Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  The DJ said, “You’re worthless, you cud-chewing scuzzhound, we play only the best on -”

  On his way out of his bedroom, Ted picked up the hammer and smashed it down on his clock radio.

  2.

  He was in the shower so long his skin began to wrinkle. The water went from boiling hot to ice cold. But the steam had felt good on his skin, and he had that smell of deodorant soap on him and the blood was gone and he had stopped shivering. Ted took his time shaving; combed his hair, sliding some gel into it to keep it neat; brushed each of his thirty-two teeth and flossed. He only looked directly in the bathroom mirror when he drew blood from flossing.

  His face was worn and gray and almost as tired as the Old Man’s had been.

  And then he knew.

  Something had knifed right through the skin of the world.

  My God. It really happened. He killed himself. The Old Man killed himself, and he still couldn’t die.

  That voodoo abortionist he was babbling about, yeah, that’s who got him. Came for him and wouldn’t let him die. Always keep an open mind, you never know what’s going to want to crawl in there and start gnawing away. An open mind and closed eyes. The Old Man wants me to believe? Well, I ain’t sayin’ yes and I ain’t sayin’ no, I’m just sayin’ maybe.

  He stepped out of the bathroom counting the number of parquet tiles on the floor until he came to the hall carpet (thirty-six squares of tile).

  In the bedroom would be a corpse who was not yet allowed to give up the spirit. Feel it in my bones, in my blood, way down in my gut with last night’s supper just about to go up or down or sideways.

  “He won’t let me die.”

  His father’s words echoed in his mind.

  When Ted entered his bedroom he avoided looking at the bed and the body on the bed. He looked above the bed, to the white wall above the headboard.

  In blood, the Old Man had written: HELPRACHEL.

  Wasps danced frantically around the windowpane.

  Ted, calmly, went over to the window, brushing the wasps away. They stung his hands, but he paid them no mind. With his numb fingers, he cracked the window open. “Ain’t sayin’ no.”

  The wasps darted out into the shimmering air. Down below the building, a middle-aged woman was out walking her dog. The dog urinated on Ted’s Mercedes. The woman wore curlers and congratulated her pet for doing his business; she swatted at wasps that flew around her.

  Ted shut the window.

  The words were burned into his mind.

  HELPRACHEL.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  HELPRACHEL

  1.

  Ted lifted the phone receiver. His hands trembled so much he tossed it out of his hand. The high-pitched pips started up a few seconds later. Ted gazed down at the fallen phone and said, “Hi, Rachel? Just thought you ought to know the Old Man’s duh-duh-dead.” He laughed, slapping his chest. Get real, Ted, my boy, let’s have a trifle more coordination between mind and tongue. “Get Hughie and get out of the house, Rachel. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know, but it’s something that the Old Man set in motion years ago and if I sound crazy, well, then I guess I am, but just get out for a while, get as far away from Draper House as you possibly can.”

  Sounds sensible enough, Ted, my boy, now all’s you got to do is pick up the phone and call her and then maybe it’ll be copacetic. “I ain’t sayin’ no.” He barely recognized the whispery voice that came from his throat.

  He left the phone where it was.

  Nope, can’t really call her up with this kind of news. Call the cops? Not a great idea with a dead body in my bedroom. Particularly one this far hammered away. Cops might not be too sympathetic to my plight.

  He wandered back out to the living room feeling as if a grenade had rolled right into his condo and blown up in his face— yeah, that’s right, I got shards of the Old Man’s insanity in my skull.

  In the freezer, he found a half-full gallon of vodka.

  When Ted decided what he would do, where he would go, he took the bottle with him.

  Driving was easiest for Ted when he was drunk. With a little medicine in him he didn’t have to worry too much about where he was headed. He’d dressed quickly, almost forgetting his shoes in his eagerness to get out of his place ( don’t go back in that bedroom again, Ted, m’boy, you don’t need to double-check to see what’s dripping all over the white carpet).

  In blood: HELPRACHEL.

  Uncharacteristic of the Old Man even in death, even after death.

