As he lay on the bed, his own shades drawn, he thought about the other messages in the curtains. He’d gone back just before dark that night once the parking lot had cleared of milling tenants to check the curtains. He had to be sure he wasn’t just imagining things.
He wasn’t. The colors of the threads, their placement, the fractal order in the chaos of their 3-dimensional patterns, formed ideas in his mind. He could read them, the literal and the layered meanings. Some of the suggestions were...intense. Some were criminal. Some were horrific. And yet, as he stood there gazing up, studying the patterns, reading the truths tucked inside ideas, none of them seemed impossible to carry out. Not for her.
Larson had never been a stickler for rules, exactly, but he had always been a basically clean cop. His methods were, in his mind, outside the box, but they got results. He was good at what he did. The only time he had ever crossed any lines legally, and then, not so much in his opinion as in the opinions of his superiors, was with Julia. But out here in these apartments, he wasn’t a cop. He was only lovesick Jack Larson of 2J, trying to rebuild his life and find that little glimmer of happiness with a woman that so many times was given and then taken away.
And if mutilating a hand was step one in that direction, so be it. Even some of a hand could still deliver the thrill of touching her body.
He got up slowly, his body creaking. There was no time like the present, but he’d have to prepare first. He was not as young as he used to be, and it would do no good for him to bleed out. He moved down the hall to the kitchen and stood over the knife block, considering which knife would be best for the work. After a few moments, he chose a non-serrated butcher knife whose blade, thanks to his adventures in take-out, was still very sharp. He let it clatter to the counter and went to the liquor cabinet for a new bottle of whiskey. His hand closed around the neck of a Jim Beam Devil’s Cut 90 proof bottle he’d been saving for a special occasion and he pulled it out.
Forgoing the glass, he twisted off the cap and took a swig right from the bottle, then settled down in one of the kitchen chairs set up next to a folding card table where he ate. Just about half the bottle should do it—not too drunk to see what he had to cut, and not too sober to feel the bulk of the pain. Realizing he’d forgotten something, he got up again, took another swig, then rifled through his kitchen drawers until he found Ziploc bags. He considered using one, thought better of it, and kept looking. In one of the cabinets, he found a large box of long matches, the kind where the box slides out like a drawer. He dumped the remaining matches onto the shelf and measured the length of the box against the side of his hand. It would fit, with a little squishing. He also found duct tape, which he thought might come in handy. He brought the empty box and the tape back to the table, sat, and took another swig of whiskey.
When the bottle was a little more than half empty (or a little less than half full, he thought with a dull grin), he got up again to get the knife. By then, he felt light and kind of tingly all over, and though he expected it to hurt, he didn’t think it would be unbearable. Reaching into a cabinet below and to the right of the sink, he got out a cutting board. Then he laid everything out on the table.
A towel. He ought to have a towel for the floor, and maybe another for...after. He went and got a bath towel and a hand towel, spreading the former out on the floor beneath the table and the latter alongside the cutting board.
As methodically as the whiskey would allow, he taped the cutting board firmly to the little card table. Then, he taped his left hand by the wrist just as carefully to the cutting board. He took one more swig of whiskey (for luck, he told himself), and picked up the knife. He angled the point between his middle and ring finger, then brought the blade down on an angle toward his wrist.
Blood immediately spritzed up into his face and sprayed across the cutting board. The pain was immense, even through the haze of alcohol, and his wrist jerked against the tape as if he could pull himself away from the feeling. His vision swam before him and he had a terrible notion that he might just pass out, collapsing to a heap on the floor with his arm still taped above his head to the table. He took several long breaths, trying to right the world again, and when he could see, albeit somewhat more soberly than before, he picked up the knife again. He glanced at the bottle near the towel, considering another swig or just forgetting the whole thing, wrapping up his hand and passing out in front of the TV, but dismissed it.
He studied his hand a moment, tracing the welling blood line and the angry pink skin around the cut. He’d broken the skin and cut through part of the tendon in his ring finger, but hadn’t cut through all the way. It might take two or even three more tries to take off those two fingers and that end chunk of hand.
Larson positioned the knife blade to match the blood line, looking to cut the same place. He didn’t want it to be a hack-and-saw job if it didn’t have to be.
He closed his eyes, opened them, and sucked in a breath to hold through the pain. Then he brought the knife down again.
His vision burst into sparks of light but cleared itself quicker than he expected. The pain became a throb, and blood that had been collecting under his palm now spilled off the edge of the table and pelted the towel below.
Without giving it too much more thought, he brought the knife down and sawed a little. The sensation was a hot silver pain that ran across the back of his hand, his wrist, and up his arm all the way to his armpit. Surprisingly, the tape held against his body’s natural reaction to flinch, and he enjoyed a modicum of pride in his forethought. He didn’t think he would have gotten this far with a free-flinching hand.
The knife blade, now sticky with blood and bits of white despite its smooth, non-serrated edge, rose and fell again. He was almost there, could feel when he hit the inner layers of his palm’s skin. It was a weird sensation that overlapped the pain. One more....
