Trapped Within

by Bradshaw, Duncan P.

  “I want it,” she said. “Don’t you understand, Jesse? It’s okay, because it’s what I want you to do!”

  “You’re obsessed with it,” I said.

  “Her.”

  I ignored that. “It eats you, Shelly! You don’t come back. It ain’t like you step into it, and a few minutes later it shits you out on the other side. Is that what you think is gonna happen? Maybe you think you step out of it and all of a sudden you’re in a better place?”

  She looked at me like I’d just insulted her. “I’m tellin’ you… this is what I want. I want to know what happens. Whatever she does to me, wherever she takes me, it’s got to be better than this!”

  I looked at her, lyin’ there all frail and sick, attached to needles and tubes like somethin’ out of a bad science-fiction movie. She was gettin’ worse every day. She barely even looked like herself.

  It broke my heart.

  “You go somewhere else,” she said. “But when she takes you, I don’t think you suffer. I think you’re just… gone. You cease to exist.” Again, she said, “Whatever happens, it’s gotta be better than this, Jesse. This way, I know I’m gonna suffer. The whole family’s gonna suffer. I don’t want that.”

  My eyes grew wet with tears. I swallowed back a sob.

  “You have to do this for me,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her for what must have been the millionth time. It seemed that was all I said to her these days.

  “Dammit, Jesse, you told me you’d do anything—“

  “Not that,” I said. “I can’t.”

  I couldn’t murder my sister.

  So I let the leukemia kill her slowly.

  I know she never forgave me.

  And neither did the slit.

  Here I sit, decades later.

  My trailer smells like stale beer, mildew, and cigarettes. It’s about to be repo’d soon, but I don’t give a shit.

  I finish off the can of Natty Light in my work-calloused hand. Some of the beer trickles down my chin, into my beard. I don’t bother to wipe it away.

  I think about what I have become…

  I swore I would never be like him. But look at me.

  I’m a loser. A drunk. I have no job. I’ve been married four times—five? Hell, at this point I’ve nearly lost count. All of them ended badly. I’ve been in and out of prison for beatin’ on my exes ‘cause I couldn’t control my temper. My kids don’t even speak to me anymore. One of them, a three-year-old named Shelly, I’ve never even met in person.

  I have become what I despised.

  I am my father’s son.

  Every day I ask myself: was this my destiny all along? Would I have been unable to escape it even if I tried?

  Or did my life turn out like this ‘cause I didn’t give my sister what she wanted? Was she right about the thing in the woods? Has it waited out there all this time, hungry and neglected?

  The slit giveth, but she also taketh away.

  That’s what Shelly said, so many years ago. Maybe those weren’t her exact words, but the message was the same.

  And more and more these days, I believe she was right.

  I have nothing. I am nothing.

  I’m sorry, big sister. I’m sorry I let you suffer.

  I know it’s still out there. I can feel it, calling to me.

  Her.

  It’s been too long. The slit is hungry.

  So I’m going back. I’ll give the bitch what she wants, by God…

  I will step inside.

  I hope Shelly was right, all those years ago, on that night when the skeeters wouldn’t leave her alone but for some reason they kept avoidin’ me.

  I hope I taste like shit.

  And I hope the thing friggin’ chokes on me.

  James Newman lives in North Carolina with his wife and their two sons. His published work includes the novels MIDNIGHT RAIN, ANIMOSITY, THE WICKED, and UGLY AS SIN, and the collection PEOPLE ARE STRANGE. Next up are two new novels, DOG DAYS O' SUMMER and SCAPEGOAT (co-written with Mark Allan Gunnells and Adam Howe, respectively). When he isn't writing, James loves listening to loud rock n' roll and watching University of North Carolina basketball.

  Maude promised herself that if it turned out to be wall-to-wall spiders in her mother’s old gardening shed, she’d take up some different hobby.

  Scrapbooking, maybe. Crocheting. Something, anything, some way to fill the waiting hours.

