McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  The woman came out of nowhere. She slammed against the window, her two palms pressed against the pane, blue. Her face was blue, almost black, lips pulled back to reveal a gaping, toothless mouth. She wore the same dress that Jennifer wore.

  Jennifer screamed and pushed herself away from the window.

  “Jesus!” Maureen looked at her like she was crazy. “What the hell?”

  “Didn’t you see the woman?”

  “What woman?”

  “She was wearing . . . oh God, she was wearing this dress!”

  Jennifer began to sob dryly. She reached behind her neck and scrabbled, frantically, to release the hooks. Her breath felt thinned down to the finest threads.

  “Calm down. Jennifer.” Maureen yanked Jennifer’s arms downward.

  “Maureen, take this thing off of me.”

  “Of course,” Maureen said. “But first look in the mirror.”

  “I don’t want to look in the mirror!” Jennifer hissed. “Unhook me.”

  “First you need to look in the mirror,” Maureen said. “You’ll still be scared if you don’t.”

  Jennifer was shaking, almost hyperventilating. Normally she was the one in control—no, always she was the one in control— but now Maureen had the upper hand. It was the slightest shift of power, but it unnerved Jennifer; it signaled to her that something between them had irreversibly changed.

  Maureen nodded toward the mirror. Jennifer turned, slowly, one eye on the window, feeling that woman was watching them. The window remained empty, save for the snow that the wind whisked into a looming, transparent shape and flung against the window. Jennifer laughed.

  “Why are you laughing?” Maureen asked.

  “Nothing. I’m just . . . I thought the snow was a ghost.”

  “You’re really wound up,” Maureen said. “I’ve never seen you so wound up.”

  “You have no idea.” Jennifer told Maureen her, admittedly, insane suspicions about Helen—that she was involved with their father’s death, that she was an impostor, that she’d sent them on this wild goose chase and possibly wanted them dead. As she spoke, she noticed Maureen growing more and more remote, her face drifting into shadow; she threw repeated glances at the closet, at the window, as though perhaps they were being eavesdropped upon.

  “Crazy, right?” Jennifer concluded. “I told you, you had no idea.”

  Maureen smiled nervously. “Let’s get you out of this dress and into bed,” she suggested.

  “But I haven’t looked in the mirror,” Jennifer said.

  “Forget about that,” Maureen said sharply. “You just need to get some sleep.”

  Maureen started to unbutton the hooks of the dress. Jennifer could feel her hands shaking against her shoulder blades.

  “No,” Jennifer said, pulling away. “No, let me look.”

  Jennifer walked over to the mirror. The flame on the lamp chattered weakly along the tip of the blackened wick. Still, it threw a pallid light, enough to see her reflection, if she leaned over the dresser, close to the mirror. A mixed message: her eyes were stricken, oblong, her skin a muted gauzy gold. She appeared both more ethereally attractive and more crimped and neurotic than she’d possibly ever appeared; the effect was foreign, pleasing.

  She was so transfixed by her reflection that at first she didn’t hear Maureen moaning in the background.

  “No, oh, no . . .”

  She caught Maureen’s eye in the mirror, and followed it downward to her neck, clamped beneath the satin and the string of beads, her chest.

  Blackness spread. In the available light, it looked like an avid shadow, a creeping void made visible.

  Jennifer peered down at the dress. Nothing. It was white, stainless.

  “Maureen?”

  Jennifer stood in the middle of the room. A noise. She snapped her neck in the direction of the window. That woman, that cat-eyed woman. She scratched at the window as her face, fading in and out of the faint light thrown by the oil lamps, shifted and changed, bones moving under the skin, mouth lengthening, until she was no longer the cat-eyed woman; she was the spitting image of the one live person Jennifer had only ever seen in mirrors—herself.

  It was then that the dress began to burn. The sleeves cinched in tight, the waist, the neck, making her gag. The seams, already prickly, intensified their irritation until she felt like her arms were being torn open by a serrated knife. The woman in the window was scratching and scratching—no, in fact, she was beckoning. Come here. Come here.

