Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  —the baby pushes the bottle away, breathes deeply, then gurgles, a thin and hideous smile crawling across its face. Russell hoists it up against his shoulder and begins to pat its back. The thing gurgles again, a warm, contented sound, then burps and spits up.

  Russell cleans the thing, then himself, then puts it back in the crib. It shakes its arms almost gaily, gives one last kick of its feet, then closes its eyes, flopping over on its stomach.

  Russell’s wife has made him read countless books and pamphlets about infant care, and every last one of them said you should never let a baby sleep on its stomach because it might suffocate itself in that position.

  Russell thinks about turning the baby over—

  —notices how blessedly silent the house is—

  —then walks away. It is still alive, and will still be alive after Russell lies in the cold rot of a grave.

  Its being alive is both a miracle and mystery, so it seems only natural and understandable that it should die before him.

  —and there is Russell, a child again, being led back to bed by his father, who tucks him in, sees Russell staring at his erection, and says, “Take a good look at it, boy. You gotta feed it when it’s hungry. A man is no stronger than his appetites. Stay hungry, boy. Hungry for money, for success, for respect and power, hungry”—he lifts his erection—“for pussy. Feed it enough and it’ll vomit, and when it pukes, you get little chow hounds . . . like you.” Russell watches horrified as his father’s erection dribbles, then splits down the middle and opens wide, the inside ribbed with thousands of teeth like a lamprey’s mouth. His father leans down and strokes Russell’s hair, then says, “You want me to take you out to the roof before you go back to sleep? You always like it when I take you out to the roof.”

  Now, in his own bed, next to his own wife, feeling the heat of his own erection, Russell listens for the sound of the baby’s breathing.

  He can’t hear it.

  And he grins.

  * * *

  When he awakens, his wife and the baby are gone and there is still silence in the house. Russell stares up at the ceiling and wonders what his wife found in the crib. Was the thing shriveled, cold, dead? Had it gone into silent convulsions during the wee hours of the morning, become trapped in a crazed descent that led from convulsions to pain, then paralysis and death? Perhaps she went over to the find the sheets of the crib sopped in blood, the baby staring up at her with pitiful, frightened eyes, not understanding why this dark liquid was seeping from its body. Yes, that’s it! Things Russell. His wife did everything she could to staunch the flow of blood but nothing worked, and she tried to wake him but couldn’t and so grabbed the child and called for a doctor and—

  —from the kitchen her voice echoes—

  “. . . just a little ol’ chow hound, that’s all him is.”

  Russell presses his fists against his sides and curses under his breath.

  He showers, dresses for work, and goes to the kitchen.

  His wife is sitting at the table, her breast bared, the baby sucking at her nipple. Her breasts droop lower than before. Yes, they’re bigger (Russell thought he would enjoy that) but now both hang so low they look like two huge cysts.

  The bottles like sentries line the top of the table. All of them are empty.

  “Has he had all of them?” Russell asks.

  “Just like his daddy,” replies his wife—not to him, to the baby. “Him’s always so hungry.”

  Russell winces, wondering what it is about a baby that makes even the most intelligent adult suddenly start goobering gibberish like a moron. Gibberish is all his wife spouts now. No more do they have those long, in-depth conversations like they used to, conversations that were literate and multi-leveled. Now it’s “Googoo” and “Him make poo-poo?” and “Little ol’ chow hound.” Jesus.

  Russell opens the morning paper and reads the comics as the baby claws at his wife’s nipple.

  It’s not until Russell hears a deep, wet, tearing sound that he lowers the paper and looks at his family.

  The baby has devoured his wife’s breast. The mangled, dropping meat hangs like a hacked carcass on a butcher’s hook.

  Still the baby eats, chewing and gnawing like a rat until it has burrowed deep into his wife’s gut, then sits there in her viscera and wraps its lips around an artery on her heart, sucking, sucking, sucking.

  His wife sighs like she used to whenever he would tongue her vagina in bed, arching her back and shuddering with delight and ecstasy.

  “I remember the way my father used to play with me,” she says, not looking at the thick gore that pumps out of her raw cavity and spreads across the floor. “We would go to this hill behind our house and run to the top, then race down. He always beat me, was always waiting at the bottom to catch me in case I got to running too fast and fell. I want to do that again. I want to watch you two race down the hill. I want to watch you catch him and then the two of you can wrestle and laugh and when you come inside I can complain about the grass stains on your pants and the dirt in your hair. Then I’ll make cookies.”

  The baby is sucking harder, gulping her down. Her head begins to collapse from within, a deflating balloon.

  “We’ll have so much fun,” she says, going soft, sinking into herself. “Life and laughter and love. All because of him.” She reaches through the muck of her mutilated body and strokes the back of the baby’s head. One of its tiny hands reaches up and grips her fingers, snapping them off one by one.

  “Thank you,” she sputters to Russell. “Thank you for giving me back that hill.”

  And with a soft hiss her head flattens out, drooping over her shoulders like a rubber shawl. He eyes slop out of their sockets and dangle at the end of their stalks.

