Gina had to go back to the Pantheon – back to apartment 403. She had to read more.
* * * * *
After her third visit, she had deciphered a wall and a half. She was a quick study and meticulous reader. She had already accomplished in three visits more than Owen had since he’d found the place. By then, she understood what those vile little vipers masquerading as children had really been, and why Owen had dispatched them, but it was such small potatoes in the overall big picture. The apartment’s messages suggested such a grand scope of truths that it was almost too much for her feeble human mind to take in. She felt privileged, blessed by the travelers, to be the recipient of such important knowledge. Owen had called it the graffiti of the gods, a vulgar description. The apartment had become a shrine to her, and she felt it only right to bring sacrifices now, however small, however much they paled in comparison to her gain.
* * * * *
On her fourth visit, she found Joe there. He looked terrible – pale, unshaven, wild-eyed. He reeked of booze. Clearly, he had never been meant to receive the truths. His body and mind couldn’t handle it. Joe looked warily at her, as if he no longer trusted her. Perhaps the changes Gina had gone through herself in the last month and a half – her eyes, her hands, her mouth, and of course, her mind – intimidated him or made him envious.
He had his gun with him; she supposed he still worked, though jobs were such a shallow pretense in the grand order of things. Gina had stopped going three weeks ago, ignoring the police department’s phone calls and emails, ducking their visits. Once, she suspected Joe might have gotten in when she wasn’t home, because things were out of place. Elevens had been set to nines and such. Perhaps he had seen her own notes, scrawled on the walls, cross-referenced, footnoted, ideas bursting forth from ideas which burst forth from prior ideas going all the way back to the creations of the universes. Patterns within patterns. Surely, the look in his eyes suggested that he knew something about her new pursuits.
Joe also had with him a can of gasoline and matches, which was somewhat more disturbing. The heavy reek of the gasoline, which had been splashed against the walls and all over the floor, nearly blocked out the chemical smell of the mind-opener.
“I’m going to burn the place, Gina,” he told her with careful deliberation.
She shook her head. “No you’re not. You can’t, Joe. Think about it.”
“Watch me,” he said, then after a thoughtful pause, “No, don’t watch. Call 911, get them over here. You need help, G. This place, it’s gotten inside of you like it did Offrey. You’re sick.”
“Me? Ha! Have you looked in a mirror lately?” Gina glanced around the apartment, found a certain looping script above and to the left of where a kitchen cabinet once was, and felt better. No Songs for the Stars. “Go ahead. Try lighting those matches, and see exactly what burns here.”
Joe followed her gaze to the hem of his trench coat, soaked in gasoline. When he looked at her again, his face was a pale blank moon of panic. His gaze darted around the room, and realization ratcheted up that panic to sheer terror.
For the first time, he seemed to finally understand.
She closed her eyes and imagined a fiery sun of a faraway galaxy, and did not open them again until Joe’s screams and the heat from his body grew nearer. He was staggering toward her. She frowned, not comprehending until he embraced her, and she, too, felt that faraway sun blaze bright, engulfing her whole body.
* * * * *
As the flames of the bodies smoldered, the hardwood floors drank in the remaining gasoline. Tiny sprouts of flames randomly distributed by Joe’s flailing sputtered out, and the apartment finally went dark. The odors of gas fumes and cooked meat were overtaken by the regular scent of the wall writing’s special ink. The door remained unlocked; the taste of desperate and broken minds still on the palate of the place, new human wanderers from the desolate halls beyond the door were welcome.
In a shadowed corner by a closet door engraved with one traveler’s method for traversing time, a twilight glow formed, and the writing on the door skittered to make room for the newly arriving traveler’s note.
SHADOW PUPPETS
ANGIE KEPT THE OLD FLASHLIGHT because she supposed it reminded her of Evan. It was a rather unremarkable thing, with a heavy plastic handle of chipped, utilitarian gray, a large round lens that was scratched now and smoky, and one of those black buttons that slid up to the turn the light on and down to turn it off. She’d found the flashlight in the garage among her dad’s old things; she’d given it to Evan when he was six and having a bad run of nightmares about a spiky, long-clawed, shadowy thing he claimed would emerge from the closet during the dusk and dawn of his dreams to menace him.
