Chaos

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Six years ago that past May, they had gone another round of debating his theories. She had joked with him about it, but he’d returned both an expression and an answer of almost sad gravity.

  “It’s only a matter of time, cupcake,” he’d told her, and she had shaken her head, neither dismissive nor conceding.

  He’d had the heart attack minutes later, while reading, of all things, the obituaries.

  Her recollection and subsequent consideration of the maintenance man’s words took less than five minutes, and within that time she’d already crossed the kitchen on her way back to the front door, intending, she supposed, to ask the man...something. She hadn’t fully formed what she wanted to ask him; she only knew that she couldn’t let his words go.

  She opened the front door and stepped back out into the hall.

  The elevator doors were closed. The halo of greenish light around the Up arrow button to the right of the doors was lit. There was no sign that the man was or had ever been there at all. She frowned, turning to survey the lobby, then went to the main doors and scanned the front lot for a van or truck with the elevator maintenance man’s logo on the side. There was nothing but the usual collection of tenant cars.

  She frowned, turning back to the lobby. There had been no follow-up of paperwork, no mention of the bill. There hadn’t even been enough time, by the maintenance man’s own estimation, for him to have finished the job. So why had he packed up and left?

  It occurred to her then—she didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it right away—that the man very likely hadn’t left. He was probably up on another floor. The second floor, maybe, where the majority of her inhabited apartments were.

  She crossed the lobby to the elevator and pushed the button. The upright triangle above the doors lit up. The muted hum of the cables lowering the elevator to her floor was punctuated by a cheery ding! as the doors slid open. The elevator was empty. With only a moment’s hesitation, she stepped in and the doors closed behind her. She had never been a fan of elevators, and for a second or two following, she felt an overwhelming rush of panic, as if she were being swallowed by some large, gleaming silver fish that would swim with her down into the black depths of the ocean to drown and digest her. The panic passed as quickly as it had come, as quickly as it took her stomach to bottom out and then right itself while the elevator lurched upward.

  The interior of the elevator was brightly lit, the mirrors polished and the steel panels beneath them reflecting the overhead light in strips and slashes. No eyeless men here, she thought, and a grim smile twisted her mouth a little. She found herself glancing at the mirrors anyway, just to be sure no one was reflected behind or beside her. To her relief, she was alone, and she chided herself for having been silly enough to think otherwise even for a moment. The possibility of some ghostly figure with gaping red eye sockets hovering just over her shoulder or close enough to her reflected self to reach out bone-sharp fingers to touch her—

  The elevator doors opened, and she hurried out. She did not look behind her.

  The hallway on the second floor was empty. Aside from a few muffled voices and the occasional bump or creak of unidentifiable movement from within the apartments, the hallway was quiet, too. She moved a little way down the hall, trying to be quiet for reasons her conscious mind could not quite access. It seemed important, though, not to get caught...well, prowling, she supposed. Spying on the tenants. It was important she use stealth so that this elevator man, intent on eluding her, could be snuck up upon, and his true purpose discovered.

  She paused. That thought sounded absurd even in her own head. It was a crazy thought, an alien, un-Livie thought. Keep it together, cupcake, she told herself, pinching off the headache starting in the bridge of her nose.

  Nothing indicated the maintenance man had come up here. She shook her head, little twitches of a tight neck, and made a frustrated clicking sound with her tongue. It was ridiculous, chasing a mystery maintenance man from floor to floor to ask him why he had called her cupcake. She’d already wasted more time than she should have. Something inside her had driven her to pursue the issue this far, but it was gone now. The man had left, the elevator obviously worked, and the bill would probably come in the mail.

  She turned back to the elevator.

  The doors now stood open, patient, inviting her back in.

  She frowned, looking around the empty hallway. She was sure no one had come up on the elevator behind her. She peered inside. It was empty. The doors remained open and silent, waiting.

  With a final glance around the empty hallway, she stepped inside the elevator and turned to push the first floor button. Just before the doors slid closed, she thought she saw something man-height flash by, a pale sickness-yellow blur of mottled skin rippling over inhuman musculature in jerking, rapid movements. She gasped, her heart thudding, and stabbed a ruby-red nail at the Open Doors button. The elevator whirred internally but the doors did not open, despite her repeated jabs.

  “Dammit,” she muttered. The elevator car began its descent with a pleasant little ding. The tight thumping in her chest spread to her stomach.

  When the elevator approached the first floor, she felt an overwhelming sense of dread anticipating what might be waiting for her in the lobby. She took several deep, measured breaths while she listened for the cables to brake. When the doors slid open, the relief at finding the elevator car secure on the first floor and the lobby empty drew a little cry from her lungs. She couldn’t get out of the elevator fast enough. As her shaking hand closed around the doorknob to her own apartment, she felt the sweaty heat that sheathed her, heard the silent thrumming of her heart in her ears and the raggedness of her breath.