  Let go. Downsized. Fired. Taking involuntary advantage of the early retirement program. No matter what you called it, out of work was out of work.

  She wasn’t sure when anybody had last been inside the shed, but she ought to at least see what there was before she went spending a bunch of money on tools.

  The door stuck. Maude pulled. She heard and felt a soft ripping giving-way, like muffled Velcro, as it opened. She backed up in case those anticipated, wall-to-wall spiders came out in a swarming flood.

  Nothing came out, no spiders, swarming or otherwise. Only a draft of air, cool, heavy, and musty-smelling. Not stuffy and sweltering like she would have expected, but a basementy smell, a subterranean cellar-like smell.

  The doorway showed only a rectangle of shadow in the hazy, sepia-toned smoglight of yet another southern California summer. Maude squinted through her sunglasses, waiting for her vision to adjust.

  This wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. This wasn’t how her life should have turned out.

  All those things she’d wanted to do, meant to do… but kept putting off… until the time was right, until the money was better, until the divorce was final, until the kids were out of the house…

  Maude sighed.

  Too late now.

  At her age? In this economy? What, go back to college, get her degree? Start her own business? Begin a new career? Travel? Date? Remarry?

  Have a life?

  Yeah. Yeah, that’d happen.

  “Oh but Maude,” everyone told her, “you’re always so good about putting your family first.”

  Married right out of high school, divorced fifteen years and three kids later. Custody battles and child-support hassles. Working full-time to keep their heads above water and stay a step ahead of the expenses both expected and unexpected.

  Putting your family first.

  Telling yourself that, once they were grown, once they were settled and on their own… once the nest was empty… there’d be the chance for something else.

  Maude sighed again.

  Instead, here she was. Back home right where she’d started. Pushing fifty and already washed up. A dead end with nothing to look forward to but getting older, maybe with the hereditary dementia into the bargain, like a bad bonus prize.

  She noticed a black, fuzzy smudge along the shed door’s edge. Thready in fine straggling wisps, like a torn piece of linen, or a skein of brushed wool, it ran all the way down, as well as along the top and bottom… in fact, the entire inside of the door was covered.

  Maude touched the stuff. It felt fibrous, a little crumbly, a little springy, a little furry and a little… moist? No, not moist, not quite, but not dry.

  She thought of dust, the greasy but fluffy dust that accumulated in range hood fans and under stoves. Or soot, ash, the waxy char-black residue that came off a burnt candle wick. Those were close, but not quite right.

  Weird, not unpleasant, but odd and foreign and… strange.

  She poked a fingertip into it, made a divot, pulled her finger back, and watched as the whatever-it-was filled the depression slowly back out. Like one of those fancy foam mattresses, the kind that, on the commercials, suggested you could jump on the bed without spilling your wineglass.

  Spongy, sort of. And thick. An inch-thick layer, coating the inside of the door. Top to bottom and side to side. With a rounded hump where the inner half of the doorknob mechanism was, and longer narrower humps over the hinges.

  When she looked at the jamb and saw it there, too, all the way around, the Velcro sensation made sense
. She’d pulled until the stuff had… had just torn along the seam, like an old pair of pants.

  She scraped at it with her nail, scratched at it. She pinched a tuft, plucked it off the way she’d pluck a lint puff off a sweater, and rolled it between her forefinger and thumb. The texture made her think of oily strands of hair wadding into a ball… or the clumps of fur that used to be left in the comb after she groomed the dog.

  Rubbing her palm back and forth over the strange black layer was almost like petting Woozles again… the woolly feel of his coat… smoothish one way, nappier the other.

  A tickle on her cheek startled her, and only when she wiped away a tear did Maude realize she was crying. Standing here in the hot, midday smoglight, crying over a dumb, sweet goof of a dog who’d gotten out one day and run off when the gate had been left unlatched. Hadn’t she been wondering just a few minutes ago when that hereditary dementia would catch up with her?

