by Paul Finch
When we reached the main road, she asked if I was hungry and without waiting for an answer headed for the first of several Turkish restaurants that lined the high street.
She tore at a shish kebab with her teeth as I tried to keep pace, then we bought some beers from the off-licence across the road and took them back to hers, where we drank them slouched on the sofa in front of the television. Without warning, she stood up and put out her hand. I let her pull me to my feet and followed her into the bedroom, where she quickly undressed and got into bed. I looked down at her, becoming aware of the Observer's Book of Birds on her bedside table.
"I just need to go to the bathroom," I said.
As I passed through the kitchen I looked at the two doors on the left. My eye was drawn to the stained door, which in the light from the window appeared a dark rusty red. For the first time since I had been coming to the flat, this door had a key in its lock. I walked on into the bathroom, where I emptied my bladder and quickly cleaned my teeth before going back through the kitchen and on to the landing, where the loose floorboard creaked beneath my feet.
As soon as I got into bed, she sat up and knelt over me, then kissed me. I felt her teeth pressing behind her lips. I kept thinking about the book that was within arm's reach, plus my stomach had started to ache, presumably from the meat-heavy meal. We soon finished and she got up to go to the bathroom while I reached over and picked up the book. The cover flap had been moved forward about ten pages. I glanced at the nightingale on the left-hand page, then turned to the red-backed shrike on the right. I read: 'This summer visitor from Africa is well named "Butcher Bird", as it butchers birds, mice and insects, and impales them on thorns and spikes, known as its "larder".' I heard the creak of the loose floorboard and quickly closed the book and put it back.
She went to sleep within minutes of getting back into bed, whereas I lay awake for what seemed like hours, unable to relax.
The pain in my gut woke me in the night. I thought at first it was serious, but as I came fully awake I realised it had not got any worse. I could hear her breathing, low and regular. I got out of bed and walked softly out of the room. I stepped around the loose floorboard and entered the kitchen. I went into the bathroom but failed to make anything happen that might have eased my stomach ache. Instead I returned to the kitchen and stared at the door to the larder. I looked at the key in the lock. The next thing I knew I was holding the rough-textured key between my finger and thumb, turning it, then twisting the door handle.
As I started opening the door I heard a noise-not the squeak of a hinge that needed oiling, but the familiar creak of the loose floorboard on the landing.
THE VEILS
Ian Rogers
Drew was asleep when the phone rang, half-awake when he picked it up, and full-on wide-eyed alert when he heard Lily's trembling voice say, "It's coming for me, Drew. It's turning red. I have to go. I'm sorry."
The line was dead before he had the chance to say anything in reply.
Lily was dead by the time he got to her apartment.
The doctor told him later that it probably wouldn't have mattered if Drew and his sister had lived next door to each other rather than on opposite sides of the city. Lily hadn't just nicked her wrists with a razor and waited for the EMTs to arrive. She had slashed her arms to ribbons with a butcher knife and climbed into a hot bath. This wasn't a cry for help, he told Drew. This was someone who wanted to die.
"But then why did she call me?" Drew asked.
The doctor shook his head. "Maybe to say good-bye."
Drew didn't believe it. Goodbye was the one thing Lily didn't say on the phone.
****
Drew didn't know many of the people at the funeral. He had made all the arrangements himself-their parents had died in a car accident seven years ago and were, in fact, buried in the plot next to his sister's. They had some other relatives, but none who were close or close by. With the exception of a few of Drew's co-workers at the newspaper, the people who came to the church and the graveside service were strangers. People who had seen the obit notice, he presumed, and some others he had called from the address book he found in Lily's apartment. The apartment he'd have to clean out, since there was no one else to do it.
At the end of the service, some of the strangers introduced themselves and shook Drew's hand and offered their condolences. Some were Lily's friends, a few were people she had worked with over the years-Drew didn't know any of them. He and Lily had never been close. They talked on the phone every month or so, swapped birthday and Christmas cards. It was not so much a relationship as it was touching base, as if to make sure the other person was still in the world, still alive.
Drew didn't feel too badly about that-at least that's what he told himself. None of the people at the service seemed to have been close to Lily, either. There was no boyfriend- at least none of the men identified themselves as such-and even among her friends and co-workers, there were a few sniffles, but no real tears. No one broke down or threw themselves on the coffin asking Why? Why? Why?
One strange thing, though:
After the service was over and everyone else had left, Drew was walking back to his car and saw a man standing on a hill on the far side of the cemetery. His face was dark, like he was wearing sunglasses or a hat. His arm came up and pointed straight at Drew. Then he turned and walked away, disappearing over the other side of the hill.
****
"I don't know why it's bothering me so much," Drew said.
"Probably because she was your sister," Harris said.
They were in the ground-floor deli where a lot of the people from the newspaper went for lunch. Drew and Harris sat in a corner booth with their sandwiches lying untouched before them. Harris worked in layout. Drew supposed they were friends, although they didn't do much outside of work except grab the occasional beer. But there was no one else he could talk to about this.