  The baby crawls out of her and starts playing with them.

  * * *

  At the funeral everyone cries and kisses Russell, telling him that he’ll be just fine, if there’s anything they can do for him or the baby he just has to let them know and they’ll be right there.

  That night, unable to satisfy the baby’s hunger, he calls his parents and they come over.

  Russell’s mother takes the baby and cries, then wipes her eyes and says, “Him’s just like his daddy and his grandpa, an ol’ chow hound.” Then bares her shriveled, liver-spotted breast. The baby devours her quickly, then crawls over to grandpa.

  “Still think a man should stay hungry for pussy?” Russell asks his father as the baby wrenches open the old man’s mouth, dislodging his jaw as it claws its way down his throat.

  After Russell finishes mopping up the mess and burning his parents’ clothes, he puts the baby to bed. It sleeps quietly, contentedly.

  * * *

  By the time the mourning period is over and it’s time for Russell to return to work, the baby has grown to well over nine feet tall. It sits naked in deep piles of its own filth, screaming to be fed. Russell tries everything but the thing still bawls and shrieks.

  Finally he just sits across from it, staring up at the huge head and its obscene mouth.

  “We gave you everything we had,” he whispers to it.

  It screams shrilly, its head growing larger.

  Russell picks up a toy rattle and shakes it. The baby ceases its howling for a moment, staring at the rattle with fascination, then grabs it from Russell’s hand and eats it.

  Russell drops his head into his hands and weeps.

  He remembers the way his own father played with him, and decides to tell the baby a story. Maybe that will lull it to sleep.

  He raises his head, wipes his eyes, and crosses to the baby, stroking its back.

  “When I was a child my father would take me up to the roof of our house and throw me off head-first. My skull would smash against the pavement and I’d laugh, watching my brains splatter in the grass. I’d get up and yell, ‘Do it again!’ and Dad would wave me back up, then throw me off again. On summer evenings we’d go to neighborhood cookouts and I’d listen to other parent
s tell funny stories about how they’d throw and break their children, then all of us kids would run off to play and show each other our holes and scrapes and bruises and broken parts. That made us hungry. The hamburgers and hot dogs at these cookouts were always real good; they reminded me of what the stuff inside my skull looked like when my head crashed into the cement. After we’d get home I’d ask Dad to kill me one more time before bed and he’d give Mom one of those ‘what-do-you-think-dear?’ looks, and she’d smile and shrug and say, ‘Oh, all right, but make it quick.’ The bedtime throw-and-breaks were the best. They gave me good dreams. Dreams about falling over the edge of a cliff and feeling my body break against sharp rocks, and as I lay there bleeding and moaning a beautiful princess would come along on her horse and see me and weep because I was in so much pain. Then she’d dismount and cradle my head tenderly in her arms and whisper, ‘I will nurse you back to health, my brave, beautiful lover. And when you are well, we shall wed and be together forever.’ She would come in to my bed late at night and kiss me and soothe me and tell me stories about how she used to race with her father. And then we’d fuck, and she would squeal and scream my name, and when we came together we’d promise each other that we’d be good parents, when that time came.”

  He looks up. The baby is staring at him, hypnotized, a thin string of slobber dangling from the corner of its mouth.

  The baby nods its head, seeming to understand.

  “I’m hungry too, you know?” says Russell.

  The baby smiles.

  “Like you.”

  The baby squeals.

  “Me’s an ol’ chow hound, just like my son.”

  The baby flails its arms and kicks its legs, rocking the foundation of the house as it giggles and googoos and gurgles.

  Russell rises to his feet as the baby flops forward, slamming its chin into the floor. Its head is as tall as the room. The top of its skull smashes through the ceiling, raining plaster and beams.

  It opens its mouth and Russell sees its teeth, then steps closer.

  In the gap between its two upper center teeth is his wife’s head, upside-down and staring out at him, her mouth twisting and wriggling as she tries to form words.

  Russell smiles.

  The baby moves its tongue, only it’s not a tongue at all, it’s slick, pink, quivering vaginal meat, pulsing and lubricated and ready for Russell’s hardness.

  Russell looks up at the eyes of his son. “In bed she used to say that I was trying to swallow her whole when we were making love.”

  The baby opens its mouth.

  Russell whispers, “A man is no stronger than his appetites . . . stay hungry, boy.” Then steps into the gaping maw.

  He throws back his head and groans with pleasure as he feels something heave below his waist and his wife squeals in delight and their baby giggles and googoos and gurgles, and then closes its mouth and sighs as it drifts off to sleep, dreaming that it is a golden, sloping hill where a princess rides by on her horse to find a brave lover lying crushed upon the jagged rocks below.

  John Wayne’s Dream

  Introduction by Mort Castle

  And so we catch the latest horror on CNN or read about it in the Tribune or see the Facebook-filtered report as it becomes the springboard for keyboard philosophers.

  The summary: It is senseless. There's no reason. What a world. Go figure ...

  Uh-uh. There's always a reason. And so often the reason is a ghost, or ghosts, the ghosts uniquely our own but universal in their hauntingness, ghosts named Regret, Grief, Anger, Failure, or that legion of ghosts named Dead Dreams.

