Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  “Okay, Retch, you win. Everything’s going to be okay. It all comes out in the wash.”

  “Fuck you. Everything I’m hearing today is such complete bullshit.”

  But Sassy had hung up before Rachel had the “fuck you” out of her mouth. God, Mrs. Adair, you’ve got the maturity of a two year old—what kind of mother are you going to make?

  She redialed Sassy’s number. It rang nine times. “Pick up the phone, pick up the phone, pick up the phone,” Rachel chanted under her breath. She sighed with frustration, hanging up.

  She recycled the quarter into the phone slot, trying to remember Ted’s number ( last digits 46 or 48, well, here goes nothing), then dialed it.

  “‘Lo?” The voice was so much like Hugh’s that Rachel almost thought she’d misdialed and gotten her own home.

  “Ted? This is Rachel.”

  “Rach—where are you? I hear strange noises.”

  “Traffic. I’m out and about. Is this a bad time to call?”

  “As good as any. What’s up?”

  “Well, we’re finally throwing that housewarming party this weekend. I was wondering—I know it’s just tomorrow night—but if you—I’d like you to come.”

  “Why do I get the feeling that my better half isn’t in on this?”

  “Oh, Ted, please come.” She didn’t mean to, but somehow the sadness she was feeling inside slipped out in her voice. Sadness and desperation.

  “I don’t know if I should, but not for the reason you’re probably thinking. The Old Man’s told me some weird stuff about your house.”

  Was he joking? She couldn’t tell. His voice was slightly jittery.

  “Oh, not you, too, Ted. I’ve gotten a dose of that—ghosts and goblins and bumps in the night.”

  “Something along those lines. You all right? You sound…”

  “Just a little winded. Been jogging.” God , you’re a terrific liar. Scout. “The party’s seven-thirtyish. Saturday. You’ll come? Please?”

  “I shouldn’t.”

  “Because of Hugh.”

  “One reason among many.”

  “Tell you what: don’t make up your mind this instant. I’m inviting you last minute, so, well, you can decide to come last minute, too.”

  “Oh. Well. Listen, I better go. I’ve been sort of caring for the Old Man, and I think I hear him breaking things in the bathroom.”

  “He’s there? Is something wr—Is he all right?”

  “Well as can be expected. But we’ll talk.”

  “Saturday night?”

  “I ain’t sayin’ yes, and I ain’t sayin’ no, I’m just sayin’ maybe. Take care,” he said, hanging up the phone.

  Walking back home, drained of emotion, wondering what she would say to Hugh when she went to bed (hoping he was asleep), Rachel made a mental list:

  People I have alienated from my life by age 28:

  1) My husband

  2) My best friend

  3) Probably the lady downstairs for killing her cat

  Oh, daddy, you’d know what to tell me, you always had good advice, you could put things right.

  Something twisted in her gut, like a case of diarrhea coming on. She hurried up Connecticut Avenue; as she went she told the sphere that must be growing inside her that everything was going to come out in the wash.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE OLD MAN TAKES A SHOWER

  When he hung up the phone, Ted hurried down the hall to the bathroom where he’d heard the smashing of glass. The bathroom door was locked; he pounded on it. “Open the door—pop? Open the damn door!”

  “Give me five minutes, son.”

  “What’s all that noise?”

  “Accident. Just a little accident.”

  The sound of glass crunching underfoot.

  Ted could hear his own heartbeat.

  Through the door, his father said, “Just a few minutes, son, it’s all I need.”

  “Open this door before I break it down.”

  “Do what you will, boy, do what you will.”

  Then a moan of pain.

  Ted shook his head. “Jeez, pop.” He brought a dime out of his pocket and fit it into the keyhole and twisted—the doors were cheap in this condo. When he heard the click of the lock, Ted turned the knob, swinging the door wide.

