by Brett Savory
Slipknot waited until Edward had gone to bed before slipping out again from behind the bathroom mirror.
It would rend this one like it had the last, and the one before that, and on down through history. Sometimes it wished it wasn’t restricted to just one family, that it could fuck with others, turn their lives inside out, torment them in whatever ways caught its fancy that generation. But rules were rules, and these were rules of the universe, so there was no one to appeal to.
Smithy had been a long-time friend of the Curtis’, and was Slipknot’s first and only human host. In its true form—the form it was in now, that of shadow—it was not as limited as when it was the bear or the human. It had forgotten the other forms it’d assumed/created over the many, many years with the Curtis’, but it knew, and never allowed itself to lose sight of the fact, that they were all, essentially, human creations.
Guilt took all forms, and Slipknot’s was only to portray them. Though in its boredom of late, Slipknot had deigned to help things along their way a little. After all, as there was no one to appeal to about the rules, it stood to reason that there was no one to answer to, either.
Edward often dreamed about his guilt, and Slipknot fed off it, intertwined it with the rest of the family’s, splashed it across the ceiling and let it drip down. Slipknot increased the tentative connection with Edward as he slept, and listened hard . . . Edward dreamed of it again.
And Slipknot was hungry.
In the dream, Edward was taking his twelve-year-old son, Stephen, to a hockey game for his twelfth birthday.
“Woo-hoo! Go Canucks!” Stephen shouted, his little boy’s voice lost in the roar of the crowd.
The noise was driving spikes into Edward’s brain.
The pounding headache/near-migraine was threading through his skull, chipping bits off, and by Christ he wished Stephen would just watch the game and shut the fuck up.
“Dad, did you see Ohlund rip that shot through Hasek?! Holy cats! What a blast he’s got! Incredible! Dad, did ya see it?! Dad?”
Edward gritted his teeth, more cracks in his head. The Canucks had scored on the Buffalo Sabres and this Vancouver crowd was going nuts—a jackhammer at the base of his skull. He’d never had a headache this bad in his life. He’d taken aspirin for it before they’d left for the game, but—
“Ha-HO!” Stephen leaped out of his seat with the rest of the capacity crowd and started clapping and hollering. The Canucks had popped in another one. “Dad, Bertuzzi roofed one! Did ya see it?! Wow!”
Shut the fuck up, he thought. Just SHUT UP. Yes, I fucking saw it. Edward leaned forward in his seat with his head in his hands, rubbing his temples.
“You okay, Dad?”
“Leave me alone, Stephen,” Edward said, eyes shut, a tear slipping down his cheek from the pain. “Just . . . watch the game and let me be for a bit, okay?”
“But what’s wrong?” Stephen shouted over the noise of the crowd.
I knew the little shit wouldn’t shut his trap. He can’t just fucking leave me alone, can he? He has to know what’s wrong. He has to shout the question right in my goddamned ear. Has to—
“Dad, can you hear me?! Are you alright?!”
Edward knew he was close to snapping. Teetering on the brink. One more word and he knew—
“Dad, is it your head? Is it—”
Slipknot pushed just then . . . only a little bit, but he pushed. Just enough.
Edward swung around in his seat, lifted his son up to his face by the arms. Stephen dangled like a broken puppet, eyes wide, suddenly terrified. “Yes, Stephen, my FUCKING head is killing me, you little bastard!” The words came from his mouth, but he had no idea where the thoughts that had formed them came from. “My head is pounding like hell, and your constant shouting and bellowing in my fucking ear isn’t exactly helping, ALRIGHT?!”
“B-B-But . . . Dad, I—”
Slipknot shoved a bit more and grinned as the words tumbled from Edward’s mouth. “You were an accident, anyway, Stephen,” Edward said, and dropped his son back into his seat, utter disdain on his face.
The Canucks came close again, hitting a post, and the drill probed deeper into Edward’s mind, stirring Slipknot up even more.
