Song for the Unraveling of the World

by Brian Evenson

  Had anything really happened? Perhaps he had dreamed it all.

  The ashes in the grate were still warm. The room, which had seemed to him so immaculate in his flashlight beam the night before, clearly wasn’t: the floor was dusty. There was litter and garbage as well, and a faint sour smell. The bearskin he had slept on was moth-eaten and tattered, as were the two chairs. The only place that was immaculate was the wall above the fireplace: there wasn’t a stain there after all.

  He quickly packed his duffel bag and made for the door. He wouldn’t come back, he told himself. He was, after all, just passing through. He’d never stayed in the same place more than a day or two, not since his father’s death.

  He searched the house, found nothing of value. The dead batteries still weren’t anywhere.

  It was late afternoon by the time he walked the half mile into town. The town was smaller than he’d hoped, the business district little more than one main street, with a diner, a general store with a lunch counter in back, a drugstore, a feed and grain supply, a hardware store. He spent some time in the hardware store. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough other customers and the clerk was paying too much attention for him to lift anything. So he left and walked down to the general store.

  He moved down the aisles, considering. One clerk here too, seemingly the identical twin of the fellow in the hardware store, albeit less attentive. In the candy aisle he slipped a pair of energy bars into his coat pocket as he bent down to pretend to examine something on the bottom shelf. Batteries were on an endcap and a little trickier to pocket unobserved. It took him some time to position his body between the display and the clerk in such a way as to allow him to surreptitiously slip a set down his pants.

  He wandered a little more, to throw off the scent. By the time he was turning again toward the front of the store, prepared to leave without buying anything, it was beginning to grow dark outside, snow just starting to fall. The clerk seemed to have doubled, having been joined by his brother or cousin or whatever the fuck he was from the hardware store next door. Unless there was a third one floating around. They were whispering back and forth, watching him.

  He briefly considered putting everything back. But he needed the food—it had been well over a day since he had had anything to eat—and he needed the batteries too, particularly if he was going to spend another night outdoors. He needed to be certain his flashlight wouldn’t go out. Matches, too, he thought, otherwise no fire. He found a box of them, slipped them into his duffel bag.

  The clerk from the hardware store was heading toward him, his lips a tight line. The other clerk, the one who actually worked there, had moved to block the front door.

  Lars headed quickly up the aisle and toward the back of the store. Behind him, the man closest to him gave a shout, and Lars burst into a run, darting through the door marked Employees Only. He swerved around boxes and metal shelves until he reached the back wall. He chose a direction and ran along it until he hit the door, a metal bar slung about waist level. He pushed on the bar and the door opened to a blast of cold and an alarm went off. And then he was out in an alley, the light fading, snow drifting slowly down. He ran, his feet slipping on the ice, hearing the sounds of the two clerks in pursuit.

  He ran until he no longer heard them, no longer felt them behind him. Then he stopped, listened. It was all but dark out now. He walked for a while, catching his breath. Where was he? He wasn’t sure exactly—on one of the roads leading out of town, fields on all sides. And then he heard something, a cry from behind him. He began to run again.

  And then in the darkness he heard voices even closer, as if he had not run away from the two men but toward them. He cut quickly off the road and into the field beside it—only it wasn’t a field but a house and its grounds. Almost a mansion from what he could see of it. And then he realized exactly what house it was.

  But he hadn’t been anywhere near it. How could that house be here?

  The voices drew closer. Would they see him if he stood motionless in the house’s yard? It was already dark, but was it dark enough? Would his face shine like a buoy in the darkness?

  It’s only a house, he tried to tell himself. Only an ordinary house. Nothing to worry about. Before the voices came any closer, he forced himself to walk toward it, find the loose boards covering the window, and squirm in.

  Later, he wondered if he had heard voices after all. Or, rather, wondered if the voices he had heard had been connected to the two clerks, if they were still chasing him. That was, he told himself as he waited in the house, the heart of the matter. Either the voices were the clerks’ or they weren’t. But if they weren’t, whose were they?

  I’ll just wait a little, he told himself once inside, just until I’m sure they’re gone. But each time he thought he was safe and made for the window, he heard them again. Or heard something like them, anyway.

  How much time passed? He wasn’t sure. Had he slept? He didn’t think so, although it was much darker in the house now, so dark he couldn’t see at all save for the pale lines marking the joins between the window boards.

  He got out his flashlight. It wasn’t wise, not if the two men were still outside looking for him, but he couldn’t help himself—he couldn’t stand the dark, not in here. He turned it on, pointed it at the ground.

  The room, he saw, looked exactly as it had the night before: clean, immaculately so, the floor freshly polished. As if it were not a deserted house after all. Having the flashlight on made him feel better. But seeing the impossibly polished floor made him feel worse.

  He listened. The voices came and went for a while and then dissolved into wind, a lonely sound with nothing human to it at all. He pulled on the boards to look out and see if they were still there—or tried to: the boards wouldn’t give. It was as if they had been nailed back in place since he had entered. He pulled at them, hammered on them with his flashlight. Disoriented, he looked around, tried the boards on the other window. They were all tightly nailed in place.

