by Jeff Strand
A dull thud came from the rooms below the attic, and in tandem her heart beat out a similar sound. Darcy got to her feet and ran down the wooden stairs back to the landing. She opened the door to her parent’s bedroom and found a feral landscape of bed sheets and nothing more. She called out for her mother, skewering a cry for her father to its end. More stairs. Two at a time. Down she went. The moonlight was split upon the cold slate floor of the kitchen like a gallon of milk. Darcy slipped as she rushed through it and fell on her back. Pain danced up her leg and spine, elbows throbbed. She clambered up and limped to the door that divided the kitchen to the living room and paused to catch her breath. All can be explained, she said like a mantra. All can be explained. The wind was a werewolf trapped in the walls, the moon a phantom consuming the stars. The house creaked and moaned as though the souls of the damned resided under floorboards. The door’s handle cooled her sweltering palm. She twisted it slowly and pulled back, releasing a whimper from the hinges. The gap could not have been more than a few inches, but the naked heel of her father’s foot suspended in the pastel shades of a lifeless night was enough to force her to not open it any wider.
She assumed it was tears. The tips of her fingers were darker after she wiped her cheek. Darcy felt another large drop upon her face and she looked up. A patch of water collected on the ceiling, its color brownish in tone. Darcy moved back and every drip that hit the kitchen floor resembled a short-lived scarlet coronet. To her knees she fell, shaking, sobbing. The bathroom was directly above her. Flashes of a naked wrist cleaved to reveal open veins flooded her fragile mind. She scampered to the sanctuary of a shadow, wrapped it around her shoulders and wept. It had to be a dream. Darcy convinced herself of this. Her parents would not end their lives like that. They were happy, and they would have never left her alone. The noise from upstairs suggested something, or someone was still in the attic. If it was a dream, she had nothing to fear. If it wasn’t, then it was better she was with her parents than in an empty and cold cottage. Alone.
Legs turned weak. Nightgown, drenched with tears. She passed the bathroom without looking in. At the foot of the attic stairs she inhaled deeply, wiped her eyes and took the first step toward the beyond. The world slowed to a crawl. Silence overruled the clamor of what lain among the flotsam of domestic knick-knacks within the attic. Even Darcy’s weight held no influence on the steps beneath her feet. It was though the whole house was holding its breath in apprehension. She arrived in the attic to find it as it was. The boxes were unmoved, the cobwebs sloth-like as they hung from corners. Shadows hugged miserably to the walls and floor. And there the dollhouse glowed like a Halloween pumpkin in the dim light, a macabre symbol of her fate. There was no change to her parent’s figurines, which remained in their varying exhibition of death. But Darcy drew her attention to the small attic in the dollhouse. There was the small crafted model of herself kneeling before the miniature dollhouse, just as she was knelt before the larger one. On closer inspection she noted a red line that scored the throat of the tiny figure. The winter’s breath she grew to believe was only a draft fell upon her neck in that moment, and from the corner of her eye a hand came into view. The tips of each finger were sheltered by gauze, blood seeping through as if the toil of intricacy and detail had worn the skin to the flesh. Scars as thick as leeches chartered the hand, and the rasp of failing lungs stirred her hair. The glimmer of a small whittling knife constricted her pupils, and upon her throat its cooled edge prevented the words she longed to speak.
All can be explained.
All can be explained.
Poor Me and Ted
Kate Jonez
Glory, Glory, Glory. That’s about the stupidest name you can give a person like me. But my mom had high hopes like lots of hard-working folks do. They use fancy names like they’re magic spells. As if naming a kid could somehow make it better than it really is. I don’t go in for that kind of crap. I named my kid John. Simple. John.
“I know that mess is up here somewhere, Ted. I know it is.”
I heave one more of the brown boxes down from where they’re piled up and drop it on the floor. It’s not so heavy this time. This one must be a box of old clothes even though it says ‘kitchen’ plain as day on the side of the box.
