Cauchemar

by Alexandra Grigorescu

  She wondered how often Leah had entertained the two men. “Shall we open the wine?” Hannah said, her voice sounding taut to her own ears.

  “I’ll do it.” Callum took the bottle.

  She sat down beside James and palmed her knees. After a moment, she heard glasses clinking from the kitchen. “He must miss you, and the nightlife in town. I feel bad for that.”

  James blinked, then leaned over and pulled a stack of magazines from his bag. “Yeah. A few grungy bars and too much drinking. Really, what’s to miss? I think he’s in good hands here. I hope you are, too. I brought these for you.”

  Hannah’s hands sagged beneath the weight as she leafed through the covers, a series of flawless airbrushed faces. Her finger lingered on the beaming face of a bride. She let herself consider the veil on the magazine’s cover, committing each white satin rosebud to memory.

  “That one’s from Leah,” James said. “I told her it might not be, well, you know.” He muffled a cough. “Anyways. She insisted.”

  Hannah could feel her face flush. “She would, wouldn’t she?”

  “She’s trying to be kind,” he said quietly.

  Hannah raised her chin and looked him straight in the eye. “I’m protecting what’s mine.”

  “Believe me, I get it.” James put his hand over her wrist. “But there’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  “But,” Hannah started, then noticed James’s red cheeks. It dawned on her. “You love her,” she said slowly. She could feel the clamminess of his hand, and his fingers twitched as if a mild current was animating them.

  “Her hair’s brown under all that black gunk. We go back awhile. Everything was simpler then, back when we used to climb trees and smoke our parents’ tobacco. When we used to feel free saying what we meant, piss-drunk off our parents’ rye.” His mouth clamped shut.

  “Have you told her?” Hannah asked, lowering her voice.

  James looked over to the kitchen, where Callum was rifling through the pantry. “We got older, Hannah, all of us. Mistakes were made.”

  Hannah bit the inside of her lip. “Did they,” she cleared her throat, “together?”

  James squeezed her hand and though she waited, breathing carefully, he didn’t look at her. “It’s the past,” he said simply.

  Hannah swallowed, and it sounded like someone falling over a gorge. She’d known somehow.

  “It didn’t mean anything to him, Hannah. Not really. I can promise you that.”

  “But it meant something to you,” Hannah said.

  James’s smile was pained. “I’ve watched her hook up with an army of shits, and for some reason, I’ve stuck around. I guess you never forget your first love when, no matter how hard you try, the timing never works. But, still, you hope.” His eyes closed for a moment.

  Hannah withdrew her hand as Callum entered the room, his body half-arched to support the three wineglasses.

  “You, my dear,” he said, thrusting his chin toward Hannah, “can have exactly one. A little one.” He winked at James, not noticing his expression. “We men will luxuriate in not having a uterus.”

  At the dinner table, Hannah studied the spread of food that Callum had prepared. He’d moved with surprising speed through the kitchen, baking fragrant cheese-and-chive scones, as she’d given orders from her chair. She tried to summon up an appetite for the salmon speckled with pepper and parsley, but its dead eyes looked like props to her. Callum excavated the bones from the fish, then squeezed half a lemon over her pickled fennel.

  “It’s nowhere near as good as Hannah’s cooking,” Callum said.

  “I believe it,” James said, smiling, “but it’s still a far cry from those awful nachos you used to live on. You’ve trained him well, Hannah.”

  She watched Callum move his food around his plate as James spoke. He seemed to be gagging deep in his throat whenever he looked down at the fish. She squeezed his thigh under the table and fought not to indulge the nauseating image of his hands entangled in Leah’s hair, the two of them tussling on a mattress.

  When they were left alone for a minute, Callum kissed her through a blazing smile and his cheeks felt warm. He massaged her belly. “I’m happy to be us.”

