Etched Deep & Other Dark Impressions

by David Niall Wilson

  In contrast there were papers and folders strewn everywhere. Drawers hung open, and every horizontal surface held something that was out of place. She couldn't have explained this sensation, but the room exuded such permanence that a missing volume in the bookshelf, or a drawer spilling its contents onto the floor, which was how the police had left the room, was a glaring affront the character of the space.

  Monica had started instinctively forward to straighten the mess when two things caught her eye, and she stopped. Beside the desk, right where it belonged, she thought, though she didn't know how she knew, stood his walker. The black rubber handles that he had gripped so tightly, that had molded to his hand, mocked her. On the desk, beside the walker, his glasses rested. Thick black birth control frames, like the ones they forced for free on military men, the lenses half as thick as a coke bottle. His eyes had watched her through those lenses. They were part of his face.

  She trembled, and she was certain the room breathed, that she felt that raspy rhythm wheezing in and out around her, ready to break out at any moment in a cacophony of coughing, phlegm-spewing laughter.

  There was nothing. Just like in the old car, where his scent lingered like mold, or rot, the unhealthy aromas of pipe tobacco and old age mingled and imbedded deep in the upholstery. The silence was deafening. It reminded her of the silence when she'd shut off the wipers and the radio. It was the silence of a tomb.

  Monica reached out and slid one of the file cabinet drawers closed. Somehow this small action broke the icy stasis she'd been mired in. She stepped to the desk, glanced down at the walker, and then, without even knowing she meant to do it, lashed out and kicked it across the room. It clattered against a bookshelf, toppled two folders full of old receipts onto the floor, and settled in a heap.

  She began to methodically straighten the room. Books slid easily into the slots they had been yanked free of on the shelves. The files were in disarray, but mostly the items separated in folders remained separated, and she was able to gather them up and cram them back into the yawning drawers, slamming each one closed in turn. Before long the only thing out of place in the room was the walker, it's four feet pointing toward the center of the room. She left it right where it had fallen, smirking each time she passed it and giving it another kick. It felt good.

  There was a bar in one corner, cherry wood and mirrors. It held a single decanter and four short, squat highball glasses. Monica had known her father drank, she'd smelled it on his breath and in his sour, old-man sweat, but she'd never actually seen him do it. He never drank in front of her, never had a beer with his dinner, or wine.

  She pulled the stopper from the decanter; it smelled like some sort of whiskey, but her own drinking was so limited she couldn't tell if it was scotch, or bourbon. It didn't matter. What mattered, she told herself, spinning slowly to take in the office, the books, the cabinets and the desk, was that it was hers. For better or worse, richer–yes, richer than she'd thought he would be–all that her father had owned belonged to her. He would not be stomping and banging down the hallway to break her things, or slapping her, or spitting on her with his diseased drool as he screamed and screamed. He was gone.

  She took one of the highball glasses down the hall to the kitchen, tossed in a couple of cubes of ice, and returned to her father's den. She poured two fingers of the rich, amber liquid from the decanter over the ice and stepped around behind the desk.

  Her courage failed, just for a second, as she ran her hand over the soft leather upholstery of the chair. It was deep, cushioned, and felt far too much like skin wrapping around her fingers as she caressed it. It was slick, and when she thought of how many times, and for how many years, her father had pressed back into that leather, soaking into it like slow poison, she nearly wiped her palms on her jeans.

  She set the glass on the desk, held her breath, and dropped slowly into the chair. She leaned back, her body rigid with dread. The leather was cool, supple, and the action invoked no response whatever from the room, the glasses, the walker, or her subconscious. She was fine. It was fine. It was a desk, and a chair–and he was gone.

