“What that, Mac?”
“That odor, that smell?”
“Can’t smell a thing, pal, got a head cold.”
He sat in silence the rest of the way. All he wanted was to get home and find out what was happening—put an end to this hideous evening. Until he did, he didn’t want to think about smells or phone numbers or book departments or anything. Those things could wait; right now the sole occupant of his thoughts was his wife. He shivered once spastically. Somewhere deep within him, he’d begun to fight the insane notion he’d never see her again…
The tires made a crisp sound on the pavement as the cab turned onto his street. He watched the familiar line of his neighbors’ houses passing by. The homes on either side were butted together in an unbroken line: welcome to suburbia. Welcome home.
His house was not among them.
He couldn’t seem to find his voice.
”Which one is yours, Mac?”
He blinked out at the night. “Are…are you sure we’re on the right street?”
“This is the only Maple Drive in this burg, pal,” and the driver set the brake.
Wilkes opened the door carefully and stepped into the street, staring intently at the line of homes. There could be no mistaking it. This was his street all right. He just didn’t live here anymore.
A horn blared behind him. “Hey, buddy! You payin’ tonight or what!”
He fished bills from his wallet, handed them absently to the cabby. The taxi jerked away in a cloud of fumes. Silence settled around the man on the empty street. He came to the sidewalk, stepped up on the curb, stared numbly at the houses before him.
He closed his eyes and felt a sob break in his chest. God help me…I’m losing my mind!
He felt a wave of suffocating heat wash over him. A fever? Something he’d eaten earlier? Sweat ran in rivers under his clothes. He opened his eyes and stumbled backward in shock.
The line of houses in front of him was gone. Replaced by a broken landscape of charred rubble, little islands of dirty, drifting smoke.
He turned with a gasp and began running blindly down the steaming sidewalk. As far as his fevered eyes could see, the neighborhood was leveled; an endless black field of twisted, gutted frames canted in terrible contrast before a glowing cyclorama of orange sky. Everywhere was devastation and ruin.
And the smell was overpowering.
He recognized it now; it was the same odor he’d encountered in Iraq. The odor of decaying flesh.
His shoe caught on a piece of shattered concrete and he twisted, pin-wheeled and crashed to the pavement. He winced pain, stared down with unbelieving eyes at the burns on his body, his wasted flesh, ribs jutting white under dust-smudged, shredded clothing. He tried to push up again, but the effort sent slivers of pain through his leg. He seemed to have no strength at all.
* * *
He sat alone in the center of the rubble-strewn remains of what had once been a church.
Above him, the poisonous red clouds boiled together and sent a light curtain of rain hissing across the parched earth. The sound it produced was the only sound against the night, save the occasional rumble of thunder.
Robert Wilkes heard none of this. Nor saw the glowing holocaust around him. Nor felt the stifling heat. He braced himself against the frigid blasts of December wind as he and Lindy struggled across the slush-strewn parking lot to the department store entrance. Once again he regarded with irritation the seething mob of last-minute shoppers.
For the eighth time that day, Robert Wilkes relived the same endless dream kept alive by a single thread of sanity still pulsing feebly within his mangled mind. All alone among the crumbling rubble, rocking gently to and fro, he crooned softly to the radiation-choked heavens above.
“God rest ye merry gentleman,” he sang, “let nothing you dismay…”
Sarah Gomes
CHRISTMAS WISH
‘TWAS THE NIGHT before Christmas, and Billy was as miserable as a kid could be.
It was approaching midnight, and he held the phone to his ear, only half-listening as Mark prattled on about the “epic party” Billy had missed.
Like pouring salt into the wound, Mark said again, “You should have been there, man.”
“Yeah,” Billy said, “I should have been there. But I also should have kept my mouth shut.” Arguing with his father was never a wise decision, but doing so while the man was piss-drunk was a guaranteed ass-whoopin’.
