Winston held the hammer up to warn Ted away. He swung it through the air in front of him.
Ted stumbled back. The hammer just missed his knees.
Winston pounded the hammer right above his own eyes, whispering, “This?” as it smushed into his forehead.
Ted heard the crack of bone, but it might as well have been a crack in the universe, a rip down the side of reality.
He had no voice to scream.
Winston continued smashing his own head in until it caved in, a bloody pulp, a swirling nest made of gray paper and pomegranate juice.
Ted thought he heard it, the buzzing sound.
His father’s mouth went slack, sagging open.
Blood obscured his teeth, his tongue.
And then the wasps flew out from the red, gaping chasm of the Old Man’s mouth, and Ted tried hard to get his vocal cords to flex in just the right sequence, just the perfect arrangement for a scream. But Ted had never had to scream before, and to scream the right way you’ve got to practice just like with anything else. Maybe if Ted had screamed then a neighbor would come running. He had neighbors. He knew he had neighbors and if he screamed loud enough they’d be pounding at the door. But Ted had no screams in him. He rasped instead, he hissed, he moaned.
On the radio, “Staying Alive” was playing.
The Old Man grinned a river of blood. “Now you believe, boy, now?”
5.
“Mr. Big Man’s gone, Baron Samedi got him now,” Mattie said to her daughter’s skull. She twisted some of her plastic cloak through the empty eye sockets, wrapping the skull up into it. “You send wasp to take his spirit home, take him away from the baron. But you and me, Nadine, you and me’ll stop that house from screamin’.”
And then Mattie stopped in her tracks.
She was speaking aloud; she knew she was speaking aloud, the vibrations were humming up her throat, her teeth were clicking together, the sounds were coming out clearly, completely.
But the voice was her daughter’s.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
DREAMLAND TEA
1.
I’m not pregnant.
It was Rachel’s first thought upon waking. She was aware of a smell in the room, heat, and stale air. Sweat on her back, on her neck. Sheets twisting about her legs.
Hugh?
Her eyes were sore from crying, her head ached from wringing out the tears. She’d cried all day Sunday—but was Sunday already gone? Was it really Monday morning? Or was this Sunday morning, still? Sunday night? She had the vaguest memory of swallowing at least one of the antidepressants she had kept in a shoe box beneath the bathroom sink. Just one pill. Or had it been two? No more than two. She had to consider her sphere— wait, there is no sphere. Never was a little subdividing ovum. I was just late. I was just imagining it.
She stretched her arm lazily across the bed; Hugh’s pillow was hard and flat, no indentation where his head would’ve sunk down into it.
“Hugh?”
Rachel somehow expected him not to be there.
But why?
“Hugh?” She heard her own voice as if she’d thrown it, and now it came back to her. How could she expect him to be there—down the hall, in the bathroom shaving, whistling, putting the tea kettle on the stove. But, God, did I really throw him out of the house?
Had she done that or merely dreamed it? If this really was Monday morning, where was he? Why wouldn’t he have come back home? Didn’t he know how much she needed him?
A sharp pain like an icicle thrust between the hemispheres of her brain momentarily blotted out the thought of Hugh. Like a hangover, but with a sweet edge. Her father, as he lay dying and coughing in his hospital bed, told her, “Pain’s never bad, sweetheart, it’s just part of the transformation. It’s resisting the pain that hurts, but if you just give it its due, well, it’s just another way of feeling is all.” Smoke rose up above her father’s head, from his flared nostrils, up to the ceiling, circling around itself, and the smoke became bubbles drifting out the hospital window, popping as it met the heat and the stale air. Rachel was losing consciousness again, she was drifting downward into her pillow. Back to sleep, oh, thank you Nanny Deerfield for sleep and for that wonderful dreamland tea you make special for boys and girls, thank you. Antidepressants and dreamland tea from dear Nanny Dreadful. She was sleeping and dreaming of an entire field full of running deer, all of them leaping over the yellow grass, the young bucks butting their heads, and the fawn nursing from the young doe.
