by Brian Keene
He tries to not think about the things his daughter has done for him the past few months, things he didn’t ask her to do, but things she’s done nonetheless. To help him relax, to help him sleep.
And then he hears a sound from his daughter’s room. A squeak of bedsprings. A soft sigh. The muffled laughter of a boy.
His face becomes a slab of granite and the broken things behind his eyes shatter into even more fragments. Unaware that he’s doing it, he reaches over and picks up the hammer he left lying on the kitchen counter last night while he tried repairing the loose cupboard door above the sink. He turns and marches toward his daughter’s bedroom, knowing what he’s going to find when he opens the door and—
—what? All right, just this once, we won’t watch the rest. He wasn’t really there. Anyway. I’m glad we know that now. He just wanted to scare us but his frustration, his anger, his heartbrokenness took control.
Let’s pretend that we still have hands, and let’s pretend to hold them as we play “Ring Around the Rosie” once more, going back just a little more, a year, maybe less, because I’ve been saving this for you, for this anniversary, this most special anniversary. Why is it special? That’s a secret I need to keep just a little while longer. Take my hand and let’s go, round and round and round and—
—stop right here. Yes, this is the place, the time, exactly right.
There’s a young girl of seventeen sleeping in her bed who, for a moment, wakes in the night to hear the sound of weeping from the room across the hall. She rises and walks as softly as she can to her door, opens it, and steps into the hall.
“… no, no, no …” chokes the voice in the other room.
“Daddy?” she says.
“… no, no, no, oh, God, honey, please …”
She knows he can’t hear her, that he’s dreaming again of the night his wife, her mother, closed her eyes for the last time, of the way he took her emaciated body in his arms and kissed her lips and stroked her hair and begged her to wake up, wakeup, please, honey, what am I supposed to do without you, wake up, please …
She takes a deep breath, this seventeen-year-old motherless girl, and slowly opens the door to this room stinking of loneliness and grief. She takes a few hesitant steps, the moonlight from the window in the hallway casting bars of suffused light across the figure of her father as if imprisoning him in the dream. She stares at him, not knowing what to do.
Then his eyes open for a moment and he sees her standing in the doorway.
“Arlene,” he says, his voice still thick with tears. “Arlene, is that you?”
“Shhh,” says the young girl, suddenly so very cold at hearing him speak her mother’s name in the night. “It’s just a bad dream, go back to sleep.”
“… I can’t sleep so hot, not without you …”
She can hear that he’s starting to drift away again, but she does not move back into the hallway; instead, she takes a few steps toward the bed where her father sleeps, tried to sleep, fails to sleep, sleeps in sadness, sleeps in nightmare, wakes in dark loneliness, drifts off in shame and regret.
For the first time, she realizes the pain he’s in, the pain he’s always been in, one way or another, this man who was no war hero, no spy, no secret notebook novelist, just a sad and decent and so very lonely man, and she feels useless, insufficient, foolish, and inept; but most of all, she feels selfish and sorry.
Her eyes focus on one bar of suffused moonlight that points like a ghostly finger from her father’s sleeping form to the closet door a few feet away, and she follows the beam, opening the door that makes no sound, and she sees it hanging from the hook on the inside of the door: her mother’s nightgown, the one she’d been wearing on the night she died.
“Oh, Daddy …” she says, her voice weak and thin.
Still, her hand reaches out to lift the gown from the hook and bring it close to her face. Her mother loved this nightgown, its softness, its warmth, the way it smelled when it came out of the dryer after a fresh washing, and this girl holds the garment up to her face and pulls in a deep breath, smelling the scent of her mother’s body and the stink of the cancer still lingering at the edges.
From the bed her father whimpers, “… no, no, no, oh, God, honey, please …”
And she knows now what she can do for him, what she has to do for him, and so she removes her nightshirt and slips on her mother’s death-gown, crosses to the bed, and slips beneath the sweat-drenched covers.
“… Arlene …?’ says her father, not opening his eyes.
“Shhh, honey, it’s me. Go back to sleep. Just a bad dream.”
His hand, so calloused and cracked, reaches out to touch her face. She lies down on her mother’s pillow and is shocked to find that it still carries the ghost-scent of her perfume. She remembers that her parents liked to spoon, so she rolls over and soon feels her father’s body pressing against her, his legs shifting, his arm draping over her waist as he unconsciously fits himself against her. After a moment, she feels his face press against the back of her—her mother’s—gown, and he pulls in a deep breath that he seems to hold forever before releasing it.
She does not sleep much that night, but her father sleeps better than he has in years.
We can watch now, you and I, and see his face, see my father’s face when he wakes the next morning and sees her next to him. Shadows of gratitude, of shame, of self-disgust, of admiration and love flicker across his face as he stares down at her now-sleeping form. He feels her stir beneath his arm and realizes with a start that his hand is cupping one of her breasts, the way he used to cup his wife’s breast before the cancer came and sheeted everything in sweat and rot and pain.
Still, his hand lingers for a few moments as he realizes how very much like her mother’s body does his daughter’s feel. Then he feels her stir, waking, and closes his eyes, pulling his hand away at the last moment.
