by C M Muller
She nearly jumped from the bed when she heard him. With her cheek against the floorboards, for the first time she noticed a smell under there. Slight at first, but once in her nose it was deep and pervasive.
They’d had a poisoned rat in the wall of their last house. Ethan had ended up hammering a hole behind the fridge to get at it and the kitchen had reeked for days. This was the same unmistakable stink of dead animal.
Ethan’s words were so close to discernible. What could Socrates have said that had him so entranced? She could only pull “changing” from the muddle; it was repeated and had a rough emphasis to it. Then came a pause, as if for a small sip of air, and the same rhythm again.
A soft series of thumps startled her and she pictured Ethan having another seizure, his arms and legs rattling against the filthy floor, surrounded by wads of insulation. Thick and muffled grunts, as though he’d swallowed his tongue. She lay on her stomach and could almost see him on his back, staring up at her through the floorboards.
Silence spread out between them as she waited for the sound of him lowering himself back into his office. But the space below remained a blank stillness, and she realized she hadn’t heard him climb back down on any of the last several nights. A half-hour later she gave up and crawled back under the covers. He’d asked her to stay out of this. Let him sleep in that narrow coffin if it made him feel better.
She set her alarm for seven and turned out the light even though dawn was already paling the windows. The moment her head touched the pillow she heard the distinctive high groan of the back door opening and closing. His steps passed through the living room and up the creaking stairs.
She rolled away onto her side when he entered the room. The quilt lifted and the naked warmth of him pressed against her back. A scent clung to him, something clean and sharp and the opposite of the stench under the floor. It wasn’t until he’d stretched out on his back with a long sigh that she recognized it as pine trees.
How had he gotten outside? His breathing settled, and Cara looked over her shoulder. His lips curved into a smile. His head rolled toward her and he opened his eyes, bloodless and clear and too large.
She turned back and stared at the wall. Eventually daylight strengthened across it, and Ethan began to snore.
Cara was out of her doctor’s leather chair and driving to the pharmacy by nine-thirty, even with no appointment. When she came back home, in the old Valium fog, it was some time before she noticed Ethan wasn’t there.
He must have gone to speak with his boss. She hadn’t taken him seriously when he mentioned going back to the university part-time. He insisted his headaches were lessening. It was difficult thinking of him in the future tense. Falling into this new routine.
The pills would help.
A couple of fingers of vodka in some juice and the fog deepened. Things were out of place, more than just some critter rotting under the bedroom floor. She knew she had to go downstairs and see for herself, but being swallowed up inside her grandmother’s quilt was all she could manage.
She stayed there long enough for time to swell, slipping in and out of sleep, through the evening and Ethan’s barked laughter at the TV floating up the staircase and through the parted bedroom door. There were slivers of dreams trying to connect, like torn paper dolls, in which she plunged her hand into Lake Champlain, the pills turning to blue and white stains on her palm.
Sometime in the night Ethan’s prayer rose into the room. Cara lay unmoving until she heard his thin moans and the pounding of his fists or feet, then silence. Her fog slowly dissipated into the first clear thoughts of the day. She let her courage slowly build, then got out of bed, her legs unsteady and full of needles as she approached the stairs and gazed down into the heavy dark. Even the house’s natural, settling ticks had hushed.
She crept through the living room to his office door. A deep breath and she flipped the light on, saw his cluttered desk, the stepladder upright beneath the closed panel in the ceiling. A book lay on top of his computer, a skinny paperback with a grocery receipt bookmark curling out. It was Plato’s Phaedo, and an orange highlighted passage greeted her when she opened to the marked pages.
“The seen is the changing,” she read just above a whisper, “and the unseen is the unchanging. That may also be supposed. And, further, is not one part of us body, another part soul? To be sure.” Just the single recitation carried enough of the near-melody she’d been hearing every night. She scanned above and below the highlighted words, read what the poisoned Socrates had to say on the nature of death as he gazed upon it. She flipped back a few pages. Within many of the same orange streaks was the word hemlock. She turned to the first page she’d seen. Printed in the margin in Ethan’s careful letters was “Can I bury them?”
