There’s static, and then a voice—not Morgan’s, but clearer, maybe British?—droning in muffled tones.
“I WAS sick, sick unto death, with that long agony, and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence, the dread sentence of death, was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of REVOLUTION, perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill-wheel...”
“I thought it was just right,” Morgan says in the background, causing the recorded words to jumble and tilt. “Don’t worry if you don’t catch the beginning—I’ve got it on continuous play. It’s about a pit. And now you’re in a pit, asshole, ‘cause you couldn’t keep your crying baby mouth shut. No pendulum in there, but hell, you got a spider—who needs a pendulum when you got one of them crawling around, slippin’ up your pants leg, or down your collar.”
Morgan laughs again, slams his hand against the cabinet door, making Johnson’s heart leap in shock, slam his head painfully back into the pipe again. Christ. His leg itches. His arm itches. The voice drones on...
“At first they wore the aspect of charity, and seemed white slender angels who would save me: but then all at once there came a most deadly nausea over my spirit, and I felt every fibre in my frame thrill, as if I had touched the wire of a galvanic battery, while the angel forms became meaningless spectres, with heads of flame, and I saw that from them there would be no help.”
Johnson’s pulse quickens steadily, pounding the blood through his neck and down his arm. His chest is compressed by the position he’s in, trying to avoid the door and the spider—and the words. He tries to scream, but has no breath in his lungs. His thoughts swim in swirling circles, as if sliding into the drain behind his head.
Pit, he thinks. Sure, but what’s a pendulum?
Then the unmistakable tickle of several tiny, hairy legs on his left hand. His breath catches, but he doesn’t scream, doesn’t utter so much as a peep. Just holds his breath, waits for the spider to cross over his hand.
But it doesn’t.
It angles up toward his wrist and starts crawling up his arm.
Sweat pops out on Johnson’s forehead. He licks his lips. Almost unaware of the action, he realizes his right hand is scavenging around the bottom of the sink cabinet, looking for something to crush the spider with. But, of course, there’s nothing—all the bug killer, dishtowels, and drain cleaner having been taken out years ago to make this a proper place of punishment.
The British man on the recording outside carries on, but the words lose all cohesion in Johnson’s mind. They become nothing more than bumbling black flies, banging themselves about inside his head like it’s a lampshade.
The spider crawls farther up Johnson’s arm, nearing his elbow. It is tentative, exploring new ground for the first time.
Sweat slides down Johnson’s cheeks, curves around his lips, drips from his chin onto his knees.
His right hand continues searching for something with which to kill the spider, pressing against the kitchen wall, pushing under tiny cracks at the bottom of the sides of the sink cabinet, testing every square inch for anything at all.
Nothing but flat surfaces or tiny bits of crumbled brick. The occasional piece of something gritty, something slimy. Nothing of any use to flatten a spider.
Crush it with your hand, idiot! Pig’s voice, intrusive, as always.
The thought disgusts Johnson. He imagines his right hand lifting from the bottom of the sink cabinet, moving in slow motion, palm open, firm, ready to squash. Moving, moving, hovering over the hairy black intruder. Then, crunch and splat!
Dead. Smeared all over his arm, just above the elbow.
Johnson shudders, shakes his head, tries to shake the thought out. No way. I can’t do it. Not in a million years.
Weakling, says Pig. Like me. Your brother and Mother will keep you down forever. You’re exactly where you deserve to be, you little shit. Stuffed under a sink. Hidden away. Left to rot, bitten by spiders and drowned in your own cowardly sweat, left to just fucking —
And then Johnson’s right hand stumbles across something solid, raised. His fingers trace its edges.
A hinge.
His hand scuttles across the bottom of the cabinet, searching, searching...
And there is another hinge.
Johnson’s fingers trace a rough square in the floor. The spider moves up, closer to his head. Johnson’s hand finds a latch between the two hinges. He pulls on it frantically, yanks this way and that. There’s rust on it; some of it crumbles between his fingers.
The spider trundles up onto Johnson’s shoulder.
The latch gives way.