  Those are the ghosts old Charles Dickens understood and wrote about so well, whether he metaphored them into Christmas Past, Christmas Future, or Christmas Unwrapped or just psychically attached them to Pip or Oliver—and, for that matter, Fagin.

  And those are the ghosts not-so-old Gary Braunbeck knows so well and writes about so often: the soul ghosts. Those are the real specters discerned, but seldom fully exorcised, by psychology and not by a reality show nitwit with a Radioshack green screen stumbling around an allegedly haunted house in East Dipstick, Iowa.

  Those are the spirits, their kith and kin, we find in Gary Braunbeck's enduring and insightful work. The late Jerry Williamson, the horror writer who was a mentor to Braunbeck (and to me and so many others!) maintained that any writer creating serious fiction should automatically be declared a psychiatrist or a minister—or both.

  Here we have "John Wayne's Dream." We've got Carl Jung and William James and perhaps even a shot of Wayne Dyer and maybe the Dalai Lama, but above all, we have Gary Braunbeck doing what he does best: exploring fearlessly the wasteland that is mapped out in the GPS of the human soul.

  John Wayne’s Dream

  “Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.”

  —Oscar Wilde

  “It (music) expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to remain silent.”

  —Victor Hugo

  Man, it’s bad tonight—sick, miserable, choke-on-this ugly—the worst it’s ever been, worse even than when you were drying out in the hospital, and you need tonight’s meeting before you decide to break the goddamn seal on the bottle stashed in the trunk of your car with those Other Things, Things you can’t help but think of in upper case, that’s how bad it is, it’s so bad you can’t bring yourself to name them, even silently to yourself, because that would mean the repellant thoughts and ugly pictures that are kicking so hard across your mind, these things you know damned well ought to turn your stomach but don’t, not even a little (they’ve caused you to actually smile when you’re alone and once even chuckle into your cold coffee), it means you’re actually seriously no-shit-Sherlock considering it, and if you decide to do it the Things will make it so easy, easy, easy-peezy, so you have to think of those Things in upper case because to name them, to admit you have them because of the thoughts and pictures in your mind, that’s what scares you right down to the marrow of the bones in this sad-ass body you’ve been walking around in for—what?—fifty-three years and however-many months and days, this sad-ass body that at least had enough willpower to drag itself down here to the church basement and the all-too familiar door halfway down the hall, the one you’re standing in front of right now, so you take a deep breath, close your eyes, force the thoughts and pictures to the back of your mind, hoping they’ll stay there, God grant me the serenity to make it all fuck off, and as you grasp the doorknob and begin turning it you see the piece of paper that’s been hastily taped to the frosted glass—

  AA Meeting Canceled

  Tonight Only:

  Ghosts Sing Sad Cowboy Song

  for the Whole Broken World

  —and you feel your jaw actually drop like the anvil-mouth of some cartoon character as you read the words a second time, hand still gripping the doorknob, but before you can react you hear it start from inside the room: that song … and on a guitar, of course—a steel-faced dobro-style resonator, from the sound of it, just slightly out of tune, causing the melody to sound all the more distant and empty and hopeless; gritting your teeth, you pull your hand away from the doorknob and step back, as if moving two feet away will stop the sound from reaching you, but reach you it does, just as loud, just as cheerless, no goddamned different from any of the hundreds of times you’ve heard it played or played it yourself by request, by request, by request only because that’s the only way anyone in their right mind would play the song, sure as hell not by choice, nosiree, like King Lear always said never never Never Never NEVER.

  “Are you going in?” says a voice to your left.

  She’s younger than most of the people you’ve seen at the meetings; her face is round, its skin slightly pink beneath the surface, no tell-tale loopy blue lines of broken veins in her nose, no too-bright sheen in her eyes, no crow’s feet, nothing to indicate that she shares your disease—hell, she looks like someone who should be playing the Julie Andrews part in The Sound of Mus
ic, not a recovering drunk.

  “The, uh … the meeting’s been canceled,” you say, not so much pointing at as absent-mindedly flipping a finger toward the makeshift sign.

  “I know,” she replies. “I’m here for the ghosts’ concert. Isn’t that why you’re here, ___________?”

  She calls you by name. You have never seen this woman before. She’s so fresh, so genuinely pretty, so clean—no, it’s more than being clean, she seems … absolutely unspoiled. You might have a small graveyard of brain cells relegated to the back plat of your grey matter, but you’re not so far gone that you’d forget a face like hers.

  She smiles and brushes past you, reaching down and turning the doorknob. She’s pressed against your side, her hand almost touching yours, but doesn’t seem the least shy or embarrassed by it.

  “I always loved this song,” Unspoiled says. “It’s been one of my favorites for … oh, I don’t remember how long.”

  You just stare at her, not knowing a courteous way to respond. C, F, G, A-minor and D-minor; the whole goddamn song’s based on various combinations and repetitions of those 5 chords—hell, the intro alone looks and feels like the most goddamn boring tune ever written—