Next an animated eye that Eric knew was her eye. Now and then the snake slither of her tongue across his upper leg and groin.
From above where Eric was digging: “You better find some of her soon—I’m getting a headache that’s going to kill me for sure.”
Eric stuck his head up out of the trench in annoyance. “Then grab the other shovel, get down here …” He stopped. Jim was walking through the yard, kicking at the constructions, wagging his head, hands over his ears. His hair longer, hips wider, mimicking their mother in gesture and stance.
“I can’t stand this anymore!”
And voice.
Eric hunkered down, attacking the walls of dirt with the shovel tip, handle end, at times with his bare hands scraping off metal and wood, yanking pieces out and throwing them behind him and up into the yard, sweeping aside long tendrils of root and hair, stomping on tubes and toes, breaking through slats, rungs, and bones, ripping the guts right out of the ground and throwing them at her face as her eyes winked open in rotting magazine ads, ragged holes in cloth, her mouth eating its way through cardboard, her teeth rattling against gnawed aluminum.
A hand brushed his trying to stop him, then lips caressing his ear, stop, as the whispering became louder, a chorus jangling his nerves so that he wanted to throw up. Her face came out of a white plastic grocery bag, eyes the color and shape of shriveled tomatoes, and more dirt falling, threatening to trap him inside, congealing into thin arms and legs turning, rolling as if unable to get out of bed, craving just a few years more sleep, the yawn becoming a scream as dirt-root fingers pushed against him, and still he found it, grabbed it and pulled it out: rotting hand attached to arm attached to fraying shoulder attached to nothing else.
Part of a leg was wrapped in a newspaper’s unreadable mush, except a piece of one story: the county fair, the name of a neighbor lady he once knew and her first place pie.
“The sheriff can find the rest of her.” Eric looked up at Jim’s weary features, perched like a decapitation on the edge of the hole. “Call him now, Eric, or first thing in the morning. Do what I brought you back here for.” And the light went out of Jim’s eyes as he continued speaking, but the moment was too loud for Eric to hear.
No one thought Jim had killed her, especially after her doctor told the story of her deadly heart and deadlier liver. The worst thing he was guilty of was improper disposal of the body, and a certain hereditary insanity that unfortunately would mean confinement in a safer environment.
The sheriff’s apology to Eric rang hollow. No one thought it necessary for him to return again for the hearing that would follow the long period of evaluations, but although he did not look forward to the confusion of that bus ride, Eric knew he could not let Jim face all of this alone.
“Maybe if I hadn’t stayed away so long …”
“Then we’d both be sitting here,” Jim said from across the steel table, “wearing this, what is it, blue outfit?”
“I think it’s some shade of green.”
“Mother could have told us, I reckon,” Jim said. “She knew her colors.”
Eric looked away, afraid he was going to laugh at his brother’s goofy expression. When they were kids they used to crack each other up at the most serious times. It was a good, good memory. “I talked to a lawyer,” he said. “There are some angles he can try. Of course there are no guarantees.”
“Leave it. I told you, this is the way I want it, Eric. That was the whole idea. Mother finds some peace, and I get to be someplace where they’ll take care of me, and I won’t have to worry about not having done anything with my life. And I won’t have to worry about her anymore. Taking care of her, doing what she says, staying away from her. That’s all taken care of now.”
“It’s not right. She was a terrible person. She put you, she put us all through so much crap. She wins this way.”
“You just don’t get it. You never did.”
Eric felt as if he’d been slapped. He examined Jim’s face, looking for signs of their mother in Jim’s lips, in his eyes. But of course Jim resembled her. They both did.
“You’re not saying she was right?” He couldn’t stop himself from shaking, and that made him so angry at himself he shook even more. “You’re not saying she was ‘Mother of the Year’?”
“She was a little crazy. I was a little crazy. We all were a little crazy, Eric.”
