by Laird Barron
Thud. Someone struck his door with a fist. He reached over and tried the lamp, but the switch clicked, dead, so he fumbled through the apartment, flipping other useless light switches as he went. The air pressed him, dank and smothering as a foul, wet blanket.
Royce navigated the minefield of his apartment without breaking anything and staggered into the door and almost opened it before he sobered enough to remember where he was and who might be on the other side: corrupt government agents; terrorists; bandits; any of a dozen kinds of riffraff who might mean him bodily harm. He knocked a shade from a lamp, gripped it in his left hand. He located the peephole by touch and screwed his eye against the opening, not expecting to see much, if anything. A trickle of yellow light suffused the hall, its origin probably the threshold of some open apartment door. Someone wept, their faint moans emanating from a hidden source. The sobs were muffled.
He unlocked the door and stuck his head out. One of his neighbors, the German software designer, a couple doors down and across the way, had indeed set a paper lantern on the mat in the hall and Royce guessed the man probably stumbled off to wake the superintendent. The German was a can-do sort, the sort to burn the midnight oil. He'd been around since Hong Kong went back to the Chinese and was a veteran of these all too frequent LRA adventures.
Precisely at the outer ring of lamp light, a big lumpy sack slid and bumped along the floor, disappearing into the dark. Slippers rasped against tile and the sob sounded again, farther away, descending into the depths of the building. A man on another floor shouted foreign curses that echoed down through the grates and vents; these were answered in kind in a groundswell of slamming doors and broom handles rapped against pipes, grievances kindled by the humidity and heat, the ungodliness of the hour.
"Elvira?" Even as Royce invoked the name, chills raced along his arms; he clenched the muscles of his buttocks. He tiptoed a few steps down the hallway, compelled against his better judgment. The passage seemed to expand and contract with his pulse, as if he were being squeezed through an artery. He stooped to retrieve a wig where it had fallen upon the dingy floor. The wig was lush and black in his hands and smelled of rank cologne and cigarettes. The unwholesome intimacy of touching it sent thrills through his already weak stomach.
He went to bed and was asleep in moments despite, or perhaps in response to, the bizarre and somewhat shocking encounters of the evening.
Shelley Jackson, warm and slick and hungry as death, slipped under the covers. She kissed him and worked her hand beneath the waistband of his pajamas. She rolled atop him. Her eyes were lidless stones. Her throat bulged, impossibly bulbous, a pearly sac. She croaked softly and her frigid tongue unspooled into his mouth before she brought a bag down to cover his head. When the rough burlap closed over Royce's face, he inhaled to scream and Coyne, who replaced Shelley Jackson somehow, put a sticky finger against his lips, a shushing gesture that communicated a world of terror. They were mashed together, their breaths humid in the suffocating enclosure, the tightening ring. Coyne's face was also sticky; it seeped and ran like syrup from the broken skin of a peach.
Shh, Coyne whispered. For God's sake.
Royce clawed at the bag, woke thrashing and half-crazed with terror.
The next morning Royce noticed odd smudges on the outer panel of his apartment door; distorted imprints, as if someone had stamped his or her muddy face against the wood. One was near the top of the frame; two more below his knees. He grabbed a camera and snapped a few shots, such was his disquiet. After, he rang the front desk and a custodian soon arrived with a bucket and a sponge to wipe the unseemly marks away. It took the man over an hour of diligent scrubbing. The marks were stubborn.
Royce visited Shea and mentioned he'd enjoy meeting Ms. Jackson. Shea guffawed and said she wasn't exactly hard to get, but here was an invitation to a company soiree, all the same. Jackson would be there to smooth the way with the Chinese, who, like men anywhere, were amenable to a pretty face and a flash of cleavage.
Meanwhile, lunch with the Coynes proved a bizarre affair. Royce arrived a few minutes early with a bottle of wine and a bouquet of cheap flowers he'd picked up at the grocery. He said hello to Mary Coyne, who answered the door in a bulky sweater and fleece pants. "I'm frightfully chilled in this climate," she said, indicating her attire, and indeed her hands were cold in his. "Bad circulation. Since I was a girl I've had bad circulation. Just terrible. A condition, you see. My, aren't you handsome today."
