I was still thinking of Annie when I entered the vestibule of my apartment building, Number FORTY-SEVEN. Just inside the door were Shade and Shadow, Clay, Ashes, and Dust. Shade and Shadow smiled at me and took my arms. I could not tell the men apart, but one of them kicked me in the belly. I bent forward double and howled with the pain. The second of them pressed the back of his forearm against my brow to hold down my head; with his other hand he grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled and twisted until he had torn it out by the roots. He let me go; my scalp felt as if it were on fire. He had exposed the four wounds made by the terns nine years previous. Shade and Shadow still held me upright by my arms. I looked up. The third one took out a knife—exactly like the knife Howard showed me in his room—and released the blade.
I thought he would come at me, but he remained still.
Shade and Shadow pushed me toward him.
He raised the knife above my head and brought it down on the newly denuded spot on my scalp. He pressed it in, and though I felt the pressure, I felt no additional pain. He slowly drew the point of the knife down the side of my head, parting the hair and the skin beneath, just behind my ear, down along the side of my neck. Then, turning his wrist, he slipped the edge of the knife neatly beneath the collar of my shirt and pushed it along the line of my shoulder. He withdrew the knife and wiped the bloody blade on the sleeve of my jacket. Then he pressed the point of the knife slowly through the lapel of my suit jacket. Eventually I felt the point of it against the skin of my shoulder. I felt it pierce the skin. I felt the blood flow over my breast inside my shirt.
“Dust,” I said, guessing.
He nodded.
Dust brought the blade of the knife down slowly, not as if he was deliberately cutting, but rather as if the handle were simply too heavy for him and he were allowing it to fall of its own weight. It cut through my suit jacket, my shirt, my undershirt, my skin, and the muscles of my chest.
He cut all the way down from my shoulder to my ankle.
My trousers and belt were sliced through and would have fallen off me had not Shade and Shadow pressed my elbows against my waist to hold them in place.
Dust knelt before me and sliced open my shoe from tongue to toe. My black cotton sock inside sagged apart. The sole of the shoe filled with the blood from my lacerated foot.
I did not doubt this action was to be repeated on the right side of my body.
It was not. Dust wiped the blade of his knife on the cuff of my split trousers, replaced it in its sheath and slipped it into his pocket again. Ashes and Clay had already left. Shade and Shadow pushed me forward and I fell against the stairs. By the time I had raised myself, they all were gone.
For the first time since I had come to live in Number FORTY-SEVEN, I took the elevator up. I leaned against the wall inside for support. When the elevator came to rest at my floor and I pulled away, I found that I had left a long narrow line of blood there, from the height of my head all the way down to the tiled floor of the elevator.
The elevator door opened but I did not get out. I remained behind the cast-iron grating, staring at this narrow line of blood. I stared, because something extraordinary had occurred.
The blood was red.
It was a deep crimson, very near a vermilion.
Even in the dim light provided by the low-watt yellow bulb embedded in the ceiling of the elevator, the color of my blood pulsated in its intensity.
I had experienced no such perception of color since the day, the hour, the very minute I was attacked by the terns in their nesting ground.
In nine years I had seen no color such as the color of my blood upon the wall of the elevator.
I peered up at the yellow light to see if it, too, were different.
The bulb was the color of dense morning urine, but it shone.
I leaned against the walls of the elevator and peered at them. I could make out flecks of bright purple, bright blue, bright orange, mere stains and chips and idle brushings, but they were magical in my long-deprived eyes.
I dreaded leaving the elevator. What if the ability to appreciate these intensities of colors was confined to this small space? What if outside it, I returned to my drab perception of grays and whites and blacks?
That was, however, nonsense. It could not be so. I had just been beaten, and that beating restored to its proper sphere whatever it was the attack of the terns had knocked ajar in my head. My sight was repaired. I wondered how my apartment would appear to my new eyes.
Trembling, I pushed aside the grating. I stepped outside into the hallway and withdrew my key from my pocket. This was a delicate operation, since with one hand I must hold up my trousers, which were in every danger of tumbling down around my feet. And I limped for the injury done my foot. I still bled. But what mattered these things when the farther reaches of my sight had been restored to me?
I blessed the winged hourglass in my soul.
The elevator grate sprang shut. The mechanism of the elevator was roused into action by some other tenant on some other floor. It began to descend with a loud grating whirr.
In that same instant, the bright color that had flooded my brain began to fade.
I cried out, “No!” and threw my hands over my eyes.
I fell forward onto the floor, weeping. I crawled toward the door of my flat, leaving my shredded trousers and a trail of blood behind.
I pulled myself up along the doorjamb. The knob of the door and the keyhole beneath it were blurs behind a web of darkness that was growing thicker in every strand over my accursed eyes.
Not only my perception of color, but my very sight itself failed as I inched upward.
