Mr Wicker

by Maria Alexander

  Alicia placed her mug in the kitchen sink and reached for the switch on the kitchen wall. Before her finger could touch the plastic cover, the light died. She frowned and toggled the switch.

  Click. Nothing.

  Alicia ran as her world dimmed, flipping switches. The living room. Den.

  No lights.

  The retreating sunlight dimly lit the foyer, falling through the rippling glass pane of the front door and spilling across the bills she’d kicked earlier. In the mess of paper she saw the words “Final Notice.” She picked up the envelope and held it to the light: her electric bill. A strong wind stirred the large evergreens around the house and a cloud swallowed the last of the sun.

  She dropped the envelope and heard it slip to the floor.

  They told her at the hospital she should call someone at times like these. Dr. Farron wanted her to call. She hadn’t told anyone her phone line had been disconnected.

  She could go to bed, but the darkness did not suggest rest. Vague hands pawed at her vulnerable body—not the limbs of outré creatures as she’d expected, but the familiar fingers of shame and defeat. It was her fault what happened with Dr. Sark. Had she not egged him on in his office, he would never have done what he did. She knew he was a rattlesnake. And if James ever found out, how could he ever love her? James. If she could ever conquer her anger at him for deceiving her. Besides, he would leave her like the others. How long had she known him? Four days? Please. What was she thinking?

  In that moment, between the darkness and the violation, she felt like nothing, as if at the slightest movement the seams of her flesh could unbaste, utterly unmaking her.

  The bathroom and the razors. They could free her from the shame and defeat.

  Brooders weep and brooders keep their misery at hand.

  The thought suspended in her mind, dangled by self-power, but held back by a thread of self-preservation. As she stepped toward the staircase, her intentions tumbled over one another, hands to ankles. Bed or blade, bed or blade...

  Let Mr. Wicker wash your sicker memories in sand.

  She could hear him singing as she climbed to the top of the stairs, stumbling twice on weak legs. When she reached the top stair, she stopped. In the thickening dusk, the void stretched its arms before her, larger than she remembered and far more loving. Her rational mind recalled that, if she would just reach out beside her, she could feel the wall, perhaps a painting hanging from it, but she kept her arms close to her body and let the void embrace her.

  Then, she heard the soft patter of the rain. And his voice.

  You slipped into the light because I wanted you...

  The bandages on her wrists fell to the floor.

  ...and because you love the darkness.

  Bed and blade. Dream and death. She could have both with Mr. Wicker. But it would mean the end of her life. Forever.

  A whisper of movement, a clicking sound behind her in the hallway. Every hair on her arms and neck prickled.

  Alicia slowly turned to look.

  A raven hopped up the last step and shook its wings.

  “What do you want?” she asked, throat tight. Every injury to her body throbbed as adrenaline razed her veins. She felt more insane at that moment, talking to the bird, than she had ever in her life. The animal must have worked its way down the fireplace flue. It was no stranger to ash.

  The bird rose with a flap of its wings and soared over her shoulder, swimming in slow motion toward a pinprick of light that appeared at the far, far end of the hallway where the bathroom should have been. Was she imagining the light? Had the bird summoned it? She could now think of nothing else but the Library as she moved toward it, her feet dragging on the carpet. Her rational mind said a bathroom was there, not a library. Not the souls of children, but the brittle glass of the shower door.

  She ran.

  The light waxed and shifted, howling toward her as before, this time with the raven’s body in sight. Two realities fought for her mind.

  Light and glass. This world and his.

  Chapter 39

  Dr. Farron’s cellphone rang. He let go of the wallpaper and clambered down as he answered. “Alicia?”

  “Not remotely,” Rachelle answered.

  “Oh, hey,” he said. He knocked aside the chair and dropped into it.

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” she said. “I got your message.”

  “Yeah, I wish I didn’t have to leave it.”

  “I’m still pissed at you, but I’m going to miss you around here.”

  “Me, too—you, that is,” he said, distracted. Two of the most important people in his life were now mad at him. Great.

  “You know,” she started, voice lowered, “you haven’t turned on your recorders.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t even want to think about the grant.”

  “Do you want me to have someone do it for you?”

  Alicia’s feet hit gravel.

  Exhilarated, she threw open her arms and tears of joy streamed over her cheeks. She laughed, running faster to meet the children and the light. And him. He was waiting for her. He was real, and she was free from the void.

  “You’re a tattletale!” “...sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.” “Ummmm-mum-mummmm, you’re in trouble.” The vapors drew over her like veils, covering her with their happiness as she ran toward the greater warmth blazing beyond. “Ring around the rosie, a pocket full of posies...”

  He, indeed, waited for her on the other side of the light. She passed through, her skin damp with sweat from exertion and excitement. She still wore the clothes her grandmother brought her. The peach silk clung to her curves. His eyes—luminous, excited—softened when he saw her.

  A dark-haired little girl stood at his side, one eye clouded with broken blood vessels, bone fragments prickling from her head, coated with slick hemoglobin that shone like freshly sucked Tootsie pops. A white thrush from the antibiotics fleeced her tongue.