The fifth and final time, both his ring and pinkie fingers, as well as a slant of flesh, came away from the rest of his hand. It leaned wet and glistening on its side on the cutting board. Immediately, Larson cut away the tape and brought his mutilated hand and the bottle of whiskey over to the sink. He poured some of the alcohol over the wound and the burn set off every pain sensor in the area with blazing sparks of agony. He took another swig as a reward for accomplishing his goal, then moved quickly to the table to wrap up his hand. He laced it tightly, binding it with more duct tape until he looked like he was wearing a puffy silver mitt. Then, with his good hand, he brought the piece of himself he’d cut off over to the sink, rinsed it off with water, and dried it with a paper towel. He then wrapped it in more paper towels and tucked it into the match box. It fit better than he’d expected.
He used the bath towel to wipe most of the blood off the table, the chair, the cutting board, and his face. After freeing the cutting board from its tape bonds, he dropped it and the knife into the sink, and the wadded-up tape into the garbage.
Finally, he sat to finish off the bottle of whiskey. As he took the last few swigs, he stared at the box, willing his hand to stop pounding out blood and pain.
She’d see the sacrifice he’d made. She’d know his heart. She’d have to know.
When the bottle was empty, he pulled the match box to himself, holding it in his good hand. Seeing the stains forming on the sides and bottom of the cardboard, he reconsidered the Ziploc bags after all. Before he left the apartment, he slid the box into a quart-sized plastic bag and did his best to seal it with his one good hand.
Then he brought it out into the hall. A woman’s seductive laughter, echoing from behind a door, caused an instant flare of jealous rage to heat his chest, neck, and face. If she had another man over, after what he’d done for her....
He realized, though, as he listened, that it was from a television in a different apartment. Not 2C. No, 2C was perfectly silent, perfectly dark.
He crossed the hallway to her door, as nervous as a young boy bringing flowers to his first crush.
She’d s
ee. She’d have to see.
He knocked once, fully expecting her not to be home, but half-hoping she was. There were no sounds of movement from the far side of the door, and after several seconds of staring at the unmoving 2C plaque affixed slightly above eye level, he put the first token of his love, boxed and bagged and leaking just a little pinkness against the plastic, on the floor by the door. He turned, willing himself not to look, not to keep checking every five minutes to see if she was home and had picked up his present. By the time he made it to his couch, he was convinced he’d be helpless not to check. He surprised himself, though, by passing out soundly into a depth of pain-addled, alcohol-blurred darkness.
TEN
The thing in the tub that suggested terrible things to Myrinda yanked her out of sleep, leaving her heart thudding in her chest, an icy-hot off-kilter sensation tingling in her extremities. Derek, sleeping beside her, awoke at her sudden bolting out of bed. The room was still dark. The digital alarm clock on the night table looked, at first glance, to read 3:78, then reformed itself properly to 3:13 a.m.
“Babygirl?” His eyelids were half closed. “What happened? Are you okay?”
She took several deep breaths before she could manage words. “I—I’m okay. Just a bad dream. A nightmare. It was awful.” She crawled back into bed and snuggled back against Derek’s chest. He put his arm around her, and immediately she felt safer.
“Want to talk about it?”
She thought about that; she could tell from the looks he’d been giving her ever since Aggie’s death that he knew something was off with her.
“No...not now. Maybe in the morning. Go back to sleep, baby. I’m okay, really.”
He mumbled something, already half-asleep again anyway, and in a few minutes, the sound of his breathing slowed.
Myrinda, on the other hand, lay wide awake in the darkness. She trusted him completely; she’d wanted to tell him what was wrong with her. She didn’t really know what it was herself yet, though. She could feel herself changing from the inside, could feel tumorous thoughts growing like pearls around specks of dust in her mind. It was like Aggie had said in the basement: “Their lunacy pollutes. It gets in the air we
breathe, the water we drink and bathe in and wash our hair in and wash our clothes with and brew tea with...everywhere, everywhere. It gets inside, that other alien place, and the alien things that breathe and writhe and slither through. It poisons us. It sickens us. And the sickness is contagious.”
Aggie had said there was a wound in the ground, and if she were to put her hand in it, she’d be able to touch an alien world. She implied some kind of creatures had come through from that wound, bringing a kind of poison with them that would infect everyone exposed to it. Of course the whole idea sounded crazy...but so many things, real things, had been happening that she’d have otherwise discounted as crazy, too, if she hadn’t experienced them herself. If Myrinda was going crazy (and she was not completely oblivious to that notion, either), it had been before Aggie’s dementia could set her own wheels spinning. There had been those fingers in the vent. The whispers of her name she kept hearing when Derek was out. She wanted to believe things would right themselves again when she and Derek both started their new jobs in a week or so, but the incident in the basement with Aggie seemed to suggest otherwise. The old woman had sounded so sure about what she was saying. That she might have been in the throes of some dementia couldn’t explain what Myrinda had watched happen to the old woman’s body. And if her falling apart like that was real, then maybe what Aggie had been saying was real, too.
And how was she supposed to explain all that to Derek?
