Nightmare Magazine Issue 5

by Ted Kosmatka

  “I’m falling apart. I’m seeing things,” she told Gene three days later.

  From Gene’s arms, Sally reached out, so Clara came close enough that all three of them were huddled and touching. Sticky hands squeezed flinching, grown-up faces.

  “I miss my mom,” she said.

  “She was a good lady,” Gene answered. He said it like an accusation, like Clara herself wasn’t a good lady. When Gene was pissed off, it was all about pronoun emphasis. Nothing you could put your finger on or argue with. A passive-aggressive ghost with razor feet, flitting through the room.

  “Dad’s got no phone or heat,” she said, pouring herself a Chivas and then taking Sally. “He never paid a bill the whole time he was married. It was my mom’s job. He never even opened the mail.”

  “What is dementia, anyway?” Gene asked, rubbing his eyes. As extra punishment for not getting tenure, he’d been assigned five composition classes this semester. From his sleep last night, he’d sat up fast and shouted, “The answer is always Virginia Woolf!” Then he’d kicked her.

  Clara took a slug of whiskey and gave Sally a bounce and squeeze. “You forget a lot. Little things like names and dates, and eventually big things, like how to drive or boil water. Your personality stays the same, though. He’ll always be Pop.” She thought about that as she said it. Tried to imagine tying the old man’s shoes, sponge bathing him in front of Howdy Doody.

  “We’d better figure this out now, then. Because he’s gonna need help,” Gene answered.

  She liked the sound of the word “We.” When his tenure got denied, a part of her had wondered if there was some detail he’d forgotten to tell her, like he’d insulted the provost or shown up for class dressed as Freud. Then she’d decided it didn’t matter.

  “I think we should go to the Justice of the Peace. I want you to marry me,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Why? It’s just a social contract between us and the state. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  She took another sip of whiskey. Sally sucked on her cheek as if to extract milk from it. “Sleepy baby,” she said while tears ran down her face. “I love you so.”

  “Hey, you want to? I didn’t think you wanted to,” Gene said.

  “Of course I want to. I’m the free cow!”

  “So okay. Let’s get married.”

  Sally grinned. So did Clara, still crying. They came together again, three heads touching. “Okay,” they repeated at the same time. “Okay.”

  That night, Sally woke up screaming. Gene went to her first, but she could not be consoled, and so it was Clara who rocked her, and offered her a dry breast, which she suckled for comfort but not sustenance. They pressed their faces close and fell asleep that way.

  At dawn, Clara and Gene sat over their coffee, dog tired. He cupped her used breast when the baby went down for a nap, and she accepted. They made love. She didn’t think she’d like him more, or feel much better after it was over. She was wrong.

  “Dad, open up,” she called a few days later, at the Red Hook homestead. When he didn’t, holding Sally, she keyed her way in. This had become a routine.

  She found him sitting in a green La-Z-Boy that he’d dragged out from the television room. The center hall was filled with crap. Linens and knick knacks—including a giant, plaster Virgin Mary on the half shell—blocked the stairs.

  Wearing his black funeral jacket, Pop sat in the center of it all like the god of junk. The Ziploc baggie of ashes jutted out from his right pocket. “Heya Naggy,” he said, then took a bite out of an apple turnover. Its filling splatted out the sides.

  “I think you should live with us. We’re getting married, so you don’t have to worry about sin,” she said, then laid Sally next to him and began to change her diaper. It was a stinker.

  “Ruin my appetite!” Pop answered, though she noticed that he didn’t stop eating. Newly diapered, Clara put Sally on his lap, thinking a warm lump of love might rouse him. He held her stiffly while she cried, so Clara took her back, and cried, too. Pop ate his turnover.

  She found the house skeleton keys amidst the sprawled junk and tried all nine on her mother’s sewing room door. The place had become large in her mind, like inside it, Mary’s many ghosts were waiting. They lived there, and one-by-one, were escaping into the world.

  None of the keys worked.

  After Clara dropped Sally back home with the babysitter, she went to work the afternoon shift, where she learned that she’d left a clamp in a patients’ hip again. This time it wasn’t caught until a subsequent x-ray. She told the patient before telling the hospital lawyers. The subpoena came that same day. She was suspended for a month, which, given the circumstances, wasn’t so bad. (Call it a bereavement staycation!)