  Alicia recognized her. “I know you.” She kneeled between the book stacks and held out her hand. “What’s your name?”

  The girl shambled toward her and smiled grotesquely, missing a front tooth. “My name is Georgeta. Are you Alicia?”

  Alicia nodded. “That’s a pretty name. How’d you get it?”

  “It was my grandma’s name. My mommy’s Romanian and my daddy’s from Brazil.”

  “It’s a beautiful name. So, what happened to you, sweetie? Why are you in the hospital?”

  Georgeta frowned. “My daddy had been drinking when he made our car go into the other cars. I was really scared. I think my mommy died.”

  Alicia clasped the child’s sickly warm hand. “That sounds terrible. I’m really sorry.”

  Georgeta continued, “I heard the nurses say my head is hurt pretty badly and I’ll never be okay again. Do you think I’ll be okay?”

  The truth bit viciously at Alicia’s stomach, which was already sensitive to the grotesqueries of the child’s injuries. “Of course, honey. Don’t listen to what grownups say.”

  Georgeta’s good eye focused on Alicia’s hand. “You hold my hand, don’t you?”

  “Whenever I can,” Alicia said.

  She threw her arms around Alicia, who thought, of all the nightmares she had created, none were as moving as this.

  A wall behind Alicia hummed.

  Alicia’s back warmed as the light shone against it, bleaching Georgeta’s face with the infinite. “I gotta go,” she said and limped into the blinding whiteness.

  Now they were alone.

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” Mr. Wicker said. He approached her and she reached out to him, the backs of her fingers lightly brushing his soft cheek. His eyes closed and his breath slowed as he succumbed to her touch.

  A blue nylon backpack slung over his shoulder, Dr. Farron slipped past the front desk to the elevators. If anyone asked, he was cleaning out his office, even though he wasn’t going to do it until Saturday. The security staff changed guard at seven p.m.,
and they often did not communicate with the previous shift. It was now about eight thirty p.m. and he could move freely up to the children’s ward.

  The night nurses greeted him as before. Word had not traveled, it seemed. He continued down the hall and swung into the first child’s room. Starting with the empty bed, he flipped open the tape recorder and flicked the tape out of the slot before slipping it between the teeth of the backpack zipper. As expertly as a London pickpocket, he filched the tape from the recorder over the head of a wispy-headed, eight-year-old boy who snored through his nasogastric tubing.

  Room after room, he repeated the sleight of hand, removing the numerous tapes without even a yawn from the bed occupants. The labels were marked in black felt pen with the current patient’s names and date of admission. The ones where the tape had moved forward concerned him. Had they been talking to him? Or had the night nurses been gossiping as they worked?

  Toward the end of the ward was the last room he wished to visit. Georgeta, his bloodied cherub. His only other link to the Library. He threw his sports coat over the chair and sat watching her breathe as he contemplated the weird events of the last three days. Some bizarre logic must be at work, but he could not fathom why it chose to invite him into its machina. He felt the brittleness of his spiritual mind cracking and spewing dust from disuse as the revelations bucked against its walls.

  Georgeta slept soundly in her not-death. He opened the tape recorder and withdrew her tape. It had rolled forward significantly. As Dr. Farron excitedly dropped it into the backpack, Georgeta moved for the first time. Her feverish body shifted toward him and her chin tipped backwards as she whispered through a mouthful of thrush.

  “She’s pretty, Mr. Wicker.”

  That name. He hunched closer, because maybe for the first time he would hear for himself what she told the Librarian instead of any human being.

  “I heard the nurses say I’ll never be okay again. Do you think I’ll be okay, Alicia?” Georgeta whispered more airily through her enflamed esophagus.

  Dr. Farron’s thoughts spiraled into chaos.

  He staggered from the hospital into the visitor parking lot under the crushing downpour and threw the soggy backpack into the passenger seat of his car. He strangled the wheel of the Lexus as he fled the lot. The car roared under the unrelenting pressure of his foot as he madly sped from Highway 580 to Park and scrambled up one steep hill after another with alarming speed into the labyrinth of narrow streets. His deepest fear was that the house was empty, that the void Alicia so feared had swallowed her, that she had retreated to the Library—and not in one piece.

  As he slid to a shrill stop in the wet driveway, the headlights angled at the front door, he threw open the car door and shouted at the top of his lungs. “Alicia! Alicia, are you there?” The entire house was dark inside. He ran back to the car in the rain and retrieved a mag light from the trunk. He then approached the elegant front door, pounding on the doorframe. No answer. He even pulled up the metal flap for the mail slot and shouted into that, training the light into the opening. Through the flap, he saw nothing except more darkness and a wall. No signs of life.