And not only had Billy picked a fight with his drunk father, in a rare moment of defiance he had gotten in his face and shouted, “I hate you! I wish I’d left with Mom!” That had gotten him ten whacks to the backside as well as an express pass to his bedroom and the promise of a Christmas morning without a single gift.
“Well, your father’s a dick,” Mark said, launching Billy back to the present. “You missed an awesome time. The chicks—they were hot, man. Really hot. Heather was there. She was asking about you...”
Billy could have cried.
“...she had this short skirt on, and when she bent over you could totally see her ass. And that could have been ALL YOURS—if only you’d been there, bro.”
Billy sighed. “Yeah, I know. My father’s work hours, you know.” He hated to lie, especially to his best friend, but revealing the truth would make everything worse. “And I always have to babysit the brat.” Which was indeed part of the problem.
Ever since his mother disappeared two years ago, Billy had been in charge of watching his little sister when their father worked. The problem was, he worked all the time, and when he wasn’t working he was pickling his liver down at Lou’s Tavern. It was no wonder Billy’s mother had left them.
“Yo, I gotta go,” Mark said. “My mother’s yelling at me about something. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
After he hung up, Billy knew sleep would elude him for at least a few hours. He was too wired, and the backs of his thighs throbbed painfully. His pride didn’t feel much better.
There was nothing on TV except infomercials and lame-ass Christmas shows featuring perfect families living in houses full of love and laughter. It made him want to puke. And he sure as hell didn’t want to go on the computer because it would be full of status updates about how awesome the party had been. So he decided to read.
From the nightstand, he snatched up the latest issue of Shock Totem, unlucky number 13. The dark tales within promised to match his mood. With a bag of Doritos and a couple cans of Mountain Dew by his bedside, he settled down, got as comfy as possible given his injuries, and started reading.
He was about halfway through Andy Cairns’s “The Head That Tried to Strangle Itself”—which was either extremely pee-your-pants scary or Billy had drank too much Mountain Dew—when he heard the strange noise coming from the down the hall. You have got to be shitting me! he thought.
Maybe he could ignore it. Yeah, he’d ignore it. He wasn’t in the right frame of mind to go investigating in the dark. And the more he listened, the more he realized it wasn’t truly coming from down the hall, it was coming from below and only echoing from down the hall. The hollow thunk-drag-thud was coming up from the basement.
Billy had never liked going down there, day or night, let alone after he’d been reading horror stories. But the sound came again, and again, and again. Curiosity mixed with dread. Goose bumps sprouted along his arms, but Billy found himself out of bed and moving cat-like across the room as if he were sleepwalking, with no clear memory of leaving the bed.
From his closet, he pulled out his old Louisville Slugger. “Nothing to be afraid of,” he whispered. Of course, the baseball bat revealed just how little he believed it.
He crept down the hallway and paused by the open basement door, a sliver of light slicing through the dark. His heart pounded. The sound coming from below had ceased, but he knew someone was down there. It occurred to him that he should call the cops, that he was making one of the most common—and not to mention stupid—horror-movie mistakes: the Don’t Fucking
Go Down There mistake. But he slowly opened the door anyway. Musty basement air wafted over him. He peeked inside, but saw nothing but cobwebbed rafters and the cold gray concrete walls and floor.
The stairs were old and every other one creaked when he placed his weight on it. With each step down he felt more and more confident that he’d heard nothing but the old furnace rattling away. Still, he braced the bat on his shoulder, both hands holding it tightly, as if he were at home plate, waiting for a pitch to come sailing in from the mound.
As he got closer to the bottom, he heard movement from around the corner. He stopped dead, immense fear planting him firmly in place while also firing off warnings to run, run, run! He began to tremble as the thunk-drag-thud noise resumed, louder now, more distinct. It sounded like...someone was digging. Could someone have broken in? No. Why would a burglar be digging in the cellar?
Only one way to find out, Billy-boy.
Billy descended the final steps, and braced himself before turning the corner that would take him into the open area of the cellar. He hefted the bat. “One...two...three,” he whispered before stepping around the corner.
