There were perhaps sixteen people in all, every one of them in costume, every one of them playing statues.
“Very funny,” Theo said aloud, forcing some cheer into his voice, because in truth, he didn’t find it funny at all. Perhaps in the light of day he might have better appreciated the performance or the prank, or whatever it was, but in the sickly orange gloom, he found the sight of his coworkers all frozen in place a little unnerving. Even the sound of his own voice in a room devoid of all other sound startled him. Which, he supposed, was the intent. It was, after all, a Halloween party.
Still standing just inside the door and very much conscious of the fact that even though everyone was pretending to be frozen they could still see and hear him, he surreptitiously produced from his pocket the invitation. A brief scan and he pocketed it again. Stay 4 Trivia Quiz and Mannequin Chalenge. So, that’s what this was. Everyone here was playing at being a mannequin, but to what end? And how long should he expect it to continue? And had they pulled this same trick on every guest or was he the sole target of their silly prank?
Feeling even more self-conscious simply by virtue of his mobility, he moved further into the room and stood among the statues. He looked around, at turns impressed and disquieted by the intensity of their focus. “Very good,” he said again, smiling and nodding to show his approval, hoping it would be acknowledged somehow by one of his colleagues. But no one moved. Beneath the heavy makeup, voluminous orange wig, and big red nose, he recognized Jeremy Lowell from administration. Ordinarily a rather humorless and curt fellow, Theo was surprised, not only to see him in costume at a party, but engaged in this odd performance with the others.
“You must have been bored,” he said, and grinned to show he was joking.
The clown didn’t respond, didn’t move. Instead, he continued staring across the room at where Sally sat looking bored. His thick-fingered hands were joined together as if praying, or, more likely, hoping, perhaps that Sally might be open to spending some time with him. Not that Theo could blame him. She was arguably the most attractive worker here. Even Theo had caught himself staring, caught himself wishing he were younger whenever she passed his desk and the scent of her perfume infiltrated his day. But he knew better than to make a fool of himself.
He almost laughed out loud at that, felt the bitter grin spread across his face.
Yes, it surely wouldn’t do to make a fool of yourself.
The smile faded and he walked on toward the main aisle between the cubicles where the cluster of coworkers had stopped mid-dance. Though the whole thing was off-putting, and he felt like the outsider not being a part of it, he nevertheless had to admit that he found the whole thing impressive. It couldn’t be easy to hold those poses for so long. And they were being so still. It really did appear as if they’d been frozen. He saw not a stumble of foot nor twitch of lip, heard not a rasp of breath, nor scuff of heel. That many of them were probably drunk too only made it even more astonishing. He knew he wouldn’t last more than a minute in a given pose. Not only was it a physical challenge, it also flew in the face of his motto, his need to always be moving forward.
The revelers around him formed a cage of monsters. One of the men, a werewolf he suspected might be the clerk, Lenny Hall, notorious ladies’ man (though one whose charms had failed to win Sally over) had his arms in the air as if reaching for the lights. His shirt was open, exposing a muscular chest covered in a patina of wiry black hair. An Elvira lookalike Theo didn’t recognize had her hands on his pecs, her lips spread in a broad grin, eyes hooded with lustful appreciation. Theo frowned and watched them closely, unblinking, until his eyes stung. They were not moving. At all. He had looked at Lenny’s chest to try and detect the rise and fall of the man’s breathing.
And found none.
Against his better judgment, for surely this would be the moment when they would explode back to life and scare the living hell out of him, he reached a hand out and placed it, palm down, on Lenny’s right breast. After a few moments, he moved his hand up and held his fingers before the man’s lips.
No heartbeat.
No breath.
Puzzled, Theo looked around at the gathering, all frozen, all perfectly motionless. If it was a prank, it was a mighty convincing one, but how were they doing it? It was making less sense the longer it went on. For example, the dancer in the schoolgirl costume—Veronica Dawson—was leaning backward in faux revolt from the spastic gyrations of her boyfriend Dean Nolan. She had one knee raised, her arms thrust up in the air, so the angle at which she was leaning should not have been sustainable for more than a few seconds. And yet she was holding it with no indication of strain at all.