His daughter rolls over and sees how deeply asleep he is, and realizes that she’s now given herself a duty that can never spoken aloud, only repeatedly fulfilled. Only in this way can she comfort him, help him, thank him.
She slowly rises from the bed, crossing to the closet where he replaces her mother’s gown on its hook, then slips back into her own nightshirt and leaves, closing the door behind her.
As soon as the door closes, her father opens his eyes and stares at the empty space in the bed next to him that now hums with her absence. So much like her mother. So much like her mother. So much like her mother.
This goes on for nearly a year, her assuming the role of her dead mother in the night so her father can sleep. In a way, both know what’s going on, what they have become, the roles they are playing, but neither ever speaks of it aloud. And even though nothing physical ever occurs between them in the night as they keep the grief at bay, a little part of each of them falls in love with the other. In this way they become closer than they had ever been, and though the house is never again a happy place, the shadows begin to retreat a little … until the night when her father hears the muffled laughter of a boy coming from his daughter’s bedroom and storms in with a hammer that he does not intend to use but does, nonetheless, then collapsing to the floor afterward, vomiting and shaking with the realization of what he’s done, what he’s become, and it takes only a few frenzied hours for him to mop up the blood and tissue and tear up the floorboards and move the piles of human meat underneath, burying his daughter in her mother’s nightgown. He takes great care replacing the boards, hammering them into place, then covering them with an area rug taken from the living room before gathering a few things—some clothes, what little cash is in the house, some food—and stumbling out into the night.
Shhh, listen—do you hear it? That sound like old nails being wrenched from wood? The front door is opening, someone is coming in, someone who walks in a heavy heel-to-toe fashion as if afraid the earth might open up between each step and swallow him whole.
We watch as the old, hunched, broken thing that was on
ce my father makes his way toward my bedroom. He carries a battery-operated lantern with him, a small backpack, and so much regret that its stench reaches us even in this non-place we wander.
He sets down the lantern, then his backpack, removing a hammer from inside. The same hammer.
In the light we see how he’s changed. Well over seventy-five, and the years have not been kind. He looks so much like Mother did toward the end, a living skeleton covered in gray skin, slick with sickness. He moves aside what little remains of the rug and sets to work on the floorboards, which offer little resistance, and within a few minutes, he is staring down at us.
“I’m home,” he whispers.
Hello, Daddy. I’ve missed you.
He sits down, his legs dropping down beneath the hole in the floor, his feet resting between us.
“I thought about the two of you every day,” he says. “I’ve dreamed about the two of you every night … those nights that I can sleep. Ain’t too many of those, especially lately.”
It’s all right, Daddy. I understand. We understand.
He reaches into his backpack and removes something we can’t quite make out, because he’s deliberately keeping it hidden from our gazes. We’re back in what remains of our bodies now, staring up at this lost, broken, sick old man whose face is drenched in sweat, in pain, in the end of things.
“I had no right,” he says. “I had no right to love you like that, in that way. I had no right to be jealous, Melissa.”
Melissa. So that was my name. How pretty.
“I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean to do it.” And he brings the object into the light so we can see it. But we already knew, didn’t we, you and I? His old gun from the war where he never was a hero, just a simple foot soldier who helped fight the enemy and serve his country before coming home to marry a good woman and build a life for his family.
He begins to speak again: “Oh, honey, I …” But the rest of it dies in his throat, clogged by phlegm and failure and guilt.
It’s all right, Daddy. We understand. We’re not mad anymore.
But he doesn’t hear us. He clicks off the safety, jacks a round intro the chamber, and pushes the business end so deep into his mouth that for a moment we expect him to swallow the entire weapon.
He hesitates for only a moment, but that gives us enough time to move, to rise up as we are now and open our arms as he squeezes the trigger, and we are with him, and he is with us, and as the human meat explodes from the back of his head we lean forward and take him into our embrace, cold flesh and tissue meeting bone and rot, and he embraces us both, does my father, and we hold him close as his blood soaks into the tattered, rotted remains of my mother’s nightgown, and we can smell her, she is within us, around us, part of us, and in the last few moments before we pull my father down into hole with us, I find some remnant of my voice in the release of his death, and have just long enough to say, “I forgive you, Daddy, And I love you.”
Then he is in the hole with us and in this way are our sins of omission at last atoned.
We remember the way we mingled as we decayed, how we were then found and identified; we remember the way Uncle Sonny claimed our bodies—even yours, my teenaged lover whose name I still can’t remember—and had us taken to the place of cardboard coffins with plywood bottoms where we were fed one at a time into the furnace, our tissues charred and bones reduced to powder. We remember the way the workmen swept us into the containers and then into the machine that shook back and forth, filtering out gold fillings and pins once inserted to hold hips together.
And now we are here, all three of us. Our new home; our hushed home; our forever home.
And you are welcomed here, I tell them.
Mrs. Winters thinks Melissa sounds like an nice girl, the type of girl her grandson might have married if he hadn’t died in Vietnam, and oh, by the way, don’t let me forget, young lady, to tell you all about my son who was a pilot, who flew so high above the clouds you would have thought he was some kind of angel.