And Rachel dreamed that she awoke sometime later and Mrs. Deerfield stood at the foot of the bed, beyond the grasp of the writhing sheets. But it was daddy standing there, not Mrs. Deerfield, and daddy said, “Nothing wrong after all, she’s sleeping, and sleep will take care of it.” And Rachel felt good in her dream, and then the haze descended again and she met blackness with her sweet dreams.
2.
Mrs. Deerfield had heard Rachel breaking the china and had come up the back way, from the crib up through the vanity, through the rubble that was the vanity. Rachel had been frightened when she’d heard the footsteps coming from that end of the house, but it was only Mrs. Deerfield after all.
“I was afraid you might hurl yourself, dear,” Mrs. Deerfield said. She wore a green kimono and looked like she hadn’t slept a wink the way Rachel also had not slept a wink.
“I’m just breaking dishes,” Rachel said, not even pretending to make sense.
“I’ve made some tea, dear, to help you sleep.” Mrs. Deerfield offered her a cup and it tasted like raspberries and cream. Rachel was beginning to feel calm again. “It’s full of vitamins,” she said as Rachel drank up, “and those sorts of horrendous ingredients that go into healthful solutions. A touch of brandy, too. I call it dreamland tea.”
“I don’t drink, “Rachel told her as she finished the last drop in her cup. “I don’t really drink, but I want to scream.”
Mrs. Deerfield said nothing. Rachel caught something in the older woman’s face: a smile? Not a smile. A grimace. For a second she thought Mrs. Deerfield was in pain. Pain is our friend. It’s resisting the pain that hurts. If you just give it its due…
“You’ve been so sweet, thank you so much,” Rachel said as Mrs. Deerfield walked her upstairs to her bed.
“It’s me should thank you, dear.”
“I thought I was going to be a mommy. An acre of kiddos. All screaming.”
“You’ll make a wonderful mommy.”
“I don’t know about that, I just don’t know about that.” Rachel felt goofy as she lay across the sheets while Mrs. Deerfield closed the curtains. White noise of the fan—Hugh would like that, but Rachel didn’t give a damn what Hugh would like. Hugh would not like the way she’d destroyed the Havilland china, their wedding present from her mother.
“Two birds with one stone,” Rachel murmured, still tasting dreamland tea in the back of her throat.
Mrs. Deerfield smiled that beautiful gap-toothed grimace. “Yes, dear, two birds with one stone.”
Rachel awoke tasting something sour. A small red stain on the pillow next to her head. Did I cough that up?
She felt queasy standing up, getting off the bed. The sunlight through the bedroom curtains was too bright for such an early hour. She didn’t want to look outside to see that the world was going on all around her in a pale imitation of normal life.
There was no note from Hugh on the dressing table. All husbands should leave notes for their wives on the dressing table even when the wives kick them out of the house. Hugh always left notes for her whenever he went out. Rachel left notes, too, but hers were Post-it Notes and messages scrawled on steamed bathroom mirrors.
“Let’s Pretend!” she had shouted at him, covering her face, kicking her legs out to push him away. They had just made love on the rug in the living room after the housewarming party. “Let’s not pretend anymore, let’s just get down to the real thing.”
Rachel sat back down on the bed. The mattress was hard
. Her back was achy; she’d been sleeping on her back and stomach all wrong-She leaned back into the pillow. Falling through the pillow. She coiled around Hugh’s pillow, sank into her pillow, rubbed his pillow between her knees and kept it there. Comfortable. Sleepy.
3.
“Did I just do something?” he asked. Hugh had that face—he looked like a little boy who didn’t know when he’d been naughty.
She didn’t mention the blood, or the fact that the blood meant there was no sphere. Maybe there had been one, maybe she’d had a mini-miscarriage. Nature, at any rate, had once again taken care of it. Nature in all her brutal perfection had cut her womb open and had let it bleed.
She didn’t say anything to him, but wouldn’t let him come near her while she cried.
The world was quiet on Sunday morning after the party.
She began smoking cigarettes—there was that pack of Marlboro Lights in her purse, and she chain-smoked them one after another until they were all gone.
