by James Hynes
She gazes at him unblinking, He nudges her and says again, “Where did you come from?”
Her gaze snaps into focus. “Below. One floor down. I think.”
Kevin notices her nostrils flaring, a little Bewitched twitch of the nose. She’s sniffing the air like a mouse.
“I peed myself,” he says.
“What?”
“I pissed myself.” Kevin gestures feebly at his damp, stinging lap. “That’s what you’re smelling.”
Involuntarily the Yellow Rose glances at the dark stain, then meets his gaze. “Hon, if that’s the worst thing that happens to you today, you’ll be a lucky man.”
“Yeah.”
Now she’s tucking her heels under her again, balancing on the toes of her shoes and steadying herself against the wall. She combs the tangles out of her hair with her fingers, scowls at the soot on her palm. “I’m not exactly feeling fresh at the moment, either.”
“Why are you here?” Kevin says.
She’s got that directionless gaze again, the thousand-yard stare. Perhaps she misunderstood the question, the way he misunderstood the one about where he’d come from. Perhaps she thinks he’s asking her an existential question. Aw hon, she’ll say, why are any of us here?
“Why’d you come up,” he says, “instead of down?”
She narrows her eyes at him. “How bad are you hurt? Can you stand?”
“I’m fine. It’s just my hands.”
“Come on.” She hooks her fingers under his elbow and tugs, helping him slide up the wall to his feet. His knees are a little wobbly; she senses it and tightens her grip, but when she tries to pull his arm around her shoulders so that she can support him, he shakes her. I can do it, Mom. Still, she clutches his sleeve, and Kevin almost apologizes.
“Will you help me find a way down?” Her eyes struggle to focus.
“Sure,” he says, “why not,” as if he’s doing her a favor.
She tugs him between the elevators, where the six doors, three on each side, are buckled to various degrees. The woman keeps close to Kevin, tightly gripping his arm; Kevin curls his bleeding hands spastically close to his waist, holding them stiffly so that they don’t shake. The ceiling above is crumpled, too, but it hasn’t fallen in, though Kevin can feel grit under his stocking foot. Together they scuff along like runners in a three-legged race. With only one shoe on, Kevin limps as if one leg were an inch shorter than the other. The hot breeze from the gap presses at their backs, carrying the smell of something burning. Kevin tries to ignore it. The Yellow Rose leads him up to one of the crumpled elevator doors and gingerly taps the warped metal with the tips of her fingers. Her nails are long and bright red, and she bends her fingers back, jerking them away and then touching the metal again. She takes care of her hands, Kevin notices; they look younger than her face.
“We probably shouldn’t take the elevator,” Kevin says, and the woman looks sharply up at him. She’s petite; without her pumps she would come up only to his chin.
“They say don’t take the elevator in emergencies,” he says.
“I know.” She’s placed her palm flat on the buckled door. “That’s good,” she murmurs, then tugs him farther on, past the elevators into the hall beyond, which splits right and left. At the junction they each tug in a different direction, then stop and pull close again, the woman clinging to Kevin’s sleeve. Each direction is the mirror image of the other: a narrow hallway with a high ceiling and a couple of tall, anonymous doors. The Yellow Rose’s hall on the left is full of glaringly lit haze and dust. Kevin’s hall, on the right, is hazy, too, but more fitfully illuminated by a flickering light around the corner.
“This way.” She tugs him to the left, and they hobble together to the first door. The woman tests it nervously with her fingertips, then lays her palm against it before trying the handle, while Kevin hovers at her side. It’s locked, so they scuttle to the next door, which is also locked, and then follow the hall around a sharp corner into the glare of twin emergency spotlights. They stop short, squinting into the white light at a door with a red-lit EXIT sign above it. The haze is thicker here, though not enough to make their eyes water, and without speaking Kevin pulls free of the Yellow Rose and hobbles, sock, shoe, sock, shoe, toward the door. The floor is cool under his stocking foot.
“That’s the way I came up.” The woman hangs back by the turn in the hallway.
Kevin stops inches from the door, hands still curled, hip poised at the crash bar. He looks back at her. In the harsh glare of the emergency lights, her disheveled hair looks like a wig, and her makeup looks like a mask.