He was an imaginative boy, an explorer of ideas and a creator of stories in his little head. He was a believer in the world beneath this world, and her words weren’t going to dissuade him. So she suspected the way to reassure her son was to arm him, to put him in control of his fears on his terms. Light, she’d told him as she showed him his grandpa’s flashlight, could make the bad things go away, because monsters were afraid of the light. Light could pierce shadow-monsters, blazing through their spikes and claws and sharp, pointy ends.
Of course, light couldn’t make a monster like cancer go away, because cancer wasn’t much afraid of anything. A feeble little flashlight ray wasn’t going to blaze through brain lesions or blast away the headaches. Bad things like the death of a child couldn’t be chased away by a heavy-duty flashlight. The shadows of guilt and grief were too much gathered darkness, too strong, and Angie was pretty sure there wasn’t a light in the world that could dispel them.
For a good year and a half after Evan’s funeral, she’d left his room exactly as it had been, his toys strewn all over, his books on the bookshelf, his clothes tumbled about the floor around his hamper. His closet, his dresser drawers, and his bed stood all as if he had only just gone to school. Most often, especially in the late evening, when she would have gone to tuck him in and kiss him good night, she saw to it that his closet door was shut tightly and his bedroom door was closed almost but not all the way, like he always asked, and she’d pretend he was in bed for the night, safe and asleep.
Her friends had encouraged her to move and make a fresh start, to get out from under the miasma of tragedy in that old house, but it only proved to Angie that they didn’t really know her at all. This was Evan’s house, the only one he’d ever known, and if any part of him remained there, she wanted to be close to it. She wanted to imagine him playing with his trucks or his Avengers action figures in the yard or building rock forts or jumping through the sprinkler she’d attach to the hose in the summer. She wanted to remember the sound of his feet running down the hall or clomping in his big sneakers down the stairs. She wanted to keep the smell of his shampoo in his pillowcases, the sweet, innocent child-smell of him in his clothes. She wanted to keep his little socks.
No, she wouldn’t be moving. Memories were like shadows, and light, she had discovered, was absolutely necessary to create shadows, not destroy them. They only existed if you continued to shine light on them. Darkness, on the other hand, swallowed them up and made them indistinguishable from the nothingness around them. She would never let the darkness of forgetting engulf the shadows that were left of her son.
And there was that flashlight. One night they’d laughed themselves silly making awkwardly-formed shadow puppets on the walls – bunnies and ducks with her long fingernail shadows, rocket ships and space aliens and dinosaurs with his little hands. Only by the most flexible stretch of the imagination could attribute meaning to them – like his – and he could recognize the shapes much more readily than she could. She remembered being so amazed by how creative he was and how profoundly his little mind worked. Plus, it had seemed to make him feel so much better. For that one night at least, there was only laughter – no uneasy sidelong glances at the closed closet doors, no moments where the pain in his head m
ade his eyes close and his angel face twist into a mask of discomfort. It was one of the last truly happy nights they’d spent together, just her and him, Team Evan-and-Angie, before he’d gone to the hospital, then the hospice, and then, Gates of Heaven Cemetery.
Unlike the other things that had Evan’s essence all over and through them, the flashlight didn’t make her cry. It made her smile – a small, semi-sad smile, to be sure, but a smile that actually could make the bad memories of hospitals and wires and tests and injections and radiation go away. When she held the flashlight, she could forget for a little while the ancient look of understanding in her child’s big brown eyes, the certainty of instinct over experience that the body surrounding those eyes was dying, and the light in them going on to some other place. Evan had been ready to let go, and had wanted her to be ready, too. And she’d done all she could to make him believe she was.
