by John Pelan
“You're the one that's always telling me to get my nose out of books,” and Anna's starting to sound angry, cultivated indignation gathering itself protectively about her like a caul and she slides away from Julia, slides across the vinyl car seat until she's pressed against the passenger door.
“I don't think this was what I had in mind.'
Anna begins kicking lightly at the floorboard, then, the toe of a sneaker tapping out the rhythm of her impatience like a Morse code signal, and “Jesus,” she says, “it's only an old house. What the hell are you so afraid of, anyway?”
“I never said I was afraid, Anna. I never said anything of the sort.”
“You're acting like it, though. You're acting like you're scared to death.”
“Well, I'm not going to sit here and argue with you,” Julia says, and tells herself that just this once it doesn't matter if she sounds more like Anna's mother than her lover. “It's my car and we never should have driven all the way out here alone. I would have turned around half an hour ago, if there'd been enough room.” And she puts the Bel Air into reverse and backs off the dirt road, raising an alarmed and fluttering cloud of grasshoppers, frantic insect wings beating all about them as she shifts into drive and cuts the wheel sharply in the direction of the trees.
“I thought you'd understand,” Anna says. “I thought you were different,” and she's out of the car before Julia can try to stop her, slams her door shut and walks quickly away, following the path that leads between the high and whispering grass toward the house.
Julia sits in the Chevy and watches her go, watches helplessly as Anna seems to grows smaller with every step, the grass and the brilliant day swallowing her alive, wrapping her up tight in golden stalks and sunbeam teeth. And she imagines driving away alone, simply taking her foot off the brake pedal and retracing that twisting, treeshadowed path to the safety of paved roads. How easy that would be, how perfectly satisfying, and then Julia watches Anna for a few more minutes before she turns the car to face the house and tries to pretend that she never had any choice at all.
The house like a grim and untimely joke, like something better off in a Charles Addams cartoon than perched on the high, sheer cliffs at the end of the road. This ramshackle grotes-querie of boards gone the silvergray of old oyster shells, the splinterskin walls with their broken windows and crooked shutters, steep gables and turrets missing half their slate shingles, and there are places where the roof beams and struts show straight through the house's weathered hide. One black lightning rod still standing guard against the sky, a rusting garland of wrought iron filigree along the eaves, ard the uppermost part of the chimney has collapsed in a redgreen scatter of bricks gnawed back to soft clay by moss and the corrosive sea air. Thick weeds where there might once have been a yard and flowerbeds, and the way the entire structure has begun to list perceptibly leaves Julia with the disconcerting impression that the house is cringing, or that it has actually begun to pull itself free of the earth and crawl, inch by crumbling inch, away from the ocean.
“Anna, wait,” but she's already halfway u;j the steps to the wide front porch and Julia's still sitting behind the wheel of the Chevy. She closes her eyes for a moment, be: ter to sit listening to the wind and the waves crashing against the cliffs, the smaller, hollow sound of Anna's feet on the porch, than to let the house think that she can't look away. Sone dim instinct to tell her that's how this works, the sight of it to leave you dumbstruck, vulnerable, and My God, it's only an vgly old house, she thinks, An ugly old house that no one wants anymore, and then she laughs out loud, as if it can hear.
After she caught up with Anna and made her get back into the car, and after Julia agreed to drive her the rest of the way out to the house, Anna Foley started talking about Dr. Montague's article in Argosy again, talked as thojgh there'd never been an argument. The tension between them forgotten or discarded in a flood of words, words that came laster and faster as they neared the house, almost piling atop one another toward the end.
“There were stories that Dandridge murdered his daughter as a sacrifice sometime after his wife died in 1914. But no one ever actually found her body. No, she just vanished one day and no one ever saw her again. The daughter, I mean. The daughter vanished, not the wife. His wife is buried behind the house.”
Only an ugly old house sitting forgotten beside the sea.