“The stairway’s full of smoke.” She’s squinting into the bright light, nervously opening and closing her hands.
Kevin lays the back of his hand against the door. It’s not warm, so he licks his lips, glances at the woman, and nudges the crash bar with his backside. The door clicks open, and black, acrid smoke gusts out of the entire length of the opening. Kevin can feel heat, too, and he recoils from the door. It swings slowly shut and pinches off the smoke, which gathers in an ugly thundercloud up under the high ceiling. Kevin’s already running now toward the Yellow Rose, who has both hands clasped to her mouth, her eyes gone even wider. Forgetting the pain in his hands, he hooks her by the elbow and hauls her around the corner and back to the junction in the hallway, his one shoe grinding dust, his shoeless heel hammering the hard floor. The Yellow Rose’s sharp heels clatter alongside him. They clutch each other panting by the elevators, not looking at each other. Her gaze has gone glassy again, and Kevin’s is wild, glancing all around without seeing much.
“Was it like that before?” His throat is nearly too dry to speak, and when she doesn’t say anything, he rattles her a little. “Was it like that when you came up?”
No, she shakes her head.
“Is it worse now?” Kevin’s almost angry at her.
Yes, she nods.
“You might’ve said something before,” he says. “About, you know, the building being on fire.”
He’s gripping her tightly despite the bitter stinging of his palms. She looks up wide-eyed, almost as if she’s beseeching him.
“I couldn’t go down, so I thought maybe I could come up”—she shakily glides her palm up, across, and down like an airplane—“and then go down the other way.”
“Fuck,” he says. “Fuck.”
She flinches suddenly, looking past him, forcing him to wheel with her. He turns to see what she’s looking it, and the cloud of smoke he let in through the emergency door glides like a shadow around the corner under the ceiling, as if it’s following them. Kevin looks over her head down the other, darker hallway, with its sinister flickering light.
“Wait here.” He lets go of her, leaving two bloody palm prints on the sleeves of her jacket, and he hurries up the hallway to another locked door and pounds on it with his hands. But it stings too much to ball his fists, so he backs up and kicks the door savagely with the toe of his expensive shoe, making black scuff marks along the bottom of the door. “Hello!” He kicks and kicks. “Can you hear me? Can anybody hear me?” He backs up and kicks the door flat with his shoe, like a TV cop, and his stocking foot slides out from under him and he ends up sprawled on his ass, grinding the glass into his palms again. He’s on the verge of tears as the Yellow Rose stoops to haul at his elbow, helping him to his feet.
“We should stick together.” She slaps the dust off his suit.
He ignores her, starting into the haze down the darker hallway, and she clutches at him, trying to hold him back.
“We have to check down here,” he says, breaking free. “There’s got to be another stairwell.”
“Don’t,” she says, but she doesn’t stop him, and around the corner he sees, in the flickering light, that the end of the hallway has collapsed. Not just the ceiling, but a concrete beam from the floor above has come down, along with most of a wall—a heap of rubble like an ancient ruin. A light fixture spits and fumes, floating orange sparks th
at fade and die in the haze. This is the source of the whip-crack he heard before. The emergency door and lights are buried behind the heap of concrete and drywall. In the maddening flicker of the fixture, Kevin sees an arm thrust out of the rubble a foot or two above the littered floor. It’s hard to tell in the unsteady light, but he thinks it’s a man’s arm, from the blue dress shirt buttoned at the wrist. The arm sticks out from just above the elbow, palm up, the hand limp.
Kevin balances on the balls of his feet, ready to flee. He glances at the ruined ceiling, at the haze all around, anywhere but at the arm. Above the tangle of rubble he can make out the glow of the emergency lights, but he can’t see the exit sign. And he’s glad, because the word EXIT would read like a cruel joke. NO ENTRING is what it would really say.
“Come back!” cries the Yellow Rose from around the corner.
“Don’t go,” said his Aunt Mary from the porch of his grandfather’s house, clutching her elbows in the cold. “Give ’em a chance to clear the roads first.”
“I gotta get back,” Kevin said. “I promised my mom I’d be there for Christmas.”