  Clara spent most of the following week in bed. By five o’clock she was regularly drunk. After the babysitter left, she’d let Sally sip tiny bits of wine because it made her stop crying. Then they’d lie on the floor and play with the infant-sized piano.

  Once, a woman dressed in green sat across from them, angrily tapping her feet to the piano beat of “Don’t be Cruel.”

  The woman’s face was sunken where eyes belonged, like she’d made the sockets herself by rubbing her knuckles there. She jerked fast and unexpected, reaching for Sally.

  Clara grabbed Sally and ran. The woman chased.

  By the door, something terrible and small rocked back and forth. A baby, only half-formed. They didn’t stop to look.

  Tragedy struck when Malbec season ended. Clara decided not to switch to Cabernets.

  Instead, she gave the babysitter the rest of the month off and took Sally to the park every day. They stared at each other a lot, not quite sure how to proceed. “Ma-ma. Maaaa-ma,” Clara would say.

  “Da-dee!’ Sally would answer.

  Eventually, the old lady and her IV tree showed up. Clara was relieved to see Sally’s eyes follow her slow progress through the park, signifying that she wasn’t the only cuckoo seeing ghosts.

  “Lay me to rest before this gets ugly,” the hag called as she walked. Unlike the others, her face was a deflated roadmap of wrinkles. Cross-hatched lines of joy and misery blended, as if they were the same.

  Because Clara had arranged for a part-time day nurse with Pop’s insurance, and also because she’d been doing some grieving of her own, it wasn’t until the third week of her suspension that she visited her father. By now a pile of bills jammed the mail slot. His suit was torn, and the Ziploc baggie of ashes was gone. She poured herself a shot of his Jameson and sipped it slow.

  Under the La-Z-Boy, something small rocked. It crinkled its face as if to cry, but no sound came out. Sally hid her face in Clara’s chest.

  “I want you to be honest with me about the ashes,” Clara said.

  Pop looked up from his Hostess.

  “Did you eat mom?”

  The old man perked up and smiled. Then he took her highball glass. “Physician, heal thyself!” he announced as he swilled it down and handed her back the empty.

  Another rocking thing appeared, this time in the open center of the room. It banged its head against the carpet and its smooth face was marred by a sheen of hairy down, just like Sally’s.

  Clara’s ears didn’t hear it, but she could feel the thing’s wails. They pulsed through her body in waves: a low-pitched sensation that flushed her womb and forced her monthly bleeding. It came out so fast that the floor dripped with blood.

  The verdict came back and the news was not good. The hospital settled for ten million dollars, and Clara was put on probation. They reduced her caseload by half, and she wasn’t allowed to sign out without having a chief attending review her work.

  “No big deal,” Gene told her, which he had to say, because if she worked herself into a frenzy and quit, they’d be scraping pennies for groceries. She accepted the terms of her new contract for that same reason. All the while, a blank faced woman in red frowned at her from outside the Montague Street apartment window; then, with a blunt kitchen
knife that she produced from her apron, the woman sawed her own wrists. She pressed hard to tear skin and when it opened, blinding white came out.

  Clara watched, her face pressed against the window, blood running between her legs.

  A few nights later, Clara and Gene picked up a spinach pie from Zaytoon's and went to her father’s house. The place was a shocking wreck. The old man had moved all the furniture into the center hall. The television was unplugged, and he informed them that he’d fired the day nurse because he didn’t trust black people, whom he believed were part Italian.

  Clara’s eyes filled.

  They ate dinner on the den floor. Pop handed his crust to Sally, who dutifully gummed it. When she finished, she lifted her arms at Clara and, for the first time, said, “Momma!”

  Clara smiled and kissed her across the nose, face and cheeks. “My one and only girl,” she said.

  After dinner, they put Sally in a pack-n-play and returned what furniture they could to their appropriate places while Pop watched. “It’s good you came,” he said as she opened the mail. “I didn’t know what the hell to do with all that.”

  Amidst the bills was a letter from her brother Tom, who, it turned out, had tried to come to the funeral, but hadn’t been able to afford the flight. He’d written the letter formally, but she felt his shame through the pages nonetheless.

