Ghouljaw and Other Stories

by Clint Smith

  Ninety minutes later—ninety minutes of elevator-and-stairwell circuits broken by bouts of small-talk banter with Barb—Corbin was nearing the box-toting finish line. On one of his final trips, Corbin found the old woman in her now nearly clutter-free living room, the coffee table containing two highball glasses, both filled with punch-tinted liquid and garnished with a couple of maraschino cherries. Barb waved at the remaining boxes. “Take a break for a few minutes.” She offered Corbin a drink. “I may not be much in the way of physical labor these days, but I can still lift a drink or two.” Barb made a mock-astonished face. “Please tell me you’re old enough to drink.”

  Corbin licked his lips, not immediately accepting the beverage. “Yeah. Beyond it.” But after a few seconds he gently clutched the glass. “Thanks. What is it?”

  “An old-fashioned. Some bourbon, few dashes of bitters, some club soda, couple of other things—nothing complicated. Cheers.” Barb extended her glass.

  The impulse to incredulously sniff the drink crossed Corbin’s mind, but he simply eyed it for a moment before clinking glasses with his strange new friend and taking a sip. After a few seconds of savoring the pleasantly potent concoction, Corbin said, “Thank you.”

  “I’m glad you like it.” She took another sip, passed a hooked finger across her lower lip, and swirled the ice, making a sharp, glassy sound. “This drink brings back good memories.” Barb gave a distracted glance over Corbin’s shoulder, over toward one of the bookcases, before batting her eyes and producing a thin smile. “It was Emily’s favorite.”

  Corbin nodded once and turned a bit in an attempt to casually follow the distracted direction of Barb’s eyeline. It took Corbin just a few seconds of scouring the room until he spotted it. He froze and narrowed his eyes, absently cocking his head as he scrutinized the framed photo on the shelf.

  The large black-and-white picture contained two smiling women, one of them a younger version of Barb Whitaker dressed in a similar—maybe the same—bohemian ensemble. But that’s not what made Corbin inadvertently hold his breath. It was the other woman: smaller than Barb, smiling and postured in a way that seemed reluctant to pose for the picture but still contained genuine affection. Her bulb of curly hair was partially suppressed by a folded paisley bandana. The women were shoulder to shoulder, leaning against each other, and their hands were clasped together, their fingers intertwined in what was an unmistakable gesture of intimacy. But beyond this was the recognition—recognition of this other woman in the photo. He’d seen a slightly older version of this woman before, last fall, when she was standing in the window of his apartment.

  Suddenly aware of his paralytic pause and the silence that had drifted into the room, Corbin cleared his throat, took another pull from his drink, and turned to face Barb.

  She was staring at him, not unkindly examining him. Corbin felt compelled to say something. “Is that who that is?”—he angled his head to gesture toward the framed photo—“Emily?”

  Barb still seemed to be gauging her guest. “Yes.” She straightened up a bit, as if to give a declaration. “Emily and I were devoted partners for over thirty years.” A spell of silence returned. “I’m sorry,” Barb finally said, “have I made you uncomfortable?”

  Corbin had no problem contemplating the relationship of the pair of aging lesbian lovers in a photo. No, that’s not what unsettled Corbin at the moment. “No, that’s not it at all. I just . . .” He tried arranging his words in the least insane sequence possible. All that came out was, “I thought . . . I thought I recognized her from somewhere.”

  Barb nodded tersely, her smile dispirited.

  Corbin scrambled for a sophisticated way to ask, Is she dead? But before he could say anything, Barb said, “She passed away some years ago.” But Corbin knew this already, didn’t he? “Cancer, of course. She had been—we had been—coping with it for years.” After about thirty seconds of pondering something she added, “Best friend I ever had.”

  Corbin was preparing to wrap things up here by downing his drink and hinting at compensation. Barb said, “Why did you think you recognized her?”

  A bit of the cocktail dribbled onto his lower lip, and he used the back of his hand to wipe it away. “I don’t know. I think she might just have a familiar face.”

  Without hesitation Barb said, “I’ve seen her down the hall, wandering around by your apartment.”