“Okay,” Theo said, stepping away from the dancers. “You got me. Good job, everyone.”
They ignored him.
“I have to admit, this is very, very impressive. I’d love to know how you all pulled it off.”
After a few moments, he moved to the girl with the food tray.
“Hi, Betty. What’s good?”
Raggedy Ann stared robotically at some point to the left of his face.
He helped himself to some Ritz crackers and cheese cubes from her tray. Management will provide the food, he thought. Cheapskates.
“I should have come as Raggedy Andy,” he quipped and chuckled around a mouthful of cheese. “What a pair we’d have made.” As he spoke, a sliver of cracker flew from his lips and lodged in the white of her left eye. Theo gaped, a horrified apology surging up his throat that stalled when he realized she hadn’t blinked, hadn’t reacted or registered the intrusion at all. And he couldn’t help it, he laughed. Laughed so hard he wept, and when he noticed that Betsy’s offended eye was weeping too, the only reaction he’d seen from any of them thus far, another wave of mirth hit him until he was doubled over and coughing a mixture of crackers and cheese out onto the floor.
At length, the gales of laughter subsided, and he rose, wiped his eyes, and took another cube of cheese from her tray. He popped it into his mouth, leaving only the cocktail stick in his hand, which he regarded thoughtfully. Then he looked at Betty, her eye streaming tears, and let his gaze rove down her face and neck until he was staring at the ample swell of her bosom beneath the gingham material of her dress.
“What if I were to touch you? Would you move then?” he asked, and his voice sounded strange to his own ears in a way he didn’t like. Indeed, he felt strange. The hair was prickling all over his body. His pulse raced; he could feel it ticking away in his dry throat as if he’d swallowed a watch. His body was trembling, and he felt warm, much too warm, and yet giddy at the same time. It was alarming, this new sensation, but not unwelcome. A small grin crept across his lips and stayed there. Let them play, he thought. I can play too. And with that, he grabbed a cluster of cheese cubes and slid them free of the sticks upon which they had been impaled and returned to the makeshift dance floor in the center of the main aisle.
“What about you?” he asked Lenny Hall, who was still holding his arms aloft. “How long are you going to keep this up or is it your intent to be the last one standing?”
When Lenny didn’t answer and just kept on dancing without moving, Theo swallowed, moved in close and pricked the man’s belly with the cocktail stick. He almost expected the skin to resist, to be solid like concrete, but it behaved the way skin is supposed to and dimpled under the tip of the needle. Theo chuckled drily, looked up at Lenny’s face for a reaction, and pricked him again, this time hard enough to leave a tiny dot of blood on the wound.
“How about now, Lenny? You in there? You going to answer me?”
Lenny’s head was thrown back, eyes to the ceiling, chiseled jaw jutting defiantly forward. He was smiling. Consequently, Theo’s grin faded.
“You’re very popular in this office,” he said. “And I honestly never understood why. Your looks? Sure, you’re not ugly, but those looks are already starting to fade and you’re only...what, thirty, thirty-one? Is it the coke, you think?” He pricked Len
ny again, harder this time, right under his nipple, and still the man did not react. “Oh yes, I’ve walked in on you snorting that stuff in the bathroom. You fancy yourself a celebrity, I think. I think you believe you’re better than everyone here. You’re not though.” He stabbed Lenny with the little needle again and again and again as he spoke, until the orange sky of Lenny’s chest was dotted with tiny red suns. “You know what I heard Betty say about you once?” He let his hand move down until it was poised before the man’s crotch. “I overheard her say she bets that with an ego so big, you probably have a tiny...” He jabbed the man in the groin three times in succession. “...prick.”
And still Lenny did not blink.