  Then, inspired by the rescue team’s entrance, he turned the doorknob. It gave way with ease, the door’s bottom brushing through a thick stack of unopened mail. He swallowed. “Alicia?” He swept the light over the entrance. The light caught an unusual ink drawing on acrylic paper hanging on the foyer wall: a bald man sitting on a stone, draped in crosses with a bandaged hand and a knife for an erect penis. Clive Barker, unmistakable, although the signature gave it away. Beneath it, a light switch. He flicked it on. Nothing. Dr. Farron wandered carefully into the family room beyond, the spotlight in his hand illuminating the fireplace, the books strewn over the floor. Coated in cobwebs, the ceilings were entirely too high for his tastes. He felt both like an intruder and the only person in the world who belonged here. He located a lamp. No juice. The melted wax and burned manuscripts unnerved him as he surveyed the home of what was—and might now be—a dead woman.

  He resisted the urge to make a pre-emptive call to the authorities or ambulance. He’d call if he found her in any state other than breathing.

  A wooden banister threw back the mag light’s glare. Dr. Farron abandoned the living room and, although terrified of what he might find, approached the stairs. His footsteps grew heavier with dread as he landed on each step. He pictured her lifeless, bloodless body crumpled in some bathroom or on her bed. Success in death at last. As the hallway floor met him at eye level, the light skittered over the white gauze strips. Stunned, he let the light drop center stage on the bandages. She had taken them off here, probably just prior to slitting them again.

  A flicker of light from the hall’s end. He raised the flashlight beam to catch the glimmer. One of those beveled glass shower doors. As he drew the light over the walls—more portraits, including one of Barlowe’s hellish parades—and then that flicker. He brought the light to bear on the shower door once more.

  The rain was punishing the roof. Deafening. He knelt and picked up the bandages. He could look through every room—and he did, to be certain—but he knew that she was gone from this world.

  And she did not even say goodbye.

  Mr. Wicker took her wrist and brought it to his nose, inhaling the grotesque bouquet of her stitched wounds. His long arms closed around her waist and hers around his neck as he kissed her. His lips, softer than silk, pressed against hers in a tender hush. He then held out his hand toward the table and one of the books opened, a darkly romantic waltz of piano and sweet sopranos ringing from the blotchy pages. “You chose me over life,” he said. “Let us celebrate.” Taking one of her hands in his and pressing his other to the small of her back, he led her in a waltz around the book stacks.

  Alicia smoldered in the green flames of his eyes, never fearing that she would misstep as she sank deeper.

  “You say this music is someone’s nightmare,” Alicia said. “So this music really is, in fact, evil.”

  “Can anything this beautiful be, in itself, evil?”

  “Can anything ugly be good?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes it can,” he replied.

  “Even when I was in grade school, I was partial to the monsters in movies.”

  “I would have never guessed.”

  They kissed. After a moment, he drew her down onto the ancient hardwood floor. They continued kissing. Death and dream. Eros and architecture. The lingering candle smoke trailed across the repository ceiling. His fingers found the cloth-covered buttons that closed her dress up the front. He loosened every one, the flaps falling back to bare her flushed chest and waist. Then those scribe hands, fleecy and firm, moved slowly over her skin.

  She tensed up. She didn’t want this. She’d wanted freedom and to escape the darkness, but now she had neither. How could she now say no? The word fell between the blackened cracks in the floorboards and imbedded itself in the otherworldly dust. The clack and whirr of the clocks on the wall grew more pronounced by the second, plucking at her attention.

  Help me? Alicia. Help me do it.

  Lillian?

  “Is something the matter?”

  Alicia looked into his eyes. Sea green and flames. “I heard a voice. Did Georgeta leave?”

  “Georgeta is gone,” he whispered in her ear. “You could not have heard her.”

  “But I heard someone. Can you check?”

  He reluctantly stood up, those robes swishing about his ashen ankles, and strode to the far end of the Library, peering into the book stacks.

  Help me, Alicia.

  As her hand reached out for a table leg for leverage, her fingertips scraped the sharp edges of unevenly bound pages. Her hand grasped again and this time stroked a cloth cover. She cast her gaze aside.

  Her book. It lay with several others beneath the table in a heap.

  She twisted under the table as she reached for it.

  “No! You mustn’t!”

  He ran to her and lunged f
or her waist. She grasped the table leg firmly, pulling away from him. The table groaned, its frame crumbling under the weight, and then it crashed, the precarious tomes and candelabra tumbling. Thick candles rolled across the floor, wicks licking the wood as they sought kindling.

  “Damn this!” He gave up his grip on her to chase the flames.

  Alicia reached in the pile and worked her book free. She snatched it up, holding it hostage to her chest, and scrambled to her feet. The light broke between the stacks, warm and fluctuating, humming to announce its arrival. But when she tried to leave, Mr. Wicker blocked her path.

  “Don’t do this,” he pleaded, those whispering hands stretched out toward her. “You mustn’t, mustn’t do this.”

  “All my life things have been taken from me,” she said angrily. “I can’t bring back any of it, but I can bring back this.”

  “Perhaps, but there is a terrible price,” he replied. A blustering wind rattled the window glass as he spoke. The smoky lavender landscape turned slate. “These memories were vomited by your soul for a reason. Reading the book could have a devastating effect on you, and I can’t let that happen. Besides,” he added sadly, “if you take your book...you can’t return.”

  “You don’t mean it.”