No Doors, No Windows

by Joe Schreiber

  Faircloth was both surprised and gratified by the ferocity of his response. He grabbed the sheriff’s throat and squeezed until his thumbs popped through something just above the notch between Dave Wood’s collarbones. With a tiny gasp, the man dropped to his knees and then onto his side. A small trickle of blood ran from the corner of his lips. But Faircloth could still hear him breathing, or struggling to breathe.

  For an instant, the sound startled him and he looked down, unable to believe his eyes. What had come over him? He had committed murder, but he wasn’t a murderer. He was just a normal man in an extreme situation. He had gone to war and come home to a hero’s welcome. He had gotten engaged and put money in the bank. Someday he hoped to go back to college and start his own business. Now all those plans lay smashed before him on the floor. What in God’s name had he done here?

  The sheriff’s eyes gazed up at him, lips moving, trying to speak. Faircloth heard words, hoarse, whispered. “… not too late,” the sheriff was saying. “… help me … hospital …”

  Faircloth bent down and lifted the cop’s hand, then paused at the rustle and creak of something in the corner of the dining room.

  When he looked up, the girl in the blue dress was standing in the entryway to the black wing. She wasn’t alone. The tall man behind her wore a black suit. Her father.

  Together they smiled, as one.

  Faircloth smiled back. He understood.

  “… doctor …,” the sheriff said in a mushy voice.

  Still smiling, Faircloth picked up the coffee cup, now without its handle. He swung it down, smashing it into the sheriff’s face. Something shattered, but it wasn’t the cup. The sheriff made a squeak, hardly audible. Faircloth hit him again and again, beating the man’s face in with the cup until finally it broke in his hand. His arm was very tired and sore, but he felt good, as if he’d accomplished something worthwhile, the way a pile of wood warms you three times–once when you stack it, once when you chop it, and once when you burn it. Hard work is its own reward, as his father sometimes said. Faircloth had never truly understood what he meant until now.

  He looked down at the palms of his hands and saw that they were dripping with

  Scott stopped typing. He’d been working very quickly in an effort to get the words out fast enough. It wasn’t until he’d felt his fingertips sticking to the keys that he’d stopped, shaken from the spell that the story had cast, and looked down.

  There were red blotches all over the keyboard.

  Sticky scarlet whorls and dabs and smears were everywhere, spread across almost every key. It was as if a mouse, its feet dipped in red paint, had gone dancing across the horizontal surface of the laptop.

  He took in a breath, held it for a five count, and let it out. Very deliberately, he told himself: This isn’t happening. I will turn my hands over and I will see that they are clean, and then I’ll look back at the keyboard and it will be clean too. Maybe I’ll get one last brain zap in the bargain.

  But there wasn’t any brain zap.

  He turned his hands over.

  They were still covered in blood.

  He sat motionless, staring at them patiently, waiting for the illusion to go away. That was how you dealt with tricks of the eye and mind, wasn’t it? You waited for them to go away, and eventually they always did. Because if they didn’t, then that meant—

  They’re real. Or you’re crazy. Or both.

  But the longer he stared at his hands, the more real the illusion—assuming it was an illusion—became. At this point, he realized that he could actually feel the blood drying in the webs between his fingers and becoming tacky in the lines on his palms. Worse, his joints and knuckles felt hot and sore, the tiredness spreading clear up to his arm—but only his right arm. The feeling of fatigue went all the way up to his shoulder and down the muscles on the right side of his back. He had done something vigorous and taxing with that arm, and recently. Like chopping wood, it warms you not once but—

  “Scott? Are you all right?”

  He looked up over his upraised hands at Sonia, and she stared back at him in confusion.

  Scott put his hands over his eyes, scrunched them shut. In the self-imposed darkness, he heard her coming closer, felt her hand on his shoulder. The room tightened, sloping inward along a vortex of intensifying pressure. An eternity of time passed as he floated in a void and then heard her voice ask:

  “What did you say?”

  He took his hands down, opened his eyes, and looked at them. His palms and fingers were clean again. Of course they were. They had always been.

  “You said, ‘I killed them all.’ ”

  Scott opened his mouth and shut it again. He felt a sudden pressure in his throat. “He killed them,” he said. “He killed them all.” “Who?” “I don’t know.”

  “Scott?” She touched his cheek. “Are you sick?”

  Scott looked over at the boy on the air mattress. Henry’s sleeping shape gave him a measure of solace in a way he couldn’t describe. His pupils flicked toward the window at a shiver of activity off to the left, just a flicker, as if something inside the wall had shifted. “What’s that?”

  “Snow,” Sonia said gently, walking out. “It’s snowing again.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just out to check my car. I’ll be right back.”

  Following her toward the foyer, he caught himself running his fingers along the wall and through the sloping curves of the doorway, brought up short by how it was impossible to tell where the hallway began. The plaster walls flowed outward, unto themselves, without demarcation or boundary, in unspoken mimicry of living tissue. There was no question that it had become rounder since he’d arrived here.

  He killed them all.

