by Garrett Cook
Brian has the planchette again. He is seated on the pink carpet and staring into the corner, in the basement where the one he loved was lost.
“Do you want me?” he calls out to me, as if I would answer the question or as if he doesn’t know. He punches the wall. Scrapes his fist, scrapes the drywall. He thinks he can agitate me by defiling my temple or that I am the temple itself. Both of these things are true but not true enough to serve him right now. Do I want him? Yes, I want him. He must be mine, his heart and soul and the Closetsong that sticks to him. He punches the wall again and again until his fist bleeds.
“Do you want me?” he shouts out, angry. Arrogant. He acts as if he doesn’t belong to me already. He has prayed to me and begged me and made use of the things that are mine and lived inside these walls that are so much mine and he asks me if I want something that I have. I let him see the face of the First Girl again and then the big, sardonic smirk of Doctorpuppet.
I know he wants to punch the smile off of Doctorpuppet’s face. I know what he thinks of Doctorpuppet and that he would put an end to the man’s life if he were still alive. I do not blame him. Antonia is precious to me as she is to him. He would not deserve to live. Inside my walls, possessed by me, nothing and nobody is living.
“You can have me,” he says, “show me the way.”
Doctorpuppet obliges him with a smile. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out one of his scalpels. Maddy emerges to play with herself and watch, giggling and tittering like a schoolgirl. Leah emerges, surgical masked, topless, exposing two open red crevices where once her breasts had been. Her ribs threaten to rip their way out of her skin. Her legs are sticks that shouldn’t be able to hold her up. She pulls off the mask and throws up on the floor, a pile of buttons.
“CUT” they spell out.
Teetering on its awkward and broken body, the homunculus approaches. Kaz holds the monster up, tenderly planting a kiss on its oily red shoulders. It growls, recognizing Brian as a part of its grotesque genesis. The infant head on the edge of its grotesque, overinflated cock opens its mouth.
“Die now die now die now die now die now.”
“You don’t need to hurt me,” he tells it, “I understand.”
“No!” Antonia screams, “Fight this!”
Treasonous whore. I could take her away from this but then she wouldn’t get to bear witness, she wouldn’t see what she gets for loving him and wanting to be had by him. She is had by me and there can be no other having. He approaches Doctorpuppet and takes what he is offered.
He makes the first cut. Antonia looks into his eyes and begs him with her gaze to stop what he’s doing, to somehow gather up whatever it is inside him that she’s in love with, as if what she values in him makes him bigger than me, more important and capable of freeing this all from me. But he isn’t. He cuts again and he opens himself to me, knowing that he has to surrender. And he cuts again and he starts to bleed and he gives himself to dying.
He fades and he draws into me, he starts to fade and starts becoming mine. He opens wide and I let in his thoughts, his dreams, his heart, the size of his love for Antonia, the weight of his longing, the regret and the abuse. I can taste every drink he’s had and I can taste the need for the ones he hasn’t yet. I can taste the fear and fervor and fever. I can taste it all and I know what it is to be him now and I know what it is to live with the banging of pipes and the sound of the Closetsong.
He had tried to ignore it for so long and forget it in the corners of his mind but there’s no forgetting that clanging and there’s no forgetting the Heap standing behind his father and the fear and confusing it engendered. There was no way that anyone could have forgotten, no way that anyone could have touched that without having to walk around with it forever. How has he endured that? How has he lived with the unbearable joyless noise and all it meant?
There is a strength that let that happen. There is a will. He’s so quiet and so desperate because it was heavy because day in and day out, most of him was devoted to living with it. This haunting has come with him and it is a part of him. I see that blackness in him and as he comes into me so too does it, a corona of dark that emanates from his essence. It is cold and dank and hurt. It is loud and clanging and vastness, a vastness full of…
And suddenly, it grows around us, tentacles of blackness enveloping time and space. It has dripped itself over all of the moments in which I have held dominion, it has grabbed my house and dragged it into its house. It has grabbed the souls and minds I’ve taken by dragging me into it. I do not understand how I can be on the inside and the outside of a man at once but it is so, the shadow, The Heap is vast as all creation and it has eaten it up in its darkness, me included.Brian is shuddering from the belt again and from the breath of the corpse on the back of his neck again and again and again, it has spent so long harming him, so long holding him in its thrall that he has grown used to it though. What it had tried to show me was not the root of this man’s pain but that the man carried the pain day in and day out and that every waking moment he has lived with it. It was a warning of sorts.