  He went to the front door, unlocked it, rattled the handle. It felt almost like something held the door shut from the other side. He hit it with his shoulder, hard, and then stopped. It had been padlocked, he remembered. Of course it wouldn’t open.

  All he needed was something to pry the boards away from the window. It didn’t matter how they had gotten stuck—it was not worth thinking about. All that mattered was to get them off and get out.

  But there was nothing in the room—the room was empty: he knew that already. He hit one of the boards with the butt of his flashlight. He stopped when its beam began to flicker. He couldn’t bear to be without a light. Not here. He needed to find something he could pry with. He would have to find something else.

  He traveled back and forth between the entrance hall and the hallway, always stopping shy of the door at the end of the hallway. He searched the kitchen, found nothing but empty cabinets. The dining room was empty too. He tried the doors to either side at the end of the passage, found them both still locked. He kept searching the same empty rooms and finding nothing. I won’t go, he was telling himself. Not in there.

  But in the end he did go in. In his mind he could see the poker, leaning in its stand right beside the fireplace. He could pry the boards off with it. He would rush in, take the poker, and leave. He would look at nothing, no one. He would think about nothing, no one. He would simply come and go. He wouldn’t stay.

  But when he finally opened the door, he found a fire already lit, roaring in the fireplace. He couldn’t help but see that. And he couldn’t help but see that spray of blood there again on the wall above the mantel, looking even larger than before. Just as he couldn’t help but see the creature in the chair, struggling into, or perhaps out of, its skin. The skin was on the bottom half of its body, but not the top half.

  It looked at him and perhaps smiled. Moved its face anyhow in a way that frightened him.

  “Back for more?” it said.

  “I was just leaving,” said Lar
s.

  The creature ignored him. “You wanted another story?” it said. “Is that what you came for?” And it reached out toward his face.

  It didn’t touch him, but his face still felt warm. He could not, he suddenly found, move.

  It reached down and wormed further into the sheath. What had not been a hand became a hand. It flexed the fingers experimentally, settling the skin deeper around them.

  “No story,” it said. “I haven’t eaten.”

  Lars felt the flashlight slip from his fingers. It struck the floor with a thunk and began to roll away, until the sound was abruptly cut off as if, suddenly, the flashlight was no longer there.

  “Well,” it said. “What am I to do with you?”

  The fire roared and then without warning fell silent; the rest of the room, too. In the silence, the creature came closer. First it touched Lars with its hand, then with the thing that was not a hand, and finally it wrapped what remained of the loose, empty skin around him and drew him in.

  Song for the Unraveling of the World

  Drago thought what he was hearing was his daughter singing through the thin wall. He lay in the narrow bed listening to the sound of her voice, trying to make out the song’s words. He could barely make out the melody, such as it was: off-key, meandering. He could make little sense of it. Soon, he was not so much listening as letting the sound lull him to sleep.

  But when he awoke the next morning and went to wake her, his daughter was gone. There was no sign she had slept in the room; the bed was neatly made. The blanket she had kept with her ever since her arrival was folded in the center of the bed in a neat square. The bed had been pulled away from the wall, and the objects in the room—clothing, toys, souvenirs, oddments—had been meticulously arranged to form a circle around it. It was nearly a perfect circle: how had a five-year-old child managed that?

  “Dani?” he called out, but there was no answer.

  The door to her bedroom was locked from the outside, precisely as he had left it the night before. He thought she must be hiding somewhere in the room, and so pretended they were playing hide-and-seek.

  “Where’s Dani?” he said in too deep of a voice. “Here I come to get Dani!”

  He waited for her giggling to give her away, but there was no giggling. She wasn’t under the bed and she wasn’t in the closet. Apart from those two places, there was no place in the room for her to hide.

  He couldn’t find her in the rest of the house either. Not in the kitchen, not in the laundry room, not in the living room. The bathrooms, too, were empty. He even looked in the basement, though he knew there was no way she would go down there willingly on her own. The front and back doors were still bolted shut and the windows all nailed shut as usual. Which meant she had to be in the house.

  Only, she wasn’t in the house.

  He went through the house again, meticulously this time, looking even in places that were too small for her. He opened the refrigerator; she wasn’t inside. Had she wedged herself behind it somehow? No. Had she somehow worked her way into the ventilation system? The vents’ cover plates were all screwed firmly in place. Was she crammed into a drawer? But even on the third pass—when, heart beating hard in his throat, he was looking less for her than for bits and pieces of her, some remnant of her, something to prove she had once existed (peering in jars, looking in the dank space behind the water heater, shining a flashlight down the garbage disposal)—she still wasn’t there.

  He sat down on the couch, stared at the dead screen of the television. He wasn’t sure what to do. She wasn’t there. Yet there was no way she could not be there. He kept expecting her to pop out at any moment, kept expecting himself to think of one more place he hadn’t thought to look—a neglected closet, some sort of semisecret room—and to find her there, curled in a tight ball, waiting for him.

