Apex Magazine - January 2017

by Apex Publications

  He stares at the ominous circular grill directly over his head for several seconds before his addled brain tells him it’s in fact the cover over a drain set in a concrete floor. Though his eyes tell him he must be hanging upside down, he feels no corresponding upset of balance. When he tries to bend his neck, he learns something doesn’t work right. It’s like his muscles find no spine to pull or push against, but his gaze swivels enough to see a water heater, a tool bench, saws and hammers hanging on a wall-mounted peg board.

  Somewhere, perhaps in another room, the sound of a tea kettle boiling to a whistle, quickly subsiding as a hand removes it from the stove.

  He doesn’t know if he should call out or keep quiet. He tries to look up at the ceiling, find out what the hell he’s hanging from, but he can’t make himself bend. His back, his arms, his legs—none of these things cooperate.

  Unbidden he remembers something awkward, something awful. Hanging upside-down in a smoke-filled bedroom, his mountain of a father dangling him, crushing both ankles together in a sandpaper-rough hand. Lance was tiny then, so tiny, and when his father used his free hand to punch him in the back, the fist that struck him was almost as wide as he was. He wailed like a siren, wailed red-faced at his momma sitting on the bed, who took the cigarette out of her mouth to say, Hit him again! The impact felt like it cracked him in half, and when he screamed his momma yelled, Shut him up! Again!

  When the mist clears from his eyes he connects with a start that he’s in a utility room, just a plain old utility room like any you’d find in the houses all through this neighborhood where he’s lived all his life. Those blocky things in the darkness beneath the lowered shade are just a washer and dryer, those jars on the shelves across from him hold nothing more than jam and canned beans.

  A door opens somewhere he can’t see, and the overhead light clicks on. Someone pads into the room. Lance tries again to turn his head, can’t. Then he tries to call out, but he can only push out air, no matter what he tries to say, Hey or Help me down or Who are you or You fucker.

  Striped athlete’s socks, no shoes, slender legs covered in blond fuzz, white boxers, the bottom hem of a black T-shirt. A hand gripping a large silver stovetop kettle, thumb fiddling with the lever that controls the lid over the spout, making it open and snap shut. The bastard stands that way, the spout not inches from Lance’s nose, flicking the lid open and shut, muttering something Lance can’t quite hear.

  His course of action ought to be a no-brainer. Knock that kettle away, grab hold of the little fuck however he can with his own massive hands, twist with arms thick as his puny captor’s legs, hell, tear the freak’s balls off if that’s what it takes, make him weep, make him beg, make him Let me down!

  But he does nothing of the sort—the most he manages to do is sort of tremble in place.

  Now is when it occurs to him to be afraid.

  And even that feels all wrong. His heart should be freaking in its ribcage like an inmate with the DTs. Instead he feels an unnatural and sickening chill, like ice is cracking underneath his chin.

  The guy bends down to look him in the eye. It’s Shaun, staring with wild green eyes. His hair is matted, bird’s-nest crazy, as if he hasn’t slept in years. And there’s something wrong with his face, not just that the pussy’s been crying, but his skin looks like it’s straining, on the verge of bursting.

  It isn’t enough, he says. Don’t try to tell me it’s enough. It isn’t enough. He deserves so much worse. So much worse than what we can do. Don’t tell me it’s enough. Don’t tell me what to fucking do, I want this, I want this.

  He grabs Lance by the hair and lifts his head. Lance’s head and shoulders shouldn’t be able to bend and fold the way that they do.

  His eyes tell him things. He doesn’t understand or accept them.

  His eyes show him that he’s hanging from nothing more substantial than clothesline strung from the bare ceiling rafters. Something is wrong with his skin. It’s loose, neither stretched by muscle nor distended by belly fat. His eyes tell him he has no arms—they’re simply not there. His body truncates at the waist, no cock, no legs. Odd black pins clip him to the clothesline. If his eyes are to be believed, he’s hanging like a pillowcase of empty hide in the drug addict’s basement.

