The Dark Magazine

by Prime Books

  “I may not be what I used to be but I can still help a pretty, young lady.”

  “No,” she said, her eyes flickering between stooped Barney and the maw of the opened front door. “No, thank you.”

  “Haven’t seen your old man in some time. How’s he holding up?” he said, admiring the Astro with blunt curiosity. “Feels like an eternity since I’ve seen his big ol’ smile. I remember, no kidding, when all ya’ll first moved in here, ’bout twenty or so years ago, your parents were what I’d call picheresque.”

  She didn’t appreciate the reminder of their parents together, because she had mostly revised her memories so that it was just Lars and her father, the remaining faithful. The problems began with the deterioration of their mother’s faith. She believed in a pick-and-choose manner regarding doctrine, which upset their father. He had tried to ignore most of these misgivings, for the sake of Lars and Tabby, he later told them, so they could be raised in a proper household. Yet when she began to question the trinity, that’s when he realized feigning ignorance did not ameliorate the situation. The household had already fallen. In their early teens, Lars and Tabby would press their ears against the wall of their bedroom and listen to the quarrels, which had vaguely started as theological debates. “You can’t compare the trinity to different Christmas lights, and don’t think I haven’t heard you talk of gas, liquid, and solid. That’s matter, not the trinity! You think you’re enlightening our children, but it’s heresy, modalism!”

  “I try to make sense of it, it doesn’t make sense!”

  “Haven’t you read the Athanasian Creed?”

  “You think I cherry-pick my beliefs, that I leave His word in tatters, but what about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You . . . you nearly made me watch my daughter die . . . ”

  “Did Jesus take the sick to hospitals, did—”

  “You’re not Jesus, we’re not Jesus. You wouldn’t have cared if she died!”

  A thump, like something thrown against a wall.

  “Perhaps it would’ve been better,” he said.

  “What?”

  “If she died, if all of us died, then we’d be in a place better than this, but He has a plan for us, although I’m not too sure about you.”

  “Threatening me with hell now?”

  “It’s not about me, or you, or any of us . . . greater forces are at work. I fear that you’ve been influenced. If—”

  “Anything that—”

  “Let me speak . . .if you can find your way back, I will accept you. In the meantime, you must leave us and hope for His guidance. I’ll pray for you.”

  “Ohhh . . . ohhh . . . ”

  She couldn’t say anything then, she responded with sobs, and she left the family. Exiled. Lars and Taby, regardless of guilty attempts at communication, never heard from her. Their father had explained how she had abandoned her faith, after pieces of it had already perished, and how she had engaged in extra-marital sex with a respected member of their now former church. That’s when their house became the house of the Lord, their couch became the pew, their television the altar and preacher both. This new church made Lars and Tabby aware of how elastic their father’s beliefs really were. He changed and adapted just as their mother had. Lars and Tabby told themselves that he wasn’t a hypocrite, that he saw deeper into truths and doctrines and thus navigated the labyrinth of creeds and revelations like Theseus, the thread his critical intellect, the whole of the clew as divine inspiration. They even entertained the possibility that their father had a direct connection to God, however indistinct in nature, where a pluck of the taut line sent reverberating epiphanies to his cortex. These thoughts more than eased Lars’ allegiance, but Tabby had been injected with a disconcerting question, one she couldn’t ever ask her father: “What if the fever had killed me?”

  Now she had nightmares of being in the chair of the guest bedroom instead of their father, metamorphosing. Lars had always defended their father from Tabby’s doubt, telling her about a time before she had been stricken with the fever: Little Lars had been playing in the forest near a highway—where sometimes he’d roll medium-sized stones into the paths of cars—when he heard a screech followed by metal crunching. He ran up to the guardrail of the highway and saw a minivan’s nose embedded into the back of a pickup truck. He felt as though God wanted him to see this, to be a neutral observer, a cosmic witness. The driver of the truck was bent forward, still, and his head pressed the car horn, the incessant sound like an anguished goose. From the passenger side of the minivan a bloodied woman crawled out, sliding her hands through glass and metal. She was saying, “Tommy, Tommy,” and reached for the door behind hers, unable to open it. A sedan braked to a stop behind the forcibly conjoined vehicles and a man came out with his phone to his ear. “Are you alright, ma’am?” “Tommy, Tommy.” The man, whom Lars took for a lower angel with pity in his heart, had called emergency services and then lifted her and put her into the passenger seat of his car. “Tommy, Tommy,” her hand reaching out. With a strong jerk the man succeeded in opening the door and pulled out a limp boy. His right leg had been twisted into a golden ratio, his foot at the center. Although his face seemed full of holes, black mouth, black eyes, black bruises, Lars recognized him as Tommy Mommy, a classmate who had been made infamous by calling out for his mommy when anyone threatened him with a fist, including Lars. Even as the ambulance arrived with a wail, lights aflash, Lars remained by the guardrail, hidden by shadows and overhanging branches. They took Tommy in a stretcher, tied down like a victim on the rack, along with his mother and father. Lars had waited for Tommy to return to class so that he could tell him that he understood something, but he never arrived. Because science couldn’t heal him, explained Lars’ father. Tommy’s parents, probably atheists or agnostics, held Darwin as their doctrine, Sagan as their sacred heart. And the doctors probably gave up without a fight, he told little Lars, like they did when your grandmother was ill—how much determination can you have without the real God? He reinforced this after Tabby had been healed of her fever. “In the end, we have Tabby, but where did your friend Tommy go, why isn’t your grandmother with us?” In light of this anecdote, all Tabby had for her mother was hatred, but if she allowed herself to overthink, as her brother often accused her of, she pitied her mother, saw her as the prey of those unknown forces, and if that was the case, then they could have helped her, saved her through His will, but the vicious words of their father during many an altercation tore her down . . .

