of the images beneath were entirely hidden behind this snowy expanse, while elsewhere ghostly glimpses still peered through. She had worked from left to right, and must have become overwhelmed by the heat and dropped while painting over the diminutive, cherubic devil in his diaper. He was partly effaced but his eyes still gleamed through a white fog, and she hadn’t yet touched the word balloon that said: “Art is dead!”
Staring at the word balloon, Dill said aloud, “Art. Art is dead.”
He turned to stare across the street, settling on the third floor window where he himself had stood gaz
ing out that morning. Might an echo of himself, a lingering shadow, be standing just behind that curtain even now, his past self watching for his future self down in this lot...waiting for the two of them to converge in revelation?
“Angela...Renee...Turner,” he muttered to himself. “Is dead.”
She had left her apartment unlocked before going downstairs and across the street to paint the concrete wall.
Dill had washed out the coffee maker’s glass pot, plus one mug for himself, and while fresh coffee brewed he spoke with Sloane on his radio, peering through the parlor window at his car parked and locked at the curb.
“So where are you now, man?” Sloane asked him.
“After I took a look at where they found Mrs. Otis I headed home,” Dill said. He wasn’t lying...it just wasn’t his home. “Pretty bad headache.”
“I can relate. Anyway, I told you that poor old lady was a loony. Painting over that graffiti...not that I blame her. It’s not connected, buddy – let it go. Let me tell you what I found out after you left.”
“Shoot.” Dill wandered back to the kitchen and poured himself some black coffee. He wanted to be sure to stay awake through the night.
“Didn’t talk with them myself, but I’m told Mom and Dad are both pretty shaken up; they were under the impression she was dead these past four years. They never heard a peep from her after she vanished from the rehab center.”
“Huh,” Dill said. “Well, at least now they have some closure.” He hated using that inadequate cliché, but he was at a loss as to what else to say.
“As for the rehab center, as far as the staff knows our girl never told anybody she planned to escape, let alone run off to California. But they remember something funny.”
“Which is?”
“They had this therapy program, encouraging the kids to vent all their inner demons through art. Well, sometime during the night, right before Turner ran off from the place, she painted a mural on the wall of her room. She shared the room with another girl, and that kid left the place legitimately a long time ago so I didn’t talk to her, but the staff swears the roommate slept through the whole thing – never saw the mural or discovered Turner was missing until she woke up the next morning.”
“What was it Angela painted?” Dill asked in a quiet voice. Why did he want to ask if what she had painted was a door? What would make the image of a doorway paint itself in his mind?
“A fish bowl...one goldfish inside. Blue eyes, long eyelashes, lipstick on its lips.”
“A skeleton? Like the mural at the lot?”
“Nope. Scaly. This one was supposed to look alive,” Sloane replied. “Before and after, I guess.”
“I guess.”
“The fish had a word balloon, too. It was saying: ‘Art is Free!’ You see that? She’s obviously the one who painted that stuff in the lot.”
“Mm,” Dill grunted noncommittally.
“One more funny thing. Apparently what set the girl off so she wanted to run away that night was she got in a big fistfight with another kid in the cafeteria. The staff says she ended up with a real shiner.”
“Left eye?” Dill asked.
“They didn’t specify which eye. But that has to be a coincidence, my friend. It’s not like our girl would have a black eye for four years, is it?”
Dill had turned off all the lights in the parlor, except for the ghostly blue cathode glow cast by the television set, which he sat in front of in Mrs. Otis’s old armchair, a coffee cup in one hand.
He had no wife to go home to, and so he sat for hours, getting up only to pour more coffee or use the bathroom. Mrs. Otis hadn’t specified which channel she had been viewing when her program had been interrupted, so he pointed the remote and changed channels every so often between the few that offered halfway decent reception. The others were nothing but solid, hissing static.
Despite his efforts, despite the coffee, he woke with a startled jolt in the early hours of the morning with the realization that he had dozed off at some point.
He wasn’t sure what had awakened him. Maybe it was the silence of the TV, replacing its incessant chatter. Maybe an intuition in his very nerves.
Whatever it was, when he straightened up in the chair and focused on the TV screen, he saw three indistinct figures behind a layer of grainy snow...like a trio of portraits that had been obscured under a thin layer of paint.
The figures were garbed in black uniforms or jumpsuits, but more striking was their hairless, lumpy white heads. These heads looked formed from some raw matter, like virgin protoplasm. The eyes were mere punch-holes, and yet Dill felt their stare penetrate him. For all three figures had been studying him while he slept, and continued to study him now that he was awake. Gazing at him not as if they were enclosed in the TV on the other side of its glass, but as if he were the one enclosed...imprisoned like a fish in an aquarium.