Royce wore a polo shirt and cargo pants. He'd taken time to get his mustache trimmed at the salon and spent several minutes rehearsing sincerity before the mirror. In his experience, elderly women were readily disarmed by young men who dressed and smelled nice. Polite, well-groomed lads were considered trustworthy. He also wore the wig he'd taken from the hall and was mystified by his compulsion to do so. His own hair was dark, and, yes, thinning a bit at the crown, yet not unattractive considering he kept in decent shape with light calisthenics, a few laps here and there on the treadmill at the gym.
God, it's started. Cuckoo time. Yeah, yeah—it's happened before. You really go bugshit on these missions, man. That job on the oil refinery. You wore the Slav's corduroy jacket for a month. And that one guy, the dude from Arkansas, you swiped his cowboy boots and the buckle with the razorback. Why do you do shit like that? It's the chameleon trip, isn't it? How did you score their personal belongs, by the way? They ran out on their jobs, just lit out without a goodbye or screw you. Funny how that works . . .Where do suppose this wig comes from? I'm sure it'll be a surprise.
It was hardly just the wig. Only last week he'd come across an expensive wristwatch and a class ring inside his safe and had no idea how they got there. When he worked out these items had belonged to Ted K., the boring guy who'd shared his flight into Hong Kong, he felt ill again, just like he'd been sick the previous night. He managed to resist the urge to wear the ring and the watch, and tossed them into a Dumpster instead. He considered, and not for the first time, it might be wise to visit a therapist and discuss whatever subconscious demons were eating him. The main reason he didn't was primarily because he already knew what the doctor would say—a man could hardly expect to live a double life without facing a few consequences.
Mary accepted the flowers, exclaiming it wasn't necessary. "We're only having lunch, for goodness sake!" She rushed into the kitchen to pare the stems and get them into a vase, calling out that Brendan was on the deck. Royce followed the odor of charcoal and sizzling beef to the terrace where Coyne turned fat slabs of beef on the grill with a big prong.
Coyne handed him a beer from the ice chest and waved at a patio chair. He squinted at Royce, and frowned. "Is that a wig?" And when Royce neither confirmed nor denied this, he frowned again and let the subject drop, although he shot odd glances for the remainder of the afternoon, his expression a mixture of petulance and fascination.
They sat and drank beer and smoked cigarettes and made small talk about the weather and work, until the rest of the lunch party arrived. Mrs. Ward slouched into the apartment in a red and gold mandarin gown that clung and cleaved to her bulging thighs, the rounded curve of her belly. Her rose-lipped mouth grimaced and gaped, and slightly crossed eyes twitched with astigmatism.
Royce carefully shook her fleshy hand and tried not to stare at the wattles of her neck or the wen on her chin.
"Mm-hrmm, my you are certainly a handsome one," Mrs. Ward said, and her voice slid forth, gravelly and low, descending to a murmur at the end of the sentence. She licked her lips and grinned with half her mouth, lending her the aspect of someone who'd suffered a minor stroke. "Lila, isn't he a handsome boy? A bit long in the tooth for a boy, but you take my meaning."
"Why, my stars, yes." Lila Tuttle emerged from Mrs. Ward's shadow, a moon orbiting its planet; frail and wrinkled and bent as a twig, she smiled ceaselessly and with vacuous conviction. She wore a shawl wrapped around her head and clutched an ancient handbag to her bony breast. "Lovely to meet you, Mr. Hawthorne. Lov
ely, lovely indeed." She pecked a lock of his hair with a long, hooked nail the color of a chicken's foot, and tittered.
The merry group retired to the kitchenette for plates of ribs and steins of Sapporo beer Coyne had imported from Japan. None of the elderly women was particularly fastidious in regards to tucking into the meal. Mrs. Ward gnawed at the bones with an almost sexual intensity that called to mind the hoary old painting of Saturn chewing his hapless children to bits. Mrs. Tuttle and Mrs. Coyne followed suit. This concordance of slurping and smacking in lieu of conversation turned his stomach.
"What are you reading today, Mrs. Coyne?" Royce said by way of distraction from the unsavory relish of the diners. He noted the Coynes kept many books on hand; dozens of paperbacks and magazines were scattered about the apartment; romances and travelogues on the main, and older, clothbound tomes stacked on a floor-to-ceiling rack in the living room beside the television. He recognized the faux mahogany shelf as the exact model he himself had purchased from an upscale department store.
