The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

by Brian Evenson

  And?

  Not remotely possible.

  How can you be sure?

  I’m sure.

  But how?

  Arn, humming softly under his breath, ignored him.

  And the second time? asked his therapist.

  Excuse me? said Arn.

  There were three times, you said. What about the second?

  Ah, said Arn. Yes.

  2.

  Time marched on. Arn grew up. He was admitted to the local college. He moved out of his aunt’s house and into a dormitory.

  More time passed. He was studying something, working toward a degree. It did not matter what he was studying, he told his therapist; it had no bearing on his haunting. He was a junior in college and suddenly was living alone, his roommate having received academic probation followed by a semester of suspension.

  He was lying on his bed trying to sleep. It was perhaps two in the morning. There were still noises coming from the hall despite the time being late enough that quiet was supposedly in effect. His door was closed, the light from the hallway shining through the crack beneath it. Occasionally the light would flicker as someone walked down the hall and past his door.

  At some point, he drifted off. Maybe he was asleep for a few minutes, maybe for several hours.

  He awoke to the impression something was wrong. He remained in bed, blinking, trying to see. Why couldn’t he see? Usually he could, even at night, even if only a little. But now he couldn’t. Suddenly he realized why: the light in the hallway was no longer on.

  But the light in the hallway was always on. There wasn’t even a switch to turn it off. All night it seeped beneath the door enough for him to dimly make things out, as if in sleep he remained lodged in a colorless facsimile of the actual world.

  There was a light of sorts, but exceptionally low and at a great remove, like a single flickering candle cupped by a hand at the far end of the hall. He could see nothing at all of the room around him. The only thing he could see, barely, was the outline of the doorframe.

  Even seeing this, it took his mind some time to register the fact that the door must be open. But once it did, he began to see the silhouette crowded into the doorframe, hunched, almost too large to fit, waiting, immobile, watching him.

  How do you know it was watching? interrupted his therapist.

  I thought I could see its eyes, he said. Or not eyes exactly, but a gleam or glister where I knew eyes should be. Which led me to believe its eyes were open and looking steadily at me.

  “Hello?” Arn had said. “Who are you?” Because he did want to know. He was frightened, of course, but above all else, he wanted to know who or what it was.

  The figure did not respond. It seemed again, just like that first time years before, not to have heard him.

  Carefully, slowly, Arn started out of the bed and crept toward the door. But the door was already closing, and even though he rushed it at the end, he was not quick enough to stop it from slamming shut. Or, rather, he managed to get two of his fingers around the edge of the door before it closed in its frame, but the door closed anyway.

  He lifted his hand, showed his therapist the awkwardly crimped ends of his middle and index finger where the last joint of both digits had been sewed back on. He had felt the severing, the brief, sharp pain of each joint being sheared off, followed by the warm throb, enough of a distraction that he almost missed that something had changed: he could see.

  The light in the hallway was on again. He tore open the door and looked out onto an ordinary hall: no silhouette in sight, the hall just as it had always been, except for the blood drizzling from his fingers onto the grimy carpet.

  The fingers had been reattached, though he could feel nothing in the top joint of either of them—it was as if they were dead. He had thought long and hard about this second time, unsure what to make of it. The only point in common between his aunt’s house and his dorm room, at least that he could see, was himself. The ghost, if it was a ghost, must be tied to him.

  But why him? For this, he had no answer. Nor did he have an answer for why it would visit him so infrequently, or why both times it was always reduced to that single gesture of standing in a doorway, his doorway, the doorway to his bedroom, in the dark.

  3.

  Another decade passed, he told his therapist. He graduated, got a job, became a responsible citizen. He met the man who would become his husband, they fell in love, lived together, married once the law allowed it. They bought an apartment together, and he allowed a certain form of existence to crystallize or calcify around him. And yet, all the while he was waiting, wondering when—not if but when—despite his move far away, his haunting would find him again. For it would find him, he was sure of that.

  He had a few false alarms. Times when he awoke to find his husband, who tended to come to bed much later than he, standing in the open door, motionless, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness before navigating to the bed. But his husband’s silhouette looked nothing like the silhouette of his haunting. Arn was the larger of the two of them by far. His husband, small, could not come close to filling a doorway.

  The third incident he thought at first was just that—his husband hesitating in the doorway before coming to bed. He felt a presence and half opened his eyes and groaned, and said, “How late is it? Come to bed already.”

  When there was no answer, not a sound, he found himself startled fully awake.

  The room around him seemed too dark. He turned and could just make out the open doorway.

  “What’s wrong?” he started to say, but got very little of it out, for he realized the shape in the doorway was so large it could not possibly be his husband. And, in any case, his husband was there already in the bed beside him, breathing heavily, sound asleep.

  And then, he told his therapist, something happened that I didn’t expect. You see, I had made the mistake of inviting it, whatever it was, to come to bed.

