Nightscript 1

by C M Muller

  He waited for her on the back steps, his legs scrabbling across the wood like a spider’s, and led her out into the night.

  It had begun to snow, but the flakes looked tinged with grey, as if night had stained their surface, and she swiped at her hair, afraid that somehow by simply touching it, the darkness would leak, like poison, into her as well.

  She followed him past the row of Camellias she had planted, past the vegetable boxes she had put to bed back in October. Her feet were freezing. She had forgotten to put on shoes.

  There was no light in the shed, but she could hear him before her, that slow, methodical dragging.

  “Benjamin?”

  “Can you see it? The whole world opened up. Waiting.” His voice was high, breathy with excitement.

  It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, to take in the massive cedar door Benjamin had built. He’d suspended it somehow—a series of ropes and pulleys—and it hovered above the ground. Strange wormlike shapes with round mouths and jagged teeth carved into the surface, their bodies tangling together in some kind of obscene orgiastic experience. Here and there a proboscis extended, probing into the chests of what appeared to be human torsos, the hands held up in supplication.

  “So beautiful once you open the door and look. Once you really look. Like the wood. Waiting to be seen and touched. Then it opens you up, swallows down all of the sin and the hurt and the damage. You can’t imagine. What it’s like to be whole again.”

  He stood then, his full height towering over her, his toes cracking as he extended his body into arabesque, laughing as he went en pointe. Something his body should not be able to do.

  Behind her came the sound of something pulling itself on hands and knees through snow.

  The door really was beautiful. Deep amber tints that glowed without light. A color she could wrap herself in and forget this past year. All of the struggle and pain and doubt that she’d had in herself and her marriage. Wondering if she was truly strong enough to carry Benjamin—to carry the both of them—through a future that promised only loss.

  “Don’t you want to open the door, Carin?” Benjamin said, and turned, his pirouette a quick, almost violent movement.

  Benjamin’s lips did not move, but his voice came from behind her. A voice that belonged to deep earth and snow and dark. A gaping mouth waiting to take everything that had left her bleeding and raw.

  “Something good,” she whispered.

  Benjamin laughed, his body turning impossibly fast, moving into a blurred fouette. She had forgotten how to breathe. The smell of Cedar everywhere.

  Then, she laughed, too, and opened the door.

  Strays

  Gregory L. Norris

  A baby sobs somewhere in the murk beyond the few hundred square feet of your new prison, a studio apartment in a tall house with dark shingles perched on a hill whose back faces the city’s downtown. Lately, you have trouble telling dawn from dusk, because the days have all bled together, the one before no different than the next to follow, the summer indistinguishable from this new autumn. A baby crying, its plaintive mewls in sharp contrast to all other sounds like cars on streets and the neighbor’s television, which blares through the layers of ancient horsehair plaster from God-knows-when, fake wood paneling put over it in the Seventies, and cheap paint slapped on in the decades since. You wish somebody would attend to that baby’s needs. Help the poor thing. Shut it the hell up.

  You track its howls. It’s down there in the weedy patch of dirt that passes for a parking lot for those residents who have cars. A ghost on four legs, black, darts into the scraggle of diseased trees. Soon after, the baby screams—likely having encountered this other stray orphan. You steal a deep hit off your cigarette, gag on the noxious taste, your stomach curdling. A flick over the rail of the set of rickety steps leading up to the apartment’s door sends the embers of the still-lit cancer stick onto the parking lot of the next apartment house, situated below yours. There’s a jack-o’-lantern in one of the windows, its features backlit by a flickering candle lodged where living heads have throats. Its eyes stare at you without blinking. Its jagged smile mocks your unhappiness.

  You came out for a smoke, and to see the bats that roost under the Route 125 Bridge. The bats fly every night around sunset. They sail and slither through the sky by the hundreds if not thousands. Thousands of bats. They’re not here. It must be morning instead of twilight.