By the time I got the keys into the locks and had pushed open the door and stumbled headlong into the first narrow corridor of my flat, I was wholly blind.
I sat for a long while with my back against the door, wondering what to do. I may have slept, for at some point I seemed to rouse myself.
I rose, pushing myself up along the plane of the door. Unthinkingly and out of sighted habit, I spun the combination lock that was on the inside.
I now was locked inside the apartment. I had no way of getting out for I could not see the numbers on the lock. I had no telephone with which to call for assistance, and had I had a telephone, there would have been no one to call. It was no comfort to think that if worse came to worst—and it already had, I considered ruefully—I might beat upon the walls and summon my neighbors. For my nearest neighbors were madmen. I might call out of my windows, but I was certain that some member of the gang would be on watch, and it would be Shade or Shadow, Clay, Ashes, or Dust alone who came to my assistance.
I resisted an impulse to panic. I felt my way to the bathroom, removed my clothing, and climbed into the bathtub. The stinging nettles of the shower water would have been exquisite torture on my long threadlike wound.
I lay beneath the warm water and shook my body slightly. The seeping blood from my wound swirled away into the bath—I could taste and smell it in the water.
I let the water flow out of the tub. I filled it again. I carefully soaped the wound and probed every inch of the narrow trench made by Dust’s knife. I pressed my fingers in that tender furrow between the hedges of flesh that had been raised on either side. It seemed, at least, no longer to bleed.
I rose from the bath and went to the medicine cabinet. I fumbled among the bottles there until I found one that was square and the correct size as I remembered it. I removed the top and sniffed it—there was no mistaking the stink of merthiolate. Holding the closed bottle tightly in one fist, I felt my way to the living room. I lay down upon the sofa, still naked, and propped the bottle on my chest. I unscrewed the cap and methodically brushed the stinging liquid into the wound, beginning at the top of my head and proceeding all the way down to my foot.
I flinched and hissed through my teeth at the pain.
Dust had done a careful job, I had found, and had connected the three separate incisions into a single long
line, from the crown of my head to the extremity of my left foot.
When I was done, I lay still from the exhaustion brought about by so much tension in my bracing against the pain.
I slept I think, just as I lay. When I woke, the long wound along my body throbbed even more loudly than before, but I felt that I now had it under my control.
I was hungry, but the kitchen was sealed and empty anyway. I could not get out the front door, and the back door—even if I could have got to it—was nailed shut. And even had I reached the street, how would I, so recently blind, have maneuvered myself?
I wandered the flat naked, wondering how I should occupy my time.
I wondered, in fact, how much time I had left to occupy.
I thought about resuming my regimen of cleaning, but this I found, after only a few moments of selecting the proper cloths by touch, hadn’t its former charms.
I ended up sitting at the dining room table. I began putting the gilded French clock back together again.
This was necessarily a slow operation, as I was blind and must not only remember, in reverse sequence, exactly how the thing was taken apart, but must find the pieces by touch. To translate a visual memory into a tactile contemporaneity is a tricky task. Yet by dint of patience and a refusal to consider the helplessness of my lot, I proceeded.
The hours passed. So much I could tell by the faint chiming of a church bell in the distance. I had never, in my sighted days, heard it. I could tell when the night had ended and the morning begun by the increase in temperature inside the apartment and the rise in traffic on the street outside.
As I worked with the clock, I considered my present predicament. I analyzed not so much my feelings, as what I felt. At the same time that I felt completely empty, empty of all desire and all regret, I felt infused with an intense and searching calmness, like a philosopher, all alone, who thinks in search of a thought.
I wondered, as I walked naked about the dining room table, pressing my thumbs against each of the springs, gears, and cogs in their serried ranks in search of the next and only correct piece, if I actually even existed. It occurred to me, in my blindness, that all along, it had not been the vindication of my perfection but rather the mere destruction of Marta that had been of paramount importance to the world.
That is to say, the justification for my birth, my decades of upbringing, education, housing, and sustenance, had been that one day I would conceive a plan to do away with
MARTA ALEKSANDROVNA BLYUSHKINA
It was she, therefore, who had been of real significance. I didn’t understand this, I wasn’t certain I believed it, but I had to admit the possibility of its validity. In any case, if it were so, then once Marta was dead, my duty—my very raison d’être—was finished. There was no longer any justification for my existence.
And perhaps I did not, after all, exist. Perhaps I lay dead in the lobby downstairs, my corpse awaiting discovery. An oily black smudge on the plaster wall there marked the egress of my soul.
These tactile sensations were merely the occult residue of my very nearly indomitable being. They would fade as I continued my delicate work, and the clock never be whole again.
These and other such thoughts occupied me at the dining room table. The ranks of the parts of the clock’s mechanism became depleted. The hours were counted off by the distant church chimes. That day faded into night again.
I no longer fretted.
