by Ellen Datlow
“Perhaps what stays your hand is the thought of having them go sniffing around your place, looking for drugs.”
“You think I won’t go to the cops? I’ll call ’em right now.”
“I’ll wait inside, shall I? We’ll have a chat when they get here.”
Shellane started to close the door, but Broillard shouldered it open. Then, abandoning the tactics of machismo, he said with unvarnished desperation, “I need to talk to you, man!”
“It’ll have to be another time.”
“If you’re fucking with me, that’s cool. I don’t care. I just wanna know!”
“I’m not fucking with you,” said Shellane. “Grace is with me now.”
Broillard stood on tiptoes, trying to see past Shellane into the cabin. “Where is she?”
Shellane flirted with the notion that this might all be a hustle involving a fake grave and a pretend ghost, a variation on the Hooker with an Outraged Husband. “Seems I’m the only one who can see her,” he said.
“Oh, sure … yeah.” Confidence soaring on chemical wings, Broillard made as though to push inside, but Shellane elbowed him back.
“You’re more than a little thick, Avery. Where else do you think I learned the sordid facts of your life?”
“She mighta called you … or written you a letter. Like maybe you’re a relative or something.”
“Of course she did. ‘Dear Uncle, the other night Avery sent me to the outlet store to buy him a pair of cashmere socks. He prefers to masturbate in cashmere. We haven’t made love in four months—he says I’m too fat. But he’s gone through dozens of socks.’ Just the sort of thing she’d disclose to a relative.”
Broillard gaped at him.
“We’re all sad animals.” Shellane gave him a gentler shove, moving him back from the door. “Some of us manage to rise above it.”
“You think she’s such a saint? Maybe it was me fucked her up, but she wasn’t never a saint, man. She wanted something, she’d do whatever she needed to get it.” Broillard bunched his fists, ready to be a soldier. “This is my fucking property and I got a right to inspect it. I’m coming in.”
Shellane was about to repeat his original response, but then, thinking that Broillard might become a problem, he said, “All right. But you won’t be able to see her.”
Once inside, Broillard stood in the center of the room, turning his head this way and that. “Is she here?” He fixed Shellane with a terrified look. “Where is she?”
Shellane gestured at the refrigerator.
Broillard stared at it. “Grace?” he said, and then to Shellane: “What’s she doing?”
“Watching you. She doesn’t appear overjoyed.”
Doubt and fear contended for control of Broillard’s features. He sat heavily in a straight-backed chair beside the table. “Can she hear me?”
Shellane sat opposite him, facing away from the refrigerator. “Give it a try.”
Broillard made an effort to compose his face. “Grace,” he said. “I’m so sorry, baby. I was—”
“She doesn’t like you calling her ‘baby’,” Shellane said. “She never liked it.”
Broillard nodded, swallowed. “I didn’t want to hurt you, ba … Grace. It’s like I was watching someone else do the things I did. I don’t know what the fuck was going on.” His voice cracked and he covered his eyes with his right hand. “I’m so sorry!”
Shellane glanced at the refrigerator. Grace was standing beside it, wearing only her panties. Tears cut down her cheeks. A cold pressure pushed upward from the base of Shellane’s spine and he had the feeling that something very bad was about to happen.
Broillard’s tone was urgent. “What’s she doing?”
“Crying,” Shellane said.
“Aw, Christ … Grace! I know I can’t make things right. But I’m—” Broillard fumbled in his trouser pocket, pulled forth several folded sheets of notebook paper. “I wrote something. About you … about everything. You want to hear it?”
He looked to Shellane for guidance and Shellane shrugged, as if communicating Grace’s indifference.
“I don’t know how to talk to you, Grace,” Broillard said in a plaintive voice. “This is the only way I got.”
Her face empty, Grace had come halfway across the room and was standing to his left as he addressed himself to the refrigerator, reading from the sheets of paper, singing the words in a muted but obviously practiced delivery intended to convey anguish:
Never thought it could happen,
never saw the storm comin’,
never once had a clue about
how much you were sufferin’ …
It all was so damn easy,
I took love for nothin’,
What I thought was us livin’
was the heart of your dyin’,
and now all I remember is
Grace Under Pressure …
As he reached the chorus, Broillard built his reading to the level of a performance, half-shouting the words. Shellane could not decide whether his loathing was colored by pity, or if what he felt was embarrassment at seeing another man act with such unabashed stupidity and arrogance.
… forever and ever,
Grace Under Pressure …
It’s all I can think of,
the way you just sat there,
with everything broken …
Grace Under Pressure …
Grace Under Pressure …
Grace Under Pressure …
He began a second verse, and Grace stepped behind him, gazing at the back of his head with dispassion.
Aw, I wish I could breathe you
straight through until mornin’,
where a white dream arises
from the bright flash of being …
Grace trailed her fingers across his neck and Broillard broke off, stared at Shellane. “What just happened? She do something to me?”
“Did you feel something?”
“What’d she do? I got all cold.”