  So she picked up the phone, and first called him and let him know that she’d send his regrets to the rest of the family, then called the moving company. Then she and Gene tried to jimmy the sewing room door with a serrated knife. They cut the lock, but the stubborn door, warped inside its frame, still wouldn’t budge.

  In her dream, the old woman with the rolling IV came to her. “It’s unnatural, being split in so many pieces,” she said. “Liable to drive a person mad.”

  When she woke, the room was filled with pale, clay creatures without eyes or mouths or ears. There were so many that they piled atop each other; elbows, hips, and necks.

  Her womb continued to bleed, and in a terrifying moment, it occurred to her that first Sally, and then she, Clara, were becoming unborn.

  During her first day back at work, Clara didn’t leave any clamps in anybody’s hips, which was a good start. Afterward, she went to her father’s house, where she found the door open. He was watching television and eating fried chicken straight from the Tupperware she’d left him. At least it wasn’t apple pie.

  “Lookin’ good, Dad. The movers are on their way. Gene’s following them.”

  He gazed out the window at Coffey Park. She and Gene had searched for a cheaper, bigger apartment for nearly three weeks and found nothing, then realized they’d overlooked the obvious. Pop’s place was paid off. They could live there, and the babysitter could help out with both daughter and father.

  Already her brother had called, asking for his half of the house’s value. “What do you want me to do?” she’d asked, “Cut it in half and mail it to you?”

  “I love you pop,” she now told him.

  He put his chicken down, and for a second she got a glimpse of the guy he used to be, back when Mom had kept things going, and he hadn’t been so lonely. “Same here,” he said.

  “Where are mom’s ashes?” she asked.

  He nodded at the vase over the television. “I keep meaning to put flowers in it,” he said, “But I think she wants to live in the sewing room.”

  Howdy Doody returned from his commercial break. Pop turned his head to face it. She picked up the vase, and sure enough, it was filled with ashes.

  On her way to the sewing room, she saw her mother’s puzzle. It was finished— a perfect snowflake. The young woman in the seventies shirtdress was there, too. She’d torn her red hair out in clumps.

  Clara felt the pain in her scalp, too. And in her groin, as if something in there was dying. She slammed her shoulder against the door. Once. Twice. It rattled, but didn’t give.

  “Open Sesame,” she commanded. Then rammed the door again. No dice.

  “Rumpelstiltskin?” she slammed the door again. Nothing.

  Finally, she took a deep breath, and knocked. “Mary Burns Maloney? Are you in there?” Tight as a drum.

  At last, she asked, “Mom? Could I come in?”

  The door opened as soon as she turned the knob.

  The room was nothing special. About five feet by ten and all it fit was a small window, sewing table, and closet. On the table was a half-sewn quilt. On the sill, two dried-up ferns. The wallpaper was snowflakes against a blue background. In the closet, Mary’s wedding dress hung over Clara’s infant clay hand impression, and her brother’s bronze-dipped baby shoes.

  One-by-one, the clay ghosts filled the room. Pale, unformed, naked and shapeless. They crammed against each other as if joined. They mewed, a vibration that throbbed inside Clara’s chest and belly. It was the feeling of coming undone.

  Clara placed the vase on the windowsill between the dried ferns. The room emptied, first of the old, and then the young, and finally, the faceless infants. Everything got quiet.

  Out the window, the old woman wheeled her IV. Clara recognized her, finally, as Mary Maloney on her deathbed. The old woman didn’t say goodbye as she lumbered, pole squeaking, down the street and toward the cemetery, but she did look back, just once.

  From the main part of the house, Clara heard a doorbell chime, meaning the movers, Gene, and Sally had arrived. Gene and Clara had gotten married yesterday morning at the Justice of the Peace. Afterward, they’d gone to work and been too tired that night to consummate the union.

  Dust settled, flitting in the air. The vase seemed rightly placed. Clara stood in the center of the empty room. She’d always imagined that in this place, her mother had found peace. It was here that she’d healed whatever frailties from which she suffered. Here that she’d stuffed her dreams, mustered her strength, and subjugated her unhappiness. Here that she’d drawn and learned to don her mask of mother and wife.

  But looking around Clara understood that none of that was true. There was no mask. There was only change. Every day, Mary Burns had broken. But she’d never had the time to lick her wounds. So she’d sloughed her old, broken selves and moved on.

