The Siren House

by Andrew Post

  All I could hear through the radio now was Thadius’s labored breathing. He gave no answer, made no move.

  “As I thought,” she said.

  Next, I heard the Smocks’ footfalls and watched as, one by one, they harvested each other until all of them were gone. A few moments of Thadius’s steps thudding on carpet rang through the radio. Soon, Thadius crashed through the control room doors. He looked at me still splayed out on the floor. I’ll be honest. I felt like I’d pass out or my head would explode. It was all just too, too much.

  “They leave?”

  “Yeah.”

  He bent, picked me up, shouting for the control room guys to find a way out. They didn’t need to be told twice. They bolted.

  “My bag,” I said.

  Thadius dropped to one knee, and I picked up my bag and crutches. He took them from me, looped his arm through both, hoisted me tighter, and rushed into the upstairs hall.

  The audience members had broken through one set of doors and were now looking for an alternate way out. Thadius awkwardly pressed through the oncoming rush of terrified theatergoers and cast and crew.

  People shouted and raced, frantically asking if anyone knew a way out. The Smocks had been thorough. Every exit had the molten-metal treatment. People still tried, but they weren’t making much progress.

  The Scary Thing, now alone in the auditorium, apparently figured out it was trapped. It began ramming the walls, sending tremors throughout the Siren House that rivaled my memories of the A’s worst earthquakes.

  As Thadius carried me down the stairs to the lobby, taking them two at a time, I saw the shelves behind the bar give, the bottles shattering onto the floor. The smells of booze and smoke commingled.

  Another slam. Framed pictures fell. A woman ran, shrieking, toward the barred exit. Above, a chandelier chain gave, and the whole thing smashed to the floor, crushing her.

  We reached the front doors. At least a dozen people pushed against them, smacking the glass with their hands. The glass broke out of its frame, but the bars securing them from the outside held firm.

  “It’s no good,” Thadius shouted. “Find another way.” He turned us around. Again, everyone scattered, screaming.

  In the center of the lobby, it got quiet—a sort of quiet that precedes only bad things. I remembered stories about the peaceful moments before a hurricane hits land.

  The double doors to the theater buckled, a wall of toothpicks leaping at us. Thadius spun so his back would receive the brunt of it. Over his shoulder, I faced what was there.

  The Scary Thing’s face had smashed through the wall like a mounted buck head, but it was very much alive. It thrashed side to side, widening the gap with its powerful shoulders. A leg crashed in, working down and up.

  We didn’t stick around to see if it made it through.

  Thadius bolted up one set of stairs that hugged the lobby, right beside the Scary Thing. It caught us with its brown eyes, no bigger than baseballs, and its mouth followed the meal it’d spied. The jaws elongated and gnashed a six-foot hole out of the staircase.

  The whole thing buckled, the spindles of the railing popping free. Thadius charged harder up the stairs, despite their rocking, and leaped up the last four. The stairs gave way, along with a large chunk of the wall. The Scary Thing retracted and charged again. As Thadius and I made our way up the hall, I could hear the people in the lobby who’d been mere inches from freedom devoured. Unfortunately, I saw some of it happen. I still wish I hadn’t.

  Thadius faltered, and he stopped. Ahead, the upstairs hallway had collapsed, and a support beam blocked our path. Through the hole in the wall, we could see down into the auditorium.

  “What are we going to do?” I said.

  “We can’t leave them. We have to get it out of here somehow. Chase it out of town.”

  “How?”

  “I’m thinkin’.”

  People in the lobby were screaming; then they weren’t.

  “Do something,” I said.

  It was then that the Scary Thing apparently thought to go back and clean up anything it’d left behind. It ducked through the hole it’d made, back into the auditorium.

  Thadius quickly stepped out of view. He set me down. Hugging the wall, he ambled up to the edge of the gap, looking out over the auditorium. Somewhere, I could hear something burning, crackling. There were still the occasional screams, and I could see smoke gathering around the ceiling.

  “Is she me?” I whispered. When he didn’t answer, I repeated.