Grace appeared to have lost interest in Broillard. She was weeping again, her shoulders hunched and shaking, and Shellane recalled how she had acted the afternoon when he had come to her house. Silent; tearful; unmindful of him. He wondered why her fingers never left him cold. “She touched you,” he said.
Broillard scraped back his chair and stood, hands braced on the table. He seemed poised to run, but unable to take the first step. His eyes were bugged and he breathed through his mouth.
“I don’t think she liked your song,” said Shellane mildly.
“Is she close? Where the fuck is she?”
“I wouldn’t move if I were you,” said Shellane, though Grace had wandered back toward the refrigerator. “You’ll bump into her.”
He took Broillard by the elbow. “Let’s go.” He opened the door to the porch, admitting a glare of the lowering sun, and guided him through it. “You wouldn’t want to piss her off. She gets pissed off, she does all that Exorcist shit.”
Broillard shook free of Shellane’s grasp. “You’re fucking with me, man. You got my imagination playing tricks, but I know you’re fucking with me. I’m calling the cops.”
He started for the outer door, but stopped dead. The door stood open and framed there, barely visible against the light, a glowing silhouette had materialized. It was as if an invisible presence were drawing the light in order to shape a rippling golden figure with the swelling hips and breasts of a woman, limned by a pale corona that crumbled and reformed like superheated plasma. The figure was so faint, it seemed a trick of the light, similar to an eddy on the surface of a pond that briefly resembles a face. It brightened, acquiring the wavering substantiality of a mirage, and Shellane saw that the light within the outline was flowing outward in all directions, a brisk tide radiating from some central source.
Broillard made a squeaky noise in his throat.
“Grace?” Shellane said.
With a womanly shriek, Broillard sprang for the door- and burst through the f
igure, briefly absorbed by its golden surface. He went sprawling over the bottom step, rolled up to his knees, and ran. The figure billowed like a curtain belling in a breeze, then winked out.
Shaken, unable to relate this apparition to what he knew of Grace, Shellane went back inside. The sheets of paper on which Broillard had scribbled his song lay on the floor. He picked them up and stood at the table, unable to think or to even choose a direction for thought. Finally he crossed to the bedroom door and opened it. Grace was still asleep, lying on her side, one pale shoulder exposed. He touched her hip and was so relieved by her solidity, he felt light-headed and sat down on the edge of the bed. She turned to face him, reached out with her eyes closed, groping until her fingers brushed his thigh.
“Grace?”
“I’m here,” she said muzzily.
“Avery’s gone.”
“Avery?”
“Don’t you remember? He was here … a minute ago.”
“I’m glad you didn’t wake me.” She stretched, twisted onto her back and looked up at him. “What did he want?”
“He wrote you a song.”
“Oh, God!”
“It really sucked.” Shellane crumpled the pages in his hand. “You don’t remember him being here?”
“I was asleep.” Her brow furrowed. “What’s the matter?”
He told her how she’d acted with Avery, how she acted the afternoon he had come inside her house—another occasion she did not recall—and about the apparition. She listened without speaking, sitting with her knees drawn up, and when he had done, she rested her head on her knees so he could not see her face and asked him if he loved her; then, before he could answer, she said, “I realize that’s a difficult question, since it’s not altogether clear what I am.”
“It’s not a difficult question,” he said.
“Then why don’t you answer it?”
“Every minute I stay here, I know I’m in danger. You don’t understand that …”
“I do!”
“Not all of it, you don’t. The fact remains I’m in danger and yet I feel at home. Easy with this place … with you. That frightens me. You frighten me. What you might mean frightens me.”
Her injured expression hardened, but she continued to look at him.
“There’s an old Catholic taint in me wants to deny it,” he said. “It’s telling me this is unnatural. Against God. But I love you. I just don’t know what’s to come of it.”
She said nothing, fingering an imperfection in the blanket.
“And you?” he asked.
She shrugged, as if it were trivial. “Of course. But I wonder if I’d love you if you weren’t my only option.”
His face tightened as he parsed the meaning of the words.
“See how we hurt each other,” she said. “We must be in love.”
The light dimmed, clouds moving in from the south to shadow the lake. They started to speak at the same time. Shellane gestured for her to go on, but she said, “No … you.”
“Where do you go when you leave?” he asked her. “What happens to you?”
“Limbo,” she said.
The word had the sound of a stone dropped into a puddle. “That’s where unshriven infants go after they die … right?”
“‘Unshriven’.” She laughed palely. “You’re way too Catholic, Roy. Limbo’s what I call it. I don’t know what it is.” She touched the place on his palm where he had picked up the splinter. “You were there. You saw it.”
“I did?”
“The black house. The one you asked me about.”
He took this in. “You’re saying the afterlife’s a house on the lake?”
“Not on the lake. You could walk around the entire lake, you wouldn’t find it.”
“I found it,” he said.
“You weren’t walking anywhere near the lake.”
All the half-formed suspicions he’d entertained regarding his fate seemed to mist up inside his head, merging into a dark shape. “Where was I?”
