Doomsdays

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Yes, I worked almost entirely by myself, except for the several times that Tommy and his friends helped me carry out the larger pieces of furniture (only a few of which they took for their own apartment), but I actually preferred my lonely communion with the house, however melancholy that was. Another reason I didn’t resent Tommy’s absence was that I knew how grievously he suffered even stepping over the threshold – taking mother’s death and horrific defilement (and father’s mental collapse) almost as badly as father had. I was worried that soon our father might have a roommate...

  It took me weeks to clean the place out. I presided over yard sales – watched strangers take away the furniture I had grown up with. I emptied my mother’s drawers, bagged her clothes for the Salvation Army, threw out the things that no one but my parents would have wanted, a piece of myself thrown out with every one of them.

  While I had only limited storage space at my apartment, there were some things that I simply could not part with, for instance the tattered copy of The Night Before Christmas that my mother had read to me every Christmas Eve, and the watercolors she had done as a younger woman while working as a nanny up in Bar Harbor, Maine.

  The paintings showed a promise that she never pursued. I especially liked one she did of a loon, and the one that showed a ship's figurehead, ghostly in snow.

  The attic of the old Victorian dinosaur was big enough to have been an apartment itself. I had stored things there for many years. There were boxes of old toys that I had been too sentimental to part with, childhood scrapbooks, all my true crime books – serial killers and MacDonalds-spraying monsters sleeping under dust. There were newspaper clippings I had hoarded over the years – missing teenage girls smiling, the news-ink capsulizing their happier times.

  There were unexpected treasures too, like a German Luger, stuffed in a box of ancient brittle newspaper, that my father must have inherited from his uncle, who likely smuggled it home from World War II. I was glad Tommy had never discovered it up there as a child, as he had been rambunctious enough to have done me or himself some harm with it...and I was relieved father hadn’t remembered it, after having failed at an attempt to overdose himself just before we convinced him to check into Eastborough State Hospital. But more perplexing than the Luger was a faded box of curled black and white photographs that revealed itself when I was cleaning out a dim attic corner. It had sheltered there unseen for many years, tucked beneath the rusting, moth-worried stroller that my mother had pushed me in as a baby.

  This proved an especially intriguing discovery. I carried it out to the car, through the sad empty rooms where I had laughed and played, where my family had dwelt, seemingly since the dawn of time. My footsteps were an awful sound in the abandoned rooms.

  That night, sitting in the clutter of my apartment, I had time to explore the box of photos. They had been taken up in the wilds of Acadia National Park, largely. Black pines balanced above cliffs of grey stone over an Atlantic the color of ash. Mountains reared, misty and ancient, and quaint New England farmhouses stood humbly in expanses of field and on shores that were the stuff of postcards.

  My mother was in many of the pictures. She looked to be the age she was shortly before meeting my father, back when she would leave Maine to visit her sister in Eastborough, not long before I was born.

  A man accompanied mother in a number of shots, older than her but fairly good-looking. He was very tall and thin and there was a curious scar on his belly. It looked like an anchor, I thought, or a serpent dancing. There was no doubt that it was Mr. Silvestri.

  One picture in particular fascinated me. It showed my mother and Silvestri with their arms around one another, standing beside a freshly carved figurehead, such as one might have found on an old historic ship. The photo was slightly older than me and the image was washed out in spots, so I could not make out the details of the figurehead. All I could be certain of was that it was female, and that it was naked.

  What struck me most about the picture was that my mother, dressed in a two-piece bathing suit that looked conservative by today’s standards, was clearly pregnant. Being my mother’s first child, I was offered a rather straightforward conclusion. The photo depicted my biological parents.

  Your head would have been reeling as mine was, if you too had discovered such a thing. To think that the box of pictures – my very history – had been sitting above me, up in the attic all the years I had spent in the family home. My history in a cocoon of cobwebs, waiting.

  * * *

  I could not wait to talk to Mr. Silvestri. Maybe he could explain it all away. There had to be some explanation, other than the one implied by that image. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself yet to ask my father about it. Was I afraid to unhinge him even more? Talking with Tommy about it seemed out of the question, for the moment, as well. And after all, if what I thought – what I feared – was true, then the man who had raised me as his own son wasn’t my father anyway...just as my brother must actually be my half-brother.

  So I took the box of photos and rushed down to my car, climbed into the clutter of empty coffee cups and crinkled tattoo magazines, and sped off for Eastborough.

  The ride seemed so much longer than the forty minutes it actually took. Mr. Silvestri's house sat there pink behind its fence, beside the looming husk of my childhood home, a cruel FOR SALE sign sticking up out of the weedy lawn.

  I found myself pounding on Silvestri's door, when he did not respond to my more civilized knocks. I called through the grey mesh of the screen. Blue light flickered inside and the volume of the television, while low, carried the sound of something buzzing, above an under-layer of screams. The door was unlocked – I let myself in.

  The house was dark but for the cathode-pallor that flashed and rippled, loosely defining a path for me. Perhaps I had inherited my housekeeping inadequacies from Mr. Silvestri, I thought, stepping around and over empty soup cans, bunched newspapers and even some sculpting tools.

