Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5

by Robert Shearman

  I often played in Mbuyi’s room when I was little. While Uncle sat with my parents downstairs, he let Mbuyi and me play mancala with his nice board, the one of polished wood with hand-carved faces of men and of women with corn-rowed hair, their nimble fingers wrapped around flowering vines. Mbuyi’s scarred right hand could always hold all the beads, and he chose which hollow to scoop from faster than I did. Still, though I was younger, we were almost evenly matched. I took a long time to move each turn, but strategizing for the game came naturally to me. He was more reckless, but didn’t mind losing to a girl who was younger as long as we both had fun.

  Mbuyi was my favorite cousin, and although given the name for an older twin, he remained Uncle’s only child. When I asked Mbuyi— once—why he had no younger twin, no Kanku, he rubbed his long scar. Then he left and stayed gone long past dark. When he returned, and Uncle yelled at him, Mbuyi asked something in Tshiluba. Uncle immediately shut himself inside his room. No one spoke of it again. Mbuyi never explained his obsession with returning to Congo, but at twenty-three he finally did. He stayed in Kinshasa with my grandfather, and boarded the plane to return to the States after seven weeks meeting family I have yet to meet, eating food I’m still not skilled enough to cook, and being exposed to a way of life my father says will “show you how some people live.” That is to say, one cannot go to Congo and return as spoiled as one left.

  Only Uncle knows if Mbuyi came back less spoiled; the day after his return, Mbuyi was declared missing. None of us have heard from him since. He had no car to find by the side of the road or in a ditch or the Connecticut River. His friends knew nothing about where he’d been. Uncle was distraught and cut himself off from my family almost entirely. Not until I came out to school here, where I could take a bus down from UMass to his apartment and Uncle had to let me in because I am family, did he begin to repair the rift he had created. He welcomed me with open arms and haunted eyes when I knocked on his door, and when the banging started from Mbuyi’s old bedroom, Uncle told me he’d adopted a dog.

  After the first afternoon I spent in Uncle’s house, poring over the books in his office and avoiding the handwritten journals and the room with the dog, I visited his apartment often. Determined to drag him back into our family, I brought news, helped him clean, and begged Congolese cooking lessons from this man who knew all the best dishes because he had no wife to cook for him anymore. I stayed with Uncle for Thanksgiving because it was cheaper than going home. I did homework and helped him organize his students’ papers in the afternoons, and read late into the night, then slept, in the office. And I kept the light on when I slept, because the creaks in the house sounded like footsteps, and even though Uncle’s room was right above mine, I knew they couldn’t be his noises, and I was afraid.

  It has been more than a year since my first visit as a freshman, and I have yet to see what lives in Mbuyi’s old room. It is summer now, and hotter upstairs than the heat-soaked downstairs. Every night Uncle presses his fingers to my forehead and re-hangs the beads above the lintel. Every night I hear him creak upstairs, and I lock the door and bundle up in pajamas that are too hot for sleeping with a blanket, but just right for a surprise dash into the street for safety, and wait for sleep with open eyes trained on the floor between the bookshelf and the door, where the yellow light from the desk lamp stretches to reach. I am watching for a sentient darkness. I am searching for shapes I don’t want to see. I fall asleep every night on the lookout for what makes my heart beat too fast and my back prickle like an arching cat’s back. I don’t know what form it will take. I just know its voice, sweet like sugar cane and cruel as ice water on a slumbering child’s face.

  *

  My headphones are plugged into a tape recorder the size of a hardback book. I’m typing up Uncle’s interview with a man from Florida, and have been since just after washing the dinner dishes. The lethargy from the foufou and fish have worn off with the steady tapping of my fingers on the laptop keys, and now I am simply on autopilot, stopping the tape recorder every so often because my fingers don’t type French as fast as they type English, and the interview switches back and forth.