A big, fat Sabres fan—a Mike Peca jersey pasted to his sweaty back—leaned over in his seat one aisle up from theirs and threatened Edward, telling him to lay off the kid. Edward ignored him.
Stephen’s face had gone slack at the word “accident,” but Edward simply could not stop. “We didn’t want you. No one wants you. You were an accident. Just a fucking stupid accident.”
Edward felt something release from inside him. The headache started to fade, slowly, in increments. Waves of nausea passed over him and he fell clumsily into his seat. He started to cry.
The Canucks slammed their third straight goal through Hasek and the crowd erupted. Stephen remained seated, staring at nothing, wishing he were dead.
Edward woke from the dream, sweating, head pounding. His sheets were soaked through. Breath coming in raspy, choking gulps, he looked up to the ceiling and saw the shadows stretching themselves along the ceiling again, pulsing in time with his breathing. He had only ever seen this in dream before, but now it was real. Dripping onto his sheets. Slithering between the folds of his crumpled quilt. The hushed whisper, I’m inside you, slinking through his mind like a back-alley whore. You can’t kill me ’cause I’m already inside you.
The shadows seeped under the covers and into Edward’s pores. Flitting images and vague feelings of broken promises and forgotten dreams: the back of Dad’s head splashed across trees, the dull thump of his body hitting the leafy ground; Chumbly twisting in his red wine prison; Gramps with his brains splattered all over the oak table and mantelpiece; Edward’s wife leaving him after two years of marriage, lurid scenes of the infidelity that had caused it; Stephen at the hockey game, the flat, stone look of worthlessness, of being loved by no one.
“I do not want to kill you,” Edward mumbled, dream becoming reality, the words untrue, but practiced, ingrained nonetheless. Guilt tightened, became a machine, thrust forward, immutable. Parts of it became a hard, cold stone in his chest. Other parts swam through his veins, burning, congealing, solidifying. Frozen Pompeii, an ashen statue of grief and guilt.
Then Slipknot told Edward his name.
“Slipknot,” Edward whispered, the beginning sibilant like a razor deep and hard across his tongue, the word itself a poisonous miasma drifting through his psyche, ripping out memories like talons tearing at clumps of soil.
When the pain had subsided and only a dull throb remained, Edward slept, and dreamed about Stephen.
Stephen walked through the front door of his house to see his father standing in the hall, a gun pointed at his son’s head. He dropped his overnight bag on the floor and tried to think of something to say.
Edward felt the knot tighten. He was sweating from everywhere a human being can sweat from, his entire body drenched, the exposed parts—arms, hands, face—glistening. His whole frame trembled, but his gun hand was steady. He felt Slipknot racing around inside him, shooting random images of betrayal, regret, and loss through his mind. With each image, each impression, the trigger bent back that much farther.
In his son’s face, he saw Gramps, saw his father, saw himself . . . and squeezed a little more.
He tried to say he was sorry, that Stephen wasn’t an accident, that he’d wanted him, loved him, still loved him, would always love him. But Slipknot pulled tighter, securing itself against the accumulated guilt/betrayal of the centuries before him. More images seared synapses, burned grooves through rational thought. Images two, three hundred years old of people Edward did not know, but knew were his blood. Their faces sliced through his will, their deeds crushing it to dust.
The hammer of the gun cocked back slowly as the pressure on the trigger increased. Shades of gray wrapped in shadows in the shape of tears rolled down Edward’s cheeks.
Slipknot smiled, and waited patiently for the back of the boy’s head to open up all over the screen door.
Finally, Stephen found words. Words he had no right saying. Words he didn’t understand, and had no idea from where they’d come. “Pull the slipknot, Dad.” His eyes were locked with his father’s, somehow, perhaps through the song of their blood, sharing the visions. “Pull it.”
Some rules are universal, and with no one to appeal to, they sometimes change on their own, or bend to the will of one stronger.
“Pull it. Pull the knot.”
Edward flinched at the words—
you can’t fucking kill me
—shook more violently yet, his gun hand finally becoming affected. The disease within him screamed—
I’m already inside you
—pressed harder at Edward, but Edward understood his son’s words, and he let it all go.