“Seems like you ought to know which box, Ted, long as you’ve been up here. You ought to go on and tell me.” I laugh about that because Ted never tells. He never does.
I drop the box on the floor and dust rises up in a puff. It ought to bother me more than it does with my damn allergies from all the bad air and all, but the dust motes look kinda pretty, like bubbles, the way they float in the light from the dormer window.
“John would have liked how the dust dances around in the light, wouldn’t he, Ted? He would’ve liked that—at least back when he cared about stuff like that, he would have.”
I catch the edge of the silver tape and yank it off. Clothes, I was right. Just as I’m about to close the box back up the smell hits me. Like turning a page in a picture book, one minute you’re in a dirty old attic, and one minute you fly back in time to when everything in the world was good and smelled like baby lotion and butter cream frosting. I about put my head right in that box.
“Yeah, I know, Ted. It’s stupid to cry over spilled milk.”
I fight down the burning feeling that’s trying to fill up my chest as I tape that box back up extra tight. Maybe that smell will stay in there. Probably not, though. Probably it’ll be gone next time I come looking for it, just like everything else.
I pull down another box from where it was wedged on top of the chifferobe that used to be in my bedroom. Back when I had a bedroom and I didn’t have to live in one crappy room because that’s all I can afford. I nearly topple over with the weight of the box. It lands on the floor with a thud this time. Bingo. I rip it open.
“Come on over here, Ted. I’m going to fix you up real nice, so we can go out. You’re going to sparkle just like the Fourth of July.”
I unbutton Ted’s coat, and as I’m fixing him up just right that feeling like fire starts burning inside my chest again.
“I don’t know why you say it’s my fault, Ted. Because it’s not. I did everything I possibly could for John. Somebody should have helped me. Wasn’t like I didn’t fucking ask, was it, Ted? I fucking asked people to help John. They didn’t listen.”
* * * * *
Union Station is beautiful, probably the most beautiful train station in the world. I walk across the shiny floor polished up like it’s Cinderella’s ballroom and past the leather chairs all done up with brass tacks and look up at the sparkly chandeliers. Union Station is beautiful, but it’s only fake beautiful. If I look under those chairs, there’d be wads of old gum. The bathrooms here are just as nasty as the ones at the Greyhound station. Anyone can go into the train station, and everybody knows a place ain’t shit if they let everybody in.
I jam a five into the slot of the Metro ticket machine. Five fucking dollars to ride a damn train. That ain’t right. Ain’t no way that’s fair.
“I know, Ted, life ain’t fair. Heard that about a million times.”
Ted’s looking a little ragged. He could use a new jacket. His is getting a little worn out around the middle. But at least he isn’t growing out of his clothes. Not like John did. That kid needed something new every week, it seemed like.
I move out onto the platform to wait for the train. People are lining up. The sun glints off their shiny clean hair and polished shoes and the metal decorations on their expensive briefcases or their Gucci bags or whatever the hell kind of bag rich people carry. They all hold their heads that way so their eyes don’t see anybody else. Like their thoughts are so important they don’t want them to leak out. I hate that shit. Doesn’t matter how much your suit or your shoes or your damn haircut cost, you can look somebody in the eye. Say good morning. How are you? It ain’t like I’m going to really tell you how I am or anything. I’m not stupid.
“I know they don
’t care, Ted. You don’t have to tell me. I fucking know they don’t care.”
I don’t know when Ted started thinking it was such a good idea to state the obvious. I don’t remember him always doing that when John was around. When John was around, Ted was always telling him stories. Stories with morals and happy endings and shit like that. Lot of fucking good that ever did. John wasn’t even listening. Especially not after he got himself a new name. How the hell do you shorten a name like John? The letter ‘J,’ what the hell kind of name is that? That’s a stupid name. That’s just asking for trouble.