  Clock chimes break me from my trance. My computer says it’s seven minutes to midnight. Uncle’s grandfather clock always runs fast, no matter how many times you set it back. I stop the tape and close my laptop, unplugging it from the wall and taking it to my summer bedroom, Uncle’s office with the futon folded out into a bed. I can’t believe Uncle let me stay up so late—that either of us did. He always insists I’m in bed—in the office—well before midnight.

  I have learned certain things have power. Uncle taught me this, not explicitly, but through example. Midnight has power in the West: it is the witching hour, the time of night when ghosts are most powerful. It is the time when Uncle and I are in our rooms and there are footsteps in the hall and down the stairs.

  I find Uncle asleep on the living room couch. I do not want him to be around for those creaking footsteps.

  I call him, shake him. His eyes open. “Time is it?” He is still groggy, his voice is slurred, but he looks at me with eyes narrowed the way they were when my father and aunt told him that on the final night, when all the children were back home, they dreamed their mother had died clutching her heart.

  “About five to midnight,” I say.

  Uncle struggles to sit up and I try to help, but he waves my hands away. “Go to your room,” he says. “Time for bed.”

  “I know.” I want to roll my eyes, but feel this isn’t the time for such casual familiarity. His back straightens slowly, he squares his shoulders, and then he takes me by the back of the neck, the way my father does when he is upset but being gentle, and herds me to my summer bedroom. He rushes me into the room, but does not rush as he places his fingertips on my forehead, and re-hangs the beads above the lintel. He stops as he is closing the door and casts a tired smile in my direction. I am standing still, heart hammering and mind eerily quiet.

  He opens his mouth to say something, and then he pauses. Finally, he clasps my shoulder. “Isobelle. Don’t be afraid.”

  He closes the door, and I am alone in the dark.

  I stand there and hear the creak of his footsteps approaching the stairs. I see lights go out under the door, and realize I have not turned on the desk lamp, and now it will be harder to find.

  I have not yet heard Uncle creak up the steps. A faint light still shines underneath the door. He has not finished turning off the lights. But something creaks above me, and I wonder how Uncle got upstairs without my noticing. Then the sound leaves the space above me, and the stairs start their swaying creak. It is slow, deliberate. It is not Uncle’s pull-trudge-trudge-pull, railing to foot, to foot to railing, step. It is a lighter sound. It presses heavy on my chest. I feel the fear of a shapeless, shifting dark expanding in the air around me with each step, until it is hard to breathe. I have had dreams like this, where the fear in me is so great, the danger I face so terrible, that I cannot make a sound louder than a whisper. I stare at the door, invisible in the darkness but for the faint bar of light spilling onto the floor beyond reach of my toes, and I am paralyzed with fear.

  I want to open the door, but I have always been told not to. I am afraid to open it, to warn Uncle away from what he must know, even better than me, is coming slowly and inexorably closer. I wish now that I knew the old stories of witchcraft that Uncle transcribes himself. I wish I had not thought I would never need such information, or even, when I first heard the stories, that they were the rickety beliefs of the old, the foolish, and the ignorant. I want the protection of something, and I want my uncle to be safe.

  The footsteps stop at the bottom of the stairs, and I hear a heavy thud, and then nothing but the sound of my pulse, the AC turning down, and crickets chirping dangerously loud outside.

  “Uncle?” I force the word from my constricting throat. It comes out a croak. I swallow. “Uncle?”

  There are no more sounds.

  I tell my
self Uncle is fine, and then I tell myself I am a bad liar, that the silence is too heavy to be natural, and that the next unnatural silence will come from me. The footsteps have stopped completely, but still I wait. I count to thirty, to fifty, to seventy-five, before knowing Uncle could really be hurt overpowers my cowardice. I open the door fully conscious of the hairs rising on the back of my neck and the goosebumps prickling my arms. The sound of the beads scritching over the wooden door does nothing to soothe my nerves. Outside my room it is dark, but the light over the stairwell is on. I poke my head over the threshold and feel the beads from the lintel sliding cool on the back of my neck.

  “Uncle?” I call softly, then again, louder: “Uncle? Are you all right?”

  There is still no sound.