  “You’re just drunk,” she said, laughing, but hugged him to her neck. She tried to remember that his warm breath was hers alone. She looked over his shoulder, at the table littered with dirty dishes, the tablecloth freckled with crumbs, the quartered lemons limp and curling on the edges of plates. Somehow, she’d stumbled into a real life. A life that was hers, and growing inside her, a life that was theirs.

  “There’s something wrong with your plumbing,” James said, knocking his shoulder against the doorframe. “It sounds like there’s something in the pipes.”

  Callum leaned forward across the table. “Something wrong with the plumbing,” he said slowly, making air quotes. “Code for quick, spray some air freshener.”

  “I’m serious.” James squeezed the back of his chair and sighed. “I’m drunk, and I’m serious, and I should be getting home.”

  “I’ll take you,” Callum said, rising from the table.

  Hannah waved her hands. “No one’s going anywhere. James, sleep here. We have so much extra space, and no one to fill it with.” She tapped her stomach. “At least not yet. You can sleep in the nursery. I’m sure we can find a sleeping bag somewhere.”

  The two men shared a private look and Callum chuckled. “We’ll be by to swaddle you later.”

  “Shh,” James hissed. A bang echoed throughout the house. “Listen.”

  The pounding came again, followed by a scurrying across the walls, and Hannah felt for a panicked moment that there was something pressing against the interstitial spaces of the house. “What is that?”

  “It’s just the pipes,” Callum said, squinting at the ceiling.

  “I told you they’re clogged.” James ran a finger along the wallpaper, a striped pattern that had faded and bled decades ago. “Want me to take a look at it?”

  Callum yawned. “Tomorrow. It can wait. Besides, it’s probably a frog that got in when the swamp flooded.”

  “Big frog,” Hannah whispered and gathered a stack of plates against her stomach. She took them into the kitchen and by the time she ran the water over them, the hammering had stopped. Still, she thought she could hear a pulse between the peals of laughter from the living room, where Callum and James were opening a bottle of whiskey and cracking peanut shells.

  Above her, the light flickered as if someone were screwing and unscrewing the lightbulb.

  Hannah woke in the night to the clapping inside her and the thudding against the bedroom walls. She rolled over.

  “I can still hear it.”

  “Go back to sleep,” Callum said, his voice plaintive, and stroked her arm. She watched his face lose the luster of consciousness. After a moment, he started to snore.

  Hannah stared at Callum’s bowed head. She reached out a hand to brush his hair aside, but something stopped her. The angle was strange, the hair too long and covering too much of his face. Her heart began to pound and she thought that there might be no features beneath the darkness. A terrible, irrational suspicion welled up in her that it wasn’t Callum lying beside her.

  Another hammer tested the house’s walls.

  She sat up and tiptoed toward the door. As she peered into the hallway, fear dried her mouth. “James?” she called softly.

  Silence answered her, and she snuck along the old floorboards. The door to her childhood room was ajar and she pushed it open. “James,” she whispered into the room.

  His face was half-lit by the moon, his features slack in sleep. He had collapsed in his clothes atop the sleeping bag, and he looked harmless, although she remembered a very different version of him pinioning her against a rusted pick-up when she was only ten years old.

 
“Who gave this to my little sister?” he’d yelled, dangling a twine necklace in front of her. A bone hung from the loop.

  Hannah had gone limp at that. It was fear, she’d suddenly understood, that motivated him. “I don’t know,” she’d whispered.

  A slap had sounded against the door of the truck, and they turned to see a waddling old woman in a crochet sweater. White wiry hair showed beneath her makeshift turban. “Hush up, boy,” she hissed, “or I’ll cane you like your mama should. That there’s rabbit, and your little miss must be teething something fierce. You put it back around her neck, ’less you want her smile to grow up crooked. Go on,” the woman had said, and slammed her bag of groceries against the truck again. “Git.”

  A thud against the wall startled Hannah out of remembrance, and she backed instinctively into the doorframe, hands closing like parentheses around her belly. In the moment, she had the wild sense of a womb around her, spasming with its own imperative.

  “What the fuck?” James cried, struggling to his feet.

