by Ellen Datlow
He tapped the pen against the table, then added:
is she telling me everything?
if not, why?
Duplicity? Fear? Something else?
It was not that he sensed duplicity in her, but her situation was of a kind that bred duplicity. Like a convict, wouldn’t she be looking to play angles in order to improve her lot? Wouldn’t that breed other forms of duplicity? It was not inconceivable that she might love him and at the same time be playing him.
Under the word “House,” he wrote:
In my Father’s house, many mansions …
philosophical speculations—particularized form
of afterlife? For people who’ve given up. Who,
failing to overcome problems, surrender to death.
(Look up Limbo in Catholic dictionary)
The uglies (men?). Demons. Instruments of
God’s justice. Forget Christianity. What if the
afterlife is an anarchy? Lots of feudal groups
controlled by a variety of beings who can cross
back and forth between planes of existence.
Science fiction, he thought; but so was Jesus.
A maze. Hallucination?
Mutable reality?
The doors. Core of the problem? Can they be manipulated?
He made several more notations under “House,” then began a new list under the heading, “Me.”
Have passed over into the afterlife once
Why?
He circled the word “Why”—it was an omnibus question. Why had he turned off the highway toward the lake? A whim? Had he been led? Was some ineffable force at work? Why had he, after years of caution, been moved to such drastic incaution? He wrote the word “Love” and then crossed it out. Love was the bait that had lured him, but he believed the hook was something else again.
The lists were skimpy. His preliminary lists for taking down a shopping-mall bank had been far more substantial. This would be, he thought, very much like the job in upstate New York, the house with the maze. He’d have to case the place while attempting to survive it … if survival was possible. And maybe that was the answer to all the “Whys?” He could feel his body preparing for danger, cooking up a fresh batch of adrenaline, putting an edge on his senses. It was the kick he’d always been a chump for, the thrill that writing songs could not provide, the seasoning he needed to become involved in the moment. And that, he realized, might be the answer to all the whys. He had caught the scent of danger, followed the scent to the lake, and there had taken it in his arms. Like Grace, for the first time in a very long while, he felt alive.
AFTER WAKING, GRACE liked to have a shower. It was not a cleanliness thing—or so Shellane believed—as much as a retreat. He assumed that she must have taken a lot of showers when she was in the world, hiding from Broillard behind the spray, deriving comfort from her warm solitude. Shellane usually let her shower alone, but the next afternoon he joined her and they made love with soapy abandon, her heels hooked behind his thighs, back pressed up against the thin metal wall, whose surface dimpled and popped when he thrust her against it. As they clung together afterward, he watched rivulets of water running over her shoulderblades toward the pale voluptuous curves of her ass, gleaming with a film of soap, dappled with bubbles. He saw nothing unusual to begin with—he wasn’t looking for anything. But then he realized that the streams of water were not flowing true; they were curving away from the small of her back, as if repelled by a force emanating from that spot. Curving away, then scattering into separate drops, and the drops skittering off around the swells of her hips. Fear brushed his mind with a feathery touch, a lover’s touch. Instead of recoiling, however, he moved his hand to cover the place that the water avoided, pressing his fingertips against the skin, and imagined that he felt a deep, slow pulse. This was the thing he most wanted, he thought. The seat of what he loved.
“I’m drowning,” Grace said, and pushed him away. “There was a waterfall coming off your shoulder. I couldn’t breathe.”
Her smile lost wattage and he knew she must have understood the irony of her complaint. He cleared wet strands of hair from her face and kissed her forehead.
“This must be so awful for you,” she said. “To feel comfortable with someone. Almost like normal. And to know it’s anything but.” Soapy water trickled into her left eye and she rubbed it. “It does feel like that sometimes, doesn’t it?”
“Normal? Yeah, more or less.”
She seemed disappointed by his response.
He put his hands on her waist. “All the craziness that goes on between men and women, ‘normal’ isn’t the word I’d use to describe any relationship.”
