by Shaun Hamill
“Where now?” one of the teenagers said.
The door at the far end of the hall swung open. Lurch turned and went down the stairs, leaving them alone.
They walked forward. No ghouls or demons sprang out. The house sounded quieter than before. Empty.
The room at the end of the hall was doused in sickly-pink light, and had been dressed like an old woman’s bedroom. An old vanity stood on the left side of the room, and a twin-size bed sat in the opposite corner. The bed rested on a metal frame, head- and footboards so tall that it resembled a cradle for adults. A lump lay beneath the blankets, unmoving.
Old black-and-white photographs hung on the walls: small children smiling and laughing on a summer day at the beach; a portrait of a soldier in formal wear, hat cocked at what must have been considered a jaunty angle; a newly married couple running from a church, heads ducked and hands raised against an onslaught of rice; an accident photo, one car T-boned into the other, the passenger side of the first car crumpled and caved in, the rear bumper of the second dominated by a Just Married banner and a train of empty cans. A second accident photo hung next to the first, this one depicting a body beneath a sheet that was soaked through with blood on one side. A single hand hung free and visible, white lace stopping at the wrist, diamond wedding ring glinting in the sunlight. Margaret stared at this one a long time. Was it real? Was it staged?
“I don’t get it,” one of the girls said. “It’s creepy, sure, but what’s the gag?”
“And what does this have to do with The Addams Family?” Margaret said.
“I don’t know,” Harry said.
One of the girls pointed at the lump on the bed. “What’s that?”
“Go see,” said the other.
“No way.”
They argued for another moment before the taller, broader of the two boys volunteered to investigate. The smaller boy followed, a step or two behind, his torso bent away from the bottom half of his body as though restrained by its own good sense.
The tall boy stood over the lump on the bed, his back to the room. He shook the stiffness from his hands and reached for the covers. Margaret licked dry lips, thought of the shape watching her through Pierce’s car window. She reached for Harry and his hand caught hers.
The tall boy took hold of the covers and yanked them off. His friend shouted, the girls shrieked, and Margaret took a step toward the door. The tall boy stood unmoving, blanket in hand, gazing down. Margaret still couldn’t see what he was looking at.
“What is it?” Harry said. He let go of Margaret and stepped forward for a better look. The tall boy dropped the blanket and picked the lump up off the bed. He turned around and held it so everyone could see that it was a pillow with a childish drawing of Dracula on it. The girls laughed, and Harry returned to Margaret’s side.
“This place is officially the pits,” he said. “Want to leave?”
“Yes, please,” she said.
They exited the room, leaving the teenagers alone. When they returned to the potted plant on the second-floor landing, though, they found the way down blocked by a sliding metal gate.
“I didn’t notice that on the way up,” Harry said. He tugged on it. It rattled a little, but didn’t budge.
“Now what?” Margaret said.
“Let me see,” Harry said. He began fiddling with the gate. Margaret looked back toward the pink room and realized the house had grown quiet again. What were the kids doing in there?
She strained to hear, listened for the telltale noises of necking. She concentrated so hard on her eavesdropping that she didn’t notice the potted plant moving until it had her in its grasp.
She screamed. In her terror, she twisted back and forth, trying to tear free, and the plant, perhaps surprised by her alarm, let her go all at once. She pitched forward into Harry, and he crashed into the gate. They both bounced off and hit the hardwood floor.
Margaret shoved herself up off Harry, tried to stand, tangled her legs in his, and went down again. Her head smacked against the floor, and pain flashed white behind her eyelids. She blinked a few times, trying to focus, aware in some distant way of her body moving through space, hands on her arms pulling her to her feet.
“C’mon,” Harry said. His hand closed over hers and he dragged her to a newly opened door at the end of the hall, away from the pink room, the plant, the stairs, and the gate. This room was bare, lit by a single bulb, and had a black hole where the window ought to have been.