  Branches of ice broke out under Corbin’s skin. His lips and the back of his neck began to tingle. He stammered, “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, come now.” Barb made a dismissive noise and gently touched Corbin’s forearm. “You can cut the shit. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen her.” Corbin’s face was impassive as he thought about the frail gray figure in the window. Barb said, “I’ve seen her down there, lingering around by your door, but she doesn’t pay me any attention.” Corbin said nothing. “Or perhaps you’ve heard things—strange noises?”

  Before he could catch himself, Corbin mumbled, “Crying, sometimes.” Having inadvertently consigned himself to this dialogic insanity, Corbin cleared his throat and refined his statement. “Sometimes I hear a baby crying at night.”

  Barb nodded slowly, sympathetically. “Do you have the wherewithal to talk about it?” she said.

  Corbin acknowledged that he did by shakily lowering himself to the patched and faded sofa.

  “They’re not ghosts,” Barb said. “Or least I don’t think they’re ghosts. It’s something else. I’ve often thought it was more like a Gore.”

  Corbin listened—had been listening for twenty minutes—to Barb Whitaker’s fluent monologue. “I grew up out east, out near New England, but I moved out here decades ago to be with Emily.” She peered out the window, but shook her head as if to get back on track. “Anyway, back home, back out east, there are these places—or really these non-places—called Gores, little pockets of land that don’t belong to anybody.” Corbin made a face he hoped elicited further explanation. “Decades and decades ago, when the land was being portioned and divided, the surveyors made miscalculations, mistakes in mapping when they were charting townships and villages and so forth.

  “Most times these sorts of no-man’s lands ended up being a neglected field or something or other. But sometimes the Gores were dense channels of forest where acreage went disputed, claimed by some but technically belonging to no one.” Barb shifted on the patched couch. “When we were children we cobbled together legends of these Gores that we’d heard from our parents and grandparents. One of the big things to do was to dare each other to run through a segment of woods, the idea was that if you ran though the wrong pocket you’d disappear into, well, nowhere or somewhere—some place not here.”

  With a weary thread in his voice, Corbin said, “So this all has to do with maps?”

  Barb sighed. “Yes and no. Some maps, some boundaries, are just arbitrary anyway. Sometimes it’s just perception. Sometimes it’s just ink.” She chuckled. “Did you ever wonder where the magic came from in magic markers?” Corbin blinked a few times. Barb cleared her throat and scanned the room. “It’s a bit like that box over there,” she pointed, “the one marked MATRYOSHKA. I would probably have to tell you that it’s full of these Russian toys called nesting dolls, all shaped the same but all different sizes, tall to tiny, tiny to tall. Are you familiar with them?”

  After a few seconds Corbin said, “You mean those little souvenirs you stack inside each other?”

  Barb smiled. “Precisely. Well, you may be imagining that the box is full of these cute little pear-shaped dolls just because of what’s written on the outside. You’re certainly picturing them right now.” Corbin blinked a few times, only nodding his head as a courtesy. “But what if that’s not what was inside at all? What if it contained, oh, I don’t know . . . just a bunch of mason jars filled shrunken, trepanned heads floating in formaldehyde.” Corbin had no idea where she was going with this, and his expression seemed to signal as much to Barb. “I suppose what I mean is that after a whil
e most folks begin to believe in boundaries just because of ink.”

  Things were quiet for a while. The muffled sound of a television pulsed from the apartment on the floor above them. A door slammed down the hall. The old woman took an ice-clinking sip of her drink before carefully placing the glass on the coffee table and resting her hands on her lap. “There is something down that in your corner of the building, something parallactically skewed. There’s something like”—she winced—“an asymmetrical screen.”

  Corbin shrugged. “So what’s it have to do with me?”

  “Nothing maybe. I don’t think you’re special and I don’t think you’re the only one who’s experienced something. I’ve seen things. I’ve seen Emily. I’ve watched people come and go quite quickly from leasing that apartment down the hall. But I also believe it’s a matter of seeing the right—or seeing wrong—geometry.”

  Corbin caught himself off-guard as a series of thoughts rushed into his head: Maybe it’s something in the angles of the building itself. Maybe it’s something connected to the actual body of the building—the mortar, the clay of the bricks, the pipes and plumbing—some sort of radiation. But as quick as the unbidden thoughts came Corbin shoved them away, as if the mere assembly of these notions carried a deranged complicity with what this old woman was suggesting.