  He didn’t look away from the Scary Thing. I could hear it kicking its way through the rows of seats, wetly sampling this and that, and snuffling his way around.

  I expanded the question. “Is she me from the other versh?”

  The Scary Thing passed by the gap in the wall so close I could smell it: dung, blood. Thadius ducked in, hiding beside me. Each of its steps shook the walls—dum, dum, dum—unsettling frames and the contents of my insides.

  “That wouldn’t add up,” he said. “She’s obviously older than you by a couple of years. Rough ones at that. I mean, at first glance she looked like you, but . . . I mean, seeing you now, I can tell it’s not you.”

  “But she looks a lot like me. Like, a lot.”

  “Doesn’t matter. The waylaid time flow saw to that. You’ve aged faster than you should’ve here,” he said. “Time moves faster here and slower there, in that versh.”

  Once the Scary Thing had passed, Thadius peeked out and continued, at a low whisper, “She’s probably somewhere around forty or fifty, in non-WTF time. But here, as things are, she looks like she’s about thirty.”

  “Wait. Forty or fifty?” I choked. “Maybe like forty-two?” When the math aligned and all of it—the truth—hit me, it felt like someone ripped my chest open, dumped in a gallon of gas, and lit the whole thing up.

  Thadius pulled back from the gash in the wall, then glanced out again. “Maybe. Why? What’s it matter? She’s not you. Not really you. Only you’re you. And besides that, she can’t be that versh’s you. She’s too old.” He looked at me. I’m sure I was pale. “She’s probably just . . . oh. Oh no.”

  I gave him the now-you-get-it smirk and slow nod.

  He visibly deflated, his tone softening. “Holy Christ, kiddo.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s . . .”

  “Yep,” I said. “That’d be my mom.”

  Track 24

  FIRE ESCAPE

  The screams throughout the place had died out, and I hoped some people had escaped. Thadius and I remained where we were, waiting. We sat among the broken bricks and powdered drywall. Fires continued around the Siren House, spreading. It was getting hotter by the minute, and the air was turning gray.

  “We need to get out of here,” Thadius said and coughed.

  I agreed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that Smock, my alternamom. I thought about Mom, my mom, and how she’d never seemed like the type who’d join some dimension-hopping cult bent on planet stealing and impose their law. She’d rarely even grounded my sister and me. The idea of Mom burning people at the stake was so ludicrous it was laughable. Entirely out of character.

  Like Beth, giving herself up in my place. I cleared my throat. “Why’d she do that? Beth, I mean.”

  “I have no idea.” He checked the gap again, then sat back. “Looks like that thing’s getting tired.”

  I didn’t care. My head was too full. I could’ve been sitting in the cement mixer belly of the Scary Thing, and I probably would’ve been thinking about Beth, Alternamom, and the looming question of another Dad over there, another me, another Darya and her husband, Alan. But the hammering question remained: “Who turned me in?”

  “I don’t know that either.” Thadius sighed.

  I got onto my hands and dragged myself toward the slice in the wall.

  The Scary Thing was lying down, its face pressed into a shredded something. Something green. The hoodie.

  “Why did she bring
that here?”

  “Said she wanted to use it for the scent. Scary Things have notoriously bad eyesight and hearing. Speaking of which, here.” Thadius took a handful of dry wall dust from the floor and drained it into my hands. “Rub this on your clothes.”

  I rubbed dust up and down my arms, across my torso and chest, and down both legs—flinching when I passed a palm over my knee. I’d forgotten about it.

  “How’d she get it, anyway?”

  “Probably went to the Twin Cities and harvested it.”

  “I meant the sweatshirt.”

  “Did you leave it here?” Thadius asked.

  “I don’t think I did. I usually wear it only around the rig.”

  Thadius frowned. “Suppose they found out where you’re living, then?”

  It was surprising it’d taken them that long. Pretty hard to overlook a girl with fiercely red hair rowing in and out daily. Maybe it’d been Clifford, I thought. Maybe selling me up the river was part of him trying to buy his way back into good graces.

  “What if they found Squishy?”