  Hell, Ted thought as he dropped his car keys on the sidewalk for the sixth time, who’d the Old Man ever help in his life?

  The hard part about being drunk so early in the day was getting the keys in the door of the car. Damn it, they make these things too small and slippery.

  The vodka had made it all go down easier, just like it had when the Old Man had cracked. Cracked, but not yet hammered. It was all crazy, but vodka helped Ted over the rough spots of credibility: I ain’t sayin’ yes and I ain’t sayin’ no, I’m just sayin’ maybe. Finally he managed to unlock the car door without dropping the keys; he opened the door wide and checked under the seats for wasps before sliding in behind the wheel.

  His eyes blurred with tears. He tried turning on the windshield wipers to slash his tears away. You are drunk, son, you sure you didn’t hammer your own head in?

  He started the car, swerving to avoid a boy riding by on his bike. HELPRACHEL. Hallucination—that’s what this whole damn thing is. You didn’t see the Old Man dent himself silly and then keep yapping away like a manic schnauzer, you been walking in your sleep, Tedward. you been drinking too much of the Russian poison and dry humping your pillow, lusting after your brother’s wife. You just want Rachel to need your help, you want her the way you want every toy you’ve ever had and now you feel guilty ‘cause it’s your asshole brother’s wife and you’re a sinner and now guilt’s going into overdrive on the fuel of Absolut—ain’t sayin’ yes. He pressed his foot down on the accelerator as the light at the comer of Q Street and Connecticut turned yellow; his silver car swerved, screeching as he turned up Connecticut Avenue, pedestrians scattering, shouting curses. Ted barely noticed them. The wasps? Well, bugs always get in places in the summer. That’s it. They just squeezed through a crack last flight and the Old Man swallowed them while he was snoring. I ain’t sayin’ no. He waited at the light on Columbia Road, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. He glanced over at a girl in a VW Bug that had pulled up next to him.

  He could still smile, that was good. See? I haven’t cracked, I can be a regular guy.

  The girl, a pretty redhead, wrinkled her nose and quickly looked the other way. Like he was the most repulsive thing on the face of the earth.

  Ted brought his gaze up to the rearview mirror. All he saw were his eyes: bloodshot.

  And in those eyes a certain wildness. The girl must’ve seen that insanity there in the baby blues.

  The eyes of someone out of control.

  A madman.

  The light turned green.

  At Hammer Street, on the edge of the park, Ted spun the wheel into the curb, going up onto it and then down to the road again. He parked his Mercedes with a ridiculous amount of care for someone who had stopped giving a damn.

  I won’t pretend to know what’s going on. Maybe they’ll put me away like I should’ve put the Old Man away weeks ago, before his madness started rubbing off on me.

  But I’ll get Rachel out of there and then show her what’s in my apartment. And if the Old Man is back there laughing his head off at the clever trick he played on me, then they can give me some more booze and I’ll go off and be a bona fide alcoholic for the rest of my natural-born days.

  But if I take her home and there’s a corpse and blood on the walls, then she can have me put away and she will be safe.

  2.

  Rachel, in bed, dreaming. In her dream someone was at the door. Knocking. Calling her name. Was it Hugh? She went to the door in her
dream and opened it. It was not Hugh standing behind the dream door but a black man in a dark shirt and pants, a top hat on his head. When he opened his mouth to speak to her she felt as if she were being sucked into the mouth, and the mouth became a dark cave whose monstrous teeth became rows and rows of babies, their clicking talons raised to her, their mouths like balloon lips, opening and closing to drink her milk.

  3.

  Ted smashed his vodka bottle against the front door of Draper House. “Rachel! It’s Ted! Open up!” The stone balustrades on either side of the steps seemed to have grown around him, fattening each time he shouted for her. He was standing in a cold, shadowed spot, there at the entrance, and the sunlight reached everywhere on the street and in the park, everywhere except this front porch and these steps and this door.

  When the door finally drew open, its wood squeaking against the floor of the lower hallway, it was not Rachel Adair standing behind it, but someone who invited him in nonetheless.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  THE MAGIC TOUCH

  1.