  I grip the door frame and step one foot outside. I cannot see around the stairs. I cannot see Uncle. I feel my way slowly outside and, seeing nothing—though perhaps what had happened couldn’t be seen?—dart into the light of the stairwell.

  I nearly trip over Uncle. He is slumped at the bottom of the stairs, as if he’d started to go up, become light-headed, and sat down just before passing out. There is no blood, and no wound that I can see. Perhaps he had been walking strangely because he felt sick?

  Still I am wary when I crouch over him, clutching his thin shoulder and staring down at his chest to make sure it still rises and falls. He is alive, at least, but his breathing comes shallow and fast, and a strange smell of rot covers him that is both odd and familiar—the scent of the house when I wake up in the mornings, that fades until I go to bed. The smell grows stronger, and I look from Uncle to the dark room around me. The shadows move as they always move, and yet the stench creeps closer. Rot, death, decay. That is what’s coming.

  The clock chimes quarter past and I think I might leap out of my skin.

  I want to leave Uncle and go to my room—the room with a door I can close and beads that are supposed to protect me. But before I can decide whether bolting will remain on my conscience forever, a shadow peels away from the darkness: a dragging corpse with a face I almost recognize.

  The creature before me might have been human once, but the body it wears is in tatters. Dark skin in a wash of brown and green shades hangs off of torn muscles and ligaments and bones, just as the fibrous rags of a blue pinstriped dress shirt and stained off-white briefs hang from it. Maggots wriggle in the creature’s empty eye sockets and drip from the thing like blood. Its lips are gone, leaving black gums and a ghastly wide smile that never wavers. It reaches out to me with fingertips that are almost entirely bone, and a familiar scarred hand.

  The corpse’s mouth opens. “Cousin,” it says in French, “give me your body, so I can avenge my death.”

  It makes the creature real when that honey-sweet, broken-glass voice pummels its way out of my missing cousin’s mouth. I start to scream, but the taste of its stench makes me choke. Someone— Uncle—clutches the back of my knee, and I scream and scuttle away before realizing I have left us both alone to face the creature, the stranger who’s wearing my cousin’s skin. I grope toward the kitchen light, but before I can turn it on, the smell of rot is overwhelming and the creature is in front of me.

  I freeze as abruptly as I moved before, and my breath stops with my body. The corpse’s hands touch my face with hard fingers, pressing my forehead where Uncle touched me just before he closed my door. Darkness seeps into my vision, and a new presence crawls in from the edges.

  Something pushes me hard in the chest, but it is not a hand or a body, it is that presence—who is Kanku?—in my chest and my head, stretching through my legs and my arms and my pelvis, trying to push me out.

  With a snap like a rubber band or a sparked synapse, I am outside myself. I feel nothing. I think I must go somewhere, but I do not know or care where that place is. I only know my body is walking away from me, out of the kitchen and into the living room, and I feel nothing about this but mild curiosity: why am I not inside my body? A knife hangs casually from the hand that was mine. I wonder what it is for.

  KANKU:

  “MY FATHER HE KILLED ME”

  Soon my twin’s body will be too weak to leave this room, and Baba will have killed me—again. Day after day, I stand at this bedroom door in Mbuyi’s decomposing flesh—though it has lasted years, like it knew this shape would have been mine too if I had lived. I wait for the midnight chimes as the air grows ripe around me. My hour, once again, is closing in.

  I have spent much of my life waiting. Much of my life thinking. There is little living to do without a body to do it with. There have been three long waits in my life, before and after my death. I dwell on my memories, review them, pick at them like wounds made to fester and seethe. I replay my life and my rage, and the memories give me strength to finish the task I have set for myself: I will kill my Baba.

  *

  It all began with Mama.

  “Kanku, come here!”

  In our bedroom, I stop playing cowboys with Mbuyi and run to the kitchen. “Yes, Mama?”

  Mama is stirring a pot on the stove. “Kanku, find me my peeling knife. It’s not in the drawer where it belongs.”