Horror seized him, his mind unable compute what his eyes were seeing, but still knowing it was every shade of wrong. Again fear screamed for him to flee yet held him tight within its clutches. Billy could almost hear it laughing.
“Evening, son.” His father stood by a large hole in the basement’s dirt floor, his T-shirt and pants stained with dust and sweat. He held a shovel in his right hand.
“What are you doing?” Billy asked.
“Well,” his father said, “you told me that you wanted to be with your mother—” he bent down, scooped up another shovelful of dirt “—so I have to unbury her first.”
“Unbury her?” Billy asked stupidly, the bat falling to the ground.
“Yeah, unbury her.” His father stopped digging, just long enough to reach back and pull a gun from the waistband of his pants. “I had a change of heart. It being Christmas and all, I figured the least I could do is grant you your Christmas wish. And since you here now—”
Billy didn’t even have a chance to blink before his father aimed and pulled the trigger—twice. The bullets ripped through Billy’s chest, the pain so horrendous he instantly prayed for unconsciousness, even death.
Only one prayer was answered.
He was still awake when the first scoop of dirt landed on his chest.
“I must be a bad shot,” his father said, staring down at him. “Your mother was still alive when I buried her, too.”
Thomas Ligotti
THE CHRISTMAS EVES OF AUNT ELISE
A Tale of Possession in Old Grosse Pointe
WE PRONOUNCED HER name with a distinct “Z” sound — Remember, Jack, remember — the way some people slur Missus into Mizzuz or for Christmas say Chrizmuzz. It was at her remarkable home in Grosse Pointe that she insisted our family, both its wealthy and its unwealthy side, celebrate each Christmas Eve in a style that exuded the traditional, the old-fashioned, the antique. Actually, Aunt Elise constituted the wealthy side of the family all on her own. Her husband had died many years before, leaving his wife with a prosperous real estate business but no children. Not surprisingly, Aunt Elise undertook the ownership and management of the firm with phenomenal success, perpetuating our heirless uncle’s family name on for-sale signs planted in front lawns all over the state. But what was Uncle's first name, a young nephew or niece sometimes wondered. Or, as it was more than once put by one of us children: “Where’s Uncle Elise?” To which the rest of us answered in unison: “He’s at his ease,” a response we learned from none other than our widowed aunt herself.
Aunt Elise was without husband or offspring of her own, true enough. But she loved all the ferment of big families, and every holiday season she possessed as much in relations both young and no longer young as she did in her real estate returns, her tangible and intangible assets and investments, and her abundant hard cash. Her house was something of an Elizabethan country manor in style while remaining modest, even relatively miniature, in scale. It fit very nicely — when it existed — into a claustrophobic cluster of trees on some corner acreage a few steps uphill from Lake Shore Drive, profiling rather than facing the lake itself. A rather dull exterior of soot-gray stones somewhat camouflaged the old place in its woodland hideaway; until one caught sight of its diamond-paned windows — kept brilliant by the personal attention of Aunt Elise herself, no less — and one realized that a house in fact existed where before there seemed to be only shadowed emptiness.
Around Christmastime these many-faceted windows took on a candied glaze in the pink, blue, green, and other-colored lights strung about their perimeters. More often in the old days —Remember them, Jack — a thick December fog rolled off the not-yet-frozen lake and those kaleidoscopic windows would throw their spectrums into the softening mist. This, to my child’s senses, was the image and atmosphere defining the winter holiday: a serene congregation of colors whose confused murmurings divulged to this world rumors of strange and solemn services that were concurrently taking place in another. This was the celebration, this the festival. Why did we leave it all behind us, leave it outside? And as I was guided up the winding front walk toward the house, a parent’s hand in either of mine, I always stopped short, pulling Mom and Dad back like a couple of runaway horses, and for a brief, futile moment refused to go inside.