"It's more than that," Drew said. "It's not just that Lily's gone. It's like, in a way, she isn't gone, couldn't be gone. That this entire thing is a mistake, and the moment I look around I'll see Lily come walking into the room."
"They're sure it was suicide?"
Drew nodded. "It doesn't make any sense."
"I don't think it's supposed to." Harris looked down at his sandwich without picking it up. "Everything I know about mental illness comes from a university course I took eight years ago, but what I remember is that people don't always show signs when they're suicidal. Sometimes they seem perfectly happy. Did you notice anything different about how Lily was acting lately?"
"No," Drew said." But I didn't see her that often. We'd get together for dinner or lunch maybe once or twice a year. After my parents died..." He shook his head. "You'd think something like that would've made us closer, but it had the opposite effect on us. And that's the problem. I can't tell if something about this situation is actually wrong, or if I only feel this way because I'm trying to find something wrong. I didn't know her, Harris-I didn't know my own fucking sister-so I have no idea if it was completely normal for her to kill herself."
Drew's voice had started to rise, and several people in the restaurant turned to look at him. Harris stared hard at them until they looked away, then he turned back to Drew.
"You feel guilty," he said.
Drew frowned. "Are you asking me or telling me?"
"You tell me."
"Fucked if I know. All I do know is that there's something... wrong about this situation."
"The whole thing is wrong," Harris said. "Your sister killed herself, and you were the one who found her. If you didn't think something was wrong, I'd be worried about you, pal." He hesitated. "Should I worry?"
Drew didn't say anything.
****
Harris had offered to help Drew clean out his sister's apartment, but Drew said he was fine. He wasn't really fine-in fact, he didn't think he was even in the same time zone as fine, but it felt like something he needed to do on his own.
Then he got to her office.
Standing in the doorway, Drew realised two things. The first was that even though he'd been to Lily's apartment on several occasions, he had never once been in this room. The second was that this was clearly the place where Lily spent all of her time.
The room had that lived-in quality that Drew saw on a daily basis at the newspaper: cubicles adorned with photos and calendars and stuffed animals and action figures, whatever it took to make it seem like anything other than what it was-a place of work.
Lily's office was like those cubicles except on a grander scale, and yet in a way it was completely different. The room was clearly the central hub of the apartment-from the walls covered with photographs to the discarded take-out food trays that cluttered every surface. She had done a lot to make it her own place, but by the same token it was not a room that exuded a sense of warmth or homeliness. In fact, although Drew was reluctant to admit it-because doing so would imply that he didn't know Lily nearly as well as he thought he did-the office had the air of an obsessed, overworked mind. Possibly an unhealthy one.
But was there really any 'possibly' about it? Drew wondered as he looked down the hallway to the bathroom where Lily had died.
It was impossible to say for certain, especially now that she was gone. Lily had worked as a freelance graphic designer, so on the one hand it was only logical that her home office would look like a college kid's dorm room. But on the other hand, there was this other, darker quality that made Drew extremely uncomfortable.
It was the photos that bothered him the most. Even for someone who worked in graphic design, he thought this was overkill. All four walls were completely covered in photos. Drew walked around the perimeter of the room, looking at them all, but he couldn't discern any pattern, any rhyme or reason as to why Lily would have chosen these particular images to paper her walls.
Then, on his second pass around the office, he noticed two things about the photographs. One, they all showed large groups of people, crowds on city streets, people in parks, malls, stadiums. And two, he noticed that in each of the photos, a single person, a woman, had been circled in red marker.
The same woman.
****
Before he left that night, Drew forced himself to go into the bathroom where Lily had taken her own life. He made himself look at the tub. The porcelain was white; he told himself the pink stains around the edge were only in his imagination. He had cleaned the tub himself, his hands burning from the bleach for hours afterward.
His gaze fell to the floor where he had found the bloody butcher knife. It had been lying next to the cordless phone Lily had used to call him before she died.
It's coming for me, Drew. It's turning red. I have to go. I'm sorry.
What had been coming for her? That was the question, and Drew wasn't sure there was an answer. Not one that made any sense. The thing or things that had been after Lily probably only existed in her mind. It's turning red. What did that mean? Probably the water in the tub. The blood leaving her body from the dozens of cuts she had inflicted upon herself. He'd seen them when he hauled her out of the water. He remembered how frightened he was, not because the cuts had been bleeding, but because they hadn't. They'd looked like tiny mouths, some of them smiling, some of them frowning, as if they couldn't quite decide if this turn of events was for the best or not.
Drew turned out the light and walked back down the hall to Lily's office. He took a closer look at the photos on the walls, and noticed that, in addition to the mystery woman, Lily had also circled two mystery men who appeared in several of the pictures. None of the three appeared in the same picture, either all together or in pairs. Drew assumed Lily had taken the pictures here in Toronto, but he supposed they could've been taken anywhere. Or by anyone.