  Another baby cries from somewhere in your new neighborhood. Turning back toward your prison, you’re sure there are more stray cats living here than bats. You’ve never seen so many homeless, hungry animals, and your flesh crawls as that sound again rises, sharp and painful on the ears, greeting another day.

  Four hundred square feet, maybe. The studio space is divided by a half-wall that grants an illusion of separate living room space. But on the other side of the partition, the bed is only a few short paces away from the kitchen sink, stove, and a shitty refrigerator that chugs all night and barely keeps the milk cold. At least the narrow closet of your bathroom has a door.

  Smoking is a new vice for you, more fallout from the divorce, the foreclosure. You don’t smoke inside the apartment. Still, the stench of full ashtrays from tenants past permeates the place. All of the sorrows from untold souls forced to exist in the back apartment of the brooding old manor house at 11 Park Street in Haverhill, Massachusetts have seeped into the walls. You are surrounded by anger and tears, by ashes. Whenever you gaze out your four windows or down the back stairs, a legion of stray cats is visible darting over sidewalks and side yards. Close your eyes, and their sad, insane yowls chase you.

  Face it, you’re a stray now, too, just like the cats. And face one other truth you haven’t wanted to acknowledge since the rainy afternoon you lugged the last of all you owned up those stairs, into this hopeless hovel: the place is haunted by more than the sad cries of stray cats and cigarettes smoked by former tenants.

  Autumn humidity lays rotten over the city in October, so you sleep with your windows open. There’s no air conditioning; you’d use it if there was, despite the last of your money going to the month’s rent. You don’t know how you’ll pay the electric bill, let alone November’s rent when it comes due on the first, which creeps ever closer.

  Sleep hasn’t been easy, your nights fraught with worries about utility bills, the roof over your head—as cursed as this place is, it’s all you’ve got—and food. The fridge grumbles and groans. You’ve hit up two food pantries within walking distance and have plenty of peanut butter and white rice, but little else. Poverty, however, isn’t what denies you sleep on this stagnant night. Movement, from somewhere close by, teases your ears and gossips across your sweating flesh in icy ripples. Not quite footsteps.

  Your eyes shoot open. On your spine with two pillows funched behind your head, you face the window beside the front door. The misty orange glow from the streetlamp in the lot of the nearby apartment house oozes into your tiny living space, a view screen of sorts, presently blank. Eyes wide, breathing no longer easy or even involuntary, you wait. But not for long.

  A shadow cuts across the window from the inside of the apartment. You bolt upright, a moan dying on your tongue. It sounds even to your ears like a terrified child’s as you reach for the lamp, switch it on, sure there’s somebody in here with you.

  The lamp sprays bald light on the sad landscape of cardboard boxes and other relics that have survived the detonations and dust clouds of your failed marriage. There’s no one there. You’re all alone. At least you pray that you are.

  On a memorable gray morning in the blurry succession of days after you move in, you hear noises coming down the side of the half-wall facing your bed, what sounds like a breeze riffling through sheets of paper. Given your inability to sleep of late, even this might as well be cymbals crashing together or a gun’s report. You stir, your bleary eyes tracking the sound and, at first, you sell yourself on the lie that you’re still asleep, dreaming what you see. The pattern of ele
ctric-blue circles on the horror’s spine undulates as it skitters down the wall, threatening to hypnotize you. The fast-moving coordination of its multitude of legs paralyzes you to the spot and unleashes revulsion deep in your guts, perhaps born of some primitive race memory.

  It skitters closer to the bed, and your horror doubles at the very idea of the enormous black centipede with the bright blue circles working into the bunched bedclothes at your feet, touching your skin.

  Going on instinct, you jump up, ball your hand into a fist, and pound the centipede as it performs a truncated figure eight. You draw back; see the foul, inky stain blooming over the wall, which weeps nicotine whenever you boil water on the stovetop. The horror has disintegrated except for a chorus line of tiny dismembered legs twitching and flexing in uncoordinated jerks.