A passage of clean text near this caught her eye and she read aloud: “Were we not saying that the soul too is then dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the world spins round her, and she is like a drunkard, when she touches change?”
She put the book down with a tremor in her hands. A small mortar and pestle sat against the wall at the back of the desk. She’d never used the pitted stone tool, but it had decorated a kitchen shelf for years. Thick white powder clustered in the bottom of its bowl. Half a glass of water stood next to it. She opened the single desk drawer and saw a small plastic bag full of the powder and a handful of short stems with tiny blue-tinted flowers.
Had he killed himself? She knew hemlock was poisonous and paging through the book had certainly confirmed it. She called out his name several times with no answer, each “Ethan” emerging more broken than the last from her mouth. Dread throbbed down at her as she stepped onto the ladder and pushed the wooden panel up and to the left.
The smell clouded against her face. Her heart pounded and the first anticipatory sobs gathered as she took the last step up and stuck her head through the hole between floors. Ethan had left his camping lantern just inside the space. By its light Cara saw her husband lying two feet from her. His eyes were open and blank and his mouth was wet with foam. Another glass sat beside him, empty but for a residue of white paste clinging to one side.
She reached out and touched his neck. There was warmth but it was already fading. She left her fingers against his skin, waiting, her breath—holding a scream or some denial, she didn’t know—caught in her chest.
Cara’s eyes moved beyond him and saw that the crawlspace was filled with other bodies. It was an interminable minute before she realized every one of them was Ethan. She counted nine, then noticed two more wedged under the angle of the roof to the left. Each lay on his back with a different set of clothes, the lips paper white, the first few flies exploring the skin.
Then she did scream, a breathless keening. Her foot missed a ladder step and she stumbled down to the office floor. She started for the living room then stopped and looked around, shaking her head and saying “No, no, no” in a blind loop. Her pills were upstairs in her purse, an unthinkable journey in the reeling moment. A packet of the ground hemlock caught her eye and she tipped it into the glass of water, stirred it with a finger and then stood there with the rim of the glass pressed against her mouth.
She grasped at her own thoughts. For a moment the world spun around her. It was as though she slept on her feet below Ethan’s corpses, watching the hands from her dream lift from cold lake water trailing threads of blue and white, the dissolved pills spilling away from her. A cotton-thick fog peeled slowly back and the Causeway ground to a halt. She saw fierce colors, gold and red across the far horizon.
Her breath fogged the inside of the glass and that too faded. She thought of the X-ray chart hanging from metal clips, the brain tumor collapsing from the size of a baby’s fist to a speck of black to possibly just a memory forgotten again each night.
She thought of what might happen if she drank the hemlock. Just the once. Would she be reborn? Would clocks unwind for them together? No pills, no tumors, leaving only
a wealth of time. She laid her free hand against her belly and imagined a future beginning there.
A door in the back of the house opened and shut with a groan and a flat crack in the stillness. Footsteps neared—she heard the floor beneath them rather than the feet—and she grabbed the book from the desk. She was stepping up onto the ladder when she felt the doorway fill to her right. A man stood there, watching her, naked and pink. He looked so much like Ethan, but for the first time she knew it wasn’t, not quite. It hadn’t been Ethan in eleven days, she supposed. It was as if he’d been molded from their wedding photos, the hair a shade darker, the cheeks and jawline as smooth as birth. But the eyes were wrong, millimeters too wide. The angles of his face were out of true in some way. From this distance she couldn’t see his old childhood scar beside his ear, the fishhook she knew like her own fingertips, but something told her it was gone.
“I see you had trouble sleeping, love,” he said. Cara noticed his bare fingers and wondered if his wedding band was above her, on the hand of his newest husk.
“Who are you?” she said.
“Does it matter?” He grinned and it was almost the grin she knew. “Wouldn’t you rather have an Ethan who lives?”
“I want the man I married. I want a family with him.”