  Thadius got to his feet. “We’ll figure it out once we’re out of here.”

  I watched for another moment as the Scary Thing, half asleep, nosed deeper into the ribbons he’d made of the hoodie.

  Thadius offered to carry me again, but I said I was fine to go on my own. I got on my crutches and followed him up the now-leaning hallway. We went around the perimeter of the building, avoiding the auditorium entirely. We reached the other side of the second floor, where Thadius’s office and the dressing rooms were, and found no one. His office door was open, and a set of collapsible stairs had been pulled down from the ceiling. A trapdoor was left open, and the stars peered down at us.

  “Looks like some of them made it,” he said.

  We both sighed, our relief enormous.

  From the hallway, bellows rose and fell.

  Thadius was halfway up the collapsible stairs when he stopped to listen. I stared out the open office door. The yellow-tinged light flickered. The Scary Thing had stirred.

  Thadius went up the rest of the stairs, got onto the roof, lay at the edge, and extended a hand down. I took a seat on the stairs, threw one crutch up to him, the next, then my bag.

  A hard thump rocked the floor, nearly knocking me off balance. A stack of papers on Thadius’s desk, what I knew to be next week’s scripts, sprayed every which way. The Scary Thing roared, and the wall across the hall exploded inward. I covered my face, and when I dared a peek, through the spraying dust and debris, I could see the maw of the Scary Thing crashing through the hall, with me at mouth-level. The pair of jaws peeled back, and the throat lit up in the moonlight from the hatch above. So many teeth. All the way down, lining its esophagus. I spotted the shreds of green fabric snagged in its teeth, balled up into saliva-logged deposits between its gum and cheek.

  I felt like I was being strangled while Thadius hoisted me up through the hatch, but it certainly beat being eaten alive.

  The pebble-covered roof of the Siren House blistered up, as if a geyser were about to form there. The tar paper appeared as rocks tumbled away. Inside, supports and joists snapped and gave, but the Scary Thing was too short to push itself up farther. It relented and let the roof fall back down, leaving a sizeable dip in the roof. The rocks all cascaded into the new crater, raining in through the still-open hatch.

  Thadius seemed more rattled by the close call. He hugged his ribs as if his lungs were trying to escape.

  “Hey,” someone shouted.

  I turned and looked down to the sidewalk across the street. “Over there. There’s stairs down,” a few people shouted.

  It was the eighty-year-old knife thrower, the Orangutan. His wife was there, Gherkin, all five feet of her, as well as Namaste (well, the actress, but she was still in costume), and a few of the crew members, two of the holocap operators, and a few of the kitchen staff. No Jeff. No control room guys. None of the bartenders. I stared at the gaggle of people, what must’ve only been eight or nine of the thirty-nine Thadius employed, and felt a pang of sadness.

  “Well, what are you waitin’ for?” the man named Orangutan shouted. “Get down offa there.”

  I suppose we did look pretty idiotic, remaining up top when there was a fire escape within easy reach right there.

  Thadius didn’t need further instructions. He came over and scooped me up, walked the long way around the shallow middle of the roof, under the enormous antennae tower, and to the fire escape. On one rickety step, we were at eye level with the figurehead on the front of the Siren House’s painted-over marquee. She was even more beautiful now than in the day. She could almost be real, the way the moonlight fogged her details. Like her surface wasn’t wood at all but smooth, caramel skin.

  We reached the bottom, and the theater’s remaining employees rushed to help us get clear of the building. I had my arm around the shoulders of the two knife throwers, Gherkin to my right—which was comfortable, me and her about the same height—and the Orangutan to my left, which wasn’t comfortable since he was a head and a half taller than both his wife and myself.

  Together, we made it to the sidewalk and rested there.

  The woman I knew only as Namaste asked, “Have you seen Adrian?” The actor who played Jeff.

  I was sad to say, “I’m sorry, I haven’t.”

  She asked Thadius the same.

  His answer was simply an apologetic shake of his head.

