“God, you’re sick.”
When they got up to the house Jakob asked Jeff if he was staying tonight.
“No. I can’t. I have to get up early and go to Bang’s. Maybe I’ll try and buddy up to Mr. Castle. See if I can get some kind of confession from him.”
“Meet back here tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
Jakob went back into the house and went to bed. Lying there, he thought about the slaughterhouse. The place had always unnerved him but he found himself now terrified of it. He didn’t know why exactly. If it was making people “beautiful” that should be a lot less terrifying than thinking of the slaughters it was normally used for. But he didn’t like the idea. In his German class, they had discussed Faust, and it seemed like there had to be something Faustian about this. One does not get something for nothing. Then he had another horrifying thought. The thought actually came to him in Jeff’s voice. It was what he had said when they were walking back from the field, “Marcie’d be pretty hot if it wasn’t for her hand.”
No, Jakob thought. Marcie wouldn’t even think about that. He knew she wasn’t a shallow person and he thought she had actually grown quite comfortable with the idea of her hand over time. If she had asked he could have told her the hands were like the last things guys looked at.
He couldn’t get the idea out of his head.
Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to get up and check on her. Act big brotherly for a change. He was the one who had brought the whole thing up to begin with. If something happened to her, he would be partially to blame. He didn’t want the guilt.
The wooden floor in his room squeaked as he walked across it. He opened his door and looked down the hall. Her room was at the end of the hall and he saw that her light was still on. Maybe she fell asleep with it on. She was never up this late and she had seemed pretty tired at the stakeout. He walked down the hall and gently knocked on the door. He didn’t hear any answer and just assumed she was asleep but decided to open the door and check on her anyway.
When he opened the door she wasn’t in her bed.
He looked at the walls of her room, all of her drawings and paintings hung up with masking tape as though she were still deciding which ones to keep there. Dominating the wall above her bed was a painting that did not alleviate his paranoid thoughts at all. It was on an open-hardback size canvas. There was something childlike about it. It looked like she had dipped her hands in paint—the left one in primary green and the right one, the small one, in primary red—and pressed them to the canvas. Scrawled all around the colorful hands in black ink were the words: MY SCHIZOPHRENIC HANDS. Over and over.
Jakob ran out of his house and out to the meadow. Maybe he could still catch her before it was too late.
The night was a buzzing swarm, matching some internal rant raging within Jakob. He reached the rusted fence separating his property from Old Man Bussard’s and clumsily made his way over the top. A dim light glowed from inside the slaughterhouse. Jakob didn’t want to go in. He had never been this close to it. He didn’t like it. It made his skin crawl. He slapped at a gnat that had kamikazed into his forehead.
And now he was going to go inside the slaughterhouse.
His stomach did a great turn. The smell increased as he drew closer. Standing at the rusted iron door between him and the mystery waiting inside, he wanted to be able to tell himself this was crazy so he could go back home and curl up in his bed, surrounded by air conditioning and a lack of insects. But Marcie might be in there.
No, he told himself. Marcie had to be in there. Where else would she be? He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen the signs earlier. She had never been interested in creepy things like the slaughterhouse before. Then, after being presented with the alluring prospect of self-transformation, she had suddenly wanted to find an answer to all the mysteries.
Jakob grabbed the handle of the door and yanked it to his left. It slid into place with a clanking boom. The smell hit him, threatening to drop him to his knees. It was the worst thing he had ever smelled. Occasionally, a raccoon would get smashed on the road in front of the house and rot there for a few days until the park ranger removed it. That was enough of a deathsmell for Jakob. This was a hundred times worse. This smelled like what he imagined burying his nose in the roadkill raccoon might be like.
His stomach tried to bolt up his spine but he managed to hold it down.
He looked frantically for Marcie but didn’t see her.
He didn’t see anything.