But it was already early Christmas morning, and he knew as he scuffed through the snow of the farmyard to unbury his Pinto that he wouldn’t get to his mom’s until noon at the earliest, even if the roads were clear all the way back to Royal Oak. But he couldn’t spend another moment in the house with all those rural Quinns and his dead grandfather. Not after having been mistaken for his dead father, not after having slept through the old man’s death, not after having been the last to know. Kathleen loomed behind Aunt Mary, watching him blankly with the sleeves of her massive sweater pulled over her fists. He didn’t even ask her if she wanted to come; she and their mother weren’t on speaking terms at the moment. Go, stay, her look said, it’s all the same to me.
So while his sneakers soaked up snow, he flailed at the accumulation on his car with the little brush on the end of his windshield scraper, until the faces watching from the farmhouse realized he was serious, and Kyle and a couple other burly farm cousins tromped out in their boots with the laces undone and helped manhandle Kevin’s Pinto through the snow down the drive and into the road, then stood by the mailbox in their shirtsleeves and watched him fishtail down the hill. Kevin barely made it down the road, his wheels churning snow and gravel, but the Grand Ledge Highway had been plowed and the tires gripped the scraped gray pavement gratefully. A haze hung over snowy fields on either side, and a weak winter sun, just risen, hovered above the skeletal branches of some farm’s woodlot. He fiddled with the radio but found only Christmas music, and every tune, from “Run, Run Rudolph” to the “Hallelujah Chorus,” sounded like a taunt, so he drove with the radio off, listening to the rush of the heater and the clatter of his shitty little car.
East of Lansing on I-96, bored by the freeway, he got off at the Okemos exit and headed south through Mason, hoping that the storm the night before had passed mostly north of the freeway and that the back roads were clear. By now the sun had climbed higher into a crystalline blue sky, and the snow on either side of the road glittered so painfully that Kevin regretted not having brought his sunglasses. The road itself was clear and dry and the streets of Mason were empty early on a Christmas morning, so he decided to risk an even smaller road, Dexter Trail, that wound around small lakes and through woods and past ranch houses and farms. On a long, straight stretch of the Trail east of M-52, just north of Stockbridge, he impulsively pressed the accelerator to the floor and pushed his rattling little deathtrap as fast as it would go on the cracked pavement—which, luckily for him, wasn’t very fast, so that when the road passed through a gloomy patch of woods where the low winter sun hardly ever shone, and the car hit some ice and began to spin, he wasn’t instantly propelled into a tree. Tree trunks slid sideways past his windshield, then the road behind him, then trees sliding the other way. When he was facing forward again, his adrenaline kicked in and he stomped on the brake, screeching to a halt on a dry patch of pavement just beyond the woods and stalling out the car. As he sat panting in the sudden silence, he saw that someone else had hit the same ice and spun out not long before, only without as much luck as he’d had. In the steely winter light falling across a farmyard just beyond the woods, Kevin saw a pair of tracks plowing through the snow across the yard and past the front of a derelict farmhouse. The twin tracks ended at a green pickup truck tipped on its side at the edge of the field beyond the house.
His heart racing, Kevin sat in his ticking car in the middle of the road. The tracks looked fresh, unblurred by later snow or wind. The old farmhouse, though, was heaped with snow. Its front porch had long ago collapsed like a shopkeeper’s shutter over the first-floor windows and the peak of the farmhouse roof had caved in, so that he could see bitter blue sky through the empty window frames of the second story. Across the weathered gray siding someone had spray painted, in huge letters, NO ENTRING. Even under the blanket of snow Kevin could see the tangle of untrimmed bushes across the farmyard, the angular heaps of rusting farm machinery, and the splintered uprights of a barn that had long since burned or collapsed completely into itself. The tracks of the overturned pickup seemed to aim straight through the only unobstructed path across the yard and into the field beyond.
