No, the scary part was not that he believed this was happening and that therefore his mind was going. The scary part was that his mind was not going, that this thing really existed. This creature, this being, this demon, this ghost, this whatever-it-was could actually be conjured up by making macaroni and cheese.
But could it be conjured up at any time, or was it only on Saturdays and only at lunchtime?
He didn't know.
That night the apartment seemed much darker than it did ordinarily. There were shadows on the sides of the couch and at the foot of the bed, echoes of darkness in the corners of the rooms.
He went to sleep early.
He left the lights on.
He dreamed of a man in a doorway with an ax.
He had the rest of the week to think about what had occurred. Afraid, he stayed away from the apartment as much as possible, leaving early for work, coming home late. He cooked no meals for himself but ate out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner: Jack in the Box, Der Weinerschnitzel, Taco Bell, McDonald's.
He'd thought the fear would abate with the coming of a new day, that as the hours passed the horror of the occurrence would dim. He thought he'd be able to find a rational explanation for what he had seen, what he had heard.
But it had not happened.
He recalled with perfect and profound clarity the contours of the bubbly foam face, the way the boiling water had made it smile. He heard in his head the whispered word.
Blood.
There was nothing he could do, he realized. He could move, get a new apartment, but what would that accomplish? The impetus for this horror might lie not in his home but in himself. He could never cook again, or at least never make macaroni and cheese, but he would always know that the face was there, waiting, unconjured, below the surface reality of his daily life.
Blood.
He had to confront it.
He had to try it again.
***
Everything was the same. He put in the water, put in the salt, put in the macaroni, turned on the flame, and out of the pot's swirling contents emerged a face. He was not as frightened this time, perhaps because he had been prepared for the sight, but he was nonetheless unnerved. He stared down at the white foam.
"Blood," the mouth whispered. "Blood."
Blood.
There was something hypnotic about the word, something almost... seductive. It was still terrifying, still horrifying, but there was also something attractive about it. As he looked at the face, saw its vague familiarity, as he listened to the whisper, heard its demand, Alan could almost understand what was wanted with the blood. In a perverse way that was not at all understood by his conscious mind, he felt that it made a kind of sense.
Outside, a dog barked. Alan looked up. The barking came closer, and through the open window he heard the sound of paws on the dirty sidewalk of his small patio. The animal continued to bark loudly, annoyingly.
Alan looked down into the swirling pot of macaroni.
"Blood," the face whispered.
Nodding to himself, Alan opened the cupboard under the sink and drew out the small hand-held hatchet he used to cut rope. He moved out of the kitchen and walked across the living room to the front door.
Apparently no one had ever done the dog harm or had in any way subverted the animal's natural trust. With virtually no coaxing at all, the innocent pet happily followed him into the apartment on the soothing-voiced promise of lunch. Alan searched through the kitchen for something resembling dog food, found a can of beef stew, and walked into the bathroom, dumping the contents of the can into the tub. The animal hopped over the low porcelain side and began gratefully chowing down.
He cut off the dog's head with one chop of the hatchet.
Blood spurted wildly from the open neck and severed arteries, but he caught some of it in the water glass he used for brushing his teeth.
He hurried back to the kitchen and poured the blood slowly into the simmering pot. The blood swirled and whirlpooled into the center before mixing with the water and spreading outward. The foam turned red, the mouth smiled.
Alan stirred the macaroni. The mouth pursed, opened, closed, and beneath the bubble and hiss he heard a new whisper.
"Human," the face said, "blood."
Alan's heart began to pound, but he was not sure this time if it was entirely from fear.
His palms were sweaty and, as he wiped them on his pants, Alan told himself that he was being crazy. A dog was one thing. But he was about to cross over the line and commit a serious criminal act. A violent act. An act for which he could spend the rest of his life in jail. It was not too late to back out now. All he had to do was go home, throw away the pot, never make macaroni and cheese again.
He got out of the car, smiling at the child.
He used the hatchet to cut off the boy's arm.
The kid had not even started screaming by the time he had grabbed the arm, hopped in the car and taken off, the child's shocked brain not yet able to process the insane information it was being fed by its senses. Alan dropped the arm into the bucket even as he put the car into gear.
It was a clean getaway.
Back home, curtains closed, he poured water into the pot, added salt, dumped in the package of macaroni. The face appeared as the water started to boil. It looked stronger this time, more clearly defined.
The mouth smiled at him as he poured in the child's blood.
As the water turned pink, then red, as he stared at the happy, bubblefoam face, he felt the mood shift in the kitchen, a palpable, almost physical, dislocation of air and space. He shivered violently. A change came over him, a subtle shifting of his thoughts and emotions, and he seemed to realize for the first time exactly what it was that he had done. The mad savagery of his actions, the complete insanity of his deeds hit him hard and instantly, and he was filled with a sudden horror and revulsion so profound that he staggered backward and began retching into the sink. For a few blissful seconds, he heard only the harsh sounds of his own vomiting, but when he stood, wiping his mouth, he realized that the kitchen was alive with the sounds of whispering. He heard the bubbling of the water, and above that the voice of the macaroni, calling to him, whispering promises, whispering threats.
