by Steve Berman
I spread plastic over the bathroom tile, the kind movers use. It clung to the floor and never curled at the corners. And it stuck to itself when it was time to ball it all up. I always kept a roll handy.
The air was cool, with no more steam. She must’ve used up all the hot water. My shoulder brushed the shower curtain as I unraveled more plastic, and it felt as cold as her breath, when I held her close under a highway. One more strip of plastic and there was enough to hold her. I trimmed it with my knife. A few red flecks dotted the seam, delicate as snowflakes. I thought I cleaned the blade better. Metal rings shrieked on the rod when I pushed the curtain open. It was freezing inside the shower and I shut off the water. I closed the knife and slid it back into my pocket.
She looked so small in death, like her miserable life made her larger. Bloodless pale, she could’ve been a porcelain statue. This was the gift I gave her. Something her creator could never imagine. Mercy.
I reached down to lift her out, and her eyes opened. I tumbled onto my back, and my wet fingers couldn’t get any traction on the plastic. All I could do was watch as she stood, glaring down at me. There wasn’t a hint of blood on her gaping throat. Her eyes kept going down, rolling to pure white. Her arms came up, hands curled like she was still holding her mug. She took a step, but couldn’t lift her legs high enough to climb out of the tub. Instead, she toppled over, right toward me. On the way down, I saw her mouth open.
She was cold and wet, pale like some deep-sea thing. Heavier than I imagined, for a tiny girl with no blood in her. All her frigid weight was on me, and there was a wiry strength in her limbs. I couldn’t get enough friction on soaked plastic to push her off. There was a clicking close to my ear, maybe fingernails on tile, maybe teeth on teeth. Her arms and legs pumped franticly, until she slid right off me.
I grabbed her hair, used her momentum to turn myself over. She was standing by the time I got to my knees. Pure reflex, I had the knife in my hand before I was on my feet. She wasn’t moving, water pattering from her fingertips onto plastic. But I wasn’t taking any chances. I jumped up. Two quick slashes, one to each side of her neck.
This had never happened before. Maybe I got careless. Or faithless.
She didn’t weaken or fall. I opened her throat earlier in the shower, and the new neck-wounds completed a crooked letter H. But there was nothing left in her to seep from the cuts. She was dead, but not at peace. And there was nothing I could do.
She took a step toward me, and I lifted the knife again. I was running out of places to cut her, but it was all I can think to do. Her bare feet squeaked on plastic as she moved, but she bumped past me, out the bathroom door. I followed her, knife still in front of me. Naked, she walked to my front door. Breathless, I opened it for her.
They huddle around me. I’m only a few miles from the city, but I’ve never seen any of them. And obviously, they’ve never been near me. There must be twenty, all ages, rags of designer clothes hanging on their limbs. One woman still wears a diamond necklace. There’s a man who must’ve been a sports star. Seven feet tall and broad as a wall, his clothes are still baggy. All the local heroes lived on the lake.
They each take a turn rushing up to me, then turning away. I stand still and wait for them to finish. Then I can get back to searching the mansion. It’s got the largest deck I’ve ever seen, facing the water. I could live here, and pretend to watch the sunrise.
The crowd thins quickly, only a few stragglers coming up to me. Inside the house their smell is thick, clinging to my tongue like bacon-grease. After they’re gone, I’ll have to open up all the windows and let the place air out. But I’ll keep the first floor windows shut, long-term, so newcomers don’t tumble in. Actual, unbroken glass.
I make my way upstairs to the master bedroom, listening. There might be one of them up here. If so, I’ll push them down the staircase. But it’s deserted.
The scent of them, so many, has given me a headache. I search the master bath for aspirin. Inside the medicine cabinet, there’s nothing but a bottle of sleeping pills. I turn on the cold water, splash my face and take a sip from my cupped palm. Another sip could wash the entire bottle of pills down my throat. But something tells me the only rest I’ll be getting is on the master bed.