Eric looked at his brother, thinking you’re crazy – you’re a crazy creep but he was uneasy just the same. He wanted his brother to shut up and not be such a know-it-all for a change. “That didn’t mean she had to be the way she was with us.”
Of course not. But she was crazy. And worse, she knew she was crazy.”
“She treated us like we were evil or something. Like we never should have been born.”
“Not so much evil,” Jim said. “But think about this. You’ve always wanted a kid. You think that if you just have a kid then everything in your sorry life will turn out okay, somehow. But your kid is born dead. And you don’t understand it, you can’t accept that God would do such a thing to you, you grieve and you grieve, and then one day you feel better enough that you decide to try it again.
“So you have a second child. And that one is born dead, too. What are you going to do? Are you going to love life, are you going to pick yourself up and brush yourself off and get on with your life even after this terrible thing has happened to you twice? Some will, but I swear to you, most won’t.”
“We didn’t die in childbirth, Jim. We were always healthy.”
“What would you think, though, how would you feel, if not only are these two boys born dead, but they’re so crazy, they don’t even know it. Maybe you teach them how to pretend they’re alive, you teach them about going through the motions, but you can see it in their eyes they’re dead, they don’t know how to be among the living. Because there’s something broken in their souls, you know they’re always going to be crazy, they’re always going to be alone, and that makes you even crazier still. Wouldn’t that make you hate them just a little, hate yourself of course but hate them even more? Sure, you love them anyway, you try to love them and you do all kinds of things for them. But wouldn’t it make you hate them enough that after you died you’d decide you just had to haunt them for awhile?”
Eric had closed his eyes, unable to watch his brother as he vomited all this insanity into the air. When he opened them he was alarmed to see that Jim was crying now. He’d never seen Jim cry before. He’d never … there had never been much crying in their family. “You are crazy,” he said softly. “You’re exactly where you belong.”
“I know you are but what am I?” Jim grinned.
“Just stop it. This isn’t funny. Any of it. You belong here.”
“Don’t I know it. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Maybe I’ll get involved in some activities here—hey, I got pretty good helping Mother with the art. Maybe I’ll forget I was born dead long enough that I can fit in a little and actually be just a little bit alive. Because if I leave here I know I’m a dead man. That’s for sure.”
“I can’t talk to you anymore. I have a life to go back to. Mom was crazy. You’re sure as hell crazy. And now I don’t even know about Dad.”
“Sociopath, probably.”
“Shut up!” Eric tried to get the attention of the guard on the other side of the glass-and-steel-mesh window, who appeared to be distracted.
“Eric! Before you go, what about Nancy? Remember Nancy?”
Eric swung around, his hands curling in and out of fists he was trying hard not to make. “Of course I do! I loved her, or at least I thought I did. But Mother was drunk and crazy and it was just awful!”
“Of course it was awful. But Mother wasn’t drunk that day—she wasn’t even drinking much at that point in her life. But she was so anxious to make a good impression, to make it good for you with your first girlfriend, she botched dinner, which brought on this crying fit, this anxiety attack, but even then she held i
t reasonably together until you got there with Nancy, and you were just off the wall that day. I don’t know if you were having your own kind of breakdown or what, but you kept talking weird and saying things embarrassing to both Nancy and Mother, talking about bad smells in the air and bodily fluids backing up into people’s brains. You offered to get Nancy tea but we didn’t have tea, so you gave her something you made out of grapefruit juice and the leaves from one of the houseplants, and when Nancy started choking and spit the stuff out you turned and started screaming at Mother. You said she was a whore and a drunk and that she had just tried to poison both you and Nancy just like she poisoned Dad.”
Eric’s mouth was so dry he could barely get any words out. “You’re … raving. I’ll find Jack … he was there. He saw it—he drove us.”
“You always talked about Jack. There was no Jack. I was there. I drove the poor girl home.”
Eric laughed. “You always said you wanted a car but you never got around to getting one.”