Still trembling, Kevin restarted his car, checked his mirrors, and pulled the car as close as he could to the side of the road without getting stuck. He put on the emergency blinker, left the motor running, and got out. Clutching his denim jacket shut at his throat, he slipped and slid in his soaking sneakers up the track of the pickup, calling out weakly in the bitter cold, “Hello?” The empty farmhouse seemed bigger and gloomier now; through its broken windows he saw that the first-floor ceiling had also caved in, too, so that the interior of the house was stuffed full of splintered gray timbers like a box full of pickup sticks. Even if you wanted to, there’d be no entring that house, making the blunt warning across the front seem both superfluous and more menacing. Scuffing up the track on his icy feet, Kevin thought the handpainted warning might as well have read ABANDON ALL HOPE.
Kevin called out again, “Anybody there?” but his words froze and died, leaving only a ringing, icy silence. He was shivering, and his feet were beginning to sting. The snow around the truck was disturbed by the truck’s final topple onto its side, and Kevin steadied himself with one hand on the freezing side panel as he edged along its rust-eaten and salt-rimed undercarriage. He kicked through the snow around the front of the truck, trailing gusts of white breath. The truck’s hood was still warm under his hand, so he called out again, “Anybody in there?” The windshield was cracked but not shattered; it might even have been an old crack, an elongated S that snaked from one side to the other. The cold light fell across cracked black vinyl seats that were patched with duct tape and leaked sickly yellow foam stuffing. Kevin put his shaking hand on the cold, cracked glass and peered into the cab. The driver’s door window was rolled up and intact, while the passenger door window, pressed into the snow at Kevin’s feet, was crazed with fractures. His pulse throbbed in his throat, and he angled this way and that, peering into the foot wells and the narrow space behind the seats, briefly misting the glass with his breath. There was no one in the truck.
The hair rose on the back of his neck as if someone were watching him from behind, and he spun suddenly around. The field of snow glittered away into the distance, poked through with the dried stalks of last year’s corn. No one there, either. He glanced at the gloomy house, gray wood heaped with white, then at the ruins of the barn, blackened uprights frosted with snow. He stepped back into drifts up to the calves of his jeans to get a wider view of the truck. There was no snow on it, so it must have crashed since the storm, but the only footprints around it were his own, coming up from the road. He trudged along the top of the truck, noting the empty bed and the intact window at the rear of the cab. Standing behind the sideways tailgate, he saw the truck’s tracks and his own coming up from the road, saw his Pinto with its lights flashi
ng dimly in the bright sun, saw its thin plume of exhaust rising straight up in the brittle, windless air. He turned completely around, stamping a hole in the snow. There was no one in the truck, and no tracks led away from it.
Suddenly the cold penetrated deeper, not just the freezing air through his thin jacket, but an all-encompassing cold that seemed to flow from the truck, the ruined barn, the decaying equipment, the slowly collapsing house.
“Hey!” he shouted, as loudly as he could, but the syllable disappeared into the cold as quickly as the mist of his breath, leaving no trace that he had ever cried out at all. The snow glittered painfully in every direction, except in the interior of the derelict house. Even though the roof had collapsed and the windows were all broken out, none of the relentless winter light seemed to make it into the house’s interior, where all he saw were the shadows of shattered and upended timbers, curling peels of ancient wallpaper, sheets of water-stained lath and plaster, and where, he knew, with absolute certainty, that if he stared into the shadows long enough—trembling in the cold, up to his knees in snow—something would move and beckon him.
He started to run, clumsily, back toward the road. He threw his arms out for balance and let his jacket flap open, lifting his knees high to punch his sodden, freezing sneakers through the drifts. Halfway across the farmyard it occurred to him that he might tread on something sharp under the snow, that he ought to retrace his original path back around the truck, but there was no way he was going back there. He plunged through drifts up to his knees, caking his jeans with snow, and he struggled past the front of the ruined house without looking back, finally bursting through onto the pavement, gasping white clouds, his whole body shaking, his throat raw. He yanked open the Pinto’s door, fell into the bucket seat, and put the car in gear even before he slammed the door or buckled his seat belt. The wheels whined in the snow, ratcheting Kevin’s panic even higher, but then treads caught pavement and he skidded out onto Dexter Trail and rocketed away from the house and the empty truck, warmed as much by sheer relief as by the car’s wheezing heater. He didn’t look back, he never drove that road again, and he never mentioned what he’d seen to another living soul.