  Dully, he reached out and switched the television on. The channel was nothing but static. He reached to adjust the coat-hanger antenna on top of the console and then stopped. Maybe she was there, in the static, he thought absurdly. That was somewhere he hadn’t checked. Maybe if he stared long enough, he would glimpse her.

  His eyes hurt. He was not sure how much time had passed. An hour, maybe two. It took an effort for him to reach out again and switch the set off. Even after it was off, he stared for a long time at the small dot of light in the center of the curved gray-green screen, and then at the dead screen itself.

  He had looked all through the house: she wasn’t there. He could look again. Or accept that somehow, unlikely as it seemed, she had managed to make her way out.

  As soon as this thought crossed his mind, he couldn’t understand what had been wrong with him. He shouldn’t still be sitting here. He should have gone out to look for her hours ago.

  Next to his home was a single-story house of gray brick, rusted white metal awnings above the windows. The door he knocked on was peeling and left flakes of faded yellow paint on his knuckles. He rubbed the back of his hand against his shirt, waited.

  He had to knock twice more before he heard footsteps and a clanking noise. A moment passed, then somebody opened the door. A bone-thin woman, probably midsixties, an oxygen cannula running into her nostrils. She kept the chain on the door, peering out through the gap.

  “I’m looking for my daughter,” Drago said.

  The woman just shook her head. He heard the chirp of oxygen being propulsed through the cannula. “Mister,” she said, “you come to the wrong house. I don’t got anybody’s daughter here.”

  He blocked the door with his foot before she could close it. “Let me explain,” he said.

  The woman tried a few times to close the door through his foot, then gave up. Lips tight, she waited.

  He explained that his daughter had gone missing. He described her: blond hair, five years old, a curved scar on her left temple—

  “How’d she get the scar?” the woman asked.

  He shook his head impatiently. “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “Have you seen her?”

  “Who are you again?” the woman asked.

  He told her his name. Or, rather, not his actual name: the one he’d been living under. “Tom Smith. I live next door. You must have seen us move in a few months back.”

  “That’s a weird name for a man with your accent,” she said.

  “I was adopted,” he lied. “Tom Smith,” he insisted.

  All the time, chirp, chirp, chirp.

  The woman shook her head. “I’ve seen through the windows a man moving around over there, next door. Could be you. But I ain’t never seen no little girl.”

  “I’m always with her,” Drago said. “If you saw me, you saw her, too.”

  “Don’t you have a job?” she asked.

  “That’s not important,” he said.

  “I mean, what do you do with her when you’re at work?”

  “I …,” said Drago. “Please, have you seen her or not?” He was almost shouting it.

  “I ain’t never seen no little girl like the one as described,” she said. “Not through the windows of that house over next door nor anywhere else near.”

  “O.K.,” said Drago. He took a deep breath. “If you do see her, will you let me know?”

  “Mister,” the woman said, “you get a five-year-old missing in a neighborhood even half so bad as this one you don’t go door to door letting on. What you got to do is call the police.”

  Thanking her, he quickly left.

  In principle, Drago agreed with her. What any normal person would do in a situation like this was call the police. But he couldn’t call the police. It just wasn’t possible.

  The neighbors on the other side weren’t home. The house directly across the street was deserted, the windows boarded over, the façade tagged with red spray paint. The front door was firmly shut and locked. He circled around the house, blowing on his hands to keep them warm, pulling at the boards to make sure they were all firmly in place. Even though they were, it didn’t mean anything
: anyone with a door key could come and go, so he went around behind the house and kicked the back door in.

  The house was dark inside, almost no light coming through the boarded-up windows. Using his phone as a flashlight, he walked through. It was deserted inside, no sign of squatters or habitation. He kept expecting to find his daughter’s dead body as he moved from room to room, but he didn’t find anything at all.

  He went back out, closing the back door as best he could, then crossed the street and got into his car.

  He drove slowly down the block, looking right and left, then did a u-turn and drove down it again. From there, he drove a rectangle around the block, then a larger rectangle around that, careful to drive down each and every street. He kept moving in wider and wider arcs, turning around his house, looking for his daughter, looking for Dani.

  Late afternoon found him at a rundown bar a half mile away, showing a photograph of his daughter to a trio of hapless old men. It was the only photograph he had, and it was a year out of date, although it still looked like her more or less. The men kept shaking their heads, refusing to hold the photo, hardly even speaking.

  He tried another bar, then another.

  “Maybe you should come back later, when more people are here,” said the bartender in the third one.

  “Sure,” Drago said. “But no harm in trying now, is there?”

  The bartender nodded and stared at the picture again. “Who used to be in the other half of it?” he asked.

  “Just me,” lied Drago. “I tore that half off. I wanted people to focus on my daughter.”

  The bartender looked at him, looked back at the photo, looked at him again. “Doesn’t look like your hand,” he said. “Looks more like a woman’s hand.”

  “I’m just trying to find my daughter,” Drago said. When the bartender looked him in the eyes he met the man’s gaze, held it until, at last, with a sigh, the fellow handed the photo back to him.