By the time he left that night, he was no closer to understanding why Lily had put the photos on her walls or why she had singled out these three people.
Maybe there was no reason. Maybe she had simply gone crazy.
Drew wished he could say he knew Lily better than that, but he couldn't.
****
It took Drew three more days to clean out his sister's apartment. The only room he left untouched was the office. He wanted Harris to see it first. He asked him to come over one day after work.
"You've never been here before?" Harris asked, standing in the doorway.
"I'd been to her apartment, but never in her office."
"I can see why." Harris wandered around, looking at the photos on the walls. "This... this is not the sort of thing you'd want other people to see."
"I don't know what you'd call it," Drew said. "A collage?"
Harris shook his head. "This isn't a collage, Drew. This is an obsession." He loosened his tie. "Frankly, it scares me a bit. It's like being inside..." He trailed off, his cheeks flushing bright red.
"Inside the mind of a sick person," Drew finished. "It's okay. I thought the same thing." He went over to one wall and pointed at a few individual photos. "See how some of the people in these are circled?"
Harris came over. "Yeah. They're like..." He shook his head.
"What?" Drew asked, interested.
Harris didn't reply right away. Eventually he said, "I was going to say they look like surveillance photos. You know, police stuff, like on a stakeout or something."
"You think Lily was spying on these people?" The thought had already crossed Drew's mind. "Stalking them maybe?"
Harris shrugged. "I honestly can't say. But I don't think so. Some of these shots are candid, but most of them seem kind of... I don't know... staged? Like they're..." He trailed off again.
"What?"
"I don't know. They're definitely odd, though."
Drew nodded. That much they agreed on.
"Would you mind if I borrowed a few?" Harris asked. "There's something kind of familiar about these shots, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I'd like to show some of them to Billy Wurtz."
"Yeah, sure," Drew said. Billy Wurtz was one of the newspaper's on-staff photographers. "Just don't tell him where they came from, okay?"
Harris gave him a sympathetic smile. "Sure thing."
Drew said, "You want to know the really strange thing about these photos?"
"What's that?"
"Lily was a graphic designer, and she worked with photos all the time, but I never knew her to be much of a photographer herself."
"Maybe she started taking pictures as a hobby," Harris said. "You said you weren't that close to her. It's possible she got interested in photography and just never mentioned it to you."
Drew nodded. "It's possible. But you want to know something even stranger? I've been through this entire apartment, from one end to the other, and I never found a single camera."
****
Drew was a financial reporter at the Globe and Mail, and while his work was far from stimulating, it was at the very least distracting. So, in the days following his sister's death, he immersed himself in his work, while at night he returned to her apartment and spent a few hours going through her office, searching through papers in her filing cabinets, files on her computer, trying to find something that would help him understand her death. Her suicide.
But would he be able to find anything that truly made sense out of what was, to most people, a senseless act?
He didn't know, but he kept searching.
****
One night, Drew noticed the pictures in Lily's office had changed.
He had come to a point where he'd decided enough was enough, that even if he had to live with the mystery of Lily's death for the rest of his life, it was time to finish cleaning out her office and move on.
He started by boxing up Lily's computer. Then he moved on to her books and files. He saved the photos for last, not because it would ta
ke a great deal of work to remove them from the walls, but because they represented the last piece of Lily in the place... even if they only showed how mentally distressed she had become. Once they were gone, so would she.
"She's already gone," Drew told the empty room. "So just do it."
He went over to the wall, gripped one of the photos by the corner and started to peel it off the wall.
Then he stopped.
The picture was different.
No, it was the same one, but something in it had changed.
He couldn't tell what it was at first, then he saw it. It was a shot of people on a busy city street. The hustle and bustle of a work day in some anonymous city that could have been Toronto or New York or Chicago or Hong Kong. One of the women in the crowd had been circled in red-the same one that been circled in several other photos that decorated the office walls. Except in this shot, the woman's face was darker, as if a shadow had fallen across it. Even though there was nothing in the picture to cast such a shadow.
Drew thought it might have just been his imagination, but he knew that wasn't the case. He had been staring at these photos intently the past few days, especially the people Lily had circled. Their faces were always bright and clear; it was how he was able to tell it was the same ones in every shot.
He looked at one of the other photos, this one showing a line of people standing at a bus stop. One of the men was circled-Drew had come to think of him as Curly because of his tight brown curls. In the picture his face was dark, as if a cloud was hovering over his head. His face shouldn't have been dark; there was a streetlight shining down on the whole group of people waiting for their bus, and all of their faces were starkly illuminated.
Drew went across the room to a photo taken in a city park-High Park? Central Park? Who knew? In the shot a pair of joggers trotted down a winding path, while in the background a crew-cut man on a bench fed some pigeons at his feet. The man's hand was raised in mid-toss, and a spray of breadcrumbs hung in the air. His face, circled in Lily's tell-tale red marker, was also noticeably darker than before.