Mrs. Coyne and Mrs. Tuttle twittered and tee-heed over some romantic claptrap they'd been perusing. Then, Mrs. Ward said, "I'm enjoying Journey to the West. Have you ever read that one, Mr. Hawthorne?"
"It sounds familiar."
"Mrmm-hmm, a classic, I daresay. My father was something of a bibliophile. He worked for the great museums in England and Germany. They sent him to the four corners after antique manuscripts. A few he kept for his library at home, and some of these he read aloud to me when I was a child. His copy of Journey to the West is exceedingly rare, perhaps an original. Father related it to me in Mandarin, no less."
Coyne snorted and Royce could tell the man was more than a touch drunk from all the Sapporo he'd been downing. "I find that difficult to swallow, Mrs. Ward. An extant copy of Journey to the West would fetch a fortune on the collectors' market. Surely you'd have cashed in by now."
"You speak Mandarin?" Royce said quickly. "And what else, I wonder."
Mrs. Ward shrugged and smiled into her napkin. "I dabble here and there; enough to get by in the country if I'm ever stranded on the mainland. Are you married, Mr. Hawthorne?"
"Divorced. The traveling life doesn't agree with everyone." Actually, Royce had lived with Jenny, the future orthodontist, for several years, but he'd never actually gone so far as marriage. He was interested to see her reaction. That, and when it came to his personal history, he was a habitual liar. "Why do you ask?"
"No reason, really. And children? You don't seem the type, but then who knows?"
"I hate children."
"Do tell. Don't we all, eh?" Mrs. Ward licked a bone; her tongue lolled overlong and came to a point. She probed and teased forth the marrow. Her face seemed a feeble mask slipped over the crude geometry of some atavistic visage. Her inflection remained neutral. "Not much call for children in this modern world, I suppose. Nor marriage. The need for fecundity has passed into twilight, yea."
"I have three daughters," Mrs. Tuttle said. She counted her crooked fingers: "and eight, wait, nine grandchildren. Angels, they are. Mary?"
"Only Brendan. He was quite enough, I assure you." Mrs. Coyne crinkled her cheeks to soften the barb. Royce thought he glimpsed a darker current beneath kindly seams and tender wrinkles, a flex of the iris like a shard of ice heeling over into the depths. It was not difficult to envision the source of her jovial bitterness; perhaps a deep, ragged cesarean scar, a white fissure ripped along the once-tanned axis of her bathing beauty abdomen. Baby Brendan would've consumed her best years; frightened away the pretty men, repaid her maternal generosity with shriveled breasts whence his greedy mouth had sucked dry all semblance of taut youth.
"Is that why you've journeyed to the East, Mrs. Ward? To free your sisters from the yoke of institutional patriarchy?" Royce said, averting his gaze from Mary Coyne's flaccid chest. He shuddered at the unbidden image of infant Brendan feasting there; a fat, red leech.
"Watch yourself, dear Brendan. This one's a tricky devil." Mrs. Ward patted Coyne's arm, although the man was so deep into his cups Royce doubted he understood the implicit warning.
Can she know? How in the hell could she? Royce gulped beer to cover his discomfort and confusion. "I'm hardly a devil, Mrs. Ward. A humble cog in the great machine and no more."
"We know our hell-dwellers, and you are certainly one. Girls?"
"Oh, yes," Mrs. Tuttle said and Mrs. Coyne echoed the sentiment. "A handsome white devil!"
"Don't worry, dear," Mrs. Ward said. "Nothing personal—all white men are devils here. Especially the British and the Canadians. You aren't a Canuck, thank heavens."
"Yeah, thank God for something," Royce said, relaxing slightly.
Lunch petered out after that. Coyne brooded and the old women nattered about cards, shopping and whose kids were doing what. Royce excused himself. Mrs. Ward took his elbow at the door. She said, "You should do more than window shop."
"Excuse me?" Royce said.
"Miss Jackson. The girl in 333. She's very charming. You should take a chance. I think the two of you have common interests. She's a bird watcher."
"I don't understand what you mean, Mrs. Ward." Royce kept smiling, kept playing it cool. What the hell is your game, lady?