Of course not. He had himself all worked up over nothing. This was, after all, just a slaughterhouse. Crazy old Bussard had probably just left the light on accidentally. Whatever he had seen previously was probably not what he thought he had seen. Maybe Ms. Minnow had lost a bunch of weight and maybe the person he had seen entering the slaughterhouse the one night wasn’t Ms. Minnow. He doubted everything now. Maybe Jeff had made up the whole Mr. Castle scenario. Jeff had been known to tell wild stories until everyone believed him before telling his audience it was a lie.
“Marcie?” he called out, just to be sure.
No one answered him.
Okay, he had served his big brotherly duty. Now he just wanted to get out. He turned around and saw Bussard standing in the doorway.
“Lookin for somethin?” Mr. Bussard said.
“No. I was just leaving. I’m sorry. I thought my sister was in here.” Surely the old man would understand that. He looked perfectly reasonable, just like he had always looked – a short man with bandy legs and a big gray mustache.
“You two playin games or somethin?”
“Yeah. Something like that. It was stupid of me to look for her in here. I’m gonna go now. Sorry if I bothered you.”
Bussard stepped aside to allow Jakob passage to the outside.
“You kids get stranger every day,” Bussard said. “Hidin out in a slaughterhouse.” He laughed a gentle laugh. “I’ll let it pass this time but you can see how it concerns me. You bein out here. Some people might wanna steal my cattle and I can’t have that.” Bussard stepped farther into the slaughterhouse and motioned Jakob out the door, a look something like interested disappointment on his face.
“I understand. Good night.” Jakob stepped through the threshold and lost his footing. Falling forward he caught himself with his elbows. Clumsy idiot, he thought. I can’t even walk away gracefully. He tried to stand up and fear seized his heart. His feet were drawn together. Bussard was dragging him into the slaughterhouse.
“You noticed all the beautiful people in town?” Bussard said.
“Let me go,” Jakob said, his mouth dry, panic taking over. He struggled to scoot away but it was useless. The chain bit into his ankles and Bussard looped one of the links onto a hook.
It was some kind of pulley system. He turned a little lever about ten feet from Jakob and Jakob felt himself rising up from the ground, suspended by his feet. Jakob screamed. He screamed for Marcie. He screamed for his mom and dad.
“You can scream all you want,” Bussard said. “The only thing anybody ever hears is music. Or a cow. They make what they want to out of it, I guess.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me!” Jakob spat. “I don’t want you to change anything.”
“But everybody wants something to change. Sure, you don’t have any major flaws but if you looked even better you probably wouldn’t have any problems at all.”
“Let me go!” Jakob shouted, flailing his arms wildly, trying to swing on the chain and get close enough to Bussard to do some harm.
“Besides,” he said, grabbing a sledgehammer leaning against the dark stained wall. “It’s not so much about changin anything. It’s more about dyin. And bein reborn. And me ownin a little piece of you that was all yours once upon a time.”
Jakob took a deep breath, ready to scream again, before the hammer smashed into his face and everything he had ever known about life was sent spiraling into some black space.
Marcie came up from the basement. That was w
here the big TV was and, when she had returned to the house after the stakeout, she realized she wasn’t as tired as she thought. She walked past Jakob’s room and noticed his door was open. She had to admire his and Jeff’s tenacity. They were really taking this seriously. Marcie was now so tired she could hardly hold her eyes open. She didn’t know how Jakob was still awake. She shut the door to her bedroom, turned off the light, and crawled into bed. As she lay there in silence, she thought she heard the music from the slaughterhouse and laughed it off. She really had become obsessed over the past couple of days. It was stupid, really, she figured. Just before she submitted entirely to sleep she had a strange notion. She wished she hadn’t told Jakob Geneva had said those things about him. Genny hadn’t even really said that. She had actually said she thought he was pretty cute but Marcie had wanted to have fun with him. What if Jakob had gone into the slaughterhouse, seeking the same thing that Mr. Castle and Ms. Minnow had sought? All so Geneva would find him more attractive. She drifted off to sleep, convincing herself the noise she heard was just a conglomeration of the country night sounds and her speculations about Jakob were just the product of her somewhat warped creative mind.