  She ran in her bare feet through the dark living room and out the door. The snow was as cold as the burning sensation inside her dress; impossible to determine which was more painful, or differently painful. It was too much of one thing, too much of another. Still snow fell from the sky and whipped around her in bundles that looked like bodies and then people—a hovering parade of women in white dresses, closing in on her from both peripheries and moaning like a chant, an incantation, an expression of antique, weary misery. The women whisked her up the hill, up and up behind the house through an empty zone in the trees, and her feet were so cold, so senseless, that the air felt no different from the frozen ground. She was running through space now but the women stayed with her, they spiraled around her like twisting bedsheets as she dropped and dropped and dropped.

  She awoke in an attic. She knew it was an attic because of the unfinished ceiling, the rafters, the steeply pitched roof. The wall to her left was all brightness, a huge window. It hurt to look at it.

  Jennifer was achy; she was surprised to find herself wearing a plaid kilt and a green sweater, a pair of hard brown shoes that numbed her feet. She descended the stairs into a gaudily wall-papered hallway, empty save for a table and a black phone. I’ll call Maureen, she thought, but the phone receiver wouldn’t come free of the cradle; the two were fused together, one piece of metal, clumsily painted. There were no numbers on the dial.

  She walked down the main staircase into a living room, where a fake fire, made of sharp bits of orange construction paper, “burned” in the fireplace.

  “Hello?” Jennifer called out.

  No answer. She walked through a study, lined with books that were also fake—the shelf was a single strip of painted spines. She called out a second time. The house appeared deserted. At least, she thought it was deserted, until she entered the kitchen. A man sat at the table, reading a paper. There was a grapefruit on a plate, a cup and saucer. A woman stood by the stove wearing an apron, a dress with a flared skirt, ugly brown shoes similar to Jennifer’s. She was frozen in place, stirring a pot. There was no smell of food.

  “Excuse me,” Jennifer said. No one said anything. Nobody moved. She crept closer to the woman by the stove. Her hair fell over her face. Jennifer moved closer, put a hand under her hair, lifted it free—and screamed.

  The cat-eyed woman stared at her pot blankly, her lips frozen in a half smile. Jennifer backed away, shaking. She backed right into the breakfast table, knocking it over. The wooden grapefruit spun away; the coffee cup, glued to its saucer, lay on its side, its coffee contents perfectly intact.

  Oh, God, Jennifer said to herself, Oh, my God . . .

  Her father stared at the space where his paper had previously been. Beyond him, a wall of glass stretched from floor to ceiling. Jennifer ran to the glass, pressed her hands against it. The view was wavy, uncertain, distorted as though through a magnifying lens. She was looking into another house, a giant house, a house that struck her as vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t be certain because her brain was overcome by a fossilized feeling of rictus, as were her arms and hands. She righted the table, retrieved the wooden grapefruit, the cup and saucer, returned the paper so that it was again directly beneath her father’s gaze. Tired now, scarcely able to move, she dropped beside her father and waited, for eternity, to be served breakfast.

  THE CHILD

  by RODDY DOYLE

  HE HADN’T SLEPT IN DAYS. He hadn’t slept in weeks. He was never aware of waking up. He was just
there. Awake. Lying there.

  All night.

  There was no safe time.

  He tried a hotel. In his own town. He thought it might work. Just one night away. But it didn’t. He didn’t sleep. It was day at the curtains; he gave up.

  He hadn’t yawned in days. He hadn’t stretched. He never closed his eyes. They’d stopped being sore.

  There was no safe time.

  He was past tiredness. It was in his breath, though. In his chest. The catch, the warning. The exhaustion; more.

  Sometimes he came at night. The child. He’d hear the breath, the silence. Sometimes twice, three times. He’d be there. Sometimes not for days. But he was always there.

  Always. And not just at night. Not just when he was alone. There was no time when he wasn’t there. When he didn’t feel him.

  He didn’t go out now. Go to the cinema, or just out—a few drinks, a walk. He didn’t do that. He went home and stayed there.

