Alan picked up one of the fallen boards, moved to set it back in place. Closer to the window now, and looking further down, he saw the dark face that was out there, peering in at him.
He cried out, dropped the board, tore desperately into the sunny end of the attic.
It was several minutes before he could go back. He smoked a cigarette, gazed at the dark window from a distance. At last, determined, he returned. He picked up the board, set it in place. He didn’t look out there this time. He looked only at the grain of the board. Then of the next one. And on, until he had sealed that window closed for the third time in its history.
Outside the house, he mounted the ladder once again. Now it was actually becoming darker as evening approached in his world. He had found a can of black paint in his father’s work shop, and had taped a brush to the end of a broken broom handle.
But when he reached the roof, he couldn’t help but strain to gaze into the attic through the window once more.
He saw several things then. He wouldn’t be able to reflect on all of them until later...but this time he could see inside.
The interior of that other attic, pretending it existed within his mother’s house through the two-way trickery of the glass, glowed red not with dusk but with dawn. It was the rising sun, not the setting sun, that had streaked that alien sky. More light entered the parallel attic now than before, permitting him to see inside. It was not boards that had darkened the view earlier, but merely the pre-dawn gloom. The alien window had never been boarded.
But these were the realizations Alan made later, after he had painted the window panes black. At the moment he stared through the mysteriously altered glass, his mind registered only one thing.
And that was the face of the creature – the being – inside that attic, gazing out at him. It was the same dark face he had seen outside the window, before. When he had been inside his attic, it had been atop its ladder peeking in at him. And now that he was atop his ladder, it had changed places with him, and was inside its own attic.
As they locked eyes in that moment, the being lifted a board in place, meaning to nail it there. To shut out the terrifying visage it had witnessed.
That was when Alan began to paint...trying not to see the face as he did so.
Because the face was not human. Not remotely human. But more horrifying than this fact was Alan’s realization that – despite its terrible distortions – that face was in effect his own.
What Washes Ashore
Marsha was sorry she had wandered so far in this skull-drilling heat in a place she didn’t know, which for all its bleakness didn’t look known by any. The small houses were silvered from the salt air, warped and bloodless, rows of bleached skulls on display. She had wandered beyond the coffee shops and gift stores tacky or trendy, the miniature art galleries and the expensive little restaurants that crowded the more tourist-favored streets of this seaside town. Marsha didn’t hold those bustling, colorful streets in disfavor, but this afternoon she had felt the need to be alone.
Well, the need to escape the anonymous crowds, at any rate; she was traveling alone to begin with. She took on these missionary-like missions to far-flung ally companies eagerly, welcomed the time away from her tiny office, her bosses, her co-workers. She normally stayed in a hotel in the course of these excursions, but a co-worker had a summer cottage here, a mere half hour’s ride from the host company. It was quaint, humble, not actually within view of the ocean but that was fine with Marsha, who had never been the volley-ball type. She had been reluctant to accept, not wanting to feel obligated to friendship or worse with this male co-worker, but had decided it might be nice to have a cute little cottage all to herself.
Today her work was over; tomorrow she flew back home. This time was her own, and her own time was of the greatest importance. So she had set out on foot, in sneakers and blue jeans and a crisp new t-shirt, short red hair and big dark glasses, free of her sharp-edged dark suits and ant-black shoes. She had forsaken her rental car, stopped at a coffee shop along the way to buy a large ice coffee to take with her on an aimless walk...
She had turned into one less-peopled street, then into another less-peopled than that. And on, until there were no shops, just houses, closing in on narrow streets more like alleys. From a tiny cage-like screened porch, an old woman who looked headless with her upper body lost in shadow waved at Marsha dreamily. Marsha gave a little wave back. A dog, unseen, had growled at her from beneath another porch – she assumed, or perhaps behind a screened window – as she passed by.