The ground rumbles under my feet. For a second it feels like the whole damn train station is coming down. “Wouldn’t that be something, Ted? Wouldn’t that be something to see?” But it’s just the train pulling in. The slick steel train all shiny and bright like a new can of air-freshener pulls up alongside the platform. Its doors open with a whoosh. I could have felt the cool air-conditioned air if it hadn’t been for all those people crowding ’round the doors. They think they’re so fucking important. They think every minute of their day is worth a hundred bucks. If I ask them, I know that’s what they’ll say. That is, if they’ll spend a whole minute on me. Fucking people think their time is worth money.
My old boss used to think his time was worth money. He even said that to me when I had to take time off to be with John, or ‘J’ as he made me call him by then. I knew I needed to be at work. I knew that more than my asshole boss did. He could take off work anytime he wanted and go to a resort in the Caribbean or some such shit like that. Not me. I miss one single day, and I’m fucked.
I hang back and wait for everybody to get on the train. I could go up there and push my way in so I can get a good seat, but Ted wouldn’t like that. It’s better if he doesn’t get jostled around too much anyway. When everybody finally sits down I find a seat by the door. It’s all full of newspaper, but at least it doesn’t look like a bum pissed on it or anything.
“Save my seat, Ted.” I laugh out loud at this because that’s what John used to say before he was ‘J.’ Before they shot him in the head. Before he became the kind of kid who goes by the name of ‘J’ and ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Always happens. Always does. He was just asking for trouble. Well, he got it, didn’t he?
“I’ll watch him for you,” a little kid says. He plops down in the seat next to Ted.
The kid is maybe seven or eight. His clothes fit him exactly, like his mom didn’t ever have any trouble keeping him in clothes that fit. That kid shouldn’t be on a train by himself. I look around to see if someone looks like his mother. A kid shouldn’t be on the train alone. A kid shouldn’t be on the train.
“Not my problem, Ted.” The kid has a mother to watch out for him. One of those rich mothers who never have to worry about how their kid will turn out. I did my best, and it didn’t do one fucking bit of good. Nothing I can do about it now.
“Alright, you watch him,” I say to the kid. I put Ted in the kid’s lap, and pat his brown furry head. He was a good friend to John. He always was.
I pull my phone out of my pocket as I walk down the aisle and back out the door. It’s a cheap phone like you get at the 7/11, but that doesn’t matter. It works. It gets the job done.
I step out on the platform and move down a ways as I’m punching in the numbers.
When I punch the last one the train’s doors swish closed. I think about that kid in there with Ted. And how Ted’s watching over him just like he used to watch over John before he was ‘J.’ Did that kid’s mother ever worry for one minute, one ‘hundred-dollar minute’ if she’d be able to keep her kid safe? I doubt it. She doesn’t have to. Everything is easy for her.
Fire rises up in my chest and burns like it’s going to kill me. What if Ted is right and it really is my fault, all the stuff that happened? That thought makes the fire burn even hotter. I don’t worry about that pain, though, because—BLAM!
The blast rattles the platform and shakes Union Station. For an instant, about as long as it takes for a bullet to exit a gun barrel, fly through the air, and blast through my boy’s skull, all motion is suspended.
And then, all at once, smoke and fire pour from the twisted metal of the train. Bits of metal, shards of glass, chunks of cement rain down on the passenger’s shiny clean hair and polished shoes and expensive briefcases or Gucci bags. They scream, all of them, like they have a fire burning inside.
“Glory, glory, glory, Ted. Now they know what it feels like to be me.”
A Little Crimson Stain
Joe McKinney
Donnie Ross knew the little girl was dead the instant he saw her picture in the attic of the Wilmington town home.
He gasped and stopped short. His gaze flicked to Cowen and Curtis, but neither man had noticed his reaction. Both were too busy fussing over a dusty porcelain tea set. Slowly, like two heavy wheels reluctant to turn, Donnie’s eyes moved back toward the dead girl’s picture. With her eyes closed, one hand nested in her lap, she might have been sleeping. But Donnie knew better. In her black, papery dress, her features as wooden and as doll-like with rigor mortis as the doll she was holding, she was most certainly dead. He swallowed hard. The picture disturbed him, even horrified him. And yet he was completely fascinated.
