by Jack Ketchum
Then the glass began to move.
I'd seen it happen at séances before, but never quite like this. The glass was making aimless darting starts in all directions, like an animal that had suddenly found itself caged. It seemed frantic and bewildered, and in a strange way its blind struggling beneath our fingers reminded me of the almost mindless fluttering of hands near to death. "Stop playing the fool," Joan said to Bob, but I was becoming certain that he wasn't, all the more so when he didn't answer.
Then the glass made a rush for the edge of the table, so fast that my fingers would have been left behind if our fingertips hadn't been pressed so closely together that they carried each other along. The light swooped on the letter I and held it for what felt like minutes. It returned to the centre of the table, drawing our luminous orange fingertips with it, then swept back to the I. And again. I. I. I.
"Aye aye, Cap'n," Stan said.
"He doesn't know who he is," Marge whispered.
"Who are you?" I said. "Can you tell us your name?"
The glass inched toward the centre. Then, as if terrified to find itself out in the darkness, it fled back to the I. Thinking of what Marge had said, I had an image of someone awakening in total darkness, woken by us perhaps, trying to remember anything about himself, even his name. I felt unease: Joan's unease, I told myself. "Can you tell us anything about yourself?" I said.
The glass seemed to be struggling again, almost to be forcing itself into the centre. Once there it sat shifting restlessly. The light reached toward letters, then flinched away. At last it began to edge out. I felt isolated with the groping light, cut off even from Joan beside me, as if the light were drawing on me for strength. I didn't know if anyone else felt this, nor whether they also had an oppressive sense of terrible effort. The light began to nudge letters, fumbling before it came to rest on each. MUD, it spelled.
"His name's mud!" Stan said delightedly.
But the glass hadn't finished. R, it added.
"Hello Mudr, hello Fadr," Stan said.
"Murder," Marge said. "He could be trying to say murder."
"If he's dead he should be old enough to spell."
I had an impression of bursting frustration, of a suffocated swelling fury. I felt a little like that myself, because Stan was annoying me. I'd ceased to feel Joan's unease; I was engrossed. "Do you mean murder?" I said. "Who's been murdered?"
Again came the frustration, like the leaden shell of a storm. Incongruously, I remembered my own thwarted fury when I was trying to learn to type. The light began to wobble and glide, and the oppression seemed to clench until I had to soothe my forehead as best I could with my free hand. "Oh my head," Marge said.
"Shall we stop?" said Joan.
"Not yet," Marge said, because the light seemed to have gained confidence and was swinging from one letter to another. POISN, it spelled.
"Six out of ten," Stan said. "Could do better."
"Shut up, Stan," Marge said.
"I beg your pardon? You're not taking this nonsense seriously? Because if that's what we're doing, deal me out."
The glass was shuddering now and clutching letters rapidly with its beam. "Please, Stan," Marge said. "Say it's a game, then. If you sit out now you won't be able to discuss it afterwards."
DSLOLY, the glass had been shouting. "Poisoned slowly," Stan translated. "Very clever, Bob. You can stop it now."
"I don't think it is Bob," I said.
"What is it then, a ghost? Don't be absurd. Come on then, ghost. If you're here let's see you."
I heard Marge stop herself saying "Don't!" I felt Joan grow tense, felt the oppression crushed into a last straining effort. Then I heard a click from the apartment door.
Suddenly the darkness felt more crowded. I began to peer into the apartment beyond the light, slowly in an attempt not to betray to Joan what I was doing, but I was blinded by the glass. I caught sight of Stan and knew by the tilt of his head that he'd realised he might be upsetting Louise. "Sorry, Louise," he called and lifted his face ceilingward as he realised that could only make the situation worse.
Then the glass seemed to gather itself and began to dart among the letters. We all knew that it was answering Stan's challenge. We held ourselves still, only our exhausted hands swinging about the table like parts of a machine. When the glass halted at last we'd all separated out the words of the answer. WHEN LIGHT COMS ON, it said.
"I want to stop now," Joan said.