  For a second, his captor looks him in the eye, face peeling like wet wallpaper.

  The kid lets him go, and his head flops down so he’s staring at the drain again.

  Shaun walks around him, still talking. So he never did this. That makes me an innovator. Taking things to the next level. Shaun stops behind him, tugs at him, tugs at his back, where he can’t defend himself.

  Now Lance is really struggling to form words, saying Don’t, don’t, Daddy don’t…

  Tell me if this hurts, the addict says.

  Then the water sluices in, poured through the opening at his waist, scalding him from the inside out. It burns worse than a hand on the burner, than a blowtorch in the throat, gushing through his empty insides, and he screams and screams, but only water pours out, searing his tongue, searing his nostrils, cooking his eyes like eggs as it leaks out through the corners of his eyelids.

  stitching

  You can’t control the whole, but you can control its pieces. You can break off parts, you can make them long for a voice to scream with. You’ve never loved loss of control so much, you’re high on it, laughing as the tornado lifts you.

  Surely a sin eater can also sin. You say it to yourself, over and over, despite the whispers of alarm deep within. Eventually all those whispers shift along the spectrum, no longer voices in unison, no one could understand their thousandfold overlapping syllables, especially not you.

  ninth square

  Maria has too much to think about when she gets home.

  The confrontation with Clive really rattled her, has her pacing through the house, paying only half-attention to her evening routines as she rehearses how she’ll tell him she never wants to hear from him again.

  She’s only indulged their clandestine trysts this long because he’s been so sweet to her, oftentimes the only help on hand when she really needs it. And he’s smart in a way that most of the men who chase her generally aren’t. She never sought out a relationship with a married man, but she fell for him anyway. Her feelings are what they are and she knows the good things in life are fleeting, so she enjoys them when she can.

  And she knows that as soon as something goes bad it must be thrown away. No matter what excuse he concocts.

  So many men are just like children. They push boundaries. It took her a few bouts too many with abuse to learn that lesson, but boy has she learned it.

  She ditched graduating high school to become a wealthy older man’s toy, to learn a toy’s life is torture when one’s owner never lets you out of the box and never wants you to ask what he does while you’re trapped inside alone. The bad boy who helped her escape turned out to be even worse, a charming wild-man guitar player with a heart-melting grin and a honey tongue, who’d get her drunk and stoned and show off what he could make her do, with other men, with other women, with people watching. And then Ralph the disc jockey, who turned out to be the worst of all, like marrying Hitler disguised as Casanova. The only thing worthwhile that came from all of it was Davey. For her son, she’d do anything.

  Everyone else could go to Hell, and if Hell came for her and her boy, she’d stand in the fire and hold him out of reach of the flames.

  She’s wandered into Davey’s room, the one he uses on weekends. She sits on his bed with its Spiderman-patterned comforter, idly thumbs through the books stacked on his short metal bookshelf. Bartholomew and the Oobleck. He’s a little old for that one now. Alice in Wonderland. Something Wicked This Way Comes. That’s a little better. Bulfinch’s Mythology. She’s wondered if that would be too fat and wordy for him, but he loves it, loves those old tales of weird Greek heroes and gods and goddesses always doing terrible things to each other, just like life.

  What was the one the
y read together that punched her so hard in the gut? The musician and his wife. Orpheus.

  No man was ever going to lure her down into the dark and trap her there, accident or no. She thinks of Clive again, starts telling him to go fuck himself a hundred different ways, then snaps out of it. Laundry. All her uniforms are dirty. Laundry, now.

  There’s a note taped to the basement door. She doesn’t recognize the handwriting. A woman’s, curvy and meticulous. It just says, I know now.

  She freezes as if every drop of blood in her body changed to ice crystal.

  Who the fuck has been in my house, she thinks, although the message itself points to one particular person, which is impossible because Clive doesn’t have a key to her house. She learned never to make that mistake again many years ago.

  With a slow-motion avalanche of denial at war in her mind with an inferno of curiosity, she opens the door.