  Maude snapped herself out of it and took a closer look, as well as an experimental sniff. The scent of the stuff was the same as she’d smelled on that cool draft… musty, heavy… an earthy plant smell…

  It was some kind of moss, or mildew, or mold.

  Her nose wrinkled. She thought of the nasty brownish slimy spots that appeared in the bathroom corners, no matter how often she sprayed and scrubbed.

  Only this stuff wasn’t nasty, wasn’t slimy.

  It reminded her of the ground-covers people might choose for their gardens, something that would spread in a nice low pad. Hardy, durable, not needing a lot of fuss and maintenance.

  The moss, or whatever it was, had overtaken the whole interior—door, walls, floor, ceiling—in carpets and cascades. Here and there, it bunched up in hummocks, dotted with little shiny-black domes like mushroom caps. It was so thick over the windows that not a single pencil-thin ray made it through the shutter-slats. Long feathery-fine tendrils dangled from the ceiling, stirring in the desultory breeze.

  The shed was much cooler than the yard outside… cooler than it’d be in the house, for that matter. The old house had no air conditioning, just fans that made a constant stuffy whirr all summer.

  Out here it was cool, and quiet. Muffled-quiet, padded-quiet. No whirring fans. No unsynchronized ticking of clocks. No yellowish-miasma nicotine buildup on the wallpaper. The musty, earthy smell was… pleasant. Comforting.

  If she closed the door behind her, she’d be isolated in this cool, quiet, comforting, fragrant darkness. The way the moss sank under her feet told her that it really would be as soft as one of those foam mattresses.

  What a wonderful thing it would be to sleep, to sink into a full, real, restful sleep for a change. For the first time in a long time. For the first time since she’d come home again. Sleep without the subliminal anxiety of listening for her brother… without being on alert for the next outburst or disturbance… how nice that would be!

  “Oh but Maude, you were always so good about putting your family first.”

  Yes, it would be nice, but she couldn’t. Sleep? Out here? That was crazy.

  She pushed the door closed.

  Besides, it was Friday. Friday was grocery day. She went into the house for her purse, list, and keys.

  “I’m going shopping now,” she called.

  No answer from the den down the hall.

  Two hours later, Maude pulled into the driveway, turned off the ignition, and listened to the engine clunk-chug-wheeze its way to silence. She got out, popped the trunk, and hauled in the groceries in one trip by laddering the plastic bag handles up her arms. They dug into the flesh and left sweaty red marks.

  “I’m home!”

  “Did you bring chicken?”

  “Chicken’s for Monday!”

  “It isn’t Monday?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t you go to work?”

  “I don’t go to work anymore, remember?”

  Fred’s reply was a disinterested snort, signaling the end of the conversation.

  The groceries got put where they belonged, a place for everything and everything in its place, where they’d gone for as long as Maude could remember.

  Clocks ticked. Fans whirred. Pipes gurgled. The house was as stuffy and sweltering as ever. Furniture sat and pictures hung where furniture had sat and pictures had hung for over half a century. The same knickknacks gathered the same dust. Each year, the rug got a little more worn, the wallpaper a little more yellowed.

  She set frozen fish fillets onto a baking sheet because it was Friday; chicken was for Monday, take-out rotisserie chicken; frozen fish fillets were for Friday. Saturday, their big day, they’d go out to the smoke shop and beer barn to stock up, then have an early dinner at the Heartland Buffet.

  As the oven pre-heated, she poured herself a soda and went to check messages.

  Nothing from any of the kids. She wasn’t surprised, had no reason to be—they never called; they’d write sometimes but they never called because Fred might answer.

  “He’s dead to us,” they’d told her. “As far as we’re concerned, he’s your brother, not our uncle. He’s no relation of ours. He’s not welcome in our homes, and we don’t want him anywhere near our children.”

  Maude thought they were being a little extreme. Okay, they didn’t like him, he gave them the creeps, but he’d never done anything to them.

  “He beat up Grandma,” they’d said.

  “He didn’t beat her up,” Maude tried to explain. “He slapped her once, and you know how she was toward the end, she was out of control.”