"All right," I said. "I'll light the candles."
But she'd gripped my hand. "I'll do it," Stan said. "I've got some matches." And he'd left the table, and we were listening to the rhythm he was picking out with his shaken matches as he groped into the enormous surrounding darkness, when the lights came on.
We'd all heard the sound of the door but hadn't admitted it, and we all blinked first in that direction. The door was closed. It took a few seconds for us to realise there was no sign of Louise. I think I was the first to look at Bob, sitting grinning opposite me behind his empty bottle of Pernod. My mind must have been thinking faster than consciously, because I knew before I pulled it out that there was only one ticket in his pocket, perhaps folded to look like two by Louise as she laid out his suit. Bob just grinned at me and gazed, until Stan closed his eyes.
—Wrath James White
Wrath James White is a former World Class Heavyweight Kickboxer, a professional Kickboxing and Mixed Martial Arts trainer, bodybuilder, distance runner, performance artist, and former street brawler, who is now known for creating some of the most disturbing works of fiction in print.
Wrath is the author of The Resurrectionist, Succulent Prey, Yaccub's Curse, His Pain, The Book of A Thousand Sins, Population Zero, Sloppy Seconds, Everyone Dies Famous In A Small Town, Sacrifice, Pure Hate, Like Porno For Psychos, The Reaper, and SKINZZ. He is the co-author of Teratologist with Edward Lee, Orgy of Souls with Maurice Broaddus, Hero with J.F. Gonalez, and Poisoning Eros with Monica J. O'Rourke.
—The Monster in the Drawer
By Wrath James White
Elizabeth's house was an old colonial row home that was over two centuries old and not carrying its age well at all. It was bowed and stooped, ready to cave in upon itself. The house was in need of a total remodeling or, at the very least, a paint job. It still had flecks of white lead paint clinging to the crumbling red brick from its last paint job, sometime during World War I. Five generations had fought, struggled, suffered, and died behind those walls. The home had known few smiles in the two centuries it had stood on this block and even fewer celebrations. This was a house that had grown accustomed to sorrow.
The house's dour, dilapidated visage reflected the history, misery, and depression of its inhabitants. It was the architectural equivalent of the picture of Dorian Gray. Its own decay mirroring the gradual necrosis of those who resided within.
It took only a glance at the collapsing roof, shuttered and boarded up windows, cracked and crumbling concrete porch, and faded, deteriorating brick facade to know that this was not a place of good fortune. Happiness did not grow in the shadows of haunted buildings. It was far too dark to nurture flowers.
This was the house where widows sat in windows waiting in vain for soldiers to come back from war. It was the house where women died during childbirth. It was the house where children played with broken toys and tried to keep their minds off the hunger in their bellies and the sounds of spousal abuse coming from the next room. The house where prayers went unanswered and parents cried themselves to sleep. To Elizabeth, even decorated in Christmas ornaments, her house looked funereal, like a corpse in a party dress.
Everyone knew that ghosts and monsters lived there. Haunted was a word Elizabeth had often heard used to describe both her house and its inhabitants. Even the bravest kids refused to pass in front of it during the day or night, stepping off the sidewalk and into the street rather than risk something reaching out from one of the dark, shuttered windows to snatch them inside.
Elizabeth
knew why they were afraid. It was because of the monster. The monster that lived with them in the house, the one that had always lived there.
She could hear the young kids passing below her window, daring one another to go up and ring the doorbell. No one would take the dare. The most they would do is come back in the dead of night to throw eggs at the door. No one ever came to visit Elizabeth except to mourn some tragedy or another. She and her family lived in the morbid old house in relative isolation. Just her family and the monster.