“I know I’ve -” he began. Hugh was always beginning things he couldn’t finish: law, the vanity, fatherhood. So very Hugh.
“Let’s Pretend!” she shouted.
After he was gone she realized she was having a migraine headache and hadn’t even noticed. Rachel felt then that she would never again let a migraine headache bother her because things like this could block it out. Things like wanting to scream but not being able to, not loud enough, not the way she could dream of screaming.
Then she began breaking the china, one dish at a time, against the walls. She thought of her mother on her date with Mr. Martin—David, and Hugh, and the lost spheres of the free world, and daddy puffing on his cigarettes dying like that just because she hadn’t been as good a girl as he would’ve liked her to be. But just give pain its due. Pain is our friend.
Of all the things that could’ve been on her mind, she did not think of the baby she heard bawling from downstairs because it had become a constant for her, like her migraine, and she was beyond all that, beyond pain, beyond caring.
4.
“Get-out-get-out-get-out.” But Rachel didn’t scream. She was holding that scream in. The scream she had in her was special. She had one good scream to give and she was saving it.
Rachel felt as if she were watching herself sleep. She floated above her own body, looking down at herself: greasy hair, makeup wiped clean with drained emotion, cracked lips. Her arms were curled around her knees; her legs were pale white. Hugh’s pillow was tucked up between her knees.
“Enough,” Hugh said and went out the French doors to the patio, through the back gate.
The phone was ringing. It tickled her ear, and Rachel watched herself roll farther into the sheets, away from the sound
She watched Hugh walk down the alley, and for a moment she thought he looked back. But then she realized it was just Let’s Pretend because she knew that he would never look back to see her again. She was beyond that. She would hurl her wedding-gift china at the walls and she would put it all in the broken past.
Hugh?
Scraping in the room. Her eyes were sealed shut with crusty sleep. The feeling of being watched. In the back of her throat she tasted the bitterness of dreamland tea. Things moving in the room. She could barely lift her eyelids wide enough to see through them. Hugh must be back, Hugh must be back and maybe he would be begging her forgiveness, or maybe he wouldn’t but she would overlook what he’d done to her. What had he done to her? Something, she knew he’d done something. No. it was what he hasn’t done.
She tried to focus on whatever was there on the bed next to her. A shoe? A glove? A children’s toy? A small baby shaking a rattle? Her sphere, with its tiny hands clutching a noisy rattle, shaking, shaking, shaking.
She was too tired to even lift her head, too tired to move. Her arms and legs felt like stones.
The taste of raspberries and cream and cigarettes on her lips.
A rat the size of her fist sat up next to her face in bed and in its jaws it carried a small dead mouse. The rat shook the mouse violently, and the mouse let out a high-pitched squeak that could only have been a scream.
But Rachel watched all this from above her bed, and could not awaken her body which lay awake and asleep and staring and listening to the sound of the mouse screaming.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
IF I HAD A HAMMER
1.
On the clock radio in Ted Adair’s condo, the Sludgeman said, “Looks like another hellacious day, my little Sludgettes, truly hellacious…”
The bedroom smelled like overflow from a sewer, like a butcher’s shop on a hot afternoon. Ted’s chest was covered with some of his father’s blood and Ted’s own dribbling spit as he rocked back and forth on his knees as if praying to the Old Man, crouched before him.
“Shit, boy, that bastard won’t let me die, that goddamn voodoo abortionist won’t let me rest.” Winston Adair’s voice whistled through the ridge of broken front teeth as he continued hammering away at his face.
Ted didn’t want to look at the Old Man. He wanted to crawl inside himself. He wanted to wake up from what he hoped was a nightmare. A spray of blood shot out of the Old Man’s nose, speckling his throat. Blood spurted from the open wound of red pulp just above his father’s eyes. The nose was completely gone. The Old Man’s jaws sagged into his jowls—a few good hits with the hammer had separated the lower jaw from the rest of his skull. His pale skin was dripping like an ice cream cone in the sun. Here comes the blood. Ted had watched while his father hammered off each of his toes, all ten of them, and then slammed the hammer into his ankles.