  The figure was still motionless, still little more than a silhouette, but it was no longer in the doorway. No, it was just inside the room now, as if a bit of film had skipped, or as if he had closed his eyes and it had moved only while it could not be seen. And then it was closer still, and closer still, until it was there, just beside the bed but still motionless, still little more than a silhouette. Arn could see again those dull gleams he thought of as its eyes—but could see now that they were scattered all over its body, as if its entire skin was studded with them, with eyes that couldn’t quite be made out. He couldn’t move. It came very close until it was touching him, but he couldn’t feel anything. And then it came closer still, and he felt very cold. And then it passed slowly through him and across the bed.

  Somebody’s breath was hissing fast through clenched teeth, and though he rationally understood it must be his teeth, his breath, they still seemed to belong to somebody else. Someone was screaming and it was him screaming, only it wasn’t him either. And then his husband was shaking him, and the light was on and shining into his eyes, and the figure in the doorway was again nowhere to be seen.

  …

  Where do you think it went? his therapist asked, after waiting a long time for Arn to continue.

  My husband, he said.

  Your husband?

  He was the only other one in the bed. It was moving toward him. It moved through me and toward him.

  Don’t you think that—

  Now, sometimes in its least guarded moments, I see something flit across his face, coming to the surface to breathe.

  It seems to me—

  It’s his haunting now. He doesn’t know yet, of course. How could he? He won’t know until it is his turn to see it in the doorway.

  But then where was it before?

  Arn looked hard at his therapist. Can’t you guess? he asked. Why do you think my father left? What do you think he was looking for in my face? The same thing I was no longer finding in his. It must have been in him before. After it left him, where else could it have
been but in me?

  He cracked his neck, then slowly took hold of the arms of the chair and pulled himself to his feet. He looked older, tired somehow, almost a different person.

  Next time, he said, you can ask me the usual questions. Next time we can analyze all this to death.

  We still have a few minutes, his therapist said. I really think we should talk about this.

  But Arn just shook his head. Next time, he repeated, and he made his way to the door. Upon opening it he hesitated a moment, his body nearly filling the frame. Then he turned his shoulders slightly and sidled through.

  4.

  It was a moment the therapist would think about often, particularly after it became clear he would never see Arn again. After Arn missed the next few appointments and he took steps to try to find him, he would discover, talking to his distraught spouse, that Arn, like his father before him, had simply disappeared.

  Which meant the therapist’s last real memory of Arn was of the man standing motionless in the open doorway, facing away from him. But the back of his head still, somehow, gave (when the therapist thought about it later, alone, at night in bed, in the dark, struggling to sleep) the impression of looking back in, of noticing him.

  Haver

  By December, six months into his institutionalization, Festus had begun exclusively to draw his own apartment. Or rather, just one room of his apartment, his studio, nothing but that, over and over again. He had given up painting entirely, was only drawing now. When Haver asked him why, he only shrugged and said, “I must not give in too easily to color.”

  “Why not?” asked Haver.

  For a long time Festus did not respond, which was not unusual for him. Indeed, Haver had come to think of the times when Festus did respond as the exceptions rather than the rule. Festus kept drawing, kept sketching with a nub of charcoal held delicately between thumb and forefinger, as if Haver wasn’t there. Which was why Haver was surprised when a minute or two later he actually did speak.

  “Black and white give way to me. But color, no. Color does not give in easily.”

  “But how—” began Haver, but Festus just pressed one charcoal-blackened finger to his lips and shushed him.

  …

  Haver kept coming back; he wasn’t sure why. He spent far more time with Festus than any of his other patients. There was something about the man’s drawings that spoke to him—or not spoke exactly: threatened to speak. If he kept coming back, it was in part to try to hear whatever they were saying. Or whatever Festus was saying, he corrected himself—because how could a drawing say anything on its own?

  They were always the same, rapidly sketched on cheap butcher paper, and just as rapidly added to the growing stack beside the bed. Haver had instructed the orderlies to leave the stack where it was—the one time they tried to remove it, Festus grew very upset. This despite the fact that once Festus finished a drawing, he, as far as Haver could ascertain, never glanced at it again. But he still wanted them there beside him, in the room.

  Haver was allowed to look through them. Often Haver began his visit by thumbing through the drawings, careful not to smear the charcoal or change the ordering. Festus’s talent was such that even though he worked at speed, the drawings struck Haver as remarkably vivid and clear. He felt almost as if he knew Festus’s studio, almost as if he could imagine himself in it, almost as if he had been there himself. The drawings were all, as far as he could tell, identical, all rendered from precisely the same perspective, with the objects always in the same place. The studio was empty of human or animal presence, the perspective exacting and unvarying. Which meant, Haver came to understand, that there was one full wall, and small parts of two others, that could not be glimpsed, portions of the room that could not be seen.