  “Mind if I say hello to him?” said Barney. “I mean if your old man’s home, that is.” He leaned over and scratched where prosthesis met flesh.

  Nosy neighbors like Barney were, as far as Tabby was concerned, covetous, perhaps not of material things, but of news and trivial information, anything to fill the idle emptiness of their skulls.

  She picked up the last two cumbersome bags from the van’s bed and balanced them against her inclined chest. As she approached the front door, she could hear the static in her ears, a bio-noise that replaced her irritation with a pang of pride.

  “He’s in God’s hands now,” she said and disappeared into the shaded house.

  Tabby had finished preparing a casserole of rice, chicken, and broccoli with cheese as Lars returned from work in an anxious mood. He threw his visor with the embroidered arches of gold on the floor and told her, “Let’s eat.”

  The palatable scent of home cooking was a welcome mask to the rot that had settled in the base of their lungs. Elbows on the table, Lars uttered few words. His movements were coupled with twitches, like a horse’s muscles in the presence of flies. Tabby noticed he blinked a lot.

  Although their father had been quarantined for some time now, she would never get used to the second empty chair, which was now missing from the table altogether, nor did she ever really become comfortable with the first.

  “Should we feed him?” she said, eyes fixated on the chair. “I mean, shouldn’t we be ready fo
r when he returns? He’ll be hungry.”

  Chewing, while scrutinizing the gangrenous mush on his plate, he said, “No.”

  “Why?”

  He drank more than half of the water in his glass, his throat expanding and compressing. After he wiped his lips on his forearm, he said, “Well, you’re right, but that’s not a concern right now.”

  Disinterested, Lars allowed Tabby to place some non-perishables, a can opener, a plate, and eating utensils outside the guest bedroom door, so their father would be able to have something to eat without delay. She returned to the table feeling, if not at ease, at least complacent with the vacancy.

  After his fifth bite of food, Lars pushed his plate away and said, “I’m going for a walk.”

  Tabby was going to take a sip of soda from her glass but put it back on the table. “Didn’t you hear the thunder? It’s going to storm.”

  His face was darkened by the shadows of his own features. “I didn’t hear anything. I need to walk.”

  “I’ll come with you then.”

  They traversed the pitted and fractured sidewalk, which held weeds that sprouted at odd angles, like mangled hands. Tabby, a few steps behind Lars, watched his irregular gait. All signs pointed to something wrong, but she didn’t know what.

  Barney was sitting on his porch. He didn’t wave at them. With a stuffed lower lip, he leaned on his elbow, cocked his head, and spat brackish water over the side of the railing. He muttered something they could barely register, “Gunna have a light show in a few.”

  Most of the front yards they passed were covered with misshapen patches of dirt and sand. Some were enclosed by lopsided metal fences. There was a wind that carried the minute scent of electricity, over the typical smell of engine exhaust.

  Lars wasn’t speaking, so Tabby attempted to prod the issue. “Maybe we shouldn’t have put him in there.”

  He spoke over his shoulder, “Why are you saying that?”

  “Maybe we should have had the funeral, made sure his soul was sent safely.”

  “Why are you talking as if he’s dead?”

  “He is.”

  Lars examined the dense, gray clouds that filled the sky, a sheer cliff.

  A white bulldog, wrinkled in the face like wax cascading over the edge of a burning candle, ran at them as far as the length of the leash allowed, then barked with an instinctual ferocity, the collar occasionally choking, until Lars and Tabby were at an appropriate distance. Increasingly perturbed, Lars had made sure Tabby was by his side.

  He eventually said, “I keep thinking about Grandma. I know Father didn’t talk about her much, only in the general sense of absence and presence.”

  She placed a hand on his back. “What about her?”