The more she thought about it, the more the dream upset her. In a way, it consolidated all the weird things that had been happening into a single, horrible experience. In it, she’d gotten up to go to the bathroom. She needed air, needed cool water to calm her and help her think. She remembered checking the clock, and it had read some impossible time (like 3:78) that digital clocks, unless they were broken, would never form. The time had made sense to her, though, the way dream-logic offers its skewed rationality to the strangest dream experiences to keep cohesion. The time was an association with the Old Ward, a frightening indication of something imminent, and although she wasn’t sure even in the dream exactly what that something was, she knew it had to do with the chasm beneath the apartments, gaping open like an untended wound, and the near-hysteric excitement of the other ones, those in the Old Ward.
She’d gone to the bathroom and flipped on the light, bathing everything in dazzling brightness it took her eyes a few seconds to adjust to. Then she’d glanced up at the vanity mirror hanging above the gleaming sink.
In the dream, she’d seen a face behind hers. She’d whirled around to find a figure standing in the tub. It appeared sexless, motionless, even lifeless. It held long black tangles of hair clenched in its hands and bald patches, marred by cuts and scrapes, showed through the sparse stringy locks on its head. Very pale skin stretched tightly to the point of splitting across the sharp bones of the emaciated frame. It wore a torn gray sweatshirt and sweatpants, smeared with long brown stains. Myrinda took all this in and though her stomach twisted, she felt pressed against the sink by some heavy weight.
It had looked up at her. Where its eyes should have been were tiny inkstorms waxing and waning, shifting with their own internal tide. It was not a person, nor had it ever been.
It opened its mouth and like a fault line, its face split vertically, halving the chin, bisecting the nose and forehead. The gaping lipless maw revealed hundreds of tiny, sharp teeth. From the original mouth, new tears ripped the flesh of its cheeks nearly to the ears. The two halves of jaw unhinged and fell with a wet plop to the chest of the sweatshirt. Blood and something thinner and blacker poured over the lolling tongue, carrying the bottom teeth, its human teeth, away in a murky tide.
Myrinda screamed for Derek, but the weight pressing her to the sink stole the force behind it so that it came out as a rasp. She tried again, but couldn’t draw in enough air to give it volume.
The mess that was the head twitched, the dangling pieces splattering fluid against the shower tiles. The figure took hold of the curtain with exceedingly long fingers, and it stepped over the edge of the tub. With a sharp crack, the knees caved in until the legs bent backward.
It spoke to her without words. It showed her images of her carving her own intestines out with a spoon from a gash in her abdomen. It showed her flowers in a field. It showed her peeling the skin off the muscle of Derek’s thighs while he lay strapped to a gurney, screaming. It showed her a child’s doll. A digital clock blinking 3:78 over and over and over. Aggie Roesler being pulled to chunks by disembodied fingers. Small children bursting open like blood-filled water balloons. Apple pie.
Finally it showed her the Old Ward, and she understood it wanted her to go there, to find a book and read it, to open more unhealing wounds in the ground. It made her see, so they could move freely from one place to the next, locking bloody hands and dancing and while their high-pitched screams of laughter pierced the night skies of many, many worlds. It promised her peace. It celebrated her uniqueness. It offered acceptance and comfort and showed her violence over which she could have total control.
Myrinda took it all in, mesmerized, neither terrified nor elated, but a terrible blending of both.
Then the thing gave its hands a good, hard shake and all its fingers fell to the floor. Its hands kept shaking, and more fingers kept falling until the bathroom floor looked like it was writhing with long, jointed maggots. Immediately the fingers turned themselves over so they could worm-crawl toward her. She screamed again, soundless, and kicked out at them with her bare feet, mashing some beneath her heel and launching others to crunch against the wall. There were just too many, though; they crawled over each other in their frenzy to reach her, snaking over her toes and ankles, clinging somehow to her pajama pants and working their way up her body. She batted at them, still unable
to break free of the sink, her legs spasming in terror and her horror mounting as they crawled over her stomach, inched over her breasts, worked their way beneath her clothes. She felt them tugging on her hair, plugging her ears, and finally, working open her mouth so they could swarm down her throat. She gagged, choking on the rancid, rotting taste of them, the smell of them like skin left too long under a bandage. Her eyes watered and her vision swam in little kaleidoscopes of light. In the dream, she felt herself getting light-headed as they cut off her air. She clawed at her chest and throat. She could feel them inside her, burrowing down, down into her, and she couldn’t scream, couldn’t run.
She gave it one last effort to break into the hallway...and she woke up, tumbling out of her bed.
Now, as Derek breathed softly beside her, the feel of those fingers all over her made her gag. She wanted to run to the bathroom and throw up, but she was scared of what might be in there, waiting. Instead, she took several deep breaths, willing the gorge in her throat to sink again, willing the knot of revulsion in her stomach to untie itself.
As the night wore on, she found herself checking the clock periodically until the hour of three had passed. She thought if she looked and saw 3:78 on the clock, she might scream. At 4:11, she finally relaxed some of the tension in her shoulders.
That thing in the tub…. It had on a different face, but it was one of the things Aggie told her about. She was sure of it. She knew it like she knew her body—and Derek’s, too. She didn’t know about the rest, but there was no doubt in her mind that creatures born of and fed on madness had come through the wound. They were infecting her and maybe others in the building.
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