  What could be seen was simple enough: A drafting table set at a slight incline. A stool with what looked like a chrome base—though since it was drawn in charcoal, it was hard to be certain. Metal anyway—the slenderness of the legs and their smoothness precluded it being anything else. A large window, just above the drafting table, that looked out on what Haver guessed was a ventilation shaft. A wastepaper basket, half-full. Walls made of plaster, just enough irregularity and cracking to make Haver believe it must be horsehair plaster instead of mason board or drywall. A portion of floor: what appeared to be soft pine underflooring left exposed and now scarred and irregular. And, in the corner to the left, where the walls met, a stack of paper Haver could only assume was similar to the stack in Festus’s room, no doubt depicting a series of images, no doubt repetitions of the same thing, the same place, maybe even this very studio.

  What could he not see? That was just it: how could he know since he couldn’t see it? He assumed the perspective was that of an individual standing just inside the doorway, but why should he assume this? Perhaps it was from four or five steps into the studio, or perhaps the studio was an old railroad apartment and was quite long.

  So, he simultaneously felt as though he knew the room quite well and didn’t know it at all. Which, Haver found, was a very strange thing—unless it was two things—to feel.

  He kept looking at Festus’s drawings, idly picking up the last few each time he came into the room. The stack was nearly as tall as he was now, and always in danger of collapse. He would come in, look at the drawings, chat idly with, or rather at, Festus, and then leave, continuing on his rounds.

  Which was precisely what he was doing one day, half-distractedly saying God knows what, when suddenly, almost as if it belonged to someone else, he heard his voice trail off. The picture he was examining, he suddenly realized, was different from the others.

  He couldn’t place the difference at first. Indeed, it looked at first glance like all the others. But he could sense a difference, could feel it.

  “What’s this?” he asked Festus. “What’s changed?”

  Festus, as usual, didn’t answer. It took Haver a few moments of staring to grasp what it was: within the frame of the darkened window, there was, half-hidden, the vague suggestion of another shape. Round or ovular, its edges eaten away by the darkness around it. But the shape was a little more deliberate, a little darker, than the rest of the shaded frame.

  “What’s this?” he asked, thrusting the drawing at Festus and pointing to the shape.

  Festus glanced at it briefly. “He’s new,” he said.

  “I know it’s new,” Haver said. “What is it? What is it doing there?”

  “He seems to be looking in,” said Festus.

  A head then, a human figure, the first one he knew of that Festus had drawn. Haver looked at the oval more closely. It was barely there. It was impossible to say anything of substance about it.

  He scrutinized the drawing Festus had done just before it. The shape wasn’t there. He waited impatiently for Festus to finish his current drawing and once he did almost snatched it away. He pored over it. Everything that had been in the drawings all along was still present, but the window was uniformly shaded again, no suggestion of a head.

  “I was waiting for you to draw it again,” Haver said. “Why didn’t you?”

  “What?” asked Festus, confused.

  “It’s not there,” said Haver. “The head’s not there.”

  “No,” said Festus.

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s gone.”

  “No longer in the drawing, you mean.”

  “That too.”

  Over the next few weeks Haver found no variations in Festus’s drawings, or only variations so slight they were all but unnoticeable. No more heads, nothing out of the ordinary. Which, perhaps, was what made Haver continue to press his patient about the head. Why in that drawing and not in the next? he asked. Because it was there, Festus responded, implacably, when he bothered to respond at all. But bit by bit, Haver squeezed enough out of him to be certain, or almost so, that Festus genuinely believed he was drawing the studio as it was, actually, at that very moment. He had drawn a head because, at that moment, a head
had been peering into the studio.

  “Which is strange,” said Festus, “since the studio is at the top of the building.”

  “But how can you see the studio from here?” Haver asked.

  Festus, seemingly confused by this question, did not respond.

  It was not a good sign, Haver felt. Perhaps he had been wrong to encourage Festus artistically. The man certainly hadn’t gotten any better since having been institutionalized, and perhaps had even gotten worse.

  He spoke to the supervising clinician.

  “I wonder if we shouldn’t change Festus’s medication,” he said.

  “Festus?” said the woman, and frowned. She got out his file and skimmed through it while Haver awkwardly waited, standing beside her window, unsure what to do with himself.

  “According to this, it seems as though he’s doing fine,” she said.

  “It’s subtle,” Haver claimed.

  She looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll defer to you.”

  The new medication had a different shape from the old medication, a different color, too. He worried Festus would notice and refuse to take it. But Festus swallowed them as usual.

  He continued to draw, the same picture of the studio. Even a few days into the new medication, nothing had changed.

  And then something did change. Perhaps two weeks had passed when, suddenly, plucking up the latest drawings, Haver noticed something: a strand of red, subdued, nearly buried in the black of the charcoal, a slender ribbon threaded insidiously through the drawing, increasingly visible the more he looked for it.

  “What’s this?” he asked. And then, when Festus didn’t answer, “I thought you weren’t to give in to color.”

  “Not easily,” said Festus. “Give in, but not easily.”

  Only then did Haver notice the dressings wrapped around Festus’s hand. He reached out and took hold of the man’s wrist. Suddenly Festus fell inert, as if powered off. The charcoal slipped out of the other hand, the undamaged one. Haver unwrapped the dressings and saw the deep gash in the palm beneath them, still suppurating.