  When she spies the heap at the foot of the basement stairs, at first she thinks it’s a pile of clothes, and she wonders how it got there, because Davey’s with his father.

  Another step down after flipping on the light and her confusion grows, because these are women’s clothes, but not like anything she herself has ever worn. A no-nonsense, non-revealing skirt and a clean, pristine blouse, when she is totally a jeans-and-T-shirt person, if even that formal.

  The disconnect resolves itself when she takes her next step, and she understands someone is wearing these clothes, someone lying motionless at the bottom of the stairs.

  Down a slow step further and she realizes she knows who it is, recognizes the outfit. Francene, who is always at home, because Clive makes enough she doesn’t have to work. She’s had any number of reasons, ranging from seething envy to sympathetic pity, to give Francene more than casual scrutiny on multiple occasions.

  It looks for all the world like Francene is lying with her head wedged under the bottom step.

  The illusion doesn’t come apart until Maria stands on the bottom step and softly calls Francene’s name. When no response comes she toes the other woman’s arm with her slipper, and the body shifts.

  She appeared to have her head wedged under the step because her shoulders were flush against it. Francene’s head is missing.

  What’s even stranger about it, what pushes Maria right past the need to scream, leaves her sitting silent with mind in freefall, is the sheer absurdity of the fatal wound—or lack thereof. Francene’s starched collar doesn’t encircle a gory stalk of severed neck. Instead it reveals an expanse of smooth skin, as if Maria’s unknowing romantic rival had never had a head, was somehow born without one.

  Immediately Maria convinces herself that she’s the victim of a prank and her own overactive imagination. She grabs an arm of the dummy and her fingers circle flesh that’s still warm, still has a pulse.

  The next thing she knows she’s on the floor herself, back against the cinder-block wall in the furnace room, kicking at headless Francene, who does nothing in response but flop and loll. The shrieks ringing in her ears are no doubt her own.

  A rap on the basement window startles her into new silence.

  The squat window in question is set high in the wall above the dryer. On the outside of the house, the sill of that window is set in a shallow concrete well, its floor about six inches below ground level. Shadows move outside that could be legs and feet, someone in the backyard retreating from the window, impossible to tell in the dark.

  There’s another note, taped to the window. She can see writing. WE NEED TO TALK—in the same hand she saw before, that neat feminine cursive.

  She should call the police.

  She can’t. Her cursed brain shows her the consequences all too clearly.

  Her rival’s still-living headless body lies sprawled at the foot of her basement stairs. Either Clive or his son left her there. One of them is responsible for Francene’s state, somehow. She doesn’t understand what’s happened to Francene, she knows that she’s alive, somehow, and that means there’s hope. Whatever has been done, she doesn’t understand it, but she needs it undone.

  She can’t call the police.

  She could have before, and she didn’t. When Denise showed up on her stoop crying late one night, wanting to talk. Maria will never forget the conversation they had over warm tea that graduated to straight shots of Jack, as Denise spilled her guts about things that happened in that house. She made Maria promise never to tell.

  It weighs like a hot brick inside that she kept that promise. But the consequences of breaking it are too painful to think about.

  The loud-mouthed father of her sweet little bookworm of a son already has far too much power. What would happen to her life, if she exposed this squirming mess? How would Ralph exploit it?

  She can’t give up. For Davey’s sake, she needs this fixed.

  But she’s not completely without her senses.

  When she crosses over to Clive’s house, nonchalant as if she’s planning to borrow a bag of sugar, there’s a little extra pressure in the front hip pocket of her jeans, a gift from one of her previous paramours, a big-bellied trucker with a wicked sense of humor and too much of a mean streak to be a keeper.

  The gift: a silvery folding knife with molded black grips and a ten-pound spring that causes it to flip open and lock with the speed of a switchblade when she depresses a button with her thumb. Hardly an assurance of even odds—Clive owns guns. And there’s Francene’s body, still living somehow without its head. She can’t comprehend how something like that is possible, can’t deal with it in any rational way, so she just doesn’t.