And I finally know what it is to be the one I could not read or understand. I finally plumb the mystery that I would destroy the world I had built to uncover. I am impossibly small now, curled up in the pocket of something cosmic in scope. And I cannot skitter out. Pressed close to its chest my sole luxury is that I can hear its heartbeat and know its purpose. That purpose? The purpose is pain. The purpose is akin to mine but mine, it ends in having. Is this thing less perfect than I in its machinations? Though it possesses, it too is possessed. Is it really a boon to be used?
I am in a tiny body. I had thought I knew smallness through Antonia, walking whisper. She had seemed so fragile and suggestible, gate and portal oh so very open to assassins and lies and instigators and to treacherous thoughts and misconceptions. She had been, she’d been molded and melted into something that would quietly serve its purpose, practical as a dustpan and broom. I had thought I knew smallness through Kaz’s insignificance and need to be coddled and approved of or through shrinking Leah, vanishing fast ‘til gone at last. But I have not looked through the wet brown eyes of a child of six living in fear of a giant that might have lurked right outside.
I know streaks of red on someone’s back and bruises on the ass. I know what it is to be quiet and behave. This shouldn’t make me so mad. This shouldn’t make me afraid. I do not like this. Let me out. Let me out. I DO NOT LIKE THIS! LET ME OUT! I DO NOT LIKE THIS! LET ME OUT! I remember this man in the grey suit, with his rotting face and the maggots crawling up and down his face. I’m not afraid of the dead. I’m not afraid of ghosts. My name is Brian Kinney. I’m six. I’m stuck here and I’m scared and I need you to let me out of it.
The man in the grey suit is in here again and dad’s been drinking. Mom says when dad’s been drinking, he’s not responsible for what he does. I don’t like that. I want to be mad at him for what he does when he’s been drinking. He’s going to hit me again when he comes back. I shouldn’t have been bad I guess. I don’t know what I did but I shouldn’t have been bad. I think the man in the grey suit is dead.
“I wasn’t the one, I didn’t lock you in here, so you can’t get out. You’ll see sunlight when it’s time.”
I’ve heard this before. I know I’ve heard this before. Where have I heard this before? Am I me again? What are you doing to me? I want out. You did do this to me. I’m stuck in here. Let me out! It’s dark and confusing and he’s coming up soon. These aren’t my thoughts. This isn’t me. Mom said there are no such things as monsters and there are no haunted houses. She said it while she was looking right at this thing and I know it was behind me, the great big shadow.
The man in grey is dead and he smells and I don’t understand what he’s saying to me. When the shadow comes, everybody gets mad and dad starts telling that story again or he locks me in the closet with the dead people and the noises and I just want out. But when I get out, he’ll be there with the bel
t because I was bad and he hopes I’ll learn my lesson but nobody tells me what lesson I’m supposed to be learning or why I was bad. Mom tells me that dad isn’t responsible for when he’s been drinking.
“There will be ways to forget this, and one day, you can make it so you won’t have to sit in dark and wait for sunlight. Look back to this and the way out opens up. The world is full of bottles, scalpels, pills.”
I’ve heard this before. He stuck me inside of himself. He stuck me inside of the thing inside of himself. I’m small and afraid and deceived by forces bigger than me. He cannot be bigger than me, he’s crossed my threshold, he’s still inside me, he still belongs to me. I don’t understand how the Closetsong can be his when he belongs to it or I can be his when belongs to me.
“You are mine,” says the voice of the Heap, “you are here in the closet with him and there you’ll stay. You shouldn’t have tried to take from me what was mine.”
I pound against the walls of this nightmare, begging to see light I could never see again, borrowing the tiny fists of a child that can’t get out, a child with a dusty cadaver breathing down his neck and a father waiting right outside to strike him. To have him is to be had by the Closetsong. I have been tricked. Nothing has ever tricked me. It outrages me. I smash the boy’s head against the door but nobody outside it hears. Nobody will let him out. Nobody will let me out. It is slowing down this moment, stretching it so it is all of time, encompassing creation. History, which was a toy to me is now my dungeon, worse even than this closet.
Behind the layers and layers, Antonia is looking into Brian’s eyes, eyes that are getting heavy, eyes that are about to close forever. I am inside Brian and Brian is inside the house inside of me as I am inside the closet inside of him. Space and time and mind make no sense. Nothing is making sense to me. I have been tricked. The Closetsong has tricked me. Brian is shivering with torment and blood loss. The closet is hurting him, the Closetsong saps his will and is leaking out his spirit.