  The first thing he saw was the broken mirror. It looked like it had been punched in the center, sending rays of broken glass outward. Four shards were missing. On the floor were three of them, slightly chipped. Bloody footsteps led Ted to the shower, its curtain drawn.

  Ted held his breath as he went over. No, pop, don’t have done this, don’t have gone and sliced yourself open.

  He pulled the shower curtain over all the way back, tearing it from the rod.

  His father was hunkered down in the shower. His hands were cut and bleeding. He held a fat slice of broken mirror between the fingers of both hands. It was triangular, he was pressing one end of it against his throat.

  Winston Adair looked up at his son and said, “Just a few minutes and I’ll be done. Then you’ll believe me, boy, then you’ll see it’s true.”

  But he was not slicing into his throat. He sat there immobile, the sharp mirror fragment beneath his chin. Ted squatted down beside him, reaching over. This kind of thing was becoming a normal occurrence—although the Old Man was getting more creative with the instruments. He’d gone from a kitchen knife to a screwdriver to a pair of scissors, and now mirrors. “Jesus, pop.” Ted grasped his father’s hand between his. “Drop it! Drop it!”

  The Old Man’s hand opened, silver glass clattering against tile. He looked up at Ted, his eyes staring dully, his face devoid of expression. “I wouldn’t have done it, boy, I wouldn’t have done it. I’m as scared of what comes after life right now as I am of life itself. I wouldn’t have done it.”

  “I know, pop.”

  Sometimes I just wish you would go ahead and do it. Like a cat cleaning itself, Winston Adair began licking the blood from his fingers, rubbing his damp hands across his face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  BEFORE THE PARTY

  Rachel felt like she’d never even gone to sleep. But the party, good Lord the party’s tonight—it came to her like that when she awoke in the morning. Just lying there on the sofa staring at the ceiling, a ceiling she had memorized through the night. When Hugh had made his grand announcement she’d had nothing to say: what do you say to a man in whom you’ve believed, whom you’ve looked up to, whom you would’ve dented the corners and edges of your life to accommodate, when he tells you such a thing? Rachel had never felt completely tongue-tied before—she’d always been his pleasing machine, somebody who could smooth out the rough spots, fill in the potholes, but now how could she possibly say or do anything that would make him comfortable with his new decision?

  At least she’d resisted that cigarette, for her baby’s sake, for her sphere’s sake—although the sphere may just have been Let’s Pretend, Let’s Pretend I’m going to have a baby, Hugh, but she hadn’t even made an appointment to see her doctor, because what if she were wrong? And Hugh, looking so different last night, looking like a stranger, like a stranger who almost looked like her husband, but not quite.

  Was he the same man she’d married at all? Had she really known him as well as she thought she had? Was it all Let’s Pretend? She’d come in last night to a dark house; Hugh had already gone to bed. She thought of calling her mother about this new development—she imagined the conversation they’d have: “Rachel, if you just don’t take this phase too seriously—and that’s all it is, a phase, your father went through something similar—if you just don’t make too big an issue of it, this too shall pass. He’s probably depressed from being unemployed, and men are notorious for making sweeping and regrettable statements like that…”

  And there, she’d been all prepared to tell him her little secret, about the sphere inside her, what she thought was a sphere inside her, but don’t call it a baby just yet
because then you’ll lose it, just like you lost your last little sphere by thinking of it as a baby when it was still just a tiny subdivision. She wanted to tell him, and he’d gone and topped it, he’d gone and told her something that made her think this was the worst possible time for a sphere, unless there was some magical way of keeping the sphere from subdividing all the way to babyhood.

  So when Rachel awoke in the morning, remembering the party, remembering Normal Life, she tried to put it out of her mind. Put him out of her mind. She was lying there, staring at the ceiling, and the light through the French doors was still purple and hazy—it must be just dawn, and it had been years since she’d been up this early. Usually, she woke up about half an hour before she was due at work, and then on weekends, slept till nine or ten.