Harry let her go, walked to the black hole, and looked inside. He looked back at her, mouth open, eyes suddenly far away and blank. Before Margaret could ask what was wrong, a figure stepped into the doorway behind them and stopped any further intelligent thought. Tall and hunched, wrapped in a crimson cloak, the figure had a long, furry face and a snoutful of giant fangs. Instead of hands it had paws with long, curved claws. Its eyes glowed a bright orange. The creature pointed at Margaret with one talon and bellowed an inhuman, animal noise.
Margaret shrieked. Harry grabbed and lifted her, and when she looked into his eyes, he appeared present again. He smiled and said, “Trust me,” as he tossed her into the black hole.
She hit black plastic and sped down through the dark, her body squeaking against the texture of the slide. She heard something behind her, rushing up fast, big and noisy and impossible to see. As she turned her head to try to catch a glimpse, to see if it was Harry or the beast in red, the slide ended and she hurtled out into the crisp, clear night air. She hung there, weightless for a moment, before she landed with a whump on something big and soft.
She lay on a giant pillowy mat in what appeared to be the backyard of the house. There was a teenager out here, too, shouting at her. Her heart pounding, her head still clearing, it took her a moment to understand what he was saying: Move out of the way. So she was still horizontal on the mat when the slide ejected Harry, and he landed right on top of her.
In that moment in 1968, as they lay missionary style outside Spooky House, my mother looked into Harry’s face and felt a comfortable life with Pierce disintegrating. In its place, she saw a different, harder span of years stretch out before her: a small, anxious wedding, too many children, life in a blue-collar neighborhood, aggressive penny-pinching, hand-me-down clothes, thrift-store shopping. She felt powerless and unwilling to stop it from becoming a reality.
She didn’t tell my father any of this. Instead, she put her hands on his face and said, “My mother’s going to hate you.”
The Turner Sequence I: Margaret
When Margaret enters the fluid waking dream of the City, that mix of memory and nightmare, she thinks she’s in the tiny apartment she shared with Harry in the poorer part of Lubbock—that shabby one-bedroom affair with ratty carpet and wood-paneled walls, although you can hardly see the walls behind the stacks of boxes that line the room—boxes full of Harry’s paperbacks and comic books and pulp magazines.
Harry’s things are everywhere. The kitchenette table is buried beneath his typewriter and stacks of school papers and doodles of metropolitan skylines she never recognizes. He always promises to clean up the mess, but never seems to get around to it. It’s a stressful way to live, tiptoeing around someone else’s belongings, never truly comfortable in your own home.
Thump.
The sound seems to come from the bedroom, and Margaret leaves the overfull living room to investigate. When she opens the bedroom door and passes through, she finds herself in bed. Harry is asleep beside her, his mouth slightly open. He wears her sleep mask so she can leave the light on to read. The mask is lavender and fringed with frilly lace, but Harry never complains about using it, and Margaret loves him for that.
Thump.
This time it seems to come from somewhere inside the room, but she can’t tell where. Thump. Thump-thump. As though the room itself is inside th
e sound. She sets the book down on her belly and notices for the first time that she’s pregnant. Thump. Thump-thump. Her belly big and round like an overinflated balloon, ready to pop. Is the sound coming from inside the room, or inside her? She places her hands on her stomach. Thump-thump. Her belly reverberates in time with the sound.
She shakes Harry’s shoulder, but he rolls onto his side, away from her.
Thump. Thump-thump.
Her insides cramp with sudden, vicious force, and she gasps, drawing into a ball around her stomach. Something is wrong. She closes her eyes and sucks air through dry lips and gritted teeth. The pain slowly retreats to a dull ache in her middle. Maybe it’s just digestive trouble. Maybe she ate something that disagreed with the baby.
She sits up and steps out of the bedroom. She means to head for the bathroom, but she must take a wrong turn, because she’s not in the apartment anymore. She’s standing in a long, dark, narrow hallway, lined with framed photographs. A single closed door stands at the far end. Thump. Thump-thump. The sound, so low it’s more felt than heard, resonates through the old hardwood floors. She puts a hand to her stomach. The baby bulge is gone. Her stomach’s not flat again, not exactly, but the mound and attendant cramps have evaporated.