Theo looked at him strangely. What kind of a prank required this level of dedication? The answer of course was: none. This was not a prank, not some fun activity designed to mess with his head. No. This was something entirely different, the nature of which eluded him for the moment. But the genesis hardly mattered now because he was overcome with power, a sensation he could never remember feeling before. If these people refused to acknowledge him now the same way they refused to see him during the day, he was in a unique position to make them pay for that. It was almost as if he’d been granted special powers, like a superhero, his cause vengeance for the injustices he had suffered his whole life at the hands of others. And while on some level, his most human level, this struck him as patently ridiculous and inherently dangerous, it did not prevent him from returning to Betsy and her tray of hors d’oeuvres, where he stripped all the sticks from the cheese cubes and inserted one into each of her eyes. It reminded him of prepping olives for martinis, except of course, olives didn’t burst when you skewered them.
With a plastic grin frozen on his face, he moved from person to person, stripping them naked and jabbing playfully at their faces and bodies and ignoring the heightening sense of panicked urgency that built in tandem with each punctured eye.
You can stop. You can go home. You can end this. The prank is real and you’re falling for it, but it’s the worst kind of prank, the kind intended to expose the monster inside you...
At some point the music resumed, but he did not hear it, no more than he heard the counsel of that voice deep down inside him.
But as the hour grew late and midnight crept ever nearer, a great sadness descended upon him. Any vestigial joy he might have felt perforating the fleshy disguises of his coworkers ebbed away, leaving him feeling hollow and guilty. He did not know what had come over him and he dropped the bloodied cocktail sticks in disgust. Ultimately, these people were not to blame for how he perceived himself and hurting them was only a cowardly substitute for hurting himself. And that’s what really needed to be done.
He felt a black horror in his soul he doubted he would ever be able to remove and, dispirited, he made his way to the coatrack by the door. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, as he watched his blood and fluid-soaked hands retrieve from the hook the same boring jacket he wore each and every day “Truly, I am.”
Theo turned and took in the room, the statues all in states of disrepair, all naked, all bleeding, and it no longer seemed so strange that they were ignoring him, or the lengths to which they had gone to teach him a lesson that needed hearing. Tonight, Halloween night, his forward momentum would bring him to one last stop: home, and a drawer full of knifes he would use to remove himself from this life.
Freddy would understand.
For once, everybody would.
With one final nod of apology, he turned and quietly exited the room.
As soon as the latch clicked home, Sally Thurston plucked a cocktail stick from her eye and smiled at the others. One by one, they smiled back.
After a moment reserved to ensure Theo was truly gone and not lingering in the hall, the party resumed.
GO WARILY AFTER DARK
THE BOMBS FELL JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT.
They tell you to prepare for such things. There are drills, kits, leaflets and posters, stern voices instructing you over the radio, but nothing can prepare the human mind for the sound of the world coming down. It is as if the devil has felled God. It is thunder from above and below. It is the very earth sundering. It is a single prolonged moment of chaos and destruction.
It is The End.
For months, since the retaliatory statements from their chancellor, we had lived in fear that this day would come, but as the days stretched on and the weeks went by, we did what people in fear will do and reached a sort of numb acceptance infused with a vein of hopeful doubt. If they were truly going to attack the city, then where were they? Wouldn’t they have struck already? What were they waiting for? Such frail hopes, however, were easily thwarted. The city had become lightless, blacked out so as not to make a target of itself, which seemed a rather pointless exercise when the enemy already knew where to strike. People walked blindly through the streets, narrowly avoided the cars and buses with their extinguished headlights, and stumbled on in a daze, confused at this new dark world in which they found themselves marooned.