He just let.
It.
Go.
Stephen watched his father raise the gun to his own head, the hand holding the weapon now steady again. Something flickered momentarily beneath the skin of Edward’s face, something black and seething, something trying like mad to get out.
Stephen Curtis closed his eyes.
SILICA
In loving memory of Chris Hamlin (1973–1999).
Best friends forever.
The tinkling of broken glass.
I heard it, but didn’t know where it was coming from. It was like thin shards of glass being ground to dust, grating against something. Sand, maybe. Silica sand. Isn’t that what glass is made from?
Silica.
It underlay every other noise I heard, as though someone was constantly sprinkling glass-dust near my ears. Faint. Insistent. On especially bad days, the suspiration of tiny glass motes became the shattering of full windowpanes, to the point where I couldn’t see straight or even think.
In dreams, when the sound was at its dullest, my mind conjured the same image: a sliver of glass with sand flowing from its sharpest point like a runnel. Behind it and below it, only darkness, floating.
Sometimes I heard Silica’s gentle breathing creeping into my subconscious as she lay beside me, dreaming her own dreams. The combination of the sand/glass and her breathing induced in me something approaching panic, and I always woke in a sheen of sweat, my ragged breathing matching hers in time, a metronome of our dichotomous realities.
She slept so peacefully, my Silica.
I think she was the source of the sound because when she left me a few years ago it stopped. When she came back last New Year’s Eve, it returned and seemed to have grown louder. I did not tell her about the glass sounds because I didn’t think she would understand, and I did not want to risk losing her again.
Last week I woke up standing in front of the bedroom window that looks out onto the backyard. I watched the tire-swing move gently back and forth in the soft August breeze, as the creaking sound of rope against wood fell counterpoint to the sand and glass in my head. Ever-sofaintly, beneath the creaking, the sand, and the wind, there was my love’s breathing. I reached up with my left hand and put my fingers against the glass. Upon contact all sound ceased . . . except Silica’s breathing. I removed my hand and the sounds returned slowly, filtering back into my head.
I looked out the window again and saw a small figure there. A child, about eight years old. I glanced over at the clock on my bedside table: 3:19 AM. Where were the child’s parents? What was she doing out at this hour, alone? I returned my eyes to the figure and she looked up at me, the breeze blowing her straight brown hair about her head like something alive. She smiled softly at me, glass eyes searching mine. She mouthed one word that I couldn’t make out the first time. There was too much noise for me to concentrate. I put my hand on the glass and everything stopped again, save for my wife’s breathing.
The child mouthed the word again, and this time I understood it: Daddy.
My breath caught. The child’s glass eyes glittered faintly in the meager light from the thumbnail moon. A slow, knowing smile slithered onto her face, and she kicked off with both feet in the dirt beneath the tire, swinging gently, eyes still locked to mine.
I closed my eyes, then, and thought of fire making heat, making glass, making death.
Making peace.
“Steven?”
Silica was propped up on one elbow, rubbing her eyes. “Steven, is everything alright? What are you doing over by the window, honey?”
The little girl had stopped swinging now and looked in my direction again. Not at my eyes, this time, but at my hand, where it still lay flat against the pane, keeping things quiet.
I watched that little girl die. I watched her burn to death in that house. I watched her flesh boil, watched it char in slow motion right in front of me. Her eyes bubbled and popped, running down her cheeks . . . like sand on glass.
“Steven? Hon, you’re scaring me, what’s wrong?”
Her screams floated through the glass, visible, living tendrils of pain, chewed up by the smoke and flames. My hand against the window, eyes holding nothing, feeling nothing, Silica pulling my other hand, pleading for me to come. The fire! Do you want to die with her? Do you?! There’s nothing we can do! she screamed. They both screamed.
. . . And the child’s eyes were replaced with glass.
“Steven!” Silica shook me, tried pulling me away from the window.
Again.
The child’s gaze switched from my hand to my eyes, glass shards boring into my skull, cracking it, my thoughts crumbling, losing cohesion.