But in this street, there were no old ladies, no dogs, no strewn bright and broken toys. The houses looked derelict, abandoned; the windows and doors of several were even boarded up. As Marsha started down this street, sweating now and wondering if she should turn back (her coffee was gone but she carried the cup with her, not wanting to litter), she took note of an old faded barber pole outside one of the boarded-up structures. And then her gaze traveled from this point to the window of another establishment, next door. This one wasn’t boarded up; a large shop window, dusty but unbroken, faced out into the arid street. What did its sign say? Was it a laundry? A few more half-hearted steps through the broiling air and Marsha could read it.
ALL WASHED UP.
She smiled faintly. That was for sure. Was it a joke – a comment on the state of this little sub-neighborhood? She drew closer to the glass, which blazed back the molten sun.
On display inside the shop window were tables and chairs and angled boxes spread with mostly sea shells, along with decorative bits of driftwood and a blistered buoy or two.
Sea shells. Marsha had been taught an enthusiasm for them by her mother, who had a fine, museum-quality collection. It was something that they had in common, something they had been able to talk about. They had never talked about much. (“She’s cold, your mother,” Brian had said.
“She’s British. It’s her reserve,” Marsha had told him.
“Even British people can be passionate,” he had countered. “Or there wouldn’t be any more Brits brought into the world, if you catch my meaning.” He said this last bit in his favorite, Monty Pythonish caricature of a British accent.
He meant it about me, more than my mother, Marsha reminded herself now. He thought I was cold. He told me so. “I never know what you’re feeling.” “Do you even love me?” “You never even smile, Marsha!” The guilt trip. The accusations. She had left it behind, now. And he had cried, tears and all. “You’re like your mother, you know that?”)
But they talked about sea shells, she and her mother, from when Marsha was a child. Her mother didn’t stroke her hair, didn’t giggle and nudge her. But Marsha liked to believe that the dry, formal genus and species names they both uttered were like an encrypted language of affection. The touching of bony surfaces, crusted rough or smooth as mother-of-pearl, were like caresses traded. She liked to believe...
Marsha craned her neck from side to side, attempting to look further into the shop, but it was charcoal gloom. The displays were filmed in dust. Could this place still be in business? If it was indeed open, could enough tourists stray far enough to make this “business” anything more than a hobby, like selling one’s own preserves at a fair?
Marsha moved to the door, and tested its latch. It was unlocked. The door squealed open. No bells jingled.
She stood a moment in an early evening beam of slanting and gilded light, that swarmed with motes like churning plankton.
There was a table in the corner with a chair behind it...a few books stacked there, and a lamp that was unlit. Marsha looked there, first, to see if someone would be waiting for that rare, lost customer. But the impromptu desk was empty.
She eased the door shut guiltily behind her, wondering if she were trespassing. She saw no sign in the door announcing business hours. How could this shop not be defunct? Only the fact that the door had been unlocked – that, and the tempting array of shells – encouraged her to move deeper into the shadowy room
.
There were tables in its center, and shelves and benches around its sides. There was a bookshelf with various titles on shells and the sea, and Marsha recognized a few that her mother and even herself owned. But the shells drew her, foremost. She might find a few things here for her own, long-neglected collection. More importantly, she might even find a few things here that her mother didn’t own, that she could mail to her back home. They had lived half a country apart for six years now. Mailing a shell would be better than their brief telephone exchanges.
Marsha neared the closest of the center tables. There were shallow cardboard boxes with shells ranked inside them, the names of the shells either written on cards, or on the floors of the boxes themselves, or on stickers stuck to the shells. The prices looked very good. Even too good. Again, Marsha had the impression that the shop was defunct. Either that, or lost in a pocket of time long past.
The names of shells had always delighted her, and she relived that old nostalgic pleasure now. She lifted a lovely Imperial Harp into her palm, then set it delicately down again. There was one called an Eye of Judas. There was an abalone used as a bowl, and filled with numerous little spotted shells called Measled Cowries.