Against his will, he found himself once again leaning over the stove, looking into the pot.
"Make me," the face whispered. "Eat me."
Moving slowly, as if underwater, as if in a dream, he drained the macaroni, added butter, added milk, poured in the package of powdered cheese. The finished product was neither cheese orange nor blood red but a sickening muddy brown that looked decidedly unappetizing. Nevertheless, he dumped the contents of the pot into a bowl, brought it over to the table, and ate.
The aftertaste was salty and slightly sour, and it left his mouth dry. But when he drank a glass of milk, the taste disappeared completely.
After lunch, he chopped the boy's arm into tiny pieces, wrapped the pieces in plastic wrap, put them in an empty milk carton, buried the milk carton deep within the garbage sack, and took the sack out to the trash can in the garage.
That night, he dreamed that he was a small child. He was sleeping in his current bed, in his current bedroom, in his current apartment, but the furniture was different and the decorations on the wall consisted of posters of decades-old rock stars. From another room he heard screams, terrible I horrible heart-stopping screeches which were suddenly cut off in midsound. Part of his brain told him to break the window and jump out, run, escape, but another told him to feign sleep. Instead he did neither, and he was staring wide-eyed at the door when it burst open.
The man in the doorway held an ax.
He woke up sweating, clutching his pillow as if it were a life preserver and he a drowning man who could not swim. He sat up, got out of bed, turned on the light. In the garage, he knew, the pieces of the boy's arm were lying individually wrapped inside a milk carton in the trash.
On
the stove in the kitchen was the pot. And in the cupboard six boxes of macaroni and cheese.
He did not sleep the rest of the night but remained in a chair, wide awake, staring at the wall.
The next day was Monday, and Alan called in sick, explaining to his supervisor that he had a touch of the stomach flu. In truth, he felt fine, and not even the recollection of what he had ingested had any emotional effect on his appetite.
He had two eggs, two pieces of toast, and two glasses of orange juice for breakfast.
All morning, he sat on the couch, not reading, not watching TV, just waiting for lunchtime. He thought back on last night. The man in his dream, the man with the ax, had seemed vaguely familiar to him at the time, and seemed even more so now, but he could not seem to place the figure. It would have helped had he been able to see a face rather than just a backlit silhouette, but his memory had nothing to go on other than a bodily outline that somehow reminded him of a person from his past.
At eleven o'clock, he went into the kitchen to make lunch.
The face when it appeared was less ephemeral, more concrete. There were wrinkles in the water, details in the foam, and the accompanying change that came over the kitchen was stronger, more obvious. A wall of air moved through him, past him. The light from the window dimmed, dying somehow before it reached even partway into the room. He looked down. This face was scarier, more brutal. Evil. It smiled, and he saw inside the mouth white bubble teeth. "Blood," it said.
Alan took a deep breath. "No."
"Blood."
Alan shook his head, licked his lips. "That's all. No more."
"Blood!" the face demanded.
Alan turned down the flame, watched the elements of the face disperse. Details dissolving into simplistic crudity.
"Blood!" the voice ordered, screaming.
And then it was gone.
***
The shabbily dressed man on the street corner was facing oncoming traffic, holding up a sign: I Will Work for Food. Alan drove by, shaking his head. He'd never seen such people before the Reagan years, but now they were impossible not to notice. This was the fourth man this month he'd seen holding up a similar sign. He felt sorry for such people, but he wasn't about to let one of them work at his home and he could not imagine anyone else doing so either. For all he knew, such a man would use the opportunity to scope out his house, check out his television, stereo, and other valuables, casing the joint for a future robbery. There was no way for a person such as himself to check out the credentials or references of a homeless man. No one knew who these men were—
No one knew who these men were.
Blood.
He felt the urge again, and he pulled into the parking lot of a supermarket and turned around. He did not want to, but he was compelled. It was as if another being had taken control of the rational portion of his mind and was using the thought processes there to carry out its will while the real Alan was shunted aside and left screaming. He made another U-turn in the middle of the street and slowed down next to the homeless man, smiling.
"I need some help painting my bedroom," he said smoothly. "I'll pay five bucks an hour. You interested?"
"I sure am," the man said.
"Good. Hop in the car."
Alan killed the man in the living room while he was taking off his coat. It was messy and ugly, and the blood spurted all over the tan carpet and the off-white couch, but it had to be done this way. The homeless man was bigger than he was and probably stronger, and he needed both the element of surprise and the partial incapacitation provided by the undressing in order to successfully carry out the murder.
The larger man stumbled, trying to get all the way out of his jacket and free his arms to defend himself, while Alan hacked at his neck with the hatchet.
It was a full ten minutes before he was lying still on the floor, and Alan filled up the measuring cup with his blood.
The macaroni and cheese tasted good.
He had a hard time going to sleep that night. Though his body was dog tired, his mind rebelled and refused to quiet down, keeping him awake until well after midnight.