“That one went and got brain cancer, love.” He spread his arms out. “The refinement of him is what you have now. It can be a refinement of us. Sifted down to the purest grains.”
The glass in Cara’s hand clinked against her own wedding ring. She lifted the poison to her mouth again.
“Don’t,” the man said. There was urgency in his tone but he didn’t step forward. “There’s nothing it can do for you. Please, think of the baby. Come up to bed.”
“The baby?” Cara threw the glass at him. It somersaulted off the floor and splashed chalky white on his hairless legs. He smiled again and something inscrutable waited in his eyes. She reached up and pulled herself into the crawlspace, slid the panel closed.
The smell was how she found him. Dozens of paper air fresheners hung from the back wall and beneath them her Ethan lay bloated in his clothes. His body was the farthest gone. She cleared a spot next to him and stretched out on her back. His fingers were soft lumpy things but she laced hers between them.
Time passed among the remains of her husbands and she heard the weight of the man on the stairs and on their bedroom floorboards. Dust sifted down toward her face. She heard the protest of the mattress and box springs as he climbed onto the bed.
There was life below her and death around her and something not quite either above. She pressed her free hand against her belly, wondered if something bloomed there, and what to call it. Outside was only the world, its great pages of questions. The needle far north in a vast and silent lake like a compass.
For the moment she was tired. The book was still in her hand. She opened it. From her own passage she read aloud and her voice found a rhythm.
About the Contributors
Kristi DeMeester writes spooky, pretty things in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has appeared in Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume 1, Black Static, Shimmer, and several others. Find her online at www.kristidemeester.com.
Gregory L. Norris grew up on a healthy diet of classic SF television and creature double-features. Norris has written regularly for national magazines and fiction anthologies, both TV and film, and has several novels published under his byline and that of his nom-de-plume, Jo Atkinson. He lives and writes at an old New Englander called Xanadu with his small family and emerald-eyed muse in New Hampshire’s North Country. Follow his literary adventures at www.gregorylnorris.blogspot.com.
Charles Wilkinson’s publications include The Pain Tree and Other Stories (London Magazine Editions, 2000). His stories have appeared in Best Short Stories 1990 (Heinemann), Best English Short Stories 2 (W.W. Norton, USA), Unthology (Unthank Books), Best British Short Stories 2015 (Salt), London Magazine, Under the Radar, Prole, Able Muse Review (USA), Ninth Letter (USA) and genre magazines/anthologies such as Supernatural Tales, Horror Without Victims (Megazanthus Press), Rustblind and Silverbright (Eibonvale Press), Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, Phantom Drift (USA), Bourbon Penn (USA) and Shadows & Tall Trees (Canada). Ag & Au, a pamphlet of his poems, has come out from Flarestack and a new short story is forthcoming in Best Weird Fiction 2015 (Undertow Books, Canada). He lives in Powys, Wales, where he is greatly outnumbered by members of the ovine community.
Patricia Lillie grew up in a haunted house in a small town in Northeast Ohio. Since then, she has published six picture books (not scary), a few short stories (scary), and dozens of fonts. A graduate of Parsons the New School for Design and Seton Hill University’s Writing Popular Fiction program, she is an Affiliate member of HWA and a freelance writer and designer addicted to coffee, chocolate, and cake. She also knits and sometimes purls. You can visit her on the web at www.patricialillie.com or follow her on Twitter @patricialillie.
David Surface lives in the Hudson River Valley of New York. His stories have been published in Shadows & Tall Trees, Supernatural Tales, The Tenth Black Book of Horror, Morpheus Tales, The Six-Fingered Hand, and the new Darkest Minds anthology from Dark Minds Press. He is co-author, with Julia Rust, of ‘The Secret Life of Gods’, a series of prose monologues published in part in The Cortland Review. David also writes a blog, Poe’s Doorknob (www.dsurface.wordpress.com), about the many sides of horror in fiction, film, and life. As an arts educator, David teaches writing in public schools, and leads writing programs for U.S. veterans and adults living with drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, and homelessness. He is thrilled to appear alongside many of his favorite authors in the first volume of Nightscript.