A Butterfly in Ice
1.
“Joel.”
The voice came from very far away, swimming toward him.
“Jooooel?”
The voice was unrecognizable.
Joel Vernon struggled to open his sandy eyes. Scraping open, he had the feeling they had been closed for a very long time. He stared into blackness.
No. It wasn’t blackness. It was...
Pupils.
“Good,” the man who owned the pupils said softly, pulling his face away from Joel’s. “You’re awake.”
Joel resisted the urge to speak. Didn’t even know if he could. He resisted the urge to ask the man in front of him a million questions. Already, a frantic feeling of dislocation rolled around in his brain. He sensed rather than felt his eyes darting around the room. A room unlike any other he had ever seen and the man in front of him was unlike any other man he had ever seen.
The man’s black pupils, set in irises just as dark, were the only breaks in the monotonous white of this room. Even the rest of the man seemed to be white. His hair was white, even though the taut skin of his face suggested he was not old enough to have a head of totally white hair. His skin was very pale and not reddish pale but powder white vampire pale. He wore a white outfit Joel immediately thought of as a uniform. A name was embroidered into the chest of the uniform’s shirt, right over the heart, and Joel didn’t know if it was the man’s name or some kind of logo. The embroidery was white. It said: SNOW. So this man in front of him was potentially “Mr. Snow,” Joel thought. He couldn’t think of a more appropriate name for this man to have.
Joel scanned the entire room. There wasn’t really anything to take in. It was like trying to take a drink from an empty cup.
Everything was white.
White walls. White door. White floor. White ceiling. White bedside table. White chair in the corner. White blinds covering a window. After spotting those blinds, Joel wondered what would happen if he lifted them. Would everything outside be white, also?
This made him wonder how long he had been here, wherever here was.
“How long have I been here?” Joel asked, not really knowing why he put this before the other obvious questions like “Where am I?” and “Who are you?”
Snow looked at Joel with an expression he couldn’t quite place. He didn’t think there was caring in those eyes. Neither did there seem to be any malice. Sadness, maybe.
“You’ve been resting here for some time, Joel,” Snow said, his voice low and soothing.
“Where am I?”
“Well, that’s difficult to explain. You’re in a hospital of sorts.”
“Of sorts? Which hospital?”
“You need to rest, Joel. Rest.”
So maybe this man, Snow, was a doctor. Dr. Snow. Apparently, Snow noticed the wildness in Joel’s eyes. He held up a small sky blue pill in front of his face.
“Here,” he said. “This will help you rest.” And then he placed it into Joel’s mouth. His fingers, while gloveless, tasted of latex.
Something inside Joel revolted. He didn’t want to swallow the pill. He didn’t want to swallow anything this man was going to give him.
Snow rose from the bed to his full height. From Joel’s position on the bed, Snow seemed very tall.
“I’ll return shortly,” Snow said, leaving the room.
Joel raised his hands up to pull the pill from his mouth and noticed he had no hands. The sleeves of his thick white shirt descended past his hands, where they were sewn tightly shut. Quickly, before the pill dissolved, he turned his head and spit it onto the floor.
Bad idea, he thought. The semi-dissolved pill made a small bright blue splash on the harsh white of the floor. Sliding out of the bed, he attempted to stand up, his rubbery legs immediately dumping him back on the floor. Panic seized him. What the hell was he going to do with the pill? He took another quick scan of the room, searching for a bathroom door. Surely there had to be a bathroom in here and if there was then he could just take the pill in there and flush it down the toilet.
For a few frustrating seconds, he tried to pick up the pill, succeeding only in making a bigger mess. The blue was all over his elongated sleeve. How could something as small as that pill make such a big mess? Finally managing to pick up the pill, he stood, contemplating where he could put it.