Dill’s fingers dug into the chair’s armrests like claws. But then he thought of the remote on the little table beside him, on which also rested his coffee cup. He shot his hand out for it, knocking over his cup and spilling its dregs of coffee in the process. Jumping up from the chair and backing away from the TV a few steps, he pointed the remote at the screen like a gun and thumbed the OFF button.
The image of the three obscure figures flashed to darkness. Now in the screen he saw only his own reflection, but even that shadow being’s face with its crazed expression unnerved him.
In a lower kitchen cabinet he found a toolbox with a hammer in it, and another can of white interior house paint.
He used the hammer to smash in the television’s screen.
That morning, people driving or walking past the street corner on their way to work or school glanced over into the vacant lot where that young woman had been found murdered, and where their neighbor Mrs. Otis had dropped dead from the heat...a little perplexed to see a man standing in front of the high concrete wall at the back, his arm pumping fiercely as he finished what the old woman had started: covering over the colorful mural completely.
THOSE ABOVE
Home from the night shift at the factory, Hind looked in on his children before joining his wife in his own bedroom. There were two bedrooms in their chilly little flat, his two sons sharing one of them. Five-year-old Jude lay stiffly on his back in his cot by the door. Eight-year-old Alec was by the single window. The older boy had the quiet handsomeness and straw-colored hair of his father, while Jude possessed his mother’s dark hair and eyes and rounder face. But Hind knew these details by heart more than he actually observed them now. With the boys’ heads inserted into grayish blocks of gelatin, their features were presently hard to discern.
Hind moved on to his bedroom, treading lightly on the creaking floorboards of the hallway as he thumbed off his suspenders. While stripping off his black trousers and white shirt to the dingy long johns beneath, he stared down at his sleeping wife. Netty’s pretty face, too, was indistinct in its pillow of gelatin. It was Netty who set out these large cubes each night, as they could only be used once. A blunt-tipped metal probe was inserted into the block, attached to a thick black wire that ran to a brass mechanism on a cart beside the bed. Idly, Hind shifted closer to this heavy device to confirm that it was functioning properly, as he had done in his sons’ room. Gears delicate as snowflakes whirred almost silently inside it, and there was a faint ghostly sound of scribbling as a graphite needle traced an ever-unfolding landscape of peaks and valleys upon a slowly unspooling roll of paper. It wasn’t really necessary for him to check on the machine, however. If any of these peaks or valleys extended beyond their safe parameters, a brass bell would ring and the sleeper would be awakened to recalibrate the device.
Clever machines, they were – the height of technology. Due to the gelatin’s conductivity, the machines were powered by the brain’s own electrical output. But they were not meant as batteries to harness such energy, though Hind had read in the newspaper that there were scientists studying how the electrical output o
f human minds might be utilized to power whole cities, replacing steam-driven thermal power. No, the function of the gelatin and the apparatus on its wheeled metal cart was to suppress dreams.
He noted that the peaks and valleys were all of proper height and depth. No dreams had insinuated their tendrils into Netty’s sleep. She was, thankfully, as empty of thought as the corpse she so resembled lying there flat upon her back.
Hind slipped under the blankets beside her. It was warm within their envelope, warm from her body heat, but he shivered as he pressed his head into the cool block of gelatin that Netty had positioned on his side of the bed.
He stared up through its smoke-tinted substance at the ceiling, waiting for sleep to close around him as the gelatin had. Though the pressure of the substance was little more than that of the air, he kept his lips pressed in a small thin line against it.
Hind didn’t want to turn his head and stress the material, but he did shift his eyes to glance over at the bedroom window. The curtains hung to the sides of it like a pair of specters stealing a glimpse of the street below, as silent as a street in an abandoned city. He wished he had closed the curtains before climbing into bed, but he couldn’t withdraw now. He wouldn’t leave the bed again until that same bell rang in the morning, announcing it was time for the children to be up and preparing for school.
Yet it still bothered him, those parted curtains, as if the night sky overspreading the jumbled rooftops and sentinel chimneys might be gazing in at him while he lay vulnerable like a frog awaiting dissection.
Ha, he thought…as if those gauzy veils, even if he had drawn them together, could keep out the icy scrutiny of the sky.
The start of his shift, and Hind stood outdoors on the broad loading dock smoking his pipe amongst a cluster of other laborers, all of them shivering against the golden afternoon cold as they watched a team of burly dray horses pull a long wagon up the street toward the factory – the street with its flagstones like the scales of some immense dragon on whose body they all dwelt as precariously as parasites.
The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions Page 16