  But that was no good. Home wasn’t safe. Home was nothing now. The walls, the books—nothing.

  The first time, he’d looked up—he’d been reading the paper— and the child was there. Staring at him. From a seat on the other side of the carriage. He’d stared back for a few seconds, and looked back down at the paper. And he wouldn’t have remembered, except for the second time. Another day. A few days later, the end of the week. He was standing this time. The carriage was full. He tried to get his book from his pocket, and the child was there beside him. Looking up at him. Small, tucked in against his hip. But he hadn’t felt him. And he couldn’t feel him now.

  He got off a station early. He pushed his way off. He looked around as the platform emptied. The child was gone.

  But he wasn’t.

  A boy. A small one. He didn’t know ages; he didn’t know children. He didn’t know people with children.

  It wasn’t the train the next time, and the next time wasn’t for weeks. It was in a café that he sometimes went to on his way home. He was about to push the door open. The child was standing in there. Facing him, looking out.

  He stopped; he didn’t go in. He didn’t know why not. He couldn’t. He walked away, felt foolish. He turned and went back. He got to the door. The child was there, alone. No mother at a table or at the counter. He couldn’t go in—he couldn’t lift his hand to the door. He couldn’t do it.

  That was the first night he didn’t sleep at all. He got up, walked around, tried to read, got back into the bed, held his penis, got back out, tried to read—exhausted at half-five, awake and amused, laughing privately at himself by the time he got to work. He walked past the café on his way home. It was raining; there was steam on the windows and door glass. He didn’t stop.

  He wrote it down. “Boy. eight or nine.” Eye color, hair color— he didn’t know. “Thin.” He put these words in a jotter he’d taken from work. He left it on the table beside the bed, with a pen. In case he woke up with something to add. He’d seen it in a film, the jotter beside the bed, ready for the dreams.

  He didn’t dream. He never remembered dreams. He lay on the bed. He listened to the rain and the fridge. He slept. He woke. He looked at the clock. Half-five. He was tired but pleased. He’d slept.

  It rained for days then. Steam on the train windows, steam on the office windows, on the café windows and door. He decided to go in. His hand went to the door. Water ran from the sleeve of his raincoat, down his arm. He pushed the door. He saw the word on the glass. “DAD.” Written with a finger. He stopped as he pushed. He saw the child.

  “Gray shirt.” He wrote it later, in the jotter.

  Hair and eye color? He still didn’t know, although he’d stared at the child for a long time. Until a woman behind him had wanted to enter, and he’d stepped back, and the door closed slowly in front of him. “DAD.”

  The child looked back at him.

  “No expression,” he wrote. “Expressionless.”

  He wanted to speak, to say something. To get him to speak, to hear. “What do you want?” It was too aggressive—he couldn’t think. The woman behind him; he’d stepped back. The door closed. The letters weren’t clear on the glass; streams of water ran through them.

  He went.

  He didn’t sleep.

  He thought about the child. He heard the clock, the fridge. He didn’t sleep. He put on his glasses. He leaned across, turned on the light. He saw the word on the notebook. “DAD.”

  And then he was really scared.

  He searched the flat. It was small; there was nowhere to hide. But he looked everywhere. He went back to the jotter beside the bed. He picked it up. The pencil had gone down hard on the paper. The word was cut into the next page, and the next, the next. DAD. DAD. DAD. DAD. A real hand had done it. He listened: he was alone. He brushed his teeth. He got under the shower. He thought he heard—he turned off the water. He listened. A house alarm, streets away. Tires on the wet road.

  He changed carriages on the train. He got out and pushed along crowded platforms. He got into different carriages— he began to see himself doing it. He felt stupid, self-important. He wanted it over with. He wanted to grab him, to feel the bony fact. “What do you want?” He wanted to hear a voice. While he was awake, dressed, in charge of the situation. “Who are you?”

  But the child wasn’t on the train and he wasn’t in the café. He hadn’t seen him at work; he didn’t see him now.