She slid past him out of the shower and began to dry herself. He had the feeling she was upset.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m cold,” she said in a clipped tone, and briskly toweled her hair. Then, her voice muffled: “Are you always so analytical?”
“I try to be. Does it bother you?”
She left off drying and held the towel bunched in front of her breasts. “God knows, it shouldn’t. I do understand how hard this—” She broke off and started drying her hair again, less vigorously.
Shellane turned off the water, stepped from the shower. The linoleum was sticky beneath his feet; his skin pebbled in the cool air. The back of his neck tingled and he had the feeling they were not alone, that an invisible presence was crammed into the bathroom with them.
“It’s almost over, you know,” Grace said. “One of these times soon, I won’t come back. Or else you’ll leave.”
“We’ve got a while yet.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about what’s happening.”
A noise came from the front of the house—a door closing. He threw open the bathroom door and peered out. Nobody in sight.
“Who is it?” asked Grace from behind him.
“Maybe the wind.”
He wrapped a towel about his waist and went out into the living room. On the table next to his laptop was an envelope and a portable cassette recorder. The envelope was addressed to Grace. She came up beside him, wearing his bathrobe, and he offered the letter to her. She shook her head. He tore open the envelope and read from the enclosed sheet of paper.
“Once again Avery offers his apologies,” he said. “He regrets everything.” He read further. “He claims he wouldn’t have treated you so badly if you weren’t unfaithful.”
“He never changes!” Grace folded her arms and scowled at the letter as if it were a live thing and could register disapproval. “He was unfaithful to me every day. With footwear! And then when I …” She made a spiteful sound. “We hardly ever made love after we got married. I was so desperate …”
“You don’t have to explain,” he said.
“It’s habit. I used to have to explain it to Avery all the time. He liked hearing me explain it.”
Shellane set the letter on the table and pressed the “Play” button on the recorder. Avery’s voice, tinny and diminished, issued forth over a strummed guitar:
“Beauty, where do you sleep tonight?
In whose avid arms do you conspire … ?”
“Our boy’s waxing Keatsian,” said Shellane.
“Turn it off.”
“ … beauty is everywhere they say,
but I just can’t find a beauty like thine …”
“Please!” said Grace.
Shellane switched off the recorder. “Sure sounds like he loves you.”
“I believe he did once. But you can’t tell with Avery. He’s adept at mimicry.”
They stood without speaking for a time, then Grace pressed herself against him. “I shouldn’t have pulled you into this,” she said.
He wanted to reassure her, to tell her that he would not have forgone the experience of being with her. But though he believed this to be true, he no longer was certain of it. That he could accept her to the point he could dismiss, even dote u
pon, the symptoms of her strangeness—this fact had, almost without his notice, shredded the fabric of his emotions, and it had grown difficult for him to separate hope from desire.
After she had gone into the bedroom to become whatever she became without him, he dressed and sat at the table, studying his lists. They revealed no pattern, no truth other than the nonsensical and menacing truth that he was in love with a dead woman. In love, also, with her deathly condition, with her odd glow and the curious behavior of water on her skin. It was a splendid absurdity worthy of an Irish ballad. The trouble with such tunes, though, they tended to neglect the ordinary heart of things, things such as the commonplace mutuality that had developed between them, which was a matter truly worth commemorating in song. Nobody sat around scratching their ass or discussing the character of an ex-husband in an Irish ballad. They were all grand sadness and exquisite pain. Of course, sadness and pain were likely headed his way, and he had little doubt they would be grand and exquisite. As if anticipation were itself an affliction, his thoughts spun out of control, images and fragments of emotions whirling up and away, prelude to a despair so profound it left him hunched over the table, eyes fixed on the lists, like a troll turned to stone by an enchantment he had been tricked into reading.
