Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  The teenage boy behind the counter, dressed in the L’il Ol’ Baker’s Pantry uniform of puny chef’s cap and large white apron, murmured, “You get all kinds in this neighborhood,” but the nice middle-aged lady pretended that Mattie was invisible. Joke’s on you, lady! I know I ain’t invisible without the trash bags over my face! You just trying to fool old Mattie, and you just don’t go around foolin’ no mambos!

  “Hey!” The boy behind the counter yelped like a dog whose tail has been stepped on. He reached across and slapped Mattie’s hand—she was helping herself to the free sampling of pastries on the white paper doilies.

  “Ain’t these free?” Mattie growled; she hadn’t even bothered to look up at him.

  “Not for you,” he said.

  This didn’t seem unfair to Mattie. She was accustomed to this kind of treatment. She refrained from laying a curse on the boy. She stared at the sliced bear claw and the neat square cuts of a cherry Danish that remained on the doily. “Ain’t for me, for my little girl.”

  The nice middle-aged woman pretended to be having trouble deciding if the raspberry-filled doughnuts were right, or if those coconut-covered ones were more suitable for the breakfast she had in mind. Her nose wrinkled slightly like a ripple across a pond.

  She smells me. Mattie grinned.

  Mattie knew how to make the boy give her the pastry samples.

  She reached across the counter, her fingers grazing every crumb on the doily.

  It was the Magic Touch that she possessed.

  And the Magic Touch worked.

  The teenager said, “Take all of them and get out of here—no one’s going to want them now that your fat old hands got all over them.”

  Out on the street again, Mattie wrapped the pastries carefully in a newspaper and tucked it into her grocery cart; she found a safe space for it down beneath the empty cans she’d found behind the store, and her usual collection of blankets, newspapers, and bottles. The weather suited Mattie: the skies hung low like a sagging cushion—she felt she could reach up and touch them (she tried to, to push the stuffing of the clouds back up into the lining of sky)—and the humidity was itchy. The temperature matched the soaring fever in her soul, the sun was approaching midday, and the time was right to feed the dead.

  I brung this for you, my baby. Mattie’s words spun through the gallery of her head, although all that jumped out from between her lips was a bleating “My baby.” I done promised to keep him outta this world, and he ain’t gonna come back. He ain’t gonna use your little baby to come back, my baby.

  She pushed her cart down along Connecticut Avenue; the streets were desolate of pedestrians—a few people late for work, or an occasional bum hanging out on the stoop of Steve’s Ice Cream, but the heat had sent lingerers inside buildings and shops. Mattie felt the plastic from the trash bags tickle her cheek. The wheels of the cart squealed as she pushed it over the cracks in the sidewalk, negotiating the turn to the right around the DuPont Circle Metro entrance. The wind from the trains came up from the long downward fall of escalators, and she waited, tasting the wind for Baron Samedi—but he was not that strong. He had no power in this world. He ruled the dead. He could only breathe himself into those who were close to death. He had no life. I don’t fear no dead man. She passed over the entrance, feeling that innocent train wind pass by her. Then at P Street, she turned right again.

  I feed you, my baby, because I need your spirit strong to help your mama, I need your spirit strong. He’s coming back again—they tried those girls, but none worked, but this one work because this one repayment, this one give for services due. He’s tired, he’s weary, but he sees his chance to come through, and he’s going to turn it inside out.

  The sidewalks were hard on her: the grocery cart felt heavy, and she had to pivot and lift up on the wheels each time she went from the sidewalk to the street to the sidewalk crossing Twentieth, Twenty-first, Twenty-second Street, until she came to a wide green park. There were even sunbathers down along the grass near the picnic tables—just a few people in bathing suits, looking silly with the traffic speeding along Rock Creek Parkway just across the thin creek. When Mattie saw them she pointed and laughed.