  She opened the door to step through to safety, and fell into a hole in the earth.

  SIX

  Wayne cursed as the Internet connection went down for the sixth time that morning. Each time he lost access, the irrational semi-hypochondriac part of his mind offered it as proof from the universe that his self-diagnosis of early onset dementia was true. No other explanation could be obtained.

  He was sure he’d seen something—a mutilated girl, dead or almost dead—out on the lawns below his window. But just because his eyes had seen it and his brain was backing the image, that didn’t mean what he saw was real, or that what he saw was what he thought it was. That kind of uncertainty was never a good sign. He’d been working long hours picking mundane facts from a mire of particularly unpalatable horrors, and the contents of which were suggestive to even the strongest-willed mind, but still...hallucinations? He’d left a life of varied party substances behind twenty years ago. Hallucinations were no longer supposed to be part of the deal. Looking back over the last couple of years, he couldn’t imagine any event that might have catalyzed the deterioration of his mental state. However, the World Wide Web was not forthcoming in offering any counterargument to his insanity theory, either—even when it was accessible.

  The little hourglass turned over and over on his screen, his PC’s version of on-hold music. It connected to the Internet for a moment and promptly froze. He swore at it. Warner glanced at him from his lion stance on the windowsill and then went back to lazily watching birds.

  Wayne sighed. For a place so brand new it practically goddamn shined, nothing ever seemed to work. Cell reception was non-existent everywhere except for a six-inch square patch of carpet just to the left of Warner’s window. The power went out for random ten- to fifteen-minute intervals even on perfectly clear, sunny days. There were thumps and groans in the plumbing pipes. Occasionally he caught crossed cable signals on his television in the form of muttering voices and high-pitched singing over whatever was being broadcast, something he found to be even more prevalent on the higher-range empty channels, where static took a back seat to actual clear phrases and snippets of eerie pipe music.

  Once, he’d found a website where reviews of apartment buildings could be posted for those looking for a place to live; he’d been tempted to
post anonymously about the amenities never working right. He’d ultimately decided against it, though. It seemed premature, early enough in the building’s history to seem mean and self-serving rather than justified and helpful. He assumed many of the problems were due to the building being so recently built. He’d spent enough time in Corporate Cubicle America to know that anything new, from technology to business to people, had to be troubleshot sometimes, and ultimately had to work out a few kinks and flaws before functioning at full capacity.

  That didn’t make it less frustrating, however, when deadlines loomed—or when possible mental breakdown and the deterioration of his faculties of perception hung like low clouds around his brain, stratus anxieties whose details even now were blowing off, losing shape and substance.

  Wayne clicked on the red X between his network and the Internet and tried to repair whatever was wrong. The system spun its wheels a moment and then informed him that the connection could not be repaired. He sighed, glancing over at Warner curled up on his window sill.

  “Looks like we’re off the ’net again, buddy,” he said to the cat. Warner, who had given up bird watching in favor of curling up in a ray of morning sunlight on the windowsill, lifted his head, blinked sleepily, and twitched an ear indifferently.

  “Damn.” Wayne pushed away from the desk and rose. The chain bookstore down in town had free wireless; he’d have to email his article (and browse for mentions of something like the hobbled creature he’d seen the night before) from there.

  He glanced out the window over the cat’s back, but found he couldn’t look too long. He hadn’t been able to all day. He half-expected to find someone dragging stumps of legs across the grounds below, its jerking body inching closer to the front door, its stench of rotting skin still on the bone clinging to it like its shabby, darkly-stained clothes.

  There was a part of him that hoped if he did see it in the light of day, it would reveal itself to be harmless, an easily explained thing—a zombie-walk reenactor, maybe, or an early Halloween decoration. Or possibly, it had been a girl, hurt but not nearly in so severe a state as the shadows around her limbs suggested. Maybe Mrs. Sunderman had taken care of her, had taken her to the hospital or patched her up and sent her on her way. A second glance could prove what he had seen to be no more than a host of mundane, safe realities the night had perverted into horrors.

  A much bigger part of him didn’t want to see it at all, ever again. That part was sure the figure was exactly what he had perceived it to be, and seeing it again would prove he was crazy, especially if glimpsed during the day, when perception did not have the kid gloves of low visibility to handle the sharper facts.

  He glanced at the window again, nervous, only skimming the view for something out of place.

  There was, however, a third part of him that entertained another possibility. If the woman had been gravely injured out there on the lawn, and if she had been looking for help and was now missing, it was a story. The local papers wouldn’t print it if he made the Bridgewood Heads into bad guys or suggested their newly renovated patch of paradise was rife with violence once again. But there could be a story there. A ticket, perhaps, back onto a bigger paper, and in more than just a freelance capacity.