  She sipped the whiskey and gazed at the shelves and the walls, taking in each and every nuance. She had been forbidden access to this space for so long that it felt like visiting an alien planet. Her mother had never entered the room either, she was sure. She'd seen her standing outside, staring, sometimes with one hand raised as if to knock, or to grab the doorknob, but Monica was certain that Emily Pettigrew had done the smart thing–the wise thing. She'd turned and walked away, letting the questions eat away at her mind, and her heart, but protecting the shell that made her whole–for a while.

  She opened the center desk drawer. There was a compartmentalized rack of pens, pencils, erasers, and paperclips. Nothing out of place. It seemed that the police had not felt the need to dislodge all of her father's office supplies in their investigation–or, if they had, they'd felt the same sensation she herself had felt when entering the room, and had just wanted it back the way it 'belonged.'

  She slid the drawer closed and opened the file drawer to her right. Her heart, which had begun to drop into a calm, regular rhythm, hammered. Her breath caught in her throat, her face grew red and her throat constricted. It was all she could do not to release a long, drawn out scream.

  Leaning against the side of the drawer, the only thing in the drawer was the Ouija board. The very board he'd smacked over her head and thrown through her figurines. Her mind reeled and she tried, without success, to remember what had happened to it–when it had disappeared. She'd never tried to use it again–but had he taken it? When?

  She shivered at the thought of her father in her room, going through her things, when she wasn't there. Running his hand over her bed, her clothes.

  She shook her head. No. He wasn't getting back into her head, not that easily, not over something that happened so long ago she couldn't even remember it properly. She pulled the board out of the drawer and laid it on the desk. The wood had a slick, oily sheen to it. The letters and words YES–NO mocked her. The moon winked and she wanted to lash out with something sharp and carve that mocking winking eye off the surface of the board but she did not.

  The planchette was missing. She remembered that word from the box, and the instructions. "Place your fingers lightly on the planchette, applying no pressure." The word had caught in her mind because it was odd, and because it seemed right, at the same time. Such a thing should have an odd name. Such a thing, to have the power it was supposed to have, should be hard to pronounce and mysterious.

  The board was no good without it, and suddenly, irrationally, Monica wanted to make it work. She had the memory of how he'd hurt her, how he'd broken her things and screamed in her face. She even had the essay, on Byron, which she'd had to write for him three times that night–until her eyesight, already blurred from what she later learned was a minor concussion–had failed her entirely. He had hated it, but she had gotten an A+ on the essay, and he'd never brought it up again. Monica kept the paper to remind her. She never dropped to the dreaded "B" level again.

  Her gaze lit on his chess set, and she smiled. She rose, walked to the board, and grabbed three of the pawns. They were tall, maybe two inches each, and slender with peaked tips. She carried them back to the desk and sat down. She held one of the pawns in her hand and slid it back and forth over the slick surface of the Ouija board, and smiled. It moved easily.

  There was a tube of Superglue in the center drawer, and she pulled it out. Then, her hand trembling, Monica reached across the desk and wrapped her fingers around his glasses. She gripped them tightly and drew them close, turning them so that the lenses faced her. She searched their depths and found nothing. With a satisfied grunt of effort, she took one lens in each hand and snapped them down the center. A second later she'd stripped off the earpiece from the right-hand lens.

  Working carefully, concentrating as Dr. Brubaker had taught her, Monica centered herself as she worked. She dabbe
d a single drop of the glue on the tip of each of the pawns, and pressed the rim of the lens into them, suspending it over a triangle formed of the chessmen. She held it and counted to thirty, then released. She smiled. If it hadn't been for the black color of the frames, the "planchette" might have been designed that way.

  "Expression is the key," she said, speaking quietly, but firmly.

  She placed the makeshift planchette in the center of the board, and sat back, staring at it. She took another long sip of the whiskey, and then set the drink aside. Before she reached out with shaking fingers she had a moment to wonder–if expression is the key–what is the lock?