THE LAST OF the gray light blended with the mist forming above the lake. Shellane stirred himself, went to the stove and heated a can of soup. He leaned against the counter, watching steam rise from the saucepan, remembering an interview he’d seen with a man who had directed a horror movie—the man said his film was optimistic because though its view of the afterlife was gruesome, the fact that it lent any credence whatsoever to the concept was hopeful. Shellane supposed this would be a healthy attitude for him to adopt. But the prospect was so completely daft. It had been a long while since his Catholic school days, and the ideas associated with the religion—virgin birth, the Assumption, the hierarchies of angels, and so forth—had lost their hold on him. Now he was being forced to confront an idea even less logical, one concerning which his knowledge was so fragmentary, any conjecture he made about it had the feeling of wild speculation.
Once his soup was done, he went on the Internet, accessed a Roman Catholic dictionary, and looked up “Limbo.” According to doctrine, Limbo referred to a place in which unbaptized children, souls born before the advent of Christ, and prudent virgins awaited the Second Coming, at which point they would be assumed into Heaven. Grace did not appear to fit any of these categories; thus it followed that the church was a bit off-base in its comprehension of the afterlife. No surprise there. Yet the idea of a halfway house, an interim place where souls were parked for the duration, for some term pertinent to their lives—this accorded with what Grace had told him. The black house, however, seemed to incorporate an element of punishment, to be less a limbo than a state of purgatory. A kind of boutique hell targeting a select clientele?
“Fuck,” he said, switching off the laptop, and stared at his uneaten soup.
Grace, fully dressed, came out of the bedroom. “I have to go,” she said absently as she crossed the room. He watched her leave, sat a moment longer, then once again said, “Fuck,” heaved up to his feet and grabbed his jacket off the peg beside the porch door and followed.
HE MOVED CAUTIOUSLY through the fog, listening, peering ahead, and thus he noticed the point at which he crossed over from the lakeshore into whatever plane it was that Grace had made her home. The wind suddenly died, the sounds of the spruce boughs swaying were sheared away, and his anxiety spiked. Despite the cold, a drop of sweat trickled down his back; he felt a pulse in his neck. Each step he took seemed the step of a condemned criminal walking toward the death chamber. Legs weak, mind bright with fear. When he came in sight of the black house, its gabled second story lifting from the murk, he did not think he could go on. Even without the motive force of the wind, the fog boiled around him, as if alive, and the notion that it might be a form of ectoplasmic life, tendrils and feelers plucking at his clothes, trailing across his skin, wanting to touch him … that got him moving again.
He paused at the door. The knob was of black iron and had the shape of an open hand. He would have to give it a shake in order to enter, and the dire symbolism inherent in this made him less eager to proceed. He had a memory of himself as an altar boy, kneeling, striking the bell as the priest intoned the litany, gazing up at the great gold cross mounted against crimson drapes, participating in the medieval magic of the mass. Whatever he had believed then, he wished he could believe it now. He wished he could take the power that had inspired his awe, all that glorious myth and promise, into his shaking heart. But if the house proved anything, it was that God was far more perverse than the church had dreamed. The unreal fingers of the fog traipsed across the back of his neck, and the fingers of the iron hand seemed to press into his wrist, trying to feel the hits of his heart. Before further doubts could enter in, he turned it.