She turns to look back at the door she came through, but finds herself facing a blank stretch of wall instead. Thump-thump. The hallway pulses, vibrates, and the door at the end unlatches to swing inward. A weak snuffling sound drifts out like a breeze. She doesn’t want to go in the room, but she can’t stop herself moving forward.
The room is dark. She reaches for the switch, and bathes the room in a dim pink light the color of nausea. The room is an empty nursery. There are no toys, no changing table, no mobiles, no cheerful wallpaper—only a bunch of framed black-and-white photos on the walls, a single rocking chair, and a crib. She walks over to the crib, but the mewling sounds have ceased. The crib is empty, the blankets thrown back. How long has she been here?
She clenches the railing. Oh god. Oh god.
She looks around the room, sees nothing out of the ordinary. She lowers herself to her knees, groaning, and looks under the bed. No baby, but there is a framed picture, gathering dust. She picks it up.
It’s a photo of Margaret and Harry at the courthouse on their wedding day. Harry wears one of his father’s old suits, which doesn’t quite fit—it’s loose and baggy on his wiry frame, and he looks like a small boy playing dress-up. Margaret wears a simple green dress that Mrs. Johnson paid for (green, not white, because Mrs. Johnson wanted her to be able to wear it more than once). Margaret’s parents aren’t pictured because they refused to attend, but Harry’s mother, Deborah, is there, wan and frowning at something off-camera. It’s the most cheerful Deborah ever looks, like someone trying to feign happiness around a throbbing toothache.
The baby makes a noise, drawing Margaret’s attention from the picture. The sound has moved into the hall. She braces herself against the crib and climbs to her feet. Her belly has grown round and hard again. The baby cries down the hall, and something moves in Margaret’s womb, stirred by the sound. She leaves the nursery, photograph in hand, and finds herself back in the bedroom.
She finds Harry awake, sitting up in bed. Two small figures crawl over his body, snuffling and smacking. They’re roughly human in shape, but they have no skin. They remind her of diagrams from her old high school anatomy textbook, the musculature of the human body glistening, sinewy meat flexing and stretching with each movement. The little creatures’ heads, though: long, skull-like faces, protruding snouts, and eyes the bright orange of traffic cones. These things crawl up and down Harry’s body, taking bites from his flesh.
Harry, she moans.
What do you have there? He points at the framed picture. Margaret gives it to him, and they both examine it, the sound of the chewing babies pulsing like a migraine through her head.
He points to his mother. She’s a good person. It’s not her fault she’s this way.
Of course not, Margaret says. She wants to touch him, comfort him, but she’s afraid of being bitten by the little monsters.
I’m not like her. I’m not sick that way.
I know, she says.
Get into bed, he says.
I don’t think I want to, she says.
He gives her a puzzled look. It doesn’t matter what you want.
One of the babies climbs up his chest and takes a bite out of his cheek. He doesn’t seem to notice. The baby inside Margaret stirs, kicks against the prison of her womb. Thump. Thump-thump.
Harry, she says. Harry, we have to escape.
Escape? he says.
Her stomach cramps again. No, not a cramp. It feels like rusty nails being dragged across her insides. She reaches for the side of the bed but loses her balance, lands on her back on the floor. She rolls onto her side and holds her belly.
These aren’t our babies, she says, through gritted teeth.
Harry leans over so he can see her on the floor. He might be trying to give her another puzzled smile, but there’s not enough skin left on his face to tell. Jagged flaps of flesh dangle like curtains in a breeze. He seems impossibly far away.
Margaret. Of course these are our babies.
Their faces appear over the side of the bed, peering down at her with orange eyes. They coo and gurgle. They rock back and forth, gathering the momentum necessary to heave themselves forward, down to the floor. They’re coming to help, to pull the third baby out of her womb and into the world with their sharp little teeth.