Postmortem photography such as this was common between 1845 and 1925, though this example was almost certainly from around 1905. It was very Edwardian. Her clothes helped to date her, but so too did some basic history. Until 1900, most middle class families dressed and prepared their loved ones for burial at home, an operation customarily performed in the front parlor. But as professional funeral homes opened up, this tradition became a mark of the provincial and the poor. So much so that in 1910 the Ladies’ Home Journal issued a decree that the front parlor should be forevermore referred to as the living room. Funeral establishments were then free to adopt the more familiar, and less threatening, attribution of funeral parlors.
Donnie, who made his living as an antiques acquisition agent for the auction house of Harris-Sadler, Inc., had once delivered much the same lesson on an episode of Antiques Roadshow, and the show’s producers loved it. So much so that they’d asked him back four times. But the dead girl’s picture meant that he was probably wasting his time here in this dusty attic. Photography used to be expensive, and death was one of the only occasions important enough to justify the expense. That meant they were a middle class commodity. And that, in turn, meant that everything in this attic was likely to be middle class, too. Donnie sighed. Another road trip wasted.
He scanned the rest of the attic, his practiced eye hoping to catch sight of something unusual as he stifled the need to cough. Intense morning sunlight poured in through the large, open window opposite him. White silky curtains billowed on the breeze. The dust clothes covering the furniture fluttered gently. Opening the window was a wasted effort, he thought. Airing the place out had done nothing for the dust. He was going to be miserable with sneezing and sniffling all the way back to Greensboro. He could already feel it coming on.
And then he saw the doll.
Donnie blinked in surprise. It was a “bebe” bisque doll, he could see that through the layers of dust covering it, but it wasn’t done in the usual French or German style. The clothes were simpler, more American. French and German dolls had round, cherub-like faces, with enormously round blue eyes that always reminded Donnie of the anime cartoons of Japan. From its clothes to its facial features to the eggshell fragility of its cream-colored cheeks, this doll, perhaps 24 inches high, was something else entirely, something uniquely American.
Dolls weren’t Donnie’s forte. His specialty was furniture. But he knew the basics, just like he knew the basics of sports memorabilia and landscape paintings and model trains and a hundred other species of attic treasures. Donnie knelt down next to the little figure and examined its fingers and the joints where the arm pieces met. These dolls usually showed signs of wear, nicks and cuts and gouges in the porcelain, and so the
value at auction could range from the ultra rare six figure examples to the modestly worn ones that might fetch a few hundred dollars on a lucky day. This one was very clean. It was better than clean, he corrected himself. It was amazing.
“Is that...?” Frank said, gasping.
Donnie glanced up at him. Frank put his hand over his mouth, stifling a giggle. Herb came over to stand by Frank’s side. Both men were wide-eyed.
“Oh my God,” Herb said. “I can barely breathe.”
“I know,” Frank said. He took Frank’s hand and squeezed.
Donnie shared their excitement. This was exactly what they’d hoped to find when Frank and Herb first contacted him about this house. The woman whose death had created the opportunity for them to search the attic was the daughter of the fin de siècle actress, Marianne Staples, who at one time had lived with the American doll maker, Christian Mueller. They had two daughters together. Mueller’s dolls rarely came up for auction. But when they did, they fetched high prices, even when the condition was less than ideal. If this was an authentic Mueller, Donnie figured, it could bring $130,000 at auction, easily.
Donnie removed a fingerprinting brush from his shirt pocket and gently cleaned away some of the dust from the doll’s face. Except for a little dark spot just below the left eye, the doll’s condition was marvelous.
He worked on the spot with the brush.
It wasn’t dust.
“Can you see Mueller’s mark?” Frank asked. “It should be just behind the ear, right at the hairline.”