When he finally did slip into sleep, he dreamed.
Again, it was the man in the doorway. But this time he could see the man's face, and he knew why the outline of the thick body was familiar, why the contours of the form were recognizable.
It was his father.
As always, his father walked through the door, ax in hand, blood still dripping from the dark blade. This time, however, Alan was not a child and his father not a middle-aged man. The surroundings were the same—the old posters on the wall, the aging toys—but he was his real age, and his father, walking slowly toward him, had the dried parchment skin of a corpse.
With a sibilant rustling of skin on sweater, a sharp crackle of bone, his father sat next to him on the bed. "You've done a good job, boy," he said. His voice was the same as Alan remembered, yet different—at once whisperingly alien and comfortably familiar.
Had this ever happened?
He remembered flashes of his past, pieces of an unknown puzzle which he had never before stopped to organize or analyze. Had he and his father really stumbled across the bodies as they had both told the police? Or had it happened another way?
Had it happened this way?
The pressure of his father's body seated on the side of the bed, the sight of the dark bloody ax in his lap seemed familiar, and he knew the words that his father was speaking to him. He had heard them before.
The two of them said the final words in tandem: "Let's get something to eat."
Then he was awake and sweating. His father had killed both his mother and his sister. And he had known.
He had helped.
He stumbled out of bed. The apartment was dark, but he did not bother to turn on the lights. He felt his way along the wall, past furniture, to the kitchen, where, by the light of the gas flame, he poured water into the pot and started it boiling.
He poured in the salt and macaroni.
"Yes," the face whispered. Its features looked almost three-dimensional in the darkness, lit from below by the flame. "Yes."
Alan stared dumbly.
"Blood," the face said.
Alan thought for a moment, then pulled open the utensil drawer, taking out his sharpest knife.
The face smiled. "Blood."
He did not think he could go through with it, but it turned out to be easier than expected. He drew the blade across his wrist, pressing hard, pushing deep, and the blood flowed into the pot. It looked black in the night darkness.
He realized as he grew weaker, as the pain increased, as the foam face of his father grew red and smiled, that there would be no one left to eat the macaroni and cheese.
If he had not been so weak, he would have smiled himself.
And I Am Here, Fighting with Ghosts
I've always liked this story. It was rejected by nearly every magazine on the planet before finally finding a home, so maybe my perception is skewed and it's really not very good. But it has resonance for me because it's essentially four of my dreams that I altered a bit and strung together with a loose narrative thread. I stole the title from a line in Ibsen's play A Doll's House.
***
I cannot always tell anymore. It used to be easy, there was a sharp distinction between the two. But the difference has become progressively less pronounced, the distinctions blurred, since Kathy left.
I have no visitors now. They, too, left with Kathy. And if I go into town I am avoided, whispered about, the butt of nervous jokes. Now children tell horror stories about me to frighten their little brothers.
And their brothers are frightened.
And so are they.
And so are their parents.
So I leave the grounds as little as possible. When I go to the store, I load up on groceries and then stay inside my little domain until my supplies run out and I must venture forth again.
When I do make the trek into town, I notice there are names carved into the gates outside of the driveway. Obscene names. I never see the culprits, of course. And if they ever see me coming down the wooded drive toward them, I'm sure they run like mad.
They do not know that their town is on the outskirts. They do not know that my house is on the border. They do not know that I am the only thing protecting them.
The last time I went for supplies, the town was no longer the town. It was the fair. But I didn't question it; it seemed perfectly natural. And I was not disoriented. I had intended to go into Mike's Market when I came to town, but after I reached the midway I knew that the funhouse was where I was supposed to go.
I heard the funhouse before I saw it. The laughter. Outrageous, raw, uninhibited laughter. Continuous laughter. It came from a mechanical woman—a fifteen-foot Appalachian woman with dirty limbs and dirtier clothes and a horribly grinning gap-toothed mouth. She was hinged at the waist, and she robotically doubled over, up and down, up and down, with Appalachian guffaws.
The woman scared me. But I bought my ticket and rushed past her into the funhouse, into a black hole of a maze that twined and intertwined and wound around, ending in a grimy colorless room with no furniture and with windows which opened on painted scenes. The room was built on a forty-five-degree slant and the door entered in the bottom right corner. I had to fight the incline to reach the exit at the top left.
Through the fake windows I could still hear the Appalachian woman laughing.
The door at the top opened onto an alley. A real alley. And when I stepped through the door, the funhouse was gone. The door was now a wall.
The alley smelled like French food. It was narrow and dark and cobblestoned, and it retained the lingering odors of souffles and fondue. There was a dwarf hiding in one of the doorways, staring at me. There was something else in another doorway that I was afraid to acknowledge.
The tap on my shoulder made me jump.
It was the Appalachian woman, only she was no longer mechanical but human and my height and not laughing. With one hand, she pointed down a dark stairway that opened into the ground on the side of the alley. The other hand held a rolling pin. "Turn off the light at the end of the hall," she commanded.
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