  I think it is on the television, and when I run to the other room it is waiting for me there, just like I thought. I bring it to Mama. She smiles and takes it from me, kisses my cheek. “Such a clever boy,” she says. She frowns at the blade then, spits an annoyed sound through her teeth. “Wash this.”

  I take it to the sink.

  Baba says, “Where was it?”

  I tell him, “You left it on the TV.”

  Mama’s face glows with pride as she nods, but Baba is quiet. Then he says, “You were asleep when I got it out.” He does not sound proud, or even happy.

  “Our son is gifted,” Mama says. I dry the cleaned knife and give it back. She sets it down, keeps stirring the pot on the stove.

  As I leave the kitchen, Baba says, quiet, “A gift is only as good as the person who has it.”

  Something crashes—Mama’s spoon against the pot, I think, or the stove. “Our sons are good boys,” she growls, low, like I am not supposed to hear.

  “So you say,” Baba bites back, just as quiet.

  Inside our bedroom, Mbuyi looks up from a new wire man he is making. Expression waiting to be delighted, he asks, “What did she want you to find this time?”

  I shove Baba’s suspicion away from my face and my thoughts. I won’t tell Mbuyi. It would hurt him to know.

  Mama was proud when I knew things grown-ups didn’t want me to know. She ruffled my hair and pulled me close when Baba’s friends looked wide-eyed at my words. She said I had a gift, that the ancestors had blessed me. I think maybe Mama was the blessing.

  Remembering the kitchen knife—among other things she had me find—I’ve thought about how I could have known where it was without knowing why I knew. Perhaps I followed a trail of observations: Baba sometimes used the knives in the kitchen as screwdrivers; Baba always fixed the broken things in the house; the TV wasn’t working, and he’d tested the antenna while I played in the family room, but the picture was still skipping, and he was annoyed he’d have to unscrew the back to look inside; the next afternoon the TV was working, but I never saw him fix it and I was home all day. Perhaps I even saw the knife crossing through the room from the kitchen or my bedroom, and left it because Baba might still be using it. I am still not sure how I found things for her, if I even had a gift, but Mama impressed upon me that being a good man, using my gift wisely, would bring good fortune to us all. Mama told me, You are a good boy. I know you will be a good man.

  *

  Mama said when we die, we join our ancestors in the spirit world stretched out over this one like a mirror, like a twin. There, joyfully reunited with our loved ones, we watch over our living family members. They give us honor and we bring them comfort. They give us prayers and we protect them from witches. They beg our advice and we nudge them in the right direction. Because of this, Mama said, no one is ever tr
uly alone. Living or dead, we will always have family.

  “Mbuyi, you cannot catch me! I am faster than you!” When my twin sees me again, I stop to wave the wire man he made, laughing. When he chases me, I run to the kitchen.

  “Give that back! I said give it back!”

  Mama shakes her head at us, but I see her smile as I run past her troop of steaming pots, and I am happy.

  Baba is in the living room. “Mbuyi! Kanku! Stop running around this house while your mother is cooking!”

  We stop. “We’re sorry, Baba,” we say with one voice.

  I hide the wire man behind my back. Mbuyi wrinkles his nose at me.

  “Kanku—come here.” Baba holds out his hand to my twin.

  “I’m Kanku!” I almost smile. Baba still confuses us. Mama never has.

  “Then you come here! Give that back to your brother.”

  If I give it back, the game is over. “But Baba—”

  “Don’t look at me that way,” Baba snarls, “it isn’t natural.” Baba’s face is hard, cold. It scares me. I look at Mbuyi, confused and afraid, and his face is a mirror of my own.

  “Like what, Baba?” I am grateful to Mbuyi; I know he asks for me.

  Baba only says, “Give that to me,” then, “Mbuyi, come here. Here. Now go, both of you. And don’t run in the house—you are not dogs, do not act like them!” He returns to his newspaper. Mbuyi grabs my hand as we go hide in our bedroom, squeezing it to comfort me. His unease is a mirror of my own.