“I drove her home in the car I spent two years fixing up myself. Her dad was so mad when we got to her house—she’s bawling and talking about all the crazy stuff that just happened to her at our house—he started beating on me. I ran away and he took it out on my car. Of course I never called the sheriff—I was worried about you and Mom—if people knew you were both crazy, what was going to happen to me? Of course her dad called the sheriff and he came out. You two pulled it together enough with my coaching that nobody got arrested, even though he seemed pretty sure you’d been awful to the girl. I never got my car back. And no, I never got around to getting another one.”
Eric stood by the door, hoping the guard would notice him soon, but a little afraid to move. “I have to go, Jim. I have to get home. My home.”
“With what’s her name? Marie?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s great. You’re a lucky man.”
“I know I am.”
“Did you ever find your cell phone?”
“My cell phone.” Eric watched Jim carefully. He decided if his brother came any closer he would start screaming. The guard would have to come if he started screaming.
“Yeah, your cell phone. You were pretty sure you lost it in the weeds that day the sheriff came out.”
“That’s right. No, I never found it. I’ll have to get a new cell phone, just as soon as I get back to the city.”
“I hear they can be expensive.”
“They can be, if you don’t have one of those replacement policies. If your cell phone is lost or stolen, then they just replace it. No questions asked. I’m lucky I have one of those replacement policies.”
“Marie called you on that thing, right?”
“Right, just before I lost it. And Mother broke in.”
“You didn’t have a cell phone, Eric.”
“Just stop it. I have to go.”
“The sheriff and I were talking over by the house, remember? Did you see the way we were looking at you? It was because all of a sudden we heard you talking, really loud. We look over, and you’ve got your empty hand spread over your ear and in front of your mouth, and you’re talking out loud, and you have nothing in your hand. That’s why we were looking at you—you didn’t have a cell phone.”
“Just shut up. The guard will be here any second to let me out. Just shut up.” He closed his eyes, listened, and waited.
The bus trip back to the city was much shorter than the one coming out. This didn’t bother Eric because he’d pretty much expected it. Trips away always, for some reason, were longer than trips coming home.
But he would have liked this one to be a bit longer, and more varied, than it was. The scenery was boring, consisting primarily of housing developments and shopping centers, broken by the occasional seven-year interstate highway redevelopment project. Your Tax Dollars At Work. Call Us And Let Us Know How We’re Doing. Please Report Any Discourtesy.
The problem was discourtesies were everywhere. And there just weren’t enough hours in the day to report them all.
He gazed at his fellow passengers: Jehovah Witnesses for the most part, he suspected, with their neatly buttoned collars and earnest, hopeful looks. Each clutching a book full of answers.
He dozed off a few hours from the city. A couple was arguing in the back, their child crying. Eric hated to hear children crying. Children shouldn’t have to cry on a bus trip.
When he woke up they were gone. The sun still high in the sky, it collected on the chrome pieces throughout the interior of the bus, gathering itself into one blaze as they floated above the highway in their great chariot of light.
Somewhere toward the back a passenger was humming, but the person might have been singing in some language Eric did not recognize.
They touched ground near the first exit. The brakes squealed on the turn, as if protesting the harshness of concrete and asphalt.
Their trip through the suburbs was uneventful. Children played on the sidewalks and in the parks, waving at the bus and keeping their distance from disaster. Eric waved back and made a few of them smile.
They pulled into the city center around mid-afternoon. It was so hot outside Eric was reluctant to leave the air-conditioned bus. When everyone else had departed and he had to leave under the watchful eye of the driver, he felt inexplicably on the verge of tears.
A taxi brought him back to his apartment building. He over-tipped the driver by an enormous amount, practically emptying his wallet. The driver smiled and gave him his card. Eric slipped it into his wallet to replace the missing money.
His mailbox contained an ad for protective car covers, a book of coupons from a grocery chain, and another invitation to attend services at the local church.