  All the neighborhood’s cookie-cutter houses gleam ghostly in the lamplight. The street is empty. Somewhere down the cross-street, a kid shouts, a basketball bounces on a driveway.

  Upstairs, to her right, in the room where Denise slept, the curtain moves. A face glimpsed.

  Francene? Francene’s head?

  She watches her finger push the doorbell as if she’s dreaming. Footsteps on the other side, but no one answers.

  She hears Clive call. It’s open.

  She hasn’t set foot in this house in years. Hasn’t dared.

  As promised, the door’s unlocked. Inside the house is pristine as ever, shoes arranged neat as soldiers on the split-level landing, a wooden plaque carved with the words Our Lovely Home mounted above the short stairwell to the basement, and to the side, above another plaque that reads Home Is Family, hangs a huge photo of the family in their younger years, Denise in her softball uniform, Shaun in glasses and an Izod shirt, Clive in a sweater and Francene in a pink blouse with puffy sleeves.

  Maria regards them all, their phony smiles. Clive, what the hell is going on?

  No answer.

  Clive?

  A noise from downstairs, a creak, something banging on a metal surface, and a wet sound she can’t quite place.

  As she descends the stairs, more homilies await on the walls. God bless this house. Home is where the heart is. Forgive us our trespasses.

  The door to the utility room stands ajar. That odd, wet flopping sound wafts through it. She contemplates pulling out the knife, decides against it.

  Through the door, past the furnace, and at first she’s puzzled by what she sees hanging from the short clothesline attached to the ceiling beams.

  Her mind translates it as a large, shapeless sack of untanned leather, with a swarm of something inside it, making it twitch and ripple up and down its length in a truly disgusting way. Insects? Mice? The creaks come from the clothesline cord as the thing’s weight tugs and shifts, the bangs occur when the cord snaps up against a metal air duct.

  When she steps closer, the sack shivers even more violently. Her stomach knots as she notices the thing is leaking, a thick, foamy, snot-like string dripping out a hole at its tapered bottom. A hole that looks disturbingly like a mouth. With lips that stretch and contract.

  She can make out more features. Nostrils. Ears. There are eyes. Rolling to stare at her as the drooling mouth sh
apes words.

  She recoils, and bumps into someone standing right behind her.

  A warm envelope of red, glistening flesh engulfs her head. A bear hug crushes her arms to her sides, and what feels like another arm crooks around her neck. She kicks, kicks, kicks as she’s dragged upstairs.

  one stitch loosens

  A voice, louder than the others. Not her.

  tenth square

  Her struggle ends when she’s hurled like a Barbie doll thrown in a tantrum. She lands on a mattress.

  Maria wants to laugh. She’s in the master bedroom, sprawled on Clive and Francene’s king-size bed, with its layers upon layers of floral comforters, its pillows color-coordinated to anal-retentive perfection.

  The ceiling is riddled with bullet holes.

  Shaun bars the way between her and the doorway, eyes bulged, teeth bared in an extraordinary grimace. Tears slick his cheeks. Snot globs his vestigial mustache. He’s panting so hard, it’s like his whole body is pulsing.

  She scrambles away from him, to the opposite corner, between Francene’s delicate white dresser and an immense oak wardrobe.

  The boy thumps his chest with a fist. You belong in here.

  No I don’t, she says. What the fuck’s wrong with you?

  Everything, he says, his voice breaking.

  She’s on her feet in the narrow space between bed and wall, wardrobe and dresser. He’s crossing by the foot of the bed, moving toward her as he claws at his throat with both hands, his lips stretched in an agonized rictus.

  Stay away, she says, and flicks the knife open.

  He looses a sob, and steps closer.

  stitching, undone

  You’re a forlorn cry of despair, echoing and echoing down through the spirals of flesh and darkness.

  You’re an ant atop a mountain crawling with severed and recombined horrors, the mountain itself built on layers of half-mad, half-alive remains. You’re battling against other fanged and pincered mites as the entire mass beneath you begins to move.