After my first Christmas — chronologically my fifth — I knew what happened inside the house, and year after year there was little change either in the substance or surface details of the program. For those from large families, this scene is a little too familiar to bother describing. Perhaps even lifelong orphans are jaded to it. Still, there are others to whom depictions of the unusual uncles, the loveable grandparents, and the common run of cousins will always be fresh and dear; those who delight in multiple generations of characters crowding the page, who are warmed by the feel of their paper flesh. I tell you they share these desires with my Aunt Elise, and her spirit is in them.
She always occupied and dominated, for the duration of these Christmas Eves, the main room of her house. This room I never saw except as a fantasy of ornamentation, an hallucinatorium in holiday dress. Right now I can only hope to portray a few of its highlights. First of all holly, both fresh and artificial, hung down the walls from wherever it was possible to hang — from the frames of paintings, from the stained-wood shelves of a thousand gewgaws, even from the velvety embossed pattern of the wallpaper itself, intertwining with its vegetable swirls and flourishes, if my memory sees this accurately. And from fixtures above, including a chandelier delicately sugared with tiny Italian lights, down came gardens of mistletoe in mid-air. The huge fireplace blazed with a festive inferno, and before its cinder-spitting hearth was a protective screen, at either end of which stood a pair of thick brass posts; and over the crown of each post — whose shape and design I never glimpsed — were two puppet Santas, slipped on like socks and drooping a little to one side, their mittens outstretched in readiness to give someone a tiny, angular hug. In a corner, the one beside the front window, a sturdy evergreen was somewhere hidden beneath every imaginable type of dangling, roping, or blinking decoration, as well as being dolled up with ridiculous satin bows in pastel shades, lovingly tied by human hands. The same hands did their work on the presents beneath the tree, and year after year these seemed, like everything else in the room, to be in exactly the same place, as if the gifts of last Christmas had never been opened, quickening in me the nightmarish sense of a ritual forever reenacted without hope of escape. (Somehow I am still possessed by this same feeling of entrapment, and after all these years.) My own present was always at the back of that horde of packages, almost against the wall behind the tree. It was tied up with a pale purple ribbon and covered with pale blue wrapping paper upon which little bears in infants’ sleeping gowns dreamed of more pale blue presents which, instead of more bears, had little boys dreaming upon them. I s
pent much of a given Christmas Eve sitting near this gift of mine, mostly to find refuge from the others rather than to wonder at the thing inside. It was always something in the way of underwear, nightwear, or socks, never the nameless marvel which I fervently hoped to receive from my obscenely well-heeled aunt. Nobody seemed to mind that I sat on the other side of the room from where most of them congregated to talk or sing carols to the music of an ancient organ, which Aunt Elise played with her back to her audience, and to me.
Slee—eep in heav—enly peace.
“That was very good,” she said without turning around. As usual the sound of her voice led you to expect that any moment she would clear her throat of some sticky stuff which was clinging to its insides. Instead she switched off the electric organ, after which gesture some of the gathering, dismissed, left for other parts of the house.
“We didn’t hear Old Jack singing with us,” she said, turning to look across the room where I was seated in a large chair beside a fogged window. On that occasion I was about twenty or twenty-one, home from school for Christmas. I had drunk quite a bit of Aunt Elise’s holiday punch, and felt like answering: “Who cares if you didn’t hear Old Jack singing, you old bat?” But instead I simply stared her way, drunkenly taking in her features, with prejudice, for the family scrapbook of my memory: tight-haired head (like combed wires), calm eyes of someone in an old portrait (someone long gone), high cheekbones highly colored (less rosily than like a rash), and the prominent choppers of a horse charging out of nowhere in a dream. I had no worry about my future ability to recall these features, even though I had secretly vowed this would be the last Christmas Eve I would view them. So I could afford to be tranquil in the face of Aunt Elise’s taunts that evening. Anyway, further confrontation between the two of us was aborted when some of the children began clamoring for one of their aunt’s stories. “And this time a true story, Auntie. One that really happened.”
Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology Page 12