My little girl is dead.
“Daddy . . . ”
Her voice drifted in through the open window, carrying the weight of her death, carrying the accusation.
Silica stopped pulling on me, noticing the position of my hand on the glass, following my gaze to the tireswing that had been our daughter’s favorite play spot.
“Oh, Steven, there’s nothing you could have done,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around me from behind, resting her head on my back. “You know that, don’t you?”
Jocelyn, my sweet, dead little girl, frowned at my wife’s—her mother’s—words.
You could have saved me, Daddy. You could have . . .
Tears blurred my vision. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t get around the lump in my throat, the pain in my heart.
Finally:
“Silica . . . let go of me.”
Silica lifted her head slowly from my back, her hands fluttering as they left my body. “What did you call me, Steven?”
I ignored her. She knew her name.
“Look at her, Silica,” I said quietly, tears slipping into the corners of my mouth, spreading out along my lips, salty. “So beautiful . . . and look what we did to her.”
She asked again what I had called her. I don’t understand why she ignored our daughter. She was right there, on the tire-swing, the way she was before she died, and all my wife could think about was her own name.
“Who is Silica, Steven?”
I felt her coldness at my back. I knew by the tone of her voice that if I turned around and looked, her arms would be crossed, her left cheek twitching a little, like it always did when she was mad. I didn’t have time for that; my daughter needed me. But I wanted Silica to see.
“Honey, look at Jocelyn.”
Jocelyn’s face was slowly melting. My hand was hot on the glass, burning up. She started to scream. She lost her grip on the tire-swing’s ropes and fell over into the dirt, twitching and gurgling, skin sloughing off her bones. She twisted her head in my direction once more from her position on the ground, beetles, earwigs, and cockroaches crawling in her open mouth, her beautiful face pitted from flame and belching smoke from holes in her cheeks. Her eyes turned to sand, then, and the sound of a million sheets of glass shattering exploded in my head.
I dropped to my knees, clenching my head, my left hand sizzling again
st my scalp from the heat of the fire.
Silica bent to cradle me, asking what was wrong, if I was alright, should she call 911, ohgodwhat’shappening, and still, fucking still asking who Silica was, all of it coming in a flood of near incoherence.
You could have saved me, Daddy. You could have . . . She pulled you away from the window, just like she pulled you away from me now, Daddy. And it happened again. Why do I have to keep dying for you?
Silica’s arms were around me again, and I felt their coldness, like glass, like sand . . .
After Jocelyn died, she left me. My wife left me, without a word. Every night I lay in bed and all I heard was her breathing, right beside me.
On New Year’s Eve, when she returned, she brought our daughter with her . . . every night outside the window, playing in her swing, the glass in her eyes, the glass that separated me from her.
“Silica?” I whispered, the sound of shattering glass finally receding, only the gentle swish of my daughter’s hair as she swung back and forth on the tire, in my mind . . . and, of course, Silica’s breathing.
“I’m here, Steven,” she said, rocking me mechanically under the windowsill. “I’m here.”
“Silica, why didn’t you let me save her?” I had never asked this question. It had never occurred to me before. “Why did you pull me away from the window? I could have saved her, Silica. Jocelyn says I could have. She tells me every night. But you pulled me away, you . . . pulled me . . . from her . . . ”
Silica was silent. Nothing. She stopped rocking me. “Why do you call me Silica, Steven?”
“That’s your name,” I answered, simply.
“My name is Linda, Steven. Linda.”
Sand slipped off the point of the sliver of glass in my mind. Silica sand. I suddenly felt very tired and I closed my eyes, thinking of Jocelyn as a baby, watching her grow up in fast-forward in my mind’s eye, remembering vividly each birthday, her first words, her first steps, the way she hid under the stairs when she heard me coming, thinking every time that I didn’t know where she was, then leaping out at me when I got to the bottom, screaming, “PoppaPoppaGotcha!!” and hugging me fiercely, ragged breathing in my ear from her excitement.