  Wrinkles near Barb’s eyes crinkled as she made an almost pained face, appearing to struggle with a way to convey a final thought. “You seem to be a reasonably bright boy, but I don’t expect you to be acquainted with some of the thinkers of my day.” Corbin didn’t really know how to react to that. “But after the first time seeing Emily loitering down there by your apartment I’ve reflected on the connection between dwelling and building—dwelling as a place to live and dwelling as a place to be, as an act of always staying anchored to things. But dwelling, I think, eventually gives itself to constructing things, to growing things.” Barb suddenly barked a laugh. “You must really think I’m swimming in senility now.”

  You have no idea. “Not at all,” he said, his voice unexpectedly shaky. He finished his drink in a single swallow. “But whether you’re nuts or not, I still have to get going.”

  Barb smiled. “Fair enough.”

  She followed Corbin to the door and handed him a folded bundle of money. Corbin glanced at it, peeled through it, and almost protested. For the small amount of moving he’d done, it was too much. After a second of inspecting the cash he said, “Thanks. This is really too generous.”

  “Ah. Well, you’ve been very generous and very patient to have listened to the rambles of a loony old lady.”

  Corbin gave a curt nod and a tight smile. “Okay, good night.”

  He was halfway down the hall when Barb called out: “Would you mind if I came and visited some time?”

  Corbin could feel the old woman’s young eyes on his back. He turned, contemplating the large sum of money in his pocket. “Sure. Stop by any time.” The stiff drink had tilted his thinking.

  The old woman waved, shuffled out of the threshold, and closed her door.

  Back inside his apartment, Corbin tried to confront the interior of his living quarters with sober objectivity. He wanted to shake her words out of his head. Gore. Dwelling. Emily. Corbin dropped his backpack on the floor and flipped on a few lights. He flung his green ball cap on the couch and crossed the living room, turning on a lamp near the window. He lingered there, near the window, peering through the blinds. Evening was in its last gasp of purple-orange light. Corbin scanned the urban horizon before angling his attention to the sidewalk below. A few people down there, walking dogs. A couple holding hands on their way somewhere. And then came a solitary figure that broke away from the other pedestrians. The figure—a male as far as Corbin could tell—was wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt and jeans, and was toting a backpack. Corbin’s eyes widened and his mouth inched open. The figure was wearing a green ball cap, the white moving-company emblem only discernible at this distance because of Corbin’s daily familiarity with it. He recalled Barb’s outrageous assertion that she had seen him on the street below, long before he actually arrived in the building. With a vertiginous sense of horror and acceptance, the fifth-floor Corbin watched his sidewalk-self steer toward the building as it had hours earlier—striding toward the lobby of the apartment complex and disappearing below his field of vision.

  In the weeks following their initial discussion about keeping the baby, Corbin has tried to acquaint himself with the idea of becoming—and actually being—a father. He’s aware that he must prove his sincerity to Cassidy, and so he picks up more hours at the moving company and has been looking for a second job. He’s even made an appointment with an advisor at one of the community colleges out near the suburbs. He’s preoccupied with work but assures her it’s for a good reason. Corbin has a plan to propose to Cassidy—an engagement: this is the one thing he thinks he can’t screw up. Commitment. Initiative. Vision. Resolve. The hallmarks of the businessman, the jargon of the businessman.

  Corbin arrives home to Cassidy’s apartment one evening. He has no ring, but he has a small amount of money and a plan. On his lunch break earlier that afternoon, Corbin had scrawled down a few ideas on an index card—ideas about how they could make things work with the baby, with school, with Corbin’s menial jobs and Cassidy’s unfinished degree. This reality has a lean grimness to it. But, at the very least, the inked-up index card will show Cassidy that he’s serious about the two of them—the three of them, he thinks—and their life together.

  Walking in the door, he calls out for Cassidy. No answer. Again—clutching his coffee-smudged index card—he calls out, happily trying on the honey-I’m-home guise of a family man arriving at suppertime.

