Shadows Burned In

by Chris Pourteau

  Something clucked in her head, probably her 3V voice showing its disgust. Elizabeth sat up, swung her legs over the side of the bed and faced the screen. She recited her name and student number.

  “Hello, Elizabeth. Are you ready to begin your homework for today?”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “You currently have three subjects in which homework is due before tomorrow: English, geometry, and geography. What class would you like to begin with?”

  “English,” she said. At least she liked that.

  “I hate it.”

  Shut up!

  She got to work. Thirty minutes into her reading and comprehension exercise, her mother brought her dinner. Elizabeth downed it without thinking, even ate the stewed carrots without much complaint, trying to stay focused on the work at hand.

  Susan waited for an hour after dinner. She’d let the food cool, put the dishes in the washer, and waited till she knew Elizabeth would be deep into her studies. Then she walked into the living room.

  “David?”

  “Mmmm?” He didn’t look away from the screen in front of him.

  She moved half a step to her left, edging into his peripheral vision. “David, I want to talk to you for a minute.”

  He wrinkled his forehead and mashed his lips together, disturbed and distracted. “I’m watching Web Report. President’s talking tough to the Germans again. I may need to transfer our MerChrysler stocks out of the ECM and put them in U.S. accounts.”

  Susan nodded, feigning interest. “How do our finances look?” The topic was, at least, related to what she’d wanted to talk to him about.

  He shrugged, barely listening, still staring at the screen. “If the Russo-German Consortium holds up, we’ll be okay. But the Japanese are back as a buying power, and they’ve never been friends of the Russians.”

  “David—”

  “What?” he said, disturbed again. “I’m watching Web Report.”

  She wanted to scream out loud, “Fuck the goddamned Web Report!” but she didn’t. Instead she sat down in her chair next to his. Taking a deep breath, she said, “I want to talk to you about Elizabeth.”

  He watched the numbers go by. German investors and Russian labor bosses were at it again. If this kept up, the Chinese, with American and Japanese investors behind them, might edge out their Russo-German competitors in the Eurasian markets, and then where would he be? Down the tubes with MerChrysler, that’s for damned sure. Whoever would’ve thought the Japanese and the Chinese would get together? Jesus.

  “David, are you listening to me?”

  He looked down, away from the screen, his hands hanging off his knees. “All right, Susan, what is it? I’ve already talked to her about her schoolwork.”

  She smiled, grateful that the conversation hadn’t started out more stressfully than it had. “Yes, I know. I did too.”

  “She’ll whip into shape. I’ll make sure of that.”

  Susan nodded, a little concerned by his choice of words. “I know. I think she’ll shape up on her own.” A little cheerleading from the Mom Section couldn’t hurt. “But that’s not really what I want to talk about.”

  He closed his eyes briefly. Give in. Get it over with. Get back to Web Report. “Volume, mute,” he said to the screen. “What, then?”

  “It’s our moving here, David.” Now that she’d reached the real purpose for the conversation, she was gaining determination. “Since we moved here, Elizabeth has been distant, reclusive. I’m worried about more than her grades.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t be a drama queen. She’s in a new place. Kids adjust.”

  “I know,” she said. “But it’s been over a month now, and it seems to be getting worse, not better. She’s not making friends like she had in Houston.”

  “This isn’t Houston.”

  “That’s my point.”

  He smirked, wincing one eye closed. “That makes a lot of sense.”

  Susan inhaled slowly. “Why did we move back here, David?”

  He smiled, a cat that’s spied a mouse peering out of the hole. “Ah, there it is.” He looked at his watch. “Nine o’clock. We’re early tonight.”

  The hair on the back of her neck bristled. “Don’t be an asshole.”

  “Stage Two: Name calling.”

  “You had a successful practice,” she said. Her frustration was welling up in her throat like bile, burning and bitter. “We were doing well. I was thinking of going back to school—”

  “To do what? What would you do?”

  “I don’t know!” What she did know was that she wanted to be more than she was, something she knew he would never understand. “It doesn’t matter. The point is, we moved back here because you wanted to live here again.”

  “The crime in Houston is terrible,” he said for the umpteenth time. “The traffic is worse—”

  “And the pay? Did it beat this small-town practice?”

  He looked at her from under wary lids. “We’re doing okay. When was the last time you couldn’t buy something you wanted, or something for Elizabeth?”

  “But you sit in front of this damn 3V screen getting ‘up-to-the-minute world market news,’” she said, quoting the Web Report slogan. “If we’re so ‘okay,’ why are you so glued to the news?”

  “It interests me,” he said evenly.

  “Mmmm,” she said mockingly. “Does your daughter interest you? How about what your wife wants? Does that interest you?”

  “What do you want from me—”

  “Why did we come back here? All you’ve ever told me is how much you hate this place. How much you hated him and—”

  “I never said I hated him,” he said, his index finger in the air, on top of a fist. “I never said any such goddamned thing.”

  “No, that’s true, you hardly ever say anything,” she said. “But I’m telling you we’re suffering for having come back here. This town is too small. I need a city. I need to go back to school. And Elizabeth needs her friends.”