If she had been, she’d often thought after, she would have buried him with the flashlight so he could always have it, down deep in the darkness of the earth. Had it been selfish to keep it? Had Evan forgiven her for that? When she held it, turned it on, and made little crudely-formed duck puppets against her bedroom wall, she thought that wherever he was, he understood.
* * * * *
It got to be a thing with her, making shapes against the ceiling while she lay on the bed in the dark, with the flashlight beamed above her. Sometimes she talked to Evan as if he were laying there beside her, making puppets, his own little shadows beside hers, mamma dinosaurs and baby dinosaurs, big planetary rockets and small moon rockets.
The night before the second anniversary of his death (anniversary was a funny word for it; the connotations were all wrong), she had been lying on her back in bed, the butt of the flashlight balanced just beneath her breasts, her right hand wrapped around it so her thumb could switch it on and off. She had been doing her best to contort her fingers to make, or to find in the inept contortion, a kind of superhero shape, maybe Iron Man or Spider-man or something, some character Evan would have liked. It looked more to her like a spider someone had whacked with a rolled-up newspaper. The circumference of the light above her smeared the corners and edges of shadows from other things, giving her half-squashed spider a jagged ceilingscape to limp across. She shook her head, the faint echo of a long-gone giggle on her lips, and softly said, “I’ve reached a new low of shadow puppet disaster, Ev. It’s like a wad of gum got up and sticky-stepped away.” And she could almost hear his own echo-giggle as she made her Spiderman-squished bug-gum blob pulse across the ceiling. She could so very much feel him there that at first, the tiny tendril of shadow that finger-crept up from the outer limits of her halo of light seemed natural and familiar. She smiled and the little shadow disconnected from the dark and made its way toward her own. Finally, something to put her gum-spider out of its mis–
In the next moment, it dawned on her that the movement of the little shadow was movement she wasn’t making, and she jumped. Her first thought was that a real spider must be crawling somewhere in the room, either across the ceiling or near the bed, someplace uncomfortably close to her personal space. She sat up, the flashlight fanning across the ceiling in search of the offending creature. She swept the light down around her bed, her night table, her lamp, and still found nothing. She moved the little black button down and the dark flowed in around her.
Slowly, she lay back down, the flashlight cradled flat against her chest, and waited until her heartbeat slowed down again. It was a trick for getting a handle on her grief that a psychiatrist friend had shown her. She found it worked to calm her in a number of situations.
Angie flicked the flashlight on once to confirm that there was nothing there, then flicked it off and rolled onto her side.
It had been nothing. Just a trick of tired eyes, maybe, or possibly it really had been some little crawly thing, a better bug- or spider-shadow than her squashed gum, something that moved quickly away from the concentration of her light. Something normal and natural.
As she drifted off to sleep, though, she thought about how just before she’d swept the light in a different direction, for a just a moment, that little shadow had looked like the cast of six-year-old fingers.
* * * * *
Angie had resolved by the following morning not to be scared or to chase it away; she wanted the little shadow to come back. She missed the little fingers that made it.
It seemed to her the darkness would never come. The day was the usual series of Sunday motions – breakfast, two loads of laundry, the exercise bike for forty-five minutes, lunch, a shower, cleaning the house. She kept busiest on Sundays, because that had been her day to have adventures with Evan. Having adventures meant going out to the lake, out to lunch, to an arcade, to the Game Stop to get video games. It was their day to play. When he’d been admitted to the hospital, she’d made Sunday an ice-cream and movie day. Sometimes, if he had the energy, they’d play X-box in the games room of the children’s ward. Sometimes she’d just read to him. Even after he fell asleep, she’d keep reading, for all the bedtime stories she thought she might miss out on. She kept reading as if somehow, maybe by hearing stories of the invulnerable, it might somehow make him invulnerable, too.
Once or twice, they’d done shadow puppets, but by then, he’d gone mostly blind in one eye and couldn’t see anything in the poorly constructed shadow-shapes she made anymore. She attributed the fault to the dollar-store pocket flashlight she’d bought to keep in her purse. It wasn’t the same as the one at home.