From the clock radio, the DJ droned on. “It looks like it’s gonna be a hellacious ninety-five degrees today and even hotter come Labor Day, yes, boys and girls, another lovely Washington day of smelling your favorite armpits, and for those of you who love to sweat and sweat to love, I’ve got a tune coming up from…”
The wasps that had flown from the Old Man’s mouth spun around his head, alighting across the matted red scalp before floating off like scraps of burnt paper towards the window. Their tiny blood-encrusted bodies smudged red prints on the glass until the lower half of the window seemed to be stained dark crimson.
Ted knelt in front of his father, his mouth open, staring. He had no scream in him, and, anyway, if I did my neighbors would be pissed at me for ruining their Labor Day weekend. “Oh, pop, pop, pop, God, pop, juh-juh-juh-just puh-puh-put -” Ted felt his mind was sluicing out from his skull just like the Old Man’s brains were: Make it stop, make him die, make him die. He’s supposed to die. Can’t live with your skull half off and your testicles shot like twin golf balls splat against the goddamn walk-in closet doors, can’t keep talking when your teeth are somewhere down your esophagus and your tongue looks like you been chewing on razor blades. Cheese Whiz, Daddio, didn’t anyone ever tell you the rules? Don’t you know you’re supposed to die when your body’s doing the Mashed Potato from the inside out?
Ted tried catching the hammer in his fingers as the Old Man swung it down to shatter his own left kneecap. The hammer swung wide and missed.
The Old Man grinned toothlessly, jabbing the hammer’s claw into his right ear, its thick tines scraping away most of the lobe; still he pried further into his brain like he was opening up a boiled lobster. “You believe now, boy? I told you that voodoo priest had a hold over me, and I guess he won’t let go. He’s gonna use Rachel to get into the flesh again, and he’s bringing with him every perversion that house has to offer, boy, and he’ll be born like a monster.”
Ted leapt up, knocking his father backwards. As the Old Man fell, Ted heard a sickening crack like the crack of a crisp breadstick. But, Ted reasoned, it’s only one more cracking bone among the multitude of those already smashed up. The hammer flew from his father’s hand and thudded against the wall, just beneath the window. Wasps murmured angrily as they tapped their way around the window ledge, searching for a way out.
“Oh, son, Gil DuRaz will not let m
e die, I partook, boy, I partook of the girl, I et her and she tasted so damn sweet and now they want me for leftovers. They’ve got their mother now, they’ve got the fetus, how much more do I owe that bokor?” The Old Man leaned against his son. Ted clasped the broken, torn body to his. Dampness seeped from his father’s flesh to his. The Old Man stopped babbling. Stopped moving.
I am crazy, I am insane, and I am imagining this. I am hallucinating. The Old Man is alive, shit, maybe I hallucinated this whole damn morning, maybe I’m still curled up in bed dreaming about Rachel, and this is just some subconscious guilt drama playing out in my head and I’m going to wake up in another hour or two. Maybe another ten minutes and it will be Sunday morning and even the damn clock radio alarm won’t have sounded.
On the radio, the Sludgeman said, “I’m gonna be calling your house sometime in the next hour and if you can tell me who your fave-o-rave of the airwaves is, you win a dinner for two at…”
Ted hefted his father’s body up into his arms. The Old Man was ridiculously light, like a toy with the stuffing coming out. Ted’s arms had never felt so weak, so shaky, and yet the Old Man was no burden at all. He laid his father down on his bed, but could not bring himself to look down at the ravaged face.
The hammer lay where it had fallen on the carpet. Stray wisps of Mood-dyed hair were caught in the claw.
Did I do it? Am I as far gone as I thought the Old Man was? Was it me who just bludgeoned him? Shit. Ted rubbed his eyes, tears stinging behind the lids. Got to get clean, clean it off, all that blood. Who’d think a man has that much blood to go around? Get clean, a shower, a shower and a shave and maybe a cup of coffee and then maybe I’ll be sane again, yeah, that ought to do the job.
Dark Rooms: Three Novels Page 49