  Hugh passed out drunk on a bench in DuPont Circle; he covered his face with the front section of the Sunday Post. He had spent the morning and early part of the day wandering, just ambling drunkenly from sidewalk to sidewalk. It was a holiday weekend and not many people were out early. The city seemed dead. He liked it that way because he felt dead on the inside like an eggshell with the yolk sucked out. He had clutched his stomach in pain when he felt the need to throw up— don’t want to be sick, just want to die. At around ten in the morning he passed a shop window and saw a man staring back at him. The man’s sandy blond hair stuck out from his head like he’d slept on it wrong. His face was gray and pasty; his shoulders slumped forward. He was shaking, shivering. His eyes were smudged with sleeplessness, his lips cracked dry like water starved earth. Hugh couldn’t look directly into the man’s eyes because he knew the man is me.

  Let’s Pretend, Hugh, that you’re not a loser, that she’ll forgive you and take you back, that it’s going to work out.

  Then a conflicting thought shuttled its thread through his mind: To hell with her! She wants you to be something you’re not, screw it, maybe you’re better off a single man living as you please.

  He felt in his drunkenness that there might as well have been a cartoon angel on his right shoulder and a devil on his left.

  He tried calling Rachel from a pay phone, letting it ring ten times, but there was no answer. A family walking by him, all dressed up for church, eyed him suspiciously. A man standing with him at a crosswalk handed him a dollar.

  “Don’t spend it on liquor,” the man said. “My advice to you is get a job, buddy, it don’t get no better.”

  Hugh watched the pudgy hand fold the dollar and put it into Hugh’s hand. He couldn’t bring himself to look the man in the face.

  Oh, well, at least I’m a dollar richer.

  But most of all he just wanted to die, to lay down and give up the ghost.

  He stretched out across the bench in the park at DuPont Circle hoping that death would come to him. Before he lay the newspaper across his face, he saw the clouds gathering in the sky and thought: Even God’s going to piss on me.

  2.

  He awoke suddenly. “Rachel?” Something had touched him. Something or someone. It had grown dark—clouds hanging low in the sky coupled with the sun pressing westward. Someone had grabbed his ankle, and before he sat up he instinctively felt for his wallet. It was there, in his hip pocket. The newspapers had dropped from his face and now lay crumpled beneath his head forming a makeshift pillow. He had drooled on them—newsprint ran together in a black smudge. His tongue felt like salted meat. What he tasted in his mouth—the product of not having brushed his teeth as well as the unique mixture of drinks from the housewarming party—well, his mouth tasted like he’d kissed the wrong end of a dead cat.

  “I’m talkin’ to you,” a woman said as he sat up. “You the man that lives in the Screamin’ House. I seen you there.”

  He didn’t recognize her at first: just another bag lady. She was fat and dark and dirty. He heard thunder and thought it might be the rumbling in her throat, but it was just thunder. Rain was on its way.

  “You been sleepin’ too long,” she said.

  The crazy woman. He remembered her—when Rachel had tried to start her car, this woman shouting in their back alley.

  “You been sleepin’, mister, but the house don’t sleep, it just screams ‘n’ screams, and now, mister, now your woman gonna scream, too.”

  From in between one of the folds of her rippling trash bags he saw what looked like a human skull.

  And from the empty eye socket of that skull: a wasp. It crawled along the orbital ridge, a finely-cut blue sapphire. And then it flew towards him.

  Jesus , you meet all kinds of creeps when you sleep in the park.

  Then he felt the bite on the back of his neck.

  He slapped at the wasp. Gotcha, you sonofabitch.

  Feeling that needle-prick pain shoot into him, he saw in blood: HELPRACHEL, written on a white wall.

  He heard voices whispering, indistinct.