  “She was eighty years old and about eighty pounds total, and he hit her and now you’re defending him just like she always used to do! Like you promised you wouldn’t!”

  Maude’s hand had been on the telephone, ready to pick up and dial—elder abuse, domestic violence, assault!—when her mother, already bruising, said “Maudie-don’t-you-dare!”

  Couldn’t anybody understand she didn’t have any choice? What else was she supposed to do? Later, her mother had begged, from her very deathbed, that Maude “look after my Freddie.” How could she refuse?

  “He can’t live by himself,” she’d said, trying to reason with her kids. “Without me, he’d end up—”

  “In prison? Dead? Rehab? In a loony bin? On the streets?”

  “That, or some kind of adult care home—”

  “So what? Let him!”

  “He’s your uncle—”

  “He’s a shitbag alcoholic racist sexist homophobic asshole parasite waste of space!”

  They insisted duty and obligation only went so far. They said they wished Fred would need a transplant and one of them the only donor match, so they could refuse and watch him die.

  “What about you, Mom?” they’d asked. “What if something happens to you? He’s in for one hell of a rude awakening if he thinks any of us are going to take care of him!”

  Furthermore, if it fell to any of them to make Fred’s final arrangements? They’d donate him to one of those cadaver farms like you saw on CSI or Dirty Jobs, and the only pity was, a place like that would expect him to be dead first.

  “He knew Grandma was getting worse,” they’d said. “He didn’t do a goddamn thing.”

  “He didn’t want to worry me,” replied Maude.

  “He didn’t give a shit.”

  Her mother had eventually been pulled over by the Highway Patrol for erratic driving, halfway to San Diego when she’d only been going to the beauty parlor. When she’d been too confused to answer their questions, they called the house and got Fred, whose main concern had been that “the dumb old biddy” was supposed to bring rotisserie chicken, and asked if the cops would stop and pick some up when they brought her back.

  Hiring someone, that was out of the question. So were nursing homes, retirement facilities, assisted living, anything of the sort was met with mulish stubbornness.

  So, Maude, always so good about putting her family first, went to stay with them for a while to help out.

 
; For a while. That had been the plan. Her mother deteriorated rapidly after the highway incident, and Maude told herself it’d be a matter of months, maybe a year at the most.

  On that count, she’d been right.

  Those final words, though, that deathbed plea …

  “Maudie, you have to take care of him, you have to look after my Freddie.”

  “He cost us our grandmother,” her children said. “Now he’s costing our kids theirs!”

  They wouldn’t visit her, and she couldn’t visit them. They kept inviting her for Thanksgivings and Christmases, but was she going to leave him alone on the holidays? What would her mother have thought of that?

  She was stuck, and why was that so hard for her kids to understand? Why did they think she could throw Fred to the wolves, let him sink or swim, fend for himself? Sure, he largely ignored her when she was around, but he didn’t like it when she was gone. He’d accepted her going to work out of necessity. Anything else was abandonment.

  Why should she put her selfish wishes against his legitimate needs?

  “Why not?” they’d say.

  So, she needed something to keep her busy, a hobby, but one that would also be homebound, keep her near at hand. Something like gardening.

  Their mother had gardened. The roses, the geraniums, the flower beds and rows of terra-cotta flower pots she’d set along the porch rail… Maude didn’t know if she had inherited the green thumb, but she didn’t think Fred would object the way he objected to other proposed changes.

  The way he’d object to another pet, for instance. Neither he or their mother had warmed to Woozles—“that damn dog,” was how they’d peevishly referred to him.

  And, of course, any suggestion of selling, moving, remodeling, even clearing out the garage or attic of a half century’s worth of clutter was out of the question.

  The smell of baking fish fillets and boxed Parmesan noodles drew him from his lair in the den. He shuffled into the kitchen, filled his plate without a word, grabbed the hot sauce from the cupboard—he doused everything in hot sauce, pepper or both—and went to the fridge.

  “Where’s the beer?”

  “Right where it belongs?”