  Namaste nodded, wrung her hands. “Thank you,” she said to both of us for reasons I still don’t quite understand. She drifted away from the group, took a seat on the curb, covered her face, and curled in on herself as if a black hole had busted open inside her.

  I turned back to the Siren House.

  It started small. One creak, then another. Something snapped. The tower on the roof fell in as if it’d been held there by an invisible hand, stabbing down straight through. The Scary Thing still within screamed. The walls all fell in, the marquee ripping free and smashing onto the sidewalk.

  The figurehead broke free and crashed, face-planting into the street, scattering apart—arm there, fingers here, head rolling lopsided along the gutter.

  It was quiet a second. The building was still half-standing. The crushed Scary Thing inside whimpered.

  We stood watching, everyone silent.

  And with a tearing sound of metal giving and studs breaking, the Siren House sprayed a gush of dust and smoke from its front doors and collapsed the rest of the way.

  When it was all settled and we were sure the Scary Thing wouldn’t emerge from the rubble, Thadius was the first to take a step toward it, merging with the hanging dust, becoming like a ghost. He bent at the figurehead trapped beneath the crumpled marquee. He picked up something and turned around: one arm of the siren, palm still open, inviting. He looked at us, tears catching the moonlight on his soot-stained cheeks.

  * * *

  We’d gathered at his house. It wasn’t a thing we discussed. We just seemed glued together by our grief and moved as one, a dusty mob, up the hill. Namaste was the most distraught. The Orangutan and Gherkin shared the love seat in Thadius’s living room, wiping the dust from their bifocals on their leotards. The kitchen staff milled around on the back porch, chain-smoking. Ricky was out there with them, framed in the open back door, leaning on the railing of the porch. He kept shaking his head, staring into space, the cigarette between his fingers having burned down to the filter. He twitched, and the column of ashes fell apart.

  “They’ll be back to pick through the Siren. And after that, it won’t be long before they piece it together—who survived and who was ‘in on it,’ who was a scratcher and who wasn’t.” Thadius stood before the hearth, firewood in his hands. He’d put the siren’s arm on the mantle, alongside the framed pictures of long-dead famous people. “And I guess I should probably come clean, because you all deserve to hear it.”

  Namaste sat forward in the plaid recliner, the springs of the ancient fu
rniture giving a plaintive squeak. “You’re a scratcher.” She looked at me. “Both of you are, aren’t you?”

  Back still turned, Thadius said, “I . . . I am, yeah.” He held the piece of wood for a moment longer, turning it over as if looking for his next line scribbled into the grain. He looked at me. I nodded my consent to be included in the confession, and he added, “Both of us.”

  “And what happened tonight . . . Adrian is dead because of you two?” Namaste’s voice broke, a heartbreaking squeak. Tears welled in her eyes.

  The kitchen staff must’ve heard the raised voices, because they filtered back inside. Now the remaining employees of the Siren House all stared at Thadius and me. I couldn’t bring myself to look back but just let the heat of their stares pass over me.

  “Yeah,” I said, finally answering Namaste’s question.

  “Couldn’t you have, you know, done that shit on the side? Kept it separate?” one of the kitchen staff guys asked. “So when the Smocks did find you out, we wouldn’t all get screwed too?” He was bloodied and had nothing but contempt in his eyes. “Most of us were counting on that place, Thad. To feed our families, to live.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Look. I—”

  “And you,” Ricky cut in, waving toward me. “They were asking for you and you just up and let Beth take your place? What’s the matter with you?”

  “I tried.”

  “Well, you didn’t try hard enough, chica. Beth’s gone. Zapped up. Now they’ll probably put her back together just long enough to burn her alive. You okay with that?”

  That tore me up. “I tried.”

  Ricky scoffed. “I’m out of here.” He bumped Thadius on his way past.

  “Ricky . . .” Thadius tried.

  “Don’t even, man. Don’t even.” Ricky bore holes into Thadius, then me, scoffed, turned around, and tore open the front door to leave, muttering to himself.

  The kitchen staff followed him out, the last one sure to slam the door.

  “I think we’re going,” Gherkin said, her brittle voice as delicate as dead leaves.