  But it was the baby crying that awoke her, and she had not even been aware of it—she’d opened her eyes with the sound, but she’d been dreaming of her sphere, and the transition to wakefulness had been so smooth it hadn’t seemed unusual to hear the baby— her baby crying. Dreams were like that.

  But now consciousness seeped through her like a transfusion, and she sat up on the couch, wondering where the crying was coming from.

  She went to the French doors, unlocked and opened them—it was actually chilly, and she hugged herself as she stepped out onto the narrow balcony. But the crying was not outside—dogs barked, the sound of trucks going across Connecticut Avenue, a helicopter going overhead, and silence slicing through these early morning noises. But no babies, no bawling.

  The doctors all said you’d be hearing babies every time you ran amok emotionally, but Jesus, could it please end?

  Rachel went back inside, shivering from the startling coolness of the August morning.

  And she heard the crying baby, and followed the sound down the corridor, to the torn walls of the vanity—and heard a scuttling sound like…

  Rats.

  There better not be rats coming up from down below.

  But there were no rats, at least she didn’t see anything—just the rubble that had been there last night, the bricks half built up into a wall as if the person building it was interrupted before finishing the project. A small metal washtub still lay overturned, and she wondered if maybe there were rats beneath it. She tapped on the edge.

  It thumped like a hollow drum. The only rat here is lying upstairs, snoring.

  The baby—wherever he was—was whimpering, and the sound seemed to be coming from down the stairs. Rachel gingerly stepped around the shards of broken glass, over the fallen bricks, leaving footprints in the white dust. The floor was cold, the room itself was cold, colder than it had been outside.

  The baby seemed to be crying down those dark stone steps—where did they lead? To Mrs. Deerfield’s crib? Rachel shivered, remembering her experience over that spot in the lower apartment. The man with the teeth that seemed to be coming for her.

  Something was scratching on the stairs, like an animal raking its claws across the stones.

  Rachel felt fear trickle down her spine. She was suddenly overcome with dread. She remembered what Mrs. Deerfield had told her, about the crib being a place where spirits cross on their journeys, and the articles Sassy had given her that she had barely scanned—the house now did seem evil, and Rachel knew that if it were anything other than just before sunrise she would not be so terrified, more rational thoughts would take over, she would be part of Normal Life, but this was becoming too much like Let’s Pretend, and her imagination was running wild.

  She backed away from the steps leading down into darkness, knocking into and almost tripping over the wash-tub. She kicked it away and it went clanging against the entry to the bathroom. She didn’t realize until she was out of the vanity that the baby had stopped crying, that she herself was sobbing, that her feet were finely cut with bits of glass. That her breasts had begun leaking milk.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE OFFERING

  1.

  “Retch?” Sassy called up the stairs, pushing the door open wide. It squealed conspicuously, slamming against the wall. She sensed (without knowing for sure) that the downstairs tenant was spying on her from the fisheye peephole of her door. Sassy repressed the urge to turn and stare at it.

  She stood in the downstairs hallway of Draper House. She’d been so upset the night before, after she’d gotten off the phone with Rachel, that she’d actually gone back into work at ten o’clock at night and worked on next week’s “Home” section articles— and Sassy Parker never works a week ahead of time, particularly over a holiday weekend. She’d done some work, but she mainly stayed up writing nasty things about Rachel Adair on her computer screen, getting upset, erasing the bad things and typing in: You’re my best friend, I was only trying to help. But Rachel had been the one who’d asked for her advice, had been the one who said, “Fuck you,” had been in the wrong. But it doesn’t matter, you don’t let your best friend down when she’s that upset, you don’t tell her off. So Sassy had felt guilty when she’d finally hit the sack at two a.m., got up at noon, went out and bought a peace offering—the flowers she picked up at her neighborhood florist in Mount Pleasant, wrapped up in tissue paper—and thought she’d surprise Retch.