Antonia inside of me, inside of him, as I struggle to escape and he struggles to maintain control of the Closetsong is looking at him, tears in her long gone eyes. She doesn’t understand. Nobody could. I have been tricked. I have taken this prison and now I am inside it and she wants in. She reaches out her hand.
“I love you, Brian,” she says, “you’re dying.”
“Slowly,” he says, “I can’t move, I can’t do anything but it will almost take forever. I’ll hurt like this for a very very long time.”
History hurts him as he bleeds out and he refuses the hand of the woman that he loves more than life itself, a hand that would give him comfort if he took it and it could be the start of holding her and touching her forever. If he could hold her and touch her forever, he’d be as good as me, a master of having, a god in the walls of himself. But he turns down her hand and I don’t understand why.
“Take her hand!” I hiss at him, pounding on the eternal closet door, “Hold her! Kiss her! Fuck her! She could be yours forever!”
“No!” he says to me, to her.
“I’m not being made to do this,” she says, coming closer to him.
“I know.”
“So, what do you want me to do?”
Though he is bleeding to death forever and struggling for control of the Closetsong, he manages to take a step. The confused homunculus and Doctorpuppet and Maddy part as he walks, no longer under my control since I have no control. Antonia follows close behind him.
“Where are we going?” she asks him, concerned.
“We’re not going anywhere,” he says.
I look out through the eyes of the people inside of me and I want to scream. He is shambling with all his fading strength, the strength of a young man dying forever until he can never die again, he is shambling with all his fading strength and he is going to make the front door. The girl who left had come back to me again but she had belonged to me. Though he belongs to me, here in the closet, I belong to him as well and she, the sly bastard, she belongs to him now.
She reaches out to touch him and he pulls away.
“I belong to you,” she says, “I’ll belong to you forever. I love you.”
“I know,” he says, “but you don’t belong to me.”
The closet door is so hard to bang down. I wonder if I bashed his head open and splatted his brains on that invincible door, would he have been dead before I needed to claim him. I am pleading to the Closetsong to let me hurt him more. It hates him so and he is bleeding to death now, and bleeding to death for longer than anyone could actually bleed.
“I don’t understand,”says Antonia, “what are you doing? Why did you decide to die for nothing?”
He turns the knob. I shout out through the closet, I try to shout through his mouth, I try to call the homonoculus to stop him before he can open it. But nothing comes up. He is in so much anguish and dying so long, the thing spent so long hurting him.
“You don’t belong to me,” he says, hands bleeding, pale, his eyes heavy, “you don’t belong to me, you belong to you.”
“I love you,” she says, as if she needed to say it again, as if I didn’t feel it in his rapidly emptying veins here in the closet.
He opens the door, turns the knob and she steps out into the light. And suddenly, I’m hurting worse in the vastness of this man’s time. I feel something I have never felt before and I cannot fathom it. I have known it in the minds of hearts which I thought I knew fully by having. But you cannot know something fully even by having it. I look in all the things I have and I cannot find this feeling as I know it as mine. I cannot feel it as I feel it as mine.
I had something and now I do not. I treasured it. I valued it and played with it often and tried to know its ways. But I never really did. I am looking for the places when I had her, seeking her out to drag her back and I see now just the image, just the memory. I cannot touch it but I can just remember touching it. She has stepped into the light and she is gone. I slow time for a thousand years I scream at him long as I can fathom long as I can bother and I watch him bleed out long as I can fathom long as I can bother and I need him to know what he has taken from me and show him all the pain he’s given me.
I eventually let him bleed out. And he’s dead. And he’s mine completely.
“I’ll defy you forever,” he tells me.
“I’ll never stop hurting you.”
And he doesn’t.
Garrett Cook Garrett Cook is the Wonderland Book Award Winning author of Time Pimp and four other books. He is also an editor, teacher and can make a mean pot of chili. He currently resides in Portland, OR with his collection of vntage fedoras.He’s never lived in a house that wasn’t haunted.
Table of Contents
Homecoming
Inhabitants
The New One
Champagne
Session
Paying the Piper
Basement
Session II
Absent Friends
Rival
She Will Never Be A Doctor
The Rake's Progress
Together
Playing Doctor
Hide and Seek
Homonculus
Marionette
Maddy and Clarence and the First Girl
Heap
In the Room
Investigation
Parlor Games
Family Bonding
Stuck
Never Stop Hurting