As he opened the door, stale air eased out and slipped away down the stairs. He fumbled for the light switch, momentarily forgetting which side of the door it was on. The light seemed to have grown brighter in his absence, and he had to shade his eyes from the glare until they adjusted.
His bed was well-made, which pleased him inordinately. But his sink was full of the dirty dishes he’d forgotten to do before he left. A trail of unidentifiable scent followed him from room to room.
His sketchbook was on top of the radiator in the bathroom, and he was relieved to find it undamaged. He sat down on the closed toilet lid and thumbed through the pages: a similar woman’s face on page after page, similar eyes, but different hairstyles, noses, chins. He could not decide which version of the drawing he liked best, or what her name would be, if he ever was lucky enough to meet her. Her beauty was haunting. He decided he would tell her that when that great day came. He would practice the line in front of the mirror.
He looked out the bathroom window, which revealed only the neighboring roofs, a distant flock of birds, the first suggestions of a setting sun. There was time, certainly, if he left right now.
Eric closed the apartment door behind him, and on second thought decided to lock it. He took the side stairs to the sidewalk, east, walking away from the sun.
The people approaching him winced into the day’s last stabs of light, their faces drawn, pasty, with pained expressions. They looked tired, listless, and his heart went out to them.
He wanted to tell them that sometimes, sometimes he thought he was sleeping, when in fact he was awake. Wasn’t that an odd thing? How did they explain it? Somewhere, somehow, he would find a person among the living who could tell him the answer.
Sources
The stories in this collection were originally published as follows:
“At the Bureau”: Shadows 3, edited by Charles Grant (Doubleday, 1980)
“Crutches”: Shadows 6, edited by Charles Grant (Doubleday, 1983)
“The Bad People”: Fantasy Tales, Vol. 7, No. 13 (original series, Winter 1984)
“Leaks”: Whispers VI, edited by Stuart David Schiff (Doubleday, 1987)
“Stone Head”: Shadows 5, edited by Charles Grant (Doubleday, 1982)
“Mirror Man�
��: Decoded Mirrors: 3 Tales After Lovecraft (Necronomicon Press, 1992)
“The Sky Come Down to Earth”: Tales by Moonlight, edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson (Robert Garcia Publisher, 1983)
“Houses Creaking in the Wind”: 365 Scary Stories, edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg (Barnes & Noble, 1998)
“Grim Monkeys”: Tropical Chills, edited by Tim Sullivan (Avon Books, 1988)
“Rider”: Night Visions 1, edited by Alan Ryan (Dark Harvest, 1984)
“Escape on a Train”: Pulphouse 7 (Pulphouse Publishing, Spring 1990)
“The Far Side of the Lake”: original to this volume
“Presage”: All Hallows 8 (The Ghost Story Society, February 1995)
“Derelicts”: The Dodd Mead Gallery of Horror, edited by Charles Grant (Dodd Mead & Company, 1983)
“Aquarium”: The Seaharp Hotel, edited by Charles Grant (Tor Books, 1990)
“In the Trees”: Fantasy Tales 4, 1990
“Among the Old”: Pulphouse 1 (Pulphouse Publishing, Fall 1988)
“The Little Dead Girl”: Fantasy Macabre 5, 1985
“In a Guest House”: Greystone Bay, edited by Charles Grant (Tor Books, 1985)
“Underground”: Metahorror, edited by Dennis Etchison (Donald Grant Publisher, 1992)
“Dark Shapes in the Road”: Night Visions 1
“Decodings”: Decoded Mirrors: 3 Tales After Lovecraft
“At the End of the Day”: Dead End: City Limits, edited by Paul Olson and David Silva (St Martin’s, 1991)
“Fogwell”: Doom City, edited by Charles Grant (Tor Books, 1987)
“Ice House Pond”: In the Fog, edited by Charles Grant (Tor Books, 1993)
“The Dancers in the Leaves”: All Hallows 2 (The Ghost Story Society, 1990)
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