  “Mmmm,” he said. “Well, I tell you what . . . when you think you can make it out there, you go right ahead.”

  Susan’s heart sank. She knew things were bad, but not this bad. What was he saying?

  He saw he’d made an opening and pushed through it. “You go right ahead, Susan. I did us a favor by bringing us here. It’s a small town, and that’s a good thing these days. Living expenses, particularly top-rated webschools, are cheaper. I don’t have to worry about presenting surveillance photos in divorce cases to prove infidelity here. I don’t have to wonder if I break down on the wrong side of town that I’ll get the crap beaten out of me. And I don’t have to play the fucking game anymore.”

  “But what about us, David?” She was close to tears now but determined to hold them back.

  “Why didn’t you say something when I first proposed this?”

  “I did! You brushed it aside because moving here was what you wanted to do. You’ve never given me half an ear of consideration over this whole issue.”

  “If you didn’t want to come here, you always had a choice.”

  She drew back, totally thrown by his revision of history. She had all but begged him not to bring them here, once even with a bawling Elizabeth at her side who didn’t want to leave her friends. But they were here all the same. “What choice?”

  “That one,” he said, pointing to the front door. “Volume, normal.” The commentators on the international stock and labor reports came to life again, speculating on speculation.

  “David, you—”

  “Volume, up.” The voices got louder.

  “You can’t just shut out the—”

  “Volume, up.”

  “. . . without the necessary capital investment up front,” the commentator was saying.

  “Why don’t you—”

  “Volume, up.”

  “. . . bringing better consumer prices from competition . . .”

  “Goddamn you!” she yelled, stalking
out of the room, hands clamped over her ears.

  When he heard her steps in the kitchen, he sighed heavily. “Volume, normal.”

  From behind her bedroom door, Elizabeth heard her dad mute the 3V. She knew what was coming, so she put her headphones on to finish her lessons in solitude. It was almost ten P.M. when she finally finished her homework. Her mother would be coming in soon to tell her it was bedtime.

  “Not enough time to play anything online,” her 3V voice complained. “Thanks a lot!”

  Elizabeth scrunched up her face, lay down on her bed, and curled up.

  “Would you like to go offline?” queried the computer.

  She blew out a breath, as if the air tasted bad.

  “What do you think?”

  The system didn’t even give her the satisfaction of being offended by her tone. “Please repeat.”

  “Go offline and video off.”

  “Thank you.”

  The low metallic hum faded and the room went black. It had gotten dark while she did her homework, and now the only light in the room had switched itself off. Last year the lack of light might’ve bothered her, but now she found it strangely comforting. It was like a blanket of black air that kept her safe. She thought about earlier and how her dad kept telling her she’d never amount to anything if she didn’t apply herself. She never really knew what he meant by that. She thought she was trying. She was sure of it.

  “Who cares? It’s no fun,” said her 3V voice.

  “It’s not supposed to be,” she whispered back. “It’s school.”

  “There, see? You’re not so dumb.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Michael will help you. He likes you, you know.”

  “No he doesn’t!” She felt funny about speaking out loud to herself. Her dad told her men in white coats would come and take her away if anyone heard her talking to herself. But she didn’t believe him. Not really.

  Would that be so bad if they did come and take you away? she wondered. “Michael doesn’t like me,” she said softly, though no one would hear her in her room, behind her closed door. “He tried to scare me today.”

  “Exactly. He likes you.”

  Now that made sense. Not.

  Thinking about Michael and his attempts to scare her made her think about Old Suzie’s house again. It was just up the street from her own home, a fact that both thrilled and frightened her. According to Michael, all the kids her age at least threw a rock through a window in the house when they moved into seventh grade, just to show they weren’t babies anymore. In the seventh grade, closets were no longer gateways to other dimensions full of misshapen monsters. Beds no longer hid long-armed creatures with claws for hands just waiting for children to fall asleep before reaching up, slithering their hook-hands under the covers, and grabbing their ankles to pull them down into whatever torture pits they lived in. At least, that was the theory. And the way to prove the theory, to make sure it was true? Take a rock in your hand and break the eyes of the house, knock them clean out of their sockets.

  “Then it can’t see you when you pass by, and if it can’t see you, it can’t find you at night,” teased her 3V voice.

  But Elizabeth didn’t believe that. She’d felt the empty eyes on her, seeing her from way back inside the lonely house. Spirits don’t need eyes to see, she thought.

  The more adventuresome, newly minted seventh graders actually went inside the house, into the monster’s lair, braving the cockroaches, rats, and moldy furniture. Some ran, others crept on tiptoe past the gauntlet of gray shapes scraping and pungent smells floating on a sea of spores, challenging any who dared disturb Old Suzie’s house.

  Because Old Suzie was dead.

  Chapter 3

  As she laid her head down on the pillow, Elizabeth recalled the stories Michael had told her about Old Suzie. The postman had found her sitting in her chair in the parlor, staring at an old television set. He’d knocked on the door first, then entered the house, calling “Mz. Suzie?” Her mailbox had been full of ads for stores seventy miles away in Houston and clearinghouse $10 million giveaways and guaranteed credit card offers.