“… to Poseidon, or maybe even Dagon, a sort of Mesopo-tamian corn king, half man and half fish. Dandridge traveled all over Iraq and Persia before he came back and settled in California. He had a fascination with Persian and Hindu antiquities.”
Then open your eyes and get this over with, and she does open her eyes, then stares back at the house and relaxes her grip on the steering wheel. Anna's standing on the porch now, standing on tiptoe and peering in through a small, shattered window near the door.
“Anna, wait on me. I'm coming,” and Anna turns and smiles, waves to her, then goes back to staring into the house through the broken window.
Julia leaves the keys dangling in the ignition and picks her way toward the house, past lupine and wild white roses and a patch of poppies the color of tangerines, three or four orange-and-black monarch butterflies flitting from blossom to blossom, and there's a line of stepping stones almost lost in the weeds. The stones lead straight to the house, though the weedy patch seems much wider than it did from the car. I should be there by now, she thinks, looking over her shoulder at the convertible and then ahead, at Anna standing on the porch, standing at the door of the Dandridge house, wrestling with the knob. I'm so anxious, it only seems that way, but five, seven, ten more steps and the porch seems almost as far away as it did when she got out of the car.
“Wait on me,” she shouts at Anna, who doesn't seem to have heard. Julia stops and wipes the sweat from her forehead before it runs down into her eyes. She glances up at the sun, directly overhead and hot against her face and bare arms, and she realizes that the wind has died. The blustery day grown suddenly so still and she can't hear the breakers anymore, either. Only the faint and oddly muted cries of the gulls and grasshoppers.
She turns toward the sea, and there's a brittle noise from the sky that makes her think of eggshells cracking against the edge of a china mixing bowl, and on the porch Anna's opening the door. And the shimmering, stickywet darkness that flows out and over and through Anna Foley makes another sound, and Julia shuts her eyes so she won't have to watch whatever comes next.
The angle of the light falling velvetsoft across the dusty floor, the angle and the honey color of the sun, so she knows that it's late afternoon and somehow she's lost everyihing in between. That last moment in the yard before this place without even unconsciousness to bridge the gap, then and now, and she understands it's as simple as that. Her head aches and her stomach rolls when she tries to sit up to get a better look at the room and Julia decides that maybe it's best to lie still a little while longer. Just lie here and stare out that window at the blue sky framed in glass-jagged mouths, and there might have been someone there a moment ago, a scarecrow: ace looking in at her, watching, and there might have been nothing but the partitioned swatches of the fading day.
She can hear the breakers again, now only slightly muffled by the walls, and the wind around the corners of the house; these sounds through air filled with the oily stench of rotting fish and the neglected smell of any verv old and empty house. A barren, fishstinking room and a wall wiff one tall, arched window just a few feet away from her, sunbleached and peeling wallpaper strips, and she knows that it nust be a western wall, the sunlight through the broken window panes proof enough of that.
Unless it's morning light, she thinks. Unless this is another day entirely and the sun is rising now instead of setting. Julia wonders why she ever assumed it was afternoon, how she can ever again assume anything. And there's a sound, then, from somewhere behind her, inside the room with her or very close; the crisp sound of a ripe melon splitting open, scarlet flesh and black teardrop seed
s, sweet red juice, and now the air smells even worse. Fish putrefying under a baking summer sun, beaches strewn with bloated fishsilver bodies as far as the eye can see, beaches littered with everything in the sea heaved up onto the shore, an inexplicable, abyssal vomit.
“Are you here, Anna?” she says. “Can you hear me?”
And something quivers at the edge of her vision, a fluttering darkness deeper than the long shadows in the room, and she ignores the pain and the nausea and rolls over onto her back to see it more clearly. But the thing on the ceiling sees her too and moves quickly toward the sanctuary of a corner, all feathered, trembling gills and swimmerets, and its jointed, lobster carapace almost as pale as toadstools, chitin soft and pale, and it scuttles backward on raw and bleeding human hands. It drips and leaves a spattered trail of itself on the floor as it goes.