  She gently touched the rim of the lens and closed her eyes. Images swirled through her mind, recent memories, older ones, therapy sessions and long, sleepless nights listening for the crashing thumping rasping sound of his approach. With her eyes closed, alone in the darkness of her mind, the silence was oppressive. She groped for a sound, anything, and latched onto her heartbeat, which was slow and steady. Thumping. As she focused on the rhythm, it grew louder and shifted. Backbeats settled into the mix, and she drew in a hard breath.

  She recognized the sound for what it really was, and her heart raced helplessly, while the thumping, pounding rhythm remained relentlessly steady. She let loose a small whimper. There was negation in her voice, but beyond and behind it, something else. Something more. By the time the planchette had begun to move in jerking, sliding slashes across the board, her whine had dropped to a low growl, and she opened her eyes.

  That should have stopped it. In the hallway, she heard the deep, rasping of his breath and the tortured, crippled thump of his steps and the walker. She turned wildly to where she had kicked it to the floor. The light seemed dimmer than it had before, and the shadows were long and deep. She thought she saw the skeletal framework of the thing, but it was too dark to be certain.

  Except over the board. The face of the Ouija board was suffused in the reddish glow from the slag lamp overhead. Monica hadn't noticed before, but the center panel on the lamp was a rich, blood red, shining directly down on the desktop.

  The planchette moved with life of its own. Eyes, wide, she watched as it jerked about over the desk, her finger helplessly following its progress. Monica mouthed the letters; speaking out loud each time the letters formed a word.

  "Talking to Mommy again?"

  She cried out and dragged at the chessmen, trying to topple them and break whatever connection had been made, but it wasn't possible. What had been light resin figurines only moments before might as well have been carved of foot-tall stone. Gritting her teeth, Monica gripped two of the pawns in her fists and dragged the thing across the board until the lens rested directly over the "No."

  The walker's thump in the hall thundered. The walls shook, and everything on the shelves around her shifted and vibrated toward the edges. Books fell, and she closed her eyes again, shutting it out. She remembered her own things, the collection of figurines. They had been formed of pewter, and bronze, each holding, standing on, or in some way worked around a small ball of lead crystal. Beautiful, tiny bits of fantasy she'd clutched to her like a tiny army. She could still see the Ouija board, spinning through the air like an oblong Frisbee and crashing into that army, shattering it into tiny, brilliant slivers of glass and metal. Shattering it beyond repair, or recognition.

  He was close. She heard his breath clearly from the hall. The thump of the walker threatened to split the walls and open the floors into a chasm that would swallow her whole. She tasted his contempt, but beneath it, there was something else–something more.

  She pried. With her fingers on the two chessmen, gripping from the center, she strained her arms and ripped outward, and with her mind she completed the effort, digging past the surface. There were labyrinths and passageways in the darkness of her memory that were meant to slow and confuse her, but she ran down them, flying after something that retreated and skittered from shadow to shadow, always just out of sight and reach.

  His eyes followed her, mocking when she glared into their depths and panicked if she turned away. The world echoed with coughing and tortured, thumping steps. Sending her thoughts back to that night in her room, she heard the board that sat so solidly beneath her fingers whiz through the air. She saw the bright crystal lines of her collection explode, and as the bits and pieces and splinters of fantasy burst into the air she reached out and plucked them, one by one, from their flight.

  The coughing sputtered, and then erupted anew, accompanied by what sounded like a low, tortured moan. Monica ground her teeth and pulled. She felt as if the muscles of her forearms might pop from the strain, but the planchette moved. It wasn't much, a soft shift to the side, a light wobble, no more than that, but it moved, and she growled her satisfaction.

  There was no more pretense of communicating through the letters on the board. His voice whispered in the air so close to her ear that she shied away. So close he might have bitten her. His breath, fetid and rotted by disease and death, washed over her.

  "Nobody's home," he said. "Nobody but Daddy and I am here to stay, little girl."

  "No," she whispered. Then, as the word escaped her lips, she repeated it with more force, tearing at the chessmen in her grip. Her eyes flashed open, and she screamed the negation into the air before her face.