  No one had seen Old Suzie for a while, which was how they preferred it if you’d asked them and they’d been honest. But the postman had smelled something. And it hadn’t smelled good.

  What he’d found was a two-week-old corpse, still sitting in a dilapidated, greenish recliner, staring gape-mouthed and slack-eyed at her “shows,” as she’d called them. No one really knew what she’d died of, but the story went around that it was something old people tend to die of a lot. Her position in the chair and the fact that dead bodies don’t always know they’re dead yet had forced her bowels and bladder to take their normal course. The hanging rot of flesh combined with the smell to impress an image on the postman he would not forget as long as he lived, which wasn’t long. He soon retired from the postal service and from life shortly thereafter.

  They brought in the fire department to move her. She was a big woman, muscle and fat mixed together as they often are in people who had once made their living with their backs but then reclined away everything hard work had built.

  Suzie had been a spinster widow for nearly three decades before she was found in her chair. Her husband had run off right after he’d successfully settled with his company regarding injuries sustained during the blowout of a natural gas well. Suzie had never remarried and made her own living mostly from driving a tractor for local cotton farmers who couldn’t afford to own their own equipment. When the larger, conglomerated farms took over production of the cotton fields, Old Suzie was out of business. She was close enough to retirement that she retreated to her home to live out the rest of her life watching reruns of Wheel of Fortune and As the World Turns.

  The house around her began to crumble, but Suzie lost her will to care. “My give-a-shitter’s broke,” she’d say to anyone who’d listen. The house had been the center for a small but prosperous cotton plantation 200 years before, though the land itself had been sold off in parcels over the last few decades. Its banisters were less oak than spruce, and it had no tall columns out front the way you might expect from seeing Gone with the Wind. Still, the house had a quiet elegance that reminded people in the little town of Hampshire, Texas, of a proud Southern past. The county’s historical preservation society had (around the turn of the 21st century, when Suzie still had interest in such things) gotten her permission to restore the house. But the effort had stopped partway due to lack of funding, and the sun continued to assault the old frame, bleaching and fracturing its naked wood. Still, as long as Suzie could get her mail and the local grocery store clerk could deliver the groceries without fear of falling through the porch, she was content to live inside the rot.

  After she died, the place stood empty. No one would buy it. Most thought it was a money pit, and rumors of strange occurrences kept the weak-hearted away. Suzie had no family, and her will had given the house and the rest of her meager estate to the town of Hampshire on the condition that the old house be left standing until someone else bought it for market value. This was her last demand of the community that had promised to preserve the old structure and failed to deliver. These last wishes confounded those who desired to demolish the house—the same crowd who’d opposed the house’s restoration in the first place—but the law was the law, and the court had upheld the will. Not even the great fire that had taken out much of the town years earlier had touched the weathering splendor of Old Suzie’s house.

  And so whenever people moved to Hampshire—which wasn’t often if you trusted the census, and too often if you asked the townsfolk—or made a move within the little town, which was never, the local real estate agent (who was also the county clerk) made some attempt at selling the place. But since no great commission was attached to it and it was such an eyesore to begin with, he never made much of an attempt and he never made a sale.

  So there the house still stood behind its mimosa and oak trees and too-tall
grass and weeds in the yard, a dare place for kids and a roach motel. Typical of the Victorian style of its heyday, the structure’s great open doorways at the front and back encouraged what little hot and humid breeze could be coaxed through the house in August. Nowadays, the two doorways formed the start and finish lines for children-cum-teenagers as they dashed out their dares to prove they weren’t scared anymore of closets and things under their beds and dead old ladies’ houses.

  Because no one really knew Old Suzie after she’d retreated to her television set, the local kids made up stories about her they passed down to one another, usually in the dark or around campfires on boy scout cookouts. Old Suzie, they said, was a tough old witch who wore a cowboy hat instead of a pointy one and who loved to play tricks on children on Halloween. The mailman had died so soon after finding her, they said, because he had disturbed her shows. She had finally gotten her wish and transferred her spirit into the TV through incantations and spells, and by finding her and having her corpse carted away, the mailman had made it impossible for her to ever reenter her body again. So she’d killed him, the stories said. And now her spirit moaned on the wind as it crept through the house, her broken eyes watching from jagged windows, waiting for someone to move in with a new television, her means to escape her own haunting.

  This was more or less how Michael told the story to Elizabeth, and that same story, more or less, had been told to him by his older brother. Lying in bed and thinking of the house, Old Suzie, and Michael, Elizabeth had let her fear of the school monitor’s report fade away. The sheets felt cool, the pillow soft beneath her head. She wondered if this is how it felt to lay in a coffin, on display for mourners. She’d been to several funerals for family members she barely knew and thought it funny, this ritual of painted people on display. Were they comfortable in their narrow beds, their heads resting on satin pillows, while the dearly undeparted wept over them? She wondered if anyone had come to Old Suzie’s funeral. Slowly but surely her own fatigue overtook her, and Elizabeth began to dream of what death must be like and Old Suzie’s house.