  He thought he was passing out again, everything faded to black as if the light bulb of the universe had finally died. But still, he felt consciousness. He was in a dark cold place, and he knew where he was: the crib, below Draper House, the place he’d thought he’d seen that thing with my father’s eyes, that delirium tremens hallucination, that inhuman jellyfish pulling itself further down into darkness, almost human, the bluest of eyes, almost the way a baby might look if it had been born about five months too early. A baby not born of a human mother.

  Hugh saw before him a fetus floating in ajar. It opened its eyes, screaming with the Old Man’s voice, “You saw it, Hugh, you weren’t just drunk, you were enlightened, the house is unclean, it’s the asshole of the universe, son. Verena Standish lost her children to it. and now you’ll lose Rachel. They’re gonna make her the mother of it, of that monster child, it’s gonna eat its way into her, that abomination from Hell!”

  3.

  “Rachel,” Hugh gasped. It’s the hangover, the Queen Mother of hangovers, the place where hangovers are conceived, born and die right here in my head—must’ve slaughtered a few million brain cells this time out. He was looking at the dead wasp in his hand. He had smushed it after all. But the insect began wriggling again, getting up on its small legs. It stretched its wings out and took off from the palm of his hand. The insect flew up into the darkening sky.

  It seemed to him that all the sounds of the earth had stopped, that someone had thrust the tip of a pencil in both his ears, because he was no longer aware of the crunch of the grass underfoot or the chatter of teenagers crossing the Circle or the traffic or the cries of birds or the growling thunder.

  I’m really drunk and so hung over it’s like someone’s hammering my brains to oatmeal.

  Let’s Pretend I’m a drunken sot whose wife has finally given him the boot, who finally is going to get what he wants…

  What do I want?

  Sleep. Just sleep.

  HELPRACHEL.

  Do I want to die?

  He was afraid to look back at the bag lady. His hands were shaking, and to try and calm them he pretended that none of it was real, all of it was Let’s Pretend: the park, the crazy woman, Rachel, too, all of it. He tried to turn his hands to fists and then unfold them again, but they just shook. He could not keep his hands from shaking. I want…

  “What you want ain’t important, mister,” the bag lady said, “just like what I want ain’t no big deal. What we gotta do, what we gotta do is stop that house from screamin’.” She put her hand to her breast as if in pain. “And I can’t do it alone.”

  4.

  Mattie kept one hand on her daughter’s skull, hiding it beneath her trash bags of invisibility, and her right hand under her heart. The ax was in her heart again, chopping at it. Help me, Nadine, just keep me goin’ long enough to do this one t
hing, this one righteous thing. Gotta stop it, gotta stop the house. The beating of her heart calmed, the chopping grew more faint.

  You with me, Nadine?

  Mattie thought she heard an answer.

  The Mr. Big Man who sat there on the bench was staring at his fingers. You gotta give him the Magic Touch, Mattie, you gotta make him see.

  She reached over with her right hand and touched his left, the one that held the wasp.

  The man flinched, his hand shivering.

  Magic Touch, Magic Touch, you gotta work, you gotta make him believe, ‘cause Mattie’s only got enough fight in her left for the Housekeeper, so I’m gonna need help, gonna need to make him understand.

  Mattie felt a tickling in her finger; she was afraid the man would pull away from her—she could smell fear in him, fear and doubt and even a touch of belief. Just a slice of believing would be enough, just a rusty kind of believing. She knew he had seen Nadine’s unborn child, and that was where the believing in his soul had come from. With her Magic Touch she could tell that he wasn’t like the other Mr. Big Men. He was more, but he’d buried it all down, buried himself alive in disbelief. As she held his hand, she heard the words Let’s Pretend in her mind. He had it in him, but way down where you gotta get a shovel and just start diggin’ away.

  Through her fingers, she spoke to him: “You got a lot of problems, mister, but you got life and that’s better than what the Housekeeper’s got—crawlin’ with death in that place—you got life and a body to get you places. You gonna run and hide or you gonna fight? You got to get her outta the Screamin’ House, mister. Things gotta be done, spirit laid to rest. I got the bugs in me. I got to help with the Housekeeper, but you got to get that girl before Baron Samedi gets inside her.”