She wondered, not for the first time, if the huge Queen Conch with its smooth, vivid-pink lips had been so named for its lewd resemblance to a female’s genitalia. Even considering it made Marsha embarrassed. Brian would have made a joke if she had suggested such a thing. Perhaps held the shell up to his mouth and flicked his tongue in it. And she would have chided him, or just ignored him, and he might have laughed or sulked and told her she had no sense of humor.
From atop an old bureau, she lifted a greenish Violet Spider Conch in its own box pillowed with cotton pads. There was an Arthritic Spider Conch, which looked like a dangerous creature that had become fossilized. The diseased-sounding Pustulated Triton. The appropriately leering Grinning Tun.
A loud thump, the rattle of glass, and Marsha was startled – dropped the shell she was presently holding, heard it clatter at her feet. Peripherally, she had seen something strike the glass in the shop’s closed door.
At first she had thought it was a thrown toy, but in the tail of her eye she had seen the dark blur whiz back up out of sight. A bird, then, chasing insects and colliding with the glass. Good thing it hadn’t broken through. It had to be stunned pretty nicely. And now Marsha looked back at the improvised desk in the corner, then at a closed door which must lead further into the house. The loud sound had brought no one to the door, and though she had half-expected to see some old woman (who perhaps looked like her aging mother) now seated in that chair, there was no one.
Still a bit unnerved, Marsha stooped to retrieve the shell she had dropped. Thank God it had no brittle horns or such to snap off. As she gathered it into her hand, she noticed there were more boxes of shells pushed under the table and hidden by its draped yellowish cloth. Some boxes were stuffed with brittle newspaper, the shells practically heaped amongst that crumpled garble of old printed words. And one box had written on its side in bold black marker the words: SAD THINGS.
Marsha glanced up furtively, knelt closer, dragged the box out into view.
These were not shells, but other sorts of flotsam and jetsam, detritus of the sea. There was a dark blue beer bottle without a label, with a mummified sea horse corked inside it. There was a child’s green plastic alphabet block. There was a naked baby doll with both eyes missing, as if fish had plucked them out, thinking they might be real. Marsha saw a child’s glove knitted from dark green wool, and picked it out of the box.
There was something inside the glove. Hardness, jointed and articulated, inside each finger of the glove. Marsha immediately dropped it in horror.
And part of the interior slid out into view. It was not the skeletal hand of a drowned and dismembered child, but a long-dead crab, some of its legs inserted into the fingers and thumb of the glove.
In a sort of disgust born of nervousness, Marsha slid the box back under the table. As she did so, another markered message caught her eye. It said: BLOOD.
She dragged this box out. It had sea shells in it. Some she knew by name, some she didn’t, but they were all labeled with stickers. And there seemed to be a theme.
There were a number of one kind of shell called the Bleeding Tooth. It was apt: on the lip of the shell there were several lightish bumps that looked like molars set into a vivid red patch like bloody gums.
Similarly, there were several specimens of a Blood-Mouth Conch, with its whole interior a bright red, though it wasn’t as gruesome an image as the former shell.
Another Marsha extricated from the box was a Blood-Sucker Miter, which wasn’t red, and the naming of which she didn’t understand...
But then there was the entirely red Full-Blooded Tellin, an elongated clam in two smooth halves. Marsha thought it was beautiful. She was sure her mother would, too. She selected the nicest specimen of it she could find in the carton, and as she lifted it out she took note of another sort of shell. The only example of it in the container, Marsha picked it out for a closer view.
It was much more violently red than the Tellin. Though it was elongated like the Tellin, it was only smooth on the inside (as glassy red as nail polish), its outer halves being rough and horny. They flared like the folded wings of a dragon, and Marsha wondered if it might be something in the family of bivalves called the Wing Oysters...
She turned it over in her hands and read the sticker.
BLOOD WINGS.
Well, she’d been close. But the thing was, she’d never heard of such a shell.