Johnson pulls up hard on the latch, trying to keep the left side of his body as still as possible. The trapdoor comes up, whaps against the back of the sink cabinet. Johnson prays no one hears it.
They hear everything, retard, Pig says. You know that. Better than anyone else, you know that: They hear everything. They’re coming, they’re coming...
Stale air wafts up from the trapdoor, swims around Johnson’s head. His nostrils flare. Spider legs tickle his neck—
And that’s all he can take.
His right hand comes across, swats the furry black creature from his neck, then quickly shuffles over to the trapdoor’s opening.
No time to look down, see what’s inside. He imagines the spider, angry now, intent on revenge, wanting to scurry inside Johnson’s mouth, bite his tongue, lay eggs in his cheeks, spin webs in his brain.
He’s coming, son, Pig says, coming right now. He sees you, wants to get inside you, wants to-
Johnson’s legs slip over the sides of the trapdoor, his hands supporting his weight behind him.
Spider legs trundle across one of his hands again. He flinches, pulls his hand up off the floor. He loses his balance, butt sliding off the edge of the trapdoor—
And the rest of his body follows.
As Johnson is enveloped in darkness, the British man’s voice says, “The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.”
Johnson’s mind swirls as he falls. He thinks he might land in the basement, he thinks he might land hard on the concrete, crack open his skull and leak his web-spun brains onto the dirt floor beneath. Maybe he’ll land somewhere in between, some hidden level of the house, because houses like this have secrets.
There are no secrets, Pig says inside Johnson’s head.
Johnson’s body continues to spin, fall, drop farther—so far and for so long, surely it’s impossible. He has to land sometime. The house is only so big.
Then Johnson’s body thumps hard against something soft. Soft enough that his brains stay in his head, his bones do not break, and his body does not crack and crumble to pieces inside his skin.
No secrets, Pig says. Only voices you haven’t heard.
• • •
Johnson sits up slowly. He sees nothing and tries to open his eyes again, as though he might be staring with them closed, having just forgotten to flip up the lids. Nothing. There is darkness, with which he is familiar, darkness like the cabinet beneath the sink, darkness like the basement. But this is not darkness; this is absolute. This is nothing at all.
He is sitting on something soft, yielding, like carpet, but when he presses his palms into it, they find a moist, sticky surface, and the pungent aroma of rotting vegetation rises where his fingers press too deeply. It stinks. He recognizes the scent of the clotted old drain with its mummy-wrap of duct tape, but there is more. It goes deeper, a drain within a drain so full of the hair and excrement and detritus of—something—that it is difficult to breathe. Not because the air is bad, but because the images the scent brings to the surface of his mind are better suited to screaming nightmares than they are to dark nothingness. Or spiders.
He raises his arms slo
wly, reaching out to either side, but touches nothing. Then overhead. Again, nothing. Very slowly, his head already pounding from the bruise left by the flying Tonka truck earlier, he rolls to his knees and, hands over his head in case the ceiling is near, he rises. Something silky brushes against his hand, and he lurches to the side, crying out.
The sound is swallowed. Barely, he keeps his balance. He touches no walls.
Mother will see that I’m gone, he thinks. Morgan will see, too. They’ll look for me.
Johnson is not comforted.
He steps forward. One pace. Another. He holds his hands out before him, moving very slowly, and at last, he comes to a wall. It is cold, damp stone. More of the sticky, clinging stuff that makes him think of a rotting jungle squishes between his fingers, and the scent, once again, overwhelms him.
He hears something, stands completely still. It’s far away and so quiet that it might be a whisper in his head. Not like Pig, though. A murmur. Words slurring and blurring and silent again, the entire process so swift he cannot be certain there was anything at all.
Johnson turns, so the wall is to his back, but he doesn’t lean into it—can’t stand the thought of that gook, whatever it is, soaking his pants and shirt.