I’d like that, Melissa replies. I smile, insomuch as I am capable of performing such a thing, and I continue through my corridors with their marble floors, looking through my glass doors at those who reside behind, and I know that I will never know the loneliness and hurt of those who reside here, for I will always have these hushed and hallowed nights, I will always have those who rest here within me, and—most of all—I will until eternity is no more have the tales the ashes tell.
THE LIBRARIAN
6
So ends your tour of Chapel of the Chimes, or The Library of the Dead.
The librarian—your robe- and cowl-covered guide—places the last three golden books on their respective shelves: NIGHT SOLILOQUY, followed by BROKEN LADY and TALES THE ASHES TELL, a most fitting title considering the works contained in this strangest of libraries.
“I told you earlier that I would reveal myself to you,” he or she says, and removes the cowl. And there is nothing there.
The headless figure holds out his or her hands, or more aptly where his or her hands should be, for there is nothing there but empty sleeves.
“I’m not there,” the figure says, repeating the title of a book read earlier. “Yet I am everywhere. I am the librarian. I exist with those who shall never be named, with the raven in the dove’s nest, with the chimera, with Cthylla, and with the broken lady. I exist and relive through chemistry, within the tales these ashes tell, through jaded winds, with those who dwell on the shaking grounds of these fault lines on which The Library of the Dead was constructed. I exist in the reflection of dragon tears, on the ice amongst phantoms, on the notes of soliloquys played in the night. I exist and I am getting closer and closer to becoming free of this penance.”
The golden glass behind the figure reflects the librarian’s true appearance: no longer nonexistent, but full and alive; and it is then you realize which of the two tales of the earthquake contain the ashes of your guide.
“It is time to serve your penance.”
The librarian—or what used to be the librarian of this place—removes the cowl and disrobes, dropping both garments to the golden tile floor.
Only one reflection remains, but not yours.
In this library of the dead, you realize that is exactly what you are: dead, and understand the penance you must serve before it is your turn to become free. Each of the books in this place—the seemingly countless cinerary urns—has a unique story to tell, and you must read them all in order to find your own, to discover the story amidst your ashes.
You assume the robe and cowl, wondering where to start.
“With the latest addition,” the reflection tells you before disappearing.
On the topmost shelf, a book glows brighter than any other, and you float gracefully toward the vaulted ceiling to read the spine.
Your hand phases easily through the glass this time.
AFTERWORD
MARY SANGIOVANNI
The idea of there being a library of the dead is, to me, an intrinsically beautiful one. In this world, so much of death and loss finds its way into our lives. When we can, I think we try to detach from it; this is simply a survival tactic, meant to override a sense of empathy that would make us fear and hate the unstable world around us. Sometimes, though, a death strikes the deepest chords of our emotion and we can’t turn away from it. To do so would be a dishonor to the one who has passed, a cruelty to the loved ones left behind, and plainly, a wound to ourselves, leaving a cold rift in our souls unable to be healed. For these deaths, these painful losses, the notion of a library of the dead comforts. To me, it speaks to the concept that even if we die, our story isn’t over; we live on, immortal, every time our book is taken down from the shelf to be read and reread and told to others. Like souls, our stories are immortal, both the ones we create as writers and the ones we live as people. And that means the best of us is never truly gone. Death has no real power over us; it is simply a transition from one beautiful form to another—a f
orm that cannot be touched by the ugliness of this world.
The passing of Jesus “J.F.” Gonzalez is just such a loss as I described above. I can’t think of a more fitting final resting place for one of Jesus’s last stories than this library of the dead. Jesus left a legacy, not just as a beloved father, husband, son, and friend, but also as a writer and a librarian of sorts in his own right. He is a story worth telling and retelling; his tale in this anthology alone is testament to that, and I can only hope this afterword is a worthy addition to the final pages of his life.
I met Jesus back in 2001, I think at a World Horror Convention. He looked like a California bad-ass with a leather jacket and long hair, swigging a beer and having fun with his boys, so of course, that was the group of guys I spent that evening with. But I quickly saw there was more to Jesus than that—he was a true example of a gentleman and a scholar. Five minutes of talking to him was enough to show he was smart and witty in a quiet, sharp sort of way, the kind of man who thinks before he talks and says what he means. He was honest and loyal, and when he cared about you, it meant something, because Jesus didn’t waste time on people he had no patience for.
I remember asking Jesus once what he would choose if he could have any superpower, and whether he’d be a hero or a villain with it. He said, “I’d be invisible. As to whether I’d be a hero or a villain, I’d be like Dexter and kill predators. So I guess I’d be a hero.” This response—it makes me smile now to think about it—just seems to sum up the Jesus I called a friend. He didn’t look for spotlight, he didn’t need to shout to be heard, and he spent more time listening—and learning—than talking. But Jesus had a sense of honor and justice, and of loyalty to friends and family. He kept his friends grounded. He was a shoulder to lean on. And although I think he’d shirk off the title if he knew I was using it, he really was a hero to many—to fans and readers, to aspiring professionals in the horror field, and to those who were privileged enough to call him friend.