It did not matter that I had not eaten in much more than twenty-four hours, that possibly my wounds were infected, that—as I had not had a visitor in more than three years—it was unlikely anyone would chance by now to rescue me in my helpless condition. It was no longer even of any concern to me whether I existed or not.
When it came down to it, my only thought was for the clock.
When I ran my thumb over its face, I could make out the raised Roman numerals and the legend:
TEMPUS FUGIT
It was late in the night when I finished the clock. I had been blind, I calculated, twenty-seven hours. I am, of course, twenty-seven, but the congruence didn’t seem of overwhelming significance. In those twenty-seven hours, I had neither eaten, nor drunk, nor relieved myself. It was possible I had slept or dreamed, but I could not remember with any certainty.
I walked from the dining room table to the mantel and back again, memorizing the path. Then I took up the clock carefully and carried it to the mantel. I set it in its place.
Sighing I sat down on the couch and turned my head that way. My sightless eyes gazed with rapture at the restored clock.
I wondered what I should do next.
Nothing else in the apartment wanted repair.
On an impulse I rose and went to the front door. I decided to play with the combination lock just to see if I could open it by some sixth sense.
It is set, as I have mentioned, at 1/3/12, the month/day/hour of my birth.
I turned the lock once, twice, thrice.
It slipped apart in my hand.
At that same moment, the gilded clock on the mantel resumed its ticking.
Before I had even time to grasp this small, doubled miracle, the clock was chiming the twenty-seventh hour of my sightlessness.
I wept, and as I wept the miracle turned tri-partite.
My tears washed away my blindness.
Not only was my sight restored, but I was no longer deprived of color.
I saw that, in reality, the walls of the hallway were a dim green. I exalted in the subtlety of that green. The carpet was a faded gold. I rejoiced that I could gauge such a diminution of intensity. I gazed down at my naked, trembling body. The wound along the left side of my body was a pale livid red. The broken flesh was a mottled pink. My unscarred nipple was a creamy brown, the hairs around it were lightly tinged with yellow.
Marta was dead, and Marta—I understood now—had paid the price of my redemption.
I blessed her all unconscious in my heart.
The clock continued to tick upon the mantel.
I shut the door to the hallway and turned back to my apartment. I rushed room to room, gazing at everything with my new eyes. Every object, every inch of wall and floor and ceiling was different and new to me for its acquisition of color. Even the very air was suffused with dye.
I came back to the clock at last. I stared at its gleaming gilded case, understanding for the first time why mankind lusted so after gold.
I raised my eyes in ecstasy—and realized that my self-portrait was missing.
In its place, chalked on the patterned paper there, was a large winged hourglass and beneath the hourglass, the legend
TEMPUS FUGIT
I was no longer afraid. The gang had only been a part of my redemption. The wound that had opened up the left side of my body had been necessary to my restoration.
I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror.
If the self-portrait was missing, perhaps I, too, was no longer there.
I wasn’t gone. I looked back at myself out of the glass.
My ordeal had left me haggard. The wound along the left side of my head throbbed with the pulse of my heart.
I gazed at myself for a long while.
I said to myself aloud:
What’s next?
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This work of fiction is not a true story. The episodes, though perhaps in some cases based on fact, have been altered beyond the recognition of even those individuals intimately involved in the original incidents. The behavior of the terns in Chapter 2 is, however, consistent with the most recent, though yet unpublished, studies of the nesting habits of shore birds.
Also, it has recently come to my attention that there are at least three other writers publishing under the name Michael McDowell. I would like to make it clear that I am none of them.
MMM
Thanksgiving
Mystic Street
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael McDowell was born in 1950 in Enterprise
, Alabama and attended public schools in southern Alabama until1968. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in English from Harvard, and in 1978 he was awarded his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Brandeis.
His seventh novel written and first to be sold, The Amulet, was published in 1979 and would be followed by over thirty additional volumes of fiction written under his own name or the pseudonyms Nathan Aldyne, Axel Young, Mike McCray, and Preston MacAdam. His notable works include the Southern Gothic horror novels Cold Moon Over Babylon (1980) and The Elementals (1981), the serial novel Blackwater (1983), which was first published in a series of six paperback volumes, and the trilogy of “Jack & Susan” books.
By 1985 McDowell was writing screenplays for television, including episodes for a number of anthology series such as Tales from the Darkside, Amazing Stories, Tales from the Crypt, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He went on to write the screenplays for Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988) and The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), as well as the script forThinner (1996). McDowell died in 1999 from AIDS-related illness. Tabitha King, wife of author Stephen King, completed an unfinished McDowell novel, Candles Burning, which was published in 2006.*
Harry O. Morris lives in New Mexico. He works in the basement and seldom leaves the house. He also has many mannequins.
* Michael McDowell’s bio in the original printings of Toplin read: “Michael McDowell lives in Massachusetts. He writes in the mornings and spends the rest of the day looking out the window in hope that something interesting will happen. He collects photographs of corpses.
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