With so much chaos in the street, there was no need to hide my knife. Any blood I could spill would be lost in the flood. The girl I killed was obvious in the mob, white skin gleaming in streetlamp-light as she rode a struggling man down to the sidewalk. She wasn’t the only killer, just the youngest. There were so many, most dressed in faded gowns or robes. And it made sense that if the dead rose, the first would come from hospitals and hospices. The crowd grew, but fewer clouds of breath rose from living mouths.
Something bumped my shoulder and I spun, knife ready. It was an elderly man in pajamas, a torn plastic tube taped to his nose. His teeth were bright red, the same as the throat of the girl in his hands. Two jabs and a slash from my knife, and his eyes were gone and his neck split open. But he kept chewing. The girl was limp, her breathing like bubbles through a straw. The bloody wad in his mouth fell out, and he went in for another bite.
I’d seen enough horror movies to know damaging the brain would stop the living dead. But my knife wasn’t thick enough to go through skull-bone. So I searched the street for another weapon. A window suddenly shattered somewhere over my head, glass raining down. I lifted my arms as a shield, but nothing touched me. Huge shards crashed around me onto the sidewalk, and not a scratch. Along with the glass there was a piece of window-frame, long nails exposed. I grabbed it and hit the man on his head, three times. His skull was a soup-bowl, but he wouldn’t stop. Not until the girl was dead, and he dropped her, walked away. A moment later, she got up.
She staggered up to me, palms open like begging. There was no way to kill her. No way to help her. I dropped the dripping wood, ready to accept my fate. At that moment, a pack of young boys, all in some kind of scout uniform, dashed by. They screamed, and the girl went after them. Heart hammering, I took the opportunity to run away.
Sitting on my deck, I watch the lake. The waves seem to form out of the colorless sky, vanishing as they hit the shore. Spreading more nothing on the world.
I found a collection of fancy knives in the kitchen, lined up on a magnetic strip. I would’ve loved to have them, back before everything ended. Now there’s no more warm skin. The cold metal means nothing. Everything means nothing.
There’s food in the cupboards, and there must be a store nearby. No need to go back for my supplies. I haven’t checked the garage yet, but there could be a gassed-up car in there. Ready to take me out of the city. This might be an isolated thing, living people gathered in other places. But I doubt it. The tightness in my belly tells me that it’s over. No matter where I go, I’ll find the world the same.
I wonder if I stopped eating, if it would make any difference. The dead don’t want to kill me. A hail of glass from the sky misses me. I’ll bet the bottle of sleeping pills wouldn’t make me yawn. And I can’t give final peace to the afflicted.
Maybe the preacher was right. World Without End. And God gets the final laugh.
A GHOST, A HOUSE
Becca De La Rosa
A house grew in Katie’s bedroom. It grew from her pillow, setting roots down into her mattress, and at first it was a cottage for mice. There are important steps to follow, in order to cultivate houses. Katie followed carefully. So that the house would grow up big and strong, she spun her bed around to face the window in the morning and swung it back at night; she misted the house with water from an expensive French perfume bottle; she read it bedtime stories about mansions, island castles, beautiful villas, windows, doors. Katie slept on the floor so her house would have somewhere to sleep. Weeks went by like this. Finally, in winter, the house began to grow, first slowly, and then as if it would never stop. Its thatched roof blossomed out into slates. Windows yawned up, wide and hungry. The house grew ceilings and rain-gutters. On Christmas Day Kati
e climbed into bed with her house. Its walls were warm, and it breathed like an animal, like a dog, and moaned sometimes in its dreams, one shutter kicking. Katie curled up beside it. The house opened its doors to her sleeping head.
Months ago Katie had had a gentleman caller. He said his name was Jammy, though it wasn’t. He played chess in her bedroom at night, handling the white queen with his thin fingers, breathing on its skin for luck. Katie had not known how to play chess, before he came. Katie hadn’t even owned a chess set.
The first time he visited, she had asked him who he was, and he’d smiled like a solemn king, or a priest. His hair was neat as a shroud. He told her, “My name is Jammy.”
“I don’t believe you,” Katie said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t believe in you.”
Jammy smiled wider, like a cat, like a bear trap, his teeth white as bandages, mummies, dead pharaohs. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t even think you’re real,” Katie said, lifting her chin haughtily.