  He finds Cassidy on the couch, sitting upright, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. Cassidy’s plum-brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail, her eyes scrubbed clean of mascara and eye shadow—all this, along with the sweatpants and T-shirt she’s wearing, carries the effect of a girl in the first few stages of getting over a fevered illness, the fresh, after-shower sterility of a little girl who’s had a tummyache. Cassidy is positioned in front of the coffee table, her slender fingers laced together as though she’s preparing to flip a non-existent tarot card or shift an invisible chess piece. Check. Mate.

  Corbin opens his mouth, but Cassidy goes first. “I went to the doctor, Corbin.” About a hundred heart beats fill the silent space between them. “I did it,” says Cassidy. Another hundred heartbeats. “It’s gone.”

  Her eyes—that blackly impassive, impenitent expression—tells him that there is no misunderstanding. She’s serious. Corbin’s chest begins hitching up as if a dense balloon is expanding beneath his ribcage, every pulsing hitch making it more difficult to breath. For a moment, Corbin is overcome with the nauseating wobble of falling out of a tree, the impact jarring his spine and the back of his skull in a single wind-blown thud. The index card slips from his fingers.

  Cassidy is talking, furnishing her explanation with business-proposal gesticulations. “If you could only see the big picture.” The swirling hiss of numb noise reaches a crescendo and ceases. Corbin steadies himself; he ignores Cassidy; he scours the room with evacuative urgency. Corbin doesn’t need a lecture. He knows why. He is childish and possibly mentally defective to believe an index card could have stopped any of this. For Cassidy, living with Corbin and a baby would be like raising two children at the same time. This whole thing is an inexorable, unrepealable intervention.

  He owns nothing here. A book or two. Some clothes. Essentially nothing. Cassidy has purchased nearly everything, even the hooded sweatshirt he’s ashamed to be wearing this instant.

  Cassidy’s still talking. And in his despondency, Corbin notices his pathetic reflection in the window across the room—a motionless boy listening to a lesson. His attention darts over to the bookshelf, to a marble bookend. There is a synaptic flash in his conscience, and in that flash Corbin—with objective lens clarity—sees an alternate
self lifting the bookend and cudgeling Cassidy’s shampoo-scrubbed scalp—hammering down with smooth, repeated arcs until the mineral-swirl of that marbled embellishment is coated with streaks of viscous crimson.

  “It would never have worked,” says Cassidy. “Neither of us—” She swallows, licks her lips. She takes a hostile tissue-swipe at her nose and fingers a cable of hair from her eyes. Now she just simply repeats the words. “It would have never worked.”

  It isn’t just the baby, Corbin muses meagerly. It’s everything. Through all this, Corbin understands he has one last decision before she can decide for him. Corbin strides across the living room and faces the bookcase, grabbing the ornate bookend and hefting it—I’ll start my own goddamn library somewhere—and then moving on to the next room. Cassidy is protesting but remains seated on the couch. He awkwardly fills a trash bag with what few clothes he has, some of his toiletries from the bathroom.

  As Corbin begins his final march to the front door, Cassidy, standing now, reprises her business declamation—things about keys, bills, cell phone accounts. Corbin stops as he nears the door and spins on Cassidy, now silent in this abrupt change in momentum. With his hands full, Corbin tries to slam the door as best he can.

  Night. A vacuum of blackness. And from that all-encompassing nothingness came the suppressed sound of a crying baby. Though this distant distress call has become familiar, almost expected, the stygian weight of sleep deteriorates as Corbin flinches awake with alert lucidity.

  Tonight the baby’s cries were clearer, crystalline, and contained a more starkly defined sense of urgency.

  Corbin threw back the sheet and threw his legs over the edge of the bed. The baby’s cries grew louder. Corbin was in the hallway by the time he fully surfaced from sleep, and that’s where his momentum hitched to a stop. Tonight, there was no doubt—the cries were coming from inside his apartment. Near. He suddenly understood with a flinch that the sobs were close—close as in several yards away. Corbin angled his gaze toward the sliding doors of the hall closet, just a feet from his face. The narrow passage was now filled with the panicked weeping. Corbin slowly drew up to the closet door. The distressed mewling was coming from inside. Inches, it seemed, separated Corbin from the source of the cries.