Johnson starts forward again, hands in front, shuffling into nothing. He hears the whispered murmuring again, but there are still no words. Sweat beads on his forehead and slides down the back of his neck. He feels his shirt matting to his back, and thinks of the rotting glop on the wall. He shudders, remembers the spider, and stops. Did it fall? Is it still under the sink, cheerfully building a web from the gray drain glop to the dusty trap door, filling the void?
He shuffles forward again, less careful. He wants to feel another wall, anything to make this nothing into something, a shape he can imagine, a world with substance. Johnson isn’t thinking, just walking, and about ten steps from the wall at his back, his shoelace, which loosened somewhere during the fall, whips around and catches beneath the shoe on his other foot. He drags his leg forward. It doesn’t come immediately, hung on the pressure of his weight and balance. Then it shoots free as he forces his leg to move. With a lurch, he tumbles forward, arms flailing, crashing back to the slimy stone floor. Both knees are bruised, and his hands are stuck in the muck. He howls in surprise, then stops.
The sound is louder than it should be, and when he closes his mouth, it returns in an echo.
“Fuck,” he whispers. He has fallen prostrate on the floor, and his nose should be flattened. It is not. His chest rests on solid stone, but his face? There is nothing beneath his face. Damp, chilled air rises to tease the strands of hair around his ears. His eyes water from the stench. A hole. A fucking hole, and if he had “grown up,” like Morgan was always screaming at him, learned to “fucking tie your shoes, you little moron,” like he’d been instructed, he would be in that hole. Tears form at the corners of his eyes, and he snaps the lids shut, crushing the small droplets, sending them falling into darkness.
You never learn, Pig says dryly.
Carefully, Johnson feels the floor in front of him, finds the lip of what might have been the last step of his life. He is safely back, not in danger of overbalancing or sliding in. That confirmed, he slaps his hands over his ears.
You never learn and you’ll always end up this way, in the dark, in the basement, Pig’s little piglet, bleating whatever Morgan tells you but oh-so-quietly so Mother won’t hear and all the time worrying about some fucking spider, or some fucking toy truck, or some fucking...
“Shut up!” Johnson screams. The sound is deafening, but his chest contracts at how swiftly it is swallowed, drawn into the pit below and sucked into damp, slimy walls. All the force of his lungs and he only gets a moment’s respite from the drone.
...forever and ever, a-fucking-men, Pig concludes.
Johnson scrabbles back toward the wall. He knows the wall is solid, and in the utter darkness, he needs that solidity. Once there, he scuttles spider-like to his left. Slowly, not daring to move even a single foot at one time with the possibility of the floor dropping away, or hitting some smooth, slick incline that will tumble him downward again.
There are no more holes. Johnson slides and scuttles, scrapes and drags his way along the wall until he comes up against something solid. He reaches out tentatively, runs his hands over the object and finds a chair. Without further thought, he slips up into the chair and curls into a tiny ball. Something skitters off to one side—or was that imagination? Did his nose whistle, or were there furtive footsteps? Shuddering, he curls tighter and, with nothing left to do and no strength with which to do it, he passes into a deeper darkness.
• • •
When he wakes up, there’s something in his lap.
In his sleep, his legs slipped out from under him so that his back is against the little wooden chair he’s in, his legs askew, but his feet on the ground.
He pulls himself into a proper sitting position, tentatively touches the thing in his lap. Soft, leathery. Squishy inside. His stomach lurches because he knows what it is. One of Mother’s pigs—stitched together sections of leather formed into the rough shape of a pig, and containing... whatever Mother wants to put inside. Johnson is never quite sure what’s inside, but he remembers once examining one of Mother’s creations closely when she and Morgan were having a heated argument about something Pig had done, and finding the stitches moist and red.
Moist and red, son, that’s right, Pig says. And Johnson feels his father’s dead grin inside his head.
“But where’d it come from?” Johnson whispers, rubbing his eyes.
Not even Pig answers that one.
It’s still as dark as before, but now there’s a slight chill coming from somewhere in front of Johnson. Probably from that hole, he thinks. He sniffs twice, expecting to smell the rot of death, or at least some kind of foul stench, but there’s no odor. The scent is crisp, hard to place, but not unpleasant at all. The draft increases, drying Johnson’s sweaty forehead and hair. He inhales more deeply, closing his eyes.