  He needed the security of a newspaper office job. Working without insurance benefits was like tightrope walking without a net, in his opinion, plus a regular journalism job would mean a regular paycheck. He’d steered away from the gory history and more hot-button sensationalist angles with the article on Bridgewood’s financial bang-ups because he needed to. Pissing off the Powers That Be who worked hard to bury the negativity surrounding his hilltop home would mean no publication, and worse, no paycheck. So he had slogged through a lot of false starts and frustrating slumps, but he was finished now, with a check and a publishing credit on the way (if he could get his connection to the Internet up and running long enough to email it to the editor). He was free to pursue other stories. More lucrative journalism, maybe.

  He crossed to the window to scratch Warner behind the ears (that was what he told himself, anyway), and casually looked out the window. Nothing on the grounds except one of the men from the landscaping company Mrs. Sunderman hired to mow the lawns. And the man wasn’t doing anything more horrific than sitting on the tailgate of the landscaping truck and unwrapping some kind of sandwich for his lunch.

  Wayne found himself well into wondering what that dirt-dusted little man would look like without benefit of hands and feet before he realized what he was doing and shook himself free from the thought.

  He turned back to his desk and packed up his laptop, the afterimage of the mutilated landscaper superimposed over his vision. Wayne had never had a stomach for blood and guts—he had, in fact, turned down a field reporting job once in the early nineties because of its proximity to gangland territory—but the picture in his head had no ill effect on his stomach that he noticed. Rather, it seemed grimly satisfying for underlying reasons that would not quite surface in the conscious part of his mind.

  Grabbing his keys from a hook by the front door, he and his laptop swung out into the hallway. Warner yawned and stretched, indifferent but not oblivious to the change in Wayne’s mood and routine, and went back to sleep.

  ***

  The expanding of the wound between worlds, pooling with its own viscous black liquid chaos from somewhere on the first floor, awoke Aggie from a mid-morning nap. It had been part dream, part voice, an idea as certain in her mind as her own name.

  She found herself in the rocking chair by the window, where she so often nowadays lost hours to frequent and sudden naps. Something felt wrong. It came to her as a dull ache in her legs and hands. Her chest felt like a fist closing tightly in on itself and her head felt light. More alarming than the physical aspects was the distinct sensation that she was drifting in a dark ocean and all around her, shadows as sharp as knives were slicing through the water, closing in. These apartments were supposed to be safe, but she was old and slow and she lived alone. If those shadows swam closer to her, grazing her with their sharpness....

  A sense of presence turned her head to the dark corner by the end table. A strange man stood across from her, staring not just with his mismatched eyes, but with the intensity of his whole mixed up face. She jumped, her hand fluttering to her chest. A flare of panic seared through her.

  It was hard to describe exactly what was wrong with him; the asymmetry of a blue eye and a brown one was surprising but not unpleasant. It was a character of wrongness in the combined other features of the face that made Aggie feel ill at ease. The crookedness of the mouth, the way one corner sagged just a little—that was part of it. It gave the impression of a half-cocked sneer. The nose was a shade disjointed, the protrusions of the cheek and brow bone just slightly out of proportion for the face. The chin was long, pointed, and hairless. The vaguely lopsided head was shaved, the ears small and sharp. None of the distortions of the man’s features individually were so pronounced as to suggest congenital deformity, but together, the effect chilled her blood and stole her breath.

  “Agatha,” the man said. The gravelly voice seemed awkward in his throat, the cadence suggesting words in general were out of place there.

  She opened her mouth to say something, but could find nothing to say. She swallowed what felt like a dry lump of paper.

  The man’s head gave a spastic twitch and then tilted as if in curiosity. He reached a hand toward her and she flinched. The hand hovered there a moment, the long fingers undulating in a kind of wave.

  “Agatha,” he said again. He took a lurching step toward her, widening that crooked grin to show teeth tinged with red. She pulled in on herself. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to move fast enough to outrun him but her gaze trailed to the front door nonetheless.

  When she glanced back at him, he had closed half the distance between them. His legs were long but seemed attached to his hips with an uneven, almost painful rigidity. That he could move so fast even with
such jerking motions only confirmed her certainty that she’d never make it to the door before he was upon her, that off-kilter face taking her in, those unnaturally long fingers digging into her clothing, pressing into her flesh.

  “What do you want?” she whispered.

  “I want to taste the candy pictures behind your eyes. Your skin smells like light and dark and it intrigues me.”

  She frowned. There was an underlying sinister suggestion to what he said, but the words themselves made no sense. “I don’t understand.”

  “I want to experience your mind,” the man said. She wasn’t sure if he was explaining, or continuing in rattling off a wish list. “I want to be the voices in your head and the shadow from the corner of your eye. I want to spike your folly and read the sheets.”

  She shook her head, her arms rising protectively to her chest. “Stop it. Leave me alone. I’m an old woman. I have nothing you—”