Daniel Mills is the author of Revenants (Chomu Press, 2011) and The Lord Came at Twilight (Dark Renaissance Books, 2014). He lives in Vermont.
Kirsty Logan is a professional daydreamer. She is the author of two story collections, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales and A Portable Shelter, and a novel, The Gracekeepers. She lives with her girlfriend and their rescue dog in Glasgow, where she mostly reads ghost stories, drinks coffee, and dreams of the sea. www.kirstylogan.com / @kirstylogan
Kyle Yadlosky is a Nashville writer. He’s going to plug his Twitter account, now: @KyleYadlosky. He has been published by Scarlet Galleon, Play with Death, and Gothic City Press, along with Dorkly.com.
Clint Smith is the author of Ghouljaw and Other Stories (Hippocampus Press, 2014), a collection of fourteen dark tales which, as Publishers Weekly noted, “range from the poignant and unsettling to the viscerally horrific.” When It’s Time For Dead Things to Die, a novella, was released as a chapbook by Dunham’s Manor Press (2015). Other stories have appeared in S.T. Joshi’s Weird Fiction Review, Xnoybis, the Mythic Indy anthology, and his tale, “Dirt On Vicky,” is slated to appear in Best New Horror #26 (PS Publishing). Clint lives in the Midwest, along with his wife and two children. Follow him on Twitter @clintsmithtales, or read more at www.clintsmithfiction.com.
Damien Angelica Walters’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in various anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015, Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume One, Cassilda’s Song, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Apex Magazine. She was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award for “The Floating Girls: A Documentary,” originally published in Jamais Vu. Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of short fiction, was released in 2015 from Apex Publications, and Paper Tigers, a novel, is forthcoming in 2016 from Dark House Press. Find her on Twitter @DamienAWalters or on the web at www.damienangelicawalters.com.
Eric J. Guignard writes dark and speculative fiction from the outskirts of Los Angeles. Read his novella, Baggage of Eternal Night (a finalist for the 2014 International Thriller Writers Award), and watch for forthcoming books, including Chestnut ’Bo (TBP 2016). As an editor, Eric’s also published the anthologies, Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations and After Death…, the lat
ter of which won the 2013 Bram Stoker Award. Outside the glamorous and jet-setting world of indie fiction, Eric’s a technical writer and college professor, and he stumbles home each day to a wife, children, cats, and a terrarium filled with mischievous beetles. Visit Eric at: www.ericjguignard.com, his blog: ericjguignard.blogspot.com, or Twitter: @ericjguignard.
Marc E. Fitch is the author of the horror novel, Paradise Burns, and the forthcoming crime novel, Dirty Water. He is also the author of the book Paranormal Nation: Why America Needs Ghosts, UFO’s and Bigfoot. His short fiction has appeared in publications such as The Big Click, Massacre, Horror Society and Thuglit. He works in the field of mental health and lives in Connecticut with his wife, the author E.M. Fitch, and their four children.
Michael Kelly is the Series Editor for Year’s Best Weird Fiction. He’s been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the British Fantasy Society Award. His fiction has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Black Static, Best New Horror, Postscripts, and Supernatural Tales. He is the proprietor of Undertow Publications.
Bethany W. Pope is an American-born writer living in the UK. When she was twelve, her parents sent her away to live in an orphanage in South Carolina during which time she worked as a midwife for cattle. Later, she dropped out of high school to work for a veterinarian. Bethany has performed more than a few illicit surgeries. She earned her MA in Creative Writing from Trinity, St. David’s and her PhD from Aberystwyth University. Bethany has won a great many literary awards and has published several collections of poetry: A Radiance (Cultured Llama, 2012) Crown of Thorns, (Oneiros Books, 2013), The Gospel of Flies (Writing Knights Press, 2014), and Undisturbed Circles (Lapwing, 2014). Her first novel, Masque, shall be published by Seren in 2016.