“I’ll tell you what I know.” She slid down in the bed, curled up in the way of a child getting cozy. “The night I died, Avery was off playing somewhere and I wasn’t feeling well. My chest hurt … but I had an ache in my chest all the time, so I didn’t think it was anything. I went outside to get some air and I was walking along the shore when I had a feeling of weakness. It came on so suddenly! I could tell something was really wrong and I tried to call for help, but I was too weak. I thought I’d fainted, because the next I knew, I was sitting up and a fog had gathered. I wasn’t in pain anymore and I felt stronger, clearer. A little disoriented, but clear in the way I handled it, y’know. I kept walking and before long I came to the house. I was terrified, but there was nowhere else to go, so I went inside.”
“What it’s like in the house?” Shellane asked.
“When I’m there, I feel kind of how I did with Avery. Dejected. Faded. I’m always getting lost. The people there … nobody talks much. Maybe I’m projecting, but I get the idea everyone’s like me. They’re people who gave up and now they’re just moping about. There are some others, though. Tall and really ugly. That’s what I call them. The uglies. I don’t think they’re human. There aren’t very many. Maybe twenty. They chase after us—it’s like it’s a game for them. They can’t kill us, of course. But they hurt us. They use us. Men, women. It doesn’t matter.”
“They use you sexually?”
A nod. “They act like animals. They’re incredibly stupid. But they’re strong, and they know how to move around in the house without getting lost.”
Shellane recalled the tall, naked man who had pursued him in the woods. “Ever see them around the lake?”
“Sometimes they follow me out, but they won’t go far from the house.”
“Why’s it so difficult to get around inside the house?”
“It’s not difficult, it’s just you never know where the doors will take you. The house changes. You go through a door and it kind of sucks you in. Like … whoosh! and you’re somewhere else. But you can’t retrace your steps. If you go back through the same door, you won’t wind up in the room you left. I try to figure it out, but I never have the energy. Or I’m too busy hiding from the uglies.”
“But you return here. You learned how to do that.”
“That’s different. It’s not like I understand what I’m doing. I get a strong feeling that I have to leave, so I head for the nearest door, and when I step through, I’m back at the lake. I think it’s the same for the others. At least I’ve been in rooms when people suddenly space out. They get a blank expression and then they take off.”
She tugged at him, drew him down beside her. He lay on his back, studying the water stains on the ceiling, appearing to map a rippled white country with a sketchily rendered brownish-orange coastline. His arm went about her, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Thinking about the house.”
“It doesn’t do any good.”
“Maybe not.”
“But you’re doing it anyway?”
“I’m good with problems. It’s what I did for a living.”
“I thought you were a thief.”
“I wasn’t a snatch-and-grab artist. I stole things that were hard to steal.”
A gust of wind shuddered the bedroom window, and coming out of nowhere, a hard rain slanted against the panes.
“When you pass through the doors,” he said, “you say it feels as if you’re being sucked in. Anything else happen?”
“I get lights in my eyes. Like the sort that come when you’re hit in the head. And right after that, I’ll get a glimpse of other places. Just a flash. I can’t always tell what it is I’m seeing, but they don’t seem part of the house.”
“What makes you think the ugly ones know how to get around in the house?”
“Because whenever they take me with them, we always go to the same places. They don’t display any uncertaint
y. They know exactly where they’re headed.”
“Do they do anything to the doors before opening them? Do they touch anything … maybe turn something, push something?”
She closed her eyes. “When I’m with them, I’m afraid. I don’t notice much.”
“You said there are about twenty?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What about the rest of you? How many?”
“The house is so big, it’s impossible to tell. A lot, though. I hardly ever see anyone I’ve seen before.”
“The house doesn’t look so big.”
“When you’re standing outside, you don’t really get the picture.”
Shellane worried the problem, turning it this way and that, not trying to reach a conclusion, familiarizing himself with it, as if he were getting accustomed to the weight and balance of a stone he was about to throw. He heard a rustling, saw that Grace had picked up the sheets of paper on which Broillard had scrawled his lyrics and was reading them.
“God, this is delusional!”
“He’s better when he writes about feelings he doesn’t have,” said Shellane. “Grandiose, beautiful feelings. He’s got no talent for honesty.”
“Not many do,” said Grace.
WHEN SHE LEFT that afternoon, he did not follow her, though he intended to follow her soon. That was the one path available to him if he was to help her, and helping her was all he wanted now. He sat at his computer and accessed treatises on the afterlife written from a variety of religious perspectives. He made notes and organized them into thematic sections. Then he wrote lists, the way he did before every score he’d ever planned. Not coherent lists, merely a random assortment of things he knew about the situation. Avenues worth exploring. Under the word “Grace,” he wrote:
becomes a real woman in my company
can taste things, drink, but doesn’t eat
lapses into ghostly state around others (once with me alone)
endures a state of half-life at the house
feels there is something she’s supposed to do
“knows” I can help her