  More of its dismembered limbs wiggle against the back of your hand, affixed to your skin by a smear of poisonous purple color. You wash your hands, wash them again, stopping only to retch into the toilet.

  Nothing about living here is easy.

  You don’t own a car anymore, so to shop for groceries—with the little money dwindling in your wallet—you walk down the hill, sure you’re going to stumble and then tumble along the sidewalk, all the way to the bottom of the world. The worst follows in reverse: walking back up that hill, your arms laden with shopping bags. If the drop doesn’t kill you one way, your heart’s going to explode in your chest on the upswing.

  Doing laundry? The same. There’s a coin-operated mismatched washer and dryer in the basement, but the one time you used them, your clothes came out stinking of other people’s sweat. There’s a Laundromat in the plaza near the grocery store. Getting there comes with the same financial and travel risks as shopping for food, so you’re wearing your clothes longer than you normally would, airing them out, washing them in the sink though that really doesn’t cut it in the humidity. That, and the days have gotten shorter, so there’s less sun to help with the drying. They’ll be colder soon, too.

  There’s another reason you don’t go in the basement. Since landing here a broken man, an orphan with no friends or family, you’ve repeatedly questioned whether or not you’re losing your wits. You sense eyes upon you, telegraphed in gooseflesh and odd startles at night; in moving shadows glimpsed from the corner of the eye and the dark emotions that rise from the pit of your stomach whenever you hear the crying-baby wails that curse this forsaken corner of the globe.

  Losing your mind, you avoid the basement because you believe the vast, dark house on Park Street is haunted. There’s a wrongness down there, you’re sure.

  All day when you should be out looking for a job you instead pace, holding the crumpled pay-up-or-quit notice from the slumlord in your clenched hand. The nightmare of missing the rent takes a backseat to a building, abstract fear that has yet to identify itself. You walk the floor, your body’s primitive registers warning of the approaching storm.

  At night, violent thunder sweeps through. You sit in a huddle, hands covering your ears to drown the cannonade. And then the power goes out.

  When you are able to will your legs out of their paralysis, you see the city beyond sitting dark except for candles and emergency lights. The jack-o’-lantern is still there, grinning at you a full week after Halloween. In the deathly silence between thunderclaps, your heart gallops. Alone in the dark, you feel the wrongness in this place intimately. Rain spills down, hammering the house. An angry wind howls around the eaves. The language of the eviction notice plays out again, projected onto the screen of your mind’s eye. Where the hell are you going to find five hundred bucks in the time specified? You have a few dollars for cigarettes. When was the last time you ate?

  You imagine being homeless on this night, out there in the storm, like the hundreds of stray cats that inhabit the shadows and the neighborhood’s unhappy spaces. You, huddled in a dark corner, your belly aching, your muscles tense, mind driven to madness by lack of sleep and an abundance of terror.

  The storm throws itself at the apartment house. You sit in the dark, rocking back and forth, drift deeper into your thoughts and, eventually, a state that’s not quite sleep.

  In the morning, the neighbor’s television blasts through the wall, drawing you out of your fugue. The power’s back on, but not in your apartment. You check switches. The fridge that barely runs when the juice flows sits inert and silent, and exudes a musty odor when you open the door to confirm the truth. A circuit breaker’s been tripped. The electrical boxes are down in the basement. You resume pacing back and forth across the patch of threadbare blue carpet that always stains the bottoms of your socks a greasy gray.

  There’s a bite in the air that wasn’t present before the thunder rolled in. It works the chill already inside you deeper, into your molars, your marrow. You find the old flashlight you used to keep in the car among the contents of a cardboard box full of your past life’s puzzle pieces. It still works. You exit the apartment, tromp down the outside stairs, and round the building. The storm has chipped away at the house’s exterior, damage in evidence in the numerous shakes scattered across the parking lot.