  In the small living room, I stood and stared at the flickering blue screen. A videotape was playing. It showed Phoebe (naked) lush and lovely as ever, her beauty humbled by its pockmarks. She had stopped screaming, but her body was shaking violently, the roaring chainsaw buried deeply beneath her sternum.

  There was nothing to do but watch. I saw Mr. Silvestri pull out his spitting tool and shut it off. He put it aside and went to work with several small hand tools, carefully removing the (suddenly paler than usual) wine stain mark from her forehead. His task completed, he rose up out of the picture and the screen filled with static.

  Trembling and nauseous, I stumbled through the dark house. I felt drunk or dizzy, but curiously sad when I found Mr. Silvestri dead on his bed.

  He was naked on top of the covers, thin and long. He was unmarked, the victim of “natural causes” himself, no doubt...whether that be a cerebral hemorrhage of his own, or a massive heart attack. I took his hand – the one he had cut those years ago. It was cold. Funny, I had never realized how serious the injury had been – it looked as if the fingers had been cut off and reattached. I had never noticed how feminine they were compared to the fingers of his other hand.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and stared. I could hear the hiss of the television from the other room. I could still hear Phoebe's screams, preserved in my head. Crickets called from outside and fireflies flitted beyond the screen of the bedroom window.

  I found myself gazing out into the fenced yard at Mrs. Silvestri's screen-house. The totem poles, vague and sentinel-like in the darkness, hovered nearby. There were two fireflies inside the screen-house. At least I thought they were fireflies, initially, but they did not blink, and they did not move. They just hung there like the forgotten glare of Mrs. Silvestri's dark glasses.

  Eventually these luminous dots did move, and I watched as a dark figure stood up and then came through the squealing door of the structure. It walked slowly, unsteadily, its feet hissing through the overgrown grass. While I could distinguish very little about it,
I could see that it was female, and that it was naked.

  I soon lost sight of the thing as it walked around out of my view toward the side door. I heard the door open and close. I heard soft footfalls, an empty can clattering away over the linoleum. I heard it pad in the small hall outside the bedroom.

  Back-lit by the flashing blue TV static, the woman appeared in the doorway, a silhouette. She stood there, silent, wobbling slightly as I fumbled off my sneakers, pulled my shirt up over my head and dropped it by the bed. It waited as I hurried out of my jeans and pulled down my underpants. My erection wobbled.

  I sat back on the bed by the withered dead man, his dull eyes fixed on the ceiling. The woman stepped into the room. I could hear something like breathing from her.

  She was a puzzle of sorts – Josephine Baker's perky helmet of Flapper hair hardly hiding Phoebe's wine stain, Janice's lovely brown face housing the mysterious dark eyes of Theda Bara. Mata Hari's flaccid little breasts, separated by an unsettlingly familiar scar, hung above the smooth curve of her belly. The legs, long and statue-like, could have come from none other than Mrs. Silvestri. It was not long before they were wrapped around my back.

  The dead man on the bed jostled as the mattress creaked and the headboard tapped urgent morse code against the wall. I was up on my knees watching Mata Hari's breasts slapping up and down against her ribs, her navel winking as my thrusts alternately scrunched up the soft of her belly. Janice's mouth was open and dark, rasping out a sound that might have been more appropriate to asphyxiation than lovemaking. All the while Theda's eyes, lynx-like with their Cleopatra make-up, were fastened on my own.

  I labored, deliriously, the faint blue from the TV highlighting the shared sheen of sweat. The assembled woman reached up to touch my face, the fingers of one hand stronger, more masculine-seeming than those on the other.

  Funny, I thought, close to coming – whose name should I call? I fell against the women and worked my hips desperately, slurping in and out. I could feel the thing's heart, strong against my own – I could hear it. I recognized it – wasn't it the first sound that I had heard in my life – the sound of my mother's heart?

  * * *

  There were three or four days of being sequestered in the Silvestri home...it was hard to judge just how much time elapsed. I knew that Tommy had been looking for me during those days, because when I made one brief trip next door to my family home, I saw that my brother had not only left a series of increasingly distraught messages on the answering machine, but he had even been there physically to seek me out; on the kitchen table I found a half-empty can of some sort of weight-lifter’s shake he favored. The messages, when I played them back, started out with him trying to locate me to tell me about the disappearance of my ex-girlfriend, Phoebe...but the last messages, building to the near frantic, suggested that Tommy wondered if I had disappeared off the face of the Earth, too.

  Poor Tommy; this news about Phoebe, and his worry over me – coming after the dual tragedy of our parents – seemed to have brought him to the breaking point. If only he had known that our mother was, in fact, very much alive...after a fashion. I again, as in the past, found myself wishing that Tommy and I had been closer...

  But I was too distracted, too concerned myself, to contact and reassure him...because the quilt of flesh that was my lover, my mate, my neighbor and my mother had begun to decompose.