  “I couldn’t sleep. The pounding was so loud and I was trying to figure out what it was.”

  James massaged his head as he came to stand by her. “I slept through it. That whiskey was potent. Where’s Callum?”

  “Asleep.”

  James sighed, the edge draining from his voice. “I hate to say it, but you might have a burst pipe.” He flicked the light switch on and the house remained dark. “Please tell me that idiot bought flashlights.”

  Hannah shrugged. “I don’t know. We have lots of candles downstairs. Mae was a big believer in candlelit everything.”

  James fit his fingers between hers and stepped into the hallway. “Tread carefully. He’ll never forgive me if anything happens to you.” They made their way down the stairs, both grasping the banister. She wanted to take the lead, to tell him she’d practically slid up and down these stairs on moonless nights her whole life, but she kept quiet. Sounds still bubbled up throughout the house, and when she put her hand on the wall to steady herself, she felt a pounding behind it.

  “We need matches,” he said, and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Hannah shivered. She was wrong. The house wasn’t the same as it’d been in her childhood. Mae had kept all fear, and all cause for fear, at bay.

  “Found them,” James said, joining her with a flame in his hand.

  She opened the closet with trembling hands and pointed to a box overflowing with long white candles. “Take your pick.”

  James took a step back.

  “What?” Hannah filled her hands with them and held their wicks up to the blaze.

  “Those candles,” he said, wincing as the first was lit.

  “She got them in bulk. I think it was a discount. Don’t worry, they burn fine. She used to leave them in the windows, and they’d burn for a whole day. I did it, too, for a while, but I guess I forgot.”

  James took the candles from her hands while she dug around for holders. “They’re used for offerings in town, offerings to spirits. We’ve been fishing hoodoo bottles from the Vermilion for years, little stoppered things with scrawled spells and spices in them. Rootwork,” he said, defensive before her pursed lips. James systematically inserted the candles into their holders, then distributed them around the living room, swearing as he bumped into furniture and tripped on clumps in the rug. “It’s been a strange night, that’s all. You woke me from a bad nightmare.” He whirled around suddenly with wide eyes.

  “What did you see?”

  “Something’s off here. Don’t you feel it?”

  Hannah tasted her own sour fear in the back of her throat, but shook her head.

  “I grew up on stories about your mother. The kids at school used to dare each other to cross the woods, near the edge of the water, and stand behind this house. Rumor had it that there was a crossroads here, that some mornings there’d be blood in the water.”

  Hannah remembered James’s cold eyes and bared teeth, his strong teenaged grip. Everyone had been wary of Hannah then, particularly the boys. She’d been too young to understand the murmurings, the challenge in the eyes of full-grown women as they stepped in front of their husbands, as if Hannah’s stare alone could sap them of something vital. She’d never seen pools of blood, but she’d seen shapes that at first seemed to be bloated bodies. After a blink or two, they would clarify into logs, rocks, or the spindly back of an alligator.

  “It’s my home, James,” she said.

  “We’ve been watching her for years. I’ve been watching her.” His shoulders were tight and squared. “I’d sound bat-shit crazy if I used old local tales to justify surveillance, but when the evidence shows up in hospitals and morgues, you start to wonder. I like cut-and-dry calls. I like shootings and drug busts, where handcuffs mean something. Even traiteurs are a dime a dozen, and most of them will give you a case of indigestion or land you in bed for a week. Mostly they like to fuck with tourists who have a fetish for voodoo.”

  His expression looked crazed in the candlelight as he headed down the hall toward the bathroom. “We don’t know what goes on in that church of hers, in that barn on the other side of the swamp. They call that place a crossroads, too. But men wither before their wives’ eyes, and young boys waste away in a matter of months. Every time we manage to get in, there’s nothing to see. Just her and a handful of men who swear there’s nothing wrong.”

  He tapped his heel hard against the floorboards and averted his eyes. “We’ve wanted to get under these floors for years.” He peered at the worn wood so intensely that Hannah wondered what he was seeing in his mind’s eye. Lost boys heaped in the dank dark.