Jammy said, “Don’t lie to me. Don’t try to walk through me. I am not an empty room, I am not a picture frame, and I can see when you lie, I can see inside you. Let me teach you a game,” he said.
Katie’s bedroom was the kingdom of Jammy. He came only at night, his heels so quiet on the floor that they could have been moonlight, his skin the blue-white of porcelain, a fine china teacup. Sometimes he brought presents. Matryoshka dolls. Candy canes. Red wine in thimble glasses. Once he brought a folk harp on his back, and though she pretended not to listen he played all night for Katie, until she fell asleep on his right foot.
“What are you doing here?” Katie asked that first night. Jammy didn’t answer. He didn’t even smile.
Sometimes Katie dreamed of houses, when she dreamed. They grew in fields like barley. Bred in house-hothouses, rows and rows all breathing together under the breathing air. They circled the telephone wires with shimmering wings like magpies, always too many of them to count, so she never knew what it meant, if she was destined to dream in sorrow or gold. Katie raised little house-children, called them in from the hills when it was time for bed. Why did Katie love the houses, and speak their language? The houses didn’t know, or they didn’t want to say. They kept their secrets.
He wore black suits, terribly dashing, and leather gloves. His fingers were thin and white. Jammy was his own shadow. Katie didn’t know how he came into her home—did he climb in through the window? Slide down the air vent? Slip under the door like light? But he came every night. She learned to recognise his hand on the door. It sounded like an escape artist’s final failed trick.
In some past life, a long time ago, Jammy had been a scholar, or an explorer, or a Persian prince. He told stories that owed a lot to Greek mythology. Sisters married their brothers. Men argued with gods. Snakes rose out of the heart of the earth, fire spitting in their diamond-backed skins. He told stories about a girl named Peach. He had known her, he said, before he died. Was Jammy dead? Katie doubted it, but thought anything was possible. What was Jammy? Katie didn’t know.
Jammy was not always good. He did not always bring gifts and strange stories. Sometimes he came in soundlessly and bent over her while she lay in bed, his breath hot and dry on her face, his face black. She woke up to find his hands around her neck. She woke up to find him whispering sternum, calcaneus, clavicle, triquetrum. Sometimes he smashed books against her windows and screamed. His voice was like a terrible mistake. When he had screamed himself silent he would climb onto the bed beside Katie. She could never bring herself to touch him, and their silence became holy, the inside of her room a cathedral, smoke and space. Jammy did not remember how to apologise.
“I worry about you,” Katie said one day, before she knew it was true.
“Please, don’t,” Jammy said graciously. He waved one graceful gloved hand. “I can take care of myself.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Katie said.
In all the years before Jammy came, Katie had had terrible dreams. She wrote them down in a notebook by her bed, hoping for an exorcism, but they never left. She dreamed about breathing carbon monoxide inside a garage, about fires that snatched at kitchens, babies scooped from bathtubs like glittering blue fish, and it felt like watching a bird die in her hand; the bird had died, but it was the hand that haunted her, that it had held something so terrible. Once when she was seventeen she pushed a blade against her wrist, but the cottage she lived in cried out. The cottage cried her name.
Katie told all this to Jammy, and he nodded, intent as a doctor diagnosing a rare disease. “That’s why I’m here,” he said. “To guard you from bad dreams. To teach you to listen without drowning. I am a dreamcatcher. I’m here to help you.
Around them, Katie’s home shuddered, uneasy, listening.
A few facts about Peach.
Peach lived inside a circle of jack pine and witches broom. She loved piano music and bad art. “I lived in her cupboard,” Jammy said, “above the hot press.” He made friends with the towels and the washcloths. At night, when the cold came, he slept curled up on the bottom shelf, his cheek pressed against the wood to soak up heat. He spoke the language of furnaces. When he crawled out of the cupboard on all fours every morning, it was like being born clean. Peach fed him almonds and milk and honey. She was not particularly beautiful, but she had a holy look, some kind of Mary. Peach dressed Jammy in silk and soft leather and sent him out in the world to do good among strangers.