She can see the door now, the absolute blackness waiting in the hall through the doorway, and there's laughter from that direction, a woman's high, hysterical laugh, but so faint that it can't possibly be coming from anywhere inside the house.
“Anna,” she says again, and the laughter stops and the thing on the ceiling clicks its needle teeth together.
“She's gone down, that one,” it whispers. “She's gone all the way down to Mother Hydra and won't hear you in a hundred hundred million years.”
And the laughing begins again, seeping slyly up through the floorboards, through every crack on these moldering plaster walls.
“ ‘I saw a something in the sky,’” the ceiling crawler whispers from its corner. “ ‘No bigger than my fist.’ “
And the room writhes and spins around her like a kaleidoscope, that tumbling gyre of colored shards, remaking the world, and it wouldn't matter if there was anything for her to hold on to. She would still fall; no way not to fall with this void devouring even the morning, or the afternoon, whichever, even the colors of the day sliding down that dick gullet.
“I can't see you,” Anna says, Anna's voice but Julia's never heard her sound this way before. So afraid, no insignificant. “I can't see you anywhere” and Julia reaches out (or down or up) into the furious storm that was the house, the maelstrom edges of a collapsing universe, and her arm sinks in up to the elbow. Sinks through into dead-star cold, the cold ooze of the deepest sea-floor trench, and “Open your eyes,” Anna says, Anna crying now, sobbing, and “Please, God, open your eyes, Julia.”
But her eyes are open and she's standing somewhere far below the house, standing before the woman on the rock, the thing that was a woman once, and part of it can still recall that lost humanity. The part that watches Julia with one eye, the desperate, hatefilled, pale-green eye that hasn't been lost to the seething ivory crust of barnacles and sea lice that covers half its face. The woman on the great rock in the center of the phosphorescent pool, and then the sea rushes madly into the cavern, surges up and foams around the rusted chains and scales and all the squirming, pinkwhite anemones sprouting from her thighs.
Alone, alone, all all alone…
And the woman on the rock raises an arm, her ruined and shellstudded arm, and reaches across the pool toward Julia.
Alone on the wide wide Sea…
Her long fingers and the webbing grown between them, and Julia leans out across the frothing pool, ice water wrapping itself around her ankles, filling her shoes, and she strains to take the woman's hand. Straining to reach as the jealous sea rises and falls, rises and falls, threatening her with the bottomless voices of sperm whales and typhoons. But the distance between their fingertips doubles, triples, origarai space unfolding itself, and the woman's lips move silently, yellow teeth and pleading gillslit lips as mute as the cavern walls.
—murdered his daughter, sacrificed her—
Nothing from those lips but the small and startled creatures nesting in her mouth, not words but a sudden flow of surprised and scuttling legs, the claws and twitching antennae, and a scream that rises from somewhere deeper than the chained woman's throat, deeper than simple flesh, soulscream spilling out and swelling to fill the cave from wall to wall. This howl that is every moment that she's spent here, every damned and saltraw hour made aural, and Julia feels it in her bones, in the silver amalgam fillings of her teeth.
Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?
And the little girl sits by the fire in a rocking chair, alone in the front parlor of her father's big house by the sea and she reads fairy tales to herself while her father rages somewhere overhead, in the sky or only upstairs but it makes no difference, in the end. Father of black rages and sour, scowling faces, and she tries not to hear the chanting or the sounds her mother is making again, tries to think of nothing but the Mock Turtle and Alice, the Lobster Quadrille by unsteady lantern light, and Don't look at the windows, she thinks, or Julia tries to warn her. Don't look at the windows ever again.
Well, there was Mystery.… Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography. then Drawling—the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel…
An old conjure eel —
Don't ever look at the windows even when the scarecrow fingers, the dry-grass bundled fingers, are tap-tap-tapping their song upon the glass. And she has seen the women dancing naked by the autumn moon, dancing in the tall, moonwashed sheaves, bare feet where her father's scythe has fallen again and again, every reaping stroke to kill and call the ones that live at the bottom of the pool deep below the house. Calling them up and taunting them and then sending them hungrily back down to hell again. Hell or the deep, fire or iceclark water, and it makes no difference whatsoever in the end.
Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.
Julia's still standing at the wavesmoothed edge of the absinthe pool, or she's only a whispering, insubstantial ghost afraid of parlor windows, smokegray ghost mutteri ig from nowhen, from hasn't-been or never-will-be, and the child turns slowly toward her voice as the hurting thing chained to the rock begins to tear and stretches itself across the widening gulf.
“Julia, please.”
“You will be their queen, in the cities beneath the sea,” the old man says. “When I am not even a memory, child, you will hold them to the depths.”
… And they all dead did lie, And a million million slimy things Liv'd on—and so did I.…
“Open your eyes,” and Julia does, these sights like the last frame of a movie or a dream that might neve ? have ended, and she's lying in Anna's arms, lying on her back in the weedy patch between the car and the brooding, spiteful house.
“I thought you were dead,” Anna says, ho ding on to her so tight she can hardly breathe and Anna sotnds relieved and frightened and angry all at once, the tears rolling down her sunburned face and dripping off her chin ono Julia's cheeks.
“You were so goddamn cold. I thought you were dead. I thought I was alone.”
Alone, alone, all all alone…
“I smell flowers,” Julia says, “I smell roses,” because she does and she can think of nothing else to say, no mere words to ever make her forget, and she stares up past Anna, past the endless, sea-hued sky, at the summerwarm sun staring back down at her like the blind and blazing eye of heaven.
ASPECTACLE OF A MAN
Weston Ochse
“Such a leisurely way to die, don't you think?”
Alvin Samovich couldn't help but pause at the spectacle of a man with his feet nailed to the side of a building as if he had been tacked there by some collector. So queer, the angled perfection of the railroad spike pinning him to the crumbly mortar so far away from the nearest train.
So queer, indeed.
“I know what you're thinking. There must be a better way? Of course, one can always second-guess or attempt to promote his own methods, but for me, I believe this s the best. Yes. In fact, would you believe that I feel no pain?”
Alvin had taken a shortcut—an alley he had traversed a hundred times before. Sure, he could have bypassed the dark slit of emptiness, but his alternative was
to travel around the wide city block where his shoulders and elbows would be accosted at each brush of a stranger, where his breath would mingle with others as they ingested one another in furious combinations, where he would need to pause continually as people who were not him crossed, blocking his path as if they were made to detain him.
Is it any wonder why Alvin chose the privacy of a dark alley? Is it any wonder why he had chosen this In Between as an avenue to allow him a protective ignorance of the sweat and smell and insectile life of those who proposed to be his peers?
But never had he ever imagined this upside-down spectacle of a man.
“Come on, cat got your tongue? What do you think? Did I do it right?”
Alvin opened his mouth to answer, then closed it as he realized he had nothing to say.
The hanged man before him was obviously a businessman, as was Alvin. Some middle manager at some middling company whose existence was defined in the promotion of the economic dogma of an unseen board. Even though he was now clad only in paisley boxers and a white T-shirt, the carefully folded blue suit beside him indicated he had once been a man of substance, perhaps even a junior executive who commanded dozens. “Don't get the wrong idea,” said the hanged man, his arms crossed over his chest. “This isn't forever. They told me I could be helped and fixed of my proclivities, so to speak. There's even a chance I may live. Now, wouldn't that be something?”
Alvin spun and stared out the mouth of the alley. It was only six feet away, yet the eternal flow of shakers and movers appeared to be blithely unaware of this peculiar fellow, possibly the victim of some human vandalism.
As if the man wasn't real at all, but a figment of Alvin's little-used imagination.
As if he was finally going insane.
As if…
He felt a hand reach out and grasp at the creases of his trousers. Spastically, Alvin stepped back, checking for the dirty residue of this unclean man, wiping frantically at the assaulted material.