That was it, then. Without a second look Marsha set down the Tellin, and rose with the Blood Wings. There was no price on the sticker. Hmph. The Tellin had said two dollars. Marsha decided she would leave ten on the table in the corner, with a little note. It wasn’t a common shell or she’d be aware of it, and so ten dollars – at least in this store – seemed fair. It wasn’t like she was buying the ultra-rare Glory-of-the-Seas with a ten. It couldn’t be too extremely rare, to be buried in a box under a table like that...
The first pen she chose from the table was dried up, but she got a second to give up enough pale ink for her to scrawl on a scrap of newspaper from the sixties. Then, she weighed the note and the ten dollar bill down with a dried starfish.
Marsha lifted her head just as she finished, her eyes fixed on that closed door to the rest of the little structure. Had she heard a sound from somewhere deeper in the house? A distant and muffled but heavy thud? It was the sound, she imagined unaccountably, an old person heavy with soft, dead weight might make if they fell out of bed to the floor.
Marsha turned to the outer door, and saw that the sun was very low, much lower than she would have thought it would be. Her eyes must have adjusted to the increasing dimness of the shop without her being conscious of it. She had lost track of the time in her absorption.
She hurried toward the door, beginning to sweat again though the air was cooling, and was half-way out when she thought she heard the squeal of hinges in the room behind her. But she told herself it was the squeal of the door she was exiting, and thankfully she was out in the empty street again, not even a car parked along it, as silent as the inside of the shop had been except for the metallic ringing of cicadas.
As she walked briskly away, she darted a look over her shoulder that flicked her coppery hair. The shop’s molten window now gone obsidian black. And a figure behind the displays, peering out at her from the window, timidly or stealthily. She saw it only as a palish smudge before she looked away sharply.
She turned a corner down another, even narrower street. Then took a right. It was supposed to be a right, wasn’t it?
The shell was rough, fanged, in her hand. It hurt her flesh, pressing into it. She stopped to slip it into the zippered fanny pack she was wearing, then looked up about her to get a hold on her bearings.
Marsha saw the first of the flying things drop down from the bruising sky li
ke a huge, hovering bee. Because of how it flew, for a moment she took it to be a hummingbird. The metallic cicada tone was right in front of her now.
Her first instinct was to turn abruptly and walk away from it. Was it a bat? She was afraid it would tangle in her hair, even though she had heard such fears were a myth.
She glanced back over her shoulder as she walked briskly. She saw two of the blurred dark flying things now, floating after her through the lingering heat of the air. Marsha quickened her pace...and looking forward again, about to turn down yet another side street, she saw one of the flying animals emerge from it ahead of her. She came to a jarring halt, just as another and another creature appeared from the side street...
Marsha kept on going straight, then, now breaking into a trot, her heart like a fish drowning in air as it labored in the hot confines of her chest. The cicada buzz mounting, closing in on her, more suffocating than the heat. Another glance back. Now there were more than a dozen of the things, a black swarm, the two groups having converged. They were pursuing her, she knew. Drawn to her. And they weren’t entirely black, she understood in that instant of looking behind her. There was an indistinct black body, with trailing feathers that she realized were actually more like the short, numerous tentacles of a nautilus. And the wings were not black, but red. Violently red. They moved too quickly for her to see them clearly, but she believed the wings were hard, and thorny. Rough on the outside, smooth as glossy nail polish on the inside.
She began to run as fast as she could. The street, unfamiliar now in the rushing gloom, made a T ahead. She started toward the left – but a flock of perhaps a dozen more of the buzzing animals began to pour from its mouth. Stumbling, she caught her balance and redirected herself down the right-hand branch of the T. Marsha’s mind was blank with fear and her lungs were working too hard to spare sound, but she felt a tear drop from the edge of her jaw.
She realized she still had the empty coffee cup, half-crushed, in her hand; she had been too polite to leave it in the shop. She let it drop. She ran. Ran. Yet another turn in the bleak maze ahead. She took a chance and lunged into it...and thank God, there were none of those creatures. But she heard them behind her, their buzz-saw sound so loud now it might tear her eardrums, tear her mind.
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