  You enter the front hallway, where the mail is delivered to a row of metal slots. The space smells stale, gritty. Dirt tracked in crunches under your soles. Water stands in stagnant, shallow puddles. You pass the mailboxes and the soaring staircase to the left, the last trace of grandeur from when this house belonged to one of the mill barons who made his fortune, you’ve been told, off the sweat of the common people. From somewhere up the staircase, you hear your neighbor’s television. A white fluorescent circle illuminates the top of the basement stairs. The smell of other people’s dirty laundry hits your nose a few steps down.

  The laundry area stews under more cold white bulbs. What few windows exist are narrow and oblong, the glass covered in chicken wire to prevent burglars from breaking into the place. The washer chugs. The dryer turns. So does your stomach. That giant centipede originated down here, you’re sure. You switch on the flashlight and force your legs forward into the dark space beyond the laundry area. An arch leads to the gas meters, which hiss and tick. You shine the flashlight. Its beam illuminates the electrical boxes, their corresponding apartment numbers identified in black magic marker on curling strips of masking tape. You locate yours, flip the main breaker left and then right. Done, you turn to leave.

  A low whisper drifts from the dark realm beyond, where there are no windows. Your body reacts with gooseflesh and a chill that tumbles down your spine. You shake it off, pivot, flash the light. The back part of the cellar hides behind an old door with flaking paint and a rusted knob with filigree details. That door was closed, you swear, when you first entered this section of the basement. Now it sits partially open, the source of the breeze.

  No, get out of here, a voice in your thoughts urges. Don’t go in there!

  You shine the flashlight across the door’s scabrous surface. Just one look at what’s back there tempts you. You’re going crazy after all, you think, punctuating the statement with a humorless chuckle. You push on the door with the flashlight. It resists, as if—

  There’s somebody on the other side, pushing back...

  But then the door cooperates, croaks open, seeming to welcome you into the windowless tomb beyond. You’re struck by the smell of sour earth. The beam drops to a dirt floor, crisscrossed in spots by patches of white mold. The beam falters—you muse that the darkness behind the door is so concentrated that it erodes light, like a black hole in deepest outer space. Somewhere, a cat shrieks. A chill shoots through your blood. A stray cat has gotten into the house and is trapped in the basement. Maybe even in this very room. The sound echoes, terrible to hear. The flashlight ticks; its light wanes. Almost lost to your ears is the soft groan of the door, only now it comes from a place that doesn’t match the mental map you’ve drawn of your surroundings. Behind you? When did you enter the room?

  You jiggle the flashlight. The beam surges back, revealing the only other landm
ark in the room apart from brick walls and infected earth. A staircase, nowhere near as elaborate as the one in the front hallway, soars up from the dirt, runs the length of the bricks, goes nowhere. The cat’s disembodied sobs power up.

  You shuffle backward, your heels kicking up dust. The door, if it closes…

  A creak sounds, not behind you but out in front. Another follows, and more after that. Footsteps, coming down the staircase that leads nowhere. You aim the light. The beam flickers. Right before it goes out completely, it scatters shadows across the bricks in the shape of a body. Footsteps, moving closer, closer.

  Your back reaches the door, now almost closed. You drop the flashlight, turn, and pull on the cold, rusty knob. The door resists, preventing escape. Someone is coming down those stairs!

  You focus all of your willpower into the effort, vowing to tear the door off its hinges if you must. The door flies open, and you run.

  Run through the basement and up the stairs, out the front hallway, and back to your prison with its paltry few hundred square feet of room and its scoping view of the downtown.

  In that other life and time before Park Street, you read about or saw a documentary on the domestication of felines; how it’s theorized that cats, at some point, learned to mimic human baby cries as a way to garner our sympathy.

  For days—or it could be longer, because the modern calendar no longer matters—you’ve heard the cat moving around behind the walls. More than a hundred years have passed since this manor was carved up, its layout redesigned with horsehair plaster and then cheap paneling. Hell, there could be a dumbwaiter behind that wall, whole passageways sealed up, certainly room enough for a stray cat to get lost and trapped.