"Don't you?" A shadow crossed her face. Her eyes congealed in their sockets. "Try to join us at one of our weeklies. Miss Jackson has promised to come make the acquaintance of my circle."
"Oh, um, sure. I'll have to drop by, then."
"Yes. Please do that." She released his arm and extended him a motherly pat on the cheek. Her thick, sharp thumbnail pressed lightly into the flesh under the hinge of his jaw and Royce's head swam with the childhood memory of a butcher shop, and the butcher in his ruddy apron sizing up the raw red meat, slapping it with his left hand, bringing the cleaver with the right, and whistling a wry, cheerless tune while customers waited in a line, batting the occasional circling fly with their newspapers, their parasols or panama hats.
Royce said goodbye, and as he escaped into the hall, Mrs. Ward leaned out and said, "Safe travels. Oh, and Mr. Hawthorne, do be careful about answering your door at night, hmm? In this place, you never know who might come calling." She shut the door on his answer.
He'd been combing his stacks of video and photographic material in a mindless evening ritual held over from one of his first cases, when he turned up a cartridge labeled CHU/6. Chu's series of surveillance tapes ended at number five. Royce scratched his head and ran the feed through his television so he could relax in his armchair with the lights turned down.
Right away, he decided he'd definitely made some odd labeling error.
This wasn't a surveillance tape, but rather a homemade documentary. The documentary was filmed on a handheld and the picture shook as the camera operator walked. An old, old heavyset Chinese woman in a nurse's pinafore was giving the unseen narrator a tour of what seemed to be an abandoned sanitarium. She carried a flashlight and swept its watery beam over ceilings that leaked plaster and stringers of wiring. Piles of debris littered the corridor. The corridor was notched by small white iron doors. She stopped at each door, pointed and muttered into the camera. Dubbing was poor and her mouth and the sound from her mouth moved at different speeds.
"Di Yu," the nurse said in a hoarse monotone. "Di Yu. Di Yu."
When the camera zoomed in on her pointing finger, one could resolve metal placards with lettering. 2: CHAMBER OF GRINDING, said one. 8: CHAMBER OF MOUNTAIN OF KNIVES, said another. "Di Yu. Di Yu," the nurse said. Her face was white and soft as dough, except for her eyes and mouth, which were black. "Di Yu. Di Yu." She came to a larger door set into a slab of masonry. The door was barred and heavily corroded by rust. Its placard read: BLACK SLOTH HELL.
"Aunt CJ." Royce was certain. That was his dearly departed Aunt Carole Joyce under the chalky paint. No, no, that wasn't right. It was Mrs. Ward, how could he have missed the malice in her eyes, her awkward gait?
A jumble of misaligned frames heralded a scene change, which s
lowly resolved as the interior of a room. Darkness prevailed except for a glass cube spotlighted against a black backdrop. The cube was a museum display on the order Royce recognized from childhood visits to the Met, the kind of massive box intended to house dinosaur exhibits. Shadow-figures assembled at the base of the display, dwarfed by its immensity, the sheer girth of the specimen preserved within. He'd seen the animal on a grade school field trip, had seen it since in a dozen evil dreams, this father of cold sweats and night terrors. The thing reared in excess of twenty-feet high; it might've snapped the back of an elephant, torn the tops from trees. Its pelt was oily and black. Its claws were also black and hooked like daggers. The metal tag on the exhibit said: Megatherium. S. America, ca Pleistocene epoch.
There was a difference from Royce's personal beast, however. This relic, this patent fabrication, a paleontologist's reconstruction with its artificial fur and sawdust stuffing, was a hybrid of the museum curiosity he'd seen in the tour group with all the other bored sixth graders. Vaguely toadlike, somehow obscene; its shape altered for the worse as shadows moved across its monstrous bulk.
The camera swooped in tight. Dozens of naked men and women pressed against the base, hands splayed and grasping. Their skins sagged and drooped from the relentless gravity of age. More ancients shuffled and crawled from the outer darkness to prostrate themselves before the idol, and in their eagerness to worship, they pressed the first rank and crushed them until blood shot against the glass. The petitioners moaned and their cries echoed the bestial croaks he'd heard in the night outside his door.