  Focused on the lunar surface of the sidewalk, he continued, “There were times Father and I spoke, and the inspiration and wistfulness, if I can call it that, was too much for him, and so the full story only came out piece by piece. I’m sure he told you how he had prayed for her, but as a fringe variable in the treatment. He had put his faith in the doctors and their cold ways.”

  “Yeah.”

  “After her death, he realized that all they ever see is data—actions and reactions. Not to say that it was their fault exactly, and Father hinted at this. Think of what it takes to cut into someone, whether it’s the chest or, in Grandma’s case, the brain. You have to turn off your soul, you have to really see the person as an object. For all intents and purposes, they’re already dead. The doctors, the nurses, they were all lost, just like Father had been. To right at least one wrong, he had planned to resurrect her, to heal her, like we’re doing, but when he went to pick up the body after being approved for a private burial they said they couldn’t find her.”

  “Couldn’t find her? He never told me that.”

  Baritone sounds whorled in the distant air and Tabby unsuccessfully tried to find the source.

  “Can you believe it?” said Lars. “They said there must have been a mix up and they lost the body. Just like that. But this is the part he was wary of sharing with anyone . . . Father told me that he believed her faith had been its own divine seed, that it brought her back. He believed she walked right on out of that place, but then he couldn’t understand why she didn’t come home. That’s what got to him. Perhaps her memory had been wiped clean, the brain a blank slate. He studied historical accounts of resurrections, any relevant thing he could get his hands on, but they were never clear on that point, whether something like that could happen.”

  “But what a chance, to start life all over again, to be fundamentally reborn. Or maybe there’s another reason, perhaps she ascended to heaven as mind and body.”

  “As if the soul, in its purity, was flesh itself?”

  “Or the flesh turned soul. That makes me feel so alive, Lars, the idea of it.”

  “I don’t know. To lose one’s memory sounds like a curse.”

  Lars never took stock in her theological ideas, and Tabby felt belittled by his lack of support or, at the very least, interest, which made her think that her mind, if not her body, was already on the chair, waiting to be alive again.

  “But think of all the baggage memory puts on our soul,” she persisted, “without it we’re a step closer to being with Him, basking in His love.”

  “Father told us we’d know when the time was right, and I think it’s now.” He turned toward her, his face devoid of sun and blood. “What have our lives amounted to? We have second-rate jobs, our family’s been severed, my girl is always giving me excuses. She and I haven’t even spoken in over a month. When, if not now, are we supposed to go on our mission? We must be ready and willing to do God’s work. He will guide us, He will give us a sign.”

  “Isn’t this it? Tending to the return of Father?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t think so. It’s part of it, surely, but there’s more.”

  “What else is there?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  The thunder echoed through the air like a collapsing titan, filling their chests with sonic sound. Yet the accompanying purple cracks in the sky were still missing.

  “I want to go back, it’s getting worse.”

  Lars grabbed her hand. “We’ll keep going.”

  Over the course of months, they began to hear, not atomic or molecular structures, but tissues and organs revitalizing. The constriction of an aching colon, the snarl of an empty stomach, the wheezing of dust-ridden lungs, and, beneath it all, the shy beat of a heart reborn. One night, they heard the accumulation of that anatomic din in the form of a necromantic mumble: “Hmmm.” With that, they crept down the hallway. Lars produced a key from the pocket of his athletic shorts and carefully opened the padlock. They removed the tape from the door’s cracks with as little crinkling as possible. Upon pushing the door, a pocket of rancid and saccharine air encapsulated them in a bubble. They stayed inside this bubble, not wanting to rupture its sepia surface, and viewed the exhibition that was their father, in his pharaoh’s tomb: his naked and crumpled brow created the illusion that his bruised eyelids were open mauve holes, absent eyes. As if exposed to radiation, what little halo of hair he had retained by the end of his life had been whisked away, scattered among the droppings of rats. Arriving here from pathways mysterious and dank, the rodents had gnawed the toes of his clenched feet, exposing the bleached, talon-like tips of the distal phalanges. An obese and hirsute rat lay behind the afflicted ankle from which it had feasted, collapsed from gluttony or dead by food poisoning, the black, blank eyes transfixed, the chipped and mottled enamel of its bared teeth lusterless. The clothes Tabby chose for their father, a pressed button-up and dark slacks, had been reduced to nibbled threads by moth larvae. His purpled and blackened skin was both tight around his bones and excessively wrinkled, as when one stays in bathwater for too long. The now-adult moths clung to the ceiling like a carpet, their wings covered with the blinking eyes of owls. Most peculiar of all was the position of their father’s body: hunched over.
This could be written off, perhaps, as some extremely delayed death throe or schism of dystrophic muscle in the lower back, if it wasn’t for the fact that the left forearm was placed on the knee of the left leg, wrist somewhat bent, hand in vague repose, with the elbow of his right hand poised atop the thigh of the same leg. His fist against his teeth, he thinks.