No. There didn’t seem to be any bathroom doors in the room. None at all. This worried him on a whole other level but the only thing he could think about for the moment was getting rid of that funny blue pill. He looked toward the window. Deep down, he knew it wouldn’t open but he decided he had to try. He crossed the room to the window and pulled on the white cord he thought would lift the blinds. They didn’t budge. He reached under the blinds, thinking maybe he could pull them out a little but they seemed to be fastened to the wall. Now he was as thirsty for a glimpse outside as he was to find a place to stash the pill. He attempted to pry a couple of the slats apart so he could look out of the window but there weren’t any spaces in between them. They were like very convincing faux blinds. Like they were just carved out of the wall or something. He doubted there was even a window behind those blinds.
Snow said he would be coming back but he did not say when he would be coming back and there was still the matter of hiding the pill and then trying to get the stain off the floor, knowing it would just end up on his sleeve.
He took a firm grip on the pill. He had an idea of what he could do with it. He slid his covered hand down the back of his pants. Before he could really think about what he was doing, he pushed the blue pill between his buttocks and into his anus just far enough for the sphincter muscles to close around it. When he pulled his hand back up there was some brown now mixed with the blue on his shirt.
More like a straitjacket, he thought. Why the hell would they need to put me in some kind of straitjacket? Why am I even here? Do they think I’m some kind of danger to myself?
With the pill safely hidden away, he crouched down on the floor and spit at the blue spot, vigorously wiping it with his sleeve and wondering how he had arrived here. And for the first time since being conscious he was gripped with a single emotion.
Fear.
True and pure, it dripped ice down his spinal column.
It rattled his bones as he climbed back into bed, grateful to give his wobbly legs a rest.
2.
Maria Pearl. That was who he thought of when he went to sleep. Maybe it was more than thinking of her. Maybe it was dreaming her because here, in his dream, he wasn’t sure she had ever existed. He saw her laughing face, green eyes winking out of sunsplashed red cheeks, orange hair flaming crazily away from her head like the sun’s corona.
She was a dream... maybe. If he had ever had her, he couldn’t imagine letting her go and if he had not had her
, then he realized his life still had a purpose.
She wasn’t the only thing in the dream. There was a whole other place there. A summer place. Joel heard the shrieking of the insects, reveled in the sight of the swollen green trees. A stream trickled lazily in the distance.
Suddenly, Maria’s smile faded. She looked at him and said, “We have to go. I think there’s someone else here.”
And, just like that, the dream was gone.
3.
He woke up, shivering, searching the room. How could he have let himself fall asleep? Did he even remember being awake? Was that the first time he had been awake?
Snow stood over by the window. The blinds were now open, pulled all the way to the top of the window frame, and Joel wondered how this could be since, only a little while before, he had found the blinds to be completely impenetrable. As if sensing he was awake, Snow turned toward him, approaching the bed, moving slowly and languidly, those black eyes swimming in a sea of white.
“You’re awake,” he said.
“I have questions.” Joel didn’t know how he was going to force those questions out, didn’t know if he was going to be able to force those questions out when it seemed impossible to make his brain form words.
“We all have questions. I don’t expect you to answer any of my questions.”
Joel didn’t know what to say to that but he couldn’t just lie back in the bed. He couldn’t just lie there and not do anything. He didn’t know why he was here. He didn’t know if he should even be here. He didn’t know where here was. But he didn’t know if this man, Snow, was to blame. Joel’s first instinct was to attack him. To get past him somehow... but what if Snow was there to help him?
Snow rubbed his powdery hands together. “Actually,” he said. “I do have one question you could answer for me... At least, I think you can answer it. Stand up.” Snow, now bedside, reached down and helped Joel out of the bed. Joel stood up, his legs a little less shaky. Maybe, he thought, that was because he didn’t take the pill. The pill this man had given him.
Bury the Children in the Yard: Horror Stories Page 3