Katie wanted to know if it was Peach who taught Jammy to play chess. She wanted to know how Peach lived, if she walked right out of a sacred painting with that halo still hanging off her. Did she find Jammy underneath a horse chestnut tree? Did she grow him from a seed in her cupboard, tucked up warm? Katie wanted to know where Jammy came from and where he went when he went away. Maybe, she thought, he spent his days with Peach still, eating lint and warmth and honey. Katie wanted to ask, were you in love with Peach or were you afraid of her? Where is she now? “We lived side-by-side like organs,” Jammy said, thoughtfully, and Katie thought: not the heart but the dead organs of the body, eyeless, nosing their way through the skeleton blind, fish of the veins.
Sometimes the house dreamed. It dreamed about the underground, which had been like a house to it, and about Katie, while it slept on her head like a snug square cap. It dreamed of growing fat as a mansion. It snored sometimes, in its sleep.
Churches haunted the house’s dreams. Stained glass. Buttresses. Steeples. In churchyards the dead slept close to the foundations, standing guard. The flagstones had been blessed again and again.
If the house had one wish, it would become a church. It would grow holy around Katie’s head. The house dreamed of sprouting a steeple, blooming colours, and it would be beautiful, the cut chunk of a prism when the light shone through it.
Jammy walked across Katie’s room with blood on his sleeves like unfortunate cufflinks. They lay on the bed together. Katie could not hear Jammy breathe, could not move close enough to feel the heat from his body. “Why is it so hard for you?” she asked. “How did you know my name, where to find me, how to get into my house? Why are you here?”
Jammy laughed. His voice had gone hoarse. “I’m here because you need me.”
“I don’t need you.”
“What happened when you were seventeen, Katie?”
“Nothing happened,” she said.
He took off his black dinner jacket and laid it neatly on the bedside table. He popped all the black buttons on his shirt. When he lay on the bed shirtless, Katie carefully walked her fingers up his ribcage, counting the spaces in between his ribs. She fit her thumbs underneath his collarbones. Jammy had grown thinner in the last few months. His bruises looked like thumbprints, Katie’s, a stamp saying mine. He turned his head away from her. “Peach had a dollhouse,” he said. “She kept it in her kitchen. Someone had made it for a child to play with, but spiders slept in all the bedrooms. It was a home that lived inside her ho
me. The way she was a home, and I lived inside her.”
“I’m sick of hearing about Peach,” Katie said, although she wasn’t. She wanted to know everything. She wanted to ask if he wished she was Peach. If he loved Peach more than he loved her, if he loved her. If he was a dollhouse and Peach was a house, what did that make Katie? “You want to leave,” she said instead. Katie was proud of her voice, so calm and matter-of-fact, like a typewriter’s voice, click-click-click.
“That’s not it.”
“No?”
“Never,” he said.
She rolled off the bed, stood above him, her arms crossed over her chest, suddenly angry. “I don’t want you to stay, anyway.”
Jammy laughed. “You want me to stay forever.”
“I do not,” she said.
He smiled at her, teeth biting into his lip. “I don’t believe you.”
Katie shoved him off the bed. “Don’t tell me what you believe,” she said. “You don’t know what you believe, you don’t know anything. You don’t know me. Get out of my house! I don’t care what you are, I don’t care. It’s not even me you want, is it? Get your suit and get your chess set and get out of my house.”
Jammy swung to his feet, furious and unbreathing. “Never.”
“How dare you,” she said, “how dare you act like you can help, like you know everything there is to know. You aren’t a ghost. You aren’t a dollhouse. You aren’t anything. You are nothing except ridiculous. I never asked you to come walking through my bedroom in the middle of the night. I never did. Why won’t you just leave me alone?”
Jammy stood very still. His face had gone white, the colour of plaster. “Whatever you say,” he said, and left.
A few facts about houses.
They are a race of women. They give birth to the men who build their children; but they also give birth to cocktail parties and domestic violence, and arguments, and Christmases, conceptions, treaties, one-night-stands, magic spells, birthday cakes, ruined dinners, ruined marriages, broken hearts, suicides. Death lives in houses long after the dead are buried. Houses dream of benediction.