PART TWO
The Tomb
1
By the summer of 1982, Margaret and Harry Turner had been married for thirteen years. In their mid-thirties, both were softer of face and body, not fat yet but beginning to widen and buy new clothes in bigger, more forgiving sizes. They lived in a brick house in a good neighborhood in Vandergriff, Texas, with their two daughters: Eunice, newly six, and Sydney, age ten (I wouldn’t arrive on the scene for almost a year). Harry worked for the Fort Worth highway department, and Margaret had been a homemaker since dropping out of Tilden and marrying Harry in the spring of 1969. Things weren’t exciting, but everyone seemed more or less content—until the morning Margaret woke up from an uneasy pink dream and found Harry’s side of the bed empty.
It was a thumping sound that woke her. Foggy-headed and confused, Margaret sat up on one elbow and looked around the dark bedroom. According to her bedside alarm clock, it was 4:00 a.m. The bedroom door, usually left shut at night, stood open. She got up, put on her slippers, walked down the hall past the girls’ bedrooms, both still quiet, and into the living room, where she found the sliding glass door to the backyard wide open.
Harry stood in the unmown grass, barefoot and naked and unmoving, his back to Margaret.
“Harry?” she called.
He gave no indication of having heard. She crossed the yard to stand next to him. His eyelids drooped, half-closed, and he stared with empty eyes at the wooden fence marking the border of the yard.
“Harry,” she said again.
He grunted. Was he still asleep? He’d never sleepwalked before, although the expression on his face looked somehow familiar. She put a hand on his arm.
“It’s seen me,” he said. “It has my scent.” The words came clear but uninflected and gave Margaret the creeps.
“Why don’t we go inside?” she said.
“A labyrinth,” he said.
She pulled on his arm, and he didn’t resist as she guided him back to their bedroom. “It’s too early to be up on a Saturday,” she said, and pushed him gently down onto the bed. “We should sleep in, right?”
“I have a headache,” he said in that same flat, dead way.
“Sleep some more and see if that doesn’t help.”
He closed his eyes and lay still. Margaret
got into bed next to him, but although he was softly snoring a few minutes later, she was fully awake. She got up, made a pot of coffee, and started getting ready for the day.
Not long after, my sisters woke to the sounds and smells of Margaret in the kitchen: Sydney, who had my father’s dark, almost black hair, small mouth, pale complexion, and heavy-lidded brown eyes; Eunice, with my mother’s red hair, green eyes, and ruddy (almost blotchy) skin. Sydney, brash and stubborn, frequently angry. Eunice, docile and easy to manage. Sisters you wouldn’t mark as sisters if you didn’t know, both awake now, wolfing down breakfast and helping Margaret run through a checklist for Eunice’s sixth birthday party.
Harry woke for the second time around eight. He showered, dressed, poured himself a cup of coffee, finished it in a few quick gulps, then announced that he was off to pick up the birthday cake. He didn’t kiss Margaret goodbye when he left. She and the girls stood in the kitchen and listened to the car start and back out of the driveway.
“Is Daddy okay?” Eunice said.
“He’s sad it’s your stupid birthday,” Sydney said.
“Apologize,” Margaret said.
“I’m sorry Daddy doesn’t like you, Eunice.”
“Sydney,” Margaret said, warning in her voice.
“I’m only joking,” Sydney said. It was the closest to an apology she would offer, but it seemed to satisfy Eunice, so Margaret let it go.
2
Margaret would never have described Eunice as popular, but the party had a good turnout anyway. Mr. and Mrs. Henson from down the street brought their daughter, Krissy, and Mr. and Mrs. Sangalli came with their small, asthmatic son, Hubert. A couple of Harry’s work friends, Rick and Tim, brought their kids, and Sydney had invited a few friends as well. The older girls hid out in Sydney’s bedroom to avoid what Sydney kindly referred to as a “baby party,” but they all brought gifts and made sure to say hello and happy birthday to Eunice before vanishing.