Since he’d died, she couldn’t bear to sit home and do nothing on Sundays. She didn’t know what to do with all that time and no Evan to fill it, so she’d designated Sunday as a cleaning day: every room in the house but his. She was by no means a strict adherent to tidiness, but it burned through the day, and that was all that mattered.
By Sunday night – that Sunday night in particular – she was ready to drop into bed, clothes and all. She’d cried most of the day as she cleaned. She thought about his death, a final whisper of breath as his little chest rose and fell one last time. She’d held his hand while the warmth in it slowly slipped away. His eyes had been closed. She’d brushed his hair from his forehead and gave him a hundred tiny kisses and a hug and a whisper of her own, of love, before she’d let the chaos of hospital paperwork and funeral arrangements and phone calls crash into her existence. And that Sunday, all of those memories filled her and then bled out of her in tears and basement screams and heaving sobs. By that night, she was exhausted.
Almost too exhausted to make shadow puppets.
It was nearly habit by that time, though, to reach for the flashlight on the night table and flick it on as she flopped onto her back. She reached up and turned off the lamp, and the darkness swelled to fill the space, except where the cone of her flashlight hit the ceiling.
She hadn’t even raised her hand to the beam of light when the shadow puppet dinosaur – the baby, not the mamma – soundlessly worked its mouth open and closed, then shook a little as if giggles wracked the hand behind it. She breathed slowly through the hot flash of nervous excitement in her stomach and the ache in her chest. Outwardly, she showed no sign that she even saw the shadow, not at first. She was surprised by how calm and steady she could keep the flashlight. As her hand slowly reached up, the little shadow-dinosaur chattered on silently. She made a caressing motion, mamma dinosaur nuzzling its baby, and the little shadow responded. Tears blurred the shadows for a moment, but she didn’t dare drop her hand. She blinked the tears away instead, let them spill back into her ears, her hair. Her shadow cuddled the little one until sleep crept up behind her and swept both light and shadow away.
* * * * *
She woke up the next morning on the heels of a dream about Evan. In it, she had come into his room to wake him up for school, and he hadn’t been in bed. She turned her head to see the closet doors open, and she frowned. She was sure she had closed them, per Evan’s request, the night before. She closed them every ni
ght.
In the dream, she had supposed Evan had gotten himself up, and was poking around the closet, looking for something to wear. She thought it was cute that he was picking out his clothes, a big first-grader now and not a little kindergartner, and she smiled as she made her way over a pile of Legos to observe.
She hadn’t even made her way around the doors, big dream-closet doors that obscured her view even from angles where she should have been able to see him, when the dream-certainty that something was wrong gripped her. She stepped around the edge of the door and confronted a gaping throat, black yet glistening, that fell away to darkness. The cross-bar with its few scattered hangers was wedged between the jaws, and there was Evan. His skin was a pale gray like a sky threatening rain, with darker clouds gathered beneath the eyeless sockets. His head was tilted to the left, and his whole body, too thin even for a child, too still, hung from the cross-bar without any visible means of holding it there. She cried out, frustratingly dream silent, and reached for her boy, but something from the throat of the closet was faster, something made of shadow darker than the endless emptiness below, something like a loosely gathered bundle of hinged spikes with a round, eyeless head and long, sharp finger-claws. It wrapped a jointed black finger around Evan’s waist and pulled him into the throat just moments before Angie could get to him. She stood screaming at the mouth of the closet, holding onto the crossbar and watching Evan’s form grow smaller until it disappeared into the inky void below. And in the dream, she jumped in after him....
Then her body jerked her awake. Tears filled her eyes and she wiped at them with the back of her puppet-making hand. Her head hurt and her mouth was dry. She turned to the night table and found her bottle of water next to the flashlight, which had been turned off and put back in its usual place. She assumed she must have done that by habit when she was nearly asleep, though she couldn’t remember it.
Night Movies Page 5