  “MY CAR’S ALREADY BURIED,” Sonia said, returning from outside with white powder glistening in her hair, more white powder clumped onto her shoes. “I think the roads are only going to get worse.” Glancing back to the door that led into the dining room, where Henry still slept: “Maybe I should stay here for the night.”

  “That’s fine,” Scott said without much strength. He had just come back from the kitchen, sipping hot tea with lemon, the cup trembling in his hands. He’d hoped that holding on to the mug tightly enough would settle his nerves, but instead, the whole thing was shaking, almost splashing on his knuckles. “There’s a bed upstairs. I haven’t used it yet.”

  “Maybe there’s a couch in one of the other rooms down here. I don’t think I’d want to climb into an old bed anyway. Who knows the last time the covers were changed?”

  After evaluating the alternatives—of which there were none—Sonia crawled under the unzipped sleeping bag on the air mattress next to Henry. Scott turned out the lights, leaving a single lamp burning in the hall, then returned to his place on the settee, where the laptop sat with its screen saver whirling. He could sense Sonia observing him in the monitor’s blue light.

  “Scott?”

  “Yes?”

  “Am I allowed to ask what’s going on?”

  He looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “With you, tonight.”

  He paused and then shook his head. “I don’t know. Like you said, I think I’m getting sick—a fever or something.” Just saying it aloud made him feel better, and he thought of a phrase of his mother’s: Fake it till you make it. “No big deal.”

  “Because I was thinking … maybe you’re putting too much pressure on yourself to finish this book. If it’s stressing you out that much, it’s not worth it.”

  “You were the one that wanted me to finish it,” he said. “I thought you’d be happy.”

  “Seeing you like this doesn’t make me happy.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Really.”

  “I saw the movie she was showing you, you know.”

  He tried to look at her, but even with the monitor’s glow, he couldn’t make out her face across the darkness of the room.

  “It was this house, wasn
’t it?”

  “Yeah,” he said, tightening his grip on the teacup.

  “Did he live here too? Your Great-Uncle Butch?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Scott?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is it my imagination, or are the corners of the rooms …” She didn’t finish the question, and Scott didn’t answer it. He stared up at the corner, thinking of what she’d once said about how the edges wouldn’t meet properly in a dream. Somewhere a clock ticked in the house. Had the ticking noise been there before? It was possible, but not likely. He focused on the soft, measured pace, steady and constant. It should have been reassuring, but it wasn’t. For some reason, it reminded him of a finger tapping patiently at a pane of glass, over and over, a hand that wanted to come in.

  “I saw something,” Sonia said. Her voice sounded different now, younger.

  He turned around and looked at her. “What?”

  “In the movie you were watching earlier at Colette’s house. The man, the one in black … This is going to sound really stupid, but—I could tell he was looking out the window at me from the screen.”

  “Looking at you?”

  Sonia nodded. “Right before I ran. I swear he was looking me in the eye.” She blinked once. “That’s crazy, isn’t it?”

  Scott walked over to the air mattress and lay down beside her, front to back, on the opposite side of Henry. He could feel her pressing herself closer to him, shaking a little as he held on to her, back to front, her hair sliding against his cheek, still cold from her most recent trip outside. On the other side of the mattress, Henry groaned in his sleep.

  “Do you think he’s going to be okay?” Sonia asked.

  “Physically, you mean? I think so.”

  Sonia didn’t seem entirely comfortable with the answer; she seemed to be holding her breath and finally let it out in a slow, resigned sigh. “He belongs with you.”

  “That’s not my decision.”

  “It could be.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “Henry is a sweet little boy,” she said, “and he’s got brains to burn. But if you leave him with Owen long enough, he’s going to turn into Owen. You know that as well as I do.”

  “So what am I going to do?” he said, “Call social services? Hire a lawyer? Testify against my own brother in court?”

  “I know Owen”—Sonia’s voice seemed to be coming from far away—“maybe better than you do. And I know that Henry brings out the best in him. But Henry deserves better than that.”

  “He’s not my son,” Scott said. “As much as I wish he was, he’s not.”

  “I know,” she said, and they lay there for a long time, neither of them talking. Sonia’s breathing had become deeper and more regular, and he thought she might have fallen asleep until she spoke again:

  “Do you realize this is the first time we’ve ever actually spent the night together?”

  Scott nodded, even though she wasn’t looking at him, knowing she would feel it. He wished that he could see her face. Something in her voice, its intonation and inflection, made her sound so much like the teenage girl he’d left behind that he almost wouldn’t have been surprised to find that sixteen-years-younger version of Sonia lying next to him in the dark.

  “I’m still cold.” She rolled over, sleepy-eyed and stretching, and nuzzled her face into his chest. Scott kissed her forehead, and she held on to him tightly, shivering, and then pushed him away.

  “I don’t want to disappoint you,” she said. “I’m not ready for anything just yet.”

  “Neither am I. I wasn’t even thinking about that.”

  “Liar.”

  “No, I’m serious. Plus, I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s a kid in the bed.”

  She laughed a little. “Bed?”

  “Air mattress—we’d probably deflate it. And I’ve got to write anyway.”