The soldiers came with their portable shelters, little more than caged tables, cheap and shoddy forms of protection for those of us who did not have yards in which to build proper ones. They gave us gas masks and told us how to use them. Wear them always, they told us, and for a while we did, until our faces grew too hot and too sore, and the smell of the rubber gave us headaches. Mostly we sat around the rabbit hutch table and enjoyed the silence with tension making us as rigid as the chairs. And at night, we dutifully pulled down the black curtains and turned out all but the weakest of lights. In the feeble glow, we huddled together like the refugees we feared we’d one day become at the behest of an enemy to whom we had done nothing, and we listened. When we spoke, it was merely a whisper, as if the threat might not be limited to the skies above, as if night’s dark agents might be abroad, faces pressed to the windows, ears attuned to the slightest of sounds.
Sleep became a luxury few could afford. Often, there were sirens, howling up into the night like a stricken animal pleading for mercy. Instantly, we woke from restless slumber, muscles tightening, bodies subconsciously braced for impact, for death. The hair on the body rose; the heart began to race. The children, still sleepy headed, hurried into my arms, as if that could ever be adequate protection. My husband stood guard by the window, peeking through the tiny perforation in the black plastic. And always, there was nothing to report. By the time the sirens fell silent again, sleep had fled. Exhausted, we lay on the floor staring up at the cracks in the ceiling, thinking them nothing less than the blueprint of its destruction.
During the day, my husband worked. He was gone by dawn, drunk by six.
I sent the children to school where I knew they could learn nothing, washed their clothes, tried to keep up the pretense that this was still our home and not a brick prison waiting to collapse. It made my dutiful ministrations seem foolish. Bombs care little for scrubbed floors. To counter the malaise, I played scratched music on the tired Victrola, but found no reprieve in the rapturous heights of those arias. Instead, I was stricken by the profound and long delayed realization that, quite often, those women sung of war and tragedy, grief and loss. Thus, it was not joy I heard in their heavenly voices, but sorrow and anger. I felt no kinship with these strangers. Many of them had already died, the others away where windows did not need to be blackened and voices did not need to be muted. Safe.
For much of the day, I sat in silence and stared at the cracks above my head, the pattern that portended a terrible fate, and waited for my children to come home, my nose filled with the acrid stench of smoke from fires I couldn’t see.
✽✽✽
The night the bombs fell, the children were sleeping. We had moved them down into the basement, a closet sized room with a dirt floor and walls of hardened clay, the shoddy joists making it seem more like the gullet of some diseased animal than a sanctuary. It had been presented by the soldiers as a haven, a better bet, in any case, than the exposure of the m
ain floor. Both my husband and I had resisted, and when we spoke of it amongst ourselves, the suggestion was instantly dismissed by the tone used to convey it as a possibility. Without knowing why, we did not want to send our children down there into the dirty dark. We had lived in the house for six years by then and had ventured into the basement only a handful of times, three of those without clear reason. Once, after falling asleep on the sofa, my husband had woken up to find himself standing in that tiny room in the pitch dark. Blind, he had screamed himself hoarse and clawed at the walls, the tendrils of roots brushing between his fingers, fearing he had somehow been buried alive. That Christmas, I stashed the gifts on the uppermost step of the rickety wooden stairs, knowing the children would never look there, and returned Christmas Eve to find them gone. Rats, my husband said, they’ll eat anything. We laid traps, and the traps disappeared too.
After that miserable Christmas, in which we’d been forced to gift our children cheap consolation prizes, we closed the stolid wooden door and bolted it shut. We did not discuss it. There was simply nothing down in that room we wanted or needed, hence, no cause to venture down there again. Of course, these were the naïve pre-war days. Once the sirens began their wailing on a nightly basis, and there were sounds of percussive strikes on the horizon, we stopped thinking of the unpleasantness of unused rooms, the silly fear of inexplicable things, and began making a rudimentary shelter in the basement. The room did not run the length of our house. It was a design decision that confounded my husband and nulled its usefulness as anything other than a hiding space. Not a basement, but a nook. Perhaps, he said, it had been abandoned before they’d had a chance to finish it. It was the only thing that made sense, and though the wooden braces supporting all four walls suggested the job had been completed to the architect’s satisfaction, I did not feel compelled to argue. By then, it hardly mattered.
We Live Inside Your Eyes Page 5