  The shards of glass, pewter and brass that had been her figurines hung in the air before her but the sight did not startle her. The knob on the door shook, the frame rattled, and the coughing revved to a roar, like the growing whine of a turbine engine.

  Then the door burst inward. Wood, hinges and brass knobs flew into the room, imbedding in walls and bookshelves, crashing into the furniture and toppling the table where the remnant of his chess set tumbled in a long, clattering arc.

  Monica grew very still. She brought the image of the shimmering cloud of dust that had been her tiny statue warriors, the shards of glass and the splinters of metal, into focus. Then she breathed on them, her single word–"No!"–followed the turbine-like escalation of her father's roaring voice until the sound of her voice screamed so piercingly that sight blurred and everything went white.

  The planchette in her hand burst. The chessmen broke down the center, and the lens, still affixed to one leg and the tips of two others, spun wildly off the desk.

  With staggering force, the crystal blade, formed of her memory and her will and the bits and pieces of what had been precious to her hovered in the air a foot in front of where Monica sat, trembling with frustrated energy. She screamed again and the word fueled its flight.

  In the doorway, darkness hovered. There was light in the room, multi-hued and rich, but beyond the door hung a splotch of deep, unrelenting black. A hole had been torn, and through it the rasping breath and thumping walker still approached.

  The dagger drove into the center, pierced it, and disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. The room lurched, as if gripped in the talons of a huge dinosaur, or tossed by an earthquake. Monica fell forward onto the desk and spilled her drink in a long trail of golden light as everything slowed and focused with excruciating clarity.

  The air dissolved in a sizzling burst of sound. There was a scream deep in the center of that sound, but it was not an outward burst. The sensation was of a huge indrawn gasp of dismay, held for so long and drawn to such intensity that it collapsed in on itself and crumbled. The shadow snapped out of the air and was simply–gone.

  For the third time that day, Monica sat alone in a void of absolute, impenetrable silence. She leaned on her arms and lowered her head to the desk, covering the Ouija board with a blanket of her hair. She had felt alone when she'd first entered the office, but now she knew that, while it had not been true then, it was now. He was gone.

  She wanted to rise and walk to the hall to see if there was a crystal dagger imbedded in the far wall. She wanted to turn on a brighter light and look to see if the walker still lay sprawled on the floor. She wanted more of the whiskey in the corner, a
nd sunlight.

  Instead she stayed very, very still, and let it all slide away. In the ruins of her father's den, tucked deep in the soft leather folds of his chair and soaking strands of her hair in his spilled whiskey, she slept.

  She dreamed of paint and easels, colored chalk and freedom, and tiny balls of lead crystal, gleaming in the sun.

  The Acropolis

  Myth drenched and splendid,

  crumbled–food for time,

  Your temples standing idle,

  With cats for priests &

  The uninitiated swarming

  About your battlements in

  Spandex vestments,

  Flashing memories from

  Each moment to save

  & savor.

  Once Gods wagered upon

  Your soil,

  Drew lots for

  Your people

  Fought and lived and loved

  In your heart.

  Great Neptune struck your soul,

  Brought forth water

  Heavy with salt,

  Pouring from a three-pronged wound.

  Athena, from a single seed

  Brought forth life,

  And leaves,

  martinis & shaded dreams.

  To the victor go the spoils –

  Spoiled walls, tarnished dreams,

  And the cats hold court

  In the temples of the Acropolis,

  Athena's temples,

  Myth drenched and splendid,

  Dying…

  food for time.

  22:19 9/22/94

  Fear of Flying

  She stood in the center of the room and stared at the window. It was several moments before the others noticed. Mindy was daydreaming, and there was nothing very odd about that. All of them were between fifteen and eighteen years old, and the future loomed like a huge, out-of-control video game with no instruction book. In the face of that kind of pressure it was not difficult to understand if a girl was daydreaming.