  “Right.” That laugh again, like a faint echo, fading. “Spoken like a true …” But the last word was lost somewhere between her hair and the pillow. It didn’t sound like writer. If anything, it sounded like Mast.

  HE CONTINUED TO HOLD on to her. Eventually her breathing leveled out, became deeper and more rhythmic, and he got up again and carried the laptop to the kitchen and switched on the lights. He considered the gin before opting for bottled water. Better to stay clearheaded, or as close to clearheaded as the house would allow him to feel, if he was going to do this.

  Do what? What exactly are you doing—and, by the way, why? And while you’re at it, did you really just attribute some kind of anthropomorphic qualities to a piece of architecture?

  He chose the easy question first. He was going to finish his father’s novel. He could see the ending coming from a mile away. It all had to do with Faircloth and the girl in the blue dress. As the skein of Faircloth’s sanity came unraveled, her ghost would become more powerful. Eventually, on the brink of madness, he would discover that his own presence here in the house was not an accident but exactly the opposite, a consequence, the inevitable cause and effect of New England gothic. Twelve-year-old Rosemary had spent her final, horrible days here in Round House’s black wing, and somehow Faircloth was connected to it. But how? Rosemary had died in the 1880s, and the book was set in the 1940s. According to the timeline of the book, Fair-cloth wouldn’t have been born for almost forty years. And what about her father? How did he fit into all this?

  Scott closed the laptop.

  That was when he saw her.

  Rosemary Carver was standing in the doorway of the kitchen watching him. The light on her face showed the waxen pallor of her skin, and he could see where it had been eaten away, peeled back to show the underlying cheekbone. There was nothing spectral or illusory about her, no sense of her being a “ghost” in any sort of traditional way. She stood before him with weight, depth, and odor, the sour, soiled smell he remembered from the night that he thought he’d been holding Henry, only to see the boy playing on the other side of the room.

  His first conscious thought upon seeing her here was that her body must have continued to grow after her death; the bones were warped and twisted to fit the confines of her pauper’s grave. The remains of the blue dress hung from her body like rags of flayed skin. She began wobbling across the kitchen toward him, and it was clear there was something deformed in her pelvis. In the silence where the sound of his breathing ought to have been, Scott could hear the scrape of broken bones grinding and clicking together in their dry sockets.

  I can close my eyes. And when I open them, she’ll be gone.

  But he couldn’t make himself close his eyes.

  The girl was coming at him more quickly now, moving with a kind of clumsy eagerness. Scott could hear the floorboards creaking under her weight, could feel the still, stale air moving to accommodate her passage here. She moved closer, filling his vision, blocking out everything else. Her smell was very bad now, rich and overpowering, a smell like human waste and grave dirt, flooding his mouth and sinuses and making him sick. Soon she would be so close that her cold face would press against his like clay. And would he kiss the thin, cold ridge of her lips? He had an awful feeling that he would.

  Scott’s entire body filled with a scream that he was physically incapable of letting out, any more than he was able to take a step back. She moved into the spot where he was standing.

  When he looked again, she was gone.

  “HOW LONG?” DR. FELDMAN’S voice asked through the cell phone.

  “Only a week or so,” Scott said, pulling up in front of the drugstore, “more or less.” It was definitely more, closer to a number of weeks, but judging from the psychiatrist’s tone of voice, he wouldn’t be happy to hear that, and Scott kept it to himself.

  “The electric shock sensations you’ve been describing are one of the most common symptoms of SSRI antidepressant withdrawal. Have you been experiencing any other reactions? Headaches, fatigue, insomnia?”

  “Headaches, yes,” he said.
“Hallucinations?”

  Feldman made a not-too-discreet harrumphing sound. “With this kind of discontinuation syndrome, yes, there may be any number of somatic, mood, and psychomotor reactions involved, including visual or auditory disturbances.”

  “How vivid are we talking about here?”

  Papers shuffled on the other end. A continent away, Scott’s cell phone captured the noise perfectly.

  “This kind of reckless irresponsibility isn’t like you, Scott. I’m calling in a prescription to the local pharmacy. I strongly suggest you get it filled.”

  “All right.”

  “And, Scott?”

  “Yeah?”

  “When were you planning on coming back to resume our sessions?”

  Scott thought of dropping Henry off at kindergarten earlier that morning, the boy clutching his Finding Nemo backpack as he ran.

  “Soon,” he said. “As soon as I can.”

  IT WAS A WHITE, round, scored pill with the letters F and L imprinted on either side of the scoring. Scott stood outside the pharmacy looking at it where it lay in the palm of his hand like a perfectly formed snowdrop, contemplating the symmetry of the thing that he was about to ingest. At last, he popped it into his mouth and tried to swallow it dry. The pill got caught in his esophagus and, for a moment, he could only stand there half gagging, eyes watering, finally scooping up a handful of snow to help it down.

  There was nobody around to watch him struggle. The streets of town were almost empty, with only a handful of citizens wandering around, bundled up like Eskimos in the cold midmorning sun. No snow fell, but the wind was relentless. He started heading back to the car and surprised himself by walking past it to the next intersection and looking three blocks down at the Bijou. The demolition site appeared to be completely quiet, even though it was a Monday.