Today, Elizabeth was in mourning—kind of. Her baby brother had stopped breathing while lying in his crib the previous night. Family, friends, and relatives braved the frigid temperature outside, trudging through the snow in their heavy winter coats and boots to pay their condolences. They sulked around the drafty old house with shocked, grief-stricken faces, consoling her widowed mother over the loss of her son and ignoring Elizabeth as they always had. Dressed in black, with their sad, pale faces and stunned, hollow eyes, many of the mourners looked as if they were on their way to a masquerade ball. Like they had dressed as vampires and ghouls and were detoured on their way to the party and had simply worn their costumes here, using only a slight alteration in makeup to change their appearances from horrific to tragic. Elizabeth wanted to believe that her relatives took this death as casually as she did, but she knew that wasn't the case. Billy had been greatly loved. The anguished expressions on her relatives were genuine. Store-bought make-up would not have been so convincing.
They called it SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Though, at three years old, her brother Billy was not quite an infant. No one could make sense of how a healthy toddler could simply stop breathing suddenly. But Elizabeth knew. The monster had gotten him.
She'd heard the creature's mad gibbering coming from her brother's room just as the last episode of the Twilight Zone-a-thon had gone off the air. She'd heard its overgrown toenails scrape the floor and seen its twisted shadow slither across the wall as it made its way down the hall toward Billy's room. She had just dozed off and it had awakened her as she lay in bed with her door locked and the TV flickering blue phantoms across the walls.
Elizabeth had never heard the creature laugh before. She'd never heard it make any sound at all until recently. Still, as soon as she'd heard the high-pitched tittering echoing through the house, she'd known it was the monster. The sound of its ghastly mirth made her skin feel too loose on her as if a draft had slipped beneath it.
She didn't know how it had gotten out. It usually required her to help it out of the drawer. She hated touching it, but its loneliness called to her. Elizabeth understood what it was like to be alone. She knew what it was like to be ugly and unloved. So she often took it out to play with it. She liked to see the hideous little thing smile up at her as she sang to it. When it was happy, that twinkle in its eye almost made it look beautiful. At least to Elizabeth it did. She liked that it needed her. Elizabeth had never felt wanted before, let alone needed. But without her, the monster was almost helpless, or so she'd thought, until her Daddy died.
During the day it shunned the sunlight and hid in her vanity drawer. She'd never really seen the thing leave on its own, but she knew it had. Sometimes she'd be half-asleep in the middle of the night and would hear it scurrying about. Mostly she would see the aftermath of its nightly jaunts when she awoke in the morning to find things smashed or misplaced. She'd often wondered how it could seem so passive and docile during the day, yet at night, when she slept, it would burst free from her vanity and wreak havoc all about the house, throwing and breaking things, leaving a mess for her to clean up. Sometimes, she would hear it out in the hall just beyond her door, throwing a tantrum. It sounded so angry, so violent. Elizabeth would hide under the covers until it stopped. She wouldn't move until the thing had crawled back into her drawer and gone to sleep. Then she'd wake up and stare in awe at the holes in the drywall where it had punched or kicked straight through the plaster, the furniture now reduced to kindling.
Her mother and father never believed the monster could be dangerous either. They always blamed the destruction on Elizabeth.
Sometimes, Elizabeth awoke to find her parents tiptoeing around her, casting nervous and fearful glances in her direction. Often they sported bruises and scratches. Elizabeth knew the monster had attacked them in the night. She wanted to prove it to them, but she didn't want them to take it away from her. It was the only thing that listened to her. The only thing that really loved her. So instead, she bore the blame for its violence and vandalism and watched as her parents drifted further away from her behind a wall of fear and mistrust. Daddy had learned all about the monster though.
He'd staggered home drunk one night and began abusing Elizabeth's mother as he did every Friday night after payday. When Elizabeth shrieked at the top of her lungs for him to leave her mommy alone he had come after her.
"Stop hurting my mommy! Go away! Leave us alone!"
Her father was a large man with big, calloused hands hardened by years working as a brick mason. He'd clamped those hands on Elizabeth's throat and pushed her back into her room onto her bed. He'd done more than beat her that night. She had bled for two days afterward. On the third evening, the monster came out. They'd found her father torn to shreds at the foot of the stairs.