White lights stabbed into his eyes. It was just as Grace had told him—like the actinic flashes caused by a blow to the head. Then he was drawn deep inside the room, rushed forward as if on a moving walkway. For an instant he thought he might have been transported to the ground floor of a parking garage. A dark, musty space with a strip of brilliant light to his left. Everything blurred and rippling. Either his vision steadied or the house settled on a form, and he saw that he was facing a row of large, round holes—perhaps forty or fifty in sum—piercing a wall of black boards. Yellow radiance spilling from them. He strained his ears, listening for signs of life. Hearing none, he walked toward the wall, then along it. The holes were of equal dimension, six feet wide and high, each opening onto a small cell, unfurnished except for a bowl set in the floor. The bowls were the radiant source, light spraying up from them. The first cell he came to was empty and littered with wastes. Shreds of a slick transparent membrane adhered to the edges of the hole; as far as he could tell, the membrane had not been affixed to the wall, but had been extruded from it, as though it were a natural production of the wood. The second hole was also empty. Shellane reached in to learn if the bowl could be lifted out and used to light his way. The radiance burned him, provoking a prickly, crawly sensation like that of an inflamed rash. In the third cell sat a figure that appeared to be made of dull, tarnished gold with the bulbous shape and pudgy face of an infant. But it was the size of a man. Swaddled head to foot in a golden robe that seemed of a piece with its flesh and left only the face exposed beneath a tightly fitted cowl. Its features had an Asiatic cast, and Shellane recalled photographs of Chinese babies clothed in similar fashion. He was so certain it was a statue, when the creature turned its head toward him, mouth open in what must have been—though Shellane could hear nothing—a full-throated scream, he fell back a step. He punched at the membrane, which was stretched tight across the entrance to the cell; although the shreds hanging from the entrances of the first two cells were flimsy, the surface of the intact membrane was rubbery and hard. The huge baby lowered its head, and a chubby hand, emerging from the sleeve of its robe, pawed in apparent agony at its face and gave another silent scream.
Horrified, Shellane continued on. Five other cells were occupied, three by ordinary men, all of them naked. The other two prisoners were extremely tall men, also naked, with grayish skin and deformed faces, similar to the man who had chased Shellane along the margin of the lake, though their deformities were not as severe as his had been. Sunken eyes; their mouths gashes with thin, ragged lips; flat noses, elongated skulls. The ruffs of flesh at the back of their necks caused Shellane to realize that his pursuer had not been wearing a mask. The chests of these two men displayed a peculiar articulation, as if they had too many bones. Their genital areas were hairless; their eyes so deeply recessed, shadowed by prominent ridges, they threw back not a glimmer of light. On seeing him, they reacted in fright, scrambling back against the rear of their cells and gaping.
One of the normal-looking men—scrawny, with a careworn face and stringy gray hair—seemed init
ially disinterested in him, but after Shellane had been standing in front of his cell for a minute or so, he pushed himself up against the membrane, pleading with his eyes and mouthing words that Shellane could not understand. He offered a helpless gesture and hurried along.
Beyond the cells lay a door taller and wider than the first; the doorknob was a clenched fist of black iron. Shellane was still afraid, but he was operating efficiently now. Fear had become a resource, a means of refining judgments. He searched the area beside it for projections, a declivity that might conceal a control, a switch. At about eye level, he found a patch of wormy ridges in the surface of the boards, like a cross between circuitry and varicose veins. He tried pushing at them and felt some give, but achieved no result. At length, he opened the door and was swept forward into a space full of shattering light. Like hundreds of flashbulbs being set off. For a second or two, he seemed to be in a place that he could make no sense of—all bright movement and crystalline geometry. Then he was standing on a balcony guarded by a swaybacked railing, gazing out onto a confusing perspective of other balconies and windows and doors and stairways, above and below and beyond, every structure fashioned of black wood. The scene was confusing partly because of the lack of variance in color, partly because the architecture had such a uniform character, an Escheresque repetitiveness of form. It reminded him of old wooden tenements in New Orleans with their courtyards and step-through windows and rickety stairs. These structures, with their sagging balconies and cockeyed doors and unevenly set windows, had that same arthritic crookedness, the same aura of age and disrepair. But unlike New Orleans, there were no planter boxes, no music, no bright curtains, no brightness of any kind apart from the white glare in which everything was bathed. The space was roofed with boards and massive beams, but it was unclear if what he saw was one enormous interconnected building or many separate ones. Several dozen people were in sight and whether on balconies, in the various rooms, or passing along the street of boards below, they went slowly, hesitantly, their movements suggesting infirmity or overmedication. He wasn’t close enough to see their faces, but they all looked to be of ordinary human dimension.