  But the laugh turned into a bleating cry as she remembered her duty. She set the cart parallel to the dirt path that led through the sparse bushes and trees to the right of the park, almost beneath the stone bridge of P Street as it ran over the Parkway into Georgetown. Mattie reached down beneath the can for the pastries. She walked down the path, into the woods.

  She searched the area, trying to remember the spot—the summer with its hungry branches and thick green tresses of grass covering up the spot—everything was overgrown. Mattie slipped on a ridge along the path and came thudding down hard on her ass, pebbles scurrying towards the creek. The pastries wrapped in the paper bag leapt out from where she had been cradling them in the crook of her elbow, and scattered beside her. Methodically, she picked up the crumbs and the bits of bear claw one by one—placing them in the bag again. She looked down towards the cold running stream with the ragged grass growing along its banks, and beyond it, the deep purple of the road, the cars whizzing by.

  Mattie prayed that she would find direction. She prayed for the place to be revealed.

  The place where she’d buried her daughter.

  She hunted with her fingers, crawling through the dry rough grass that scratched her like sandpaper—her fingers never let her down, not the way her eyes and her mind did. Mattie’s Magic Touch still worked, and if she wiggled her fingers through the grass, it would begin talking to her, whisper the secret as to where the grave was. She sliced her finger across a shard of glass thrust upward in the dirt and cried out—but she was close, the glass seemed to sing to her, oh, she was close!

  And then she found it.

  Marked by a broken pitcher she had buried there in the earth. As she sat back to look at the grave she realized how obvious it would be if someone looked at the pattern of the grass: it had grown in a wavy pattern around the body of her daughter.

  Nadine, she prayed, for your strength. Help me, my baby, help me. Stop him, stop him. He can’t be comin’ through. Help, my baby. But the words that leapt from her mouth were: “Help her. ”

  As if to answer her prayer, a tremendous droning hum seemed to swoop up from under the P Street Bridge, a noise that grew like cicadas on a summer’s evening—only it wasn’t yet evening and these weren’t cicadas.

  Wasps. The gray, tattered nest was thrust into the crotch of the bridge’s underside; it shook as if by a breeze.

  It was alive with hundreds of them.

  Mattie knew what she must do, she must send a warning, the wasps must carry her warning.

  Mattie Peru pressed her face close to the earth, gently scraping her lips against the singing grass above her daughter’s grave.

  2.

  The sign on Roxanne Hastings’ desk read: Receptionist, but everyone knew she had run the law offices of Adair, Long, Wilmot and Sanford almost single-handedly for the past thirty years. She prided herself on being a tough customer, a hard woman, someone who didn’t put up with any guff, nonsense, or shenanigans. She could tell a wisenheimer as soon as he stepped off the elevator, and she could fix the company Xerox machine faster than anybody with just a kick of her heel. Roxanne had spent most of her adult life remaining unruffled by the scum bags who trekked to the sixth-floor suites—they were rich and sometimes famous, but scum bags nonetheless. The lawyers themselves—rude, overgrown babies who were quickly becoming old men—self-indulgent and so darn wealthy (Roxanne disliked strong language the way she disliked strong perfume) that they seemed to think they could buy anyone and everyone in their paths. And for thirty years she had been as sweet and hard as candy to them, had taken their messages, arranged their conferences and board meetings, their Christmas parties, even their trysts.

  But in her thirty years with the law firm, she’d never witnessed what came off the elevator on a lazy Friday afterno
on in July.

  Roxanne Hastings screamed, “Holy shit!”

  She had never used that sort of language before in her life.

  It might as well have been a giant sewer rat that had come up through the vents.

  Make that a giant sewer rat with its guts dangling out.

  But Roxanne could deal with rats.

  But what got off the elevator Friday afternoon and stepped across the pale blue plush carpet— looked like the contents of a dumpster had come to life.

  A large bag woman whose smell preceded her stood in the hall between the four elevator doors.