  He had to wait.

  He woke in the night and felt something in the room— breath, something, an echo of what had woken him. He leaned over to the light, and knew it was hopeless. He turned the light on. Nothing there. He lay awake. He turned off the light. He held his penis. He lay still.

  He stopped eating. Food made him feel sick. He could feel it turn. DAD. He had no children.

  He got into bed. He closed his eyes. He waited.

  He was sure he had no children. There was his ex-girlfriend. Two years together. There were women before that. He remembered them all. He wrote their names in the jotter. “Marion, Brenda.” Down the page. “Frances, Karen.” In reverse order. Down the years. “Hazel.” He stopped at the first one. “Tina.”

  He tore out the page—there was a faint “DAD” on the new page—and wrote the names again, more space between them. Three lines each. “Brunette.” He wrote that beside Tina. He looked at it. He put a line through it. “Brown hair,” he wrote. “Sixteen. Nice. Too nice.”

  He felt the fingers on his hand.

  “Blond. V. red when embarrassed. Angry.”

  At the counter.

  “Hair color? Not sure Karen is right. Sharon?”

  He was buying a paper. Going to work. He went for money in his pocket—fingers, he felt them, suddenly.

  “Dyed green. Different colors.”

  He felt the fingers let go—he felt. He looked.

  “Laughed a lot. Too much.”

  Beside him, against him. Looking up at—staring at him. The hand still there, in the air, half-open. Right against him—

  He got away from the counter. The child was against him, right there. He got out to the street.

  He stepped back.

  “Eyes?” he wrote later.

  There was space between them. People passed. They went around the child, made sure they didn’t knock against him. He was there.

  “Who are you?”

  The child looked at him. The look on his face—he didn’t know children—was painful, begging, trying to smile, win.

  He put his hand out.

  People went around them.

  He stretched out his arm, brought his hand closer to the child. He moved his fingers—they brushed against nothing. A woman smiled down at the child.

  He ran.

  “Why?” he wrote later.

  He was sick, appalled. He’d felt the hand on his, in the shop. But his fingers couldn’t touch what he could see. He’d touched the shoulder—it wasn’t there.

  “Ghost?” he wrote.

  He ran across the street. He changed
his mind as he ran, but it was two more streets before he stopped. He leaned against a post office wall. He waited for the sweat to turn cold. People passed. He didn’t look. He waited. He stopped gasping. He looked.

  No child.

  “Colorless.”

  He looked in the door of the post office. He went to the next corner, stood so he could see down two streets, turn slightly and see down another.

  He didn’t go to work.

  He sat on the bed. He picked up the jotter. He flicked open a new page. He heard breath. He didn’t look.

  He wrote.

  Block letters.

  “I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GHOSTS.”

  He’d held the fingers; he’d felt them.

  He read the names of the women, down the page.

  Marion

  Brenda

  Frances

  Karen

  Hazel

  Tina

  He flicked to a new page.

  “Child.” He underlined the word. What did he look like? Who did he look like? What was happening?

  He flicked back to the women. He needed surnames. He was keeping it real. The child was real; the child had a mother.

  He didn’t look.

  “Marion Murphy.”

  Three years since he’d seen her. She’d met someone else. “We’ll still be friends.” It had surprised him how little he’d cared. But even if she’d been pregnant when she’d left, that child would be much too young.

  “Brenda Wilson.”

  He got up. He looked in the kitchen, the toilet. He came back. He sat on the bed.

  “Brenda Wilson.”

  He could hear it. The breathing.

  He stood up. He couldn’t hear it.

  He sat back on the bed.

  “Brenda Wilson.”

  He hadn’t liked her. He’d never liked her. But they’d met because she was at the desk beside him at work. His previous job. “Blond. V. red when embarrassed. Angry. Good-looking.” That was true. “The best-looking.” They hadn’t lived together; it had lasted a couple of months. He’d left for a new job—the one he had now. He’d applied for it before they’d met, but she hadn’t believed him. A year before Marion. A bit more. Not enough for her to be the mother.