  “I give permission,” Hannah said quickly. “It’s my house.”

  James pressed his ear to the bathroom door and listened. “It’s not your house,” he murmured.

  “She said—”

  “I’ve looked into it. It’s still hers. I’d bet anything that if we came in here, ready to dig, her and that crony Samuel would manifest quick as bunnies.”

  “Samuel isn’t well,” Hannah said, then wondered if he was even still alive. James’s face told her he was thinking the same thing. “Why don’t you stop her?” Somehow, she already knew what he would say.

  “It’s voluntary, you see?” The gentle tone of his voice undid Hannah, and she sunk onto the arm of the couch. “I still believe she forces them somehow, but they swear to their families, right into their deathbed, that it was their choice.” James bit his fingernail. “And I literally mean deathbed. Most of them die in their sleep.”

  Hannah breathed in, surprised. “In their sleep? But how? What happens to them?”

  As if in answer, another crack rang out, sounding like the house were made of bones, all snapped at once.

  “They drain. Sure as a bucket taken by rust.”

  A few days before, she’d glimpsed Callum through the open bathroom door. When their eyes met in the mirror, he’d closed the door with a tight smile. He’d tried to clean the blood from the ceramic, but the surface retained a dark red smear. She’d felt frozen by a foreboding she couldn’t place. Mae’s scrawled medicine held a troubling treatment for nosebleeds—wadded cobwebs, tight into the nostril.

  Something beat itself against the bathroom door and both Hannah and James jumped.

  “That’s one of the many perks of living on the swamp,” James said. His forehead shone with sweat. “If your septic breaks down enough, little critters can find their way in.”

  The living room was luminous, each candle giving off its own halo. Painful nostalgia filled Hannah, for the candlelight beacons Mae would set in the windows, murmuring as she looked at her illuminated reflection in the glass. Some nights, Hannah would tiptoe downstairs for a midnight snack and find the kitchen bright as day, infused with the smell of burning wax. She’d felt safe then, the unexpected light making those moments feel like extensions
of a dream.

  Another knock sounded and Hannah stood and stepped forward. James put an arm across her chest. “You hang back. If there’s a gator in there, you run.”

  Hannah gripped James’s shoulder. “Don’t go in,” she pleaded. “We’ll wait until morning.” It had finally found her. Now it was toying with her. The bathroom door could be broken as easily as cardboard by the thing’s heavy back. That anemic white, parched for red.

  James shook off her hand and moved toward the bathroom, his face grim. She followed quietly, hugging herself.

  All she could feel were the creature’s fingers tapping against her belly, its cuticles stretched and bloody from trying to contain the gnarled claws. She wasn’t sure where or when she’d felt them. A dream, maybe, as textured as memory. Suddenly, she felt humiliated. She wondered what James would think, seeing the nightmare creature made real against the tiles. The feeling was new, as if the creature was somehow her responsibility. Hers to explain, hers to hide.

  James threw her one darting look before launching his body at the door. The smell of swollen oysters drifted out.

  The white tiles were covered in black tendrils, corded and coiled, growing exponentially before her eyes. They writhed, wet and glistening from the pipes they’d crawled through, and moved hypnotically toward her. Hannah brought her bare feet down on them, without thinking about what she was doing. She slipped on their slick backs.

  “Christ!” James cried and wrestled open the cupboard under the sink. “Snakes,” he screamed. He pulled out a hammer and began to strike. The sound was hideous, and Hannah turned away, covering her ears. Behind her, something live and anatomical was being crushed. Then there was only James’s heavy panting, echoing from the tiles.

  James backed out of the bathroom and Hannah followed him as he sunk slowly to the hallway floor.

  “It’s just the flood,” Hannah trailed off with a moan, realizing that her excuses were growing flimsier. Blood stained her heels. She closed her eyes and concentrated on slowing her rapid heartbeat.

  “It’s this house, isn’t it?” He shook her arm urgently. “It’s something to do with your mother?”