  The smell was one with which Roxanne Hastings was well familiar: the smell of executive washroom stall number three which was always backing up. Roxanne knew about stall number three because one of the summer clerks had bet her that she wouldn’t go into the men’s room and check it out, and Roxanne was a sucker for a sure thing. And this thing, in her dark, rippling plastic bags and oversized, open-toed hiking boots, her partially covered face huge , round pop-eyes, crying out, “Holy shit!” also as if the sight of Roxanne Hastings was enough to scare her, too.

  “You—you can’t be here,” Roxanne gasped, pushing herself back from her desk, standing.

  Vail Foster, a junior partner, was coming out of the Xerox room, a stack of papers under his arms. He shot a glance towards the creature (smelled her first, his nose wrinkling, he was wondering who farted); then he winked at Roxanne as he passed her desk. “One of Sanford’s pro bono’s no doubt.”

  “You’re on the wrong floor, lady,” Roxanne said. She was regaining some authority. This was her office after all, and anyone who stepped off those elevators was trespassing on her territory.

  The homeless woman’s mouth opened wider.

  “I’m gonna have to call somebody if you don’t get out of here.” Roxanne was now in full blossom— no crazy bag lady was gonna stink up her life.

  The bag woman’s mouth clamped shut. Her eyes crinkled into small silverfish, almost paper cuts of eyes, all white, and then they popped open again. “Here to see Mr. Big Man,” she snarled, her upper lip curling back to her flaring nostrils, causing a ripple of tension across her round face that continued uninterrupted along the Hefty trash bags.

  Before Roxanne Hastings could tell her again to leave—simultaneously reaching for the phone to dial the number for security—the woman brought her arms into view. They’d been hidden beneath the folds of the torn, flapping bags. They were thick, flabby arms, and in her twisting, swollen fingers she brought out something. Something which Roxanne thought at first was a bomb and that thought -- after all the bomb scares the office building had sustained over the past twenty year -- now, today, this Friday in July, it was for real.

  But then Roxanne heard the noise, saw the tiny particles floating out from the gray papery object.

  Wasps.

  This crazy woman was holding a wasp’s nest in her hands.

  The woman held the nest up and shook it madly, the way you’d shake a snow globe to watch the tiny specks of plastic white snow fall down across a winter scene. But this snow, angry, buzzing, murmuring, flew in all directions, several towards Roxanne Hastings’ desk, which is the reason she ran screaming back to the private offices of the senior partners of the law firm of Adair, Long, Wilmot and Sanford.

  3.

  Mr. Big Man! You come outta your office, you come out from behind your fat desk, and you see your children flying and singing, looking for you, they want to claim you, Mr. Big Man, they’re gonna find you, too, and then you’ll know you got to do something, something to stop the house from screaming, got to stop the babies from crying! You got to stop the Baron from raising the knife! You got to stop the monsters from breeding!

  4.

  Winston Adair felt like he was sinking into the back of the plush leather chair. His office was dark, the only light stealing in like a coward from beneath the door and between the slats of the Venetian blinds.

  “I am a monster,” he said to no one.

  Beyond his door there was the clacking of his secretary’s typewriter and a low murmur as if of whispering just on the other side of the door.

  The headache he was having made his vision blur, and sometimes when they came on suddenly like this he hallucinated voices. When he heard the woman scream down the hall, when he heard a woman yelling some indecipherable word, when he heard the commotion of office doors opening and closing, he knew there was something.

  He had stood at the window of his office, the blinds up, the afternoon light flooding in, not ten minutes before. He had no headache then. He was thinking about a case the firm was handling, thinking about a prostitute he was afraid he may have killed, thinking about what he would have for dinner, where he would go, who he would invite out with him.

  Then he saw her.

  Madeleine Perreau.

  Crossing K Street, narrowly avoiding being hit as she crossed against the light. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t seen her in over twenty years, and it didn’t matter that he could barely see her through all the trash bags she wore.

  It was her.