The air clears Johnson’s mind. Thoughts of the spider, of Pig’s incessant voice, of Morgan and Mother, dwindle to a dull ache somewhere in the back of his mind. It’s somehow not as important now, with this fresh air blowing, cleansing him.
Johnson clutches the stitched-together leather pig in his lap, barely conscious of the act.
This is a perfect time for Pig to chime in, shatter Johnson’s optimism, crush him down, reduce him to the shadow of his father that Pig constantly tells him he is. But there’s no sound save for the breeze.
Johnson stands up carefully, leaves the leather pig behind him, on the chair, puts his hands out in front of him, wanting to get just a little closer to the source of this wonderful scent. He takes one step, then another, feeling with his toes as he goes. Then... yes, there it is, the gap. The wind blows up his right pant leg. He steps back, leans down, puts his hands behind him on the sticky ground, and sits in a cross-legged position near the lip of the hole.
There is light coming from the hole. Just a glimmer at first, then softening to a dull brown gleam as it rises. The glow shines off the sides of the hole. Johnson now sees that the hole is bigger than he initially thought. It’s roughly the size of a man. A big man.
The light rises higher and, as it nears the rim of the hole, it glints off something close to Johnson’s left knee. He looks down and sees his Tonka truck, blood still wet on its cab. Not entirely sure why, Johnson stands quickly with the truck in one hand, steps back to the chair where the leather pig is, sets the truck down beside it. He returns to his cross-legged position at the edge of the hole, waits for the light. Waits for whatever it brings. Because whatever it is, it’s got to be better than this stifling, sickening darkness.
Abruptly, the wind stops blowing. Johnson peers over the lip of the hole, sees something large, swinging, silver. His eyes widen and he gains his feet, shuffles back to the chair, picks up the truck and pig, sits down with them in his lap.
One hand for each symbol of his family’s hatred for him. Heart in his mouth, beating madly.
The thing in the hole hovers, floating upward, attached to nothing. It clears the lip and continues rising, swinging slowly back and forth.
Pendulum, Pig says in Johnson’s head.
But Johnson doesn’t care what it’s called. He wants the breeze to blow again. He wants that feeling back. His hands grip the truck and pig tightly.
What does it want? Johnson thinks.
Why do you think it wants anything at all, Johnson? Pig says, and there’s a sliver of genuine fatherhood in his voice this time. Unexpected and, for that reason, unwelcome.
The pendulum swings farther up out of the hole. When its blade rises above the hole’s lip, the arc slows and widens. The dim brown-yellow light glows from the blade. He sees the outline through the light, a darker shadow. Johnson thinks of mosquitoes trapped in amber.
Or little boys trapped in deep, dark holes, Pig says.
Johnson ignores him, eyes glued to the swinging blade. The breeze returns, but not as heavy as before. Puffs instead, in time with the arc of the blade.
And now something else rising from the hole.
I’m coming, son. I’m coming...
No, Johnson thinks. Not now. He clenches his truck tighter, mashes the leather pig’s innards together, squeezing red glop out of its stitching. I don’t want to see you again. Not like this.
But the pendulum floats higher, makes way for what comes after—Johnson’s father. Pig. Dead of an idiocy fabricated by Mother and Morgan, who had stolen his name and made him what he became. Who had killed him. Who had pounded nails into his eyes, draining the life from him as Johnson watched in tearful silence.
The disease is strong, son. Their disease. It’s contagious, but only if you have a mind to catch it.
Johnson closes his eyes, wishing away the pendulum, wishing away the dark slab of concrete rising up out of the fresh-smelling hole. This coffin-sized hole that should smell like death, but does not.
Tears slip out of Johnson’s eyes. He hugs the truck and the little leather pig to his chest. Go away, dad. I tried to save you. At least I tried. I helped you more than you ever tried to help me. I hate you for being weak. I don’t want to see you. I don’t—
My Eyes Are Nailed But Still I See Page 7