  Clara’s mother had not come here to gather strength; she’d come here to cloister her monsters.

  — “Clara?”

  — “Momma?”

  — “Naggy?”

  Gene, Sally, and Pop called all at once.

  Like her mother had done a thousand times before, Clara paused for a moment, and expelled her regret between her legs. She left it in the sewing room, newly born.

  “I’m here,” she said when she got out, locking the door behind her. “What do you want?”

  for C.J. Langan

  © 2013 Sarah Langan

  Sarah Langan is the author of the novels The Keeper and The Missing, and her most recent novel, Audrey’s Door, won the 2009 Stoker for best novel. Her short fiction has appeared in the magazines Cemetery Dance, Phantom, and Chiaroscuro, and in the anthologies Brave New Worlds, Darkness on the Edge, and Unspeakable Horror. She is currently working on a post-apocalyptic young adult series called Kids and two adult novels: Empty Houses, which was inspired by The Twilight Zone, and My Father’s Ghost, which was inspired by Hamlet. Her work has been translated into ten languages and optioned by the Weinstein Company for film. It has also garnered three Bram Stoker Awards, an American Library Association Award, two Dark Scribe Awards, a New York Times Book Review editor’s pick, and a Publishers Weekly favorite book of the year selection.

  The H Word: The Failure of Fear

  Dale Bailey

  Let me make a confession here: I haven’t been truly scared by a work of literary or cinematic horror in a long time—perhaps only once in my adult lifetime: fourteen years ago, when I saw The Blair Witch Project, and slept with the bedside lamp alight,to my wife’s amusement. What made the movie work (for me, anyway) was the way the film broke the fourth wall, successfully pretending to be found foo
tage from a student documentary in the works, and casting complete unknowns who didn’t fulfill the horror movie clichés, which even a good film like The Cabin in the Woods indulges (however much it seeks to subvert them). The protagonists are neither budding Hollywood sensations nor gym-massaged hardbodies who spend the film in various states of undress: they’re everyday folks who spend most of the movie in parkas. The found footage motif has now become a cliché itself, but we’re still watching the same young hardbodies get sliced and diced on their way to the inevitable sequel. Not scary. Just as the literary side of the equation—even in the most accomplished hands (and I believe we’re experiencing a small renaissance in the genre)—almost invariably fails to unsettle me.

  Yet I’m not by any means an unsatisfied customer. I continue to see a lot of horror films and to read widely in the genre—more widely, in fact, than in any other realm of fiction. There is an essential mystery about this that I first latched on to during a horror panel at the late lamented Trinoc*Con, when I found myself admitting (to my horror—pun intended) that unlike the other writers on the panel, I really didn’t work very hard at scaring people and indeed wasn’t much interested in it: this from a writer who works fairly regularly, though by no means exclusively, in the genre, and who has occasionally been nominated for its annual awards. I even won one, the International Horror Guild Award, for a novelette called “Death and Suffrage,” about zombies who return from the dead . . . to vote. Not exactly the stuff of nightmares.

  In his now classic study of horror, Danse Macabre, Stephen King argues that “the genre exists on three more or less separate levels, each one a little less fine than the one before it”—terror, horror, and revulsion. Terror operates through the unseen, the specter that is merely imagined. Horror presents the monster as physical reality. Revulsion—“the gross-out”—works by making us recoil from some gory “reality” (he offers us the chest-burster scene in Alien by way of example). Yet none of these levels really leaves me sleepless at night. I can think of no finer example of “terror” than Henry James’ Turn of the Screw—yet it does not terrify me. Joseph Payne Brennan’s “Slime,” with its eponymous—and very physical—monster, does not move me to leave the light on when I go to sleep. And even the most violent gross-out fantasy—think Romero’s Dawn of the Dead—is more likely to leave me wondering about the secret of the special effects (or bemoaning them in this era of CGI) than hiding my head under the bedclothes. A (very) informal poll of my friends, aficionados all, suggests that my reactions are not uncommon—that none of the three levels inspires the kind of quaking-under-your-covers, fearful-of-the-boogeyman-beyond-the-closet-door terror most of us experienced as children. On the rare occasions when we do experience true fear as adults, King admits, we regress into our “terrified ten-year-old” selves.