  Not the Madeleine Perreau he’d remembered, not the woman with the smooth young skin and broad accommodating hips, the tantalizing walk, but the Madeleine he’d created: a grotesque sculpture, the Madeleine he thought he had buried in his memory of that night.

  Thought they had buried that night.

  All these years I thought she was dead. I thought… after what she’d done I thought she would’ve died.

  I thought the housekeeper would’ve killed her.

  The woman below on the street had walked up to the entrance to his building. Had gone inside.

  Winston Adair felt a sudden throbbing in his temple; his stomach lurched and he tasted his lunch (pastrami on rye and two dill pickles) in the back of his throat; his knees trembled, and a muscle just to the right of his right eye began twitching.

  The throbbing under the skin of his face seemed to explode, and he turned off the light in his office, closed the blinds.

  He didn’t notice the wasp that had crawled beneath the door of his office until it stung him on the back of the hand and he screamed just as Roxanne Hastings had done.

  5.

  Mattie Peru’s fingers were numb, but fingers were nothing special. You had ten of them, anyway. Mattie licked each finger as she rode the elevator back down to the lobby of the building. She pressed her back against the coolness of the full-length mirror—the elevator was full of mirrors—and looked at her reflection for the first time in twenty years.

  She saw nothing reflected there, because her trash bags of invisibility covered her.

  He’ll know it. he’ll know it was me. He thinks he sits in his office all safe and sound. He don’t have to see Mattie, he don’t have to think nothing about Nadine, he don’t have to think about my baby and my baby’s baby, but he’ll know it when he sees them bugs.

  She took inventory on herself, glancing beneath her trash bags: ten fingers, ten toes, two tits and all of ‘em numb and scratchy from where the bugs took a bite or two or three or four. “Ain’t gonna breed no monsters!” she shouted uncontrollably as the elevator doors parted in the lobby.

  A bewildered group of men in dark suits, coming back from late lunches, stood back as Mattie Peru invisibly stepped out of the elevator.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  PLAYING HOUSE, II

  1.

  When Rachel Adair was not in her office, she came up with ways of staying away from the house when Hugh was around working on it—she and Hugh still had the occasional laugh, still began speaking at the same time saying the same thing, still had tender embraces when the day had been long and frustrating, but these were all becoming few and far between. There are times to be close and times to be distant, and this was one of those times to be a little distant, to let Hugh work out his troubles on his own. Rachel was afraid that if she were to sit down with Hugh and plan out his future, he would blame all his troubl
es on her. She did not intend to be used for an emotional punching bag, and didn’t want to begin disliking Hugh.

  “Well, I almost broke my sacred vow.” Rachel was jogging with Sassy Parker on the bike path that ran alongside the Potomac River, with the Kennedy Center just across the parkway. The river smelled of dead fish, and the carbon monoxide from the traffic on the road to their right was equally as nauseating. Rachel sometimes wondered if jogging near heavy morning traffic was as bad for her lungs as her old cigarette habit.

  “You running around on Hugh?” Sassy was her usual knock-out self in just an old T-shirt and baggy shorts. She wasn’t even sweating half as much as Rachel. They jogged to Rachel’s pace, which was very slow, almost a walk.

  “Really, I don’t have time to run around on Hugh.”

  “But you’ve got time to run around.”

  “No—I meant the vow about smoking. Hugh fell apart on me last Sunday and I ended up having the cigarette dream.” Rachel’s breathing was ragged and she had to slow down even further, until finally she was walking. “You know, the one where the cigarette is just begging you to suck it?”

  Sassy gave her a nasty glance, but also began walking.

  “Like a teenager horny for sex—you are a wicked girl, Retch. I never deny myself—in fact, I want to light up right now.” Sassy withdrew something small, slender, and white from the pocket of her shorts. A cigarette. “I have another one in my pocket if you break down.” Sassy brought a book of matches out. She paused, leaning against the railing of the walkway, and lit the cigarette. Sassy took a long fat drag, blowing the smoke over the Potomac River.