  This’ll teach you to always call first. A note on the door: Scout, Ran out to pick up dry cleaning—also, cleaning stuff at drugstore— Swept up most of vanity mess—Hugh.

  But he must have run out in a hurry, because both the outside and the inside doors to their house were unlocked and slightly ajar.

  Sassy called out again from the bottom step (she’d moved up one giant step without asking mother-may-I). “This is your good friend Sassy Parker! Halloo! Retch?”

  She heard floorboards creak from behind the downstairs tenant’s door.

  Water from the flower stems soaked through the tissue and into her yellow cotton blouse—it felt gross, and she held the flowers away from her body. “Shit.”

  A noise. Upstairs.

  One more giant step up the stairs. “Mother-may-I,” she said.

  Why do I feel like I’m breaking and entering when this is my closest friend’s home and nobody’s going to get mad if I am caught sneaking up these stairs?

  A loud smashing sound, and then scraping. Thumping across the floor. Scraping. A sound like a sponge being squeezed out. Slurping. More heavy objects falling.

  “Retch?”

  Up more stairs, to the first floor.

  A baby began bawling its head off after the last crash, and Sassy, worried, ran down the hallway towards the sound, wondering what in hell was going on at the end of the hall.

  2.

  When it was over, when the woman had stopped struggling, Penelope Deerfield saw the crumpled piece of paper in the dirt. She disentangled her small pudgy fingers from the woman’s scalp—a handful of blood-matted hair was caught like a cat’s cradle between her hands. She shook it out. Penelope knelt down and picked up the piece of paper. Too dark to see what it had written on it, although she could almost make out a photograph. “Slipping notes behind teacher’s back, are we?” She stuffed the paper in her apron pocket. The palms of her hands were spotty with calluses and blisters—the gardening had taken its toll this year, between that and her ward. “My little fleshling,” she called it.

  The dead woman lay among the broken jars, her hands streaked red from razor cuts. Her heart was no longer beating. The fleshling was sated and had crawled back behind its brothers—they floated lifelessly, eternally staring out of their watery graves, their bodies barely formed. And none of them chosen, none of them like the baby, the fleshling. None of them inspired with the breath of death, with the spirit of Gil DuRaz, with the spirits of the house. None of them special

  Penelope had to coax him into his jar. He crawled like a slug across the corpse, his tiny bumpy fingers clawing into the earth to propel himself along, then scraping through the tangle of skin and bloodied cloth of the dead woman. The jar was tall and wide, the smell of alcohol stung the air l
ike a tragic memory. Bits of translucent tissue hung suspended in the fluid. “Must stay moist, dear, or we shall never be born.” She was exhausted, but this intrigued her—this piece of paper. She knelt down, jostling mason jars—they clinked together like bells with their clappers muted. A rat ran across the dead woman’s right foot, which with its shoe, lay alongside an irregular growth of luminescent white mushroom just beneath the stairs to the main house, far above the woman’s head.

  The shoe, and the foot, remained where the woman had stepped down the last step.

  When the fleshling had descended upon her.

  Hungry.

  She would have to make sure that no one came down there snooping again.

  “But children are always hungry,” Penelope Deerfield said to the thing that treaded water in the jar. Large blue eyes staring out at her; wart-filled mouth opening and closing, breathing in the solution; crisscrossed string of veins gorged and throbbing; small raisin heart pumping furiously; the tiny body red with exertion and fresh blood.

  Penelope pressed her cheek to the side of the jar and felt its coldness before setting it down among the others. She turned and went back up through her trapdoor.

  Sitting on the patio at her small table, Mrs. Deerfield brought the crumpled paper out from her apron pocket. “So many years ago, so many lives gone by,” she said, shaking her head with memories. “And the children, oh dear, all the children I have loved, all the life I delivered then.” She scanned the paper: a photocopy of a newspaper article, the contents of which she knew well.

  From The Washington Herald-Examiner, January 17, 1967:

  MISSING WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN NW