A terrific pool of blood filled the foyer with a thick strawberry pulp containing chunks of torn and masticated flesh. Shattered bone stuck out from the numerous lacerations and avulsions gleaming white against the savaged red meat. His face was the only part of him left unmarred, the expression contorted into a gruesome rictus of purest agony and terror suggesting that he'd been alive through much of the ordeal. By the time the police came, the rats had already gone to work on him. They'd been having a serious pest problem that winter. The police detectives investigating the murder said that some of the local drug fiends had probably broken in and attacked him and that he'd more than likely died trying to protect Elizabeth and her mother. Elizabeth knew better. It had been the monster and it had only come for Daddy, to punish him for hurting her.
The police found her covered in blood at the foot of the stairs, cradling her father's head while the rats splashed around in his blood, retrieving choice bits of his internal organs from the tacky red effluence.
"Daddy? Wake up, Daddy. Wake up. I'll make breakfast. I'll...I'll make eggs and bacon and…and—wake up, Daddy! Wake up!"
No one believed her about the monster. She heard her mother whisper to the police officer that Elizabeth was functionally autistic. She had difficulty staying in the present, distinguishing things in her mind from things in the real world. Most of the time, she appeared normal, but then she'd lapse into a fugue from which it was nearly impossible to rouse her. She'd often found that days would go by without her remembering a thing she'd done or said. They took her father's head from her and sent her upstairs to her room to wash up.
No one bothered to check Elizabeth's drawer. They all laughed at the monster. But Elizabeth knew it was in there and it was getting stronger. It no longer needed her help to get out of the drawer.
Elizabeth knew the monster was getting jealous. It had whispered to her constantly in the weeks prior to her brother's death. It told her it was going to kill the little brat. Elizabeth could hear its voice in her head. Well, not exactly its voice, but its intentions; the violent fury of emotion boiling off it. It didn't like the fact that so much attention was being lavished on little Billy while everyone seemed to have forgotten that Elizabeth even existed. The monster loved Elizabeth. The monster loved her because she understood it. It was as lonely as she was and needed her company as desperately as she did. It wanted to protect her; to make her happy. So she locked her bedroom door every night to make sure it wouldn't get out like it had the night Daddy died. Still, somehow it had gotten out. Now Billy was dead.
Everything died in this house. Elizabeth stared up at the water stains spreading across the ceiling from year after year of roof leaks and wondered
how long they had before the trusses finally rotted away and the entire structure collapsed and crushed them all to death or entombed them alive. She knew it was only a matter of time. Elizabeth looked over at the drawer and it began to rattle and shake as if the thing could sense her staring at it. She had no doubt that the monster would survive when the house finally swallowed them all. This was the perfect house for monsters.
The monster in the drawer was the only friend Elizabeth had left. She often talked to it when she was lonely. And she was always lonely. It talked back to her telepathically or rather she interpreted its body language. She wasn't sure which, but somehow she understood the mute and hideous thing. It mouthed words silently in imitation of her speech but no sound ever issued from its lips, except for that horrible laughter, at night, when it was angry. Still, she'd known of its plans for her baby brother and she'd done nothing to stop it, told no one, and now Billy was dead and a part of her was happy. Even though she was still ignored as Billy's memory took on a presence more vast than he could have ever achieved in life. The thing had martyred him.
Elizabeth watched her mother wail in exaggerated grief as friends and family rushed to console her. Elizabeth knew that her mother's guilt was a selfish one. Now that Billy, with his beautiful blond curly hair, big, blue, puppy-dog eyes, and flawless, tanned, and healthy skin, was dead, there was no longer any proof of her mother's lost beauty. Billy had been the only evidence that remained of her long-faded good looks besides the yellowing photographs on the mantle. Looking at the withered and wrinkled shell, with the hard, bitter, hollow eyes of a prisoner of war, no one would've ever connected her mother with the lovely, vibrant, young bride smiling in those ancient photos, and looking at Elizabeth would've been no help in the matter. Rocking back and forth, staring at herself in the mirror and drooling for hours, lost in her own mind. Elizabeth knew she was no beauty queen.