  I had started to detect an unpleasant odor emanating from the mute being’s flesh, even after our post-coital showers. The increasing suggestion of rot. And then, on the second (third?) day, the wine stain on the entity’s forehead actually sloughed off, leaving a livid, glistening red wound in its place. (I saved the patch of flesh in a plastic microwave container.) By what I judged to be the fourth day, the smell had become a stench (I had to wear a painter’s mask, such as Silvestri had worn doing his chainsaw sculptures, while making love).

  Where the varied components had once blended smoothly together, I could now detect seams like widening fissures, cracks in the flesh like borders between the now more disparate pieces. And they seemed to be decaying at different rates, each with its own variation of stink...some like foul meat, others more like washed-up fish. Mata Hari’s breasts smelled like moldering wood. The body parts even discolored at different rates. Janice’s brown face was blackening as if with strangulation, whereas Angeline’s legs were only mottled red as if with a spreading rash. But she/they had become so unsteady on these failing legs that I had to settle her/them in the wheelchair Angeline had occupied after her dismemberment.

  My lover did not speak (and whose voice would she utter, in any case?), could not tell me what she might need or lack. Had Silvestri died (no doubt, while in his creation’s amorous embrace) before he could add one final, crucial ingredient? Or had she been destined for a brief, mayfly-like existence all along?

  There was another source of fetor in the house, and that originated from my biological father himself. Initially, I had simply carried his body into the living room and laid him on the sofa, covering him with a blanket, but now I knew I must deal with him a little more thoroughly. I decided to carry him into the bathroom, there to dismantle him in the tub and wrap his parts in plastic for easier transportation and burial in the woods of Eastborough Swamp.

  One might wonder, at this point – and fairly enough – how I could have so readily, so easily accepted the living totem as my lover, and notions such as dismembering the man who was my father. It was the dawning in me, when I first saw my lover approach me, of a sense of fate. A sense of legacy. My composite lover, and my mind-set, were both a kind of family inheritance...from two conjoined families.

  I again wore the painter’s mask when uncovering Silvestri’s now putrefying corpse. My lover watched me from across the room, sphinx-silent in her wheelchair. My true father had gone a shade of purple-blue, but what really drew my eyes was the wound in his belly. In his decomposition, the scar had parted open and the old injury gaped darkly. There appeared to be a bright glint within him, and when I shined a flashlight into the wound, I saw its beam reflected back at me. Delicately I reached my fingers inside, doing my best not to touch the edges of the wound (but failing), and withdrew from his body a small knife for cutting linoleum, with a rounded wooden handle and a very sharp C-shaped blade.

  The knife seemed to sing in my fist, downloading a long history of speeded up, screaming information – compacted memories – into my nervous system. Again, I experienced that sense of destiny, that notion of inheritance. With this came an awareness in me of nascent artistic abilities...

  Also within this body cavity I had discovered a pretty class ring, for Sutton High School, that I knew must have belonged to Mandy Rogers. Though it did not vibrate with stored-up memories, I slipped it like a wedding band onto one of the fingers of my bride, whose silent screen vamp eyes still shone brightly up at me despite her reeking deliquescence.

  Shortly after discovering Silvestri’s knife, and using it as one of the tools in my methodical dismantling of his body, I grew convinced in my very marrow that my lover was not, in fact, incomplete in any way. She was very much whole. But she was still lacking something...and I now knew instinctively what it was I had to provide – and quickly – so as to keep these women, this golem, alive...

  * * *

  The last time I visited my father in Eastborough State Hospital, I leaned close to him over the table where we sat and finally asked him why he had never told me about my real father...how we had come to live next door to the Silvestris, or them to us...but he only stared back at me with those once crystalline blue eyes that had always made my own brown eyes seem like muddy water in comparison. But the light was out behind those windows, and he said absolutely nothing to me...though his mouth worked subtly, silently, like that of a fish. And like a fish, he now occupied another world from me. I squeezed his hand with choking pity.

  He was found dead by an orderly late that same night, spread-eagled naked upon his bed. It appeared that his
time he had not bungled his attempt to poison himself with an overdose of pills (though I was told, with frenzied apologies, that the staff had no idea where he had gotten the drugs from). But while he had apparently died by his own hand, surely he had not been responsible for that other horror. For even if he had been able to cut both his own eyes out, where were those eyes now?

  Beyond despondent, Tommy returned to our old family home, from which I had telephoned him, and met me there. We embraced and he sobbed in my arms, his own muscular arms tight around me. Over his shoulder, I saw eyes glinting in the murk of another room. I hoped Tommy hadn’t heard the stealthy squeak of a wheel. I made an angry little gesture with my hand, and the glimmering eyes withdrew.

  I had dragged a mattress over from next door, into this house, and laid it upon the floor...its own beds already gone. Tommy must have thought it was something we had missed in cleaning out the large furniture. I hoped he didn’t find the smell of the big mattress too offensive; I had turned to the floor the side that was stained from making love to the creature’s deteriorating body. We sat on the mattress, drank beer (he much more than I) and at last stretched out on our backs to talk in the growing dark like two little boys who couldn’t get to sleep. But...eventually...Tommy slept.

  I had brought pillows, too, and I put one of these over Tommy’s head to muffle the sound of the Luger.